"It's the theft of the Key that has prompted me to speak, Deacon.
Madame has some sort of power--hypnotic power. She employed it on me once, to my cost! Paul Harley, of Chancery Lane, can tell you more about her. The house she's living in temporarily used to belong to a notorious Eurasian, Zani Chada. To make a clean breast of it I daren't thwart her openly; but I felt it up to me to tell you that she possesses the secret of post-hypnotic suggestion. I may be wrong, but I think you stole that Key!"
"I!"
"She hypnotized you at some time, and, by means of this uncanny power of hers, ordered you to steal the Key of the Temple of Heaven in such and such a fashion at a certain hour in the night..."
"I had a strange seizure while I was at her house...."
"Exactly! During that time you were receiving your hypnotic orders.
You would remember nothing of them until the time to execute them--which would probably be during sleep. In a state of artificial somnambulism, and under the direction of Madame's will, you became a burglar!"
As Madame de Medici's car drove off from the house of Colonel Deacon, and Madame seated herself in the cushioned corner, up from amid the furs upon the floor, where, dog-like, he had lain concealed, rose the little yellow man from the Temple of Heaven. He extended eager hands toward her, kneeling there, and spoke:
"Quick! quick!" he breathed. "You have it? The Key of the Temple."
Madame held in her hand an ivory Buddha. Inverting it she unscrewed the pedestal, and out from the hollow inside the image dropped a gleaming Key.
"Ah!" breathed the yellow man, and would have clutched it; but Madame disdainfully raised her right hand which held the treasure, and with her left hand thrust down the clutching yellow fingers.
She dropped the Key between her white skin and the bodice of her gown, tossing the ivory figure contemptuously amid the fur.
"Ah!" repeated the yellow man in a different tone, and his eyes gleamed with the flame of fanaticism. He slowly uprose, a sinister figure, and with distended fingers prepared to seize Madame by the throat. His eyes were bloodshot, his nostrils were dilated, and his teeth were exposed like the fangs of a wolf.
But she pulled off her glove and stretched out her bare white hand to him as a queen to a subject; she raised the long curved lashes, and the great amber eyes looked into the angry bloodshot eyes.
The little yellow man began to breathe more and more rapidly; soon he was panting like one in a fight to the death who is all but conquered. At last he dropped on his knees amid the fur... and the curling lashes were lowered again over the blazing amber eyes that had conquered.
Madame de Medici lowered her beautiful white hand, and the little yellow man seized it in both his own and showered rapturous kisses upon it.
Madame smiled slightly.
"Poor little yellow man!" she murmured in sibilant Chinese, "you shall never return to the Temple of Heaven!"
Lure of Souls
Sax Romer
I. In Guise Of The Orient. II. Like A Phantom. III. A Guest Unrewarded. IV. In The Room Below. V. With Much Reluctance.
Etext from pulpgen.com
I. In Guise Of The Orient.
THIS is the story which Bernard Fane told me one afternoon as we sat sipping China tea on the terrace of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, just after we had finished a round upon the neighboring links: The life of a master at the training college is beastly uneventful, taken all round; not even your keen sense of the romantic could long survive it. The duties are not very exacting, certainly, and in our own way, I suppose we are empire builders of a sort. But when you ask me for a true story of Egyptian life, I find myself floored at once.
We all come out with the idea of the mystic East strong upon us, but it is an idea that rarely survives one summer in Cairo. Personally, I made a more promising start than the average. An adventure came my way on the very day I landed in Port Said; in fact, it began on the way out.
On my first trip out, then, I went aboard at Marseilles, and saw my cabin trunk placed in a nice deck berth, with the liveliest satisfaction.
Walking along the white promenade deck, I felt no end of a man of the world. Every Anglo-Indian that I met seemed a figure from the pages of Kipling and when I accidentally blundered into the ayas'
quarters, I could almost hear the jangle of the temple bells, so primed was I with traditions of the Orient--the traditions one gathers from books of the lighter sort, I mean.
You will see that in those days I was not a bit blase; the glamour of the East was very real to me. For that matter, it is more real than ever, now. Near or far, the East has a call which, once heard, can never be forgotten, and never unheeded. But the call it makes to those who have never been there is out of tune, I have learned, or rather it is not in the right key.
Well, I had a most glorious bath--I am sybarite enough to love the luxuriance of your modern liner--got into blue serge, and felt no end of an adventurer. There was a notice on the gangway that the steamer would not leave Marseilles until ten o'clock at night; but I was far too young a traveler to risk missing the boat by going ashore again. You know the feeling?
Consequently I took my place in the saloon for dinner, and vaguely wondered why nobody else had dressed for the function. I was a proper Johnny Raw, but I enjoyed it all immensely, nevertheless. I personally superintended the departure of the ship, and believed that every deck hand took me for a hardened globe-trotter. When, at last, I sought my cozy cabin, all spotlessly white, with my trunk tucked under the bunk, and, drawing the little red curtain, I sat down to sum up the sensations of the day, I was thoroughly satisfied with it all.
Gad, novelty is the keynote of life! Don't you think so? When one is young, one envies older and more experienced men, but what has the world left of novelty to offer them? The simple matter of joining a steamboat, and taking possession of my berth, had afforded me thrills which some of my fellow passengers--those whom I envied the most for the stories of life written upon their tanned features--could only hope to taste by means of big-game hunting, now, or other farfetched methods of thrill giving.
It wore off a bit the next day, of course, and I found that once one has settled down to it, ocean traveling is merely floating hotel life. But many of my fellow passengers--the boat was fairly full-- still appealed to me as books of romance which I longed to open. And before the end of that second day I became possessed with the idea that there was some deep mystery aboard. Since this was my first voyage, something of the sort was to be expected of me; but it happened that I stood by no means alone in this belief.
In the smoking room, after dinner, I got into conversation with a chap of about my own age who was bound for Colombo--tea planting. We chatted on different topics for half an hour, and discovered that we had mutual friends--or rather, the other fellow discovered it.
"Have you noticed," he said, "a distinguished- looking Indian personage, who, with three native friends, sits at the small corner table on our left?"
Hamilton--that was my acquaintance's name--was my right-hand neighbor at the chief officer's table, and I recollected the group to which he referred immediately.
"Yes," I replied; "who are they?"
"I don't know," answered Hamilton, "but I have a suspicion that they are mysterious."
"Mysterious?" I asked. "Well, they joined at Marseilles, just before yourself. They were received by the skipper in person, and two of them were closeted in his cabin for twenty minutes or more."
"What do you make of that?"
"Can't make anything of it, but their whole behavior strikes me as peculiar, somehow. I cannot quite explain, but you say that you have noticed something of the sort yourself?"