Skull-Face
By Robert E. Howard
(1929)
1. The Face in the Mist
“We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go.”
—Omar Khayyam
THE horror first took concrete form amid that
most unconcrete of all things—a hashish dream. I was off on a timeless,
spaceless journey through the strange lands that belong to this state of being,
a million miles away from earth and all things earthly; yet I became cognizant
that something was reaching across the unknown voids—something that tore
ruthlessly at the separating curtains of my illusions and intruded itself into
my visions.
I did not exactly return to ordinary waking
life, yet I was conscious of a seeing and a recognizing that was unpleasant and
seemed out of keeping with the dream I was at that time enjoying. To one who
has never known the delights of hashish, my explanation must seem chaotic and
impossible. Still, I was aware of a rending of mists and then the Face intruded
itself into my sight. I thought at first it was merely a skull; then I saw that
it was a hideous yellow instead of white, and was endowed with some horrid form
of life. Eyes glimmered deep in the sockets and the jaws moved as if in speech.
The body, except for the high, thin shoulders, was vague and indistinct, but
the hands, which floated in the mists before and below the skull, were horribly
vivid and filled me with crawling fears. They were like the hands of a mummy,
long, lean and yellow, with knobby joints and cruel curving talons.
Then, to complete the vague horror which was
swiftly taking possession of me, a voice spoke—imagine a man so long dead
that his vocal organ had grown rusty and unaccustomed to speech. This was the
thought which struck me and made my flesh crawl as I listened.
“A strong brute and one who might be
useful somehow. See that he is given all the hashish he requires.”
Then the face began to recede, even as I sensed
that I was the subject of conversation, and the mists billowed and began to
close again. Yet for a single instant a scene stood out with startling clarity.
I gasped—or sought to. For over the high, strange shoulder of the
apparition another face stood out clearly for an instant, as if the owner
peered at me. Red lips, half-parted, long dark eyelashes, shading vivid eyes, a
shimmery cloud of hair. Over the shoulder of Horror, breathtaking beauty for an
instant looked at me.
2. The Hashish Slave
“Up from Earth’s center through
the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate.”
—Omar Khayyam
MY DREAM of the skull-face was borne over that
usually uncrossable gap that lies between hashish enchantment and humdrum
reality. I sat cross-legged on a mat in Yun Shatu’s Temple of Dreams and
gathered the fading forces of my decaying brain to the task of remembering
events and faces.
This last dream was so entirely different from
any I had ever had before, that my waning interest was roused to the point of
inquiring as to its origin. When I first began to experiment with hashish, I
sought to find a physical or psychic basis for the wild flights of illusion
pertaining thereto, but of late I had been content to enjoy without seeking
cause and effect.
Whence this unaccountable sensation of
familiarity in regard to that vision? I took my throbbing head between my hands
and laboriously sought a clue. A living dead man and a girl of rare beauty who
had looked over his shoulder. Then I remembered.
Back in the fog of days and nights which veils a
hashish addict’s memory, my money had given out. It seemed years or
possibly centuries, but my stagnant reason told me that it had probably been
only a few days. At any rate, I had presented myself at Yun Shatu’s
sordid dive as usual and had been thrown out by the great Negro Hassim when it
was learned I had no more money.
My universe crashing to pieces about me, and my
nerves humming like taut piano wires for the vital need that was mine, I
crouched in the gutter and gibbered bestially, till Hassim swaggered out and
stilled my yammerings with a blow that felled me, half-stunned.
Then as I presently rose, staggeringly and with
no thought save of the river which flowed with cool murmur so near me—as
I rose, a light hand was laid like the touch of a rose on my arm. I turned with
a frightened start, and stood spellbound before the vision of loveliness which
met my gaze. Dark eyes limpid with pity surveyed me and the little hand on my
ragged sleeve drew me toward the door of the Dream Temple. I shrank back, but a
low voice, soft and musical, urged me, and filled with a trust that was
strange, I shambled along with my beautiful guide.
At the door Hassim met us, cruel hands lifted
and a dark scowl on his ape-like brow, but as I cowered there, expecting a
blow, he halted before the girl’s upraised hand and her word of command
which had taken on an imperious note.
I did not understand what she said, but I saw
dimly, as in a fog, that she gave the black man money, and she led me to a
couch where she had me recline and arranged the cushions as if I were king of
Egypt instead of a ragged, dirty renegade who lived only for hashish. Her slim
hand was cool on my brow for a moment, and then she was gone and Yussef Ali
came bearing the stuff for which my very soul shrieked—and soon I was
wandering again through those strange and exotic countries that only a hashish
slave knows.
Now as I sat on the mat and pondered the dream
of the skull-face I wondered more. Since the unknown girl had led me back into
the dive, I had come and gone as before, when I had plenty of money to pay Yun
Shatu. Someone certainly was paying him for me, and while my subconscious mind
had told me it was the girl, my rusty brain had failed to grasp the fact
entirely, or to wonder why. What need of wondering? So someone paid and the
vivid-hued dreams continued, what cared I? But now I wondered. For the girl who
had protected me from Hassim and had brought the hashish for me was the same
girl I had seen in the skull-face dream.
Through the soddenness of my degradation the
lure of her struck like a knife piercing my heart and strangely revived the
memories of the days when I was a man like other men—not yet a sullen,
cringing slave of dreams. Far and dim they were, shimmery islands in the mist
of years—and what a dark sea lay between!
I looked at my ragged sleeve and the dirty,
claw-like hand protruding from it; I gazed through the hanging smoke which
fogged the sordid room, at the low bunks along the wall whereon lay the blankly
staring dreamers—slaves, like me, of hashish or of opium. I gazed at the
slippered Chinamen gliding softly to and fro bearing pipes or roasting balls of
concentrated purgatory over tiny flickering fires. I gazed at Hassim standing,
arms folded, beside the door like a great statue of black basalt.
And I shuddered and hid my face in my hands
because with the faint dawning of returning manhood, I knew that this last and
most cruel dream was futile—I had crossed an ocean over which I could
never return, had cut myself off from the world of normal men or women. Naught
remained now but to drown this dream as I had drowned all my others—swiftly
and with hope that I should soon attain that Ultimate Ocean which lies beyond
all dreams.
So these fleeting moments of lucidity, of
longing, that tear aside the veils of all dope slaves—unexplainable,
without hope of attainment.
So I went back to my empty dreams, to my
phantasmagoria of illusions; but sometimes, like a sword cleaving a mist,
through the high lands and the low lands and seas of my visions floated, like
half-forgotten music, the sheen of dark eyes and shimmery hair.
You ask how I, Stephen Costigan, American and a
man of some attainments and culture, came to lie in a filthy dive of London’s
Limehouse? The answer is simple—no jaded debauchee, I, seeking new
sensations in the mysteries of the Orient. I answer—Argonne! Heavens,
what deeps and heights of horror lurk in that one word alone! Shell-shocked—shell-torn.
Endless days and nights without end and roaring red hell over No Man’s
Land where I lay shot and bayoneted to shreds of gory flesh. My body recovered,
how I know not; my mind never did.
And the leaping fires and shifting shadows in my
tortured brain drove me down and down, along the stairs of degradation,
uncaring until at last I found surcease in Yun Shatu’s Temple of Dreams,
where I slew my red dreams in other dreams—the dreams of hashish whereby
a man may descend to the lower pits of the reddest hells or soar into those
unnamable heights where the stars are diamond pinpoints beneath his feet.
Not the visions of the sot, the beast, were
mine. I attained the unattainable, stood face to face with the unknown and in
cosmic calmness knew the unguessable. And was content after a fashion, until
the sight of burnished hair and scarlet lips swept away my dream-built universe
and left me shuddering among its ruins.
3. The Master of Doom
“And He that toss’d you down
into the Field,
He knows about it all—He knows! He knows!”
—Omar Khayyam
A HAND shook me roughly as I emerged languidly
from my latest debauch.
“The Master wishes you! Up, swine!”
Hassim it was who shook me and who spoke.
“To Hell with the Master!” I
answered, for I hated Hassim—and feared him.
“Up with you or you get no more hashish,”
was the brutal response, and I rose in trembling haste.
I followed the huge black man and he led the way
to the rear of the building, stepping in and out among the wretched dreamers on
the floor.
“Muster all hands on deck!” droned a
sailor in a bunk. “All hands!”
Hassim flung open the door at the rear and
motioned me to enter. I had never before passed through that door and had
supposed it led into Yun Shatu’s private quarters. But it was furnished
only with a cot, a bronze idol of some sort before which incense burned, and a
heavy table.
Hassim gave me a sinister glance and seized the
table as if to spin it about. It turned as if it stood on a revolving platform
and a section of the floor turned with it, revealing a hidden doorway in the floor.
Steps led downward in the darkness.
Hassim lighted a candle and with a brusque
gesture invited me to descend. I did so, with the sluggish obedience of the
dope addict, and he followed, closing the door above us by means of an iron
lever fastened to the underside of the floor. In the semi-darkness we went down
the rickety steps, some nine or ten I should say, and then came upon a narrow
corridor.
Here Hassim again took the lead, holding the
candle high in front of him. I could scarcely see the sides of this cave-like
passageway but knew that it was not wide. The flickering light showed it to be
bare of any sort of furnishings save for a number of strange-looking chests
which lined the walls—receptacles containing opium and other dope, I
thought.
A continuous scurrying and the occasional glint
of small red eyes haunted the shadows, betraying the presence of vast numbers
of the great rats which infest the Thames waterfront of that section.
Then more steps loomed out of the dark in front
of us as the corridor came to an abrupt end. Hassim led the way up and at the
top knocked four times against what seemed the underside of a floor. A hidden
door opened and a flood of soft, illusive light streamed through.
Hassim hustled me up roughly and I stood blinking
in such a setting as I had never seen in my wildest flights of vision. I stood
in a jungle of palm trees through which wriggled a million vivid-hued dragons!
Then, as my startled eyes became accustomed to the light, I saw that I had not
been suddenly transferred to some other planet, as I had at first thought. The
palm trees were there, and the dragons, but the trees were artificial and stood
in great pots and the dragons writhed across heavy tapestries which hid the
walls.
The room itself was a monstrous affair—inhumanly
large, it seemed to me. A thick smoke, yellowish and tropical in suggestion,
seemed to hang over all, veiling the ceiling and baffling upward glances. This
smoke, I saw, emanated from an altar in front of the wall to my left. I
started. Through the saffron-billowing fog two eyes, hideously large and vivid,
glittered at me. The vague outlines of some bestial idol took indistinct shape.
I flung an uneasy glance about, marking the oriental divans and couches and the
bizarre furnishings, and then my eyes halted and rested on a lacquer screen
just in front of me.
I could not pierce it and no sound came from
beyond it, yet I felt eyes searing into my consciousness through it, eyes that
burned through my very soul. A strange aura of evil flowed from that strange
screen with its weird carvings and unholy decorations.
Hassim salaamed profoundly before it and then,
without speaking, stepped back and folded his arms, statue-like.
A voice suddenly broke the heavy and oppressive
silence.
“You who are a swine, would you like to be
a man again?”
I started. The tone was inhuman, cold—more,
there was a suggestion of long disuse of the vocal organs—the voice I had
heard in my dream!
“Yes,” I replied, trance-like, “I
would like to be a man again.”
Silence ensued for a space; then the voice came
again with a sinister whispering undertone at the back of its sound like bats
flying through a cavern.
“I shall make you a man again because I am
a friend to all broken men. Not for a price shall I do it, nor for gratitude.
And I give you a sign to seal my promise and my vow. Thrust your hand through
the screen.”
At these strange and almost unintelligible words
I stood perplexed, and then, as the unseen voice repeated the last command, I
stepped forward and thrust my hand through a slit which opened silently in the
screen. I felt my wrist seized in an iron grip and something seven times colder
than ice touched the inside of my hand. Then my wrist was released, and drawing
forth my hand I saw a strange symbol traced in blue close to the base of my
thumb—a thing like a scorpion.
The voice spoke again in a sibilant language I
did not understand, and Hassim stepped forward deferentially. He reached about
the screen and then turned to me, holding a goblet of some amber-colored liquid
which he proffered me with an ironical bow. I took it hesitatingly.
“Drink and fear not,” said the
unseen voice. “It is only an Egyptian wine with life-giving qualities.”
So I raised the goblet and emptied it; the taste
was not unpleasant, and even as I handed the beaker to Hassim again, I seemed
to feel new life and vigor whip along my jaded veins.
“Remain at Yun Shatu’s house,”
said the voice. “You will be given food and a bed until you are strong
enough to work for yourself. You will use no hashish nor will you require any.
Go!”
As in a daze, I followed Hassim back through the
hidden door, down the steps, along the dark corridor and up through the other
door that let us into the Temple of Dreams.
As we stepped from the rear chamber into the
main room of the dreamers, I turned to the Negro wonderingly.
“Master? Master of what? Of Life?”
Hassim laughed, fiercely and sardonically.
“Master of Doom!”
4. The Spider and the Fly
“There was the Door to which I found
no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see.”
—Omar Khayyam
I SAT on Yun Shatu’s cushions and pondered
with a clearness of mind new and strange to me. As for that, all my sensations
were new and strange. I felt as if I had wakened from a monstrously long sleep,
and though my thoughts were sluggish, I felt as though the cobwebs which had
dogged them for so long had been partly brushed away.
I drew my hand across my brow, noting how it
trembled. I was weak and shaky and felt the stirrings of hunger—not for
dope but for food. What had been in the draft I had quenched in the chamber of
mystery? And why had the “Master” chosen me, out of all the other
wretches of Yun Shatu’s, for regeneration?
And who was this Master? Somehow the word
sounded vaguely familiar—I sought laboriously to remember. Yes—I
had heard it, lying half-waking in the bunks or on the floor—whispered
sibilantly by Yun Shatu or by Hassim or by Yussef Ali, the Moor, muttered in
their low-voiced conversations and mingled always with words I could not
understand. Was not Yun Shatu, then, master of the Temple of Dreams? I had
thought and the other addicts thought that the withered Chinaman held
undisputed sway over this drab kingdom and that Hassim and Yussef Ali were his
servants. And the four China boys who roasted opium with Yun Shatu and Yar Khan
the Afghan and Santiago the Haitian and Ganra Singh, the renegade Sikh—all
in the pay of Yun Shatu, we supposed—bound to the opium lord by bonds of
gold or fear.
For Yun Shatu was a power in London’s
Chinatown and I had heard that his tentacles reached across the seas into high
places of mighty and mysterious tongs. Was that Yun Shatu behind the lacquer
screen? No; I knew the Chinaman’s voice and besides I had seen him
puttering about in the front of the Temple just as I went through the back
door.
Another thought came to me. Often, lying
half-torpid, in the late hours of night or in the early grayness of dawn, I had
seen men and women steal into the Temple, whose dress and bearing were
strangely out of place and incongruous. Tall, erect men, often in evening
dress, with their hats drawn low about their brows, and fine ladies, veiled, in
silks and furs. Never two of them came together, but always they came
separately and, hiding their features, hurried to the rear door, where they
entered and presently came forth again, hours later sometimes. Knowing that the
lust for dope finds resting-place in high positions sometimes, I had never
wondered overmuch, supposing that these were wealthy men and women of society
who had fallen victims to the craving, and that somewhere in the back of the
building there was a private chamber for such. Yet now I wondered—sometimes
these persons had remained only a few moments—was it always opium for
which they came, or did they, too, traverse that strange corridor and converse
with the One behind the screen?
My mind dallied with the idea of a great
specialist to whom came all classes of people to find surcease from the dope
habit. Yet it was strange that such a one should select a dope-joint from which
to work—strange, too, that the owner of that house should apparently look
on him with so much reverence.
I gave it up as my head began to hurt with the
unwonted effort of thinking, and shouted for food. Yussef Ali brought it to me
on a tray, with a promptness which was surprizing. More, he salaamed as he
departed, leaving me to ruminate on the strange shift of my status in the
Temple of Dreams.
I ate, wondering what the One of the screen
wanted with me. Not for an instant did I suppose that his actions had been
prompted by the reasons he pretended; the life of the underworld had taught me
that none of its denizens leaned toward philanthropy. And underworld the chamber
of mystery had been, in spite of its elaborate and bizarre nature. And where
could it be located? How far had I walked along the corridor? I shrugged my
shoulders, wondering if it were not all a hashish-induced dream; then my eye
fell upon my hand—and the scorpion traced thereon.
“Muster all hands!” droned the
sailor in the bunk. “All hands!”
To tell in detail of the next few days would be
boresome to any who have not tasted the dire slavery of dope. I waited for the
craving to strike me again—waited with sure sardonic hopelessness. All
day, all night—another day—then the miracle was forced upon my
doubting brain. Contrary to all theories and supposed facts of science and
common sense the craving had left me as suddenly and completely as a bad dream!
At first I could not credit my senses but believed myself to be still in the
grip of a dope nightmare. But it was true. From the time I quaffed the goblet
in the room of mystery, I felt not the slightest desire for the stuff which had
been life itself to me. This, I felt vaguely, was somehow unholy and certainly
opposed to all rules of nature. If the dread being behind the screen had
discovered the secret of breaking hashish’s terrible power, what other
monstrous secrets had he discovered and what unthinkable dominance was his? The
suggestion of evil crawled serpent-like through my mind.
I remained at Yun Shatu’s house, lounging
in a bunk or on cushions spread upon the floor, eating and drinking at will,
but now that I was becoming a normal man again, the atmosphere became most
revolting to me and the sight of the wretches writhing in their dreams reminded
me unpleasantly of what I myself had been, and it repelled, nauseated me.
So one day, when no one was watching me, I rose
and went out on the street and walked along the waterfront. The air, burdened
though it was with smoke and foul scents, filled my lungs with strange
freshness and aroused new vigor in what had once been a powerful frame. I took
new interest in the sounds of men living and working, and the sight of a vessel
being unloaded at one of the wharfs actually thrilled me. The force of
longshoremen was short, and presently I found myself heaving and lifting and
carrying, and though the sweat coursed down my brow and my limbs trembled at
the effort, I exulted in the thought that at last I was able to labor for
myself again, no matter how low or drab the work might be.
As I returned to the door of Yun Shatu’s
that evening—hideously weary but with the renewed feeling of manhood that
comes of honest toil—Hassim met me at the door.
“You been where?” he demanded
roughly.
“I’ve been working on the docks,”
I answered shortly.
“You don’t need to work on docks,”
he snarled. “The Master got work for you.”
He led the way, and again I traversed the dark
stairs and the corridor under the earth. This time my faculties were alert and
I decided that the passageway could not be over thirty or forty feet in length.
Again I stood before the lacquer screen and again I heard the inhuman voice of living
death.
“I can give you work,” said the
voice. “Are you willing to work for me?”
I quickly assented. After all, in spite of the
fear which the voice inspired, I was deeply indebted to the owner.
“Good. Take these.”
As I started toward the screen a sharp command
halted me and Hassim stepped forward and reaching behind took what was offered.
This was a bundle of pictures and papers, apparently.
“Study these,” said the One behind
the screen, “and learn all you can about the man portrayed thereby. Yun
Shatu will give you money; buy yourself such clothes as seamen wear and take a
room at the front of the Temple. At the end of two days, Hassim will bring you
to me again. Go!”
The last impression I had, as the hidden door
closed above me, was that the eyes of the idol, blinking through the
everlasting smoke, leered mockingly at me.
The front of the Temple of Dreams consisted of
rooms for rent, masking the true purpose of the building under the guise of a
waterfront boarding house. The police had made several visits to Yun Shatu but
had never got any incriminating evidence against him.
So in one of these rooms I took up my abode and
set to work studying the material given me.
The pictures were all of one man, a large man,
not unlike me in build and general facial outline, except that he wore a heavy
beard and was inclined to blondness whereas I am dark. The name, as written on
the accompanying papers, was Major Fairlan Morley, special commissioner to
Natal and the Transvaal. This office and title were new to me and I wondered at
the connection between an African commissioner and an opium house on the Thames
waterfront.
The papers consisted of extensive data evidently
copied from authentic sources and all dealing with Major Morley, and a number of
private documents considerably illuminating on the major’s private life.
An exhaustive description was given of the man’s
personal appearance and habits, some of which seemed very trivial to me. I
wondered what the purpose could be, and how the One behind the screen had come
in possession of papers of such intimate nature.
I could find no clue in answer to this question
but bent all my energies to the task set out for me. I owed a deep debt of
gratitude to the unknown man who required this of me and I was determined to
repay him to the best of my ability. Nothing, at this time, suggested a snare
to me.
5. The Man on the Couch
“What dam of lances sent thee forth
to jest at dawn with Death?”
—Kipling
AT THE expiration of two days, Hassim beckoned
me as I stood in the opium room. I advanced with a springy, resilient tread,
secure in the confidence that I had culled the Morley papers of all their
worth. I was a new man; my mental swiftness and physical readiness surprised me—sometimes
it seemed unnatural.
Hassim eyed me through narrowed lids and
motioned me to follow, as usual. As we crossed the room, my gaze fell upon a
man who lay on a couch close to the wall, smoking opium. There was nothing at
all suspicious about his ragged, unkempt clothes, his dirty, bearded face or
the blank stare, but my eyes, sharpened to an abnormal point, seemed to sense a
certain incongruity in the clean-cut limbs which not even the slouchy garments
could efface.
Hassim spoke impatiently and I turned away. We
entered the rear room, and as he shut the door and turned to the table, it
moved of itself and a figure bulked up through the hidden doorway. The Sikh,
Ganra Singh, a lean sinister-eyed giant, emerged and proceeded to the door
opening into the opium room, where he halted until we should have descended and
closed the secret doorway.
Again I stood amid the billowing yellow smoke
and listened to the hidden voice.
“Do you think you know enough about Major
Morley to impersonate him successfully?”
Startled, I answered, “No doubt I could,
unless I met someone who was intimate with him.”
“I will take care of that. Follow me
closely. Tomorrow you sail on the first boat for Calais. There you will meet an
agent of mine who will accost you the instant you step upon the wharfs, and
give you further instructions. You will sail second class and avoid all
conversation with strangers or anyone. Take the papers with you. The agent will
aid you in making up and your masquerade will start in Calais. That is all. Go!”
I departed, my wonder growing. All this
rigmarole evidently had a meaning, but one which I could not fathom. Back in
the opium room Hassim bade me be seated on some cushions to await his return.
To my question he snarled that he was going forth as he had been ordered, to
buy me a ticket on the Channel boat. He departed and I sat down, leaning my
back against the wall. As I ruminated, it seemed suddenly that eyes were fixed
on me so intensely as to disturb my sub-mind. I glanced up quickly but no one
seemed to be looking at me. The smoke drifted through the hot atmosphere as
usual; Yussef Ali and the Chinese glided back and forth tending to the wants of
the sleepers.
Suddenly the door to the rear room opened and a
strange and hideous figure came haltingly out. Not all of those who found
entrance to Yun Shatu’s back room were aristocrats and society members.
This was one of the exceptions, and one whom I remembered as having often
entered and emerged therefrom. A tall, gaunt figure, shapeless and ragged
wrappings and nondescript garments, face entirely hidden. Better that the face
be hidden, I thought, for without doubt the wrapping concealed a grisly sight.
The man was a leper, who had somehow managed to escape the attention of the
public guardians and who was occasionally seen haunting the lower and more
mysterious regions of East End—a mystery even to the lowest denizens of
Limehouse.
Suddenly my supersensitive mind was aware of a
swift tension in the air. The leper hobbled out the door, closed it behind him.
My eyes instinctively sought the couch whereon lay the man who had aroused my
suspicions earlier in the day. I could have sworn that cold steely eyes glared
menacingly before they flickered shut. I crossed to the couch in one stride and
bent over the prostrate man. Something about his face seemed unnatural—a
healthy bronze seemed to underlie the pallor of complexion.
“Yun Shatu!” I shouted. “A spy
is in the house!”
Things happened then with bewildering speed. The
man on the couch with one tigerish movement leaped erect and a revolver gleamed
in his hand. One sinewy arm flung me aside as I sought to grapple with him and
a sharp decisive voice sounded over the babble which broke forth.
“You there! Halt! Halt!”
The pistol in the stranger’s hand was
leveled at the leper, who was making for the door in long strides!
All about was confusion; Yun Shatu was shrieking
volubly in Chinese and the four China boys and Yussef Ali were rushing in from
all sides, knives glittering in their hands.
All this I saw with unnatural clearness even as
I marked the stranger’s face. As the fleeing leper gave no evidence of
halting, I saw the eyes harden to steely points of determination, sighting
along the pistol barrel—the features set with the grim purpose of the
slayer. The leper was almost to the outer door, but death would strike him down
ere he could reach it.
And then, just as the finger of the stranger
tightened on the trigger, I hurled myself forward and my right fist crashed
against his chin. He went down as though struck by a trip-hammer, the revolver
exploding harmlessly in the air.
In that instant, with the blinding flare of
light that sometimes comes to one, I knew that the leper was none other than
the Man Behind the Screen!
I bent over the fallen man, who though not
entirely senseless had been rendered temporarily helpless by that terrific
blow. He was struggling dazedly to rise but I shoved him roughly down again and
seizing the false beard he wore, tore it away. A lean bronzed face was
revealed, the strong lines of which not even the artificial dirt and
grease-paint could alter.
Yussef Ali leaned above him now, dagger in hand,
eyes slits of murder. The brown sinewy hand went up—I caught the wrist.
“Not so fast, you black devil! What are
you about to do?”
“This is John Gordon,” he hissed, “the
Master’s greatest foe! He must die, curse you!”
John Gordon! The name was familiar somehow, and
yet I did not seem to connect it with the London police nor account for the man’s
presence in Yun Shatu’s dope-joint. However, on one point I was
determined.
“You don’t kill him, at any rate. Up
with you!” This last to Gordon, who with my aid staggered up, still very
dizzy.
“That punch would have dropped a bull,”
I said in wonderment; “I didn’t know I had it in me.”
The false leper had vanished. Yun Shatu stood
gazing at me as immobile as an idol, hands in his wide sleeves, and Yussef Ali
stood back, muttering murderously and thumbing his dagger edge, as I led Gordon
out of the opium room and through the innocent-appearing bar which lay between
that room and the street.
Out in the street I said to him: “I have
no idea as to who you are or what you are doing here, but you see what an
unhealthful place it is for you. Hereafter be advised by me and stay away.”
His only answer was a searching glance, and then
be turned and walked swiftly though somewhat unsteadily up the street.
6. The Dream Girl
“I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule.”
—Poe
OUTSIDE my room sounded a light footstep. The
doorknob turned cautiously and slowly; the door opened. I sprang erect with a
gasp. Red lips, half-parted, dark eyes like limpid seas of wonder, a mass of
shimmering hair—framed in my drab doorway stood the girl of my dreams!
She entered, and half-turning with a sinuous
motion, closed the door. I sprang forward, my hands outstretched, then halted
as she put a finger to her lips.
“You must not talk loudly,” she
almost whispered. “He did not say I could not come; yet—”
Her voice was soft and musical, with just a
touch of foreign accent which I found delightful. As for the girl herself,
every intonation, every movement proclaimed the Orient. She was a fragrant
breath from the East. From her night-black hair, piled high above her alabaster
forehead, to her little feet, encased in high-heeled pointed slippers, she
portrayed the highest ideal of Asiatic loveliness—an effect which was
heightened rather than lessened by the English blouse and skirt which she wore.
“You are beautiful!” I said dazedly.
“Who are you?”
“I am Zuleika,” she answered with a
shy smile. “I—I am glad you like me. I am glad you no longer dream
hashish dreams.”
Strange that so small a thing should set my
heart to leaping wildly!
“I owe it all to you, Zuleika,” I
said huskily. “Had not I dreamed of you every hour since you first lifted
me from the gutter, I had lacked the power of even hoping to be freed from my
curse.”
She blushed prettily and intertwined her white
fingers as if in nervousness.
“You leave England tomorrow?” she
said suddenly.
“Yes. Hassim has not returned with my
ticket—” I hesitated suddenly, remembering the command of silence.
“Yes, I know, I know!” she whispered
swiftly, her eyes widening. “And John Gordon has been here! He saw you!”
“Yes!”
She came close to me with a quick lithe
movement.
“You are to impersonate some man! Listen,
while you are doing this, you must not ever let Gordon see you! He would know
you, no matter what your disguise! He is a terrible man!”
“I don’t understand,” I said,
completely bewildered. “How did the Master break me of my hashish
craving? Who is this Gordon and why did he come here? Why does the Master go
disguised as a leper—and who is he? Above all, why am I to impersonate a
man I never saw or heard of?”
“I cannot—I dare not tell you!”
she whispered, her face paling. “I—”
Somewhere in the house sounded the faint tones
of a Chinese gong. The girl started like a frightened gazelle.
“I must go! He summons me!”
She opened the door, darted through, halted a
moment to electrify me with her passionate exclamation: “Oh, be careful,
be very careful, sahib!”
Then she was gone.
7. The Man of the Skull
“What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?”
—Blake
A WHILE after my beautiful and mysterious
visitor had left, I sat in meditation. I believed that I had at last stumbled
onto an explanation of a part of the enigma, at any rate. This was the
conclusion I had reached: Yun Shatu, the opium lord, was simply the agent or
servant of some organization or individual whose work was on a far larger scale
than merely supplying dope addicts in the Temple of Dreams. This man or these
men needed co-workers among all classes of people; in other words, I was being
let in with a group of opium smugglers on a gigantic scale. Gordon no doubt had
been investigating the case, and his presence alone showed that it was no
ordinary one, for I knew that he held a high position with the English
government, though just what, I did not know.
Opium or not, I determined to carry out my
obligation to the Master. My moral sense had been blunted by the dark ways I
had traveled, and the thought of despicable crime did not enter my head. I was
indeed hardened. More, the mere debt of gratitude was increased a thousand-fold
by the thought of the girl. To the Master I owed it that I was able to stand up
on my feet and look into her clear eyes as a man should. So if he wished my
services as a smuggler of dope, he should have them. No doubt I was to
impersonate some man so high in governmental esteem that the usual actions of
the customs officers would be deemed unnecessary; was I to bring some rare dream-producer
into England?
These thoughts were in my mind as I went
downstairs, but ever back of them hovered other and more alluring suppositions—what
was the reason for the girl, here in this vile dive—a rose in a
garbage-heap—and who was she?
As I entered the outer bar, Hassim came in, his
brows set in a dark scowl of anger, and, I believed, fear. He carried a
newspaper in his hand, folded.
“I told you to wait in opium room,”
he snarled.
“You were gone so long that I went up to
my room. Have you the ticket?”
He merely grunted and pushed on past me into the
opium room, and standing at the door I saw him cross the floor and disappear
into the rear room. I stood there, my bewilderment increasing. For as Hassim
had brushed past me, I had noted an item on the face of the paper, against
which his black thumb was tightly pressed as if to mark that special column of
news.
And with the unnatural celerity of action and
judgment which seemed to be mine those days, I had in that fleeting instant
read:
AFRICAN SPECIAL COMMISSIONER FOUND MURDERED!
The body of Major Fairlan Morley was yesterday
discovered in a rotting ship’s hold at Bordeaux . . .
No more I saw of the details, but that alone was
enough to make me think! The affair seemed to be taking on an ugly aspect. Yet—
Another day passed. To my inquiries, Hassim
snarled that the plans had been changed and I was not to go to France. Then,
late in the evening, he came to bid me once more to the room of mystery.
I stood before the lacquer screen, the yellow
smoke acrid in my nostrils, the woven dragons writhing along the tapestries,
the palm trees rearing thick and oppressive.
“A change has come in our plans,”
said the hidden voice. “You will not sail as was decided before. But I
have other work that you may do. Mayhap this will be more to your type of
usefulness, for I admit you have somewhat disappointed me in regard to
subtlety. You interfered the other day in such manner as will no doubt cause me
great inconvenience in the future.”
I said nothing, but a feeling of resentment
began to stir in me.
“Even after the assurance of one of my
most trusted servants,” the toneless voice continued, with no mark of any
emotion save a slightly rising note, “you insisted on releasing my most
deadly enemy. Be more circumspect in the future.”
“I saved your life!” I said angrily.
“And for that reason alone I overlook your
mistake—this time!”
A slow fury suddenly surged up in me.
“This time! Make the best of it this time,
for I assure you there will be no next time. I owe you a greater debt than I
can ever hope to pay, but that does not make me your slave. I have saved your
life—the debt is as near paid as a man can pay it. Go your way and I go
mine!”
A low, hideous laugh answered me, like a reptilian
hiss.
“You fool! You will pay with your whole
life’s toil! You say you are not my slave? I say you are—just as
black Hassim there beside you is my slave—just as the girl Zuleika is my
slave, who has bewitched you with her beauty.”
These words sent a wave of hot blood to my brain
and I was conscious of a flood of fury which completely engulfed my reason for
a second. Just as all my moods and senses seemed sharpened and exaggerated
those days, so now this burst of rage transcended every moment of anger I had
ever had before.
“Hell’s fiends!” I shrieked. “You
devil—who are you and what is your hold on me? I’ll see you or die!”
Hassim sprang at me, but I hurled him backward
and with one stride reached the screen and flung it aside with an incredible
effort of strength. Then I shrank back, hands outflung, shrieking. A tall,
gaunt figure stood before me, a figure arrayed grotesquely in a silk brocaded
gown which fell to the floor.
From the sleeves of this gown protruded hands
which filled me with crawling horror—long, predatory hands, with thin
bony fingers and curved talons—withered skin of a parchment
brownish-yellow, like the hands of a man long dead.
The hands—but, oh God, the face! A skull
to which no vestige of flesh seemed to remain but on which taut brownish-yellow
skin grew fast, etching out every detail of that terrible death’s-head.
The forehead was high and in a way magnificent, but the head was curiously
narrow through the temples, and from under penthouse brows great eyes glimmered
like pools of yellow fire. The nose was high-bridged and very thin; the mouth
was a mere colorless gash between thin, cruel lips. A long, bony neck supported
this frightful vision and completed the effect of a reptilian demon from some
medieval hell.
I was face to face with the skull-faced man of
my dreams!
8. Black Wisdom
“By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire.
By a broken heart in the breast of the world
And the end of the world’s desire.”
—Chesterton
THE terrible spectacle drove for the instant all
thought of rebellion from my mind. My very blood froze in my veins and I stood
motionless. I heard Hassim laugh grimly behind me. The eyes in the cadaverous
face blazed fiendishly at me and I blanched from the concentrated satanic fury
in them.
Then the horror laughed sibilantly.
“I do you a great honor, Mr. Costigan;
among a very few, even of my own servants, you may say that you saw my face and
lived. I think you will be more useful to me living than dead.”
I was silent, completely unnerved. It was
difficult to believe that this man lived, for his appearance certainly belied
the thought. He seemed horribly like a mummy. Yet his lips moved when he spoke
and his eyes flamed with hideous life.
“You will do as I say,” he said
abruptly, and his voice had taken on a note of command. “You doubtless
know, or know of, Sir Haldred Frenton?”
“Yes.”
Every man of culture in Europe and America was
familiar with the travel books of Sir Haldred Frenton, author and soldier of
fortune.
“You will go to Sir Haldred’s estate
tonight—”
“Yes?”
“And kill him!”
I staggered, literally. This order was
incredible—unspeakable! I had sunk low, low enough to smuggle opium, but
to deliberately murder a man I had never seen, a man noted for his kindly
deeds! That was too monstrous even to contemplate.
“You do not refuse?”
The tone was as loathly and as mocking as the
hiss of a serpent.
“Refuse?” I screamed, finding my
voice at last. “Refuse? You incarnate devil! Of course I refuse! You—”
Something in the cold assurance of his manner
halted me—froze me into apprehensive silence.
“You fool!” he said calmly. “I
broke the hashish chains—do you know how? Four minutes from now you will
know and curse the day you were born! Have you not thought it strange, the
swiftness of brain, the resilience of body—the brain that should be rusty
and slow, the body that should be weak and sluggish from years of abuse? That
blow that felled John Gordon—have you not wondered at its might? The ease
with which you mastered Major Morley’s records—have you not
wondered at that? You fool, you are bound to me by chains of steel and blood
and fire! I have kept you alive and sane—I alone. Each day the
life-saving elixir has been given you in your wine. You could not live and keep
your reason without it. And I and only I know its secret!”
He glanced at a queer timepiece which stood on a
table at his elbow.
“This time I had Yun Shatu leave the
elixir out—I anticipated rebellion. The time is near—ha, it
strikes!”
Something else he said, but I did not hear. I
did not see, nor did I feel in the human sense of the word. I was writhing at
his feet, screaming and gibbering in the flames of such hells as men have never
dreamed of.
Aye, I knew now! He had simply given me a dope
so much stronger that it drowned the hashish. My unnatural ability was
explainable now—I had simply been acting under the stimulus of something
which combined all the hells in its makeup, which stimulated, something like
heroin, but whose effect was unnoticed by the victim. What it was, I had no
idea, nor did I believe anyone knew save that hellish being who stood watching
me with grim amusement. But it had held my brain together, instilling into my
system a need for it, and now my frightful craving tore my soul asunder.
Never, in my moments of worst shell-shock or my
moments of hashish-craving, have I ever experienced anything like that. I
burned with the heat of a thousand hells and froze with an iciness that was
colder than any ice, a hundred times. I swept down to the deepest pits of
torture and up to the highest crags of torment—a million yelling devils
hemmed me in, shrieking and stabbing. Bone by bone, vein by vein, cell by cell
I felt my body disintegrate and fly in bloody atoms all over the universe—and
each separate cell was an entire system of quivering, screaming nerves. And
they gathered from far voids and reunited with a greater torment.
Through the fiery bloody mists I heard my own
voice screaming, a monotonous yammering. Then with distended eyes I saw a
golden goblet, held by a claw-like hand, swim into view—a goblet filled
with an amber liquid.
With a bestial screech, I seized it with both
hands, being dimly aware that the metal stem gave beneath my fingers, and
brought the brim to my lips. I drank in frenzied haste, the liquid slopping
down onto my breast.
9. Kathulos of Egypt
“Night shall be thrice night over
you,
And Heaven an iron cope.”
—Chesterton
THE Skull-faced One stood watching me critically
as I sat panting on a couch, completely exhausted. He held in his hand the
goblet and surveyed the golden stem, which was crushed out of all shape. This
my maniac fingers had done in the instant of drinking.
“Superhuman strength, even for a man in
your condition,” he said with a sort of creaky pedantry. “I doubt
if even Hassim here could equal it. Are you ready for your instructions now?”
I nodded, wordless. Already the hellish strength
of the elixir was flowing through my veins, renewing my burnt-out force. I
wondered how long a man could live as I lived being constantly burned out and
artificially rebuilt.
“You will be given a disguise and will go
alone to the Frenton estate. No one suspects any design against Sir Haldred and
your entrance into the estate and the house itself should be a matter of
comparative ease. You will not don the disguise—which will be of unique
nature—until you are ready to enter the estate. You will then proceed to
Sir Haldred’s room and kill him, breaking his neck with your bare hands—this
is essential—”
The voice droned on, giving the ghastly orders
in a frightfully casual and matter-of-fact way. The cold sweat beaded my brow.
“You will then leave the estate, taking
care to leave the imprint of your hand somewhere plainly visible, and the
automobile, which will be waiting for you at some safe place nearby, will bring
you back here, you having first removed the disguise. I have, in case of
complications, any amount of men who will swear that you spent the entire night
in the Temple of Dreams and never left it. But there must be no detection! Go
warily and perform your task surely, for you know the alternative.”
I did not return to the opium house but was
taken through winding corridors, hung with heavy tapestries, to a small room
containing only an oriental couch. Hassim gave me to understand that I was to
remain here until after nightfall and then left me. The door was closed but I
made no effort to discover if it was locked. The Skull-faced Master held me
with stronger shackles than locks and bolts.
Seated upon the couch in the bizarre setting of
a chamber which might have been a room in an Indian zenana, I faced fact
squarely and fought out my battle. There was still in me some trace of manhood
left—more than the fiend had reckoned, and added to this were black
despair and desperation. I chose and determined on my only course.
Suddenly the door opened softly. Some intuition
told me whom to expect, nor was I disappointed. Zuleika stood, a glorious
vision before me—a vision which mocked me, made blacker my despair and
yet thrilled me with wild yearning and reasonless joy.
She bore a tray of food which she set beside me,
and then she seated herself on the couch, her large eyes fixed upon my face. A
flower in a serpent den she was, and the beauty of her took hold of my heart.
“Steephen!” she whispered, and I
thrilled as she spoke my name for the first time.
Her luminous eyes suddenly shone with tears and
she laid her little hand on my arm. I seized it in both my rough hands.
“They have set you a task which you fear
and hate!” she faltered.
“Aye,” I almost laughed, “but
I’ll fool them yet! Zuleika, tell me—what is the meaning of all
this?”
She glanced fearfully around her.
“I do not know all”—she
hesitated—“your plight is all my fault but I—I hoped—Steephen,
I have watched you every time you came to Yun Shatu’s for months. You did
not see me but I saw you, and I saw in you, not the broken sot your rags
proclaimed, but a wounded soul, a soul bruised terribly on the ramparts of
life. And from my heart I pitied you. Then when Hassim abused you that day”—again
tears started to her eyes— “I could not bear it and I knew how you
suffered for want of hashish. So I paid Yun Shatu, and going to the Master I—I—oh,
you will hate me for this!” she sobbed.
“No—no—never—”
“I told him that you were a man who might
be of use to him and begged him to have Yun Shatu supply you with what you
needed. He had already noticed you, for his is the eye of the slaver and all
the world is his slave market! So he bade Yun Shatu do as I asked; and now—better
if you had remained as you were, my friend.”
“No! No!” I exclaimed. “I have
known a few days of regeneration, even if it was false! I have stood before you
as a man, and that is worth all else!”
And all that I felt for her must have looked
forth from my eyes, for she dropped hers and flushed. Ask me not how love comes
to a man; but I knew that I loved Zuleika—had loved this mysterious
oriental girl since first I saw her—and somehow I felt that she, in a
measure, returned my affection. This realization made blacker and more barren
the road I had chosen; yet—for pure love must ever strengthen a man—it
nerved me to what I must do.
“Zuleika,” I said, speaking
hurriedly, “time flies and there are things I must learn; tell me—who
are you and why do you remain in this den of Hades?”
“I am Zuleika—that is all I know. I
am Circassian by blood and birth; when I was very little I was captured in a
Turkish raid and raised in a Stamboul harem; while I was yet too young to
marry, my master gave me as a present to—to Him.”
“And who is he—this skull-faced man?”
“He is Kathulos of Egypt—that is all
I know. My master.”
“An Egyptian? Then what is he doing in
London—why all this mystery?”
She intertwined her fingers nervously.
“Steephen, please speak lower; always
there is someone listening everywhere. I do not know who the Master is or why
he is here or why he does these things. I swear by Allah! If I knew I would
tell you. Sometimes distinguished-looking men come here to the room where the
Master receives them—not the room where you saw him—and he makes me
dance before them and afterward flirt with them a little. And always I must
repeat exactly what they say to me. That is what I must always do—in
Turkey, in the Barbary States, in Egypt, in France and in England. The Master
taught me French and English and educated me in many ways himself. He is the
greatest sorcerer in all the world and knows all ancient magic and everything.”
“Zuleika,” I said, “my race is
soon run, but let me get you out of this—come with me and I swear I’ll
get you away from this fiend!”
She shuddered and hid her face.
“No, no, I cannot!”
“Zuleika,” I asked gently, “what
hold has he over you, child—dope also?”
“No, no!” she whimpered. “I do
not know—I do not know—but I cannot—I never can escape him!”
I sat, baffled for a few moments; then I asked, “Zuleika,
where are we right now?”
“This building is a deserted storehouse
back of the Temple of Silence.”
“I thought so. What is in the chests in
the tunnel?”
“I do not know.”
Then suddenly she began weeping softly. “You
too, a slave, like me—you who are so strong and kind—oh Steephen, I
cannot bear it!”
I smiled. “Lean closer, Zuleika, and I
will tell you how I am going to fool this Kathulos.”
She glanced apprehensively at the door.
“You must speak low. I will lie in your
arms and while you pretend to caress me, whisper your words to me.”
She glided into my embrace, and there on the
dragon-worked couch in that house of horror I first knew the glory of Zuleika’s
slender form nestling in my arms—of Zuleika’s soft cheek pressing
my breast. The fragrance of her was in my nostrils, her hair in my eyes, and my
senses reeled; then with my lips hidden by her silky hair I whispered, swiftly:
“I am going first to warn Sir Haldred
Frenton—then to find John Gordon and tell him of this den. I will lead
the police here and you must watch closely and be ready to hide from Him—until
we can break through and kill or capture him. Then you will be free.”
“But you!” she gasped, paling. “You
must have the elixir, and only he—”
“I have a way of outdoing him, child,”
I answered.
She went pitifully white and her woman’s
intuition sprang at the right conclusion.
“You are going to kill yourself!”
And much as it hurt me to see her emotion, I yet
felt a torturing thrill that she should feel so on my account. Her arms tightened
about my neck.
“Don’t, Steephen!” she begged.
“It is better to live, even—”
“No, not at that price. Better to go out
clean while I have the manhood left.”
She stared at me wildly for an instant; then,
pressing her red lips suddenly to mine, she sprang up and fled from the room.
Strange, strange are the ways of love. Two stranded ships on the shores of
life, we had drifted inevitably together, and though no word of love had passed
between us, we knew each other’s heart—through grime and rags, and
through accouterments of the slave, we knew each other’s heart and from
the first loved as naturally and as purely as it was intended from the
beginning of Time.
The beginning of life now and the end for me,
for as soon as I had completed my task, ere I felt again the torments of my
curse, love and life and beauty and torture should be blotted out together in
the stark finality of a pistol ball scattering my rotting brain. Better a clean
death than—
The door opened again and Yussef Ali entered.
“The hour arrives for departure,” he
said briefly. “Rise and follow.”
I had no idea, of course, as to the time. No
window opened from the room I occupied—I had seen no outer window
whatever. The rooms were lighted by tapers in censers swinging from the
ceiling. As I rose the slim young Moor slanted a sinister glance in my
direction.
“This lies between you and me,” he
said sibilantly. “Servants of the same Master we—but this concerns
ourselves alone. Keep your distance from Zuleika—the Master has promised
her to me in the days of the empire.”
My eyes narrowed to slits as I looked into the
frowning, handsome face of the Oriental, and such hate surged up in me as I
have seldom known. My fingers involuntarily opened and closed, and the Moor,
marking the action, stepped back, hand in his girdle.
“Not now—there is work for us both—later
perhaps.” Then in a sudden cold gust of hatred, “Swine! Ape-man!
When the Master is finished with you I shall quench my dagger in your heart!”
I laughed grimly.
“Make it soon, desert-snake, or I’ll
crush your spine between my hands.”
10. The Dark House
“Against all man-made shackles and a
man-made hell—
Alone—at last—unaided—I rebel!”
—Mundy
I FOLLOWED Yussef Ali along the winding
hallways, down the steps—Kathulos was not in the idol room—and
along the tunnel, then through the rooms of the Temple of Dreams and out into
the street, where the street lamps gleamed drearily through the fogs and a
slight drizzle. Across the street stood an automobile, curtains closely drawn.
“That is yours,” said Hassim, who
had joined us. “Saunter across natural-like. Don’t act suspicious.
The place may be watched. The driver knows what to do.”
Then he and Yussef Ali drifted back into the bar
and I took a single step toward the curb.
“Steephen!”
A voice that made my heart leap spoke my name! A
white hand beckoned from the shadows of a doorway. I stepped quickly there.
“Zuleika!”
“Shhh!”
She clutched my arm, slipped something into my hand;
I made out vaguely a small flask of gold.
“Hide this, quick!” came her urgent
whisper. “Don’t come back but go away and hide. This is full of
elixir—I will try to get you some more before that is all gone. You must
find a way of communicating with me.”
“Yes, but how did you get this?” I
asked amazedly.
“I stole it from the Master! Now please, I
must go before he misses me.”
And she sprang back into the doorway and
vanished. I stood undecided. I was sure that she had risked nothing less than her
life in doing this and I was torn by the fear of what Kathulos might do to her,
were the theft discovered. But to return to the house of mystery would
certainly invite suspicion, and I might carry out my plan and strike back
before the Skull-faced One learned of his slave’s duplicity.
So I crossed the street to the waiting
automobile. The driver was a Negro whom I had never seen before, a lanky man of
medium height. I stared hard at him, wondering how much he had seen. He gave no
evidence of having seen anything, and I decided that even if he had noticed me
step back into the shadows he could not have seen what passed there nor have
been able to recognize the girl.
He merely nodded as I climbed in the back seat,
and a moment later we were speeding away down the deserted and fog-haunted
streets. A bundle beside me I concluded to be the disguise mentioned by the
Egyptian.
To recapture the sensations I experienced as I
rode through the rainy, misty night would be impossible. I felt as if I were
already dead and the bare and dreary streets about me were the roads of death
over which my ghost had been doomed to roam forever. A torturing joy was in my
heart, and bleak despair—the despair of a doomed man. Not that death
itself was so repellent—a dope victim dies too many deaths to shrink from
the last—but it was hard to go out just as love had entered my barren
life. And I was still young.
A sardonic smile crossed my lips—they were
young, too, the men who died beside me in No Man’s Land. I drew back my
sleeve and clenched my fists, tensing my muscles. There was no surplus weight
on my frame, and much of the firm flesh had wasted away, but the cords of the
great biceps still stood out like knots of iron, seeming to indicate massive
strength. But I knew my might was false, that in reality I was a broken hulk of
a man, animated only by the artificial fire of the elixir, without which a
frail girl might topple me over.
The automobile came to a halt among some trees.
We were on the outskirts of an exclusive suburb and the hour was past midnight.
Through the trees I saw a large house looming darkly against the distant flares
of nighttime London.
“This is where I wait,” said the
Negro. “No one can see the automobile from the road or from the house.”
Holding a match so that its light could not be
detected outside the car, I examined the “disguise” and was hard
put to restrain an insane laugh. The disguise was the complete hide of a
gorilla! Gathering the bundle under my arm I trudged toward the wall which
surrounded the Frenton estate. A few steps and the trees where the Negro hid
with the car merged into one dark mass. I did not believe he could see me, but
for safety’s sake I made, not for the high iron gate at the front, but
for the wall at the side where there was no gate.
No light showed in the house. Sir Haldred was a
bachelor and I was sure that the servants were all in bed long ago. I
negotiated the wall with ease and stole across the dark lawn to a side door,
still carrying the grisly “disguise” under my arm. The door was
locked, as I had anticipated, and I did not wish to arouse anyone until I was
safely in the house, where the sound of voices would not carry to one who might
have followed me. I took hold of the knob with both hands, and, exerting slowly
the inhuman strength that was mine, began to twist. The shaft turned in my
hands and the lock within shattered suddenly, with a noise that was like the
crash of a cannon in the stillness. An instant more and I was inside and had
closed the door behind me.
I took a single stride in the darkness in the
direction I believed the stair to be, then halted as a beam of light flashed
into my face. At the side of the beam I caught the glimmer of a pistol muzzle.
Beyond a lean shadowy face floated.
“Stand where you are and put up your
hands!”
I lifted my hands, allowing the bundle to slip
to the floor. I had heard that voice only once but I recognized it—knew
instantly that the man who held that light was John Gordon.
“How many are with you?”
His voice was sharp, commanding.
“I am alone,” I answered. “Take
me into a room where a light cannot be seen from the outside and I’ll
tell you some things you want to know.”
He was silent; then, bidding me take up the
bundle I had dropped, he stepped to one side and motioned me to precede him
into the next room. There he directed me to a stairway and at the top landing
opened a door and switched on lights.
I found myself in a room whose curtains were
closely drawn. During this journey Gordon’s alertness had not relaxed,
and now he stood, still covering me with his revolver. Clad in conventional
garments, he stood revealed a tall, leanly but powerfully built man, taller
than I but not so heavy—with steel-gray eyes and clean-cut features.
Something about the man attracted me, even as I noted a bruise on his jawbone
where my fist had struck in our last meeting.
“I cannot believe,” he said crisply,
“that this apparent clumsiness and lack of subtlety is real. Doubtless
you have your own reasons for wishing me to be in a secluded room at this time,
but Sir Haldred is efficiently protected even now. Stand still.”
Muzzle pressed against my chest, he ran his hand
over my garments for concealed weapons, seeming slightly surprized when he
found none.
“Still,” he murmured as if to
himself, “a man who can burst an iron lock with his bare hands has scant
need of weapons.”
“You are wasting valuable time,” I
said impatiently. “I was sent here tonight to kill Sir Haldred Frenton—”
“By whom?” the question was shot at
me.
“By the man who sometimes goes disguised
as a leper.”
He nodded, a gleam in his scintillant eyes.
“My suspicions were correct, then.”
“Doubtless. Listen to me closely—do
you desire the death or arrest of that man?”
Gordon laughed grimly.
“To one who wears the mark of the scorpion
on his hand, my answer would be superfluous.”
“Then follow my directions and your wish
shall be granted.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“So that was the meaning of this open
entry and non-resistance,” he said slowly. “Does the dope which
dilates your eyeballs so warp your mind that you think to lead me into ambush?”
I pressed my hands against my temples. Time was
racing and every moment was precious—how could I convince this man of my
honesty?
“Listen; my name is Stephen Costigan of
America. I was a frequenter of Yun Shatu’s dive and a hashish addict—as
you have guessed, but just now a slave of stronger dope. By virtue of this
slavery, the man you know as a false leper, whom Yun Shatu and his friends call
‘Master,’ gained dominance over me and sent me here to murder Sir
Haldred—why, God only knows. But I have gained a space of respite by
coming into possession of some of this dope which I must have in order to live,
and I fear and hate this Master. Listen to me and I swear, by all things holy
and unholy, that before the sun rises the false leper shall be in your power!”
I could tell that Gordon was impressed in spite
of himself.
“Speak fast!” he rapped.
Still I could sense his disbelief and a wave of
futility swept over me.
“If you will not act with me,” I
said, “let me go and somehow I’ll find a way to get to the Master
and kill him. My time is short—my hours are numbered and my vengeance is
yet to be realized.”
“Let me hear your plan, and talk fast,”
Gordon answered.
“It is simple enough. I will return to the
Masters lair and tell him I have accomplished that which he sent me to do. You
must follow closely with your men and while I engage the Master in
conversation, surround the house. Then, at the signal, break in and kill or
seize him.”
Gordon frowned. “Where is this house?”
“The warehouse back of Yun Shatu’s
has been converted into a veritable oriental palace.”
“The warehouse!” he exclaimed. “How
can that be? I had thought of that first, but I have carefully examined it from
without. The windows are closely barred and spiders have built webs across
them. The doors are nailed fast on the outside and the seals that mark the
warehouse as deserted have never been broken or disturbed in any way.”
“They tunneled up from beneath,” I
answered. “The Temple of Dreams is directly connected with the warehouse.”
“I have traversed the alley between the
two buildings,” said Gordon, “and the doors of the warehouse
opening into that alley are, as I have said, nailed shut from without just as
the owners left them. There is apparently no rear exit of any kind from the
Temple of Dreams.”
“A tunnel connects the buildings, with one
door in the rear room of Yun Shatu’s and the other in the idol room of
the warehouse.”
“I have been in Yun Shatu’s back
room and found no such door.”
“The table rests upon it. You noted the
heavy table in the center of the room? Had you turned it around the secret door
would have opened in the floor. Now this is my plan: I will go in through the
Temple of Dreams and meet the Master in the idol room. You will have men
secretly stationed in front of the warehouse and others upon the other street,
in front of the Temple of Dreams. Yun Shatu’s building, as you know, faces
the waterfront, while the warehouse, fronting the opposite direction, faces a
narrow street running parallel with the river. At the signal let the men in
this street break open the front of the warehouse and rush in, while
simultaneously those in front of Yun Shatu’s make an invasion through the
Temple of Dreams. Let these make for the rear room, shooting without mercy any
who may seek to deter them, and there open the secret door as I have said.
There being, to the best of my knowledge, no other exit from the Master’s
lair, he and his servants will necessarily seek to make their escape through
the tunnel. Thus we will have them on both sides.”
Gordon ruminated while I studied his face with
breathless interest.
“This may be a snare,” he muttered, “or
an attempt to draw me away from Sir Haldred, but—”
I held my breath.
“I am a gambler by nature,” he said
slowly. “I am going to follow what you Americans call a hunch—but
God help you if you are lying to me!”
I sprang erect.
“Thank God! Now aid me with this suit, for
I must be wearing it when I return to the automobile waiting for me.”
His eyes narrowed as I shook out the horrible
masquerade and prepared to don it.
“This shows, as always, the touch of the
master hand. You were doubtless instructed to leave marks of your hands,
encased in those hideous gauntlets?”
“Yes, though I have no idea why.”
“I think I have—the Master is famed
for leaving no real clues to mark his crimes—a great ape escaped from a
neighboring zoo earlier in the evening and it seems too obvious for mere
chance, in the light of this disguise. The ape would have gotten the blame of
Sir Haldred’s death.”
The thing was easily gotten into and the
illusion of reality it created was so perfect as to draw a shudder from me as I
viewed myself in a mirror.
“It is now two o’clock,” said
Gordon. “Allowing for the time it will take you to get back to Limehouse
and the time it will take me to get my men stationed, I promise you that at
half-past four the house will be closely surrounded. Give me a start—wait
here until I have left this house, so I will arrive at least as soon as you.”
“Good!” I impulsively grasped his
hand. “There will doubtless be a girl there who is in no way implicated
with the Master’s evil doings, but only a victim of circumstances such as
I have been. Deal gently with her.”
“It shall be done. What signal shall I
look for?”
“I have no way of signaling for you and I
doubt if any sound in the house could be heard on the street. Let your men make
their raid on the stroke of five.”
I turned to go.
“A man is waiting for you with a car, I
take it? Is he likely to suspect anything?”
“I have a way of finding out, and if he
does,” I replied grimly, “I will return alone to the Temple of
Dreams.”
11. Four Thirty-Four
“Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever
dared to dream before.”
—Poe
THE door closed softly behind me, the great dark
house looming up more starkly than ever. Stooping, I crossed the wet lawn at a
run, a grotesque and unholy figure, I doubt not, since any man had at a glance
sworn me to be not a man but a giant ape. So craftily had the Master devised!
I clambered the wall, dropped to the earth
beyond and made my way through the darkness and the drizzle to the group of trees
which masked the automobile.
The Negro driver leaned out of the front seat. I
was breathing hard and sought in various ways to simulate the actions of a man
who has just murdered in cold blood and fled the scene of his crime.
“You heard nothing, no sound, no scream?”
I hissed, gripping his arm.
“No noise except a slight crash when you
first went in,” he answered. “You did a good job—nobody
passing along the road could have suspected anything.”
“Have you remained in the car all the
time?” I asked. And when he replied that he had, I seized his ankle and
ran my hand over the soles of his shoe; it was perfectly dry, as was the cuff
of his trouser leg. Satisfied, I climbed into the back seat. Had he taken a
step on the earth, shoe and garment would have showed it by the telltale
dampness.
I ordered him to refrain from starting the
engine until I had removed the ape skin, and then we sped through the night and
I fell victim to doubts and uncertainties. Why should Gordon put any trust in
the word of a stranger and a former ally of the Master’s? Would he not
put my tale down as the ravings of a dope-crazed addict, or a lie to ensnare or
befool him? Still, if he had not believed me, why had he let me go?
I could but trust. At any rate, what Gordon did
or did not do would scarcely affect my fortunes ultimately, even though Zuleika
had furnished me with that which would merely extend the number of my days. My
thought centered on her, and more than my hope of vengeance on Kathulos was the
hope that Gordon might be able to save her from the clutches of the fiend. At
any rate, I thought grimly, if Gordon failed me, I still had my hands and if I
might lay them upon the bony frame of the Skull-faced One—
Abruptly I found myself thinking of Yussef Ali
and his strange words, the import of which just occurred to me, “The
Master has promised her to me in the days of the empire!”
The days of the empire—what could that
mean?
The automobile at last drew up in front of the
building which hid the Temple of Silence—now dark and still. The ride had
seemed interminable and as I dismounted I glanced at the timepiece on the
dashboard of the car. My heart leaped—it was four thirty-four, and unless
my eyes tricked me I saw a movement in the shadows across the street, out of
the flare of the street lamp. At this time of night it could mean only one of
two things—some menial of the Master watching for my return or else
Gordon had kept his word. The Negro drove away and I opened the door, crossed
the deserted bar and entered the opium room. The bunks and the floor were
littered with the dreamers, for such places as these know nothing of day or
night as normal people know, but all lay deep in sottish slumber.
The lamps glimmered through the smoke and a
silence hung mist-like over all.
12. The Stroke of Five
“He saw gigantic tracks of death,
And many a shape of doom.”
—Chesterton
TWO of the China-boys squatted among the smudge
fires, staring at me unwinkingly as I threaded my way among the recumbent
bodies and made my way to the rear door. For the first time I traversed the
corridor alone and found time to wonder again as to the contents of the strange
chests which lined the walls.
Four raps on the underside of the floor, and a
moment later I stood in the idol room. I gasped in amazement—the fact
that across a table from me sat Kathulos in all his horror was not the cause of
my exclamation. Except for the table, the chair on which the Skull-faced One
sat and the altar—now bare of incense—the room was perfectly bare!
Drab, unlovely walls of the unused warehouse met my gaze instead of the costly
tapestries I had become accustomed to. The palms, the idol, the lacquered
screen—all were gone.
“Ah, Mr. Costigan, you wonder, no doubt.”
The dead voice of the Master broke in on my
thoughts. His serpent eyes glittered balefully. The long yellow fingers twined
sinuously upon the table.
“You thought me to be a trusting fool, no
doubt!” he rapped suddenly. “Did you think I would not have you followed?
You fool, Yussef Ali was at your heels every moment!”
An instant I stood speechless, frozen by the
crash of these words against my brain; then as their import sank home, I
launched myself forward with a roar. At the same instant, before my clutching
fingers could close on the mocking horror on the other side of the table, men
rushed from every side. I whirled, and with the clarity of hate, from the swirl
of savage faces I singled out Yussef Ali, and crashed my right fist against his
temple with every ounce of my strength. Even as he dropped, Hassim struck me to
my knees and a Chinaman flung a man-net over my shoulders. I heaved erect,
bursting the stout cords as if they were strings, and then a blackjack in the
hands of Ganra Singh stretched me stunned and bleeding on the floor.
Lean sinewy hands seized and bound me with cords
that cut cruelly into my flesh. Emerging from the mists of
semi-unconsciousness, I found myself lying on the altar with the masked
Kathulos towering over me like a gaunt ivory tower. About in a semicircle stood
Ganra Singh, Yar Khan, Yun Shatu and several others whom I knew as frequenters
of the Temple of Dreams. Beyond them—and the sight cut me to the heart—I
saw Zuleika crouching in a doorway, her face white and her hands pressed
against her cheeks, in an attitude of abject terror.
“I did not fully trust you,” said
Kathulos sibilantly, “so I sent Yussef Ali to follow you. He reached the
group of trees before you and following you into the estate heard your very
interesting conversation with John Gordon—for he scaled the house-wall
like a cat and clung to the window ledge! Your driver delayed purposely so as
to give Yussef Ali plenty of time to get back—I have decided to change my
abode anyway. My furnishings are already on their way to another house, and as
soon as we have disposed of the traitor—you!—we shall depart also,
leaving a little surprize for your friend Gordon when he arrives at
five-thirty.”
My heart gave a sudden leap of hope. Yussef Ali
had misunderstood, and Kathulos lingered here in false security while the
London detective force had already silently surrounded the house. Over my
shoulder I saw Zuleika vanish from the door.
I eyed Kathulos, absolutely unaware of what he
was saying. It was not long until five—if he dallied longer—then I
froze as the Egyptian spoke a word and Li Kung, a gaunt, cadaverous Chinaman,
stepped from the silent semicircle and drew from his sleeve a long thin dagger.
My eyes sought the timepiece that still rested on the table and my heart sank.
It was still ten minutes until five. My death did not matter so much, since it
simply hastened the inevitable, but in my mind’s eye I could see Kathulos
and his murderers escaping while the police awaited the stroke of five.
The Skull-face halted in some harangue, and
stood in a listening attitude. I believe his uncanny intuition warned him of
danger. He spoke a quick staccato command to Li Kung and the Chinaman sprang
forward, dagger lifted above my breast.
The air was suddenly supercharged with dynamic
tension. The keen dagger-point hovered high above me—loud and clear
sounded the skirl of a police whistle and on the heels of the sound there came
a terrific crash from the front of the warehouse!
Kathulos leaped into frenzied activity. Hissing
orders like a cat spitting, he sprang for the hidden door and the rest followed
him. Things happened with the speed of a nightmare. Li Kung had followed the
rest, but Kathulos flung a command over his shoulder and the Chinaman turned
back and came rushing toward the altar where I lay, dagger high, desperation in
his countenance.
A scream broke through the clamor and as I
twisted desperately about to avoid the descending dagger, I caught a glimpse of
Kathulos dragging Zuleika away. Then with a frenzied wrench I toppled from the
altar just as Li Kung’s dagger, grazing my breast, sank inches deep into
the dark-stained surface and quivered there.
I had fallen on the side next to the wall and
what was taking place in the room I could not see, but it seemed as if far away
I could hear men screaming faintly and hideously. Then Li Kung wrenched his
blade free and sprang, tigerishly, around the end of the altar. Simultaneously
a revolver cracked from the doorway—the Chinaman spun clear around, the
dagger flying from his hand—he slumped to the floor.
Gordon came running from the doorway where a few
moments earlier Zuleika had stood, his pistol still smoking in his hand. At his
heels were three rangy, clean-cut men in plain clothes. He cut my bonds and
dragged me upright.
“Quick! Where have they gone?”
The room was empty of life save for myself,
Gordon and his men, though two dead men lay on the floor.
I found the secret door and after a few seconds’
search located the lever which opened it. Revolvers drawn, the men grouped
about me and peered nervously into the dark stairway. Not a sound came up from
the total darkness.
“This is uncanny!” muttered Gordon. “I
suppose the Master and his servants went this way when they left the building—as
they are certainly not here now!—and Leary and his men should have
stopped them either in the tunnel itself or in the rear room of Yun Shatu’s.
At any rate, in either event they should have communicated with us by this
time.”
“Look out, sir!” one of the men
exclaimed suddenly, and Gordon, with an ejaculation, struck out with his pistol
barrel and crushed the life from a huge snake which had crawled silently up the
steps from the blackness beneath.
“Let us see into this matter,” said
he, straightening.
But before he could step onto the first stair, I
halted him; for, flesh crawling, I began dimly to understand something of what
had happened—I began to understand the silence in the tunnel, the absence
of the detectives, the screams I had heard some minutes previously while I lay
on the altar. Examining the lever which opened the door, I found another
smaller lever—I began to believe I knew what those mysterious chests in
the tunnel contained.
“Gordon,” I said hoarsely, “have
you an electric torch?”
One of the men produced a large one.
“Direct the light into the tunnel, but as
you value your life, do not put a foot upon the steps.”
The beam of light struck through the shadows,
lighting the tunnel, etching out boldly a scene that will haunt my brain all
the rest of my life. On the floor of the tunnel, between the chests which now
gaped open, lay two men who were members of London’s finest secret
service. Limbs twisted and faces horribly distorted they lay, and above and
about them writhed, in long glittering scaly shimmerings, scores of hideous
reptiles.
The clock struck five.
13. The Blind Beggar Who Rode
“He seemed a beggar such as lags
Looking for crusts and ale.”
—Chesterton
THE cold gray dawn was stealing over the river
as we stood in the deserted bar of the Temple of Dreams. Gordon was questioning
the two men who had remained on guard outside the building while their
unfortunate companion, went in to explore the tunnel.
“As soon as we heard the whistle, sir,
Leary and Murken rushed the bar and broke into the opium room, while we waited
here at the bar door according to orders. Right away several ragged dopers came
tumbling out and we grabbed them. But no one else came out and we heard nothing
from Leary and Murken; so we just waited until you came, sir.”
“You saw nothing of a giant Negro, or of
the Chinaman Yun Shatu?”
“No, sir. After a while the patrolmen
arrived and we threw a cordon around the house, but no one was seen.”
Gordon shrugged his shoulders; a few cursory
questions had satisfied him that the captives were harmless addicts and he had
them released.
“You are sure no one else came out?”
“Yes, sir—no, wait a moment. A
wretched old blind beggar did come out, all rags and dirt and with a ragged
girl leading him. We stopped him but didn’t hold him—a wretch like
that couldn’t be harmful.”
“No?” Gordon jerked out. “Which
way did he go?”
“The girl led him down the street to the
next block and then an automobile stopped and they got in and drove off, sir.”
Gordon glared at him.
“The stupidity of the London detective has
rightfully become an international jest,” he said acidly. “No doubt
it never occurred to you as being strange that a Limehouse beggar should ride
about in his own automobile.”
Then impatiently waving aside the man, who
sought to speak further, he turned to me and I saw the lines of weariness
beneath his eyes.
“Mr. Costigan, if you will come to my
apartment we may be able to clear up some new things.”
14. The Black Empire
“Oh the new spears dipped in life-blood
as the woman shrieked in vain!
Oh the days before the English! When will those days come again?”
—Mundy
GORDON struck a match and absently allowed it to
flicker and go out in his hand. His Turkish cigarette hung unlighted between
his fingers.
“This is the most logical conclusion to be
reached,” he was saying. “The weak link in our chain was lack of
men. But curse it, one cannot round up an army at two o’clock in the
morning, even with the aid of Scotland Yard. I went on to Limehouse, leaving
orders for a number of patrolmen to follow me as quickly as they could be got
together, and to throw a cordon about the house.
“They arrived too late to prevent the
Master’s servants slipping out of the side doors and windows, no doubt,
as they could easily do with only Finnegan and Hansen on guard at the front of
the building. However, they arrived in time to prevent the Master himself from
slipping out in that way—no doubt he lingered to effect his disguise and
was caught in that manner. He owes his escape to his craft and boldness and to
the carelessness of Finnegan and Hansen. The girl who accompanied him—”
“She was Zuleika, without doubt.”
I answered listlessly, wondering anew what
shackles bound her to the Egyptian sorcerer.
“You owe your life to her,” Gordon
rapped, lighting another match. “We were standing in the shadows in front
of the warehouse, waiting for the hour to strike, and of course ignorant as to
what was going on in the house, when a girl appeared at one of the barred
windows and begged us for God’s sake to do something, that a man was
being murdered. So we broke in at once. However, she was not to be seen when we
entered.”
“She returned to the room, no doubt,”
I muttered, “and was forced to accompany the Master. God grant he knows
nothing of her trickery.”
“I do not know,” said Gordon,
dropping the charred match stem, “whether she guessed at our true
identity or whether she just made the appeal in desperation.
“However, the main point is this: evidence
points to the fact that, on hearing the whistle, Leary and Murken invaded Yun
Shatu’s from the front at the same instant my three men and I made our
attack on the warehouse front. As it took us some seconds to batter down the
door, it is logical to suppose that they found the secret door and entered the
tunnel before we affected an entrance into the warehouse.
“The Master, knowing our plans beforehand,
and being aware that an invasion would be made through the tunnel and having
long ago made preparations for such an exigency—”
An involuntary shudder shook me.
“—the Master worked the lever that
opened the chest—the screams you heard as you lay upon the altar were the
death shrieks of Leary and Murken. Then, leaving the Chinaman behind to finish
you, the Master and the rest descended into the tunnel—incredible as it
seems—and threading their way unharmed among the serpents, entered Yun
Shatu’s house and escaped therefrom as I have said.”
“That seems impossible. Why should not the
snakes turn on them?”
Gordon finally ignited his cigarette and puffed
a few seconds before replying.
“The reptiles might still have been giving
their full and hideous attention to the dying men, or else—I have on
previous occasions been confronted with indisputable proof of the Master’s
dominance over beasts and reptiles of even the lowest or most dangerous orders.
How he and his slaves passed unhurt among those scaly fiends must remain, at
present, one of the many unsolved mysteries pertaining to that strange man.”
I stirred restlessly in my chair. This brought
up a point for the purpose of clearing up which I had come to Gordon’s
neat but bizarre apartments.
“You have not yet told me,” I said
abruptly, “who this man is and what is his mission.”
“As to who he is, I can only say that he
is known as you name him—the Master. I have never seen him unmasked, nor
do I know his real name nor his nationality.”
“I can enlighten you to an extent there,”
I broke in. “I have seen him unmasked and have heard the name his slaves
call him.”
Gordon’s eyes blazed and he leaned
forward.
“His name,” I continued, “is
Kathulos and he claims to be an Egyptian.”
“Kathulos!” Gordon repeated. “You
say he claims to be an Egyptian—have you any reason for doubting his
claim of that nationality?”
“He may be of Egypt,” I answered
slowly, “but he is different, somehow, from any human I ever saw or hope
to see. Great age might account for some of his peculiarities, but there are
certain lineal differences that my anthropological studies tell me have been
present since birth—features which would be abnormal to any other man but
which are perfectly normal in Kathulos. That sounds paradoxical, I admit, but
to appreciate fully the horrid inhumanness of the man, you would have to see
him yourself.”
Gordon sat at attention while I swiftly sketched
the appearance of the Egyptian as I remembered him—and that appearance
was indelibly etched on my brain forever.
As I finished he nodded.
“As I have said, I never saw Kathulos
except when disguised as a beggar, a leper or some such thing—when he was
fairly swathed in rags. Still, I too have been impressed with a strange
difference about him—something that is not present in other men.”
Gordon tapped his knee with his fingers—a
habit of his when deeply engrossed by a problem of some sort.
“You have asked as to the mission of this
man,” he began slowly. “I will tell you all I know.”
“My position with the British government
is a unique and peculiar one. I hold what might be called a roving commission—an
office created solely for the purpose of suiting my special needs. As a secret
service official during the war, I convinced the powers of a need of such
office and of my ability to fill it.
“Somewhat over seventeen months ago I was
sent to South Africa to investigate the unrest which has been growing among the
natives of the interior ever since the World War and which has of late assumed
alarming proportions. There I first got on the track of this man Kathulos. I
found, in roundabout ways, that Africa was a seething cauldron of rebellion
from Morocco to Cape Town. The old, old vow had been made again—the
Negroes and the Mohammedans, banded together, should drive the white men into
the sea.
“This pact has been made before but
always, hitherto, broken. Now, however, I sensed a giant intellect and a
monstrous genius behind the veil, a genius powerful enough to accomplish this
union and hold it together. Working entirely on hints and vague whispered
clues, I followed the trail up through Central Africa and into Egypt. There, at
last, I came upon definite evidence that such a man existed. The whispers
hinted of a living dead man—a skull-faced man. I learned that this
man was the high priest of the mysterious Scorpion society of northern Africa.
He was spoken of variously as Skull-face, the Master, and the Scorpion.
“Following a trail of bribed officials and
filched state secrets, I at last trailed him to Alexandria, where I had my
first sight of him in a dive in the native quarter—disguised as a leper.
I heard him distinctly addressed as ‘Mighty Scorpion’ by the
natives, but he escaped me.
“All trace vanished then; the trail ran
out entirely until rumors of strange happenings in London reached me and I came
back to England to investigate an apparent leak in the war office.
“As I thought, the Scorpion had preceded
me. This man, whose education and craft transcend anything I ever met with, is
simply the leader and instigator of a world-wide movement such as the world has
never seen before. He plots, in a word, the overthrow of the white races!
“His ultimate aim is a black empire, with
himself as emperor of the world! And to that end he has banded together in one
monstrous conspiracy the black, the brown and the yellow.”
“I understand now what Yussef Ali meant
when he said ‘the days of the empire,’ ” I muttered.
“Exactly,” Gordon rapped with
suppressed excitement. “Kathulos’ power is unlimited and unguessed.
Like an octopus his tentacles stretch to the high places of civilization and
the far corners of the world. And his main weapon is—dope! He has flooded
Europe and no doubt America with opium and hashish, and in spite of all effort
it has been impossible to discover the break in the barriers through which the
hellish stuff is coming. With this he ensnares and enslaves men and women.
“You have told me of the aristocratic men
and women you saw coming to Yun Shatu’s dive. Without doubt they were
dope addicts—for, as I said, the habit lurks in high places—holders
of governmental positions, no doubt, coming to trade for the stuff they craved
and giving in return state secrets, inside information and promise of
protection for the Master’s crimes.
“Oh, he does not work haphazardly! Before
ever the black flood breaks, he will be prepared; if he has his way, the
governments of the white races will be honeycombs of corruption—the
strongest men of the white races will be dead. The white men’s secrets of
war will be his. When it comes, I look for a simultaneous uprising against
white supremacy, of all the colored races—races who, in the last war,
learned the white men’s ways of battle, and who, led by such a man as
Kathulos and armed with white men’s finest weapons, will be almost
invincible.
“A steady stream of rifles and ammunition
has been pouring into East Africa and it was not until I discovered the source
that it was stopped. I found that a staid and reliable Scotch firm was
smuggling these arms among the natives and I found more: the manager of this
firm was an opium slave. That was enough. I saw Kathulos’ hand in the
matter. The manager was arrested and committed suicide in his cell—that
is only one of the many situations with which I am called upon to deal.
“Again, the case of Major Fairlan Morley.
He, like myself, held a very flexible commission and had been sent to the
Transvaal to work upon the same case. He sent to London a number of secret
papers for safekeeping. They arrived some weeks ago and were put in a bank
vault. The letter accompanying them gave explicit instructions that they were
to be delivered to no one but the major himself, when he called for them in
person, or in event of his death, to myself.
“As soon as I learned that he had sailed
from Africa I sent trusted men to Bordeaux, where he intended to make his first
landing in Europe. They did not succeed in saving the major’s life, but
they certified his death, for they found his body in a deserted ship whose hulk
was stranded on the beach. Efforts were made to keep the affair a secret but
somehow it leaked into the papers with the result—”
“I begin to understand why I was to
impersonate the unfortunate major,” I interrupted.
“Exactly. A false beard furnished you, and
your black hair dyed blond, you would have presented yourself at the bank,
received the papers from the banker, who knew Major Morley just intimately
enough to be deceived by your appearance, and the papers would have then fallen
into the hands of the Master.
“I can only guess at the contents of those
papers, for events have been taking place too swiftly for me to call for and
obtain them. But they must deal with subjects closely connected with the
activities of Kathulos. How he learned of them and of the provisions of the
letter accompanying them, I have no idea, but as I said, London is honeycombed
with his spies.
“In my search for clues, I often
frequented Limehouse disguised as you first saw me. I went often to the Temple
of Dreams and even once managed to enter the back room, for I suspected some
sort of rendezvous in the rear of the building. The absence of any exit baffled
me and I had no time to search for secret doors before I was ejected by the
giant black man Hassim, who had no suspicion of my true identity. I noticed
that very often the leper entered or left Yun Shatu’s, and finally it was
borne on me that past a shadow of doubt this supposed leper was the Scorpion
himself.
“That night you discovered me on the couch
in the opium room, I had come there with no especial plan in mind. Seeing
Kathulos leaving, I determined to rise and follow him, but you spoiled that.”
He fingered his chin and laughed grimly.
“I was an amateur boxing champion in
Oxford,” said he, “but Tom Cribb himself could not have withstood
that blow—or have dealt it.”
“I regret it as I regret few things.”
“No need to apologize. You saved my life
immediately afterward—I was stunned, but not too much to know that that
brown devil Yussef Ali was burning to cut out my heart.”
“How did you come to be at Sir Haldred
Frenton’s estate? And how is it that you did not raid Yun Shatu’s
dive?”
“I did not have the place raided because I
knew somehow Kathulos would be warned and our efforts would come to naught. I
was at Sir Haldred’s that night because I have contrived to spend at
least part of each night with him since he returned from the Congo. I
anticipated an attempt upon his life when I learned from his own lips that he
was preparing, from the studies he made on this trip, a treatise on the secret
native societies of West Africa. He hinted that the disclosures he intended to
make therein might prove sensational, to say the least. Since it is to Kathulos’
advantage to destroy such men as might be able to arouse the Western world to
its danger, I knew that Sir Haldred was a marked man. Indeed, two distinct
attempts were made upon his life on his journey to the coast from the African
interior. So I put two trusted men on guard and they are at their post even
now.
“Roaming about the darkened house, I heard
the noise of your entry, and, warning my men, I stole down to intercept you. At
the time of our conversation, Sir Haldred was sitting in his unlighted study, a
Scotland Yard man with drawn pistol on each side of him. Their vigilance no
doubt accounts for Yussef Ali’s failure to attempt what you were sent to
do.
“Something in your manner convinced me in
spite of yourself,” he meditated. “I will admit I had some bad
moments of doubt as I waited in the darkness that precedes dawn, outside the
warehouse.”
Gordon rose suddenly and going to a strong box
which stood in a corner of the room, drew thence a thick envelope.
“Although Kathulos has checkmated me at
almost every move,” he said, “I have not been entirely idle. Noting
the frequenters of Yun Shatu’s, I have compiled a partial list of the
Egyptian’s right-hand men, and their records. What you have told me has
enabled me to complete that list. As we know, his henchmen are scattered all
over the world, and there are possibly hundreds of them here in London.
However, this is a list of those I believe to be in his closest council, now
with him in England. He told you himself that few even of his followers ever
saw him unmasked.”
We bent together over the list, which contained
the following names: “Yun Shatu, Hongkong Chinese, suspected opium
smuggler—keeper of Temple of Dreams—resident of Limehouse seven
years. Hassim, ex-Senegalese Chief—wanted in French Congo for murder.
Santiago, Negro—fled from Haiti under suspicion of voodoo worship
atrocities. Yar Khan, Afridi, record unknown. Yussef Ali, Moor, slave-dealer in
Morocco—suspected of being a German spy in the World War—an
instigator of the Fellaheen Rebellion on the upper Nile. Ganra Singh, Lahore,
India, Sikh—smuggler of arms into Afghanistan—took an active part
in the Lahore and Delhi riots—suspected of murder on two occasions—a
dangerous man. Stephen Costigan, American—resident in England since the
war—hashish addict—man of remarkable strength. Li Kung, northern
China, opium smuggler.”
Lines were drawn significantly through three
names—mine, Li Kung’s and Yussef Ali’s. Nothing was written
next to mine, but following Li Kung’s name was scrawled briefly in Gordon’s
rambling characters: “Shot by John Gordon during the raid on Yun Shatu’s.”
And following the name of Yussef Ali: “Killed by Stephen Costigan during
the Yun Shatu raid.”
I laughed mirthlessly. Black empire or not,
Yussef Ali would never hold Zuleika in his arms, for he had never risen from
where I felled him.
“I know not,” said Gordon somberly
as he folded the list and replaced it in the envelope, “what power
Kathulos has that draws together black men and yellow men to serve him—that
unites world-old foes. Hindu, Moslem and pagan are among his followers. And
back in the mists of the East where mysterious and gigantic forces are at work,
this uniting is culminating on a monstrous scale.”
He glanced at his watch.
“It is nearly ten. Make yourself at home
here, Mr. Costigan, while I visit Scotland Yard and see if any clue has been
found as to Kathulos’ new quarters. I believe that the webs are closing
on him, and with your aid I promise you we will have the gang located within a
week at most.”
15. The Mark of the Tulwar
“The fed wolf curls by his drowsy
mate
In a tight-trod earth; but the lean wolves wait.”
—Mundy
I SAT alone in John Gordon’s apartments
and laughed mirthlessly. In spite of the elixir’s stimulus, the strain of
the previous night, with its loss of sleep and its heartrending actions, was
telling on me. My mind was a chaotic whirl wherein the faces of Gordon,
Kathulos and Zuleika shifted with numbing swiftness. All the mass of
information Gordon had given to me seemed jumbled and incoherent.
Through this state of being, one fact stood out
boldly. I must find the latest hiding-place of the Egyptian and get Zuleika out
of his hands—if indeed she still lived.
A week, Gordon had said—I laughed again—a
week and I would be beyond aiding anyone. I had found the proper amount of
elixir to use—knew the minimum amount my system required—and knew
that I could make the flask last me four days at most. Four days! Four days in
which to comb the rat-holes of Limehouse and Chinatown—four days in which
to ferret out, somewhere in the mazes of East End, the lair of Kathulos.
I burned with impatience to begin, but nature
rebelled, and staggering to a couch, I fell upon it and was asleep instantly.
Then someone was shaking me.
“Wake up, Mr. Costigan!”
I sat up, blinking. Gordon stood over me, his
face haggard.
“There’s devil’s work done,
Costigan! The Scorpion has struck again!”
I sprang up, still half-asleep and only partly
realizing what he was saying. He helped me into my coat, thrust my hat at me,
and then his firm grip on my arm was propelling me out of his door and down the
stairs. The street lights were blazing; I had slept an incredible time.
“A logical victim!” I was aware that
my companion was saying. “He should have notified me the instant of his
arrival!”
“I don’t understand—” I
began dazedly.
We were at the curb now and Gordon hailed a
taxi, giving the address of a small and unassuming hotel in a staid and prim
section of the city.
“The Baron Rokoff,” he rapped as we
whirled along at reckless speed, “a Russian free-lance, connected with
the war office. He returned from Mongolia yesterday and apparently went into
hiding. Undoubtedly he had learned something vital in regard to the slow waking
of the East. He had not yet communicated with us, and I had no idea that he was
in England until just now.”
“And you learned—”
“The baron was found in his room, his dead
body mutilated in a frightful manner!”
The respectable and conventional hotel which the
doomed baron had chosen for his hiding-place was in a state of mild uproar,
suppressed by the police. The management had attempted to keep the matter
quiet, but somehow the guests had learned of the atrocity and many were leaving
in haste—or preparing to, as the police were holding all for
investigation.
The baron’s room, which was on the top
floor, was in a state to defy description. Not even in the Great War have I
seen a more complete shambles. Nothing had been touched; all remained just as
the chambermaid had found it a half-hour since. Tables and chairs lay shattered
on the floor, and the furniture, floor and walls were spattered with blood. The
baron, a tall, muscular man in life, lay in the middle of the room, a fearful
spectacle. His skull had been cleft to the brows, a deep gash under his left
armpit had shorn through his ribs, and his left arm hung by a shred of flesh.
The cold bearded face was set in a look of indescribable horror.
“Some heavy, curved weapon must have been
used,” said Gordon, “something like a saber, wielded with terrific
force. See where a chance blow sank inches deep into the windowsill. And again,
the thick back of this heavy chair has been split like a shingle. A saber,
surely.”
“A tulwar,” I muttered, somberly. “Do
you not recognize the handiwork of the Central Asian butcher? Yar Khan has been
here.”
“The Afghan! He came across the roofs, of
course, and descended to the window-ledge by means of a knotted rope made fast
to something on the edge of the roof. About one-thirty the maid, passing
through the corridor, heard a terrific commotion in the baron’s room—smashing
of chairs and a sudden short shriek which died abruptly into a ghastly gurgle
and then ceased—to the sound of heavy blows, curiously muffled, such as a
sword might make when driven deep into human flesh. Then all noises stopped
suddenly.
“She called the manager and they tried the
door and, finding it locked, and receiving no answer to their shouts, opened it
with the desk key. Only the corpse was there, but the window was open. This is
strangely unlike Kathulos’ usual procedure. It lacks subtlety. Often his
victims have appeared to have died from natural causes. I scarcely understand.”
“I see little difference in the outcome,”
I answered. “There is nothing that can be done to apprehend the murderer
as it is.”
“True,” Gordon scowled. “We
know who did it but there is no proof—not even a fingerprint. Even if we
knew where the Afghan is hiding and arrested him, we could prove nothing—there
would be a score of men to swear alibis for him. The baron returned only
yesterday. Kathulos probably did not know of his arrival until tonight. He knew
that on the morrow Rokoff would make known his presence to me and impart what
he learned in northern Asia. The Egyptian knew he must strike quickly, and
lacking time to prepare a safer and more elaborate form of murder, he sent the
Afridi with his tulwar. There is nothing we can do, at least not until we
discover the Scorpion’s hiding-place; what the baron had learned in
Mongolia, we shall never know, but that it dealt with the plans and aspirations
of Kathulos, we may be sure.”
We went down the stairs again and out on the
street, accompanied by one of the Scotland Yard men, Hansen. Gordon suggested
that we walk back to his apartment and I greeted the opportunity to let the
cool night air blow some of the cobwebs out of my mazed brain.
As we walked along the deserted streets, Gordon
suddenly cursed savagely.
“This is a veritable labyrinth we are
following, leading nowhere! Here, in the very heart of civilization’s
metropolis, the direct enemy of that civilization commits crimes of the most
outrageous nature and goes free! We are children, wandering in the night,
struggling with an unseen evil—dealing with an incarnate devil, of whose
true identity we know nothing and whose true ambitions we can only guess.
“Never have we managed to arrest one of
the Egyptian’s direct henchmen, and the few dupes and tools of his we
have apprehended have died mysteriously before they could tell us anything.
Again I repeat: what strange power has Kathulos that dominates these men of
different creeds and races? The men in London with him are, of course, mostly
renegades, slaves of dope, but his tentacles stretch all over the East. Some
dominance is his: the power that sent the Chinaman, Li Kung, back to kill you,
in the face of certain death; that sent Yar Khan the Moslem over the roofs of
London to do murder; that holds Zuleika the Circassian in unseen bonds of
slavery.
“Of course we know,” he continued
after a brooding silence, “that the East has secret societies which are
behind and above all considerations of creeds. There are cults in Africa and
the Orient whose origin dates back to Ophir and the fall of Atlantis. This man
must be a power in some or possibly all of these societies. Why, outside the Jews,
I know of no oriental race which is so cordially despised by the other Eastern
races, as the Egyptians! Yet here we have a man, an Egyptian by his own word,
controlling the lives and destinies of orthodox Moslems, Hindus, Shintos and
devil-worshippers. It’s unnatural.
“Have you ever”—he turned to
me abruptly—“heard the ocean mentioned in connection with
Kathulos?”
“Never.”
“There is a widespread superstition in
northern Africa, based on a very ancient legend, that the great leader of the
colored races would come out of the sea! And I once heard a Berber speak of the
Scorpion as ‘The Son of the Ocean.’ ”
“That is a term of respect among that
tribe, is it not?”
“Yes; still I wonder sometimes.”
16. The Mummy Who Laughed
“Laughing as littered skulls that lie
After lost battles turn to the sky
An everlasting laugh.”
—Chesterton
“A SHOP open this late,” Gordon
remarked suddenly.
A fog had descended on London and along the
quiet street we were traversing the lights glimmered with the peculiar reddish
haze characteristic of such atmospheric conditions. Our footfalls echoed
drearily. Even in the heart of a great city there are always sections which
seem overlooked and forgotten. Such a street was this. Not even a policeman was
in sight.
The shop which had attracted Gordon’s
attention was just in front of us, on the same side of the street. There was no
sign over the door, merely some sort of emblem, something like a dragon. Light
flowed from the open doorway and the small show windows on each side. As it was
neither a cafe nor the entrance to a hotel we found ourselves idly speculating
over its reason for being open. Ordinarily, I suppose, neither of us would have
given the matter a thought, but our nerves were so keyed up that we found
ourselves instinctively suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. Then
something occurred which was distinctly out of the ordinary.
A very tall, very thin man, considerably
stooped, suddenly loomed up out of the fog in front of us, and beyond the shop.
I had only a glance of him—an impression of incredible gauntness, of
worn, wrinkled garments, a high silk hat drawn close over the brows, a face
entirely hidden by a muffler; then he turned aside and entered the shop. A cold
wind whispered down the street, twisting the fog into wispy ghosts, but the
coldness that came upon me transcended the wind’s.
“Gordon!” I exclaimed in a fierce,
low voice; “my senses are no longer reliable or else Kathulos himself has
just gone into that house!”
Gordon’s eyes blazed. We were now close to
the shop, and lengthening his strides into a run he hurled himself into the
door, the detective and I close upon his heels.
A weird assortment of merchandise met our eyes.
Antique weapons covered the walls, and the floor was piled high with curious
things. Maori idols shouldered Chinese josses, and suits of medieval armor
bulked darkly against stacks of rare oriental rugs and Latin-make shawls. The
place was an antique shop. Of the figure who had aroused our interest we saw
nothing.
An old man clad bizarrely in red fez, brocaded
jacket and Turkish slippers came from the back of the shop; he was a Levantine
of some sort.
“You wish something, sirs?”
“You keep open rather late,” Gordon
said abruptly, his eyes traveling swiftly over the shop for some secret
hiding-place that might conceal the object of our search.
“Yes, sir. My customers number many
eccentric professors and students who keep very irregular hours. Often the
night boats unload special pieces for me and very often I have customers later
than this. I remain open all night, sir.”
“We are merely looking around,”
Gordon returned, and in an aside to Hansen: “Go to the back and stop
anyone who tries to leave that way.”
Hansen nodded and strolled casually to the rear
of the shop. The back door was clearly visible to our view, through a vista of
antique furniture and tarnished hangings strung up for exhibition. We had
followed the Scorpion—if he it was—so closely that I did not
believe he would have had time to traverse the full length of the shop and make
his exit without our having seen him as we came in. For our eyes had been on
the rear door ever since we had entered.
Gordon and I browsed around casually among the
curios, handling and discussing some of them but I have no idea as to their
nature. The Levantine had seated himself cross-legged on a Moorish mat close to
the center of the shop and apparently took only a polite interest in our
explorations.
After a time Gordon whispered to me: “There
is no advantage in keeping up this pretense. We have looked everywhere the
Scorpion might be hiding, in the ordinary manner. I will make known my identity
and authority and we will search the entire building openly.”
Even as he spoke a truck drew up outside the
door and two burly Negroes entered. The Levantine seemed to have expected them,
for he merely waved them toward the back of the shop and they responded with a
grunt of understanding.
Gordon and I watched them closely as they made
their way to a large mummy-case which stood upright against the wall not far
from the back. They lowered this to a level position and then started for the
door, carrying it carefully between them.
“Halt!” Gordon stepped forward,
raising his hand authoritatively.
“I represent Scotland Yard,” he said
swiftly, “and have sanction for anything I choose to do. Set that mummy
down; nothing leaves this shop until we have thoroughly searched it.”
The Negroes obeyed without a word and my friend
turned to the Levantine, who, apparently not perturbed or even interested, sat
smoking a Turkish water-pipe.
“Who was that tall man who entered just
before we did, and where did he go?”
“No one entered before you, sir. Or, if
anyone did, I was at the back of the shop and did not see him. You are
certainly at liberty to search my shop, sir.”
And search it we did, with the combined craft of
a secret service expert and a denizen of the underworld—while Hansen
stood stolidly at his post, the two Negroes standing over the carved mummy-case
watched us impassively and the Levantine sitting like a sphinx on his mat,
puffing a fog of smoke into the air. The whole thing had a distinct effect of
unreality.
At last, baffled, we returned to the mummy-case,
which was certainly long enough to conceal even a man of Kathulos’
height. The thing did not appear to be sealed as is the usual custom, and
Gordon opened it without difficulty. A formless shape, swathed in moldering
wrappings, met our eyes. Gordon parted some of the wrappings and revealed an
inch or so of withered, brownish, leathery arm. He shuddered involuntarily as
he touched it, as a man will do at the touch of a reptile or some inhumanly
cold thing. Taking a small metal idol from a stand nearby, he rapped on the
shrunken breast and the arm. Each gave out a solid thumping, like some sort of
wood.
Gordon shrugged his shoulders. “Dead for
two thousand years anyway and I don’t suppose I should risk destroying a
valuable mummy simply to prove what we know to be true.”
He closed the case again.
“The mummy may have crumbled some, even
from this much exposure, but perhaps it did not.”
This last was addressed to the Levantine who
replied merely by a courteous gesture of his hand, and the Negroes once more
lifted the case and carried it to the truck, where they loaded it on, and a
moment later mummy, truck and Negroes had vanished in the fog.
Gordon still nosed about the shop, but I stood
stock-still in the center of the floor. To my chaotic and dope-ridden brain I
attribute it, but the sensation had been mine, that through the wrappings of
the mummy’s face, great eyes had burned into mine, eyes like pools of
yellow fire, that seared my soul and froze me where I stood. And as the case
had been carried through the door, I knew that the lifeless thing in it, dead,
God only knows how many centuries, was laughing, hideously and silently.
17. The Dead Man from the Sea
“The blind gods roar and rave and
dream
Of all cities under the sea.”
—Chesterton
GORDON puffed savagely at his Turkish cigarette,
staring abstractedly and unseeingly at Hansen, who sat opposite him.
“I suppose we must chalk up another
failure against ourselves. That Levantine, Kamonos, is evidently a creature of
the Egyptian’s and the walls and floors of his shop are probably
honeycombed with secret panels and doors which would baffle a magician.”
Hansen made some answer but I said nothing.
Since our return to Gordon’s apartment, I had been conscious of a feeling
of intense languor and sluggishness which not even my condition could account
for. I knew that my system was full of the elixir—but my mind seemed
strangely slow and hard of comprehension in direct contrast with the average
state of my mentality when stimulated by the hellish dope.
This condition was slowly leaving me, like mist
floating from the surface of a lake, and I felt as if I were waking gradually
from a long and unnaturally sound sleep.
Gordon was saying: “I would give a good
deal to know if Kamonos is really one of Kathulos’ slaves or if the
Scorpion managed to make his escape through some natural exit as we entered.”
“Kamonos is his servant, true enough,”
I found myself saying slowly, as if searching for the proper words. “As
we left, I saw his gaze light upon the scorpion which is traced on my hand. His
eyes narrowed, and as we were leaving he contrived to brush close against me—and
to whisper in a quick low voice: ‘Soho, 48.’ ”
Gordon came erect like a loosened steel bow.
“Indeed!” he rapped. “Why did
you not tell me at the time?”
“I don’t know.”
My friend eyed me sharply.
“I noticed you seemed like a man
intoxicated all the way from the shop,” said he. “I attributed it
to some aftermath of hashish. But no. Kathulos is undoubtedly a masterful
disciple of Mesmer—his power over venomous reptiles shows that, and I am
beginning to believe it is the real source of his power over humans.
“Somehow, the Master caught you off your
guard in that shop and partly asserted his dominance over your mind. From what
hidden nook he sent his thought waves to shatter your brain, I do not know, but
Kathulos was somewhere in that shop, I am sure.”
“He was. He was in the mummy-case.”
“The mummy-case!” Gordon exclaimed
rather impatiently. “That is impossible! The mummy quite filled it and not
even such a thin being as the Master could have found room there.”
I shrugged my shoulders, unable to argue the
point but somehow sure of the truth of my statement.
“Kamonos,” Gordon continued, “doubtless
is not a member of the inner circle and does not know of your change of
allegiance. Seeing the mark of the scorpion, he undoubtedly supposed you to be
a spy of the Master’s. The whole thing may be a plot to ensnare us, but I
feel that the man was sincere—Soho 48 can be nothing less than the Scorpion’s
new rendezvous.”
I too felt that Gordon was right, though a
suspicion lurked in my mind.
“I secured the papers of Major Morley
yesterday,” be continued, “and while you slept, I went over them.
Mostly they but corroborated what I already knew—touched on the unrest of
the natives and repeated the theory that one vast genius was behind all. But
there was one matter which interested me greatly and which I think will
interest you also.”
From his strong box he took a manuscript written
in the close, neat characters of the unfortunate major, and in a monotonous
droning voice which betrayed little of his intense excitement he read the
following nightmarish narrative:
“This matter I consider worth jotting down—as
to whether it has any bearing on the case at hand, further developments will
show. At Alexandria, where I spent some weeks seeking further clues as to the
identity of the man known as the Scorpion, I made the acquaintance, through my
friend Ahmed Shah, of the noted Egyptologist Professor Ezra Schuyler of New
York. He verified the statement made by various laymen, concerning the legend
of the ‘ocean-man.’ This myth, handed down from generation to
generation, stretches back into the very mists of antiquity and is, briefly,
that someday a man shall come up out of the sea and shall lead the people of
Egypt to victory over all others. This legend has spread over the continent so
that now all black races consider that it deals with the coming of a universal
emperor. Professor Schuyler gave it as his opinion that the myth was somehow
connected with the lost Atlantis, which, he maintains, was located between the
African and South American continents and to whose inhabitants the ancestors of
the Egyptians were tributary. The reasons for his connection are too lengthy
and vague to note here, but following the line of his theory he told me a
strange and fantastic tale. He said that a close friend of his, Von Lorfmon of
Germany, a sort of free-lance scientist, now dead, was sailing off the coast of
Senegal some years ago, for the purpose of investigating and classifying the
rare specimens of sea life found there. He was using for his purpose a small
trading-vessel, manned by a crew of Moors, Greeks and Negroes.
“Some days out of sight of land, something
floating was sighted, and this object, being grappled and brought aboard,
proved to be a mummy-case of a most curious kind. Professor Schuyler explained
to me the features whereby it differed from the ordinary Egyptian style, but
from his rather technical account I merely got the impression that it was a
strangely shaped affair carved with characters neither cuneiform nor
hieroglyphic. The case was heavily lacquered, being watertight and airtight,
and Von Lorfmon had considerable difficulty in opening it. However, he managed
to do so without damaging the case, and a most unusual mummy was revealed.
Schuyler said that he never saw either the mummy or the case, but that from
descriptions given him by the Greek skipper who was present at the opening of
the case, the mummy differed as much from the ordinary man as the case differed
from the conventional type.
“Examination proved that the subject had
not undergone the usual procedure of mummification. All parts were intact just
as in life, but the whole form was shrunk and hardened to a wood-like
consistency. Cloth wrappings swathed the thing and they crumbled to dust and
vanished the instant air was let in upon them.
“Von Lorfmon was impressed by the effect
upon the crew. The Greeks showed no interest beyond that which would ordinarily
be shown by any man, but the Moors, and even more the Negroes, seemed to be
rendered temporarily insane! As the case was hoisted on board, they all fell
prostrate on the deck and raised a sort of worshipful chant, and it was necessary
to use force in order to exclude them from the cabin wherein the mummy was
exposed. A number of fights broke out between them and the Greek element of the
crew, and the skipper and Von Lorfmon thought best to put back to the nearest
port in all haste. The skipper attributed it to the natural aversion of seamen
toward having a corpse on board, but Von Lorfmon seemed to sense a deeper
meaning.
“They made port in Lagos, and that very
night Von Lorfmon was murdered in his stateroom and the mummy and its case
vanished. All the Moor and Negro sailors deserted ship the same night. Schuyler
said—and here the matter took on a most sinister and mysterious aspect—that
immediately afterward this widespread unrest among the natives began to smolder
and take tangible form; he connected it in some manner with the old legend.
“An aura of mystery, also, hung over Von
Lorfmon’s death. He had taken the mummy into his stateroom, and
anticipating an attack from the fanatical crew, had carefully barred and bolted
door and portholes. The skipper, a reliable man, swore that it was virtually
impossible to affect an entrance from without. And what signs were present
pointed to the fact that the locks had been worked from within. The scientist
was killed by a dagger which formed part of his collection and which was left
in his breast.
“As I have said, immediately afterward the
African cauldron began to seethe. Schuyler said that in his opinion the natives
considered the ancient prophecy fulfilled. The mummy was the man from the sea.
“Schuyler gave as his opinion that the
thing was the work of Atlanteans and that the man in the mummy-case was a
native of lost Atlantis. How the case came to float up through the fathoms of
water which cover the forgotten land, he does not venture to offer a theory. He
is sure that somewhere in the ghost-ridden mazes of the African jungles the
mummy has been enthroned as a god, and, inspired by the dead thing, the black
warriors are gathering for a wholesale massacre. He believes, also, that some
crafty Moslem is the direct moving power of the threatened rebellion.”
Gordon ceased and looked up at me.
“Mummies seem to weave a weird dance
through the warp of the tale,” he said. “The German scientist took
several pictures of the mummy with his camera, and it was after seeing these—which
strangely enough were not stolen along with the thing—that Major Morley
began to think himself on the brink of some monstrous discovery. His diary
reflects his state of mind and becomes incoherent—his condition seems to
have bordered on insanity. What did he learn to unbalance him so? Do you
suppose that the mesmeric spells of Kathulos were used against him?”
“These pictures—” I began.
“They fell into Schuyler’s hands and
he gave one to Morley. I found it among the manuscripts.”
He handed the thing to me, watching me narrowly.
I stared, then rose unsteadily and poured myself a tumbler of wine.
“Not a dead idol in a voodoo hut,” I
said shakily, “but a monster animated by fearsome life, roaming the world
for victims. Morley had seen the Master—that is why his brain crumbled.
Gordon, as I hope to live again, that face is the face of Kathulos!”
Gordon stared wordlessly at me.
“The Master hand, Gordon,” I
laughed. A certain grim enjoyment penetrated the mists of my horror, at the
sight of the steel-nerved Englishman struck speechless, doubtless for the first
time in his life.
He moistened his lips and said in a scarcely
recognizable voice, “Then, in God’s name, Costigan, nothing is
stable or certain, and mankind hovers at the brink of untold abysses of
nameless horror. If that dead monster found by Von Lorfmon be in truth the
Scorpion, brought to life in some hideous fashion, what can mortal effort do
against him?”
“The mummy at Kamonos’—”
I began.
“Aye, the man whose flesh, hardened by a
thousand years of non-existence—that must have been Kathulos himself! He
would have just had time to strip, wrap himself in the linens and step into the
case before we entered. You remember that the case, leaning upright against the
wall, stood partly concealed by a large Burmese idol, which obstructed our view
and doubtless gave him time to accomplish his purpose. My God, Costigan, with
what horror of the prehistoric world are we dealing?”
“I have heard of Hindu fakirs who could
induce a condition closely resembling death,” I began. “Is it not
possible that Kathulos, a shrewd and crafty Oriental, could have placed himself
in this state and his followers have placed the case in the ocean where it was
sure to be found? And might not he have been in this shape tonight at Kamonos’?”
Gordon shook his head.
“No, I have seen these fakirs. None of
them ever feigned death to the extent of becoming shriveled and hard—in a
word, dried up. Morley, narrating in another place the description of the
mummy-case as jotted down by Von Lorfmon and passed on to Schuyler, mentions
the fact that large portions of seaweed adhered to it—seaweed of a kind
found only at great depths, on the bottom of the ocean. The wood, too, was of a
kind which Von Lorfmon failed to recognize or to classify, in spite of the fact
that he was one of the greatest living authorities on flora. And his notes
again and again emphasize the enormous age of the thing. He admitted that there
was no way of telling how old the mummy was, but his hints intimate that he
believed it to be, not thousands of years old, but millions of years!
“No. We must face the facts. Since you are
positive that the picture of the mummy is the picture of Kathulos—and
there is little room for fraud—one of two things is practically certain:
the Scorpion was never dead but ages ago was placed in that mummy-case and his
life preserved in some manner, or else—he was dead and has been brought
to life! Either of these theories, viewed in the cold light of reason, is
absolutely untenable. Are we all insane?”
“Had you ever walked the road to hashish
land,” I said somberly, “you could believe anything to be true. Had
you ever gazed into the terrible reptilian eyes of Kathulos the sorcerer, you
would not doubt that he was both dead and alive.”
Gordon gazed out the window, his fine face
haggard in the gray light which had begun to steal through them.
“At any rate,” said he, “there
are two places which I intend exploring thoroughly before the sun rises again—Kamonos’
antique shop and Soho 48.”
18. The Grip of the Scorpion
“While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.”
—Poe
HANSEN snored on the bed as I paced the room.
Another day had passed over London and again the street lamps glimmered through
the fog. Their lights affected me strangely. They seemed to beat, solid waves
of energy, against my brain. They twisted the fog into strange sinister shapes.
Footlights of the stage that is the streets of London, how many grisly scenes
had they lighted? I pressed my hands hard against my throbbing temples,
striving to bring my thoughts back from the chaotic labyrinth where they
wandered.
Gordon I had not seen since dawn. Following the
clue of “Soho 48” he had gone forth to arrange a raid upon the
place and he thought it best that I should remain under cover. He anticipated
an attempt upon my life, and again he feared that if I went searching among the
dives I formerly frequented it would arouse suspicion.
Hansen snored on. I seated myself and began to
study the Turkish shoes which clothed my feet. Zuleika had worn Turkish
slippers—how she floated through my waking dreams, gilding prosaic things
with her witchery! Her face smiled at me from the fog; her eyes shone from the
flickering lamps; her phantom footfalls re-echoed through the misty chambers of
my skull.
They beat an endless tattoo, luring and haunting
till it seemed that these echoes found echoes in the hallway outside the room
where I stood, soft and stealthy. A sudden rap at the door and I started.
Hansen slept on as I crossed the room and flung
the door swiftly open. A swirling wisp of fog had invaded the corridor, and
through it, like a silver veil, I saw her—Zuleika stood before me with
her shimmering hair and her red lips parted and her great dark eyes.
Like a speechless fool I stood and she glanced
quickly down the hallway and then stepped inside and closed the door.
“Gordon!” she whispered in a
thrilling undertone. “Your friend! The Scorpion has him!”
Hansen had awakened and now sat gaping stupidly
at the strange scene which met his eyes.
Zuleika did not heed him.
“And oh, Steephen!” she cried, and
tears shone in her eyes, “I have tried so hard to secure some more elixir
but I could not.”
“Never mind that,” I finally found
my speech. “Tell me about Gordon.”
“He went back to Kamonos’ alone, and
Hassim and Ganra Singh took him captive and brought him to the Master’s
house. Tonight assemble a great host of the people of the Scorpion for the
sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice!” A grisly thrill of
horror coursed down my spine. Was there no limit to the ghastliness of this
business?
“Quick, Zuleika, where is this house of
the Master’s?”
“Soho, 48. You must summon the police and
send many men to surround it, but you must not go yourself—”
Hansen sprang up quivering for action, but I
turned to him. My brain was clear now, or seemed to be, and racing unnaturally.
“Wait!” I turned back to Zuleika. “When
is this sacrifice to take place?”
“At the rising of the moon.”
“That is only a few hours before dawn.
Time to save him, but if we raid the house they’ll kill him before we can
reach them. And God only knows how many diabolical things guard all approaches.”
“I do not know,” Zuleika whimpered. “I
must go now, or the Master will kill me.”
Something gave way in my brain at that;
something like a flood of wild and terrible exultation swept over me.
“The Master will kill no one!” I
shouted, flinging my arms on high. “Before ever the east turns red for
dawn, the Master dies! By all things holy and unholy I swear it!”
Hansen stared wildly at me and Zuleika shrank
back as I turned on her. To my dope-inspired brain had come a sudden burst of
light, true and unerring. I knew Kathulos was a mesmerist—that he
understood fully the secret of dominating another’s mind and soul. And I
knew that at last I had hit upon the reason of his power over the girl.
Mesmerism! As a snake fascinates and draws to him a bird, so the Master held Zuleika
to him with unseen shackles. So absolute was his rule over her that it held
even when she was out of his sight, working over great distances.
There was but one thing which would break that
hold: the magnetic power of some other person whose control was stronger with
her than Kathulos’. I laid my hands on her slim little shoulders and made
her face me.
“Zuleika,” I said commandingly, “here
you are safe; you shall not return to Kathulos. There is no need of it. Now you
are free.”
But I knew I had failed before I ever started.
Her eyes held a look of amazed, unreasoning fear and she twisted timidly in my
grasp.
“Steephen, please let me go!” she
begged. “I must—I must!”
I drew her over to the bed and asked Hansen for
his handcuffs. He handed them to me, wonderingly, and I fastened one cuff to
the bedpost and the other to her slim wrist. The girl whimpered but made no
resistance, her limpid eyes seeking mine in mute appeal.
It cut me to the quick to enforce my will upon
her in this apparently brutal manner but I steeled myself.
“Zuleika,” I said tenderly, “you
are now my prisoner. The Scorpion cannot blame you for not returning to him
when you are unable to do so—and before dawn you shall be free of his
rule entirely.”
I turned to Hansen and spoke in a tone which
admitted of no argument.
“Remain here, just without the door, until
I return. On no account allow any strangers to enter—that is, anyone whom
you do not personally know. And I charge you, on your honor as a man, do not
release this girl, no matter what she may say. If neither I nor Gordon have
returned by ten o’clock tomorrow, take her to this address—that
family once was friends of mine and will take care of a homeless girl. I am
going to Scotland Yard.”
“Steephen,” Zuleika wailed, “you
are going to the Master’s lair! You will be killed. Send the police, do
not go!”
I bent, drew her into my arms, felt her lips
against mine, then tore myself away.
The fog plucked at me with ghostly fingers, cold
as the hands of dead men, as I raced down the street. I had no plan, but one
was forming in my mind, beginning to seethe in the stimulated cauldron that was
my brain. I halted at the sight of a policeman pacing his beat, and beckoning
him to me, scribbled a terse note on a piece of paper torn from a notebook and
handed it to him.
“Get this to Scotland Yard; it’s a
matter of life and death and it has to do with the business of John Gordon.”
At that name, a gloved hand came up in swift
assent, but his assurance of haste died out behind me as I renewed my flight.
The note stated briefly that Gordon was a prisoner at Soho 48 and advised an
immediate raid in force—advised, nay, in Gordon’s name, commanded
it.
My reason for my actions was simple; I knew that
the first noise of the raid sealed John Gordon’s doom. Somehow I first
must reach him and protect or free him before the police arrived.
The time seemed endless, but at last the grim
gaunt outlines of the house that was Soho 48 rose up before me, a giant ghost
in the fog. The hour grew late; few people dared the mists and the dampness as
I came to a halt in the street before this forbidding building. No lights
showed from the windows, either upstairs or down. It seemed deserted. But the
lair of the scorpion often seems deserted until the silent death strikes
suddenly.
Here I halted and a wild thought struck me. One
way or another, the drama would be over by dawn. Tonight was the climax of my
career, the ultimate top of life. Tonight I was the strongest link in the
strange chain of events. Tomorrow it would not matter whether I lived or died.
I drew the flask of elixir from my pocket and gazed at it. Enough for two more
days if properly eked out. Two more days of life! Or—I needed stimulation
as I never needed it before; the task in front of me was one no mere human
could hope to accomplish. If I drank the entire remainder of the elixir, I had
no idea as to the duration of its effect, but it would last the night through.
And my legs were shaky; my mind had curious periods of utter vacuity; weakness
of brain and body assailed me. I raised the flask and with one draft drained
it.
For an instant I thought it was death. Never had
I taken such an amount.
Sky and world reeled and I felt as if I would
fly into a million vibrating fragments, like the bursting of a globe of brittle
steel. Like fire, like hell-fire the elixir raced along my veins and I was a
giant! A monster! A superman!
Turning, I strode to the menacing, shadowy
doorway. I had no plan; I felt the need of none. As a drunken man walks
blithely into danger, I strode to the lair of the Scorpion, magnificently aware
of my superiority, imperially confident of my stimulation and sure as the
unchanging stars that the way would open before me.
Oh, there never was a superman like that who
knocked commandingly on the door of Soho 48 that night in the rain and the fog!
I knocked four times, the old signal that we
slaves had used to be admitted into the idol room at Yun Shatu’s. An
aperture opened in the center of the door and slanted eyes looked warily out.
They slightly widened as the owner recognized me, then narrowed wickedly.
“You fool!” I said angrily. “Don’t
you see the mark?”
I held my hand to the aperture.
“Don’t you recognize me? Let me in,
curse you.”
I think the very boldness of the trick made for
its success. Surely by now all the Scorpion’s slaves knew of Stephen
Costigan’s rebellion, knew that he was marked for death. And the very
fact that I came there, inviting doom, confused the doorman.
The door opened and I entered. The man who had
admitted me was a tall, lank Chinaman I had known as a servant at Kathulos. He
closed the door behind me and I saw we stood in a sort of vestibule, lighted by
a dim lamp whose glow could not be seen from the street for the reason that the
windows were heavily curtained. The Chinaman glowered at me undecided. I looked
at him, tensed. Then suspicion flared in his eyes and his hand flew to his
sleeve. But at the instant I was on him and his lean neck broke like a rotten
bough between my hands.
I eased his corpse to the thickly carpeted floor
and listened. No sound broke the silence. Stepping as stealthily as a wolf,
fingers spread like talons, I stole into the next room. This was furnished in
oriental style, with couches and rugs and gold-worked drapery, but was empty of
human life. I crossed it and went into the next one. Light flowed softly from
the censers which were swung from the ceiling, and the Eastern rugs deadened
the sound of my footfalls; I seemed to be moving through a castle of
enchantment.
Every moment I expected a rush of silent
assassins from the doorways or from behind the curtains or screen with their
writhing dragons. Utter silence reigned. Room after room I explored and at last
halted at the foot of the stairs. The inevitable censer shed an uncertain
light, but most of the stairs were veiled in shadows. What horrors awaited me
above?
But fear and the elixir are strangers and I
mounted that stair of lurking terror as boldly as I had entered that house of terror.
The upper rooms I found to be much like those below and with them they had this
fact in common: they were empty of human life. I sought an attic but there
seemed no door letting into one. Returning to the first floor, I made a search
for an entrance into the basement, but again my efforts were fruitless. The
amazing truth was borne in upon me: except for myself and that dead man who lay
sprawled so grotesquely in the outer vestibule, there were no men in that
house, dead or living.
I could not understand it. Had the house been
bare of furniture I should have reached the natural conclusion that Kathulos
had fled—but no signs of flight met my eye. This was unnatural, uncanny.
I stood in the great shadowy library and pondered. No, I had made no mistake in
the house. Even if the broken corpse in the vestibule were not there to furnish
mute testimony, everything in the room pointed toward the presence of the
Master. There were the artificial palms, the lacquered screens, the tapestries,
even the idol, though now no incense smoke rose before it. About the walls were
ranged long shelves of books, bound in strange and costly fashion—books
in every language in the world, I found from a swift examination, and on every
subject—outre and bizarre, most of them.
Remembering the secret passage in the Temple of
Dreams, I investigated the heavy mahogany table which stood in the center of
the room. But nothing resulted. A sudden blaze of fury surged up in me,
primitive and unreasoning. I snatched a statuette from the table and dashed it
against the shelf-covered wall. The noise of its breaking would surely bring
the gang from their hiding-place. But the result was much more startling than
that!
The statuette struck the edge of a shelf and
instantly the whole section of shelves with their load of books swung silently
outward, revealing a narrow doorway! As in the other secret door, a row of
steps led downward. At another time I would have shuddered at the thought of
descending, with the horrors of the other tunnel fresh in my mind, but inflamed
as I was by the elixir, I strode forward without an instant’s hesitancy.
Since there was no one in the house, they must
be somewhere in the tunnel or in whatever lair to which the tunnel led. I
stepped through the doorway, leaving the door open; the police might find it
that way and follow me, though somehow I felt as if mine would be a lone hand
from start to grim finish.
I went down a considerable distance and then the
stair debouched into a level corridor some twenty feet wide—a remarkable
thing. In spite of the width, the ceiling was rather low and from it hung
small, curiously shaped lamps which flung a dim light. I stalked hurriedly
along the corridor like old Death seeking victims, and as I went I noted the
work of the thing. The floor was of great broad flags and the walls seemed to
be of huge blocks of evenly set stone. This passage was clearly no work of
modern days; the slaves of Kathulos never tunneled there. Some secret way of
medieval times, I thought—and after all, who knows what catacombs lie
below London, whose secrets are greater and darker than those of Babylon and
Rome?
On and on I went, and now I knew that I must be
far below the earth. The air was dank and heavy, and cold moisture dripped from
the stones of walls and ceiling. From time to time I saw smaller passages
leading away in the darkness but I determined to keep to the larger main one.
A ferocious impatience gripped me. I seemed to
have been walking for hours and still only dank damp walls and bare flags and
guttering lamps met my eyes. I kept a close watch for sinister-appearing chests
or the like—saw no such things.
Then as I was about to burst into savage curses,
another stair loomed up in the shadows in front of me.
19. Dark Fury
“The ringed wolf glared the circle
round
Through baleful, blue-lit eye,
Not unforgetful of his debt.
Quoth he, ‘I’ll do some damage yet
Or ere my turn to die!’ ”
—Mundy
LIKE a lean wolf I glided up the stairs. Some
twenty feet up there was a sort of landing from which other corridors diverged,
much like the lower one by which I had come. The thought came to me that the
earth below London must be honeycombed with such secret passages, one above the
other.
Some feet above this landing the steps halted at
a door, and here I hesitated, uncertain as to whether I should chance knocking
or not. Even as I meditated, the door began to open. I shrank back against the
wall, flattening myself out as much as possible. The door swung wide and a Moor
came through. Only a glimpse I had of the room beyond, out of the corner of my
eye, but my unnaturally alert senses registered the fact that the room was
empty.
And on the instant, before he could turn, I
smote the Moor a single deathly blow behind the angle of the jawbone and be
toppled headlong down the stairs, to lie in a crumpled heap on the landing, his
limbs tossed grotesquely about.
My left hand caught the door as it started to
slam shut and in an instant I was through and standing in the room beyond. As I
had thought, there was no occupant of this room. I crossed it swiftly and
entered the next. These rooms were furnished in a manner before which the
furnishings of the Soho house paled into insignificance. Barbaric, terrible,
unholy—these words alone convey some slight idea of the ghastly sights
which met my eyes. Skulls, bones and complete skeletons formed much of the
decorations, if such they were. Mummies leered from their cases and mounted
reptiles ranged the walls. Between these sinister relics hung African shields
of hide and bamboo, crossed with assagais and war daggers. Here and there
reared obscene idols, black and horrible.
And in between and scattered about among these
evidences of savagery and barbarism were vases, screens, rugs and hangings of
the highest oriental workmanship; a strange and incongruous effect.
I had passed through two of these rooms without
seeing a human being, when I came to stairs leading upward. Up these I went,
several flights, until I came to a door in a ceiling. I wondered if I was still
under the earth. Surely the first stairs had let into a house of some sort. I
raised the door cautiously. Starlight met my eyes and I drew myself warily up
and out. There I halted. A broad flat roof stretched away on all sides and
beyond its rim on all sides glimmered the lights of London. Just what building
I was on, I had no idea, but that it was a tall one I could tell, for I seemed
to be above most of the lights I saw. Then I saw that I was not alone.
Over against the shadows of the ledge that ran
around the roof’s edge, a great menacing form bulked in starlight. A pair
of eyes glinted at me with a light not wholly sane; the starlight glanced
silver from a curving length of steel. Yar Khan the Afghan killer fronted me in
the silent shadows.
A fierce wild exultation surged over me. Now I
could begin to pay the debt I owed Kathulos and all his hellish band! The dope
fired my veins and sent waves of inhuman power and dark fury through me. A
spring and I was on my feet in a silent, deathly rush.
Yar Khan was a giant, taller and bulkier than I.
He held a tulwar, and from the instant I saw him I knew that he was full of the
dope to the use of which he was addicted—heroin.
As I came in he swung his heavy weapon high in
the air, but ere he could strike I seized his sword wrist in an iron grip and
with my free hand drove smashing blows into his midriff.
Of that hideous battle, fought in silence above
the sleeping city with only the stars to see, I remember little. I remember
tumbling back and forth, locked in a death embrace. I remember the stiff beard
rasping my flesh as his dope-fired eyes gazed wildly into mine. I remember the
taste of hot blood in my mouth, the tang of fearful exultation in my soul, the
onrushing and upsurging of inhuman strength and fury.
God, what a sight for a human eye, had anyone
looked upon that grim roof where two human leopards, dope maniacs, tore each
other to pieces!
I remember his arm breaking like rotten wood in
my grip and the tulwar falling from his useless hand. Handicapped by a broken
arm, the end was inevitable, and with one wild uproaring flood of might, I
rushed him to the edge of the roof and bent him backward far out over the
ledge. An instant we struggled there; then I tore loose his hold and hurled him
over, and one single shriek came up as he hurtled into the darkness below.
I stood upright, arms hurled up toward the
stars, a terrible statue of primordial triumph. And down my breast trickled
streams of blood from the long wounds left by the Afghan’s frantic nails,
on neck and face.
Then I turned with the craft of the maniac. Had
no one heard the sound of that battle? My eyes were on the door through which I
had come, but a noise made me turn, and for the first time I noticed a small
affair like a tower jutting up from the roof. There was no window there, but
there was a door, and even as I looked that door opened and a huge black form
framed itself in the light that streamed from within. Hassim!
He stepped out on the roof and closed the door,
his shoulders hunched and neck outthrust as he glanced this way and that. I
struck him senseless to the roof with one hate-driven smash. I crouched over
him, waiting some sign of returning consciousness; then away in the sky close to
the horizon, I saw a faint red tint. The rising of the moon!
Where in God’s name was Gordon? Even as I
stood undecided, a strange noise reached me. It was curiously like the droning
of many bees.
Striding in the direction from which it seemed
to come, I crossed the roof and leaned over the ledge. A sight nightmarish and
incredible met my eyes.
Some twenty feet below the level of the roof on
which I stood, there was another roof, of the same size and clearly a part of
the same building. On one side it was bounded by the wall; on the other three
sides a parapet several feet high took the place of a ledge.
A great throng of people stood, sat and
squatted, close-packed on the roof—and without exception they were
Negroes! There were hundreds of them, and it was their low-voiced conversation
which I had heard. But what held my gaze was that upon which their eyes were
fixed.
About the center of the roof rose a sort of
teocalli some ten feet high, almost exactly like those found in Mexico and on
which the priests of the Aztecs sacrificed human victims. This, allowing for
its infinitely smaller scale, was an exact type of those sacrificial pyramids.
On the flat top of it was a curiously carved altar, and beside it stood a lank,
dusky form whom even the ghastly mask he wore could not disguise to my gaze—Santiago,
the Haiti voodoo fetish man. On the altar lay John Gordon, stripped to the
waist and bound hand and foot, but conscious.
I reeled back from the roof edge, rent in twain
by indecision. Even the stimulus of the elixir was not equal to this. Then a
sound brought me about to see Hassim struggling dizzily to his knees. I reached
him with two long strides and ruthlessly smashed him down again. Then I noticed
a queer sort of contrivance dangling from his girdle. I bent and examined it.
It was a mask similar to that worn by Santiago. Then my mind leaped swift and
sudden to a wild desperate plan, which to my dope-ridden brain seemed not at
all wild or desperate. I stepped softly to the tower and, opening the door,
peered inward. I saw no one who might need to be silenced, but I saw a long
silken robe hanging upon a peg in the wall. The luck of the dope fiend! I
snatched it and closed the door again. Hassim showed no signs of consciousness
but I gave him another smash on the chin to make sure and, seizing his mask,
hurried to the ledge.
A low guttural chant floated up to me, jangling,
barbaric, with an undertone of maniacal blood-lust. The Negroes, men and women,
were swaying back and forth to the wild rhythm of their death chant. On the
teocalli Santiago stood like a statue of black basalt, facing the east, dagger
held high—a wild and terrible sight, naked as he was save for a wide
silken girdle and that inhuman mask on his face. The moon thrust a red rim
above the eastern horizon and a faint breeze stirred the great black plumes
which nodded above the voodoo man’s mask. The chant of the worshipers
dropped to a low, sinister whisper.
I hurriedly slipped on the death mask, gathered
the robe close about me and prepared for the descent. I was prepared to drop
the full distance, being sure in the superb confidence of my insanity that I
would land unhurt, but as I climbed over the ledge I found a steel ladder
leading down. Evidently Hassim, one of the voodoo priests, intended descending
this way. So down I went, and in haste, for I knew that the instant the moon’s
lower rim cleared the city’s skyline, that motionless dagger would
descend into Gordon’s breast.
Gathering the robe close about me so as to conceal
my white skin, I stepped down upon the roof and strode forward through rows of
black worshipers who shrank aside to let me through. To the foot of the
teocalli I stalked and up the stair that ran about it, until I stood beside the
death altar and marked the dark red stains upon it. Gordon lay on his back, his
eyes open, his face drawn and haggard, but his gaze dauntless and unflinching.
Santiago’s eyes blazed at me through the
slits of his mask, but I read no suspicion in his gaze until I reached forward
and took the dagger from his hand. He was too much astonished to resist, and
the black throng fell suddenly silent. That he saw my hand was not that of a
Negro it is certain, but he was simply struck speechless with astonishment.
Moving swiftly I cut Gordon’s bonds and hauled him erect. Then Santiago
with a shriek leaped upon me—shrieked again and, arms flung high, pitched
headlong from the teocalli with his own dagger buried to the hilt in his
breast.
Then the black worshipers were on us with a screech
and a roar—leaping on the steps of the teocalli like black leopards in
the moonlight, knives flashing, eyes gleaming whitely.
I tore mask and robe from me and answered Gordon’s
exclamation with a wild laugh. I had hoped that by virtue of my disguise I
might get us both safely away but now I was content to die there at his side.
He tore a great metal ornament from the altar,
and as the attackers came he wielded this. A moment we held them at bay and
then they flowed over us like a black wave. This to me was Valhalla! Knives
stung me and blackjacks smashed against me, but I laughed and drove my iron
fists in straight, steam-hammer smashes that shattered flesh and bone. I saw
Gordon’s crude weapon rise and fall, and each time a man went down.
Skulls shattered and blood splashed and the dark fury swept over me. Nightmare
faces swirled about me and I was on my knees; up again and the faces crumpled
before my blows. Through far mists I seemed to hear a hideous familiar voice
raised in imperious command.
Gordon was swept away from me but from the
sounds I knew that the work of death still went on. The stars reeled through
fogs of blood, but Hell’s exaltation was on me and I reveled in the dark
tides of fury until a darker, deeper tide swept over me and I knew no more.
20. Ancient Horror
“Here now in his triumph where all
things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a God self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.”
—Swinburne
SLOWLY I drifted back into life—slowly,
slowly. A mist held me and in the mist I saw a Skull—
I lay in a steel cage like a captive wolf, and
the bars were too strong, I saw, even for my strength. The cage seemed to be
set in a sort of niche in the wall and I was looking into a large room. This
room was under the earth, for the floor was of stone flags and the walls and
ceiling were composed of gigantic blocks of the same material. Shelves ranged
the walls, covered with weird appliances, apparently of a scientific nature,
and more were on the great table that stood in the center of the room. Beside
this sat Kathulos.
The sorcerer was clad in a snaky yellow robe,
and those hideous hands and that terrible head were more pronouncedly reptilian
than ever. He turned his great yellow eyes toward me, like pools of livid fire,
and his parchment-thin lips moved in what probably passed for a smile.
I staggered erect and gripped the bars, cursing.
“Gordon, curse you, where is Gordon?”
Kathulos took a test-tube from the table, eyed
it closely and emptied it into another.
“Ah, my friend awakes,” he murmured
in his voice—the voice of a living dead man.
He thrust his hands into his long sleeves and
turned fully to me.
“I think in you,” he said
distinctly, “I have created a Frankenstein monster. I made of you a
superhuman creature to serve my wishes and you broke from me. You are the bane
of my might, worse than Gordon even. You have killed valuable servants and
interfered with my plans. However, your evil comes to an end tonight. Your
friend Gordon broke away but he is being hunted through the tunnels and cannot
escape.
“You,” he continued with the sincere
interest of the scientist, “are a most interesting subject. Your brain
must be formed differently from any other man that ever lived. I will make a
close study of it and add it to my laboratory. How a man, with the apparent
need of the elixir in his system, has managed to go on for two days still
stimulated by the last draft is more than I can understand.”
My heart leaped. With all his wisdom, little
Zuleika had tricked him and he evidently did not know that she had filched a
flask of the life-giving stuff from him.
“The last draft you had from me,” he
went on, “was sufficient only for some eight hours. I repeat, it has me
puzzled. Can you offer any suggestion?”
I snarled wordlessly. He sighed.
“As always the barbarian. Truly the
proverb speaks: ‘Jest with the wounded tiger and warm the adder in your
bosom before you seek to lift the savage from his savagery.’ ”
He meditated awhile in silence. I watched him
uneasily. There was about him a vague and curious difference—his long
fingers emerging from the sleeves drummed on the chair arms and some hidden
exultation strummed at the back of his voice, lending it unaccustomed vibrancy.
“And you might have been a king of the new
regime,” he said suddenly. “Aye, the new—new and inhumanly
old!”
I shuddered as his dry cackling laugh rasped
out.
He bent his head as if listening. From far off
seemed to come a hum of guttural voices. His lips writhed in a smile.
“My black children,” he murmured. “They
tear my enemy Gordon to pieces in the tunnels. They, Mr. Costigan, are my real
henchmen and it was for their edification tonight that I laid John Gordon on
the sacrificial stone. I would have preferred to have made some experiments
with him, based on certain scientific theories, but my children must be
humored. Later under my tutelage they will outgrow their childish superstitions
and throw aside their foolish customs, but now they must be led gently by the
hand.
“How do you like these under-the-earth
corridors, Mr. Costigan?” he switched suddenly. “You thought of
them—what? No doubt that the white savages of your Middle Ages built
them? Faugh! These tunnels are older than your world! They were brought into
being by mighty kings, too many eons ago for your mind to grasp, when an
imperial city towered where this crude village of London stands. All trace of
that metropolis has crumbled to dust and vanished, but these corridors were
built by more than human skill—ha ha! Of all the teeming thousands who
move daily above them, none knows of their existence save my servants—and
not all of them. Zuleika, for instance, does not know of them, for of late I
have begun to doubt her loyalty and shall doubtless soon make of her an
example.”
At that I hurled myself blindly against the side
of the cage, a red wave of hate and fury tossing me in its grip. I seized the
bars and strained until the veins stood out on my forehead and the muscles
bulged and crackled in my arms and shoulders. And the bars bent before my
onslaught—a little but no more, and finally the power flowed from my
limbs and I sank down trembling and weakened. Kathulos watched me
imperturbably.
“The bars hold,” be announced with
something almost like relief in his tone. “Frankly, I prefer to be on the
opposite side of them. You are a human ape if there was ever one.”
He laughed suddenly and wildly.
“But why do you seek to oppose me?”
he shrieked unexpectedly. “Why defy me, who am Kathulos, the Sorcerer,
great even in the days of the old empire? Today, invincible! A magician, a
scientist, among ignorant savages! Ha ha!”
I shuddered, and sudden blinding light broke in
on me. Kathulos himself was an addict, and was fired by the stuff of his
choice! What hellish concoction was strong enough, terrible enough to thrill
the Master and inflame him, I do not know, nor do I wish to know. Of all the
uncanny knowledge that was his, I, knowing the man as I did, count this the
most weird and grisly.
“You, you paltry fool!” he was
ranting, his face lit supernaturally.
“Know you who I am? Kathulos of Egypt!
Bah! They knew me in the old days! I reigned in the dim misty sea lands ages
and ages before the sea rose and engulfed the land. I died, not as men die; the
magic draft of life everlasting was ours! I drank deep and slept. Long I slept
in my lacquered case! My flesh withered and grew hard; my blood dried in my
veins. I became as one dead. But still within me burned the spirit of life,
sleeping but anticipating the awakening. The great cities crumbled to dust. The
sea drank the land. The tall shrines and the lofty spires sank beneath the
green waves. All this I knew as I slept, as a man knows in dreams. Kathulos of
Egypt? Faugh! Kathulos of Atlantis!”
I uttered a sudden involuntary cry. This was too
grisly for sanity.
“Aye, the magician, the sorcerer.
“And down the long years of savagery,
through which the barbaric races struggled to rise without their masters, the
legend came of the day of empire, when one of the Old Race would rise up from
the sea. Aye, and lead to victory the black people who were our slaves in the
old days.
“These brown and yellow people, what care
I for them? The blacks were the slaves of my race, and I am their god today.
They will obey me. The yellow and the brown peoples are fools—I make them
my tools and the day will come when my black warriors will turn on them and
slay at my word. And you, you white barbarians, whose ape-ancestors forever defied
my race and me, your doom is at hand! And when I mount my universal throne, the
only whites shall be white slaves!
“The day came as prophesied, when my case,
breaking free from the halls where it lay—where it had lain when Atlantis
was still sovereign of the world—where since her empery it had sunk into
the green fathoms—when my case, I say, was smitten by the deep sea tides
and moved and stirred, and thrust aside the clinging seaweed that masks temples
and minarets, and came floating up past the lofty sapphire and golden spires,
up through the green waters, to float upon the lazy waves of the sea.
“Then came a white fool carrying out the
destiny of which he was not aware. The men on his ship, true believers, knew
that the time had come. And I—the air entered my nostrils and I awoke
from the long, long sleep. I stirred and moved and lived. And rising in the
night, I slew the fool that had lifted me from the ocean, and my servants made
obeisance to me and took me into Africa, where I abode awhile and learned new
languages and new ways of a new world and became strong.
“The wisdom of your dreary world—ha
ha! I who delved deeper in the mysteries of the old than any man dared go! All
that men know today, I know, and the knowledge beside that which I have brought
down the centuries is as a grain of sand beside a mountain! You should know
something of that knowledge! By it I lifted you from one hell to plunge you
into a greater! You fool, here at my hand is that which would lift you from
this! Aye, would strike from you the chains whereby I have bound you!”
He snatched up a golden vial and shook it before
my gaze. I eyed it as men dying in the desert must eye the distant mirages.
Kathulos fingered it meditatively. His unnatural excitement seemed to have
passed suddenly, and when he spoke again it was in the passionless, measured
tones of the scientist.
“That would indeed be an experiment
worthwhile—to free you of the elixir habit and see if your dope-riddled
body would sustain life. Nine times out of ten the victim, with the need and
stimulus removed, would die—but you are such a giant of a brute—”
He sighed and set the vial down.
“The dreamer opposes the man of destiny.
My time is not my own or I should choose to spend my life pent in my
laboratories, carrying out my experiments. But now, as in the days of the old
empire when kings sought my counsel, I must work and labor for the good of the
race at large. Aye, I must toil and sow the seed of glory against the full
coming of the imperial days when the seas give up all their living dead.”
I shuddered. Kathulos laughed wildly again. His
fingers began to drum his chair arms and his face gleamed with the unnatural
light once more. The red visions had begun to seethe in his skull again.
“Under the green seas they lie, the
ancient masters, in their lacquered cases, dead as men reckon death, but only
sleeping. Sleeping through the long ages as hours, awaiting the day of
awakening! The old masters, the wise men, who foresaw the day when the sea
would gulp the land, and who made ready. Made ready that they might rise again
in the barbaric days to come. As did I. Sleeping they lie, ancient kings and
grim wizards, who died as men die, before Atlantis sank. Who, sleeping, sank
with her but who shall arise again!
“Mine the glory! I rose first. And I
sought out the site of old cities, on shores that did not sink. Vanished, long
vanished. The barbarian tide swept over them thousands of years ago as the
green waters swept over their elder sister of the deeps. On some, the deserts
stretch bare. Over some, as here, young barbarian cities rise.”
He halted suddenly. His eyes sought one of the
dark openings that marked a corridor. I think his strange intuition warned him
of some impending danger but I do not believe that he had any inkling of how
dramatically our scene would be interrupted.
As he looked, swift footsteps sounded and a man
appeared suddenly in the doorway—a man disheveled, tattered and bloody.
John Gordon! Kathulos sprang erect with a cry, and Gordon, gasping as from
superhuman exertion, brought down the revolver he held in his hand and fired
point-blank. Kathulos staggered, clapping his hand to his breast, and then,
groping wildly, reeled to the wall and fell against it. A doorway opened and he
reeled through, but as Gordon leaped fiercely across the chamber, a blank stone
surface met his gaze, which yielded not to his savage hammerings.
He whirled and ran drunkenly to the table where
lay a bunch of keys the Master had dropped there.
“The vial!” I shrieked. “Take
the vial!” And he thrust it into his pocket.
Back along the corridor through which he had
come sounded a faint clamor growing swiftly like a wolf-pack in full cry. A few
precious seconds spent with fumbling for the right key, then the cage door
swung open and I sprang out. A sight for the gods we were, the two of us!
Slashed, bruised and cut, our garments hanging in tatters—my wounds had
ceased to bleed, but now as I moved they began again, and from the stiffness of
my hands I knew that my knuckles were shattered. As for Gordon, he was fairly
drenched in blood from crown to foot.
We made off down a passage in the opposite
direction from the menacing noise, which I knew to be the black servants of the
Master in full pursuit of us. Neither of us was in good shape for running, but
we did our best. Where we were going I had no idea. My superhuman strength had
deserted me and I was going now on willpower alone. We switched off into
another corridor and we had not gone twenty steps until, looking back, I saw
the first of the black devils round the corner.
A desperate effort increased our lead a trifle.
But they had seen us, were in full view now, and a yell of fury broke from them
to be succeeded by a more sinister silence as they bent all efforts to
overhauling us.
There a short distance in front of us we saw a
stair loom suddenly in the gloom. If we might reach that—but we saw
something else.
Against the ceiling, between us and the stairs,
hung a huge thing like an iron grille, with great spikes along the bottom—a
portcullis. And even as we looked, without halting in our panting strides, it
began to move.
“They’re lowering the portcullis!”
Gordon croaked, his blood-streaked face a mask of exhaustion and will.
Now the blacks were only ten feet behind us—now
the huge grate, gaining momentum, with a creak of rusty, unused mechanism,
rushed downward. A final spurt, a gasping straining nightmare of effort—and
Gordon, sweeping us both along in a wild burst of pure nerve-strength, hurled
us under and through, and the grate crashed behind us!
A moment we lay gasping, not heeding the
frenzied horde who raved and screamed on the other side of the grate. So close
had that final leap been, that the great spikes in their descent had torn
shreds from our clothing.
The blacks were thrusting at us with daggers
through the bars, but we were out of reach and it seemed to me that I was
content to lie there and die of exhaustion. But Gordon weaved unsteadily erect
and hauled me with him.
“Got to get out,” he croaked; “go
to warn . . . Scotland Yard . . . honeycombs in heart of London . . high
explosives . . . arms . . . ammunition.”
We blundered up the steps, and in front of us I
seemed to hear a sound of metal grating against metal. The stairs ended
abruptly, on a landing that terminated in a blank wall. Gordon hammered against
this and the inevitable secret doorway opened. Light streamed in, through the
bars of a sort of grille. Men in the uniform of London police were sawing at
these with hacksaws, and even as they greeted us, an opening was made through
which we crawled.
“You’re hurt, sir!” One of the
men took Gordon’s arm.
My companion shook him off.
“There’s no time to lose! Out of
here, as quick as we can go!”
I saw that we were in a basement of some sort.
We hastened up the steps and out into the early dawn which was turning the east
scarlet. Over the tops of smaller houses I saw in the distance a great gaunt
building on the roof of which, I felt instinctively, that wild drama had been
enacted the night before.
“That building was leased some months ago
by a mysterious Chinaman,” said Gordon, following my gaze. “Office
building originally—the neighborhood deteriorated and the building stood
vacant for some time. The new tenant added several stories to it but left it
apparently empty. Had my eye on it for some time.”
This was told in Gordon’s jerky swift
manner as we started hurriedly along the sidewalk. I listened mechanically,
like a man in a trance. My vitality was ebbing fast and I knew that I was going
to crumple at any moment.
“The people living in the vicinity had
been reporting strange sights and noises. The man who owned the basement we
just left heard queer sounds emanating from the wall of the basement and called
the police. About that time I was racing back and forth among those cursed
corridors like a hunted rat and I heard the police banging on the wall. I found
the secret door and opened it but found it barred by a grating. It was while I
was telling the astounded policemen to procure a hacksaw that the pursuing
Negroes, whom I had eluded for the moment, came into sight and I was forced to
shut the door and run for it again. By pure luck I found you and by pure luck
managed to find the way back to the door.
“Now we must get to Scotland Yard. If we
strike swiftly, we may capture the entire band of devils. Whether I killed
Kathulos or not I do not know, or if he can be killed by mortal weapons. But to
the best of my knowledge all of them are now in those subterranean corridors
and—”
At that moment the world shook! A
brain-shattering roar seemed to break the sky with its incredible detonation;
houses tottered and crashed to ruins; a mighty pillar of smoke and flame burst
from the earth and on its wings great masses of debris soared skyward. A black
fog of smoke and dust and falling timbers enveloped the world, a prolonged
thunder seemed to rumble up from the center of the earth as of walls and
ceilings falling, and amid the uproar and the screaming I sank down and knew no
more.
21. The Breaking of the Chain
“And like a soul belated,
In heaven and hell unmated;
By cloud and mist abated;
Come out of darkness morn.”
—Swinburne
THERE is little need to linger on the scenes of
horror of that terrible London morning. The world is familiar with and knows
most of the details attendant to the great explosion which wiped out a tenth of
that great city with a resultant loss of lives and property. For such a
happening some reason must needs be given; the tale of the deserted building
got out, and many wild stories were circulated. Finally, to still the rumors,
the report was unofficially given out that this building had been the
rendezvous and secret stronghold of a gang of international anarchists, who had
stored its basement full of high explosives and who had supposedly ignited
these accidentally. In a way there was a good deal to this tale, as you know,
but the threat that had lurked there far transcended any anarchist.
All this was told to me, for when I sank
unconscious, Gordon, attributing my condition to exhaustion and a need of the
hashish to the use of which he thought I was addicted, lifted me and with the
aid of the stunned policemen got me to his rooms before returning to the scene
of the explosion. At his rooms he found Hansen, and Zuleika handcuffed to the
bed as I had left her. He released her and left her to tend to me, for all
London was in a terrible turmoil and he was needed elsewhere.
When I came to myself at last, I looked up into
her starry eyes and lay quiet, smiling up at her. She sank down upon my bosom,
nestling my head in her arms and covering my face with her kisses.
“Steephen!” she sobbed over and
over, as her tears splashed hot on my face.
I was scarcely strong enough to put my arms
about her but I managed it, and we lay there for a space, in silence, except
for the girl’s hard, racking sobs.
“Zuleika, I love you,” I murmured.
“And I love you, Steephen,” she
sobbed. “Oh, it is so hard to part now—but I’m going with
you, Steephen; I can’t live without you!”
“My dear child,” said John Gordon,
entering the room suddenly, “Costigan’s not going to die. We will
let him have enough hashish to tide him along, and when he is stronger we will
take him off the habit slowly.”
“You don’t understand, sahib; it is
not hashish Steephen must have. It is something which only the Master knew, and
now that he is dead or is fled, Steephen cannot get it and must die.”
Gordon shot a quick, uncertain glance at me. His
fine face was drawn and haggard, his clothes sooty and torn from his work among
the debris of the explosion.
“She’s right, Gordon,” I said
languidly. “I’m dying. Kathulos killed the hashish-craving with a
concoction he called the elixir. I’ve been keeping myself alive on some
of the stuff that Zuleika stole from him and gave me, but I drank it all last
night.”
I was aware of no craving of any kind, no
physical or mental discomfort even. All my mechanism was slowing down fast; I
had passed the stage where the need of the elixir would tear and rend me. I
felt only a great lassitude and a desire to sleep. And I knew that the moment I
closed my eyes, I would die.
“A strange dope, that elixir,” I
said with growing languor. “It burns and freezes and then at last the
craving kills easily and without torment.”
“Costigan, curse it,” said Gordon
desperately, “you can’t go like this! That vial I took from the
Egyptian’s table—what is in it?”
“The Master swore it would free me of my
curse and probably kill me also,” I muttered. “I’d forgotten
about it. Let me have it; it can no more than kill me and I’m dying now.”
“Yes, quick, let me have it!”
exclaimed Zuleika fiercely, springing to Gordon’s side, her hands
passionately outstretched. She returned with the vial which he had taken from
his pocket, and knelt beside me, holding it to my lips, while she murmured to
me gently and soothingly in her own language.
I drank, draining the vial, but feeling little
interest in the whole matter. My outlook was purely impersonal, at such a low
ebb was my life, and I cannot even remember how the stuff tasted. I only
remember feeling a curious sluggish fire burn faintly along my veins, and the
last thing I saw was Zuleika crouching over me, her great eyes fixed with a
burning intensity on me. Her tense little hand rested inside her blouse, and
remembering her vow to take her own life if I died I tried to lift a hand and
disarm her, tried to tell Gordon to take away the dagger she had hidden in her
garments. But speech and action failed me and I drifted away into a curious sea
of unconsciousness.
Of that period I remember nothing. No sensation
fired my sleeping brain to such an extent as to bridge the gulf over which I
drifted. They say I lay like a dead man for hours, scarcely breathing, while Zuleika
hovered over me, never leaving my side an instant, and fighting like a tigress
when anyone tried to coax her away to rest. Her chain was broken.
As I had carried the vision of her into that dim
land of nothingness, so her dear eyes were the first thing which greeted my
returning consciousness. I was aware of a greater weakness than I thought
possible for a man to feel, as if I had been an invalid for months, but the
life in me, faint though it was, was sound and normal, caused by no artificial
stimulation. I smiled up at my girl and murmured weakly:
“Throw away your dagger, little Zuleika; I’m
going to live.”
She screamed and fell on her knees beside me,
weeping and laughing at the same time. Women are strange beings, of mixed and
powerful emotions, truly.
Gordon entered and grasped the hand which I
could not lift from the bed.
“You’re a case for an ordinary human
physician now, Costigan,” he said. “Even a layman like myself can
tell that. For the first time since I’ve known you, the look in your eyes
is entirely sane. You look like a man who has had a complete nervous breakdown,
and needs about a year of rest and quiet. Great heavens, man, you’ve been
through enough, outside your dope experience, to last you a lifetime.”
“Tell me first,” said I, “was
Kathulos killed in the explosion?”
“I don’t know,” answered
Gordon somberly. “Apparently the entire system of subterranean passages
was destroyed. I know my last bullet—the last bullet that was in the
revolver which I wrested from one of my attackers—found its mark in the
Master’s body, but whether he died from the wound, or whether a bullet
can hurt him, I do not know. And whether in his death agonies he ignited the
tons and tons of high explosives which were stored in the corridors, or whether
the Negroes did it unintentionally, we shall never know.
“My God, Costigan, did you ever see such a
honeycomb? And we know not how many miles in either direction the passages
reached. Even now Scotland Yard men are combing the subways and basements of
the town for secret openings. All known openings, such as the one through which
we came and the one in Soho 48, were blocked by falling walls. The office
building was simply blown to atoms.”
“What about the men who raided Soho 48?”
“The door in the library wall had been
closed. They found the Chinaman you killed, but searched the house without
avail. Lucky for them, too, else they had doubtless been in the tunnels when
the explosion came, and perished with the hundreds of Negroes who must have died
then.”
“Every Negro in London must have been
there.”
“I dare say. Most of them are voodoo
worshipers at heart and the power the Master wielded was incredible. They died,
but what of him? Was he blown to atoms by the stuff which he had secretly
stored, or crushed when the stone walls crumbled and the ceilings came
thundering down?”
“There is no way to search among those
subterranean ruins, I suppose?”
“None whatever. When the walls caved in,
the tons of earth upheld by the ceilings also came crashing down, filling the
corridors with dirt and broken stone, blocking them forever. And on the surface
of the earth, the houses which the vibration shook down were heaped high in
utter ruins. What happened in those terrible corridors must remain forever a mystery.”
My tale draws to a close. The months that
followed passed uneventfully, except for the growing happiness which to me was
paradise, but which would bore you were I to relate it. But one day Gordon and
I again discussed the mysterious happenings that had had their being under the
grim hand of the Master.
“Since that day,” said Gordon, “the
world has been quiet. Africa has subsided and the East seems to have returned
to her ancient sleep. There can be but one answer—living or dead,
Kathulos was destroyed that morning when his world crashed about him.”
“Gordon,” said I, “what is the
answer to that greatest of all mysteries?”
My friend shrugged his shoulders.
“I have come to believe that mankind
eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.
Races have lived and vanished before our race rose out of the slime of the
primitive, and it is likely still others will live upon the earth after ours
has vanished. Scientists have long upheld the theory that the Atlanteans possessed
a higher civilization than our own, and on very different lines. Certainly
Kathulos himself was proof that our boasted culture and knowledge were nothing
beside that of whatever fearful civilization produced him.
“His dealings with you alone have puzzled
all the scientific world, for none of them has been able to explain how he
could remove the hashish craving, stimulate you with a drug so infinitely more
powerful, and then produce another drug which entirely effaced the effects of
the other.”
“I have him to thank for two things,”
I said slowly; “the regaining of my lost manhood—and Zuleika.
Kathulos, then, is dead, as far as any mortal thing can die. But what of those
others—those ‘ancient masters’ who still sleep in the sea?”
Gordon shuddered.
“As I said, perhaps mankind loiters on the
brink of unthinkable chasms of horror. But a fleet of gunboats is even now
patrolling the oceans unobtrusively, with orders to destroy instantly any
strange case that may be found floating—to destroy it and its contents.
And if my word has any weight with the English government and the nations of
the world, the seas will be so patrolled until doomsday shall let down the
curtain on the races of today.”
“At night I dream of them, sometimes,”
I muttered, “sleeping in their lacquered cases, which drip with strange
seaweed, far down among the green surges—where unholy spires and strange
towers rise in the dark ocean.”
“We have been face to face with an ancient
horror,” said Gordon somberly, “with a fear too dark and mysterious
for the human brain to cope with. Fortune has been with us; she may not again
favor the sons of men. It is best that we be ever on our guard. The universe
was not made for humanity alone; life takes strange phases and it is the first
instinct of nature for the different species to destroy each other. No doubt we
seemed as horrible to the Master as he did to us. We have scarcely tapped the
chest of secrets which nature has stored, and I shudder to think of what that
chest may hold for the human race.”
“That’s true,” said I,
inwardly rejoicing at the vigor which was beginning to course through my wasted
veins, “but men will meet obstacles as they come, as men have always
risen to meet them. Now, I am beginning to know the full worth of life and
love, and not all the devils from all the abysses can hold me.”
Gordon smiled.
“You have it coming to you, old comrade.
The best thing is to forget all that dark interlude, for in that course lies
light and happiness.”
|