My Sherlock Holmes Page 38

  I was about to say that what I most wanted was to leave that house as soon as possible, but Holmes spoke first. “Then you now have the box in your possession?” he said.

  I saw Fu Manchu’s long fingers clench into a fist. His placid smile disappeared in an instant, replaced with a scowl. His brows drew down over his burning green eyes. “No,” he said, his voice almost a growl, “I do not have the box, but I shall!” He raised his fist as if swearing an oath before his heathen gods.

  There was silence for a moment, and then he rose a trifle unsteadily from his monstrous chair and beckoned us to follow him. “Come,” he said, “I will show you how we distill the truth in China.” Beyond the archway stood two more gigantic yellow-skinned men, each armed with a great glistening blade. The proper name for such a weapon in the Hindu lands is kuttar; but whatever the Chinese name for their weapons, the half-naked giants would surely have put an instantaneous end to any sudden decision of ours to leave Fu Manchu’s company without his blessing.

  We followed a passageway lighted only by torches placed at widely spaced intervals. There were rooms on either side, but each was closed off from the corridor by a stout oaken door: several of these rooms were guarded by Fu Manchu’s underlings. I heard low moans coming from one chamber as I passed. I turned to Holmes, my eyes wide with fear, but he only nodded and placed one forefinger briefly upon his lips.

  Down a narrow flight of stairs we went, and then another, into the building’s cellar. How unusual, I thought, to find so large a vault beneath a London house. Then I realized that Fu Manchu must also own the houses on either side of this one, and that their foundations had been connected by tunnels. I began to imagine the terrible scenes that could be enacted in this madman’s Chinese enclave. As I learned later, my imagination proved unequal to the task; never in ten lifetimes could I have conceived tableaux of such cruelty and depravity as those Fu Manchu would show to me in the weeks to come.

  We left the main room of the cellar and went along a narrow, damp-smelling way to what appeared to be Fu Manchu’s private torture chamber. A moment before I entered the cell, I heard the anguished cry of some unfortunate person; so racked with pain was the voice that I could not tell if it came from a man or a woman. I shuddered and halted my steps. “Come along, Musgrave,” Holmes whispered in my ear. “Pluck up your courage. I may need you yet.”

  God save us both if he should need me, I thought. Holmes went by me, turned a corner, and entered the cell during a moment of ominous silence. A huge hand clutched at my shoulder and I must have cried out, because the hand’s mate clapped me across the mouth. I could not turn to see, but I knew one of those glistening hairless statues had come to life behind me. I was thrust forward in Holmes’s footsteps, and with each pace my heart beat louder in my ears. Until that moment I had never experienced such utter helplessness and desolation.

  I paused in the doorway, unable to make much sense of what I saw. The room was dominated by madly dancing shadows, cast upon the walls by torches placed in sockets. The air was close and foul and smoky; I choked and looked about for Holmes. He stood beside Fu Manchu, gazing with some reluctance at a form upon the far wall.

  Again I was pushed ahead. This time when I caught my balance I turned, either to strike my tormentor or, at least, to let him know the full extent of my displeasure. There was no one there.

  I quickly joined Holmes, not wishing to be separated by even a few yards from the last vestige of sanity within reach. “By all the saints, Holmes!” I cried. “What have we got ourselves into?”

  Holmes tried to appear calm, but I could see that he—even he—was having difficulty controlling his emotions. In later years, his coolness in times of danger would be his hallmark; this is something he owed in no small way to his experiences with Fu Manchu. “Observe,” said Holmes with obvious distaste. “Evidently the Chinese technique.”

  I looked where he was pointing. A man hung upon the wall, his face turned to the damp, fetid stones, his chest and arms embracing the wall as though he were trying to scale it. His wrists were locked into shackles some seven feet above the floor, set wide apart, giving him the appearance of a man in ecstasy shouting his thanks to a benevolent god. In truth the weight of his body was slowly pulling his arms and shoulders apart. He cried out again and I knew that I could not bear very much more. “Holmes,” I said, “three years of translating Greek dramatists did not prepare me for this.”

  I spoke no more. From behind me, suddenly, like the final thunderclap of a dreadful storm, a great hand bludgeoned me at the base of the skull and I fell senseless to the dirt floor of the torture chamber of Fu Manchu.

  When I regained consciousness I didn’t want to open my eyes. I knew I was either mortally wounded or straightaway dead, and I was in no particular hurry to learn which. I tried to relax, hoping the throbbing in my head would diminish after a while, but it showed no inclination to do so. I prayed that I might fall again into unconsciousness, to awaken to find the dreadful suffering relieved or else myself in Heaven, where other matters would occupy my attention. Eventually I told myself that spending the rest of my life upon this hard floor was not why I’d gone up to Cambridge, and a Cambridge man did not let the side down in any case.

  Now, the university is almost seven hundred years old and so replete with traditions that there’s barely room left for scholars. However, exhort myself as I might by thinking of the glory of the university, I still could not raise up a single inch. I found myself overcome by nausea, which only increased the terrible anguish in my head. It seemed like an age before I managed to roll over on my back. The agony eased a little and I could think more clearly. It was only good fortune that had saved me from a crushed skull and an early grave. As it was, I feared the possibility of concussion.

  There was something horribly wrong here. I had been attacked in the prison beneath Dr. Fu Manchu’s London house, where the only light had come from smoky, sputtering torches. Now the bright light of the after noon sun streamed full in my face. I had been unconscious for some time, during which someone had carried me upstairs again into the house.

  Apprehension grew in me. Looking about, I found myself in a small room, empty but for a plain gray blanket on which I lay. Otherwise the room was quite bare. Beyond a window grew a young plum tree, its branches waving slowly in the wind, tapping against the glass. The hollow sound exaggerated my feelings of desolation and dread.

  I went to the room’s single exit and put my hand carefully upon the doorknob. Laying my ear close upon the heavy door, I heard nothing at all. Unpleasant words occurred to me—the silence of a tomb. I do not know what I expected to hear—screams perhaps, emanating from the torture chamber below. Seconds passed slowly, as is their way in desperate circumstances. Finally, with a mounting feeling of cold fear, I took a deep breath and turned the knob in my hand.

  The iron-bound wooden door swung open slightly, creaking only a lit tle, and I peered into the corridor beyond. I took a few steps and saw that I was in the passageway that led to the staircase down to the dungeon. There was no one about. I turned to the right, toward the rear of the house. Perhaps the wise thing would have been to turn the other way, to pass through the sitting room and foyer and escape into the street, but I could not flee before I’d learned of the fate of my friend Sherlock Holmes. I will not claim any innate courage. Rather, I recall thinking at the time that if it came to the worst, Holmes and I would fare better together than either of us might alone.

  Although I did not have the daring to test the doors along the passage and look inside, I guessed that the rooms were as deserted as the one in which I’d awakened. What had Fu Manchu done with his prisoners? Had he ended their torment by execution, and was he preparing my own?

  I came to the end of the corridor and began to descend. My anxiety increased as I imagined being captured again, then suffering the slowest, most agonizing tortures. Still I found myself creeping farther into the flickering torchlight from below.

  C
autiously I peered around the corner of the arched entrance. Here, where I had witnessed a tormented prisoner shackled to the wall, again there was nothing. Torches guttered in their sockets, their feeble light glistening on the drops of water that coursed down the ancient, reeking stones. Holmes and Fu Manchu had disappeared. Only the empty iron staples and a few eloquent streaks of blood gave proof that anyone had ever endured Fu Manchu’s cruel hospitality.

  The unnatural stillness enveloped me as I explored beyond that room, looking into one prison cell after another. At last, having found nothing useful, I broke off the investigation, retracing my steps to the house’s ground floor and passing through the sitting room into the front parlor. There was nothing there, although only hours before it had been decorated magnificently with rare treasures from the Orient. The painted scrolls had been taken down, the embroidered hangings had been removed, and the carved furniture was gone as well. Missing, too, were the decorative vases and ivory figures, the pieces fashioned of silver and gold, and the many jade idols. Everything had been carried away as though the elaborate room had been merely a stage set struck after a final performance. The emptiness made the room seem much larger and infinitely more lonely.

  I looked around in wonder. There was not the slightest sign that anyone or anything had occupied this house for some time, not so much as a discolored place upon the wall to testify that a picture or scroll had lately hung there.

  It was evident that Holmes and I had been lured to this house and drawn into a trap—but for what purpose? This afternoon’s events had been carefully planned to allow Fu Manchu’s servants to complete their tasks with speed and precision. I could not imagine how Sherlock Holmes and I fitted into Fu Manchu’s scheme, whatever it might be. I did not even wish to speculate about why I’d been left behind at the house in Great Bowman Street.

  Then with a terrible thud the front door beyond the foyer crashed open. I confess to uttering a cry of alarm, so startled was I by the sudden noise. Two men rushed into the vestibule, one with his pistol drawn.

  The first intruder was a short, well-fed, florid-faced man who, despite the summer season, wore a long black coat and carried a high silk hat. In his other hand he held a walking stick with an ornate silver head. He halted a few paces into the parlor, looked around quickly, and pointed at me with his cane. “Damn me!” he cried. “An Englishman!”

  I stood up straight. “Quite so,” I said. “We’re in London.”

  “Who are you, sir?” the portly fellow demanded.

  “I’m Reginald Musgrave. If I may ask, who are you?”

  The man frowned but did not deign to reply. The handsome lad carrying the revolver spoke up. “This is Lord Mayfield, Queen’s Commissioner for special investigations.”

  Lord Mayfield turned to him. “Make a note of it, Powers,” he said. “Then let’s have a look about this place. Mangrove, did you say?”

  I corrected him. “Musgrave. And you’ll find nothing here.”

  It was Powers who replied. “Have you looked around then, sir?” he asked me. Lord Mayfield did not appear to have heard me.

  “Yes,” I said, “I had just completed my inspection when you came in.”

  “All the rooms as empty as this?”

  “Yes.”

  Powers’s expression hardened, but he put his pistol away and said nothing more. Lord Mayfield poked around with his silver-headed stick, tapping the walls and the floor, touring the deserted parlor with a thoughtful look on his plump features. He stood before me and examined me with frank mistrust. “May I ask, sir,” he said suspiciously, “how you came to be here?”

  “I accompanied a friend who’d received an invitation,” I replied.

  “A friend, you say. An invitation. The devil you say! Do you know who owns this house?”

  I’d taken an instant dislike to this Lord Mayfield, Queen’s Commissioner or not. I wasn’t going to offer more information than he required. It was a foolish attitude, but I was very young and not used to such disregard. “Yes,” I said, “it is the residence of Dr. Fu Manchu.”

  The effect on Mayfield was astonishing. “Damn me!” he cried, dropping his walking stick to the floor and grabbing the lapel of my coat. “How can you say such a thing in so cool a voice? Are you then one of his pawns? Powers, give me your pistol, and quickly!”

  I disengaged the man’s fist from my clothing. “I say it quite simply. Dr. Fu Manchu became acquainted with my friend at Cambridge. He invited us here in order to ask Holmes’s aid in recovering some stolen object.”

  Mayfield’s mouth worked futilely for a moment, unable to decide how to express his amazement. Powers saved him the effort. “What did you find when you arrived?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “This room was filled with Chinese furniture and artwork. Fu Manchu showed us about the house, letting us get an idea of the extent of his wealth and influence. There was a brief interview and then Fu Manchu guided us downstairs, where he maintained a torture chamber and an extensive dungeon. There we saw a prisoner unknown to us, half-naked and bound to a dripping stone wall. Before I could voice my outrage I was struck from behind. I woke some time later to find the house deserted. My friend Sherlock Holmes is now missing, and Dr. Fu Manchu with his entire Chinese retinue have gone I know not where.”

  Lord Mayfield bent to retrieve his walking stick. “You claim you were struck,” he said dubiously. “I suppose the evidence of this violence is visible upon your person?”

  “You doubt me, sir?” I said in a cold voice.

  Powers came between Lord Mayfield and me. “No, no,” the young man said softly. “We’ve learned to be very careful when we mix in Fu Manchu’s affairs. Lord Mayfield and I have followed his trail halfway across the world, and our lives have been threatened more than once. You ought to know that Fu Manchu isn’t the kind of person whose invitations one receives with pleasure.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Yes, the back of my head is bloody and still quite painful.”

  Powers glanced briefly. “You’re lucky there was no fracture,” he said. He put his hand out. “I suppose it’s time to introduce myself. I’m Willard Powers.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” We shook hands. He was a sturdy blond young man, well set-up, dressed in clothing chosen as much for comfort as fashion.

  “As young Powers mentioned,” Mayfield said, “we tend to be vigilant and wary of strangers. I trust you take my meaning, as you’ve seen Dr. Fu Manchu firsthand. Now I must examine every square inch of this house.”

  In the meantime, the Chinese genius of evil was escaping. I started to object. “But shouldn’t—”

  The Queen’s Commissioner cut me off with a curt gesture. “Patience, Mangrove,” he said. “There is undoubtedly vital evidence you’ve over looked. I follow established procedure here. We’re just as eager to go after that monster, but our actions must be sound. The fate of your friend, the fate of England may depend on what we do next. Do you see what I mean?”

  I hated being patronized and I chafed at the delay, but essentially Lord Mayfield’s plan was sound. I agreed reluctantly.

  Behind Mayfield’s back, Powers signaled me to stay calm. Given my state of mind just then, it was almost too much to ask. “If nothing else,” I said, “I demand an explanation.”

  “Damn me, sir, no!” the older man bellowed. “I do not explain myself to schoolboys! Look here, you simply have no idea of Fu Manchu’s rnalig nant force. This affair you must leave to your government. We are already in close pursuit, and I have promised my queen that Fu Manchu will be returned to England and made to stand trial for his crimes. For your own sake and that of your friend, I cannot permit you to become further involved.” He waved his stick vaguely to include the bare room and a world of mystery beyond it. I wondered if Lord Mayfield himself knew what he was talking about.

  My fury rose as I listened to his speech. “Involved, you say? I beg to submit that I am involved, and inextricably so. You have an obligation to share
your information with me. If Sherlock Holmes has been harmed, then together we will bring Fu Manchu to justice.”

  Lord Mayfield closed one eye and tilted his head a bit. “Plucky lad,” he said. “I admire that in a boy. Wish my own son had a bit of it. Still, the point is that a stout heart is not all of it. Fu Manchu is no mere dockside pickpocket. Why, he’s the very Genghis Khan of crime. Young Mr. Powers here can tell you. Do not doubt that you have my sincere good wishes, sir, but I won’t let you to endanger yourself or others in this pursuit.”

  Powers raised both hands in a placating gesture. “Please, gentlemen, we must press on. There’s nothing of interest in this parlor, but there may be something downstairs.”

  Lord Mayfield nodded. “If there is, Mr. Powers, I trust you will find it. For my own part, I’ll complete my investigation of the ground-floor rooms.”

  As Powers followed me to the underground vaults, I had a question for him. “He said Fu Manchu would be returned to England for trial. Is he so certain the madman will flee the country?”

  “I guess he is. Fu Manchu came to England to research particular matters of biology and chemistry at Cambridge. When we arrived here from Cairo, we lost his trail for a short time. We knew only that he intended to leave England soon. Lord Mayfield supposes this stolen object kept him here until now.”

  “In my short experience,” I said, “I’ve come to doubt Lord Mayfield’s ability to find his left foot in the dark.”

  “Don’t judge him so harshly. He’s a trifle stubborn and he has his prejudices, but he’s lived most of his life in the Far East. He’s not one for action, but he’s dedicated beyond doubt. He’d rather die himself than have one of Fu Manchu’s dacoits harm a single hair on the queen’s head.”

  “Dacoits?” I’d never heard the word before.