CHAPTER XIX

I HAVE never seen a man quite so surprised as Inspector Weymouth.

"This is absolutely incredible!" he said. "There's only one door to

your chambers. We found it bolted from the inside."

"Yes," groaned West, pressing his hand to his forehead. "I bolted it

myself at eleven o'clock, when I came in."

"No human being could climb up or down to your windows. The plans of

the aero-torpedo were inside a safe."

"I put them there myself," said West, "on returning from the War

Office, and I had occasion to consult them after I had come in and

bolted the door. I returned them to the safe and locked it. That it

was still locked you saw for yourselves, and no one else in the world

knows the combination."

"But the plans have gone," said Weymouth. "It's magic! How was it

done? What happened last night, sir? What did you mean when you rang

us up?"

Smith during this colloquy was pacing rapidly up and down the room. He

turned abruptly to the aviator.

"Every fact you can remember, Mr. West, please," he said tersely; "and

be as brief as you possibly can."

"I came in, as I said," explained West, "about eleven o'clock and

having made some notes relating to an interview arranged for this

morning, I locked the plans in the safe and turned in."

"There was no one hidden anywhere in your chambers?" snapped Smith.

"There was not," replied West. "I looked. I invariably do. Almost

immediately, I went to sleep."

"How many chloral tabloids did you take?" I interrupted.

Norris West turned to me with a slow smile.

"You're cute, Doctor," he said. "I took two. It's a bad habit, but I

can't sleep without. They are specially made up for me by a firm in

Philadelphia."

"How long sleep lasted, when it became filled with uncanny dreams, and

when those dreams merged into reality, I do not know--shall never know,

I suppose. But out of the dreamless void a face came to

me--closer--closer--and peered into mine.

"I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming

and seeks to awaken--to escape. But a nightmare-like oppression held

me. So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over

me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar

running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up

the lip like the lip of a snarling cur. I could look into the

malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the

distorted mouth--whispering that seemed to counsel something--something

evil. That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive. Then the

wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became

as a pin's head in the darkness far above me--almost like a glutinous,

liquid thing.

"Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did--God knows where dreaming

ended and reality began. Gentlemen maybe you'll conclude I went mad

last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood

throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I

started laughing. The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill

whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake

the echoes of the whole block. I thought myself I was going mad, and I

tried to command my will--to break the power of the chloral--for I

concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose.

"Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood

holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll's cot, in

the middle of a room like Trafalgar Square! That window yonder was

such a long way off I could scarcely see it, but I could just detect a

Chinaman--the owner of the evil yellow face--creeping through it. He

was followed by another, who was enormously tall--so tall that, as they

came towards me (and it seemed to take them something like half-an-hour

to cross this incredible apartment in my dream), the second Chinaman

seemed to tower over me like a cypress-tree.

"I looked up to his face--his wicked, hairless face. Mr. Smith,

whatever age I live to, I'll never forget that face I saw last

night--or did I see it? God knows! The pointed chin, the great dome

of a forehead, and the eyes--heavens above, the huge green eyes!"

He shook like a sick man, and I glanced at Smith significantly.

Inspector Weymouth was stroking his mustache, and his mingled

expression of incredulity and curiosity was singular to behold.

"The pumping of my blood," continued West, "seemed to be bursting my

body; the room kept expanding and contracting. One time the ceiling

would be pressing down on my head, and the Chinamen--sometimes I

thought there were two of them, sometimes twenty--became dwarfs; the

next instant it shot up like the roof of a cathedral.

"'Can I be awake,' I whispered, 'or am I dreaming?'

"My whisper went sweeping in windy echoes about the walls, and was lost

in the shadowy distances up under the invisible roof.

"'You are dreaming--yes.' It was the Chinaman with the green eyes who

was addressing me, and the words that he uttered appeared to occupy an

immeasurable time in the utterance. 'But at will I can render the

subjective objective.' I don't think I can have dreamed those singular

words, gentlemen.

"And then he fixed the green eyes upon me--the blazing green eyes. I

made no attempt to move. They seemed to be draining me of something

vital--bleeding me of every drop of mental power. The whole nightmare

room grew green, and I felt that I was being absorbed into its

greenness.

"I can see what you think. And even in my delirium--if it was

delirium--I thought the same. Now comes the climax of my

experience--my vision--I don't know what to call it. I SAW some WORDS

issuing from my own mouth!"

Inspector Weymouth coughed discreetly. Smith whisked round upon him.

"This will be outside your experience, Inspector, I know," he said,

"but Mr. Norris West's statement does not surprise me in the least. I

know to what the experience was due."

Weymouth stared incredulously, but a dawning perception of the truth

was come to me, too.

"How I SAW a SOUND I just won't attempt to explain; I simply tell you I

saw it. Somehow I knew I had betrayed myself--given something away."

"You gave away the secret of the lock combination!" rapped Smith.

"Eh!" grunted Weymouth.

But West went on hoarsely:

"Just before the blank came a name flashed before my eyes. It was

'Bayard Taylor.'"

At that I interrupted West.

"I understand!" I cried. "I understand! Another name has just

occurred to me, Mr. West--that of the Frenchman, Moreau."

"You have solved the mystery," said Smith. "It was natural Mr. West

should have thought of the American traveler, Bayard Taylor, though.

Moreau's book is purely scientific. He has probably never read it."

"I fought with the stupor that was overcoming me," continued West,

"striving to associate that vaguely familiar name with the fantastic

things through which I moved. It seemed to me that the room was empty

again. I made for the hall, for the telephone. I could scarcely drag

my feet along. It seemed to take me half-an-hour to get there. I

remember calling up Scotland Yard, and I remember no more."

There was a short, tense interval.

In some respects I was nonplused; but, frankly, I think Inspector

Weymouth considered West insane. Smith, his hands locked behind his

back, stared out of the window.

"ANDAMAN--SECOND" he said suddenly. "Weymouth, when is the first train

to Tilbury?"

"Five twenty-two from Fenchurch Street," replied the Scotland Yard man

promptly.

"Too late!" rapped my friend. "Jump in a taxi and pick up two good men

to leave for China at once! Then go and charter a special to Tilbury

to leave in twenty-five minutes. Order another cab to wait outside for

me."

Weymouth was palpably amazed, but Smith's tone was imperative. The

Inspector departed hastily.

I stared at Smith, not comprehending what prompted this singular course.

"Now that you can think clearly, Mr. West," he said, "of what does your

experience remind you? The errors of perception regarding time; the

idea of SEEING A SOUND; the illusion that the room alternately

increased and diminished in size; your fit of laughter, and the

recollection of the name Bayard Taylor. Since evidently you are

familiar with that author's work--'The Land of the Saracen,' is it

not?--these symptoms of the attack should be familiar, I think."

Norris West pressed his hands to his evidently aching head.

"Bayard Taylor's book," he said dully. "Yes! . . . I know of what my

brain sought to remind me--Taylor's account of his experience under

hashish. Mr. Smith, someone doped me with hashish!"

Smith nodded grimly.

"Cannabis indica," I said--"Indian hemp. That is what you were drugged

with. I have no doubt that now you experience a feeling of nausea and

intense thirst, with aching in the muscles, particularly the deltoid.

I think you must have taken at least fifteen grains."

Smith stopped his perambulations immediately in front of West, looking

into his dulled eyes.

"Someone visited your chambers last night," he said slowly, "and for

your chloral tabloids substituted some containing hashish, or perhaps

not pure hashish. Fu-Manchu is a profound chemist."

Norris West started.

"Someone substituted--" he began.

"Exactly," said Smith, looking at him keenly; "someone who was here

yesterday. Have you any idea whom it could have been?"

West hesitated. "I had a visitor in the afternoon," he said, seemingly

speaking the words unwillingly, "but--"

"A lady?" jerked Smith. "I suggest that it was a lady."

West nodded.

"You're quite right," he admitted. "I don't know how you arrived at

the conclusion, but a lady whose acquaintance I made recently--a

foreign lady."

"Karamaneh!" snapped Smith.

"I don't know what you mean in the least, but she came here--knowing

this to be my present address--to ask me to protect her from a

mysterious man who had followed her right from Charing Cross. She said

he was down in the lobby, and naturally, I asked her to wait here

whilst I went and sent him about his business."

He laughed shortly.

"I am over-old," he said, "to be guyed by a woman. You spoke just now

of someone called Fu-Manchu. Is that the crook I'm indebted to for the

loss of my plans? I've had attempts made by agents of two European

governments, but a Chinaman is a novelty."

"This Chinaman," Smith assured him, "is the greatest novelty of his

age. You recognize your symptoms now from Bayard Taylor's account?"

"Mr. West's statement," I said, "ran closely parallel with portions of

Moreau's book on 'Hashish Hallucinations.' Only Fu-Manchu, I think,

would have thought of employing Indian hemp. I doubt, though, if it

was pure Cannabis indica. At any rate, it acted as an opiate--"

"And drugged Mr. West," interrupted Smith, "sufficiently to enable

Fu-Manchu to enter unobserved."

"Whilst it produced symptoms which rendered him an easy subject for the

Doctor's influence. It is difficult in this case to separate

hallucination from reality, but I think, Mr. West, that Fu-Manchu must

have exercised an hypnotic influence upon your drugged brain. We have

evidence that he dragged from you the secret of the combination."

"God knows we have!" said West. "But who is this Fu-Manchu, and

how--how in the name of wonder did he get into my chambers?"

Smith pulled out his watch. "That," he said rapidly, "I cannot delay

to explain if I'm to intercept the man who has the plans. Come along,

Petrie; we must be at Tilbury within the hour. There is just a bare

chance."