Read The Island of Fu-Manchu for Free Online Page B

or the aura of the speaker.
    I was lying, in a constrained position, upon a cushioned settee which had a metal base, in a long, narrow, low-ceilinged room which possessed no visible windows. It was lighted by hanging lamps and permeated by a carnal smell: I thought of the Morgue. That half of the room which contained the settee or couch was unfurnished except for a tall glass-fronted cabinet. In this cabinet, preserved in jars, were all kinds of anatomical specimens; a collection so gruesome that I doubted the verity of this phase, too.
    There were several human hands, black, yellow, and white; there was a brown forearm; there were internal organs which I need not describe: and, half covered by a sheet of gauze, a decapitated Negro head grinned from the largest jar.
    The lower half of the room was a small but well equipped laboratory where some experiment was actually in progress. An apparatus resembling a Bunsen burner, but dissimilar in some way which my indifferent knowledge of chemistry did not enable me to define, hissed below a retort fitted with a condenser.
    One glance I took at the object in process of distillation, and looked elsewhere. I grew nauseated and closed my eyes for a moment. But I had seen something which might have accounted for the violet mirage.
    On a smaller bench there stood a low, squat lamp, resting on what I assumed to be a block of crystal. It produced a strange amethystine radiance—and instantly I thought of the eyes of Ardatha.
    With that thought came complete consciousness… Ardatha!
    Had she betrayed me? Had she tricked me again, and left me to the mercies of Fu-Manchu’s thugs? I remembered that she had stolen my Colt, and then returned it. Was this evidence of her innocence, or merely of a moment’s remorse prompted by knowledge of those who covered me, who at that instant she had seen behind me?
    A door hidden in the wall near the large bench slid soundlessly open. I became aware of a sensation in my skull which resembled that experienced on quickly climbing to a high altitude. A man entered with slow, curiously feline steps, and closed the door behind him. He wore a long coat of what appeared to be varnished green silk. Turning, he stared in my direction.
    It was Dr. Fu-Manchu.
    He was more emaciated than I remembered him to have been, and as he seated himself at the bench I noted the weariness of his movements. To one who had not met Dr. Fu-Manchu it would be impossible, I suppose, to convey any idea of the peculiar
force
which he seemed to project.
    With the exception of Nayland Smith I had never known one who could stand up to it. And now, alone with him in that long, narrow, sinister room, silent save for the hiss of the burner, I recognized the fact that this power emanated entirely from his eyes.
    His imposing figure—tall, angular, high-shouldered—lent him a sort of grotesque majesty; and as he sat there before me, a vitalized skeleton clothed in wrinkled silk, his shrunken skin exposing all the contours of that wonderful skull, no whit of this force was missing. I had sprung up at the moment of his entrance, and now I stood there battling with a fear not unmixed with loathing which he inspired; and I knew that his power resided in a tremendous intellect, for it shone out like a beacon from those strange green eyes, feverishly brilliant in cavernous shadows.
    He spoke.
    The effort of speech was terrifying. It came to me suddenly as a conviction that Dr. Fu-Manchu was very near his end. It was as though a magician had conjured back a soul into a body dead for generations.
    “I trust that you are conscious of no nausea or other unpleasant after-effects. My fellows are adepts with their knives and strangling cords, but clumsy when employing more subtle methods.”
    One clawlike hand, the nails long and pointed, resting on the plate-glass which covered the bench, he watched me for a few moments, and I felt, as of old, as if he read every record printed upon my brain.
    I plunged