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Page 23
"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the assumed
eagerness of a slave to the drug.
Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips,
and prepared another for me.
"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.
It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to smoke.
Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to sink lower
and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways on the floor,
Smith lying close beside me.
"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks.
"Look at the rats."
Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense
of isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world.
My throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached.
The vicious atmosphere seemed contaminating. I was as one dropped--
Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
And there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.
Smith began to whisper softly.
"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said.
"I don't know if you have observed it, but there is a stair
just behind you, half concealed by a ragged curtain.
We are near that, and well in the dark. I have seen nothing
suspicious so far--or nothing much. But if there was anything
going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we new arrivals
were well doped. S-SH!"
He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning. Through my half-closed eyes
I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had referred.
I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.
The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room
with a curiously lithe movement.
The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded
scant illumination, serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--
here an extended hand, brown or yellow, there a sketchy,
corpse-like face; whilst from all about rose obscene sighings
and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny, animal chorus.
It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some Chinese Dante.
But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able to make out a
ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a misshapen head
crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight, hunched body.
There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that masklike face,
and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.
Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements;
but an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--
that this was one of the doctor's servants. How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.
He was watching us.
Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed opium-smokers
had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.
Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness,
I, too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending
lower and lower, until it came within a few inches of my own.
I completely closed my eyes.
Delicate fingers touched my right eyelid. Divining what was coming,
I rolled my eyes up, as the lid was adroitly lifted and lowered again.
The man moved away.
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