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Page 51
CHAPTER XIV
THE COUGHING HORROR
I leaped up in bed with a great start.
My sleep was troubled often enough in these days, which immediately
followed our almost miraculous escape, from the den of Fu-Manchu; and
now as I crouched there, nerves aquiver--listening--listening--I could
not be sure if this dank panic which possessed me had its origin in
nightmare or in something else.
Surely a scream, a choking cry for help, had reached my ears; but now,
almost holding my breath in that sort of nervous tensity peculiar to
one aroused thus, I listened, and the silence seemed complete. Perhaps
I had been dreaming . . .
"Help! Petrie! Help! . . ."
It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!
My doubts were dissolved; this was no trick of an imagination
disordered. Some dreadful menace threatened my friend. Not delaying
even to snatch my dressing-gown, I rushed out on to the landing, up
the stairs, bare-footed as I was, threw open the door of Smith's room
and literally hurled myself in.
Those cries had been the cries of one assailed, had been uttered, I
judged, in the brief interval of a life and death struggle; had been
choked off . . .
A certain amount of moonlight found access to the room, without
spreading so far as the bed in which my friend lay. But at the moment
of my headlong entrance, and before I had switched on the light, my
gaze automatically was directed to the pale moonbeam streaming through
the window and down on to one corner of the sheep-skin rug beside the
bed.
There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing.
What with my recent awakening and the panic at my heart, I could not
claim that my vision was true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort
of gray streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape
had been withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open
window . . . From somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the
cough again, followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of a
whip.
I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leaped
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my
mind; and I found that I was thinking of a gray feather boa.
"Smith!" I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), "Smith, old man!"
He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his
head at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized
him by the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms
hung limply, and his fingers touched the carpet.
"My God!" I whispered--"what has happened?"
I heaved him back onto the pillow, and looked anxiously into his face.
Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming nervous
energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp prominence, he
now looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sunbaked as to have
changed constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that tan. But
to-night a fearful grayness was mingled with the brown, his lips were
purple . . . and there were marks of strangulation upon the lean
throat--ever darkening weals made by clutching fingers.
He began to breathe stentoriously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgling in the throat. But now my calm
was restored in face of a situation which called for professional
attention.
I aided my friend's labored respirations by the usual means, setting
to work vigorously; so that presently he began to clutch at his
inflamed throat which that murderous pressure had threatened to close.
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