The Bride of Fu-Manchu Read Online Free PDF Page A

windows of the laboratory:
    “How long has Petrie been in there?” Nayland Smith asked.
    “All the afternoon. He’s up to his eyes in work on these mysterious cases—about which, perhaps, you know?”
    “I do,” he replied. “Wait a moment.” He grasped my arm and pulled me up just at the edge of the patch of shadow. He stood still and I could tell that he was listening intently.
    “Where’s the door?” he asked suddenly.
    “At the farther end.”
    “Right.”
    He set off at a run, and I followed past the lighted window.
    Petrie was not at the table nor at the bench. I was puzzled to account for this, and already vaguely fearful. A premonition gripped me, a premonition of something horrible. Then, I had my hand on the door and had thrown it open. I entered, Sir Denis close behind me.
    “Good God! Petrie!... Petrie, old man...”
    Nayland Smith had sprung in and was already on his knees beside the doctor.
    Petrie lay in the shadow of his working bench, in fact, half under it, one outstretched hand still convulsively gripping its edge!
    I saw that the apparently rigid fingers grasped a hypodermic syringe. Near to his upraised hand was a vessel containing a small quantity of some milky fluid; and the tube of white powder which he had shown to me lay splintered, broken by his fall, on the floor a foot away.
    In those few fleeting seconds I saw Sir Denis Nayland Smith, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him, fighting to subdue his emotions. His head dropped into his upraised hands, his fingers clutched his hair.
    Then he had conquered. He stood up.
    “Lift him!” he said hoarsely. “Out here, into the light.”
    I was half stunned. Horror and sorrow had me by the throat. But I helped to move Petrie farther into the middle of the floor, where a central light shone down upon him. One glance told me the truth—if I had ever doubted it.
    A sort of cloud was creeping from his disordered hair, down over his brow.
    “Heaven help him!” I whispered. “Look—look!... the purple shadow!”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE BLACK STIGMATA
    T he laboratory was very silent. Through the windows, which still remained open, I could hear the hum of the Kohler engine in its little shed at the bottom of the garden—the chirping of crickets, the clucking of hens.
    There was a couch littered with books and chemical paraphernalia. Sir Denis and I cleared it and laid Petrie there.
    I had telephoned Dr. Cartier from the villa.
    That ghastly purple shadow was creeping farther down my poor friend’s brow.
    “Shut the door, Sterling,” said Nayland Smith sharply.
    I did so.
    “Stand by,” he went on, and pointed.
    Petrie, who wore a woollen pullover with long sleeves when he was working late, had evidently made an attempt to peel it off just before coma had claimed him.
    “You see what he meant to do,” Nayland Smith went on. “God knows what the consequences will be, but it’s his only chance. He must have been fighting it off all day. The swelling in his armpit warned him that the crisis had come.”
    He examined the milky liquid in a small glass measure.
    “Have you any idea what this is?”
    I indicated the broken tube and scattered white powder on the floor.
    “A preparation of his own—to which I have heard him refer as ‘654.’ He believed it was a remedy, but he was afraid to risk it on a patient.”
    “I wonder?” Sir Denis murmured. “I wonder—”
    Stooping, I picked up a fragment of glass to which one of Petrie’s neatly written labels still adhered.
    “Look here, Sir Denis!”
    He read aloud:
    “‘654.’ 1 grm. in 10 c.c. distilled water: intravenous.”
    He stared at me hard, then:
    “It’s kill or cure,” he rapped. “We have no choice.”
    “Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Cartier?”
    “Wait!” His angry glare startled me. “With luck, he’ll be here in three-quarters of an hour. And life or death in this thing is a matter of minutes ! No! Petrie must have his chance. I’m not an expert—but