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

Smith, out into the dusk—and a desire to close the steel shutters suddenly possessed me.
    This operation I completed without drawing a single comment from Sir Denis. But, as that menacing dusk was shut out, he stood upright and confronted me.
    “Sterling,” he said—and there was something in his steady gaze which definitely startled me—“have you, as a botanist, ever come across a true genus-hybrid?”
    “You mean a thing between a lily and a rose—or an oak growing apples?”
    “Exactly.”
    “In the natural state, never—although some curious hybrids have been reported from time to time. But many freaks of this kind can be cultivated, of course. The Japanese are experts.”
    “Cultivated? I agree. But nature, in my experience, sticks to the common law. Now here, Sterling”—he indicated the table—“lies an insect which, from the sound it made when flying, I took to be a tsetse fly—”
    “A tsetse ? Good heavens! Here ?”
    He smiled grimly.
    “Well outside its supposed area,” he admitted, “and above its usual elevation. I thought you might have recognized its note, as you have travelled in the flybelt. However, I was right—up to a point. It definitely possesses certain characteristics of glossina , the tsetse fly; notably the wings, which are typical. You see, I have been taking an intensive course on this subject! But can you imagine, Sterling, that it has the legs and head of an incredibly large sandfly? The thing is a nightmare, an anachronism; it’s a sort of giant flying flea!”
    His words awakened a memory. What had Petrie said to me, earlier in the day?... that “even if Nature is turning topsy-turvy, I think I can puzzle her!...”
    “Sir Denis,” I broke in, “I think you should know that Petrie found, in the blood of a patient, some similar freak—a sort of hybrid germ, which I lack the knowledge to describe to you. He found sleeping sickness and plague combined—”
    “Good God!”
    I thought that the lean, sun-baked face momentarily grew yet more angular.
    “You know,” he interrupted, “that tsetse carries sleeping sickness? Sandfly is suspect in several directions. But the rat-flea (and this is more like a flea than a sandfly) is the proved cause of plague infection... Am I going mad?”
    He suddenly crossed and bent over Petrie. He examined him carefully and in detail. The fact dawned upon me that Sir Denis Nayland Smith had more than a smattering of the medical art. I watched in silence while finally he took the temperature of the unconscious man.
    “There’s no change,” he reported. “‘654’ seems already to have checked its progress. But this coma... Dare we hope?”
    “I don’t know what to hope, or what to believe, Sir Denis!”
    He nodded.
    “Nor do I. The nature of my job has forced me to pick up some elements of medicine; but this is a specialist’s case. However, tell me about these leaves—the leaves which seemed to attract the fly...”
    I told him briefly all that I knew of the insect-catching plant.
    “The specimen which Petrie has preserved,” I concluded, “bears traces of human blood.”
    Sir Denis suddenly grabbed the lens again and bent over the purple leaves on the table-top. A moment he looked, then turned.
    “So does this!” he declared. “ Fresh blood.”
    I was dumb for a matter of seconds; then:
    “The insect which I partly crushed?” I suggested.
    He shook his head irritably.
    “Quantity too great. These leaves have been sprayed with blood!”
    “How, in heaven’s name, did they get here? And how did that damnable fly get here?”
    He suddenly clapped his hands upon my shoulders and stared at me fixedly.
    “You’re a man of strong nerve, Sterling,” he said, “and so I can tell you. They were brought here. And”—he pointed to the still body on the couch—“for that purpose.”
    “But—”
    “There are no ‘buts.’ I left the car in which I had been driven over from Cannes some distance back on the road