Moon of Skulls Read Free Page B

oppressive silence.
    “You who are a swine, would you like to be a man again?”
    I started. The tone was inhuman, cold — more, there was a suggestion of long disuse of the vocal organs — the voice I had heard in my dream!
    “Yes,” I replied, trance-like, “I would like to be a man again.”
    Silence ensued for a space; then the voice came again with a sinister whispering undertone at the back of its sound like bats flying through a cavern.
    “I shall make you a man again because I am a friend to all broken men. Not for a price shall I do it, nor for gratitude. And I give you a sign to seal my promise and my vow. Thrust your hand through the screen.”
    At these strange and almost unintelligible words I stood perplexed, and then, as the unseen voice repeated the last command, I stepped forward and thrust my hand through a slit which opened silently in the screen. I felt my wrist seized in an iron grip and something seven times colder than ice touched the inside of my hand. Then my wrist was released, and drawing forth my hand I saw a strange symbol traced in blue close to the base of my thumb — a thing like a scorpion.
    The voice spoke again in a sibilant language I did not understand, and Hassim stepped forward deferentially. He reached about the screen and then turned to me, holding a goblet of some amber-colored liquid which he proffered me with an ironical bow. I took it hesitatingly.
    “Drink and fear not,” said the unseen voice. “It is only an Egyptian wine with life-giving qualities.”
    So I raised the goblet and emptied it; the taste was not unpleasant, and even as I handed the beaker to Hassim again, I seemed to feel new life and vigor whip along my jaded veins.
    “Remain at Yun Shatu’s house,” said the voice. “You will be given food and a bed until you are strong enough to work for yourself. You will use no hashish nor will you require any. Go!”
    As in a daze, I followed Hassim back through the hidden door, down the steps, along the dark corridor and up through the other door that let us into the Temple of Dreams.
    As we stepped from the rear chamber into the main room of the dreamers, I turned to the Negro wonderingly.
    “Master? Master of what? Of Life?”
    Hassim laughed, fiercely and sardonically.
    “Master of Doom!”
    4. The Spider and the Fly
     
    “There was the Door to which I found no Key;
    There was the Veil through which I might not see.”
— Omar Khayyam
     
    I sat on Yun Shatu’s cushions and pondered with a clearness of mind new and strange to me. As for that, all my sensations were new and strange. I felt as if I had wakened from a monstrously long sleep, and though my thoughts were sluggish, I felt as though the cobwebs which had dogged them for so long had been partly brushed away.
    I drew my hand across my brow, noting how it trembled. I was weak and shaky and felt the stirrings of hunger — not for dope but for food. What had been in the draft I had quenched in the chamber of mystery? And why had the “Master” chosen me, out of all the other wretches of Yun Shatu’s, for regeneration?
    And who was this Master? Somehow the word sounded vaguely familiar — I sought laboriously to remember. Yes — I had heard it, lying half-waking in the bunks or on the floor — whispered sibilantly by Yun Shatu or by Hassim or by Yussef Ali, the Moor, muttered in their low-voiced conversations and mingled always with words I could not understand. Was not Yun Shatu, then, master of the Temple of Dreams? I had thought and the other addicts thought that the withered Chinaman held undisputed sway over this drab kingdom and that Hassim and Yussef Ali were his servants. And the four China boys who roasted opium with Yun Shatu and Yar Khan the Afghan and Santiago the Haitian and Ganra Singh, the renegade Sikh — all in the pay of Yun Shatu, we supposed — bound to the opium lord by bonds of gold or fear.
    For Yun Shatu was a power in London’s Chinatown and I had heard that his