The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast Read Free Page B

the door ere I left.
    I returned to Fergusson, trying by my relation of plans for his escape, to rouse him from the apathy into which he had sunk.
    To have attempted to get away by one of the regular Shanghai boats would have been suicidal folly; but there was a Jardine steamer sailing for Hong-Kong in two or three days' time, and if he could stow away in her I hoped he might be able to conceal himself in some remote corner of the world before the hounds of justice were set on his track. I explained to him that I would report him ill to the comptroller, so allaying suspicion for his nonappearance; and when the boat was ready to sail he was to slip out and sneak on board, trusting to chance to explain away his presence when she was once at sea. No one would be likely to go to his rooms, and provided he lay low in mine he would have a very fair chance of success.

    Fergusson, for his part, looked on the whole matter indifferently and took very little interest in the maturing of the plans for his own safety.
    Very surprised was my little housekeeper to find when she awoke next morning that my friend had spent the night on the couch in the other room. Of course we told her nothing of what had occurred. Nor did we think it wise to tell her that he would spend two or three days with us, deeming it better to let her find out for herself as the time passed and he still made no move to go to his own home.
    Now that I come to the last part of this terrible history I hesitate to set it down, lest it should be looked upon as a mere freak of my imagination. And yet I have not said enough to clear my old friend's name of the black stain of murder and establish his innocence, wherefore I must proceed, though discredit be cast upon the close of the tragedy.
    Yet I myself, as I look back from the vantagecoign of these after years, feel a dread steal over me lest, after all, it should be nothing but the coincidence of a large bat having flown into my room at the precise hour of one, and on another night having hovered near Fergusson's head at the same eerie hour. The rest may have been but the delusions of his drink - maddened brain and my own overwrought fancy. I dread the thought that it may be so, for if such a series of extraordinary coincidences be possible, then it means that Fergusson was a foul murderer.

    But speculation is idle; let me finish the gruesome narrative.
    That night of pain and horror wore slowly away, and never before or since have I watched the grey dawn creep slowly up from the East with such feelings of gratitude and relief.
    The ensuing day, too, passed away without event; so also another night and a day crept
    by.
    I had to leave Fergusson during each day in order to attend to my duties; but I reported him at headquarters unwell, telling the Customs doctor that it was his intention to call shortly and let him prescribe.
    The fourth night since the poor girl, lying now so stark and swollen in that silent house, had met her death closed in, and a strange change fell upon Fergusson.
    To-morrow at dawn he was to escape to safety in the outgoing Jardine steamer, and as yet we fancied ourselves secure in the certainty of no one having entered the house of death.

    But Fergusson seemed to have abandoned all hope of flight, or, rather, a gloomy despondency that whispered to him of its futility, had settled like a black pall over his being.
    All through the early part of that dreadful night I sat talking to him, trying one moment to soothe his craven fears, and the next to rouse him from the apathy of his despair. He was completely unnerved, and had a shuddering premonition that the Thing was hovering near, spite of my repeated assurances that, except for ourselves, the room was empty.
    Suddenly, far into the night—how far I knew not then, for I had tried not to count the chimes of the little clock—his terror-sharpened perceptions caught the sharp tramp of distant feet on the flags of the little street below. He rose with