I suppose I did not awake very readily. Following the nervous vigilance of the past six months, my tired nerves, in the enjoyment of this relaxation, were rapidly recuperating. I no longer feared to awake to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the darkness as a foe.
 
So that the voice may have been calling (indeed, had been calling) for some time, and of this I had been hazily conscious before finally I awoke. Then, ere the new sense of security came to reassure me, the old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping nervously. There is always a certain physical panic attendant upon such awakening in the still of night, especially in novel surroundings. Now, I sat up abruptly, clutching at the rail of my berth and listening.
 
There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a voice, low and urgent, was crying my name.
 
Through the open porthole the moonlight streamed into my room, and save for a remote and soothing throb, inseparable from the progress of a great steamship, nothing else disturbed the stillness; I might have floated lonely upon the bosom of the Mediterranean. But there was the drumming on the door again, and the urgent appeal:
 
“Dr. Petrie! Dr. Petrie!”
 
I threw off the bedclothes and stepped on to the floor of the cabin, fumbling hastily for my slippers. A fear that something was amiss, that some aftermath, some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was yet to come to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me. I threw open the door.
 
Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a wondrous sky, stood a man who wore a blue greatcoat over his pyjamas, and whose unstockinged feet were thrust into red slippers. It was Platts, the Marconi operator.
 
“I’m awfully sorry to disturb you, Dr. Petrie,” he said, “and I was even less anxious to arouse your neighbor; but somebody seems to be trying to get a message, presumably urgent, through to you.”
 
“To me!” I cried.
 
“I cannot make it out,” admitted Platts, running his fingers through disheveled hair, “but I thought it better to arouse you. Will you come up?”
 
I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown, and with Platts passed aft along the deserted deck. The sea was as calm as a great lake. Ahead, on the port bow, an angry flambeau burned redly beneath the peaceful vault of the heavens. Platts nodded absently in the direction of the weird flames.
 
“Stromboli,” he said; “we shall be nearly through the Straits by breakfast-time.”
 
We mounted the narrow stair to the Marconi deck. At the table sat Platts’ assistant with the Marconi attachment upon his head—an apparatus which always set me thinking of the electric chair.
 
“Have you got it?” demanded my companion as we entered the room.
 
“It’s still coming through,” replied the other without moving, “but in the same jerky fashion. Every time I get it, it seems to have gone back to the beginning—just Dr. Petrie—Dr. Petrie.”
 
He began to listen again for the elusive message. I turned to Platts.
 
“Where is it being sent from?” I asked.
 
Platts shook his head.
 
“That’s the mystery,” he declared. “Look!”—and he pointed to the table; “according to the Marconi chart, there’s a Messagerie boat due west between us and Marseilles, and the homeward-bound P. & O. which we passed this morning must be getting on that way also, by now. The Isis is somewhere ahead, but I’ve spoken to all these, and the message comes from none of them.”
 
“Then it may come from Messina.”
 
“It doesn’t come from Messina,” replied the man at the table, beginning to write rapidly.
 
Platts stepped forward and bent over the message which the other was writing.
 
“Here it is!” he cried, excitedly; “we’re getting it.”
 
Stepping in turn to the table, I leaned over between the two and read these words as the operator wrote them down:
 
Dr. Petrie—my shadow...
 
I drew a quick breath and gripped Platts’ shoulder harshly. His assistant began fingering the instrument with irritation.
 
“Lost it again!” he muttered.
 
“This message,” I began...
 
But again the pencil was traveling over the paper:—lies upon you all... end of message.
 
The operator stood up and unclasped the receivers from his ears. There, high above the sleeping ship’s company, with the carpet of the blue Mediterranean stretched indefinitely about us, we three stood looking at one another. By virtue of a miracle of modern science, some one, divided from me by mile upon mile of boundless ocean, had spoken—and had been heard.
 
“Is there no means of learning,” I said, “from whence this message emanated?”
 
Platts shook his head, perplexedly.
 
“They gave no code word,” he said. “God knows who they were. It’s a strange business and a strange message. Have you any sort of idea, Dr. Petrie, respecting the identity of the sender?”
 
I stared him hard in the face; an idea had mechanically entered my mind, but one of which I did not choose to speak, since it was opposed to human possibility.
 
But, had I not seen with my own eyes the bloody streak across his forehead as the shot fired by Karamaneh entered his high skull, had I not known, so certainly as it is given to man to know, that the giant intellect was no more, the mighty will impotent, I should have replied:
 
“The message is from Dr. Fu-Manchu!”
 
My reflections were rudely terminated and my sinister thoughts given new stimulus, by a loud tho............