Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 06 (1942-07).djvu/49

 bowl containing six small fishes.

From his sleeve, Dr. Shen Fu drew a cinnabar snuff box. Carefully he extracted a minute pill which he placed in the mouth of one of the fishes. Immediately thereafter he tossed it into the bubbling, scalding oil. He did the same with a second and a third fish but the remaining three fishes, he threw into the sputtering fat without imbueing them with the golden elixir.

"Now look at the result," he ordered.

Ah Chow peered eagerly into the seething cauldron. The three fishes that had been given "The Golden Pills of Immortality" were swimming about as though they were in cold water, but the other three were cooked to a crisp and might have been tasty morsels to eat.

"The Taoist, Kan-shi," said the Doctor, "was the first to perfect this experiment. He lived many cycles ago and his exploits have all been metriculously recorded by the renowned grassist, Kohung. He experimented with silk-worms in like manner. After ten months they were still alive and may be still alive for all I know. It was given to chickens and small dogs and they stopped growing. A white dog on taking it turned black, proving that many things of heaven and earth are beyond understanding."

Ah Chow had been paying no attention to the Doctor's words but he was thinking quickly. A great anger flamed up in his heart and spread through his body with the speed of a flash of lightning. Dr. Shen Fu had wasted the elixir on fish when he was willing to pay a fortune for it.

"Look! Look!" he cried suddenly, "I think the other fishes are burning to a crisp."

As Dr. Shen Fu leaned forward eagerly, Ah Chow pushed him with a cornered tiger's strength and toppled him into the fat.

The Doctor made no cry as he fell, but he threw out his hand and caught the edge of the wrought-bronze pot. Immediately their was a hissing, sputtering sound, clouds of blue smoke rose from the pot. When it cleared, there was no sign of the doctor, neither was there the slightest vestige of his clothes. But the hand still grasped the edge of the pot, a dismembered hand that was all the evidence that a murder had been committed. Quickly Ah Chow released the grip of the fingers, though it required considerable effort, and because he did not know what to do with the tell-tale hand he hid it in his sleeve. Even though to escape from that horror garden, he had to pass through the drug shop where numerous clerks were measuring out fantastic medicines such as powdered toad skins for dropsy, infant's brain salve for skin diseases and dried water buffalo hide for carbuncle, they were so absorbed in their work none of them paid the slightest attention to him.

Outside the shop, he breathed more easily. He hired a rickshaw so that the short trip to his own elaborate home might be made more quickly. It may only have been the result of his overwrought nerves but he had the ghastly feeling that the severed hand was clutching him so that it would not fall from his sleeve. What a fool he had been to give way to anger! A merchant who succumbs to anger is like unto a man who would rob his own house. Better had he followed the example of Wong See Lo and dangled on the end of a red cord from a pear tree. Still there was some little satisfaction in knowing that the great Dr. Shen Fu had preceded him to the Yang. He wished the hand would not grip him so tightly and why was it still warm? What force kept heat in those fingers that should have been cold in death?

Ah Chow shuddered. A chill was upon him as though it were four-coat weather.

It was a relief to him when he was