The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast by Dolly

with visible chains !

    A few days before my editor had called me into his room and recommended me to take a brief holiday. He had noted my harassed looks, had noticed, too, the discrepancies in my work, that of late had become too glaringly frequent, and concluded that the strain of the last few weeks—we were in the middle of the Japanese war—had been too much for me.
    " Take your wife down to Hong-Kong and back," he had said kindly; "we can spare you, I think, for three weeks, and you will return all the more fit and ready to do two men's share."
    I had thanked him and declined. I did not want to go. In truth, I could not have gone had I wislied. But now everything was different. I told my chief that I intended to avail myself of his liberality, and would take a trip to Chefoo. He looked mildly surprised that I should choose to go North instead of South. It was still early in the year, and Chefoo would be much too cold to be pleasant. However, he acquiesced readily in my wish for a holiday, so we made all preparations, my wife and I, to go up by one of the Butterfield boats.
    The day before we sailed I received a note from Rawdon. I read it through, then put it away with a smile. I was so confident in my new strength that I did not care a rap what he had to say or what he did.

    " I am glad," it said, " that you propose taking a holiday at Chefoo, and hope it will be a long and enjoyable one, though I sadly fear you may find it convenient to return long before the expiration of the allotted period.—Yours very sincerely, A. Rawdon."
    Long before we reached our destination the words of the note had begun to haunt me with the ominous and now familiar presentiment of coming danger; yet at the time of its receipt I read it through and tossed it carelessly into my desk, for I could afford to smile then at his vague innuendoes.
    And so we left Shanghai for Chefoo in the steamship Hunan, I, poor fool, cheerful at my release and confident in my newly-recovered strength ; Ethel, with quick womanly sympathy, noticing my altered looks, equally rejoiced at my obvious improvement in health.
    In the wisdom of after-knowledge I wonder at myself for thinking that the reptile could so easily have allowed his power to slip from him. I see now that those vague premonitions of approaching disaster that towards the latter end of our journey assailed me, were a warning that this old man of the sea was still clinging tenaciously to my shoulders, riding me to destruction, though for the time he had apparently relinquished the curb and forborne to use the spurs. I see it all so plainly now, and it makes it all the more bitter to look back upon. There is nothing more pitifully sad than to look back, as we rise bruised and broken, at the pit over which we have stumbled, and see how plain it was had we but looked.

    It was the commencement of the foggy season. The typhoons had made way for the blistering north-east monsoon, which in turn had yielded place to the dreaded fog, and the harassed sailor could look forward, with what resignation he might, to two or three months of constant groping and creeping out of the darkness astern into the darkness ahead, with nothing but the fog whistle of the passing steamers, braying like frightened animals out there in the blackness, to assure him that earth and sea yet existed.
    We had our full share of it. Off the Shantung promontory it shut down like a pall that made either end of the ship melt away and vanish; but while the captain and the officer of the watch anxiously paced the bridge, or leaned over the rails as though trying to get just a foot or two nearer and to catch the welcome shriek of the lighthouse syren, I stood on the deck below, positively glorying in the fog. It was to me as a solid wall that shut me out completely from the world and the force I had begun again to dread. We rounded the promontory guided by nothing but that weird shriek, that commenced in a gurgle and died away in a groan,