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Synopsis of Preceding Chapters
PROFESSOR KURT MAQUARRI, the hunchback son of the great scientist Maquarri, has discovered a new element, called zodium, which gives him power over the human will. His stepdaughter, Joan Suffern, wears a ring which, unknown to her, contains some of this element. The hunchback has demonstrated his hypnotic control over Joan by sending out electronic force through his wishing machine, and she is thereby subject to his will so long as she wears the zodium ring. He plans to send her, hypnotized by the zodium, to kill Dr. Philip Olivier, who is on the threshold of the same discoveries that Maquarri has made. Dr. Olivier, a famous psychanalyst, is Maquarri's nephew, and has inherited from his grandfather, the elder Maquarri, the papers containing that great man's scientific secrets. Maquarri plans to have Joan steal the papers after she has killed Olivier, and then withdraw with him to her native island of Montserrat, where Maquarri intends to murder Lord Hubert Charing, Joan's uncle, and obtain the Charing fortune.
5
IN THE Leeward Islands they build their houses with the dread hurricane in mind. The old manor house of the Charings, which the first lord had built when he went out to be governor of the island of Montserrat more than two hundred years before, was no exception. On the edge of the cliffs overlooking the sea it stood, some nine miles out of the town of Plymouth. The side facing toward the land reared three stories of gray stone, whose windows looked out on a formal garden, but the steep hurricane roof of red slate sloped sheerly down on the side of the house toward the sea. Its diagonal line cut almost in half the dignified square bulk of the house, stretching from the top of the third story almost down to the ground, with only a low entrance at the rear to lead to the hurricane cellar underneath the building. The fiercest and most dreaded of hurricanes could not have lifted that steep roof from the building it sheltered; and in the long room at the rear of the old house, stretching across its width, its windows cut in the slope of the hurricane roof, the first Lord Charing had established himself. The view of the sea and the harbor was superb, and the succeeding masters had never cared to use any other room in the spacious old house.
Lord Hubert Charing, who had inherited the estate six years before, had spent many years wandering in strange corners of the earth, and when he established himself at the old sugar estate on the island, he was already famous as an entomologist.
