The Island Where Time Stands Still

by Dennis Wheatley

  Following ancient Chinese usage, Ah-moi had them, the look-out and half a dozen other people dragged before him on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs, and hurled terrible threats at them; but all to no avail. Even A-lu-te, who might possibly have suspected Gregory, was entirely deceived by the red herring; so except to him, the affair remained yet one more unsolved mystery.

  On the fourth evening after the departure of the launch it returned. The Second Officer had secured a sampan but had brought it down only to the head of the estuary; so that when the passengers embarked its crew should not see the yacht from which they had come. The Engineer had also satisfactorily executed the commission Ah-moi had given him, as for a thousand dollars he had managed to buy a collection of papers. There were identity cards, travel permits and letters of introduction. Some were genuine, others forged, and they applied to over a score of different people; but owing to the illiteracy of most minor officials it was felt that, short of a very unlucky break, they would serve their purpose.

  Since 1950 Mao Tse-Tung’s government had expelled nearly all the Americans and Europeans, other than Russians, who had been living in China; so it had been agreed that Gregory should make himself less conspicuous by wearing Chinese clothes. Then among the papers they had the luck to find two which had belonged to a Polish journalist. Both were out of date, but he decided that, while still adopting Chinese costume, it would be well worth carrying them as a precaution against being pulled in for a serious interrogation at which he could no longer maintain the fiction that he was a Chinaman.

  Again, as a precaution against appearing conspicuous, they had decided to leave behind all rich garments, and go clad in the padded coats generally worn by middle-class Chinese. This had made it easy for Su-sen to sew into their linings numerous wads of dollar currency and, against an emergency, several little packets of small diamonds.

  Captain Ah-moi was anxious to get away from such dangerous waters as soon as possible; so next morning he already had steam up. His plan was to run down to the Philippines and re-coal there, then cruise in the open Pacific for a month or more at low speed to save fuel, returning to the old mouth of the Hwang-ho at the end of the ninth week; as it was not thought that they could accomplish their journey and get back in less than that time. If their sampan was not in the creek, he meant to sail again and cruise in the middle of the East China Sea, putting in afterwards once a week until either they appeared or sent him news of themselves.

  Having said good-bye to him and his officers they went aboard the launch, which ran them up the estuary to the sampan. Its Captain was a rugged little man named Mai-lee-long and he had a crew of two. Their baggage was soon stowed; then, after a final farewell to the Second Officer and the cadets who manned the launch, the sampan headed slowly up river.

  Now that Gregory had a chance to see the cramped quarters in which they would have to live for the next three weeks, he felt that Kâo’s rejection of Ah-moi’s offer to send two of his officers with them had been very sensible. The sampan was one of the larger kind and, except that it was long, narrow and flat bottomed, somewhat resembled a little junk; but it had only three small passenger cabins; two in the stern and one in the bow. All had two-tier bunks; so A-lu-te doubled up with Su-sen in one of those at the stern, Kâo had the other, and Gregory the one in the prow. As there was hardly room in it to swing a cat and its ceiling was so low that he could not stand upright in it, he was extremely glad that he was not called on to share it with one of the yacht’s officers or, more unpleasant still, with Wu-ming, as he would probably have had to do had that unhappy gentleman still been alive.

  Just forward of the after-cabins there was one fairly spacious day cabin which was raised on a half-deck. It was roofed over with bent bamboos and open at the ends, so resembled a short tunnel. Forward of it was the long open hold, normally used for cargo, and now turned over to the crew and servants who would sleep there on their mats. Aft of A-lu-te’s cabin lay the galley, and aft of Kâo’s a compartment in which the motor engine chugged noisily and the Captain slept.

  While lying in the estuary they had sighted only a few fishing boats, but as they progressed up river these gradually became more numerous. Every few miles they now came upon a collection of rickety bamboo huts that passed for a village, and the one at which they tied up for their first night in the sampan was typical of the rest. Its poverty and squalor were indescribable. There were no solid buildings of any kind, but the lean-to’s were crowded with half-naked humanity and a number of pitifully thin animals. With gaunt faces and hungry eyes the villagers stared at them, evidently quite unused to seeing even moderately prosperous travellers, while the children cried to them for alms in falsetto voices, begging even the scraps of garbage from the galley.

  Late the following evening they reached Antung-Ku. As they approached they took it for no more than a larger village, until they came near enough to see that some of the buildings in its centre had two stories, and that the huddle of bamboo, tile and corrugated iron roofs, all seeming to run together with no space for streets between, covered the best part of a square mile.

  Dusk was falling as they tied up alongside another sampan, which in turn was tied to a third moored to one of the tumble-down wharves. Anxious to see something of the homeland of her race, A-lu-te begged that they might go ashore, but Kâo would not hear of it till morning; so by the light of an oil lamp they whiled away a couple of hours playing one of the complicated versions of Chinese dominoes. Then they wished one another good night and went to their cabins.

  Having spent some time in China between the two wars, Gregory was well aware that part of the price the traveller must pay for enjoying its colourful beauties is the waging of unceasing war against almost every form of bug that has ever plagued mankind; so before leaving San Francisco he had equipped himself with a good stock of insecticides. On stepping down into the hold he saw that, gathered round a charcoal brazier, the sailors and the two servants were still talking together in low voices.

  His new man Che-khi was a sedate dried-up individual, well on in middle-age, and in appearance vague like his original master; but, while he had no doubt suited the Mandarin, Gregory found him far from satisfactory. He was not lazy, but slow, forgetful and inclined to be unobliging; so, pausing beside him, Gregory asked if he had remembered to flit his cabin.

  The man admitted that he had not, and gave as his reason that he had lent the sprayer that morning to Su-sen to do the cabin she shared with her mistress. Having told him to go and get it from her, Gregory continued on his way forward and climbed up on to the little fore-deck. From it rose a short foremast, a small hand capstan, piled sails and surrounded by various other gear, the raised hatch that led below. As he scrambled over the sails he caught sight of a figure crouching in the shadows. Thinking it that of a thief who had just come up from his cabin, he sprang forward and seized the intruder by the shoulders. His captive made no effort to spring up or get away, but said in a swift whisper:

  ‘It’s Foo, Sir. Please! You’re hurting me!’

  Relaxing his grip, Gregory asked in a low voice, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

  ‘I wanted to let you know that I got ashore safely, and to thank you,’ Foo murmured in reply.

  Gregory frowned. ‘That was a most foolhardy thing to do. If one of the others had caught you, Mr. Kâo Hsüan might not have been able to send you back, but he would have had you beaten to within an inch of your life.’

  ‘I had to chance that. Sir. It took me three days to walk here, but on the last day I saw the launch going down river with this sampan and I felt sure it was to pick you up. I’ve been haunting the waterfront ever since, on the look-out for its return. You see I’ve no money. The Bosun took my savings before they threw me in the cells. I’ve had to beg to keep myself alive, and I’m starving. I … I was hoping that you might add to your great kindness by letting me have a little money.’

  Without a second thought Gregory took from
his pocket one of the wads of notes he had been given when Kâo was distributing their funds among them. Peeling off five ten dollar bills he slipped them into Foo’s hand, and said:

  ‘That ought to keep you going for quite a time.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ Foo exclaimed gratefully. ‘I shall now be able to afford a lodging, buy decent clothes, and get a good job. If you are staying here for long, Sir, I may be able to repay you.’

  ‘I thought …’ Gregory began, and had meant to continue, ‘that you wanted to reach the village where your parents died. Now you have money why delay in going there?’ But at that moment he heard footsteps approaching along the hold; so, instead, he said hastily:

  ‘No, we set off on our long journey up to Tung-kwan tomorrow. Quick now! Someone’s coming! Make yourself scarce!’

  Foo did not wait for a second warning but rose, sprang on to the prow of the neighbouring sampan, and disappeared in its shadows. Gregory went down to his cabin and a minute later Che-khi joined him there.

  While he started to undress, his servant now conscientiously sprayed every corner of the small apartment with the flit gun. Then when he had done Gregory handed him a tin of powder and said:

  ‘Scatter some of that down the sides of the bunk, and put some inside the bed as well.’

  Obediently Che-khi carried out the first part of the order, then he drew back the bed-clothes. A three-foot-long bamboo snake was lying coiled up there. Instantly, with a horrible hissing noise it reared up to strike.

  13

  Death in a Bed and Love in a Tree-Top

  As Gregory had elected to use the upper bunk, the snake in it had reared up level with his face. In the poky little cabin there was scarcely room to turn round: so he was as near to it as Che-khi. Owing to the low ceiling the heads of both were bent, and turned towards it. In their cramped position there was no possibility of grabbing up some weighty object to smash down upon it, or of springing away.

  The venomous-looking brute was brown in colour fading to a yellowish hue where its belly showed as it raised itself to strike. Its eyes were small points of black that glittered brightly, reflecting the light, of the oil lamp. Its forked tongue flickered with lightning speed, and its flattish ugly head swayed from side to side.

  Gregory, aware that the reptile’s brain was smaller than a rabbit’s, knew that, without discrimination, it would strike at the first moving thing within its range of vision. Feeling behind him, he clutched the padded coat he had just taken off meaning to swing it up in front of the snake. Before he could do so Che-khi lost his nerve. With a high-pitched scream he turned to fly. Instantly the snake’s head darted forward and it fixed its fangs in his neck.

  Taking a chance. Gregory dropped the coat and seized the snake a few inches below its head. The force of its bite was already spent, so it was easy to drag it from the reeling Chinaman; but its jaws opened wide, its tongue flickered madly, and, like a length of electrified steel wire, it thrashed about in violent efforts to snap home its poison-filled teeth into Gregory’s arm.

  Fortunately he still had his heavy Chinese boots on. Holding its head well away from him, he lowered it towards the floor and, as its writhing body whipped from side to side upon the boards, he stamped upon it with first one foot then the other, until its vertebrae were broken in half-a-dozen places and, half pulped, it at last lay still.

  Che-khi, meanwhile, had collapsed across the floor, and lay there groaning. Pulling him aside Gregory ran up the few steps to the deck and shouted for help. P’ei, Mai-lee-long, and the two coolies who made up the crew hurried to his assistance.

  Between them they got the stricken man up into the air. The sampan captain squeezed as much poison from the wound as he could, then declared that Che-khi must be got swiftly to a doctor, and that he knew of one who lived no great distance away. As in cases of snake bite it is most important to keep the victim’s heart going and in no circumstances allow him to fall asleep, they first forced a good measure of rice spirit down his throat; then, instead of carrying him, they took him by the arms and dragged him, stumbling, across the intervening sampans on to the wharf. Gregory approved their treatment; but, as the bite was in Che-khi’s neck, and so near the brain, he had no great hopes of his surviving it. Very thoughtfully and greatly depressed, he went to bed.

  His judgment of men had rarely been at fault, but he now felt that in Foo’s case it had. Foo’s having been on the spot only a few minutes before a snake had been found in his bed was one coincidence too many. Snakes always sought warm places in which to sleep and now that September had come the nights were beginning to get chilly; so it was just possible that the deadly visitor had found its own way under the coverings of the bunk; but the odds seemed all upon its having been deliberately secreted there.

  For a long time Gregory puzzled unhappily over the affair, and he still could not hit upon any logical reason why Foo should want to kill him. Either theory, that he was Quong-Yü’s agent or a Communist fanatic, might be correct, but neither was really convincing; and to continue his attempts after all that Gregory had done for him displayed an ingratitude of such baseness that it was hardly conceivable. The only explanation seemed to be that, although he appeared to be perfectly sane, he was actually a madman.

  In the morning Gregory said nothing to Kâo or A-lu-te of his having run into Foo on the sampan the previous night; for to have done so would have necessitated his having either to invent a reason given him by Foo for being on the sampan or disclose the fact that it was he who had enabled Foo to escape from the yacht. But, of course, they had both heard about the snake being found in Gregory’s bunk; and, as soon as they had eaten, the three of them went ashore, with P’ei as guide, to the doctor’s house to inquire after Che-khi.

  They were distressed, but not surprised, to learn that he had died shortly after having been brought in. Kâo left enough money for him to be given a respectable burial, and in a chastened mood they enquired their way to the market to buy food for the day’s journey.

  Behind the screen of sampan masts, wharfs, and dwellings on stilts that fringed the waterfront, there were no squares or open spaces. The town was a warren of twisting lanes with the buildings on either side so close together that, even in midday, the sun could not penetrate to the garbage-littered cobbles. Men, women and children swarmed along them like locusts in a bean field. Most of them still wore old-fashioned blue cotton tunics and baggy trousers, and went bare-headed; but in the better part of the town quite a number of women had taken to skirts and blouses, and more of the men were wearing shoddy cloth suits with flat European style caps. Here and there a more elderly man was dressed like Kâo and Gregory, in a long padded coat, and a round woollen skull-cap surmounted with a pompom. Shouting children darted through the throng in all directions, some clad only in a rice sack with holes in it for arms and legs, others stark naked. The smell was indescribable; a mixture of garlic, ginger, cinnamon, sweat and still more unpleasant things, as old and young alike freely relieved themselves in any odd corner whenever they felt so inclined.

  The shops in the main bazaar were little more than cupboards; and although they were crammed with articles for sale the entire stock in most of them could have been bought for less than fifty pounds. Such was the poverty of the place that nothing seemed too worn or broken to be worth a few cash, and among a collection of junk on one old man’s stall Gregory noticed carefully laid out a dozen rusty nails. About all the booths, however, there was one thing in common. Every one of them had prominently displayed posters bearing portraits of Mao and Chou En-lai. That was enough to show how strong the Communist hold had become upon the country; but the only other evidence of it they saw was two policemen clad in ill-fitting khaki jackets and with red stars on their peaked caps.

  The purchase of the food did not take long, and by half-past nine they were back aboard the sampan, which soon afterwards set off up river. As they were leaving the town behind, they passed several boats with long poles protruding from
their sides, upon each of which were perched several large birds. When Gregory enquired about them, Kâo told him that the birds were tame cormorants used by the boatmen for fishing. At a signal the birds dived noiselessly into the water and snapped up a fish, gulping it down into their pouches; but they were prevented from swallowing it by a leather strap round their throats, so the fisherman was afterwards able to make them disgorge their catch. Kâo went on to say that fish was the poor man’s meat in China, so that at the season of the floods they even stocked their paddy-fields with them; and that it was also such a favourite food with the rich that over fifty varieties of carp alone had been bred, while of all kinds there were enough for anyone to eat a different sort every day for a year.

  As their journey progressed, Gregory was to be thankful for that, as fresh meat was not easy to obtain in the villages where they tied up for the night, and the quantity of tinned goods they had been able to bring with them from the yacht was limited.

  Their progress seemed maddeningly slow, as the sampan rarely covered more than thirty miles a day, and at times their irritation at its lethargic pace was increased by the motor breaking down or their running on to a mud bank. The monotony of the scenery added to the wearisomeness of the journey as there was rarely anything of interest to look at. Sometimes the river was as wide as a lake, with only a lane of rotting poles to mark the channel through the treacherous shallows; at others it became hardly more than a stream winding through a broad depression between distant slopes of higher ground which had been its banks in the days of its greatness. At times it dwindled to a useless trickle; but from point to point, by-passing these stretches, canals had been cut in a straight line to link up its navigable waters. Yet whatever the state of the river the scene beyond its banks remained much the same.