Free The Island Where Time Stands Still by Dennis Wheatley

so.’
    â€˜I am sure you have done everything you can,’ Gregory smiled. ‘But please don’t worry. My life no longer holds any interest for me, and the thought of having my memory blacked out does not distress me in the least.’
    Meanwhile Sze Hsüan was tinkling a small bronze bell. One of the men servants whom Gregory had already decided was the Number-one Boy appeared. The Mandarin gave him some orders, then rose from his chair. Gregory exchanged bows with him, with the lady A-lu-te, and with the duenna, who had remained a silent spectator of the scene: then the servant led him from the reception hall to a bedroom, provided him with things for the remainder of the night, and left him.
    Although it was now close on two in the morning his brain was far too active for him to go to sleep at once, and he lay for a long time thinking over his extraordinary situation. No guard had been placed over him, but the reason for that was obvious. It was pointless to leave the house when there was no way of escaping from the island. To stow away, as Sze Hsüan had suggested he might attempt to do later if left in full possession of his faculties, was impossible as the steamer that served the port was not due back for two months or more. During so long a time he could not possibly evade capture. The problem of concealing his identity while obtaining food from a population whose language he could not speak would have been utterly insoluable. Expert escaper as he was, he doubted if he could remain uncaught for a week if he had to make nightly raids on people’s larders, and, since the island must be quite a small one, the odds were that search parties sent out to find him would round him up long before that.
    But he considered the possibilities of escape only from habit. He felt no urge whatever to attempt it. The ladyA-lu-te had been right when she had said that his mind was temporarily unbalanced. Otherwise he would have faced death rather than tamely accept the idea of being deprived of his personality. As it was he regarded the prospect rather favourably. For the past weeks he had known a misery of which he had never believed himself capable. The thought that he would never see Erika again had encircled his heart with an icy chill which was comparable only to Dante’s ‘Seventh Circle of Hell’. To the continuance of such suffering it seemed to him infinitely preferable that his mind should be made a vacuum. On that thought he dropped asleep.
    Soon after dawn he was woken and served with an excellent ‘first rice’; then the Number-one Boy indicated that he should get up, and, when he had dressed again in his dinner-jacket suit, led him out to the front entrance of the house. Sze Hsüan was waiting there and gravely wished him good morning, then mounted into a richly-appointed palanquin with eight bearers. Gregory, meanwhile, was escorted to a rickshaw drawn by a single coolie. A-lu-te was nowhere to be seen but the slight movement of a bead curtain that veiled one of the windows made him wonder if she was watching from behind it. The palanquin bearers set off at a trot and the rickshaw followed.
    As they proceeded at a swift pace along a road on the far side of the lake, Gregory marvelled at the beauty of the valley even more than he had the previous night. Then, in the moonlight, everything had appeared grey, silvery or black: now, under a sun still low in the sky, an infinite variety of soft colours blended to enhance the scene. Although it was evident that the Council met early to avoid the great heat of the midday hours, there were very few people about. Speculating on the reason, Gregory decided that it was probably because all markets and utilitarian activities were deliberately excluded from the valley in which the aristocracy lived. The only buildings they passed were large private houses, none of the land was being farmed and there were no meadows with livestock grazing in