Read The Haunting of Toby Jugg Online
Authors: Dennis Wheatley
I had a fright last night—a very nasty fright. For the past few days the weather has been patchy, with mostly bright, sunny mornings, then getting overcast in the afternoons; and on both Sunday and Monday evenings we had showers of rain. In consequence, although there was a new moon on Saturday, cloudy skies saved me from seeing its light—until last night.
I would not have seen it then but for the fact that I had lobster for dinner. I was not, thank God, woken by my sub-conscious shrilling a warning to me that the Horror was approaching, but by an attack of indigestion, which aroused me into sudden wakefulness about one o’clock.
In the old days I used to be able to eat anything with impunity, but since my crash ruled out all exercise—except the little I get from swinging a pair of Indian clubs for a quarter-of-an-hour every morning—my digestion is not what it was. I suppose I ought to be more careful what I eat, but I never seem to think about it till the damage is done. Anyhow, the lobster woke me and there was that damnable band of moonlight on the floor.
It is three weeks now since I have seen it, and it gave me a frightful shock. It has been said truly enough that ‘time is the great healer’, and this long immunity from attack had certainly healed, or at least dulled, the awful impression that the visitations of the Thing made on my mind. Seeing that broad strip of moonlight again, with the two sinister black bars across it made by the shadow of the pieces between the windows, had the same effect upon me as if someone had suddenly ripped the bandages from a
hideous wound I had received some time ago, exposing it again all raw and bleeding.
But I am glad now that lobster chanced to be the main dish last night and that I ate too much of it. In spite of my having told myself repeatedly that time was slipping away, and that I must not let myself be lulled into a false sense of security during the dark period of the moon, that is just what I have done. Not altogether, perhaps, as the fate that menaces me has never been far from my thoughts, but I feel now that I ought to have made more strenuous efforts either to secure help or to escape from Llanferdrack. What other line I could have tried that I have not yet attempted I still cannot think; but there it is. I cannot help cursing myself now for the time I have given to fruitless speculations on this and that, instead of concentrating entirely on the all-important problem of saving myself.
Last night was a blessed warning, arousing me anew to my danger as sharply as the sounding of an air-raid siren, and I am wondering now if the lobster for dinner with my resulting indigestion was, after all, pure chance. Providence is said to work in strange ways, and, although I haven’t mentioned it in this journal, since early this month I have been praying for protection.
Until then I hadn’t said a prayer since old Nanny Trotter left, when I went to Weylands. She taught me my prayers and always made me say them, however tired I was; but I don’t think that any child prays from choice, and I was as pleased to stop praying as I was to cease from washing my neck, when other boys at Weylands told me that the first was ‘not done’ and the second optional.
Even when I was a fighter-pilot I never called on God to help me. In those days I was fully convinced that it was a calm head, a clear eye and a steady hand that did the trick. It was you or the Jerry and the best man won, with no darn’ nonsense about Divine intervention. At least, that was how I saw it then.
But, once I had argued it out with myself to the conclusion that the Thing in the courtyard is, and can only be, a creature of the Devil, it seemed logical to fall back on God. In view of my past neglect of Him I didn’t feel that I was entitled to hope for very much, but the Christian teaching is that His mercy is infinite; so
night and morning, and sometimes at odd periods of the day, I began to pray.
At first I felt very self-conscious and awkward about it; particularly as I could not go down on my knees, and to pray sitting in my chair or lying on my back in bed seemed disrespectful; but after a bit I decided that if God was taking any notice of me at all He wouldn’t let that make any difference, seeing how things are with me. So, although it may sound a bit far-fetched, it isn’t really at all improbable that Cook may have been guided to her choice of giving us lobster for dinner last night in response to my prayers for guidance and protection.
I don’t quite know why, but I am inclined to believe that God may grant us guidance and warnings but expects us to fight our own battles and protect ourselves; except, perhaps, in dire extremity when the dice are weighted too heavily against us. Anyhow, having seen the red light, whether it was a Heaven-sent one or not, I made up my mind early this morning that I must take immediate action.
My letter to Uncle Paul was posted only yesterday. It should be in London this morning, but there is no afternoon delivery at Queensclere, so even if it is now on its way down into Kent he won’t get it till tomorrow. When he does get it I think he will come here as soon as he can, but Thursday is the earliest that I can reasonably expect him; and if he has engagements that he feels he cannot break he may not arrive till the weekend. Looking at the matter from his point of view, he would be quite justified in feeling that I could hardly be in such an almighty hurry to get the new financial schemes I mentioned off to the lawyers without giving him a few days’ grace.
On the other side of the picture the moon will be full again on Saturday the 30th; but my danger period starts well before that. Last time the attacks occurred nightly from the 30th April to the 4th of May, with a blank only on the 2nd, when the moon was actually full; but that was because it was a night of heavy cloud and the moon never came through. So, judging by the previous bout, I’ll be in danger from Thursday night on. But if the nights remain clear the attacks may start before that—perhaps on Wednesday, or even tonight.
I ought to have worked all this out before, or anyway yesterday when I was so cock-a-hoop at having got my letter off to Uncle Paul. Then, I more or less counted on his jumping into a train on Wednesday; or, anyhow, getting here on Thursday. But I feel sure now that there must be some subtle influence at work which has obscured my judgment in such matters and made me over-sanguine about the success of my plans.
My fright last night has entirely dissipated the feeling of temporary security that seems to have accumulated like fleecy clouds of cotton wool round my brain. I realise now that it would be crazy to count on Uncle Paul turning up before the trouble starts again. He may or he may not; but I am not going to stay and chance it. I am going to get out tonight, or at least have a damn’ good try.
If I can hypnotise Deb to a degree at which she will post a letter for me and remember nothing about it afterwards, and send her into a trance deep enough for her to reveal her dirty little schemes against poor old Britain, I see no reason why I should not make her come and fetch me in my chair in the middle of the night and wheel me out of the house.
Once outside, Comrade Kain can damn’ well keep on wheeling me along the King’s highway; and if round about dawn she drops with fatigue it won’t cause me any pain and grief at all. In fact I rather like the idea that this earnest little disciple of Papa Marx and Uncle Lenin should have to go to bed for a week, to recover from the effort of saving Flight-Lieutenant Sir Toby Jugg, D.F.C., R.A.F.V.R., from the Devil.
Later
This journal has been a good friend to me. When I made the first entries in an old exercise book my nerves were stretched to breaking-point, and forcing myself to make a logical analysis of my thoughts did a lot to keep me sane. Since then, writing it, besides providing what may yet prove a valuable record of events here, has whiled away many an hour of my dreary invalid existence. But I hope that this will be my last entry in it.
All is set fair for tonight. Deb has her ‘Sealed Orders’ (not to be
opened until 0045 hours 27.5.42). That is actually what it comes to, as my instructions, verbally issued this afternoon, are sealed up in her sub-conscious, which will not release them to her conscious mind until a quarter to one in the morning.
Even Helmuth keeps fairly early hours here in the country. He usually goes up to bed about eleven o’clock, so by one I can count on the coast being clear. As Deb will have to get up and dress it is unlikely that she will come for me till a bit after one, and it will take another twenty minutes or so for her to get me dressed. Usually Taffy does that, but with my help Deb will manage somehow. Although I cannot stand, even for a moment, the strength of my arms is fortunately so great that I can support my dead weight by clinging to one of the posts of this big four-poster bed, and if Deb holds my chair steady I’ll be able to heave myself off the bed into it. So I plan to make my break-out about half-past one in the morning, which should give me six-and-a-half hours clear before my escape is discovered.
With my fright last night still vivid in my mind, it occurred to me that I would ordinarily have to lie here in the dark between ten o’clock and one, and that if there was a moon again the Thing might seize this last chance to attack me; so I put my blessed gift to good use again when Deb came in to settle me down. Having completed the usual ritual, she was just about to pick up my Aladdin lamp and carry it off with her, but I caught her eye, put her under, and said:
‘Leave the lamp where it is, Deb. You may go now, and you will not wake until you have turned the angle of the corridor. When you wake you will have forgotten that you have left the lamp burning here.’
As she reached the door I called her back, on the sudden thought that it might be as well to do a final check-up. I made her repeat the instructions about tonight and she had the whole thing clear; so it is now only a matter of killing time until one o’clock.
That is why I am making this final entry. I am in much more of a flap than I ever was before going out on an operational sortie, and this is the best means I can think of to occupy my mind. My idea of making her leave the lamp is therefore now proving a
double blessing, as I have never before been able to read or write after ten o’clock.
After Deb had gone I said prayers for the success of my venture, but one can’t keep on praying for very long; at least, I can’t, as I find that I start to repeat myself, which begins to make it monotonous and seems rather pointless. However, I had a new line tonight, in additional supplications that all should go well with my escape.
It suddenly struck me that it was soon after I first started to pray that I remembered Squadron-Leader Cooper telling me that I had hypnotic eyes; and it was that which led to my present prospect of getting the better of Helmuth. I think now that memory must have come to me as a direct answer to prayer, and that, seeing my utter helplessness, God has granted me the swift development of this strange power for my defence against the machinations of the Devil.
It is certainly little short of miraculous that within a few days I should have acquired such an ascendancy over Deb as to make her reveal to me her most jealously guarded secrets. She has never disguised the fact that her sympathies are with the Left, but that is a very different matter from admitting that she is a Communist agent actively working against Britain.
The idea that a foreigner like Deb is eligible to become a Member of Parliament, and actually laying long-term plans to do so, positively horrifies me. Can we do nothing to prevent such a monstrous perversion in the representation of the British people? Is Party backing, superficial intelligence and a glib tongue really all that is required, irrespective of race or creed, to gain a place in that august assembly where Walpole and Chatham, the younger Pitt, Wellington, Joe Chamberlain, and now Churchill have thundered forth the tale of Britain’s defiance, courage and integrity?
I suppose it is. If Deb’s husband was already a Labour member, and the people who run the Labour Party Office were unaware that she was secretly a Communist, they might well agree to her nomination as a Labour candidate.
Gruffydd won’t stand much chance of getting in if the country sends back the Conservatives at the next election with a large
majority; but it would not surprise me at all if, after the war, there is a big landslide towards Labour. In any case, now that Liberal representation is so small, Labour is H.M.’s Opposition, and the swing of the pendulum is bound to bring them in within the next ten years; so Deb might easily get a seat by the time she is forty-five. And by then how many other Communists will there be who have infiltrated into the House on a Labour ticket?
What is the answer to that sort of thing? One cannot prevent British Communists from using the Labour Party as a stalking-horse, and we don’t want to close the doors against foreigners settling here. Neither, shades of Disraeli, do we want to discriminate against our own Jews. Incidentally, his family had been resident in London for nearly a hundred years before he first went to sit at Westminster. But the laws governing the qualifications for election to Parliament were made in a different age, and I think they need bringing up to date. At least we could check this infiltration of foreigners into the House by passing a law that no man or woman whose parents were not British
born
should be eligible to become an M.P. And—perhaps even more important—to prevent their being appointed to high executive posts under the Government, make a minimum residence of twenty-five years in Great Britain an essential requirement to secure nationalisation.
Is that reactionary? I don’t think so. ‘Reactionary’ is just the parrot-cry howled at anyone these days who has the courage to think and act as did our forefathers who made the Empire.
Of course, if such a law was passed the joke would be on me, because my mother was born an American, so I should not be eligible for Parliament myself. But I would willingly surrender my present right to stand if it helped to ensure that Britain should continue to be ruled by the British.
Thank God it is just on one o’clock. Letting off all this hot air has filled in the time nicely. Deb should be here any minute now.