The Haunting of Toby Jugg (26 page)

In spite of the intense cold the sweat was pouring off me, and once I caught myself groaning aloud with terror. I prayed and prayed, frantically begging God to intervene and put an end to my torment, but my prayers met with no response.

I forced myself to close my eyes, first while I counted ten, then while I counted twenty; but every second while I had them shut I was terrified that when I opened them I would find that the Horror had got into the room.

Still, I kept at it, as a test of my own will-power, and I managed to get up to thirty-five. Then, when I let out my breath with a gasp and looked again, I saw that the brute had ceased its dancing and was crouching once more in the corner of the centre window. For a while nothing happened, yet I was vaguely conscious that I was becoming subject to a new form of apprehension, although I could not determine what the basis of the fresh fear could be.

Suddenly I
knew.
The Thing had a will and it was pitting it against mine. It was trying to hypnotise me.

I have never known any sound to come from it before, and it may be that I imagined this. All I can say is that it seemed to me as if it was making a faint tapping on the window—the sort of tapping that the beak of a bird might make against thick plate-glass. But the tapping was in a persistent rhythm—long, long
short, short, short—long, long, short, short, short; and those dashes and dots
translated themselves in my brain
as ‘You must let-me-in. You must let-me-in.’

I shivered anew with stark horror, but there was no escaping the sounds; or, rather, the refrain that trilled like a clear little silvery voice in my mind. I stuffed my fingers in my ears, but it still came through.

Then the tapping changed to a new morse rhythm, and the silvery voice said to me gently but firmly: ‘Tomorrow night, you will tell Taffy to leave the window open. Tomorrow night, you will tell Taffy to leave the window open.’

It was exactly the same technique as I had used with Deb, when I had said to her: ‘You will wake up at a quarter-to-one, dress yourself and come to me,’ over and over again, to impress it firmly in her subconscious.

Once more the rhythm changed, this time to ‘Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep.’ And the thing that terrifies me most of all is that I
did
go to sleep.

Later

My new nurse arrived this afternoon. Her name is Cardew. She seems a pleasant, friendly sort of girl, but I shouldn’t call her a real good-looker. In fact she does not seem at all the type that Helmuth was expecting his Matron friend to send him. She is a hefty wench with a freckled face, blue eyes and a broad nose that inclines to turn up a trifle.

As Helmuth was out when she got here, Taffy brought her straight in to me, without even giving her a chance to tidy herself; so she was still wearing a suit of old tweeds and the heavy brogues in which she had travelled down. Her light brown hair is naturally fluffy and had got a bit windswept; so her general turn-out put the thought into my mind that she ought to be swinging a hockey stick. I doubt if she is any older than I am, so my first impression of her is that she is a nice, healthy English hoyden, not overburdened with brains but the sort that has been brought up to believe in God and the King, and marries respectably to build bonnie babies for the Empire.

Anyhow, she shows promise of being a more cheerful companion than Deb, and I am glad that she arrived when Helmuth was out. As soon as he gets hold of her it is certain that he will put all sorts of ideas about me into her head; but, at least, she saw me for the first time without prejudice.

Later

I have been worrying myself stiff all day about this new development of the Horror attempting to hypnotise me. I don’t think it can possibly have succeeded in doing so—yet—for two reasons. Firstly, I am certain that I did not go into a trance while it was urging me to tell Taffy to leave the window open; secondly, I can remember the attempt perfectly clearly, which, presumably, I should not be able to do if the brute had managed to dominate my sub-conscious. On the other hand, I
did
fall asleep at its order, and while it was still at the window—which I should not previously have believed to be even remotely possible. So, in a way, it must have succeeded in getting some sort of control over my mind.

The only precaution I can think of against my giving way to a sudden impulse to obey its order tonight is to tie a handkerchief round my wrist. The sight of that should, I trust, be enough to pull me up with a jerk if I find myself apparently talking at random. But it is damnably unnerving.

I have found out why my new nurse is not the hard-faced, good-looking type of bitch that Helmuth expected his friend to send here for his amusement. Apparently the Matron had no hand in her selection. She got his telegram yesterday afternoon and nominated a Nurse Jollef for the job, then went off for a long weekend in the country. This morning Jollef fell downstairs and sprained her ankle, so the Deputy Matron picked Cardew to come here instead.

All I hope is that Helmuth does not decide to send her back to London and ask for a substitute more to his taste, as she is young and friendly. If Helmuth does not poison her mind too much against me there seems a chance that I may be able to make her my secret ally. In any case she should be much easier to get round than Deb.

I have pulled a fast one on her already by telling her that I always take one sleeping tablet, and that the bottle is left beside my bed in case I wake in pain during the night and need another; so she put the bottle in the top drawer of my bedside table. As soon as she had left the room to get my hot-water bottle I slipped four more tablets out of it; so even if she meets Helmuth on the way back and he tells her to collect it, I’ll be able to cheat the Horror tonight at all events—that is, provided that I don’t suddenly get a blackout and tell Taffy to open the window.

Here they come to settle me down.

Saturday, 30th May

It is mid-afternoon, and I am still feeling like death. Five sleeping tablets proved an overdose. It did the trick all right, as within twenty minutes of my lamp being taken away I was ‘out’, and I remained in complete oblivion for the best part of twelve hours. This morning they had the hell of a job to get me round, and it seems that if I hadn’t the constitution of an ox I should probably have kicked the bucket.

Nurse Cardew may be young, but she can be tough enough when she likes. Naturally such an episode occurring immediately on her arrival was a bit hard on her, as it reflects on her professional competence, and she gave me a terrific raspberry.

Perhaps it was bad strategy on my part to put her in a position where, through no fault of her own, she appears to have stepped off on the wrong foot. It will certainly make it far more difficult now for me to win her sympathy and possible help. But what the devil was I to do? So long as the moon remains near-f, every night means for me a new crisis in a most hideous battle. I simply
cannot
afford to think of long-term policies; I just
have
to seize on any means that offer to escape immediate danger.

Later

At tea-time I managed to get myself partially back into Nurse Cardew’s good graces. Apparently the name ‘Jugg’ is not quite such a bell-ringer as I have always imagined; she had never heard
of it before she was sent down here, and knew nothing about me at all. She asked in what sort of accident I had broken my back, and when I told her that I had been shot down she became much more matey. Her only brother—a Lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm—was shot down too; but that happened nearly a year ago in the Eastern Mediterranean; and as he was reported ‘missing, presumed dead’ it’s a hundred to one against the poor girl ever seeing him again.

Like myself, she is an orphan and, now that her brother has gone, she has no close relatives. Her father was a Naval Officer. He and her mother were both drowned in a yachting fatality when she was three, and she and her brother were brought up by an aunt who lives at Dawlish, in Devonshire. I gather they have very little money, but she doesn’t seem to mind that, as she says that up to the time Johnny—that is her brother—got his packet, she found life enormous fun; and she is beginning to again, now that she doesn’t think quite so often about his never coming home.

I have always been distinctly allergic to this hearty attitude to life, and I still cannot believe that I should find it ‘tremendous fun’ to go up to London with half-a-dozen other young people on an excursion ticket, for the sake of an afternoon’s shop-window gazing, a ‘Club’ dance of some sort at one of the lesser hotels and supper in the small hours at Lyons Corner House. Still, on the debit side I must admit that, apart from my time in the R.A.F., my own youth was extraordinarily barren of hilarity; so perhaps being surrounded by riches really has very little bearing on the amount of enjoyment that one can get, and that it depends much more on an attitude of mind.

Owing to the Naval influence in Sally’s—that is, Nurse Cardew’s—family, she went into the W.R.N.S. at the beginning of the war. Incidentally, she
is
older than I am, by just over a year, although I would never have thought it from either her appearance or conversation. But she was blown up by a land-mine in the Plymouth blitz and, in consequence, invalided from the Service.

She is quite all right again now, unless she hears something go off with a loud bang. Apparently a bursting motor-tyre, or even
a child popping a paper bag, is enough to do it; but any noise resembling an explosion still shatters her completely. She dives for the nearest cover—which, as she told me with a loud guffaw, usually means under the table, then bursts into a flood of tears and makes a general nuisance of herself for the next two hours. That is why, since the Wrens decided that she was no longer 100 per cent reliable for any regular duty, she had herself trained as a private nurse and has been taking jobs in country areas where bombs rarely fall.

Her nursing qualifications are pretty slender; she makes no secret of that. She went in for nursing only because she felt that she could not remain idle after she was boarded out of the Wrens, and she didn’t much like the idea of going into a factory.

As she cannot do shorthand she could not have got anything but a stooge-job in an office, whereas she did know a bit about massage from having been taught by a half-Swedish cousin of hers, who used to come and stay at Dawlish. So she did a course in first aid, swatted up a few books on this and that concerning the most general types of ailments, and got taken on by Miss Smith for sending to patients in the country where massage was the principal requirement. Her last case was an old Colonel with a game leg, up in Shropshire, and two days after her return to London a new throw of the dice sent her here.

It is nice to have someone fresh to talk to, however mediocre their mentality, and over tea we got on like a house on fire; but, unfortunately, later this evening I blotted it again.

Helmuth has spared me his evening visits since we had our show-down; so when Sally came in, about six o’clock, to ask if she might borrow a book from the library, I let her browse for a few moments, while concluding a paragraph of this, then opened up our conversation again.

Most regrettably, as it turned out, I chose the subject of Helmuth as a lead in. I asked her what she thought of him.

While still searching the shelves for something readable, she said: ‘He’s terribly distinguished-looking, isn’t he?’

‘The Roebuck probably thinks of the Lion that way till he takes a big jump and fixes his claws in her back,’ I remarked acidly.

‘Am I supposed to be the Roebuck in this analogy?’ she enquired.

‘You might be,’ I murmured, ‘and while Dr. Lisický’s eyes and hair give him some resemblance to the King of Beasts, you can take it from me that there is nothing kingly about his mind; it is as low as that of any reptile.’

She straightened herself a little, but continued to keep her back turned, as she replied: ‘I gathered from Dr. Lisický this morning that you have recently taken an acute dislike to him. That sort of twist in the mentality of a permanent invalid against the person who is looking after them does sometimes occur; but you should do your best to fight it. Personally, from what little I have so far seen of the Doctor, I think him a most intelligent and charming man; and I am not going to encourage your morbid ideas by letting you say such horrid things to me about him.’

Like an idiot, I did not see the red light, but plunged in further with a sneer: ‘Since you think him “distinguished-looking, intelligent and charming” it’s pretty clear that he is well on the way to getting you where he wants you already. But I warn you that he has the morals of a sewer-rat. He made your predecessor his mistress, drove her half-crazy with neglect, then, when a respectable fellow wanted to marry her, he started to sleep with her again for the fun of busting up her engagement.’

Suddenly Nurse Cardew swung round on me; her blue eyes were hard and her freckled face flushed.

‘Listen to me, Toby Jugg!’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘At tea-time this afternoon I thought I was going to like you, and I’m still prepared to do so; but we had better get matters straight before we go any further. When I took on this job I was not told that you were a mental case, and I don’t believe that, strictly speaking, you are one. But Dr. Lisický warned me last night that you’ve got a mind like a cesspool, and that your letters have to be censored because of the obscenities you put in them. What you have just said of him is obviously a wicked and disgusting lie. I’m not narrow-minded but I don’t like filth and I don’t like slander; so for the future you will kindly refrain from both in my presence, or I’ll chuck up the case and go back to London.’

‘Okay!’ I snapped. ‘I won’t sully your shell-like ears again. But
if you prefer to believe Dr. Helmuth Lisický rather than me, it will be your own fault if you get yourself seduced.’

At that she flounced out of the room, and a few minutes later I was regretting that I had put her back up. Personally I don’t give a damn if Helmuth makes her his mistress, but it seemed only fair to warn her of the sort of man he is. Where I was stupid was in putting it so bluntly, and in losing my temper with her because she wouldn’t believe me.