To The Devil A Daughter mf-1

by Dennis Wheatley

  Beddows relaxed. For a moment he lay silent, then he let out something between a sigh and a moan and said, `What the hell do you want of me?'

  Sensing that his resistance was lessening, C. B. said firmly, `We want the truth about your association with Canon Copely Syle.'

  `That has nothing to do with you.'

  `Yes it has. Fountain and I came all the way from the South of France specially to talk to you about it.' `It's none of your business.'

  `It is our business. It is the business of every decent person to lend a hand in scotching the sort of devilry that Copely Syle is engaged in. And you've got to help us.'

  'No! No! I won't talk about him! I daren’t! The danger I am in from him is bad enough as it is.'

  C. B. loosened his hold a little and took a more persuasive tone. `Come! Pull yourself together, man. You're not the only one in danger. How about your daughter Ellen?'

  `Ellen!' Beddows repeated miserably. `I . . . I thought I had managed to keep her out of this.'

  `Far from it. She has been in very grave danger indeed, and is a long way from being safely out of the wood yet.'

  Now that Beddows was no longer actually being held down, he struggled up into a sitting position and demanded, `What has been happening to her?'

  `The Canon is after her blood. I mean that literally, and I'll bet any money you know what he would do with her blood if he got it. That's why we came back to England to hunt you out. You've got to tell us everything you know about the Canon.'

  'No! I'm not talking!'

  `Damn it, man!' John cried. `Think of your daughter! How can you possibly refuse to help us free her from the influence that devil exerts over her?'

  `No!' Beddows repeated doggedly. `I did my best for her. I can't do more. She must take her chance now. I'm not talking. It's too dangerous.'

  `Yes, you are going to talk,' said C. B. quietly. `Do you know what I mean to do if you persist in your refusal?' `What?' faltered Beddows uneasily? `What will you do?' `I shall smash this pentacle to pieces; then Fountain and I will leave you here alone.'

  'No! No ! You can't do that.'

  `I can and I will. Either you are going to answer any

  questions or I'll make hay of your astral defences.' For a moment Beddows sat there panting heavily, then he muttered, `All right. What do you want to know?' `How long have you known Copely Syle?' `A bit over twenty years.'

  `Where did you first meet him?'

  `Here.'

  C. B. raised his eyebrows. `I thought you bought this place only in 1949?'

  `That's so.' Beddows now seemed to have resigned himself to talking freely, and went on in a normal voice, `I'd been wanting to for a long time, but the stiff necked old bitch who owned the place wouldn't sell. Even after the war had reduced her to scraping in order to stay on here she still refused my offers; so I had to wait till she died. Her name was Durnsford the Honourable Mrs. Bertram Durnsford and I was her chauffeur from 1927 to 1931.'

  `I see; so it was while you were employed here as chauffeur that you first met the Canon?'

  `That's right. When I said I had known him for twenty years, it's really nearer twenty five; but to begin with it was only as a servant knows his mistress's visitors. He was a great chum of the old girl's, and from the time I took the place he was often here.'

  `Was she a witch?'

  `Yes. There's a lot of it still goes on in Essex. Parts of it are so isolated that modern influences are slower to penetrate than in most other places. She had been mistress here so long that she always thought of herself as one of the gentry; but she wasn't. She started life as daughter of the village witch and, so they say, put a spell on the young squire here to marry her. It's said, too, that as soon as she got tired of him she used a wax image to cause him to sicken and die. After that she acted the high mightiness and ruled the village with a rod of iron. She was over eighty when she died and more or less bedridden for the last few years; so she had lost much of her occult power and with it most of her money; but she still had enough power by such means to keep me from getting her out after she had refused my offers to buy.'

  `Why were you so keen to own The Grange?' John asked.

  `Sentiment,' came the unexpected reply. `I came here as a young man of twenty three. I er formed an attachment soon after I took the job, and one of the few really decent things I have got out of life are the memories of it. I wanted the place on that account. I suppose, too, the idea of owning the big house in which I had once been a servant appealed to my vanity. But it was wanting to live where she had lived that made me determined to have it.'

  `Let's get back to Copely Syle.' said C. B. `How did it happen that you got to know him more intimately than as one of your mistress's visitors?'

  Beddows gave a heavy sigh, then shrugged resignedly. `Well, since you insist, I suppose I had better give you the whole story from the beginning.'

  19

  The Saga of a Satanist

  After a moment Beddows started to talk in a flat, low monotone, more as if he were talking to himself than to them. He began

  `It can't be news to you that I'm a self made man. I've never sought to conceal it. I was born less than a dozen miles from here as the son of a farm labourer, and I started life myself as a farmer's boy. But for all that I was born ambitious. I soon made up my mind that two ten a week and work in all weathers wasn't good enough. Knowing about machines seemed to me the one way out; so instead of spending my pennies on the pictures and trashy novelettes, I bought the weeklies from which I could learn about the insides of motors. That way I picked up enough to get a job in a garage.

  `Later they let me drive one of their hire cars; then one of their customers, who was a doctor, took me on as his private chauffeur. I stayed with Doc for eighteen months, and while I was with him I attended evening classes at the Colchester Technical College. You see, by then I'd made up my mind to become an engineer. I got a lot out of those classes, but nothing like as much as I should have if I'd had more time for home study; and by the nature of things, a doctor's chauffeur is far harder worked than most. That's why I left him and came here. Mrs. Durnsford was already over sixty and didn't go out very much. In fact, sometimes during the winter months a whole week would pass without her using the car at all; so the job offered just the easy hours

  I wanted to go in for correspondence courses and study for exams.

  `For a year or so I did quite well in that way, then my thoughts were taken right off engineering. I don't propose to go into the details of what happened, but for a long time I never opened one of my books. As I told you just now, I formed an attachment for a certain person, and afterwards . . . well, afterwards I simply hadn't the heart to start work again.

  `It was while I was still in that state that I got involved with Hettie Weston. She was the parlourmaid here. Pretty young thing and the flighty type. She asked for trouble and she got it. If it hadn't been me, it would have been the next feller who came along. I didn't give a cuss for her, but she set her cap at me, and if ever a chap needed a warm blooded young woman to take him out of himself, I did. I bought it all right, and the next thing we knew was that the silly young bitch had let herself get in the family way.

  `Well, plenty of them do that in these country parts long before there's been any talk of marriage. If the feller is willing they make a go of it and put up the banns. If he's not, there are usually a few tears, but no harm done. The girl picks on another likely lad to go hedging and ditching with on her evenings off, and lands him with the kid. Second or third time lucky, and she usually gets some mug to the altar. That's what would have happened in Hettie's case if it hadn't been for the old woman.

  'Hettie spilt the beans to the mistress and I was put on the mat. I suppose I could have told her to go take a running kick at herself. If I had, the worst that could have happened was that I'd have lost my job and had a maintenance order made against me for seven and six a week. But I didn't. I was still in a state of not giving a damn wha
t happened to me, and believing that I had no future worth making a struggle for. You must add to that several other factors, one of which I was certainly not aware of at the time.

  `To start with, there was the hereditary angle. Youngsters of my class had allowed themselves to be dictated to for countless generations by old women in Mrs. Durnsford's position, especially when it seemed that moral right was on their side. Next, as a person she was pretty formidable. When those beady black eyes of hers bored into you, it wasn't easy to say “No”. Lastly, although I didn't realise it then, she knew all about me. She knew both how ambitious I had been, and what it was that had caused my ambitions temporarily to take a line that had nothing to do with engineering. It wasn't any high falutin' motive of wanting to see the right thing done by Hettie that made her row in as she did. It was the malice that was in her. From what she knew had gone before, she got a special kick out of getting me married to a parlourmaid and saddled with the sort of liabilities that make it near impossible for a young working man to rise above his station.

  `Anyhow, she bullied me into making an honest woman of Hettie and we settled down in the flat above the stables, where the Jutsons are now. It took a bit of time for me to realise what a muck I had made of my life; but in a young man ambition dies hard, and in me it started to stir again after the new experience of being married began to wear off. I somehow couldn't find the energy to take up my correspondence courses again, but I was subconsciously seeking a way out. Then, three nights before Ellen was born, it seemed as if it had been thrust right at me.

  `I'd been out doing a bit of poaching, and returned late. The curtains of one of the drawing room windows were not quite drawn, and through the chink I caught sight of a flicker that might have meant the place was on fire. I took a peep in, and what d'you think I saw? The flicker I'd seen was fire all right, as the room was lit only by a pile of logs blazing on the hearth. But all the furniture had been pushed back to the sides of the room, a lot of circles and figures had been drawn on the parquet, and in the middle of them stood my mistress and the Canon. Both of them were stark naked.

  `He must have been getting on for forty then, so he was already well past his youth and had a little pot. I found him comic rather than repulsive, but there was nothing the least funny about her. She was twenty years older and the scraggy kind. Her withered shanks and flabby, hanging breasts made her a horrible caricature of what a woman should be. You can imagine how weird they looked against the firelight, and how I stared. But after a minute it was not at them I was looking; it was at the thing that stood between them. I can only describe it as a sort of blacksmith's anvil, and belly up on it they had tied a live cat.

  `The cat didn't remain alive for long though. As I watched, the Canon produced a knife and slit its throat. Old Mother Durnsford caught the blood in the sort of chalice you see on the altar of a church. Of course, I know that it must have been stolen from one; but at the time all this made no more sense than if I'd found myself at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Still, this was clearly no tea party, as the next thing they did was to each drink some of the cat's blood.

  `The sight turned my stomach, so for a bit I missed seeing what they got up to after that. When I looked again they both had some clothes on. She was rubbing the chalk marks off the floor and he was pushing the furniture back into place. Knowing her reputation as a witch, I suppose I ought to have put two and two together, but somehow I didn't. It was catching them naked that was uppermost in my mind. I thought then that he was a proper clergyman, and that the business with the cat was some sort of sexual perversion, or that drinking cat's blood might be a way of making old people feel young again.

  `Anyhow, as far as I was concerned one thing stuck out a mile. Here was my opportunity to break out of the dead end in which I had landed myself. Setting up house with Hettie had cost me the hundred or so I had put by. Since we had been married I'd had little chance to start saving again, and I knew that once the baby arrived I'd have even less. By then I was twenty seven. Ten years had slipped by without my getting very far ten of the best years of my life and I didn't want to remain a chauffeur all my natural. Here was my chance to make a brand new start.

  `We may as well call a spade a spade. My mind instantly turned to blackmail. I reckoned that the Canon and the old woman were good for five hundred smackers between them, and that they'd pay that to keep my mouth shut. For a pound a week I could park Hettie and the baby on her parents. Then I'd go to London. Four hundred, eked out by taking night jobs in garages now and then, would see me through two years as a full-​time student at a technical college. Before I was thirty I'd emerge as a qualified engineer, capable of earning good money. It didn't take me long to work that out, or how to set about it.

  `They had to dispose of the body of the cat. I reckoned they wouldn't risk the stench that would fill the house if they burnt it on the drawing-​room fire; so all the odds were that the Canon would take it out to the furnace. I nipped round there and hid behind the boiler. Sure enough, a few minutes later in he comes, opens the furnace door, rakes up the coke a bit and pops in the dead pussy. The moment he had gone I fished the animal out. Its fur was a little singed, which showed that an attempt had been made to burn it, and its throat was slit from ear to ear; so it provided the evidence I needed to turn the heat on him.

  `Next morning I put it in an oyster-​barrel filled with brine, to preserve it, and hid the barrel in the loft. Then in the evening I cycled over to The Priory to have a little talk with the Canon. But I was told that he had gone to London and was not expected back for about a week. Two days later Hettie had her baby. As it happened I didn't have to call on the Canon after all, as the day he got back he came to see the old woman. Having seen him go into the house, I lay in wait for him in the garden until he came out. As he turned a corner of the shrubbery we came face to face. Nice as pie, he congratulates me on becoming a father and asks me what I would like for the child as a christening present.

  `I say, “Five hundred pounds in pound notes to be delivered before the end of the week at a place and time chosen by me.”

  `At that he gave a rather twisted grin, thinking it just a cheeky sort of joke. But when I told him what I knew, and how I meant to make the neighborhood too hot to hold him unless he paid up, his grin became even more twisted.

  `Of course he tried to bluster, and said that no one would believe me. Even when I told him I had got the body of the cat, he still maintained that proved nothing, as anyone might have killed and partially burnt it. But I was ready for that one. I told him that I had taken the furnace rake to a friend of mine who was a sergeant in the Colchester police, and asked him, just as a matter of interest, to see if he could get any finger prints from it. The prints were there all right and we had photographed them. So if I had to tell my story about the goings on at The Grange and he sued me for defamation of character, he would have to explain how his finger prints had got on the furnace rake in somebody else's back premises on the night in question.

  `I was lying about having a friend in the police; but he couldn't know that, and it sank him. He agreed to find the money in exchange for the body of the cat, and he asked me to come to his house that night to arrange when and where the exchange was to be made. I suspected a trap, but he pointed out that as long as I had the cat and the furnace rake, I had the whip hand of him; so I agreed to go.

  `That night he received me in his study, and after giving me a drink, asked me what I meant to do with the money when I had it. I saw no reason to conceal my plans; so I told him. When he had heard me out, he said, “You don't mind being separated from your wife and child, then?” and I replied, “Why should I? Hettie was forced on me against my will, and the child means nothing to me.”

  `He asked me, then, into what church I intended having the child baptised. The question seemed natural enough coming from a parson, as at that time I took him to be. I had been brought up C. of E, myself, but Hettie was Chapel; and in spite of her flightiness as a
single girl she thought a great deal of standing well with her own Chapel folk; so we'd been married Chapel and I took it for granted she'd want her brat christened there. I told the Canon how matters stood and he went on to talk about religion for a bit. Then he said

  ` “You know, Mr. Beddows, the little scene that you chanced to witness last week had nothing to do with sex. It was a religious ritual a sacrifice to a God far older than Christ, and one who was universally worshipped when the world was a much happier place than it is to day. He still exists, of course, since Gods cannot die; and he is still worshipped in secret by a few of us who understand his mysteries.”

  `At that, the local gossip about old Mother Durnsford being the daughter of a witch, and a witch herself, came back to me. It all fitted in, so I said, “I suppose you are talking about the Devil?”

  `He nodded; and as I've a first class memory for statements made to me, I can still recall pretty well word for word his reply, which was, “That is a name that was bestowed upon him in fear and opprobrium by the early ascetics, when they were still striving to win the nations over to the worship of the Jewish tyrant God, Jehovah; but he is more fittingly called the Lord of this World. In any case, while the God of the Christians offers nothing to His followers but the meagre possibilities of an austere heaven in a life to come, the God whom I serve rewards those who honour him with wealth and happiness here and now. There may or may not be a hereafter; but everything in this life is his to give. Even the Christian Church admits that; and it is only superstitious fear that prevents people from returning to the old faith. You should give it a trial, Mr. Beddows, for at little cost to yourself you could make an offering to my Master which would ensure his behaving most generously towards you.”

  `Naturally I didn't get what he was driving at, then; neither could I make up my mind if he was really in earnest about this old religion. His saying that the cat had been a sacrifice certainly had the ring of truth, and he didn't sound as if he was goofy; but all that about getting riches in this life was a bit too much to swallow. More to see what replies he would make than anything else, I began to question him about it. His answers seemed logical enough, but even so I couldn't bring myself to believe him. Then he asked me if I would like him to reveal my future.