Still, as my hair is unusually silky for its reddish colour and dead straight, it is apt to fall forward over my forehead and bother me when it gets too long; so every few weeks I kick myself into sending for the local clipper-wielder, and submit myself to his inartistic ministrations.
It is raining today, so as I have a clear morning in front of me I’ll polish off my account of that affair at Weylands. I see that I had got to the point where I had fallen asleep in the cottage while waiting for Julia and Uncle Paul to return.
I was woken by the sound of the sitting-room door opening with a rattle, then being swiftly shut again. The lights were still on but the fire had gone out, so I must have been asleep for a considerable time. I felt very cold, and shivered as I stood up. The memory of the night’s earlier events was just flooding back to me when I heard voices outside in the hall. Someone was muttering something, then Julia’s voice came to me quite distinctly as she said:
‘So that’s why the lights were on! What on earth can Toby be doing here? Thank goodness he’s asleep and didn’t see me like this. Quick, pull yourself together, now! It’s up to you to hold the fort, while I do something to my face.’
Instinctively I had moved towards the door, and she had scarcely finished speaking when I pulled it open. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of her back as she hurried into her bedroom, but I found myself looking straight at Uncle Paul.
He was leaning against the wall on the other side of the narrow hallway; and it was clear that Julia’s admonition, to pull himself together, had not been given without good reason. He was as drunk as an owl.
Uncle Paul must have been about thirty-seven then. He is a biggish man with red hair and a ‘Guards’ moustache, brushed stiffly up. He has a ruddy face and pale, rather poppy, blue eyes. Brains have never been his long suit, and he is a weak rather than a bad man. The ‘Demon Drink’, alas, has always been his failing, and it was the cause of most of the scrapes that he got himself into with my grandfather, when he was younger.
After he married Julia he took a pull on himself. At least, as she is the dominant partner I suppose she made him toe the line. But he continued to have lapses now and then, and it was by no means the first time that I had seen him when he had had one over the eight. Fortunately he is the friendly type of drunk; and as he had always been kind to me in a casual sort of way it made no difference to the mild affection I felt for him.
Bringing himself upright with a shove of his broad shoulders, he grinned at me and said: ‘’Lo, old man! How—how are you?’
‘I’m all right, thanks, Uncle,’ I replied, ‘but you’re looking a bit part-worn. You seem to have been making a night of it.’
‘That’s it,’ he hiccuped. ‘Li’le party.’
‘It must have been a pretty rough one,’ I smiled, as I took in the details of his dishevelled appearance. There were grease-stains down one of the lapels of his dinner-jacket, his collar was a crumpled rag, his bow tie had disappeared, and there were obvious marks of lipstick all round his mouth. I had never seen him in such a state when tight before.
‘That’s it; li’le party,’ he repeated. ‘Was a bit rough. Played Kiss-in-the-ring.’
I had no idea that the parents who were up for a visit indulged in either high jinks or childish games at the Club-house in the evenings; but when one is in the middle teens one is still constantly learning unexpected things about the behaviour of grownups, so I made no comment.
For a moment we remained silent, just smiling inanely at one another, then he said: ‘Lesh go into th’ sitting-room—have a drink.’
He had obviously had far more than he could carry already, but it was not my place to tell him so. Accordingly I stood aside and he lurched through the doorway. There were whisky, glasses and a syphon on a small side-table. Swaying slightly, he walked over to it and, with a deliberation that did not prevent him spilling some of the stuff, mixed himself a stiff peg.
Having gulped half of it, he muttered: ‘Tha’s better,’ then relapsed into another longish silence, during which he stared at the carpet.
At length he looked up and asked: ‘What you doin’ here thish time-o’-night? Wash game, old man?’
I had no intention of discussing the matter uppermost in my mind with Uncle Paul while he was in that condition; so I simply said: ‘I knew you and Julia were arriving this evening, so I thought I would slip over and see you. While I was waiting for you to come in I fell asleep in front of the fire.’
‘I shee,’ he nodded ponderously. ‘I shee. Well, here’s all th’ besht,’ and he swallowed the rest of his drink.
A moment later Julia came hurrying in. She had changed into a dressing-gown, and evidently done her best to put her face to rights; but I was much more shocked by her appearance than I had been by that of Uncle Paul.
Her dark eyes looked bigger than I had ever seen them, and her face was dead-white, so that the patches of fresh rouge stood out on her cheeks like the dabs of paint on those of a Dutch doll. Her full red lips were swollen excessively and broken in places, as though they had been savagely bitten, and a heavy coating of powder failed to hide an ugly scratch that ran from beneath her left ear right down across her throat.
‘Good Lord! What on earth has been happening to you?’ I exclaimed in alarm.
She did not kiss me, but bent her head and laid her icy cheek against mine for a second; then she said:
‘Toby, darling; don’t be upset. I’m quite all right, but we’ve had a frightful time tonight. Has Paul told you about it?’
‘Only that you had been hitting it up at a party,’ I muttered, ‘and that you played kiss-in-the-ring.’
‘Paul!’ she said sharply, turning to her husband. ‘Get up at once, and go to bed.’
My uncle had lowered himself into an armchair and closed his eyes; he was already half asleep. At the sound of her voice he blinked, lumbered to his feet, and with a vague wave of his hand by way of good night, walked unsteadily out of the room.
‘I’ve never seen him as tight as that before,’ I said, as he jerked the door to behind him.
‘No, thank goodness,’ Julia agreed, with a sigh. ‘He doesn’t often get really stinking. It’s a mercy, though, that he didn’t kill the two of us tonight. If I’d realised now far gone he was, I would never have let him drive the car.’
‘You had a smash, then?’
‘Of course! How else do you think I came to get my face in such a mess?’
‘I thought you had been down at the Club all this time.’
‘If Paul gave you that impression you must have misunderstood him. He is in no state to know what he is saying. We had a few drinks at the Club before we started, and by now he’s probably forgotten most of what happened after that.’
‘Oh, you poor darling!’ I cried, taking her hand. ‘Are you quite sure that you’re not badly hurt?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’m all right. He drove us into a ditch, and when I was thrown sideways I hit my mouth against something. I’ve got a few bruises, but nothing to worry about.’ Drawing me down on to the settee beside her, she went on:
‘As we’re coming up here, Paul thought that he would like to see some old friends of his who live about twenty miles away. We wrote and proposed ourselves for dinner. They wrote back and said they would love to have us if we didn’t mind a scratch meal at the end of a children’s party, as it was their eldest girl’s birthday. When we arrived the party was still in full swing. There were quite a number of other grown-ups there and we must have stood about drinking cocktails for a couple of hours at least.
‘It was ten o’clock by the time the children packed up, and close on eleven before we sat down to supper. Afterwards, somebody suggested that we should play the children’s games. What with our steady cocktail-drinking and the champagne at supper, we were all a bit lit-up by then, and just ripe to let ourselves go at any sort of nonsense. We played kiss-in-the-ring, blind-man’s-buff, postman’s knock, and all the rest of it.
‘You know how time flies when one is fooling like that, and I didn’t notice the amount that Paul was putting away. It wasn’t until we were in the car that I realised that he was carrying such a skinful, and, of course, he insisted that he was quite all right until he ran off the road and nearly turned the car over. We had a most frightful job getting it out of the ditch, and I’m feeling an absolute wreck; so be a dear and don’t keep me up longer than you can help. Just tell me why you came here tonight; then I must get to bed.’
Obviously it was no time to tell her about the thing that I had released from the tomb, and, anyhow, I did not feel much like a long heart-to-heart by then, as the room seemed to have got colder than ever since they had come in. I just told her I had only come over for a lark, then we went to see if the bed in the spare room was made up.
The curtains there had not been drawn, and to my surprise I saw that it was already morning. The sun was shining and the trees were casting long shadows in the early light. By it, poor Julia looked more haggard than ever; but she smiled at me and said something about it being a perfect May Day morn, then she left me.
By the greatest of luck I had instinctively grabbed up my attaché-case when I fled—as I should have been terrified of going back for it, even in broad daylight, yet afraid to leave it there in case someone found it, and that led to my being expelled—so I was able to put on my pyjamas and get some proper sleep.
I woke a little after ten, and on going into the sitting-room found one of the Club servants there, tidying up. There was a kitchenette in each bungalow and it was part of their job to cook breakfast on the premises for visitors; so I asked the woman to get me some. Then I telephoned the school to let them know where I was, in case they thought I had met with an accident, and had a bath.
Julia came in just as I was finishing my breakfast. She was looking slightly better, although she could not have had blacker shadows under her eyes if she had been out on the binge for a week, and it was evident that the car having run off the road had shaken her really badly. While she drank two large cups of tea in quick succession she gave me further details of the awful time they had had getting it out of the ditch. Apparently it had rained again in the middle of the night and the mud had absolutely ruined her evening clothes.
Uncle Paul was still sleeping it off, and she said that she did not mean to wake him until it was time to dress for lunch. That meant we had a good hour before us, and the sitting-room was now warm and cosy, so I launched out on an account of my own ordeal the previous night.
When I had done, Julia could offer no explanation. At first she made a half-hearted attempt to persuade me that I must have imagined it; but in the face of my positive conviction to the contrary, she was far too sympathetic a person to insist on that; and, eventually, she agreed with me that I must have released some horrible supernatural force by breaking open the grave.
We discussed if we ought not to try to do something about it; but the idea of getting a priest to exorcise the place would have been received at Weylands about as frostily as a tart at one of Queen Victoria’s tea parties; and even to mention the matter would have meant disclosing the fact that I had broken the one and only rule in the place; so we decided that we had better not say anything about it to anybody.
Unlike the affair of the burglar, there is no sequel to throw further light on the matter. Unlike that, too, it made a lasting impression on me. The first I had accepted as a natural fright, and the eager interests of childhood soon blanketed it in my mind; but that was far from being the case after my midnight fit of terror near the Abbey. For weeks afterwards I dreamed of it every few nights. I used to wake up moaning, struggling and bathed in a cold sweat. It was not till end of term came, bringing the excitements of the holidays, that those beastly dreams grew more infrequent and finally ceased altogether.
Yet I never forgot the feeling that contact with unseen evil gave me; and my reason for describing my experience at Weylands so fully is to make it quite clear that I cannot be mistaken now. In spite of the passing of the years I recognised it again instantly that first night, now just on six weeks ago, when I woke to find the full moon streaming in under the curtain and saw upon the band of light that abominable, undulating shadow.
Five times since then I have known the same awful sensation; a second time early in April, and four times early this month. Soon after the cessation of both bouts, when my nerves have had a chance to settle down again, I have debated with myself endlessly whether it can be some form of nightmare that afflicts me, or a type of periodic lunacy. If it were not for that earlier contact of mine with disembodied evil in the Abbey cemetery, I might still be hesitant about definitely rejecting both those theories. But I am now fully convinced that it can be neither. I am not suffering from nightmares, and I am not going mad. But I may yet be driven mad—if I am forced to remain here during another full moon and these Satanic attacks upon me develop again with renewed force.
Evening
Helmuth has just left me. The mystery of Julia’s silence is now explained, but in a manner that fills me with new distress and apprehension. He asked me if I had heard from her lately, and on my saying that I hadn’t, he said:
‘I don’t suppose you are likely to for a bit. I had a letter from your Uncle Paul today, in which he says that she was near having a breakdown from war-strain and her doctor has ordered her complete rest. So he got special permission from the security people for them to reside in the banned area on the west coast of Scotland, and a week ago he took her up to the house on Mull. Even if she feels up to writing, all letters coming out of the area are held up for ten days or more in the censor’s office; so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from her for another two or three weeks.’
Three weeks! A new moon is due on the 17th, and on the 25th she will enter the quarter in which she becomes such a menace to me. I had counted on Julia arranging for me to be moved from here long before that. What am I to do? How can I save myself? If only I could get back the full use of my legs for a single hour!
Wednesday, 13th May
I spent a restless night, worrying quite a bit about Julia; but, I’ll confess, as charity begins at home, that I was worrying a darn’ sight more about myself, and racking my brains for some possible means of getting away from Llanferdrack, now that there is no hope of her intervention.
I considered writing to Uncle Paul and my other Trustees, but if I don’t tell them the truth they are bound to reply that while the war is on I could not possibly be better situated than I am, with Helmuth to look after me and so well out of it all, down here; whereas if I do they are certain to think that the injury to my spine has now begun to affect my brain.
Of course that isn’t so; but Julia is the only person who would take my word for it. If I had had a nasty blow on the head at the time of the crash, I might be tempted to think that was the root of the trouble myself; but I didn’t. I never even lost consciousness.
I had just put paid to my Jerry—I can see the wisp of smoke now that suddenly issued from his aircraft—when I got old Steve’s warning that there was another of them on my tail. But it came too late. Next second I felt a frightful blow in the back, as though someone had coshed me with a rifle-butt low down on the spine. I tried to take evasive action, but for a reason that I didn’t even guess then my rudder-bar refused to function. Before I could grasp that my feet were no longer responding to the orders of my brain, the aircraft had got into a spin and was hurtling earthwards.
When I found that I couldn’t pull her out of it I decided that the time had come to bale out. The usual motions failed to produce the desired results, but it is not easy to co-ordinate one’s actions when one is being spun round like a pea in a top; so even then I did not realise the truth, and thought that it was some of my gear having got hitched up that prevented me from heaving myself free.
The last moments, while the earth seemed to be rushing up to smash me, were pretty ghastly, and I felt certain I was
for it. I remember the words of the song ‘so they scraped him off the tarmac like a pound of strawberry jam’ flashing grimly through my mind; but, by a miracle, the old kite plunged straight into the only big tree within a mile. Her engine broke away and crashed through the branches to the ground, but I was left up there with my lower half imprisoned in the buckled shell of her body. Some farm labourers had seen me crash and were already running to my rescue. They fetched a ladder and hauled me out from among the wreckage. I was still perfectly compos mentis and told them that I could climb down out of the oak on my own; but the moment they let me take my own weight my feet slithered along the branch and my legs folded up under me.
They only just managed to catch me as I fell, so that was really the nearest I came that day to breaking my neck. There are times now when I almost wish that I had, as my broken back has put an end for me to most of the things that are worth doing in life.
It was on the 10th of July that I crashed, and after that I spent eight months in various hospitals; but the doctors all reached the same conclusion in the long run. It seems that the Jerry’s bullet snipped a bit out of me that it is still beyond the art of medical science to replace. In the end the specialists broke it to me as gently as they could that there was nothing else they could do for me, and that there was little hope of my ever regaining the full use of my legs.
But there has never been the least suggestion that either the injury or the shock had in any way affected my brain. Personally, I am convinced that they did not, and that I am still perfectly sane. At least, I was when they brought me here in March and, apart from the events which caused me to start this journal, there has been nothing whatever since in my quiet invalid’s routine to upset my mind.
The Haunting of Toby Jugg Page 8