Read The Haunting of Toby Jugg Online
Authors: Dennis Wheatley
Later
This discovery, that Helmuth must have been aware of the Thing’s existence before myself, opens up the most appalling abyss of treachery, and possibilities which it is horrible to contemplate.
It infers that he put me in this room next to the courtyard, and had the blackout curtains made six inches shorter, on purpose; that in a dozen different ways he is wilfully facilitating the attacks; that he cannot be a sceptic, as I always believed, but accepts the existence of evil occult forces and is gloating over the terror that they inspire in me.
Perhaps, even, he has great knowledge of them, as he has of so many queer subjects? Perhaps he has some control over this evil entity? Perhaps—yes, perhaps it is he who has conjured it up?
This is ghastly! It has become suddenly and appallingly clear that he must be deliberately plotting my destruction.
In view of the mental earthquake that I sustained yesterday, it is somewhat surprising to be able to record that I had an excellent night. Perhaps that was due to my brain having become addled
with fatigue from straining to find answers to so many new conundrums; but usually that kind of mental tiredness leads only to restless, unrefreshing sleep. I think it more likely that I owe my good night to subconscious relief at the knowledge that I am up against a human enemy.
Perhaps I am being a bit premature in relegating the Thing to second place; and I certainly do not mean to imply that I would rank it lower than the most evil man ever born of woman, when it is actually present.
What I am getting at is that I now know Helmuth to be at the back of this horrible business. Whether he just found out about the Thing haunting the courtyard—as it may have done for centuries—and decided to place me in its vicinity, or whether he is in some way responsible for its appearance, I have no idea. But I do know that he is deliberately detaining me here and exposing me to its attacks. Therefore it is him that I have to fight; and he is only a man like myself—except that he has the advantage of having two sound legs and a far better brain.
In a human conflict there is always a sporting chance that the weaker party may come out on top; although the fact that he has succeeded in isolating me makes me terribly aware that the odds are now pretty heavy against my being able to save myself from—well, something that even to think of makes me break out into a sweat.
Why Helmuth should wish to expose me to such a diabolical fate is entirely beyond my comprehension. I have never done him the least ill; on the contrary, his association with myself and my family has brought him comparative affluence, and he must have had the best possible reasons for believing that his position was as secure as anything could be in these uncertain times.
If I ever get a say in the matter it will be so no longer. Even if he was in complete ignorance of the Thing, he would still be guilty of the most brutal callousness in refusing my requests—to be moved to another room, to have the blackout curtain lengthened, to let me have a lamp or my radiogram beside my bed, to get me a torch or have my telephone mended. What the hell is he here for, anyway?
Of course, since quite early in the war he has had the job of
managing the Llanferdrack estate; but from the time I was brought here his first duty was to look after me, and see that I was made as comfortable as possible.
He seems to have forgotten that he is only an employee, and still liable to be sacked. But is he? After all, he was placed in charge here by the Trustees, and it is quite certain that I could not sack him—or get him sacked. At least, not unless I could put up such a hell of a strong case that it would completely destroy the faith that Julia and Uncle Paul have in him—and even that might not be enough, since he managed to get appointed as one of the Trustees himself, after old Wellard died in 1939.
Why, I wonder, am I now considering him in relation to the post he fills—which is virtually that of my Guardian—and realising for the first time since I arrived here how lamentably he has carried out its functions? It can only be because my eyes have suddenly been opened and I am thinking of him in an entirely new light.
I feel quite ashamed of myself when I think of my normal unquestioning subservience to him, and I still don’t fully understand its continuance now that I am grown up. The habit of years is mainly responsible, I know, but looking back on some recent episodes, and regarding them dispassionately, I believe there is something more to it than that. The unwinking stare of those queer tawny eyes of his, when he announces a decision, may have something to do with it. I am sure that he uses them as a vehicle for transmitting his will. Perhaps the answer is that he has secured my acquiescence to his wishes for all these years by holding me under a mild form of hypnosis.
If that it so, it is a game that two can play. Squadron-Leader Cooper, the R.A.F. doctor at Nether Wallop, told me that I had hypnotic eyes; and just for the fun of it he tried me out in the Mess one night. He had been a psychiatrist before the war, so knew the drill, and some of the successes he achieved were quite remarkable. I did not get very far, but in two instances I succeeded in putting chaps into a light sleep and got them to do simple things; and afterwards they swore that they had not known what they were up to.
This is worth thinking about. I don’t suppose for a moment
that I could challenge and defeat Helmuth’s will; but practice might strengthen my powers of resistance; and with so much at stake I should be crazy not to try out any conceivable weapon that I may have in my sadly limited armoury.
But I have been getting off the track a bit. Whether Helmuth has performed his
in loco parentis
function as my Guardian well or ill is now entirely beside the point. For some reason that I do not pretend to understand, he has suffered a ‘sea change’ from my aloof and cynical mentor to my secret, implacable enemy.
I am not quite certain that I am not mad, but it seems on the cards that he may be. No one who knows him would question the brilliance of his mind, and it is said that only a hair-line separates genius from madness. Perhaps two-and-a-half years of seclusion here, with no one of his own kind to talk to, have led to his indulging in the sort of long periods of morbid introspection that sometimes drive people over the edge.
Anyhow, whether he is mad or sane, I have got to get out of his clutches somehow. If I could get a letter to Uncle Paul I could make an official request that he and the other Trustees should come here to see me on business, then when they arrived have a show-down. That would be the hell of a risk to take, as I have not a shred of evidence against Helmuth, and unless I could trick him into making some stupid admission I should be laying myself open to their deciding that I ought to be put in a nut-house. Anyway, it is not worth even considering for the moment, as he would be just as certain to intercept any letter I wrote to Uncle Paul as he would another to Julia.
If only I had a doctor visiting me regularly I could try getting at him to pull a fast one over Helmuth, by ordering my removal to a local nursing home. But I haven’t. Apart from the injury to my spine, my health is excellent; so there has been no occasion since I arrived here to call the local sawbones in, and I don’t even know his name. The specialists in London declared that nothing further could be done for me, except to continue the massage, so Helmuth said it seemed a waste of time and money to drag some country G.P. up here to look at me once a week; and, little realising how glad I might be later to have someone like that on tap. I agreed.
Reconsidering the matter, I am inclined to wonder if the present arrangement, by which I am to be revetted by a specialist two or three times a year, really is enough; and if I ought not to have a local man keep a watching brief over my case. It looks as if the present set-up is another item in Helmuth’s plan to isolate me; anyway I am certain that he would not agree to any alteration of it now.
Of course I could say that I had ear-ache, or something, and insist that the local man be called in. But if I did Helmuth would make a point of being on hand in the role of ‘anxious Guardian’ during the doctor’s visit; so I would have no chance to talk to him in private and beg him to get me away from here.
It now seems all too damnably clear that I cannot hope to bring any influence to bear on Helmuth from outside which will force him to accept my removal; so the only remaining possibility is to take the law into my own hands and get away one night without his knowledge.
But that is utterly impossible without assistance, and the devil of it is that there is no one here of whom I can make a confidant, or trust to help me. Both Deb and Taffy are obviously scared stiff of Helmuth, and I rarely see any of the other servants. Great-aunt Sarah’s establishment is run separately from ours and she has her own dining-room, so I have scarcely exchanged a word with that gawky old stick Miss Nettelfold, who acts as her housekeeper-companion. My few friends are all up to their necks in the war, so none of them are able to come all the way down here to Wales to see me; and I know nobody locally, so I never have any visitors. Even if I could get hold of one of the servants I am sure they would not dare to aid in my escape. They would be much too scared of Helmuth and the certainty that they would lose their jobs afterwards.
Of course, if I were in a position to make it really worth somebody’s while to get me into a car, or even wheel me down to the station in the small hours so that I could catch the early-morning train, that would put a very different light on my chances. If I had fifty pounds with which to tempt Taffy I’m pretty sure that I could get him to play. But Helmuth pays all my bills for me and, as he pointed out when we arranged about that soon after I
arrived here, an invalid has no use for ready money; so I haven’t even fifty pence.
How absurdly ironical that is, seeing that I am one of the richest men in England. At least, I shall be if I am still alive and sane on the 20th of June next—when I reach the age of twenty-one.
I wrote nothing yesterday, as I spent a good part of the day reading over what I have so far written. It seems an awful woffal, without any proper sequence, and practically nothing about who I am or how I came to be associated with Helmuth.
Of course, I started these notes solely with the idea of trying to get certain things clear in my own mind; but, on finding that scribbling down my thoughts just as they arose helped to keep them off the ‘horror’, I began to let myself ramble on about this and that. Then I began to think of this script as a sort of personal testament that I hoped would reach Julia if anything happened to me. But I see that I have covered pages and pages with stuff that she already knows about—which seems a pointless thing to have done. Still, I am not sorry about that now, as a new theory to account for what is happening here occurred to me last night; and, in view of that, this journal may yet serve a different and more practical purpose. If it does, most of what I have so far written will not, after all, have been a waste of time.
My new line of thought inclines me to believe that Helmuth is not mad, but either on his own account or in association with others has hatched a diabolical plot—the object of which is to drive me insane.
I have not a tittle of evidence to support this new theory, but it is, I believe, an axiom that the basis of all crime is motive and opportunity and both are present in my case.
It was rereading the last paragraph I wrote on Thursday that gave me this idea. There is more than a grain of truth in the old saying ‘Money is the root of all Evil’, and in my life and sanity are vested a great fortune.
Should anything prevent my coming into my inheritance, at the
end of next month, there are quite a number of people who would benefit. Not directly, perhaps, but by continuing to enjoy the control of my grandfather’s wealth, and all the opportunities that gives for amassing riches themselves. Therefore it is by no means inconceivable that one, or more, of them would like to ensure that I shall never assume the reins of power in the vast commercial Empire that old Albert Jugg built up.
I do not fear murder, because scientific crime investigation has made it extremely difficult to get away with murder in these days. The sudden death of anyone so potentially rich as myself would be certain to arouse widespread comment in the press. A flock of reporters would arrive to get the story. Each of them would question everybody here in the hope of picking up some ‘human interest’ line that their colleagues had missed; and they are a bright lot of boys. If one of them tumbled on the least suspicious circumstance it would result in Scotland Yard being tipped off to look into matters. Besides, Julia would call the police in at once if there were the smallest thing to suggest that my death had been due to foul play. So I do not believe that any secret enemies I may have would dare to risk it.
An even stranger argument against it is that my death would result in the dissolution of the estate. Great sums would pass to the nation and to various charities; some individuals would benefit, of course, but Helmuth is not among them; and most of the other Trustees would lose on balance, because once the estate was wound up they would cease to enjoy their present lucrative and powerful stewardships.
On the other hand, should I become insane, those who are now responsible for handling the Jugg millions will firstly escape being called upon in a few weeks’ time to give an account of the uses to which those millions have been put during my minority and, secondly, continue in undisputed control of them for as long as I remain a candidate for a straitjacket.
Once I was certified it would mean a life-sentence. It is said to be difficult to get a chit from the Board of Lunacy, but it must be a darn’ sight more difficult to get the chit rescinded. If I am right, and there is a conspiracy to put me in a loony-bin, one can be
quite certain that, in the event of its coming off, the conspirators will find it an easy wicket to prevent my getting out again.