Authors: Dennis Wheatley
In a succession of violent swerves he backed the car until it came level with her, then demanded: ‘Where in heck d’you think you’re going?’
‘To the village,’ she replied, concealing her anger and disappointment with a nervous smile.
‘For why?’ His black eyes were glittering and his voice terse.
Defensively she retorted, ‘What do you think? To buy a few things, of course. It’s all very well for you; you’ve everything you want in the house. But I haven’t even a toothbrush of my own, or make-up things; except for the powder compact and lipstick in my bag. If I’m to stay with you I don’t mean to be reduced to looking like a drab.’
‘You’ve gotta tongue. You should have used it, and I’d have had them gotten for you. I said you were to stay put, didn’t I?’
‘You’ve no need to worry. I specially chose the quietest hour of the day when no one was about. Except for two labourers in a field I haven’t seen a soul.’
‘You would have, if you’d made the village. A quarter of an hour back I had a hunch you’d quit the maison: so I did a quick overlook and saw you beating it along the road. Get in.’
There was no alternative; so she got in and in stony silence he drove her back to the house. Following her in he waved a great hand towards the stairs and said: ‘Get on up to the
Schlafzimmer.’
Now pale with apprehension as she wondered what he
meant to do with her, she went up to the bedroom. Two minutes later he joned her there carrying a largish square box covered with imitation leather. Setting it down on a chair he scowled at her and snapped, ‘Get your clothes off.’
With mounting terror she obeyed; then, trembling a little as she stood in front of him, she began to stutter further excuses.
Ignoring them he suddenly shot out a hand. At the level of his own shoulder his outspread fingers ploughed through her hair. Suddenly they closed, so that the hair they grasped became a thick fistful. With a violent gesture he flung her sideways. She staggered and would have fallen but he wrenched her back. At the tug on her hair she let out a scream of pain. Grabbing at his wrist she strove to free herself but his grip was fast. Still holding her by the hair he flung her first to one side then the other, let her fall to her knees then jerked her upright, let her fall again, then dragged her screaming half across the room and back.
Releasing her and stepping away, he said: ‘Treatment number one for judys who disobey orders in the red-light dives. Way up on beatings. Doesn’t mark ‘em and spoil their appearance for the customers. There’s treatments two and three. Best not go walking again, honey. Get into bed and stay there. I’ll be seeing you.’
As he turned on his heel and left her, she collapsed on the bed. The hair on her forehead was wet with sweat and the top of her head one terrible ache where for several moments her scalp had had to take the weight of her whole body. After a while, still sobbing, she crept between the sheets and lay there in abject misery for what seemed an endless time.
Actually it was about two hours, then the door opened and he came in again. Putting down a big parcel he had with him, he leant over her and said abruptly, ‘Sit up.’
‘You brute!’ she flared, cowering further away from him under the bedclothes.
‘Sit up,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll not hurt you this time.’
Doubting him, but not daring to refuse, she levered herself
up into a sitting position. Her head was still aching intolerably where the hair had been almost torn from it, but when she instinctively put up her hands to defend herself, he took them both and pushed them down to her sides.
‘Not a move, now,’ he ordered. Then, while muttering some gibberish under his breath, with the index finger of his left hand he made the sign of the reversed swastika on the top of her head. As though by magic – and, indeed, it was by magic-the pain eased then faded away completely.
‘Thanks,’ she sighed, her eyes wide with wonder. ‘Oh, thank you! But why did you have to be so brutal?’
‘Teach you not to try to run out on me.’
‘I wasn’t,’ she lied.
‘Can that! I know you were. I picked it up from your vibrations. What’s been eating you? You get plenty kick out of being my squaw, don’t you?’
Knowing she must humour him, she raised a smile. ‘Yes, of course, lots. You are a wonderful lover.’
‘Then why the yen to quit?’
Swiftly she searched her mind for some reason that would sound plausible, yet not offend or make him angry. After a moment inspiration came to her, and she hedged. ‘I didn’t want to really. It was not until I was walking along the road that the idea suddenly came into my head. You see, I’d been looking forward tremendously to my initiation and on Saturday night, but for you, I’d have been made a Sister of the Ram. Don’t think I’m not grateful to you for having saved me from that beast Ratnadatta. I am. But I do want to be intiated and I can’t be until I’m back in London. I felt sure you wouldn’t be willing to let me go; so I was toying with the idea of going while I had the chance. That was the thought wave of mine that you must have picked up.’
‘Well, now,’ he smiled, ‘so that’s how it was. Why in heck didn’t you say so then, instead of giving me all that gup about wanting to buy beauty-parlour goods?’
‘But I did want to. That’s all I started out to do.’
Turning away, he picked up the parcel, threw it on the
bed and said: Take a look at that lot. Dames I’ve had here as houseguests before have known they were coming and brought their own muck. I oughta have realised you were shy of all the aids.’
Evidently he must have gone into Cambridge as the parcel contained a variety of the most expensive creams, lotions, powders, shampoos and scents, which could never have come from a village shop. As she thanked him for this generous present he said: ‘I don’t go for nightwear, either for myself or dames, but you’ll want undies, nylons, mules and frocks. Just jot down the old vital statistics for me tomorrow and you can have all you wish.’
She thanked him again and while she was still examining the packets and bottles he went on thoughtfully, ‘’Bout your initiation. You don’t have to go to London for that. I run a Lodge for some of my airforce boys down here. It’s only if happen I’m in London on leave, or for top ceremonies, that I check in with old Abaddon’s crowd. Most Saturdays I do High Priest for my own set up. And I’ve this forfeit on my neck. That entails a sacrifice. Seeing you’re so set on losing no time in becoming a Sister, I guess I’ll make my blood offering come Saturday and initiate you myself.’
Her heart sank at his words, and sank still further as he added in a slightly reluctant tone, ‘It’ll mean loaning you for a while to some of my boys, but there’s no avoiding that. Still, wouldn’t be right for me to stand in your way of becoming a full-blown witch. I’ll get a pay-off afterwards, though. You’ll be qualified to act as my assistant in some private magics I’ve a mind to undertake. Two members of the cult always get better results than one.’
Avoiding his eyes she continued to finger the bottles, miserably conscious that she had again overplayed her hand, and so now had fresh cause for dread. She could only pray that before Saturday some unforeseen occurrence would enable her to escape the threatened ordeal.
The evening and night they passed together differed very little from that which had preceded it but, in the morning
when they were called, before going into the bathroom he pressed a switch at the side of the square black box he had brought up to the bedroom the previous afternoon. Mary was still dozing when his voice issued from the box. Harshly it commanded: ‘Get your clothes off!’
Sitting up she stared at it. She had heard of, but never seen, a tape recorder. As she listened she realised that that was what the box must be and that it was now playing back the sounds it had registered in the room while she had been receiving punishment for her attempt to escape. She heard again her own terrible screams and pleas for mercy, then his voice again, followed by her moans and sobs as she had collapsed upon the bed. The sounds brought flooding back to her the memory of the agony she had suffered, and she shuddered afresh.
When he returned from his shower, he grinned at her and said: ‘Just a reminder, honey. Don’t try anything you wouldn’t like me to know about while I’m on the job today.’
‘I won’t,’ she assured him quickly. ‘I’ve no wish to leave here. I’m enjoying every moment of it.’
‘Some moments,’ he agreed, his grin becoming a little twisted. ‘But yesterday evening I had a feeling that you’d something on your mind. A looker like you couldn’t have been running solo before I snatched you. Maybe it’s that you’ve a boy-friend in London that you’re getting boiled up to be back with. Guess I’d better fix you proper, so you won’t land yourself in no more pain and grief.’
Coming over to her he took her face between his two great hands. His eyes held her like magnets for a minute, then they seemed to grow very large and she heard him say: ‘Repeat after me, “I’ll not put a foot outside this house except with that big bastard Wash”.’
Steeling herself to appear willing, she said the words not once but, at his order, three times; then he released her.
Later in the day she resolved to test the strength of the spell he had put upon her. Having waited until Jim was out of the way she went to a door at the far end of the hall that
led to the garden. Opening it she looked out across a lawn to a group of trees; then she told herself that she was going to walk over to them. But she could not. The hypnotic suggestion that he had implanted in her mind held her fast. Strive as she would she could not lift a foot to step out over the door sill.
In the hall there was a telephone and it had extensions in both the sitting-room and the bedroom. She had already thought of trying to get through by one of them to Colonel Verney, and now she considered that possibility again. She actually got as far as lifting the receiver in the sitting-room, but as the dialling tone sounded quickly put it down again. Since her absent captor had so swiftly and accurately become aware of her intentions the previous afternoon it seemed certain that his highly developed psychic sense would again warn him that she was about to betray him. She was no longer capable of even leaving the house. If he returned imbued with the belief that she had been endeavouring to bring about his arrest it was quite on the cards that he might kill her. The risk was too great to take.
She then searched the room for a book in the hope that it would take her mind off her wretched situation, but apparently the telephone directory was the only book in the house. Too depressed even to listen to the radio, for the remainder of the afternoon she abandoned herself to miserable forebodings about the next stages of this seemingly bottomless pit of afflictions into which, by her own actions, she had plunged herself.
Her gargantuan host returned much later than he had the day before, and the reason for his lateness was apparent when he had Iziah – a third servent boy who did the rough work and serviced his car – bring in a great pile of cardboard boxes. They contained at least a hundred pounds’ worth of lingerie and as Mary inspected it, being human, she could not help feeling temporarily cheered up.
Confronted with this sort of thing she found it impossible to hate Wash wholeheartedly, and felt more than ever that, as he attracted her physically, she must endeavour to put
all other thoughts about him out of her mind, and play up to him in the hope that when she had spent a few more nights with him he might relax his restriction on her leaving the house, or tire of her and send her back to London.
It was next day, Wednesday, that in the evening they talked for quite a while about the H-bomb and the chances of a Third World War. The subject arose through her having asked him what type of planes he had at his Station and his telling her that he commanded a squadron of giant bombers that could carry enough nuclear explosive in one mission to blow the whole of Moscow off the map.
‘Should it ever have to be, let’s hope they don’t blow us off the map first,’ she commented.
‘No fear of that,’ he asserted. ‘Leastways, not unless some guy on their side goes crackers.’
‘If your right about that we’ve little need to fear an atomic war at all, then.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Time may come when Uncle Sam decides to pull a fast one.’
She stared at him in amazement. ‘Surely you don’t mean that America would ever attack Russia without warning?’
‘Could be,’ he shrugged. ‘Got to be realistic. Take a look at the world situation. For years past now the Soviet’s been beating us to it all along the line. Uncle Sam’s policy of shelling out dollars to sitters on the fence has got him nowhere. Blacks, browns, yellows take our money with one hand and aircraft, tanks and guns from the Kremlin with the other. Meantime Soviet agents and their buddies in these Afro-Asian countries riddle their administrations like maggots in a cheese. Whenever it suits, the boys in Moscow pull a string and one of these little nations blows up. The Great Panjandorum and the feudal types, who’ve been playing along with the West so as to keep their hooks on their bank rolls, are bumped; and there’s another chunk of territory in the Communists’ bag. The ring’s closing all the time, and as it closes the West is losing markets. The Kremlin can put the black on the countries its nominees control to buy Russian. Add to that Soviet production being on the
up-and-up, and their labour only what they’ve a mind to pay it, they’ll soon be pricing us out of Europe and Latin America. And there’s one thing folk back home won’t stand for. That’s reduction of their living standard. What’s the answer. Ask yourself?’
Mary shook her head. ‘I don’t believe any United States Government would ever launch a world war without provocation.’
‘Provocation huh! They’ll have plenty. The Kremlin hands it out every day. And democratic Governments aren’t free agents. The White House is under pressure from our industrial tycoons all the time. As unemployment mounts they’ll be able to turn the screw. If it comes to war or the bread line they’ll have the ordinary folk behind them. The Russians will find that they’ve played at brinkmanship once too often and the big shots in the Pentagon will be told to press the button. That’s how it might go, and sooner than you think.’