The Haunting of Toby Jugg (27 page)

In normal circumstances I should have handled the business much more tactfully; but the truth is that my nerves are in absolute shreds, so that I am hardly responsible for what I am saying, and my temper is as liable to snap as the over-taut string of a violin. But how could it be otherwise, seeing what I may have to face tonight?

Sunday, 31st May

I don’t think I can stand much more of this. If Helmuth’s object is to drive me mad, as I am convinced it is, he is well on the way to succeeding. What is more, he is starting now to collect the evidence which will later be put before the Lunacy Board in support of an application to have me certified.

He already had my letters to Julia, describing my ‘hallucinations’, and the fact that I attempted to escape from his ‘loving care’ in the middle of the night, with Deb; and now, after last night, he will be able to produce visual evidence that I was seen raving. I suppose that was largely my fault; but it was bound to happen sooner or later, and I expect he has been counting on an occurrence of that kind giving him a solid basis for his case.

As a matter of fact I very nearly broke down when Nurse Cardew and Taffy were about to leave me last night. I implored her not to take away my lamp; but she said that the danger of fire from my knocking it over was too great for it to be left at my bedside. So I retorted:

‘All right, then, put it out of my reach if you like, but at least leave it somewhere in the room.’

She was still a bit shirty from my having rubbed her up the wrong way before dinner, but I think it was more the influence
Helmuth has already gained over her that decided her to refuse me. With a shake of her head, she replied:

‘If I did you couldn’t put it out; and if you had to take five sleepers to get off last night you would never get off at all with a light burning in your room. Anyhow, after the way you made a fool of me over that I am certainly not going against Dr. Lisický’s instructions to please you.’

So that was that; and in utter misery I had to watch them go.

It was the night of the full moon and the day had been fine with hardly a cloud in the sky, so I knew that I must anticipate a maximum attack. For what seemed an age I alternately prayed and lay there with my brain whirling round in sick apprehension, then my heart began to hammer and the cold sweat broke out on my face. I turned my head, and there was the shadow of the Thing on the band of moonlight. It was crouching on the sill in the left-hand corner of the middle window, its round body pulsing horribly. The malefic force it radiated made my flesh creep, and the back of my neck began to prickle.

I found myself counting my heartbeats, and I had got up to eighty-nine when I suddenly caught the tapping noise that I first heard the beast make two nights before. I tried to go on counting, so as to shut out from my mind the rhythm of this tapping, but I couldn’t.

Again that infernal morse code translated itself in my brain into the small, clear, silvery voice, and it kept on reiterating: ‘You’ve got to give way. You’ve got to give way.’

Then the rhythm changed to that of the gently swinging pendulum of an old clock, which said: ‘Forget … Remember. Forget … Remember. Forget… Remember.’ And I knew as certainly as if the Brute had explained its intention that it was endeavouring to mesmerise me, so that I should accept some instruction into my sub-conscious, forget it, and then at a stated time remember and act upon it. I knew, too, that when the instruction came it would be on the lines that I must tell Taffy to open one of the windows looking on to the courtyard, before leaving me the following night.

In a moment of time all sorts of thoughts jostled for place in my terrified brain: Could the Horror hypnotise me against my will?
Why had it left out this all-important middle stage of the process two nights before? Was it, perhaps, as much mentally blind and fumbling as it seems to be physically? How could I best attempt to thwart its evil purpose? What means could I employ to stop that sinister little silvery voice from impinging on my mind?

Of all those questions the last was that which called most urgently for an immediate answer. While the sweat trickled in icy rivulets down my face and I wrung my hands together in an agony of fear, I strove to concentrate upon it.

Suddenly, in the very midst of a groan that broke from me at my impotence, the answer came. It is difficult to catch any remark addressed to one in a room where a person is singing, and next to impossible to do so if one is singing oneself. By roaring out a song I could drown that small, insidious, evil voice that uttered its phrases over and over again in my own mind.

I suppose it was the fact that I had been praying so hard which instinctively led me to launch out with a hymn. I started with ‘Rock of Ages’, but the tempo seemed so slow and dirge-like that I quickly switched to ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’.

The effect was instantaneous. The voice was smothered and the Thing out in the courtyard knew it. From having remained quite still it suddenly leapt into its devil-dance. Quivering with rage, hate and fury, it sprang up and down, and hurled its heavy body against the window-panes.

But my triumph was short-lived. The only Church services that I have attended since I was a child were the compulsory parades to which I was detailed during my early months in the R.A.F., so I could remember only the first verse and chorus of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. I sang them over three times while I frantically searched my mind for another hymn, but I could think of nothing. Then, as I began to falter, the tapping came through again.

‘Stop that! Stop that! Stop that!’ it commanded angrily.

In desperation, rather than fall silent, I changed from the sacred to the profane, and began to roar out ‘There is a Tavern in the Town’. From that I ran through half-a-dozen old favourites that had always figured in our repertoire when, in those now far-off days, we had shouted ourselves hoarse grouped round a piano after guest-night dinners in the Mess. With one thought only in
my mind—to keep on singing—I made no attempt to pick the songs, but sang them one after another as they came into my head; so it is hardly surprising that such pieces as ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘We’ll Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ became interspersed with bawdy choruses like ‘A German Officer Crossed the Rhine’, and ‘She was Poor but She was Honest’.

I was bawling out ‘The Harlot of Jerusalem’ at the top of my voice, when the door suddenly was flung open. There stood Helmuth, holding a lamp aloft in his right hand, and beside him Nurse Cardew. Both of them were in their dressing-gowns.

No doubt from fear, strain and effort I was as near off my rocker as makes no difference at the time. Anyhow, the sheer impetus of the song and the paramount necessity of continuing to drown that evil voice caused me to carry on for a couple of lines. It was only when Helmuth shouted at me: ‘Toby! Stop singing that filthy song—instantly!’ that I realised the significance of the chorus I had been yelling.

At that second I caught Nurse Cardew’s glance and, goodness knows why, but a quick flush of shame ran through me. In this day and age it takes more than a few bawdy words to shock most girls, and as a trained nurse she must have heard plenty. All the same, just for a second, I felt as though I had been caught out doing something quite frightful.

But the feeling had passed in an instant, submerged by the far more powerful causes for agitation which were still making me sweat and tremble. With my head craned up to stare at my visitors over the foot of the bed I thrust out my arm and pointed to the strip of moonlight.

‘Look! Look!’ I cried. ‘D’you call that an hallucination?’

Then I swivelled my glance to follow my own pointing finger. With a groan I let my head fall back on to my pillow. The shadow was no longer there.

Helmuth’s voice came, with the false sadness of crocodile’s tears in it. ‘This is a tragic business, Nurse. It was lucky that I heard the poor boy and fetched you. I’m afraid he has been suffering from something worse than a bad dream, and that we have real grounds to fear for his sanity.’

At that I went off the deep end. I called him a dirty, lying,
hypocritical bastard, and every other name that I could think of. For a good two minutes or more I raved and shouted at him, and their efforts to check me were in vain.

People with red hair are said to have violent tempers, and mine can be a pretty hot one if I once let myself go. When Helmuth set down the lamp and came near the bed I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him to me. If I could have got my hands on his throat I really believe that I would have killed him. But Nurse Cardew came up on my other side and gave me a sharp slap in the face.

I was so astonished that I let go of Helmuth, stopped shouting, and turned to stare at her.

‘That’s better,’ she said quietly. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such a scene, and attacking Dr. Lisický. You don’t want to be put into a straitjacket, do you?’

‘Oh come, Nurse! Please don’t suggest such a terrible thing,’ Helmuth protested. Then, after a second, he added: ‘But, loath as I am to do so, I fear I shall have to call a mental specialist in if he goes on like this.’

Her remark, and his right on top of it, sobered me up completely. I cannot believe that she is a party to Helmuth’s plot—as yet, at all events—so her mention of a straitjacket could only have been made spontaneously as a direct result of seeing me, as she evidently thought, behaving like a madman. It flashed on me then that Helmuth must have been waiting for something like this to happen, and had deliberately brought her along so that later he would be able to call her as an eye-wintess. By letting fly at him I had played right into his hands.

With an effort I collected my scattered wits and did the little that could be done to repair the position. I said:

‘I’m sorry, Nurse. I shouldn’t have used such language in front of you; but, believe it or not, I have very good grounds for losing my temper with Dr. Lisický. For weeks past I have been sleeping abominably badly in this room, and again and again I have asked him to move me to another. Since he flatly refuses to do so I hold him responsible for my nightmares.’

‘There is nothing wrong with this room,’ she replied coldly, as she began to remake my pillows. ‘It’s large and light and airy, and most invalids would consider themselves lucky to have such a
beautiful apartment to live in. Since you suffer from nightmares you would have them just as badly anywhere else; and it is very wicked to get such horrible ideas about people who are doing their best for you. Now, if I give you two triple bromides, will you promise to behave yourself and try to get off to sleep again?’

As further argument seemed futile, I said ‘Yes’; then, as soon as I had drunk the draught, Helmuth picked up the lamp and having wished me better sleep for the rest of the night, they left me.

But the night’s battle was not over. Within five minutes of their having gone, the cold came again, and I had a sudden empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. One glance at the band of moonlight was enough. There was the shadow back where it had been before, and the horrid, insistent tapping started once more.

After that I am not quite clear what really happened. I can recall praying again, sweating anew with funk, and saying choruses and nursery-rhymes over to myself in an effort to shut out the silvery voice. The struggle seemed to last for an eternity, and the frightful thing is that I have no idea how far the Horror succeeded in dominating my sub-conscious before the bromides took effect, and I drifted off into a sort of coma—or rather a nightmarish, hag-ridden sleep.

This morning I feel, and look, like a piece of chewed string, Nurse Cardew seemed quite shocked at my appearance, but she puts it down to my having over-excited myself last night; and when I started to tell her about Helmuth’s refusal to have the blackout curtain lengthened, and to let me have my radio beside my bed, she wouldn’t listen to me. It is clear that he has already completely won her over, and she thinks that my requests are inspired solely with a view to making trouble.

What will happen tonight, God alone knows; and I can now place my hope only in Him. If the Devil in the courtyard did succeed in hypnotising me, the odds are that I shall become subject to a blackout sometime this evening, and ask either Taffy or Nurse Cardew to open that window after the curtain has been drawn, then come out of my trance without realising what I have done.

If that happens I have no illusions about my fate. The Horror will slither in and across the floor; one swift spring and it will be on the bed, wrapping its filthy tentacles round me in a ghastly
embrace. By the time my screams bring help it will be too late. They really will find me a raving lunatic.

Later

I believe my desperate prayers for help have been answered in the nick of time. I cannot tell for certain because, being Sunday, Taffy has the afternoon off, so I have not yet had a chance to tackle him. But an entirely unforeseen event has brought me new hope, and I have been hard put to it to conceal the intense excitement I am feeling from Nurse Cardew.

Indirectly I owe this lifeline which seems almost within my grasp to the great raid on Cologne. Last night Bomber Command went out in force—in far greater force than most people would believe possible. They sent a thousand aircraft against one objective, and at a guess I would not have thought that we could have put half that number in the sky. It makes a landmark in the war, and its effect on the city must have been too frightful to contemplate.

All the same, I would rather have been there, and taken my chance as the bombs rained down, than as I was, lying on my back here sweating with terror under the baleful influence of the Evil that is hunting me.

But that is beside the point. It was thinking about this giant R.A.F. raid that recalled to my mind the official letter Helmuth gave me when he brought me the one from Uncle Paul on Thursday. I was so put out by Uncle Paul’s reply that I did not even open the other; I just pushed it into a drawer of my bedside table and forgot all about it. But this morning I remembered it, and on opening the envelope I found that it was from the Air Ministry and contained various papers, including a cheque for £147 10
s.
5
d.