The Irish Witch

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Where is Susan?’

  ‘In another temporarily furnished room like this, also on this floor but on the other side of the castle.’

  ‘Could you take me to her?’

  ‘Yes. No-one will be about at this hour, and she is not locked in. Katie is confident that both of us are too frightened of the curse she would put upon us if we tried to escape.’

  ‘Very well, then. Take me to Susan. If I can get her out, I’ll take you too.’

  ‘Oh, thanks be to God!’ Jemima gasped. ‘May He forever bless you!’ Slipping out of bed she swiftly put on a chamber robe, picked up her candlestick and walked quickly to the door. Roger blew out the candle he was holding, nipped the wick and followed her out into a gloomy passage.

  With Jemima leading, shielding the flame of her candle from the draught with one hand, they walked on tiptoe down a long corridor. Roger followed a few paces behind her, with every sense alert. The girl’s plea for protection, and apparent anxiety to escape from the witch had impressed him. Yet he was worried by doubts about the wisdom of having accepted her as an ally, although she must be aware that if she led him into a trap she would be the first victim of it, for he had only to leap forward to strike her down. Again he felt bitter regret at having lost his pistol, but he now had no choice other than to trust her and, if she did betray him, he could at least fell her with a blow on the back of the neck from which she would not easily recover.

  At the end of the corridor they entered a large, lofty hall. By the light of the single candle Roger could not see the walls, but he was aware that a gallery ran round it and in passing he glimpsed a few pieces of heavy furniture.

  At the far end of the hall they entered another passage. On that side of the castle, shafts of full moonlight came through the tall windows, but they were so begrimed with the dirt of ages that it was impossible to see out of them. Nevertheless, Roger could see enough to realise that this part of the building was in almost total ruin. As they advanced, holes showed in the roof, a bat flitted by, the undrawn curtains hung beside the windows in moth-eaten rags. Here and there great festoons of cobwebs hung from the ceiling and swayed gently in the draught they made in passing.

  They turned into another corridor and then another. No sound reached them but that of the sudden scuttling of a rat. Yet Roger remained uneasy, still fearful that Jemima might be leading him into a trap. Why, he wondered, should her bedroom be where it was, while Susan’s was so far from it, in the ruined part of the castle? The silence was eerie, the whole atmosphere of the place fraught with evil.

  Another bat sailed by. Roger started back. Jemima turned and smiled at him. About fifteen feet further on she suddenly took two quick paces forward, threw up her free hand and pressed it against an iron flambeau holder on the wall, then gave a sardonic laugh.

  Without a second’s warning, the floor beneath Roger gave way. His feet slid from under him. He fell backward on to a steep, sloping ramp. Instinctively he threw out both his hands sideways, to stop himself from sliding further. They met only flat, cold stone. There was nothing he could cling to. Smoothly, his weight carried him down, down, down, down into the stygian darkness.

  25

  Render unto Satan

  Time, it is said, is an illusion. Without doubt, as assessed by the human mind, it can differ immensely, according to circumstances. The last hour of an afternoon class at school, on a subject at which one is bad, under a master one hates, can seem endless; whereas a long evening spent together by two people who are in love flashes by so rapidly that it seems over almost before it has begun. As Roger slid down the shute on his back, his descent seemed interminable to him, and thoughts sped through his brain with the speed of lightning.

  He must have been mad to trust Jemima. He had let her send him to his death. After all he had heard of her, how could he possibly have been such a fool as to be taken in by her clever acting? Never, never should he have followed her blindly, unless he had had a loaded pistol to hold against her back. Perhaps it would have been excusable to let her lead him fifty or sixty feet, but once they left the comparatively modern wing of the castle he should have been warned. If both girls had been prisoners of the witch, why should they not have been quartered together, or at least in rooms near each other? When walking down those long passages, inhabited by flitting bats and scurrying rats, where dim moonlight showed the webs of a thousand generations of spiders hanging from ceilings and walls, even a schoolboy would have realised that his guide was not taking him to Susan’s room.

  Frantically he thrust out his hands and elbows, endeavouring to check his swift descent, for he had no doubt at all that death awaited him at the bottom of the slope. During the years he had visited many ancient castles in France, Spain, Russia, Sweden and other countries, and in several of them he had been shown traps similar to this. They were called oubliettes. In mediaeval times many an unsuspecting guest had been led by a host, who had some secret reason for wanting to get rid of him, along a dim corridor until the host pressed a spring on the wall, and a trapdoor in the floor flapped open. The wretched guest fell through it, hurtled down a hundred feet or more and, a few minutes later, was choking out his life in the blackness of an underground cistern fed with water from the castle moat.

  Roger heard the trapdoor above him slam, cutting him off for ever from light and life. Even if he could have checked his downward slide and turned over, the slope was too steep for him to have crawled up it and attempted to force open the trap. There was no escape. Except, yes. It was just possible that the oubliette ended in a waterway tunnel, large enough to swim through, to the lake. But if that were so, how long was the tunnel? How deep was the water in it? Would there be enough space between the water and the ceiling for him to breathe while swimming? If not, it was certain that he would drown.

  These lightning flashes of thought and terror probably followed one another in less than a minute. Without warning, the angle at which he was sliding suddenly changed. The slope abruptly ceased, his feet shot forward and he came to rest flat on his back on a solid floor. His relief was instantaneous. It was not an oubliette. Yet it might be. Perhaps only a foot or so ahead of him there was a perpendicular drop, and by luck he was now lying on a broad ledge, the speed of his descent not having been sufficient to carry him over the edge.

  His speculation lasted only seconds. There came the sound of quick movement ahead of him, then a voice cried sharply:

  ‘Who is that?’

  Again relief flooded through him, accompanied by surprise, concern and the answer to one of the riddles he had been puzzling over for several days past.

  ‘Charles!’ he exclaimed. ‘So they’ve made you a prisoner. And now I’m one, too.’

  ‘Uncle Roger!’ cried the voice out of the darkness. ‘How in the world.… But stay still a moment while I make a light.’

  There came the scraping of a tinder box, a sudden glow, then the rising flame from a candle wick enabled Roger to get an idea of his surroundings. They were in a circular dungeon about twenty feet in diameter. From some six feet up the walls tapered in a cone, but the light was not sufficient for Roger to see where they met the roof. Opposite the shute down which he had come there were ranged four low platforms, about six feet long by three feet wide, on short, square legs. On one of them was a straw-filled palliasse and some blankets, where Charles had been sleeping; on another a pile of books, three candlesticks and a number of loose candles. On a third were a tin basin, soap, towels and two wooden platters with fish bones and a cut cake on them. Beside the last stood a six-gallon stone jar and, between it and the place where he was now sitting up, there was a round hole in the floor which evidently served as a latrine.

  As Roger was looking round, Charles said, ‘I supposed you to be still in France with Talleyrand. How come you to be here? And who led you into this trap?’

  Roger’s reply needed only a few quick sentences, then he asked, ‘But you, Charles? What happened to you in Dublin? Did you trace
Susan to this place and then got caught? Is she here? Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes, she’s here and, as far as I know, well. At least, she was a little over a fortnight ago. I have not seen her, but we spoke together.’

  ‘Is it true that the O’Brien woman persuaded her and Jemima to become witches? ’Twas that Lady Luggala wrote to your mother.’

  ‘I know. But ’tis not true—at least as far as Susan is concerned. Jemima, I’d wager, has long been a witch, although Susan did not know it. She suspected nothing until she was brought face to face with Katie. She recognised her at once after having seen her at the New Hell Fire Club. She was taken there over a year ago by …’

  ‘I am aware of that,’ Roger interrupted. ‘Your mother repeated to me all you had told her of it. Tell me what you know of the sequence of events in Dublin.’

  ‘After I left for Spain, that bitch Jemima laid herself out to win Susan’s confidence and affection. In February, for some reason of which I am in ignorance, Maureen Luggala left London for Dublin, taking Jemima with her. As Jemima and Susan were such close friends, she was also invited to come over for a fortnight’s visit, and she accepted. She had a pleasurable time doing the social round, and her first letters to my mother, asking to be allowed to stay on for a while, were genuine. Then, when my mother insisted on her returning, she told Maureen that she must. The following night they put a drug in her drink and, while she was unconscious, brought her here. Soon after she came to, Katie came to the room in which they had put her to bed, and mesmerised her. It must have been then, while under the occult influence of the witch, that she wrote the letter defying my mother and saying she intended to remain in Ireland with Jemima through the summer. When she came out of her trance Katie told her that if she made no trouble she would be well treated, but must remain locked in her room. Naturally, my poor beloved was distraught. But what could she do? Her clothes had been taken from her, and even had they not how could she escape from this place, surrounded as it is by water?’

  o

  ‘And what of yourself?’ Roger asked. ‘I traced you to the Crown and Shamrock and learned that you had been there for two nights, also that you had called on Maureen Luggala, although she swore she had not seen you. After that I could get no further, and could only suppose that, reverting to your membership of the Hell Fire Club, you had perhaps been persuaded by Susan to join their witches coven.’

  ‘No! No!’ Charles shook his head. ‘As you discovered, I waited on Maureen the first day I was in Dublin. She pretended great distress and told me the same story she had written to my mother. But she said she had been endeavouring to trace the girls, and that did I give her another day or two, she had hopes of succeeding. Obviously she needed the time to let Katie know that I had arrived in Dublin and make arrangements for my reception here. The third day of my stay she sent a message, bidding me to dinner. On arriving at her home I found her there with a repulsive priest named Father Damien. It was he who acted as Abbot at the Hell Fire Club in London. He told me that Katie had done him an evil, and he had quarrelled with her; so he was agreeable to take me that night to the place where she had the girls. It was a trap to get me here. We made the journey by coach, arriving in the early hours of the morning. The boat was moored by the lake shore. As we got into it he told me he had bribed one of the servants to let us into the castle. When we reached the great door, he rapped a special signal on it, and it was opened by a huge negro named Aboe, who was another of Katie’s assistants when she ran the Hell Fire Club.

  ‘At that moment Father Damien seized my arms from behind. As you see, I was in uniform, so was wearing a sword and I had come with a pistol in my sash. Aboe deprived me of them both, then the two of them hustled me up a stone staircase to the newer part of the building, along a corridor, pushed me into a bedroom and locked me in. As soon as they had gone, I attempted to break out, but the door was too stout. Then I tried the windows but found that they were thirty feet above a ledge of rock lapped by the water. Had I dropped down I would certainly have killed myself.’

  ‘Why then, since they had you securely imprisoned, did they transfer you to this dungeon?’

  ‘Because I attempted to rescue Susan. You must have realised how deadly quiet it is here. On my third night in the bedroom, just as I was about to fall asleep, I caught the sound of sobs behind my bedhead. From the beginning I had been convinced that Susan was no witch, and had been brought here against her will, so it flashed upon me that it was probably she who was crying, and that as I could hear the sobs the wall between the rooms must be quite thin.

  ‘Pushing away the bed, I went to work on the wall at once with the stout prong in the buckle of my belt. The wall proved to be only lath and plaster. After an hour’s strenuous work I’d made a hole the size of a crown piece. It was Susan on the other side. Having heard my scraping, she had pushed aside her bed and was listening there, so replied immediately I spoke. That was how I learned all that had befallen her, and now I had found her I at once started to plan a way in which we might both escape.

  ‘In addition to Father Damien and the negro, Aboe, who I gather acts as cook, Katie has two Irish peasants here. They are burly, wild-looking creatures, with beards and great mops of red hair, who speak no English. I call them Gog and Magog. One or other of them brought my meals and, as Susan was also locked in, hers also. We planned that she should be dressed ready to leave at the hour when our supper was brought to us the following evening. I’d hoped to overcome the man, get his keys and release her and that both of us might escape before anyone else in the castle knew what was adoing.

  ‘But fortune was against me. I lurked behind the door until Gog came with my supper, and as he walked in carrying the tray I brought a milking stool that was in the room down on his head. It felled him, but I opine the thickness of his hair saved him from being completely deprived of his wits. He was in bad shape, though, and having got my hands round his throat I could have choked him into insensibility.

  ‘Alas, I had not counted on there being two supper trays. Magog had brought up Susan’s. Hearing his fellow barbarian shout, he dropped his tray outside Susan’s door, dashed into my room and hurled himself on top of me. Gog recovered sufficiently to roll from under us and I stood no chance against the two of them. In no time they had me lashed to the end of my bed, and locked in again. I was monstrous lucky to get off with no worse than a kick in the ribs and a black eye.’

  Roger nodded. ‘You were. And it was a gallant, even if ill-fated, attempt. What happened then?’

  ‘A quarter of an hour later the two brutes returned, accompanied by Father Damien. They untied me, hustled me along from that end of the castle to this, and pushed me down the shute by which you arrived.’

  ‘And what has happened since?’

  Charles pointed up to where the cone-shaped walls of the cell seemed to meet above in the shadows. ‘The shute is not the only entrance to the dungeon. Up there, immediately above us, is a round manhole. From time to time one or other of them opens it. By a stout rope with a hook on the end, they lowered this palliasse for me to sleep on, the big jar that contains water, and the other things you see here. And every morning they let down in a bag enough cold food to keep me in provender for the day.’

  ‘And even books,’ Roger commented. ‘That, at least, is considerate of them.’

  ‘Jemima sent them down, and from time to time comes to talk with me.’

  ‘That little she-devil fooled me completely, and I still cannot make her out, nor the witch’s interest in the two girls. The story Jemima spun to me was that for the acquisition of supreme occult powers, the use of a virgin’s body was necessary. She then begged me to rescue her as well as Susan from this horror, yet tricked and made a prisoner of me.’

  ‘She did so because she is devoted to Katie, and has naught to fear. Of that I am convinced.’

  ‘What, though, of Susan?’ Roger asked anxiously. ‘Clearly she is no disciple of the witch. Why should they have d
rugged and brought her here? Virgins are plentiful enough in this country, where the Church of Rome is dominant. They could, with ease, kidnap some peasant wench upon whom to perform their abominable ceremony.’

  Charles shook his head sadly. ‘Uncle Roger, I have been obtuse, and failed to make the situation clear to you. Doubtless these Satanists do, from time to time, perform a Black Mass; but ‘twas not for that they invited my sweet Susan to Ireland, then drugged and imprisoned her. She was only the lure to get me here.’

  ‘What the devil mean you?’

  ‘Jemima is determined that I should take her for my wife.’

  ‘This is news indeed!’ Roger exclaimed with a frown. ‘Have you been having an affair with her? But, no; how could you, seeing you have been so long abroad.’

  ‘I was to some extent embroiled with her before I voyaged to Spain. During the summer and winter before last I saw much of her. She is attractive, witty and a passionate young creature. Susan and I had always had an understanding that we would marry in good time; but, until we were ready to do so, we should amuse ourselves by flirting with anyone who took our fancy. I’ve never loved anyone but Susan and never shall. To me Jemima was no more than a gay companion. I studiously refrained from giving her any reason to believe that my intentions toward her were serious. But she set herself to get me if she could, even to the point of endeavouring to seduce me—a trap into which I was not foolish enough to fall.

  ‘When I sailed for Spain, I thought no more of her, but evidently she did of me and, with her mother and the witch, made her plans accordingly. That Katie has occult power I have no doubt. Foreseeing the fall of Napoleon and that shortly after that I should return, they all came to Ireland …’