The Haunting of Toby Jugg

by Dennis Wheatley

  When he had gone I did think it over; and I was, and am, still determined to resist. Spider bites can be most unpleasant, but I can hardly believe that they will prove more painful than would a beating with thin steel rods by a gang of Gestapo toughs. And, so long as my mind remains unimpaired, I mean to stick any pain that Helmuth may inflict on me to the limit of my will.

  Nevertheless, at the time, my nerves were still in a parlous state; and, having already given way to tears, I let myself go again in a flood of self-pity. It was in that state that Sally found me.

  I did not hear her come in, as my head was half buried in the pillow and my sobs drowned the sound of her footfalls. It was her voice, saying ‘What is it, Toby? Whatever is the matter?’ that made me start up and find her already leaning over me.

  She was standing right beside my bed holding a torch. It dazzled me for a moment, but I could just make out that she was in a dressing-gown and had her fluffy brown hair done up in a lot of little plaits. They stuck out absurdly, like a spiky halo, but made her look very young and rather pretty.

  ‘What is it?’ she repeated gently. ‘Why are you crying like this? Have you had some awful nightmare? I’ve just had one about you. It was horrid. You were in bed here, and there was a great black thing over your face. I couldn’t see what it was, but I knew that you were suffocating. When I woke I was so worried that I felt I must come up and see if you were all right.’

  ‘I—I had a nightmare too,’ I gulped. It seemed the only thing to say. I could not possibly expect her to believe that Helmuth had done a Pied Piper of Hamelin on me with all the spiders in the place; but I snuffled out that I had dreamed that a horde of them was swarming all over me.

  ‘There, there,’ she murmured. ‘It’s all over now, and you’ll soon forget it. But I’m very glad I followed my impulse to come up, all the same.’

  Then she perched herself on the edge of the bed, drew my head down on her breast, and made comforting noises to me as though I were a small boy who had hurt himself.

  By that time I had practically got control of myself again; but I must confess that I didn’t hurry to show it. Perhaps Weylands made me rather a hard, self-reliant type; anyhow, circumstances have never before arisen in which I have been comforted by a girl. It was an entirely new experience and I found it remarkably pleasant.

  After a bit I could no longer disguise the fact that I was feeling better; so she said she was going to send me to sleep. She has marvellous hands; strong yet slim, and very sensitive—as I already knew from her giving me my massage treatments. Having made me comfortable on my pillows, she started to stroke my forehead with a touch as light as swansdown. In no time at all I had forgotten about Helmuth and felt a gentle relaxation steal over me; a few moments later I was sleeping like a top.

  Later

  This morning Sally and I said nothing to one another about last night. I had half a mind to thank her for her kindness, but shyness got the better of me; and she probably refrained from mentioning the matter out of tactfulness, feeling that I wouldn’t like it recalled that a girl had found me in tears.

  All the same it did come up this afternoon. I was sitting in my wheel-chair looking through one of my stamp albums—I have five altogether, and two of them are now completely interleaved with these sheets, but this was one of the others—and I found I was out of cigarettes. As Sally was near my bedside table I asked her to pass me the big silver box on it, so that I could refill my case. She did so, and opened it as she handed it to me. There was a dead spider inside.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘When I was making your bed with Konrad this morning I found three dead spiders in it, and here’s another. I wonder how it got inside the box?’

  I knew the answer to that one. The box had been open when Helmuth had come in to me at midnight. Later, while slapping at the little brutes, I had evidently hit this one as my hand caught the lid and smacked it shut.

  But, without waiting for me to reply, she went on: ‘It was queer finding three of them in your bed, too. I’ve never seen any there before. Perhaps a nest of them has hatched out behind the wainscot. Anyhow I’m sure it must have been one of them running over your face that gave you that horrid dream.’

  An almost overwhelming impulse urged me to tell her the truth; but I managed to fight it down. I’m very glad I did now, as a few dead spiders would not have been enough to convince her that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing, and that it was simply my old prejudice against Helmuth reasserting itself in my sleep.

  All the same, I count her having found the spiders a great piece of good fortune, as it is one item of concrete evidence; and, although it may cost me pretty dear, if the next few days produce others the time may not be far off when I can spill the whole story and she will have to believe me. Sally is 100 per cent honest; I am sure of that; and if only I can convince her of the facts she will be 100 per cent for me. I have got to, for in her now lies my only hope.

  As it was, I said: ‘Yes, you’re right. I can still feel the little devils crawling over my skin. But that doesn’t explain your dream about me; how do you account for that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I was worrying about you before I went to sleep. For a permanent invalid you are a wonderfully cheerful person, and in the early part of the week you were right on top of your form; but the past two days you’ve gone right off the boil. Naturally I’ve felt rather concerned about that.’

  ‘I’m very grateful to you, Sally,’ I said. ‘And I’m particularly grateful to you for your kindness to me last night.’

  Then an idea came to me, so I added: ‘I think I can explain why I’ve been a bit under the weather recently. I sometimes get premonitions, and I had one about this spider dream that shook me up so. I’ve a feeling, too, that I’m in for another tonight. Would it be asking too much of you to sit up with a book this evening, and come in to see me round about twelve o’clock?’

  She gave me a queer, half-humorous, half-annoyed look, then said a trifle sharply: ‘Nothing doing, Toby Jugg. You were genuinely upset when I came in to you last night; but for a good ten minutes before I sent you to sleep you were shamming. Midnight visiting is not in the contract, and the proper relations between nurse and patient are going to be maintained. You needn’t tell me that you never knew a mother’s care, either; because I’ve heard that one before.’

  I was so taken aback that I could not think what to answer. She was right, of course, but I had no idea that she had spotted my manœuvre. Evidently she thinks I was making up to her with ulterior motives; but she is quite wrong there. It was only that I have been rather starved of human affection and found comfort in the warmth of her evident concern for me. Since she assumes that by asking her to come to me again tonight I was contemplating making a pass at her, I find it distinctly humiliating that she should have shown so very plainly that she thinks me too poor a fish to bother, with. Still, I suppose one can’t blame her really—what healthy girl would want to start an affaire with a poor devil of a cripple?

  Sunday, 14th June

  Helmuth carried out his threat, and the result was pretty bloody. He came in to me about eleven o’clock. There was the sort of scene which it has now become redundant to record. I called him by a string of unprintable names and he retorted with variations on the theme that I was a stiff-necked little ‘whatnot’, whom he was determined to bring to heel.

  The fun started half-an-hour after he had left me. As there was no hell-broth candle on this occasion, and the fire had practically died out, I had no immediate warning before the attack. Something suddenly scurried across the back of my neck and bit me on the ear.

  I shook my head violently, clapped a hand to the place, then quickly hauled myself up into a sitting position. Nothing more happened for a while; but I don’t mind admitting that as I sat there in the darkness I had no mean fit of the jitters.

  I could not help visualising swarms of the little brutes coming at me from every direction, as they had the night bef
ore, but this time every one of them having a nip like a pair of tweezers and intending to make their supper off me.

  Thank God, it did not turn out to be as bad as all that, and the period of nerve-racking anticipation was really the worst part of the business. But the realisation was quite bad enough. Helmuth’s pet family of ‘little brothers’ turned out to consist of about a score of small, active and persistent horrors, as far as I could judge—although it was impossible to estimate with any certainty how many there were of them making darts at me in the darkness.

  I think being in the dark made the bites seem more painful, as this morning there is not very much to show for them; but at the time each hurt like the cut of a small, sharp knife, and the shock of it coming without warning added to its intensity. It brought to my mind what I had read of a Chinese torture called ‘the death of a thousand cuts’ and, although of course I wasn’t, I could not help believing that I must be bleeding in dozens of places from the bites on my face, arms, neck, hands and the upper part of my body.

  How long the ordeal went on I don’t quite know; but it must have been well over three-quarters-of-an-hour with a fresh bite about every minute. For the whole of that time I was jerking myself about and slapping at my unseen enemies; so when at last the biting ceased I was sweating like a pig and thoroughly exhausted.

  For a time I remained sitting tense and vigilant, waiting for the next bite to come; but when a considerable interval had elapsed without one I gradually relaxed, and began to wonder if Helmuth would soon appear to gloat over his blood-soaked victim. But he didn’t, and some time later, still propped up against my pillows, I dropped off to sleep.

  One good thing, at least, has come out of this last bedevilment. Sally found two more corpses in my bed this morning; and although there was no blood to show, my skin was red and slightly puffy where I had been bitten.

  I twitted her, a little unfairly perhaps, on not having believed my prediction that I should be the victim of another ‘nightmare’; but she took the matter seriously, and expressed contrition at having given me a raspberry instead of the benefit of the doubt.

  At the moment, while I sit here writing this on the terrace, she is conducting a grand spider-hunt in my room, and is dusting insect powder into the crevices of the wainscoting behind my bed. That will not stop the spiders, if Helmuth decides to send them again, as they come from all over the place; but, now that she is so concerned about it, he may abandon this form of tormenting me from fear that she will start agitating to have me moved again.

  She said this morning that proper sleep was an essential to my recovery, and that if we couldn’t get rid of the spiders she would have to speak to Helmuth about it. Moreover, she volunteered of her own accord to come in late tonight to see that I was all right.

  I reminded her that she was dining with Helmuth, and suggested, with what I fear must have been rather a forced laugh, that she might find his books and his conversation so interesting that she would forget all about me.

  To that I got the tart reply that a few hours’ relaxation had never yet made her forget her professional duties.

  Let’s hope that tonight does not prove an exception. It would be a great triumph for me if she came in while a spider-attack was in full progress, as I think that if I then told her the truth she might believe it. But will she come at all? She certainly won’t if Helmuth gets really busy on her.

  Later

  I have spent a miserable afternoon. Not on account of any further threat from Helmuth, or my own situation—which, God knows, is desperate enough—but worrying about Sally.

  I feel sure she has no idea what she may be letting herself in for tonight, and it would be futile to try to tell her. She would only put it down to a recurrence of the abnormal condition in which I am supposed to have sex on the brain, and I should risk disrupting to no purpose the excellent relations that now exist between us.

  Sally has been here over a fortnight, and a cripple is naturally far more dependent than any other type of invalid on his nurse, so I have already spent many pleasant idle hours in her company. In fact, I have really seen much more of her than I did of any of the girls that I met casually, and ran around with for two or three months, while I was in the R.A.F.

  I have come to like her enormously; and I am beginning to wonder if my intense repugnance to the thought of Helmuth getting hold of her is not partly inspired by jealousy. I have never been jealous of anyone before; the Weylands training eliminated that emotion in my make-up during my adolescence, and I thought it had done so for good; but now I am by no means certain.

  Knowing Helmuth’s attitude to women as I do, the thought of her spending a whole evening with him makes me squirm. I simply cannot bear the thought of his filling her up with drink, then pawing her about. Of course, she may not let him; but his personal magnetism is extraordinarily strong, and if he thinks she is likely to prove difficult he is quite capable of slipping something into her drink.

  The terrible frustration that I am feeling, from being unable to protect her, can hardly be entirely attributed to a normal sense of chivalry; so I suppose there is no escaping the fact that jealousy must enter into it. If so it is a most hideous emotion; and, since jealousy of this type is a by-product of love, it brings me face to face with the question—can I possibly be in love with Sally?

  As I have never been in love, I honestly don’t know. I have always thought of love in this sense as an extra-intense form of physical desire, and Sally has not so far had any profound effect upon my passions. She has a lovely figure, and, although she is not beautiful in the accepted sense, her face is so expressive that it gives her an attraction all her own. There is, too, a rich warmth in her voice, and she is altogether a very cuddlesome person; but I certainly would not jump off Westminster Bridge for the privilege of sleeping with her. On the other hand I think I would jump off Westminster Bridge if by so doing I could prevent what is likely to happen tonight. Which strikes me as very queer.

  Monday, 15th June

  I am in love with Sally. I know that now, and I wonder more than ever what ill I can have done in my short life for God to have inflicted such a series of punishments on me. To be made a cripple at the age of twenty was a life-sentence; to be left in Helmuth’s clutches, with the end of the month approaching, and to date not even the germ of an idea for getting away from him, is pretty well as good as having added to the life-sentence that it shall be spent in solitary confinement; and now this!

  Last night I went through purgatory. Sally gave me my massage early so that she would have plenty of time to change for dinner; then she told me that Konrad would settle me down at ten o’clock and she hoped that I would soon get off to sleep; but she would peep in round about midnight, just in case the insect powder had not proved fully effective and some of the spiders were causing me to have another nightmare. After that she left me, and I spent five hours of unadulterated hell.

  If this is love, God help every imaginative man or woman who falls into it, and ever has to remain inactive while knowing the person they love to be in the company of an unscrupulous rival. I knew both Helmuth and Sally, and the rooms in which they would pass the evening, sufficiently well to form a series of mental pictures, of their having cocktails together, dining, looking through his books, and of what might happen later.

  Most of the time up till about half-past-nine my personal television set was jumping ahead, with only occasional flash-backs to what was probably happening at the moment; after that hour my imagination ran riot, and my torture was intensified a hundredfold by sickening visions of what might be taking place downstairs while I was actually thinking of it. No doubt many of the situations that I conjured up, with which to flay myself, were grossly beyond the probable, but, since Helmuth was concerned, they were never outside the bounds of the possible.

  I see that I have written of Helmuth as my ‘rival’, which, of course, he is not, since I have never made even the suggestion of a declaration to Sally, and,
if I did, I have not the least reason to suppose that she would reciprocate my feelings. On the contrary, she has already shown that, far from desiring any advance from me, she would regard it as most undesirable, on account of her professional status.

  I cannot think that many young nurses allow medical etiquette to weigh much with them if they feel an inclination towards a patient; in fact, although it was officially frowned on, in the R.A.F. hospitals where I spent ten months lots of chaps had affairs with the V.A.D.s; so Sally’s attitude with regard to myself must be taken as a clear indication that she has no time for me. On the other hand, she has never made any secret of her admiration for Helmuth, and she may quite well have been hoping for the past ten days or more that he would make love to her.

  I don’t know much about girls’ reactions, but everything in such relationships must depend on the point of view. If a man of 45, like Helmuth, makes violent love to a girl of 22, like Sally, and she thinks him physically unattractive, she probably regards him as a ‘beast’, a ‘dirty old man’ and almost as a ‘medical case who should have more control over himself at his age’; but if she is attracted to him she then regards his amorous assault as a compliment, and he becomes in her eyes an ‘experienced lover’, a ‘real man of the world’ and a ‘connoisseur of women whom any girl of her age might be proud to have as a beau’.

  If Sally’s conception of Helmuth is on the latter lines, as well it may be, that would make the agonies I suffered last night all the more pointless and absurd. But they were none the less vivid and heartrending. And what makes things worse is that I have no idea how the party really went, or ended, as Sally is hardly on speaking terms with me this morning.

  That is partly my fault, as I blotted it again, and badly: and she could hardly be expected to guess that I did so mainly out of concern for her.