Dennis Wheatley - The Haunting of Toby Jugg

Then, as I sat warming myself in front of the fire, a new thought struck me. I recalled that tripping on my shoelace had caused me to fall forward and clutch at the top of the tomb, and that under the sudden pressure it had given way. Perhaps my having opened the grave had enabled something to escape from it.

The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt that I had hit upon the right solution. A year or so earlier I had read Dracula and, at the time, I had taken all the stuff about vampires and the undead as pure invention; now I thought of it again in a very different light.

The gaping tomb had been behind me as I knelt; and when I swivelled round I had looked across it and all round it, but not down into it. About half the stone lid had remained intact and the open portion of the grave, into which the rest of the lid had fallen, had been obscured by deep shadow. It seemed possible that I had aroused some horrid, corpselike thing that had been lying there in a state of suspended animation. Or perhaps, by some ancient mystery, the soul of an evil abbot had been imprisoned with his body in the grave just as in the Arabian Nights the powerful Djinn had been sealed up in a bottle and I had released a diabolical force that had been straining to get free for centuries, so that it could exact vengeance on humanity.

Such bizarre ideas were a world away from the atheism which we were taught to regard as enlightenment at Weylands. But human instincts and old traditions die hard; and most of us, while ready enough to sneer at religion, still retained a sneaking feeling that there might be something in the tales of ghosts and haunted houses we had heard. In any case, after what I had been through myself that night, no explanation of it sounded too fantastic. I was still vaguely speculating upon what sort of horror it could have been that had come up at me out of the grave when, mentally and physically exhausted as I was, I fell asleep.

Tuesday, 12th May

Last night I had the horrors again. I saw the shadow, but it was mixed up with all sorts of other beastliness in a nightmare. I do not mean that I actually had another visitation of the sort that I first had early in April, and almost persuaded myself were nightmares until their recurrence at the beginning of this month. I mean a genuine bad dream.

It must have been due to the vividness of the recollections that I conjured up yesterday, while writing an account of my terrifying experience at Weylands. Anyhow I dreamed that I was there again among the graves of the long dead monks, and that the Thing that has recently been haunting me was chasing me towards the red glow that came from the wrought iron gates.

Although the beast was behind me as I ran, I seemed to have eyes in the back of my head, for I could see it as it leapt from mound to mound in my tracks. Its body was the big, round, multi limbed patch of blackness that I always see, but it had the caricature of a human face and the face was Helmuth's, with his eyes multiplied to ten times their normal size and his fleshy nose changed into a great curved beak.

Julia was there too. She was standing by the glowing gates calmly watching the brute hunt me, and she made not the slightest move to come to my assistance when I screamed to her for help.

I suppose her appearance in my dream, and the callous attitude she displayed, are to be accounted for by a subconscious projection of the black fits of depression that I get from the thought that she seems to have abandoned me in my present plight. Why she did not arrive over the weekend, or at least answer my letter, I simply cannot think.

Of course, the only possible explanation is that she is no longer at Queensclere and has not had my letters yet. I know that she would come here on the very first train if she was aware of what I am up against. So it seems futile to write to her again. I can only thank God that we are now entering the dark quarter of the moon which means I'll be safe for a bit, and pray that one of my letters catches up with her in the next few days, as it surely must.

Yesterday the village barber came to cut my hair. I am afraid I have always been a bit casual about my appearance, and I often got ticked off for letting my hair grow too long when I was in the ranks of the R.A.F., and later too, during my year's training as a Pilot Officer. Once I became operational no one bothered me about it any more as we Fighter boys still had a bit of a halo round our heads even those of us who had come in only for the tail end of the Battle of Britain and we rather prided ourselves in going about dressed any old how, our caps on the backs of our heads and the top buttons of our tunics undone. It was all rather childish, I suppose, but in an inverse way it had the same sort of effect that super smartness has on the Brigade of Guards, and added quite a bit to our morale.

Still, as my hair is unusually silky for its reddish colour and dead straight, it is apt to fall forward over my forehead and bother me when it gets too long; so every few weeks I kick myself into sending for the local clipper wielder, and submit myself to his inartistic ministrations.

It is raining today, so as I have a clear morning in front of me I'll polish off my account of that affair at Weylands. I see that I had got to the point where I had fallen asleep in the cottage while waiting for Julia and Uncle Paul to return.

I was woken by the sound of the sitting room door opening with a rattle, then being swiftly shut again. The lights were still on but the fire had gone out, so I must have been asleep for a considerable time. I felt very cold, and shivered as I stood up. The memory of the night's earlier events was just flooding back to me when I heard voices outside in the hall. Someone was muttering something, then Julia's voice came to me quite distinctly as she said:

'So that's why the lights were on! What on earth can Toby be doing here? Thank goodness he's asleep and didn't see me like this. Quick, pull yourself together, now! It's up to you to hold the fort, while I do something to my face.'

Instinctively I had moved towards the door, and she had scarcely finished speaking when I pulled it open. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of her back as she hurried into her bedroom, but I found myself looking straight at Uncle Paul.

He was leaning against the wall on the other side of the narrow hallway; and it was clear that Julia's admonition, to pull himself together, had not been given without good reason. He was as drunk as an owl.

Uncle Paul must have been about thirty-seven then. He is a biggish man with red hair and a 'Guards' moustache, brushed stiffly up. He has a ruddy face and pale, rather poppy, blue eyes. Brains have never been his long suit, and he is a weak rather than a bad man. The 'Demon Drink', alas, has always been his failing, and it was the cause of most of the scrapes that he got himself into with my grandfather, when he was younger.

After he married Julia he took a pull on himself. At least, as she is the dominant partner I suppose she made him toe the line. But he continued to have lapses now and then, and it was by no means the first time that I had seen him when he had had one over the eight. Fortunately he is the friendly type of drunk; and as he had always been kind to me in a casual sort of way it made no difference to the mild affection I felt for him.

Bringing himself upright with a shove of his broad shoulders, he grinned at me and said:' 'Lo, old man! How-how are you?'

'I'm all right, thanks, Uncle,' I replied, 'but you're looking a bit partworn. You seem to have been making a night of it.'

"That's it,' he hiccupped. 'Li'le party.'

'It must have been a pretty rough one,' I smiled, as I took in the details of his dishevelled appearance. There were grease stains down one of the lapels of his dinner jacket, his collar was a crumpled rag, his bow tie had disappeared, and there were obvious marks of lipstick all round his mouth. I had never seen him in such a state when tight before.