Dennis Wheatley - The Haunting of Toby Jugg

'That's it; li'le party,' he repeated. 'Was a bit rough. Played Kiss in the ring.'

I had no idea that the parents who were up for a visit indulged in either high jinks or childish games at the Clubhouse in the evenings; but when one is in the middle teens one is still constantly learning unexpected things about the behaviour of grown ups, so I made no comment.

For a moment we remained silent, just smiling inanely at one another, then he said: 'Lesh go into th' sitting room have a drink.'

He had obviously had far more than he could carry already, but it was not my place to tell him so. Accordingly I stood aside and he lurched through the doorway. There were whisky, glasses and a siphon on a small side table. Swaying slightly, he walked over to it and, with a deliberation that did not prevent him spilling some of the stuff, mixed himself a stiff peg.

Having gulped half of it, he muttered: Tha's better,' then relapsed into another longish silence, during which he stared at the carpet.

At length he looked up and asked: 'What you doin' here thish time o'night? Wash game, old man?'

I had no intention of discussing the matter uppermost in my mind with Uncle Paul while he was in that condition; so I simply said: 'I knew you and Julia were arriving this evening, so I thought 1 would slip over and see you. While I was waiting for you to come in I fell asleep in front of the fire.'

'I shee,' he nodded ponderously. 'I shee. Well, here's all th' besht,' and he swallowed the rest of his drink.

A moment later Julia came hurrying in. She had changed into a dressing gown, and evidently done her best to put her face to rights; but I was much more shocked by her appearance than I had been by that of Uncle Paul.

Her dark eyes looked bigger than I had ever seen them, and her face was dead white, so that the patches of fresh rouge stood out on her cheeks like the dabs of paint on those of a Dutch doll. Her full red lips were swollen excessively and broken in places, as though they had been savagely bitten, and a heavy coating of powder failed to hide an ugly scratch that ran from beneath her left ear right down across her throat.

'Good Lord! What on earth has been happening to you?' I exclaimed in alarm.

She did not kiss me, but bent her head and laid her icy cheek against mine for a second; then she said:

'Toby, darling; don't be upset. I'm quite all right, but we've had a frightful time tonight. Has Paul told you about it?'

'Only that you had been hitting it up at a party,' I muttered, 'and that you played kiss in the ring.'

'Paul!' she said sharply, turning to her husband. 'Get up at once, and go to bed.'

My uncle had lowered himself into an armchair and closed his eyes; he was already half asleep. At the sound of her voice he blinked, lumbered to his feet, and with a vague wave of his hand by way of good night, walked unsteadily out of the room.

'I've never seen him as tight as that before,' I said, as he jerked the door to behind him.

'No, thank goodness,' Julia agreed, with a sigh. 'He doesn't often get really stinking. It's a mercy, though, that he didn't kill the two of us tonight. If I'd realised now far gone he was, I would never have let him drive the car.'

'You had a smash, then?'

'Of course! How else do you think I came to get my face in such a mess?'

'I thought you had been down at the Club all this time.'

'If Paul gave you that impression you must have misunderstood him. He is in no state to know what he is saying. We had a few drinks at the Club before we started, and by now he's probably forgotten most of what happened after that.'

'Oh, you poor darling!' I cried, taking her hand. 'Are you quite sure that you're not badly hurt?'

She shook her head. 'No. I'm all right. He drove us into a ditch, and when I was thrown sideways I hit my mouth against something. I've got a few bruises, but nothing to worry about.' Drawing me down on to the settee beside her, she went on:

'As we're coming up here, Paul thought that he would like to see some old friends of his who live about twenty miles away. We wrote and proposed ourselves for dinner. They wrote back and said they would love to have us if we didn't mind a scratch meal at the end of a children's party, as it was their eldest girl's birthday. When we arrived the party was still in full swing. There were quite a number of other grownups there and we must have stood about drinking cocktails for a couple of hours at least.

'It was ten o'clock by the time the children packed up, and close on eleven before we sat down to supper. Afterwards, somebody suggested that we should play the children's games. What with our steady cocktail drinking and the champagne at supper, we were all a bit lit up by then, and just ripe to let ourselves go at any sort of nonsense. We played kiss in the ring, blind man’s buff, postman's knock, and all the rest of it.

'You know how time flies when one is fooling like that, and I didn't notice the amount that Paul was putting away. It wasn't until we were in the car that I realised that he was carrying such a skinful, and, of course, he insisted that he was quite all right until he ran off the road and nearly turned the car over. We had a most frightful job getting it out of the ditch, and I'm feeling an absolute wreck; so be a dear and don't keep me up longer than you can help. Just tell me why you came here tonight; then I must get to bed.'

Obviously it was no time to tell her about the thing that I had released from the tomb, and, anyhow, I did not feel much like a long heart to heart by then, as the room seemed to have got colder than ever since they had come in. I just told her I had only come over for a lark, then we went to see if the bed in the spare, room was made up.

The curtains there had not been drawn, and to my surprise I saw that it was already morning. The sun was shining and the trees were casting long shadows in the early light. By it, poor Julia looked more haggard than ever; but she smiled at me and said something about it being a perfect May Day morn, then she left me.

By the greatest of luck I had instinctively grabbed up my attachй case when I fled as I should have been terrified of going back for it, even in broad daylight, yet afraid to leave it there in case someone found it, and that led to my being expelled so I was able to put on my pyjamas and get some proper sleep.

I woke a little after ten, and on going into the sitting room found one of the Club servants there, tidying up. There was a kitchenette in each bungalow and it was part of their job to cook breakfast on the premises for visitors; so I asked the woman to get me some. Then I telephoned the school to let them know where I was, in case they thought I had met with an accident, and had a bath.

Julia came in just as I was finishing my breakfast. She was looking slightly better, although she could not have had blacker shadows under her eyes if she had been out on the binge for a week, and it was evident that the car having run off the road had shaken her really badly. While she drank two large cups of tea in quick succession she gave me further details of the awful time they had had getting it out of the ditch. Apparently it had rained again in the middle of the night and the mud had absolutely ruined her evening clothes.

Uncle Paul was still sleeping it off, and she said that she did not mean to wake him until it was time to dress for lunch. That meant we had a good hour before us, and the sitting room was now warm and cosy, so I launched out on an account of my own ordeal the previous night.

When I had done, Julia could offer no explanation. At first she made a half-hearted attempt to persuade me that I must have imagined it; but in the face of my positive conviction to the contrary, she was far too sympathetic a person to insist on that; and, eventually, she agreed with me that I must have released some horrible supernatural force by breaking open the grave.