Dennis Wheatley - The Haunting of Toby Jugg

'Are all the nurses in your organisation Party Comrades?' I enquired.

'Oh, no; at least I don't think so. Owing to the war there is a great shortage of private nurses, so in these days Miss Smith takes on anyone she can get.'

From that it appears that I have been honoured. No doubt Miss 'Smith' decided that as I am potentially a great industrial magnate it would be worth sending one of her ewe lambs to look after me; but if she hopes to pick up anything "worth while about the Jugg aircraft plants I fear she is going to be disappointed.

However, as a matter of interest I asked Deb if she had learned anything worth reporting since she had been in Wales.

'Only about Owen Gruffydd,' she said. 'He is Labour and wants to stand for Parliament after the war. He is very Left and has the right ideas already. If I marry him I am sure that I could make something of him. The fact that he had joined the Party would be kept secret; and it is part of the plan that we should get as many Comrades as possible elected under the Labour ticket. Besides, if he got in I should meet a lot of his fellow members. I took out naturalisation papers in 1938, so I am already a British subject, and I could work on them to get me nominated by the Labour Central Office as their candidate for another constituency. I am quite as intelligent as most of the men I have met, and I am sure I could get myself elected, if only I were given a chance as the official Labour candidate in a good industrial area.'

That was the end of our conversation. I had always thought Deb to be a hard, capable, superficially intelligent little go getter, but I was far from realising the height of her ambitions or the depths of her perfidy. This last revelation took me so aback that I could think of nothing else to ask her, so after a few moments I told her to forget all she had said, and woke her from her trance.

Then I closed my own eyes, in order to avoid looking at her, and said I felt like a nap. But I didn't go to sleep. I sat there feeling shattered and sick just as though I had found a toad in my bed.

Tuesday, 26th May

I had a fright last night a very nasty fright. For the past few days the weather has been patchy, with mostly bright, sunny mornings, then getting overcast in the afternoons; and on both Sunday and Monday evenings we had showers of rain. In consequence, although there was a new moon on Saturday, cloudy skies saved me from seeing its light until last night.

I would not have seen it then but for the fact that I had lobster for dinner. I was not, thank God, woken by my subconscious, shrilling a warning to me that the Horror was approaching, but by an attack of indigestion, which aroused me into sudden wakefulness about one o'clock.

In the old days I used to be able to eat anything with impunity, but since my crash ruled out all exercise except the little I get from swinging a pair of Indian clubs for a quarter of an hour every morning my digestion is not what it was. I suppose I ought to be more careful what I eat, but I never seem to think about it till the damage is done. Anyhow, the lobster woke me and there was that damnable band of moonlight on the floor.

It is three weeks now since I have seen it, and it gave me a frightful shock. It has been said truly enough that 'time is the great healer', and this long immunity from attack had certainly healed, or at least dulled, the awful impression that the visitations of the Thing made on my mind. Seeing that broad strip of moonlight again, with the two sinister black bars across it made by the shadow of the piers between the windows, had the same effect upon me as if someone had suddenly ripped the bandages from a hideous wound I had received some time ago, exposing it again all raw and bleeding.

But I am glad now that lobster chanced to be the main dish last night and that I ate too much of it. In spite of my having told myself repeatedly that time was slipping away, and that I must not let myself be lulled into a false sense of security during the dark period of the moon, that is just what I have done. Not altogether, perhaps, as the fate that menaces me has never been far from my thoughts, but I feel now that I ought to have made more strenuous efforts either to secure help or to escape from Llanferdrack. What other line I could have tried that I have not yet attempted I still cannot think; but there it is. I cannot help cursing myself now for the time I have given to fruitless speculations on this and that, instead of concentrating entirely on the all important problem of saving myself.

Last night was a blessed warning, arousing me anew to my danger as sharply as the sounding of an air raid siren, and I am wondering now if the lobster for dinner with my resulting indigestion was, after all, pure chance. Providence is said to work in strange ways, and, although I haven't mentioned it in this journal,, since early this month I have been praying for protection.

Until then I hadn't said a prayer since old Nanny Trotter left, when I went to Weylands. She taught me my prayers and always made me say them, however tired I was; but I don't think that any child prays from choice, and I was as pleased to stop praying as I was to cease from washing my neck, when other boys at Weylands told me that the first was 'not done' and the second optional.

Even when I was a fighter pilot I never called on God to help me. In those days I was fully convinced that it was a calm head, a clear eye and a steady hand that did the trick. It was you or the Jerry and the best man won, with no darn' nonsense about Divine intervention. At least, that was how I saw it then.

But, once I had argued it out with myself to the conclusion that the Thing in the courtyard is, and can only be, a creature of the Devil, it seemed logical to fall back on God. In view of my past neglect of Him I didn't feel that I was entitled to hope for very much, but the Christian teaching is that His mercy is infinite; so night and morning, and sometimes at odd periods of the day, I began to pray.

At first I felt very self conscious and awkward about it; particularly as I could not go down on my knees, and to pray sitting in my chair or lying on my back in bed seemed disrespectful; but after a bit I decided that if God was taking any notice of me at all He wouldn't let that make any difference, seeing how things are with me. So, although it may sound a bit farfetched, it isn't really at all improbable that Cook may have been guided to her choice of giving us lobster for dinner last night in response to my prayers for guidance and protection.

I don't quite know why, but I am inclined to believe that God may giant us guidance and warnings but expects us to fight our own battles and protect ourselves; except, perhaps, in dire extremity when the dice are weighted too heavily against us. Anyhow, having seen the red light, whether it was a Heaven-sent one or not, I made up my mind early this morning that I must take immediate action.

My letter to Uncle Paul was posted only yesterday. It should be in London this morning, but there is no afternoon delivery at Queensclere, so even if it is now on its way down into Kent he won't get it till tomorrow. When he does get it I think he will come here as soon as he can, but Thursday is the earliest that I can reasonably expect him; and if he has engagements that he feels he cannot break he may not arrive till the weekend. Looking at the matter from his point of view, he would be quite justified in feeling that I could hardly be in such an almighty hurry to get the new financial schemes I mentioned off to the lawyers without giving him a few days' grace.

On the other side of the picture the moon will be full again on Saturday the 30th; but my danger period starts well before that. Last time the attacks occurred nightly from the 30th April to the 4th of May, with a blank only on the 2nd, when the moon was actually full; but that was because it was a night of heavy cloud and the moon never came through. So, judging by the previous bout, I'll be in danger from Thursday night on. But if the nights remain clear the attacks may start before that perhaps on Wednesday, or even tonight.