Dennis Wheatley: The Haunting of Toby Jugg

'I won't!' she moaned. 'I won't! Let me go! Let me go!'

Oh yes, you will,' I said. 'If you won't talk freely I shall have to make you.' Then I caught her glance and held it.

'Let me go! Let me go!' her voice grew louder, and tearing her glance from mine she wailed: 'You beast! You're trying to hypnotise me!'

I knew then that even at the price of giving Sally’s Nurse Cardew's hiding place away I must have help, otherwise my forlorn hope was doomed to failure. Stretching across Julia I rapped thrice sharply with my free hand on the secret panel.

In leaning over I had momentarily to loosen my grip on Julia's hand. As the panel slid back and Sally came out Julia wrenched her hand from my grasp. Turning, she ran towards the door.

'Quick, Sally!' I cried. 'For God's sake catch her, and bring her back. I've got to hypnotise her by force. It's our only hope.'

Sally darted after her and caught her in the middle of the room. For a few moments there ensued a horrid scuffle. The two women fought like tiger cats. Julia's long nails tore three furrows in Sally's grimy cheek; then she got hold of a handful of Sally's fuzzy hair and wrenched it out, while kicking violently at her shins. But Sally was much the stronger of the two. She hit Julia hard in the face, grabbed one of her arms and twisted it behind her back, then hurtled her across the room and forced her face down on to the bed.

I seized Julia by the shoulders, but by that time she had begun to scream for help; so I transferred by grip to her throat and, much as I hated having to do it, choked her into silence.

She was now sprawled over sideways on to the bed and face upwards across my middle. Stooping over her, I stared down into her eyes and ordered her to sleep.

But she shut her eyes firmly, so I had to get Sally to turn the lids back and hold them open.

Even then, Julia put up a terrific resistance, and after we had held her like that for a quarter of an hour she still had not given in. I had always heard that it is terribly difficult to hypnotise anyone against their will, but I was determined to go through with it.

I had been holding her down by the throat the whole time, and I began to choke her again, with the idea that if I reduced her to semi consciousness that way she would no longer be able to exert her will, and her resistance would give way. Her lovely magnolia skin began to go red in patches and her black eyes bulged from her head. Sally warned me to be careful, but I disregarded her advice. I eased the pressure a little, now and then, but kept my thumbs digging into Julia's neck each side of her windpipe. It was horrible; but it worked.

Her eyes took on that curious look of the somnambulist and I knew that she had passed into an hypnotic sleep. I released my grip at once and Sally got her into the chair beside my bed. We gave her a glass of water and a few minutes to recover; then I started on her.

'Now, Julia,' I said, 'I want the truth. When did you become a Satanist?'

'When I was seventeen,' she replied hoarsely.

Her answer staggered me; but details of my reactions to her story are irrelevant now.

'How did it happen?' I asked.

'An old peasant woman in our village took me to a Witches' Sabbath in the Alban hills.'

'Did you go willingly?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'I wanted all the things which were mine by right, but of which I had been cheated. She promised me that if I became a witch I should make a rich marriage.'

'But you had great beauty and you were a daughter of the noble Roman house of Colona, so why shouldn't you have made a rich marriage anyhow?'

'No. My father was a Colona, but he was not married to my mother; that is why I felt myself to have been cheated. She was a peasant girl on his estate outside Rome, and I was brought up by her in a cottage that was almost a hovel.'

'What happened after the Sabbath?'

'My father rarely left the big house when he visited his estate, but one day soon after the Sabbath he came down to the village. He saw me washing clothes in the stream, and struck by my beauty he enquired who I was. When he found that I was his own daughter he expressed a wish to do something for me. He sent me to school for two years, but after that I suffered a bitter disappointment. I had expected to become one of the family, but all he did was to make me his wife's lady’s maid.'

'Was that what you were when you met Uncle Paul?'

'Yes; and he was the rich husband I had been promised. He was not rich then, but he was a gentleman, so he could lift me by marriage to the status that was mine by right of blood; and while he was courting me he told me all about the Jugg millions. I realised that he must be the husband that had been sent for me by the Old One, and I felt certain that once I was married to him I would be able to get hold of a share of those millions.'

'What happened after you came to England?'

'I thought that if I could cure Paul of his bad habits, your grandfather would forgive him and make him a handsome allowance. That was the object of the sйances at Kew. By means of them I was able to frighten Paul out of drinking so much. When he got tight I used to send a ghoul to give him the horrors. Sometimes it used to get out of control for a while and appear in the house unbidden. That is how you came to see it the night you thought you had run into a burglar on the stairs.'

'Soon after that we moved to Kensington Palace Gardens and Queensclere, and you had everything you could wish for. Why did you continue to be a Satanist after that?'

'I didn't. And your coming made a lot of difference, Toby. I was very happy looking after you, and I became very fond of you. I didn't want you to be mixed up in that sort of thing; so after we left Kew I had nothing more to do with it.'

'Why did you take it up again then? and why did you send me to Weylands?'

Julia's big dark eyes were suddenly suffused with tears, and they began to run down her cheeks; but she made no motion to brush them away and, in her trance state, she probably did not know that she was crying. She made a pitiful spectacle, as she went on tonelessly:

'I had to. One of the Brotherhood came to me a little over a year later. How he found out about me I've no idea; but he knew all about my past. He told me that the time had come when I must pay for my riches or lose them; and that you were the price.

I was too weak to refuse. I simply could not bring myself to face poverty again, so I agreed to send you to Weylands. But I hoped that later on I would find a way to prevent them making you one of us. '

'But Helmuth got the better of you, eh?'

'Yes. He did not arrive on the scene until you were about thirteen; but within a week of his coming to stay at Queensclere as your tutor, he became my lover. I had had others ever since I was seventeen. Paul was never anything to me, except the vehicle for my ambitions; and he soon became the complacent husband, content to show me off and let me manage his affairs. But Helmuth was a landmark in my life. I became as wax in his hands, and have been so ever since.'

'That time at Weylands when you and Uncle Paul came up to see me, and I had that horrible experience. I take it that you had not been to a friend's house, or run off the road in the car, at all. When you found me at the bungalow had you just returned from a Black Mass in the crypt of the ruined Abbey?'

'Yes. Paul had been initiated that night as a lay brother. He is not a type out of which a potent Satanist could be made; but as you were growing up, it was considered advisable to bind him to the Brotherhood, so as to ensure his taking his future orders from Helmuth without question, and working to get him the next vacant seat on your Board of Trustees.'

'You knew all about the conspiracy to drive me insane, in order that the Brotherhood could get control of my fortune?'