The Haunting of Toby Jugg Page 4

  I feel my heart beating like a sledge-hammer, and I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from letting out an hysterical scream. I would give everything I possess to be free, if only for two minutes, from the physical bonds that hold me; but I know that, short of rousing the house, there is no alternative to my continuing to lie there suffering the agonies of the damned.

  If, at the first warning touch of that awful cold, I could only spring from my bed and rush from the room! If I could only sit up, press a switch, and flood the room with light! If, even, I could only reach out and turn on my radio-gramophone! But such acts are all beyond my capabilities. Even in the daytime I am unable to rise unaided from my chair, and by night I am a prisoner in my bed!

  What ill have I ever done to anyone, that I should be condemned to this now that my back is broken, and partial paralysis makes me a helpless cripple?

  Thursday, 7th May

  Nothing happened again last night, thank God; and Julia should be here today. Even if it means upsetting Helmuth, and a certain amount of inconvenience, I am sure she will have me moved when she hears what I have to say.

  I shall try to persuade her to let me go back with her to Queensclere. She’ll oppose that because of the number of air-raids that they get down there in Kent; but, war or no war, it would be lovely to be living in the same house with her again.

  Writing that reminds me that yesterday I had meant to go into the matter of the ghost that I saw when I was a small boy, but put off doing so because I suddenly decided that I felt up to setting down on paper a description of the Thing that is haunting me here. That affair took place not very long after I first went to live with Julia, and her knowing all about it is one of the things which will enable me to talk to her of my present plight, without giving her the idea that I’ve gone nuts.

  I always think of this ghost as ‘my burglar’, because that is what I believed it to be at the time; and no doubt I should have continued to believe that up to this very day had it not been for a quite unexpected encounter several years later; but I will record that in its proper place.

  At the age of eight years and four months I lost both my father and grandfather. They were killed together in October 1929, having gone up in the prototype of a new air-liner to inspect her performance for themselves; but something went wrong with the wretched kite and she crashed.

  I never knew my mother, as she died in giving me birth. From her picture and all accounts she must have been very lovely, and she was a rising film star when my father first met her in Hollywood, but she gave up her career when she married him. She was an American of Norwegian extraction and I evidently take after her. My hair and moustache are a shade darker than the red-gold curl of hers that we found in a locket among father’s things; but I have her large grey eyes and straight features. Like her, I am tall and strongly built, and her Norwegian blood must have come through very strongly, as my friends in the R.A.F. nicknamed me ‘The Viking’.

  Anyway, my father’s death left me an orphan. Whether I have any living relatives on my mother’s side I have no idea. I have never heard of any, so she may have been an orphan too. On my father’s side, my grandmother had been dead for years and grandfather had only one sister, my Great-aunt Sarah. She never married, as her fiancé, young Llanferdrack, who owned this place, was drowned just before the happy day; and she has lived here mourning him in seclusion most of her life. But the poor old thing’s romance going wrong unhinged her mind and she is a harmless half-wit, so there was never any question of my being placed in her charge.

  Apart from Great-aunt Sarah my only living relative is my father’s younger brother, Uncle Paul; so the trustees decided that I should go to live with him. I have since gathered that there was quite a bit of argument about it, because Uncle Paul was regarded as the black sheep of the family, and neither my grandfather nor father approved of him at all; but naturally, I knew nothing of that at the time, and he offered to have me. I think the thing that really decided the trustees to accept his offer was that about a year earlier he had married and at last appeared to be settling down.

  All this seems quite irrelevant to the affair I started out to write about; but having begun this journal I find it rather soothing just to ramble on, setting down any thoughts and memories that come into my head, and, after all, it is only for my own edification, so why shouldn’t I write anything I damn’-well choose?

  To continue, then. After the double funeral Uncle Paul took me down to his house at Kew and presented me to Julia. Of course, as his wife she was my aunt by marriage, but I never called her aunt, because she said the first evening she would rather that I didn’t. She said that when I was grown up there wouldn’t really be much difference in our ages and that she felt much too young to be an aunt to anybody; so she would much prefer that I thought of her as a big sister.

  I found that a bit surprising, as she seemed very grown-up to me; but it made things rather cosy, and she was quite the loveliest person I had ever seen. When she tucked me up in bed that night she kissed me, and having no female relatives I was not accustomed to that sort of thing.

  Father used to go abroad a great deal on business trips and even when he was at home I didn’t see much of him. I was still too young for him to have me downstairs when he was entertaining and on most days when he got back from the city he just dashed upstairs to my nursery for a few minutes, then changed and went out; so my world practically consisted of dear old Nanny Trotter and other nannies and their children that we met in the park.

  Of course there was Miss Stiggins too, a dry old spinster who came to give me lessons every morning, but she never kissed me and I don’t suppose that it would have registered if she had; whereas the first kiss from Julia remained an unforgettable landmark in my young life. Her lips were as soft as swansdown against my cheek and she smelled of some delicious perfume; from that moment I absolutely worshipped her.

  Julia was then twenty and had been married nearly a year. Uncle Paul met her in Rome, and although she was an Italian she already spoke English so well that she did not seem like a foreigner, and her faint accent made her speech only more fascinating to listen to. She was medium tall and very slim. Her eyes were black with long lashes and she had the warm, rich colouring of the south. Her face was a long oval, her lips full and very red. She wore her dark hair parted in the middle and it fell smoothly to her shoulders, curling at the ends.

  That first night, I remember, she was wearing a dress of oyster satin with a long, full skirt that swayed gently as she walked; as did also her pendant diamond earrings, which were the only jewels she had on. All her movements were smooth and graceful, and when she laughed it was lazily, her red lips opening to show two rows of strong little white teeth. I was still as innocent as a new-born babe and to me she seemed like an angel—a dark angel—come to life out of a story-book.

  But I must get back to the matter of my ‘burglar’. I had been living with Uncle Paul and Julia for about two months when the affair occurred. Their house at Kew seemed very strange to me at first, because it was so different from those in which I had been brought up; but Julia had a flair for decoration and I found her bright, modern rooms exciting after the much bigger but rather sombre ones to which I was accustomed.

  The Willows was a suburban villa of the type that was built by the thousand during Queen Victoria’s reign; a square three-storied building standing in its own small garden and one of a row of similar middle-class homes. Its front door opened on to a narrow hall with two rooms on each side of it, then continued on the left as a passage to the kitchen and on the right as a staircase leading straight up to the floors above. From the hall you could see the little half-landing where the stairs made a hairpin bend, then disappeared from sight. On the first floor there were four bedrooms and a bathroom, and another flight of stairs immediately above the lower ones led up to the servants’ rooms and box-room at the top of the house.

  Two months is a long time when one is only eight, so to me
the tragedy that had deprived me of my father and grandfather was already ancient history. As I have said, I saw very little of my father, and of my grandfather I saw even less. They were to me Olympian figures who, apart from brief routine visits, impinged upon my consciousness only when they descended from their grown-up heaven either to admonish me if I had been naughty or give me lovely presents.

  Nanny Trotter told me that they had both gone to live with my beautiful mother in Jerusalem-the-Golden, which I took to be a still more remote paradise than that they had presumably enjoyed down here. She made it quite clear that they would never return and it did not take me very long to get accustomed to the idea that I should not see either of them again. Grandfather’s beard had rather a nice smell, which I think was due to lavender-water, and father had a jolly laugh; but I cannot honestly say that I missed either of them very much.

  Besides, there were a thousand new interests to fill my small mind—and, above all, Julia. She did not seem to have any friends in the neighbourhood—although people often came down from London to spend the evening with her and Uncle Paul—so she let me be with her for a large part of every day. Nanny Trotter had been installed at Kew to look after me, of course, but Miss Stiggins had been sacked, as it had been decided that I should go to a prep school after Christmas and that until then I need not do any lessons.

  Julia took me shopping with her—which was very exciting, as I had hardly ever been in a shop before—and to the cinema, and several times up to London, where we lunched in restaurants and afterwards went to look at all sorts of lovely things in Bond Street. So with all these thrilling new experiences I had not a moment left to brood.

  I record all this simply to show that when I saw the burglar I was not grieving for my father and full of morbid thoughts about death. I was a normal, healthy small boy having the time of his life and without a care in the world.

  It happened about a fortnight before Christmas on one of Nanny Trotter’s nights out. Julia had let me stay up a little later than usual and it was nearly seven o’clock before she packed me off to my bath with a promise that, as a treat, she would bring me up some orange jelly with my milk and biscuits.

  I went up the first flight of stairs as usual, at a run, then turned the hairpin bend and took the next flight two at a time. I had the banisters on my left but was heading half right, as my room was the first on that side of the landing. As this was in December it was, of course, already dark; but the light on the landing in front of me had not yet been switched on, so it was lit only by the faint glow coming up from the hall below. I was still two steps from the top of the flight when something made me glance to my left.

  As I was then only a little chap my head was not much above the level of the nearest banister rail and below the further one which served the flight of stairs running up to the second floor. What I saw stopped me dead in my tracks, For a moment I remained there, paralysed by sheer terror

  There was the figure of a man just opposite me on the upper stairs. He was crouching down as though attempting to hide; but he had one white hand on the further banister rail. That gave the impression that he was poised there ready to make an instant dash up the stairs if discovered.

  The horrifying thing about it was that as he crouched there his head was below his hand and on a level with my own. He was peering at me from between the banisters and his face was less than twelve inches from mine. The light was too dim for me to see his features clearly but his face was large, round and flabby with small dark pits for eyes. He made not the slightest sound or movement but just remained there staring at me with the sort of bestial ferocity that one might have expected to see on the face of Jack the Ripper.

  What broke the tension after that awful, age-long moment I have no idea. Perhaps he moved first; or it may be that my heart, having temporarily stopped, started again, so that in an automatic reaction I let out a terrified yell. As I screamed and jerked myself away I caught just a glimpse of him, still crouched almost double, gliding swiftly up the stairs.

  I use the word ‘gliding’ because when I was questioned afterwards I could not recall having heard his footsteps, or, indeed, any noise at all. Had I been older that would certainly have struck me as queer, since the dark outline of the figure had been squat but bulky, and, even if he was wearing rubber-soled shoes, a heavy man could hardly take a flight of stairs at the run without his footfalls being audible. At the time, and for long afterwards, I simply assumed that any noise he made must have been drowned by the sounds of my own wild flight.

  Scared out of my wits, I bounded towards the half-landing, swerved round the bend of the stairs and literally flung myself down the lower flight to arrive sprawling in the hall, still gasping and yelling.

  Almost simultaneously, like a scene in a French farce, three of the doors opened. Julia came running from her sitting-room, Uncle Paul from his study with a friend of his who happened to be with him, and Florrie, the little housemaid, from the dining-room, where she was laying the table for dinner. To complete the party, Cook arrived a second later from the kitchen still clutching a saucepan.

  As they picked me up I shouted: ‘There’s a man upstairs! A burglar! A burglar!’

  Then, trembling with shock and excitement, I burst into tears and flung myself into Julia’s arms.

  The two men armed themselves with golf clubs and went upstairs. The women remained clustered about me in the hall anxiously listening for sounds of strife, but the only ones that reached us were the faint opening and shutting of doors.

  Uncle Paul and his friend seemed to be away a long time, but at last they rejoined us. They said that they had searched every room, looked under all the beds and in all the cupboards, but they had not found the burlgar, and as far as they could judge nothing had been taken or disturbed; so I must have imagined him.

  ‘But I saw him!’ I cried, repudiating the suggestion with indignation. ‘He’s a horrid, bald old man! He glared at me through the banisters and I thought he was going to spring at me. If he’s not there now he must have got out on to the roof.’

  Their attempts to reassure me were in vain. I flatly refused to go to bed until further search had been made. The burglar could not have come down the back stairs because there weren’t any, so I feared that he must be lurking somewhere and might come creeping into my room while the grown-ups were having dinner.

  To quiet my fears the attics and roof were searched; but without result. The moon had risen and in its light there was no place on the sloping tiles of that small, square house where a man could have remained hidden. As the gaps between the roof of The Willows and those of the houses on either side of it were far too wide for any man to jump, the only other possibility was that the burglar had got out of one of the second-floor windows and shinned down a drainpipe. I insisted that he must have done so and was, perhaps, hiding outside, waiting to return when we were all asleep.

  Julia made the two men go out into the garden with torches. There were flower-beds all round the house and anyone coming down a drainpipe must have landed on one, but there was not a footmark to be seen on any of them.

  My tears had long since dried, but I was still very excited and nothing could shake my conviction that I had seen a murderous-looking thug crouching on the stairs. However, nothing more could be done about it, so I allowed myself to be taken up to bed while Florrie got a special supper that Julia ate with me; then she read me to sleep.

  Next morning, of course, the whole affair was gone into again, but no fresh light was thrown upon it, and with the approach of Christmas I ceased to think about it any more. It was not until nearly eleven years later that there came a sequel to this strange affair.

  One day just as I was leaving the mess at Biggin Hill, after lunch, a trim-looking W.A.A.F. came up to me and said: ‘Hello, Master Toby! Don’t you remember me?’

  She was rather a pert-looking blonde of about thirty, and her face was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

  ‘I’m
Florrie Meddows,’ she said. ‘I was housemaid at The Willows when you were a little boy. My, sir, how you’ve grown! But I would have known you anywhere. How’s Mr. and Mrs. Jugg; in the pink, I hope?’

  Of course, I recalled her then and we talked for a bit of old times. After a while she asked: ‘Did you ever see any more spooks at The Willows?’

  ‘Spooks!’ I echoed. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Why, ghosts, of course. Surely you remember the night when you scared us all stiff by insisting that you had seen a ghost?’

  ‘You’re mixing me up with someone else,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve never seen a ghost in my life.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, it was you all right. You came yelling downstairs fit to wake the dead. But I remember now, you thought it was a burglar; and I suppose your aunt, not wanting to frighten you, never told you different.’

  At that the whole episode came back to my mind as clearly as though it had happened only the day before. ‘I’ve certainly always thought it was a burglar,’ I agreed in great surprise. ‘Whatever makes you think it was a ghost?’

  ‘Well, a human being couldn’t have flown out of the window,’ Florrie countered, ‘or disappeared like that without leaving a single trace, could he? Besides, your uncle and aunt may not have let on to you about it, but they were nuts about Spiritualism. There was hardly a night when they had friends down from London that they didn’t go in for table-turning, wall-rapping, and all that. It wasn’t none of my business, and Cook and me just used to laugh about it, thinking them a bit cranky, till the night you gave us all such a fright. That made us think very different, knowing what we did; and we were both so scared that we gave notice first thing next morning. We’d have sacrificed our money and left there and then if it hadn’t been for letting Mrs. Jugg down over Christmas, and her promising not to hold any more séances while we were in the house. If it was a burglar you saw, Master Toby, then I’m a policeman and Hitler’s my Aunt Fanny. No good ever comes of calling on the spirits, and it was through them doing that some horrid thing started to haunt the house.’