The Haunting of Toby Jugg

It is still a tossup whether he will be prepared to risk Helmuth's wrath, but I think he will for close on Ј150. That is a lot to a young Welsh country bumpkin who, but for my arrival here, would still be doing odd jobs in the garden at about Ј2 a week. Besides, there is this laudable ambition of his to become an engineer, like his brother Davey in Cardiff. A wad like this would easily cover his fees at a technical school for the elementary course, which is all he is capable of mastering to begin with, and keep him while he is on it into the bargain.

The thing that I fear is most likely to put him off is the idea of taking a cheque particularly one made out to someone else and crossed account payee. But I hope to get over that by also giving him a letter to my bank, instructing them to credit the cheque to my account and to pay the bearer out its value in cash. That would amount to giving him an open cheque in exchange for paying in the other, really; although he won't realise it. Still, it should help to allay any apprehensions he may have that when he presents the cheque the cashier will think he has stolen it and send for the police.

Of course, if only I can get to London I'll be able to see to it myself that he gets his money; but my bank being there presents another snag. Naturally, if he does his stuff and gets me out, his instinct would be to grab the cheque and make a bolt for Cardiff. But I can think of no way of enabling him to cash the cheque except by taking it to my London bank.

In one way that is an advantage, as although I could have myself put in the guard's van in my wheelchair and make the journey on my own, it would make everything much easier, particularly at the other end, if I had him with me. But it means that I'll have the additional fence to cross of persuading him that, instead of disappearing into the blue, he must accompany me to London

Lastly there is the question of our fares. As I have no ready he will have to ante up for both of us. I don't doubt that he has a bit tucked away somewhere, but it may be in the Post Office; and for me it is tonight or never. If it is there he will have no time to draw it out, and God forbid that he should attempt to borrow from the other servants. Still, if the worst comes to the worst we can use whatever cash he has on tickets to carry us part of the way, and I can offer my gold cigarette case to the collector as security for later paying the surplus on the remainder of the journey.

Taffy always gets back in time to give me my bath, and there could be no better opportunity for tackling him. He can't make any excuse to get away and leave me there, so he will have to listen to all I have to say. I shall offer him the full amount of the cheque in any case, as an assurance against failure and the loss of his job; and double the amount in addition, payable at the end of next month, in the event of his getting me safely to London.

To offer him more might make him suspicious that I mean to rat on him; but a round Ј500and that's what I'll make it won’t sound to him too high a price for the successor of his family's feudal Lords to pay for freedom. On the other hand, he'll know without telling that it is only once in a lifetime that a poor gardener's son has the chance to earn such a sum for a single night's work.

If he agrees, I mean to get him to come back as soon as Nurse Cardew has gone to her room, dress me, get me into my chair and wheel me along to the bathroom. It was the old flower room, and was specially fitted up with a bath for me so that I wouldn't have to be carried upstairs; but it has no window, only a blacked out skylight, so I'll be safe there from the Horror while the household is settling down for the night.

I daren't leave my getaway later than midnight, in case Taffy should drop off to sleep; but by twelve o'clock everyone should be in bed, and he can come and get me.

On second thoughts, though, I think I'll keep him with me; that will eliminate the risk of his giving the game away inadvertently to any of the other servants, or anyone thinking it strange if he is seen loitering about instead of going to bed.

That is certainly an improvement in my plan, as it means that we won't have to leave the house till it is a safe bet that everyone is sound asleep.

It is four miles to the station, but downhill most of the way; so, making due allowance for Taffy's deformed foot, which has saved him from being called up, he ought to be able to push me that far in well under three hours. So if we leave at two o'clock we should reach the station by five, easily; and I doubt if the earliest train leaves much before six.

So that is what is cooking. I pray God that it comes to the boil.

Later

Taffy fell for it; and tonight's the night. I fancy my grandfather must be turning in his grave, though, as the avaricious little bounder stuck out for Ј1,000 and a job in the Juggernaut factory, if he succeeds in getting me to London. But who cares! I would give him the Castle and make him the Lord of Llanferdrack just for getting me out of this room until tomorrow morning.

Tuesday, 2nd June

I am still here. I could not bring myself to write anything yesterday. I was too utterly depressed and mentally exhausted. My only remaining hope is that I may manage to hang out somehow till Uncle Paul arrives on Thursday.

On Sunday night everything went according to plan; but my luck was too good to last. Taffy came for me, dressed me, took me along to the bathroom, waited there with me for nearly three hours, then got me out of the house with no more noise than a first class burglar would have made getting in. The moon was still up and for the first time in many weeks I was glad to see it, as it lit the way for us through the grounds and for the first mile or more down the road. We reached the station by a quarter to five, and had to wait outside it for three-quarter of an hour, as it was not open; but soon after 5.30 the staff of three made their appearance and began the day's routine. Taffy is a bit suspicious of the Post Office, and he keeps his savings in an old cigarette tin concealed somewhere in his room, so we were able to buy two tickets to London, and went on to the platform.

At 5.55 a milk train came through. Why, oh why, didn't we take it? I must have been crazy not to. But everything was going so perfectly that it seemed much more sensible to wait for the 6.20, that does not dither round the loop line but goes direct to the junction.

We were the only people on the platform, and the whistling of the solitary porter was the only sound that broke the stillness of the post dawn hour. Suddenly I caught the hum of a car engine driven all out. Next moment it roared up to the station entrance. There was a brief commotion and the noise of running footsteps, then Helmuth and Nurse Cardew shot out of the booking office and came dashing towards us.

At the sight of them I knew the game was up. The train was nearly due, but even if it had come in at that moment I could not have got Taffy to heave me into it. From fear of Helmuth, he had already taken to his heels.

All the same I meant to make a fight for it; and, anyway, it seemed a bit hard that his panic should cost him the compensation I had promised him for the loss of his job; so I shouted after him:

'Come back, Taffy! Come back, you fool! Don't go without your cheque!'

That halted him, and he came ambling back with a hangdog look on his face, just as Helmuth and Nurse Cardew reached me.

She was in her nurse's uniform but had evidently dressed in a hurry, as her fluffy brown hair was sticking out untidily from under her cap and she had odd stockings on her long legs. Probably it was knowing about that which made her young face so flushed and angry. Without a word she grasped the back rail of my chair, and swivelling it round made to wheel me off the station. But I was too quick for her. Stretching out a hand, I grabbed the iron railing at the back of the platform and brought her up with a jerk.

'Now, Toby!' said Helmuth a bit breathlessly. 'Please don't make a scene. You've already given us an awful fright. Don't add to our distress by making an exhibition of yourself.'

'If there is any scene it will be your fault,' I retorted. 'I am about to take the train to London; and you have no right to stop me.'

Although the platform had been empty a few minutes earlier, a little crowd began to gather with mysterious suddenness. The porter, two soldiers, a land girl, a leading aircraftsman and a little group of children had all appeared from nowhere and were eyeing us with speculative interest.

'You are in no fit state to travel,' Helmuth said sharply.

Striving to keep as calm as I could, I denied that, and a wordy battle ensued in which both of us rapidly became more heated. We were still arguing when the train came clanking in.

The little crowd had increased to over a dozen people and it was now further swollen by others getting out of the train. Seeing it there actually in the station made me desperate. If I could have only covered those few yards and heaved myself into a carriage it meant safety, freedom and sanity; whereas to let Helmuth take me back to Llanferdrack threatened imprisonment, terror and madness. He caught the gleam in my eye and endeavoured to bring matters to a swift conclusion. Grabbing my wrist, he strove to break my grasp of the railing, while Nurse Cardew pushed on my chair from behind with all her weight.

'Help! Help!' I shouted to the crowd. 'I want to get on the train to London, and these people have no right to stop me.'

An elderly Major, who had arrived on the train, stepped forward and said rather hesitantly to Helmuth: 'Look here! This is none of my business, but I really don't think you ought to use violence towards a cripple.'

Helmuth let go my wrist and turned to him; but I got in first. 'I appeal to you, sir,' I cried. 'I am an exofficer wounded in the war; but I am perfectly fit to travel, and these people are endeavouring to detain me against my will.'

'That is only partially true!' Helmuth said quickly. "This poor

young man was shot down nearly a year ago. But the injury to his

spine has affected his brain. I am a doctor and '

'A Doctor of Philosophy!' I cut in, but he ignored the sneer, and went on:

'He is in my care, and escaped from Llanferdrack Castle last night. I assure you that he is not fit to travel, and that I am only doing my duty in restraining him from doing so. It would be dangerous both for himself and others, as he is subject to fits of insanity.'

"That's a lie!' I declared, and Taffy came unexpectedly to my assistance by adding:

'Right you. The young gentleman's as sane as myself, is it. And it is a good master he is, too.'

As the Major looked from one to another of us doubtfully, Helmuth brought up his reserves. With a gesture towards Nurse Cardew he said:

"This lady is a professional nurse. Since you appear to doubt me, she will tell you that she has seen the patient in such a violent state that she had to threaten to have him put into a straitjacket.'

She confirmed his statement at once, and added: 'Two nights ago he was screaming obscenities and attacked the Doctor.'

All these exchanges had taken place in less than a couple of minutes; but the train was overdue to leave, and the guard, who was standing on the fringe of the crowd, blew his whistle.

The Major gave me a pitying look and said: 'I'm very sorry, but I really don't think I can interfere.' Then he saluted politely and turned away.

I thrust my hand in my pocket, pulled out the cheque and the letter for my bank manager, held them out to Taffy and cried: 'Here you are! Quick, man! Jump on the train!'

As Taffy snatched them Helmuth grasped him by the arm and snapped: 'Give that to me!'

I don't know if he realised that it was a cheque or thought that it was a letter that I was trying to get off to somebody without his knowing its contents, but his act was the last straw that made me lose my temper completely.

'Damn you!' I yelled. 'Let him go. That's my money to do as I like with. He's earned it by doing his best to get me out of your filthy clutches. If you take that cheque from him I'll call the police in and have you arrested for theft.'

But Taffy had already wrenched himself away and jumped on the moving train.

To give him the papers I had had to let go the railing and Nurse Cardew seized the opportunity to start pushing me along the platform. Further resistance now that the train had gone was pointless; but, having finally lost my temper, I continued to shout abuse at Helmuth all the way to the car.

Only when they had got me into it, and were tying my wheelchair on to the grid behind, did it suddenly dawn upon me that, by my outburst, I had provided Helmuth with invaluable fresh evidence that he could use in seeking to prove me insane, as a score of people must have heard me raving at him.

That thought, coming on top of my bitter disappointment, was more than I could bear. I broke down and wept.

Later

I had to stop writing a quarter of an hour ago, as the memory of the ignominious manner in which I was brought back here, after my attempted flight, made me start crying again.

Really it is too absurd that a grown man like myself should give way to tears, but I suppose it is because my nerves have been reduced to shreds, and the appalling strain of knowing that my situation is going from bad to worse.

The worst factor is the way in which Helmuth is steadily gaining ground towards his secret objective, of collecting enough evidence about my disturbed mental state to get me certified as a lunatic. But in addition, there are the various changes that have resulted in the past week from my two attempts to escape.

Taffy was a great stupid oaf with a streak of low cunning and greed in his makeup; but on the whole he wasn't a bad sort, and, normally, he was willing, cheerful and friendly. His departure was admittedly my own fault, but I am paying for it now pretty heavily, as his place has been taken by Helmuth's man Konrad. There has never been any love lost between us at the best of times and, quite apart from the fact that I dislike him touching me anyhow, whenever Nurse Cardew is not with us he takes an obvious delight in handling me roughly.

Deb, too, was very far from being a gay and lovable companion, and my new nurse is no better. I am sure she could be, but the trouble is that I set off on the wrong foot with her the very night she arrived, by taking that overdose of sleeping tablets; and since then she has seen little but the worst side of me. Unfortunately, I find it practically impossible to conceal any longer my hatred for Helmuth, and she has already developed a strong admiration for him; so she regards me as an ungrateful young brute, and whenever his name crops up we snap at one another.

She obviously does not like it here; which is quite understandable, seeing that she expected a quiet life looking after a simple spinal case, and now she finds she is in charge of someone whom she believes to be a dangerous lunatic. In addition, my latest escapade has made her work much more exacting, as she now has to come upstairs to me a dozen or more times every day.

When they got me back here, Helmuth again played the role of Uriah Heep and pretended to be greatly distressed about me. But his concern took the form of actually and officially making me a prisoner.

Hating him as I do, I could not help feeling a sneaking admiration for the way he did it, as in achieving his secret object he killed two birds with one stone. On the drive back he declared that some means must be devised to prevent me from escaping again, in case I did myself an injury, and devilishly led Nurse Cardew into discussing with him how best this might be done.

As I have twice succeeded in securing aid for an intended getaway and might, perhaps, corrupt another of the servants to help me in a third attempt, their problem really amounted to what arrangements could be made so that I would need more than one person's assistance to get out of the house without their knowing?

Helmuth was driving and Nurse Cardew sitting in the back with me. By that time I had more or less recovered from my weeping fit and I cut in sarcastically:

'Why don't you take me down to one of the dungeons and chain me to the wall? That's what they used to do to the poor wretches in Bedlam, isn't it?'

That brought a shocked protest from them both, and assurances that they were only trying to protect me from the possibility of something awful happening to me as a result of my own folly.

Then Nurse Cardew said a piece of her own which left me undecided if I ought to curse or kiss her. The gist of her remarks were: (1) She thought the best thing would be for her to take away my chair at nights, as two people would be needed to carry me, and even then it would be difficult for them to get me very far without it. (2) That was, unless the Doctor would agree to moving me to an upstairs room; as in that case, even in my chair, no one person would be able to get me down the stairs. (3) In any case, it was clear that I had a phobia about my present room, and she had always understood that in mental cases the cause of the phobia should never be referred to, and eliminated as far as possible. Therefore, she felt most strongly that I ought to be moved.

For the moment Helmuth did not reply, as he was just driving up to the front of the house. While they got me out of the car and into my chair, my brain was working furiously. The previous afternoon I had considered the possibility of hypnotising Nurse Cardew if Taffy failed me, and now, quite unconsciously, she was suggesting measures which would render any success in that direction futile, as well as actively cooperating with Helmuth in seeking means to make certain that I should not get away again. On the other hand, if she managed to persuade him to move me to another room it seemed that she would be rendering me an inestimable service.

I felt sure that he would refuse, and that if he did it would cost him a lot in her estimation; even, perhaps, convince her that he was deliberately persecuting me by keeping me there; in which case I might soon be able to win her over completely. So it looked as if whichever way things went I stood in to gain on the outcome.

But Helmuth wriggled out of the spot she had unconsciously put him on very neatly. When we were inside the hall he said:

'For your own protection, Toby, I shall adopt Nurse Cardew's suggestion. There is a room in the old part of the Castle on the first floor, abutting on to the chapel. It has a little terrace of its own, so if we put you there it will be unnecessary to carry you down to the garden for your airings; and tucked away in the east wing of the Castle you won't even see any of the servants, except my man Konrad, so you will not be under the temptation to try to bribe one of them.'

As he spoke I caught just the suggestion of a malicious gleam in his tawny eyes, and I knew then that to make me a real prisoner had been his aim the whole time. If he had bluntly suggested doing so that might have shocked and estranged Nurse Cardew, but he had skilfully led her into practically suggesting it herself, and had then made capital out of his willingness to pander to my phobia about being moved from my old room. So here I am.

After breakfast yesterday several of the staff were mobilised to move furniture, and by midday I was installed with all my belongings in my new quarters. It is a big square room with a vaulted ceiling, a large open fireplace and two arched doorways framing stout oak doors that have iron scrollwork and huge bolts on them. One of them leads to a spiral stone staircase, up which I was carried in my chair with considerable difficulty; the other leads to the terrace, which is about twenty-five feet across and shaped like the quarter segment of a circle. It lies in an angle of the Castle, its two straight sides being formed by the outer wall of this room and the wall of another, to which there is no entrance; the curved side is castellated, and this part of the battlements has a fine view over the lake, which lies about fifteen feet below it.

The room is not in bad condition; a little plaster has flaked off the ceiling and here and there the wainscoting that lines the walls has been stained by patches of damp, but the fire which is being lit daily to air it will soon dry them out; and now that it has been furnished with such pieces as they could get up the narrow, spiral stairs, it is quite comfortable. All the same, it gives one a somewhat eerie feeling to have been lifted out of a late Victorian setting and dumped down in another overnight that is still redolent of the Middle Ages.

The thing about my old room that I miss most is the big south window. Here there is no window at all; at least, not in the modern sense. Instead, a large iron grating, about six feet long and three deep, let into the east wall, serves to provide the room with plenty of daylight and an ample supply of fresh air. As the grill is not fitted with glass, a blind, or even curtains, the wind whistling through it must make the place an icehouse in winter; but, fortunately, we are now in high summer, so that does not worry me at the moment. No blackout is needed, as the grill is not in an outer wall, but in that beyond which lies the partially ruined chapel. If I were able to stand I could look down through it into the chapel, but as its lower ledge is about five feet six from the floor I can see only on an upward angle some of the groined rafters of the decaying roof, and the tops of the upright baulks of timber which have been wedged under them to prevent it falling in.

Since I have been here I have been wondering a lot what Helmuth's motive can be in agreeing to my removal from the library. At first I was tremendously elated at the thought that, at last, I had escaped from the vicinity of the courtyard and that damnable band of moonlight; but, somehow, I cannot bring myself to feel any permanent sense of security on account of my move.

The courtyard is on the far side of the chapel from the lake, but that is no great distance; and the idea has begun to prey upon my mind that the Thing, having some horrible form of intelligence, may know of my move and follow me here or Helmuth may have some way of telling it where I am.

If it does seek me out here, and climb up the chapel wall to the grating, I shall be forced to look on it for the first, time face to face that is, if there is moonlight filtering through the broken roof of the chapel. When Nurse Cardew and Konrad left me last night I had a bad half hour fearing that might happen; but to my ' great relief the weather changed, it began to rain gently and the moon could not get through the clouds.

There is another thing that has been worrying me all day. Just as I was dropping off to sleep last night, at about eleven o'clock, I heard footsteps. They were light and clear, and sounded as if someone was descending a stone staircase behind the head of my bed.

At the time I thought nothing of it. But this morning I suddenly realised that the wall behind my bed head is an outer wall of the Castle, and I am certain that there is no staircase there.

Can those footsteps be the first indication of some fresh manifestation of Evil to which Helmuth is about to subject me? Is that why he put me in this room? They cannot have been made by any human agency, unless they are some curious echo. Perhaps that is the explanation. Pray God it is, for my nerves are strained to breaking point already.

Wednesday, 3rd June

I slept badly last night, but, thank God, had no actual trouble. It was stormy again and the moonlight only showed fitfully now and then through the grating.

This morning I managed to get a look through it down into the chapel but, in doing so, I got myself into a bit of a mess, which ended with surprising and terrifically exciting results.

As I have mentioned before, my shoulders and arms are very strong. After I had had my airing on the battlements I wheeled myself up to the grating, sideways on, and stretched up my right hand as high as it would go. I was just able to get a firm grip on the ledge and, exerting all my strength, pulled myself up until I could grasp the iron grill with my left hand; then I shifted the right to a firmer hold and, hanging there, peered through.

The chapel is both long and lofty in fact it is as big as the average country church. Its floor is a good twenty-five feet below me as, to give it additional height, the old builders sank it about twelve feet into the ground. Actually, I suppose they excavated the whole site for the Castle to that depth or more, and instead of making cellars and dungeons out of this bit, carried the walls and pillars of the chapel straight up from the foundations.

It must have been a damp and cheerless place to worship in, as its floor is well below the level of the lake, which runs parallel to its south wall and only about forty feet away, but our ancestors don't seem to have minded damp and cold as much as we do.

The roof is about fifteen feet above my head, and is not as badly damaged as I expected. There are a few big rents in it, but they are all this end. Looking down from the grill I was directly facing the altar, and the whole of the far half of the roof over the chancel and a good part of the nave is intact.

There are now no pews in the chapel, as it has not been used for many years; but there are a number of large, stone boxlike graves with effigies of chaps in armour, and their ladies, on them, as the Lords of Llanferdrack were always buried here. Parts of four out of the six pillars, which were the main support of the roof, have crumbled away, and it has been shored up in places with wooden scaffolding. It looks, too, as if its disintegration has been arrested, as there is no debris littering the stone floor. In fact the whole place is as clean as if it had been swept out yesterday, which seems rather surprising. I was just wondering why anyone should bother to keep it in such good order when my chair slipped from under my feet, and I found myself stranded, like a fly on the wall, clinging to the grating.

It was a quarter of an hour before Nurse Cardew came in and found me like that. She promptly pushed my chair back and got me down into it, while scolding me for taking such a risk of injuring myself. I simply laughed at her and said that I could have hung on there for an hour or more without serious discomfort, had I wished.

She looked me straight in the eye and said: 'I don't believe it unless you were taking some of the weight on your feet.'

I said I didn't think that I had been, not perceptibly, anyhow; upon which she told me to put my hands on her shoulders and try to stand up.

I tried, and I couldn't manage it. But she is amazingly strong for a girl, and she practically lifted me into an upright position. With one hand grasping the grating and the other round her neck we found that I could just remain erect for a moment of two.

Nurse Cardew says that is a sure sign that my back is mending; and that although we must go very carefully, if I practise standing like that for a short time every day, until I can take the whole of my own weight, there is a real chance that I may eventually be able to walk again. I gather that I should be doing well if I could walk from one room to another unaided by this time next year but, to me, even such a modest prospect is wildly exciting.

Besides, once I can manage a dozen steps they would let me have crutches. They daren't as things are, for if a crutch slipped I should go flat on my face, or on my back, and if my head struck something hard I might kill myself. But if I was strong enough to recover my balance there would be no danger of that, and with the aid of crutches I could get about all over the place.

This really is terrific, and Nurse Cardew seemed as pleased as I was. She has a nice smile that lights up her freckled face, and really makes her quite pretty while it lasts. But like a fool I spoilt the whole thing by asking her if she managed to keep Helmuth in his place last night; and got the tart answer to 'Mind your own business.'

I knew that she had had dinner with him because she told me she was going to yesterday afternoon. She asked me if I minded having my evening massage a little earlier than usual, so that she would have longer to change out of uniform. Naturally I agreed; I could hardly have done otherwise, and I forbore to make any comment.

However, a few minutes after having snapped me up this morning she resumed the subject of her own accord. She said:

'I do wish you would try to get these horrid ideas about Dr. Lisicky out of your head. It was kind of him to ask me to have dinner with him, and I hope he does again. He couldn't have been more charming, and the pre-war atmosphere of candlelight and wine made a nice change for me from the routine of having my meals served on a tray in the small library.'

There was nothing much I could say to that which would not have led to another row, so I let it pass. I wish, though, that she had been here as a fly on the wall when Helmuth was discussing the replacement of Deb, and had heard him say that it would be 'fun to have someone fresh to sleep with', as I am quite sure that he would never bother to ask her to dine with him unless he had designs on her.

As she is so young Helmuth may have decided that the best policy is not to rush his fences. On the other hand it may be a case of 'still waters run deep'. No girl can be a nurse and remain ignorant of sex, and this one looks healthy enough to have the usual urges of her age. If she had been 'educated' at Weylands she would be a veteran by this time. Still, I don't believe, somehow, that she is that kind.

Those queer footsteps came again last night, and I heard them twice; first at eleven o'clock, as before, and, as I was wakeful, again about one o'clock. The second time they were going back up the stairs. Yet there cannot be any staircase there. It hardly seems possible that the Thing could make that sort of noise yet it gave me a slight fit of the jitters. Thank God tomorrow is

Thursday. Unless Fate plays me some scurvy trick to prevent Uncle Paul turning up, within twenty-four hours now I'll be a free man again.

Thursday, 4th June

Last night it was calm with a clear sky, so for the first time I saw the full effect of a bright moon in this room. Praises be, there is no thick bar of it on the floor, as there was downstairs, for it does not shine in direct through the grating. It comes through the holes in the chapel roof, then filters through here filling the room with a soft radiance; but it was not strong enough to throw a shadow of the crisscross bars of the grill.

As the appearance of the Horror is so tied up in my mind with moonlight, I was naturally in a pretty nervous state; and when the footsteps came again at eleven o'clock I broke out into a sweat. But nothing happened and after a bit I managed to get off to sleep.

This morning, while I was sitting in the sunshine on my terrace, I went over in my mind what I mean to say to Uncle Paul. As he has always been very decent to me I dislike the idea of being tough with him; but I am afraid that is the only way I can make certain of getting him to stand up to Helmuth.

I have always been rather sorry for my uncle, as in the natural course of events he should have come in for his share of the Jugg millions and be a rich man in his own right. But that he did not, and will be almost entirely dependent on me after I attain my majority, is largely his own fault. His early life, before he married Julia, was really rather a shocking record of weakness and stupidity.

When he came down from Cambridge in 1917, my grandfather secured him a commission in the Welsh Guards; but early in 1919 he got tight one night at the Berkeley, and struck a waiter, who was trying to persuade him to go home. Naturally that led to a pretty nasty stink and I gather that he narrowly escaped being cashiered; but they let him off with sending in his papers. The old man sent him to South Africa for a couple of years, to be out of the way while he sowed the rest of his wild oats, then brought him home in 1921, and put him into the offices of our Newcastle shipyards.

There he got involved with a typist and his father had to pay a tidy sum to prevent an action for breach of promise being brought. He was transferred to London after that, so that an eye could be kept on him, but that didn't do much good. He was always at the races instead of the office, and in the next few years my grandfather had to pay up his racing debts on three occasions.

Then he got into the hands of a real top line cardsharper; one of the chaps who do things on the grand scale with a nice little house in Mayfair, run a perfectly straight game for a whole season and take just one mug for a ride in a big way at the end of it. In the season of 1925 Uncle Paul was the mug selected, and in an all-night session he was stung for seven thousand pounds.

It all appeared perfectly aboveboard, as there were scores of other gamblers who were prepared to swear to the honesty of the crook. My grandfather paid again, but that was the end. Uncle Paul was sent abroad with a thousand a year, payable monthly, and told that in the future he could go bankrupt or go to prison, but he would not get another cent.

In 1928 he married Julia. I have no doubt that he was in love with her on account of her bewitching beauty; but, in addition, she is connected with the noble Roman house of Colona, and I think he thought that a respectable marriage would put him right with his father. But it didn't. Albert Abel I would not even receive them; and Julia has no money of her own, so they took the Willows and settled down there in the hope that the old man would relent.

That is where Uncle Paul was unlucky. Before sufficient time had elapsed for his father really to appreciate that he had turned over a new leaf the air crash put an end to his chances. So poor Uncle Paul's own income is still no more than it was when he had the little house at Kew.

Later

Uncle Paul has been and is now on his way back to London. He arrived in time to lunch with Helmuth and immediately afterwards Helmuth brought him up here. Perhaps it is the result of having lived for three years in an area

constantly subject to air raids, but I thought Uncle Paul was looking a lot older. He can't be much more than forty-three, but his red hair has got a lot of grey in it now and the pouches under his eyes are heavier than ever, so he might easily be taken for fifty. All the same, his ruddy face does not look unhealthy, and he greeted me with his usual hearty manner.

'Hello, old boy! It's grand to see you again. Wish I could have come down before, but this cussed war keeps me so fearfully busy. Never realised in the old days that serious farming took up so much time; still, we must all do what we can, eh?'

Helmuth was standing in the doorway, looking like a benevolent Bishop. I had feared that I might have considerable trouble getting rid of him; but not a bit of it. With a smile, he said: 'I'm sure you would like to have a talk with your uncle alone, so I will leave you now.' And off he went. I heard his footsteps echoing on the stone stairs, so I am quite sure that he did not linger to listen through the keyhole to what I had to say about him.

Meanwhile Uncle Paul was saying how Julia had sent me her fondest love, and that when he had shown her my letter she had wanted to come too; but that he hadn't let her because last week¹ she was in bed for several days with a nasty go of summer 'flu and, although she is up again now, he didn't think she was really fit enough to make such a tiring journey.

In view of the way I meant to deal with my uncle I was by no means sorry that she had not come; but I was a bit perturbed by the apparent indifference with which Helmuth had left us on our own, and debarred himself from the possibility of butting in on us at a critical juncture. It argued enormous self-confidence on his part, or else that he had already anticipated me and fixed Uncle Paul over lunch. So, after we had exchanged platitudes for a bit, I sought to test the situation by saying:

'I don't know if Helmuth has mentioned it to you, Uncle, but he and I haven't been on awfully good terms lately.'

'I say, old boy! I'm fearfully sorry to hear that.' Uncle Paul looked a shade uncomfortable, but he had not answered my question, so I persisted:

'He and I hold distinctly different views as to the state of my health; and I was wondering if by any chance he had suggested to you that the injury to my spine might now be having an unfortunate effect on my brain?'

Uncle Paul looked really uncomfortable at that, and began to shuffle his large feet about, as he replied: 'To tell you the truth, old man, he did say something to that effect. Nothing definite, you know; but just that recently you seemed to be getting some rather potty ideas into your head. If I'd taken what he said seriously I'd have been damn' worried fearfully upset. But I didn't; and anyone with half an eye can see that you're as fit as a two year old.'

'Thanks, Uncle,' I said quietly. 'I'm glad you feel that, because one of the reasons why I asked you to come down was to make a request which you may think rather unreasonable. I know it will sound to you like an invalid's whim, and one that is going to cause quite a lot of needless trouble; but I have given the matter very careful consideration and I am absolutely set on it. I don't like being here at Llanferdrack, and I want you to make immediate arrangements for my removal.'

Evidently Helmuth had briefed him on that one, as he produced all the arguments against it that Helmuth had used to me. I let him ramble on for a couple of minutes, then I said:

'All right, let's leave that for a minute, while I put up to you another idea. You will consider this one much more startling, but I have excellent reasons for making my request. I want you to sack Helmuth.'

His pale blue eyes fairly popped out of his head. 'Sack Helmuth!' he repeated. 'My dear old boy, you can't be serious. I mean, what's he done?'

'What he's done,' I said, 'is to make himself a sort of Himmler, so far as I am concerned. He has got this bee in his bonnet that I am going nuts, so he is now treating me as if I were an escaped Borstal boy of fifteen. And I won't bloody well have it! Do you know that during the past month or more he has had the impertinence to stop all my letters to Julia?'

He nodded. 'Yes, he told me that. He was afraid it would upset us if we knew that well, you know what I mean. Got the idea that you were going gaga, or something.'

'Look, Uncle.' I caught his glance and held it. 'I am as sane as I ever I was; but if I were going gaga who are the first people who ought to be informed of that?'

'Myself and Julia,' he admitted a bit sheepishly.

'Right, then,' I cracked in. 'Helmuth has exceeded his duties and abused his position. I am now making a formal request to you as my Guardian that you should sack him.'

'But I can't, old man. It just isn't on, you know. With the best will in the world I couldn't do that. You seem to forget that he is a Trustee.'

'What about it?' I retorted. 'In just over a fortnight I shall attain my majority. On June the twentieth the Board of Trustees will cease to have any further function. The whole outfit has to cash in to me, then it goes up in smoke. It is you, Uncle, who seem to have forgotten that.'

He gave me an unhappy glance from beneath his red eyebrows. 'Of course, Toby old boy, I quite see what you mean. But, all the same, after all these years we can't just kick Helmuth out. It wouldn't be playing the game.'

My tone was acid as I remarked: 'After nearly a year as a helpless cripple, I am no longer interested in games. Helmuth is endeavouring to keep me here against my will, and I am not going to stand for it. I want to leave Llanferdrack, and leave at the earliest possible moment.'

'But hang it, old chap! We've just been into that and you couldn't be better situated than you are here as long as there is a war on.'

Feeling that I had now got to make him face up to the issue, I said firmly: "That is beside the point. I want to get out, and I'm going to get out. If you're afraid to sack Helmuth leave it to me, and I'll do it myself in a fortnight's time. But either he goes, or you take me with you when you leave. Now, what about it^'

For a moment he sat in miserable silence, then he muttered: 'Toby, this isn't like you. I'm really beginning to be afraid that there is something in what Helmuth said, and that you're no longer quite all right in the upper storey.'

I hadn't wanted to discuss the implications of that idea with him, as if Helmuth does succeed in getting me into a loopy bin I may never get out; but Helmuth may have already put that possibility into his head, so on second thoughts I decided that it would be best to put all the cards on the table, and bluff for all I was worth that I was completely confident that even if I was certified I would manage to regain my freedom later. I gave him a calm, steady smile, and threw the cat among the pigeons.

'You know perfectly well, Uncle, that you have never talked to a saner man than I am at this moment. Since Helmut has given you the idea that I am going nuts, there is something else I've got to tell you. It is my considered opinion that for criminal ends he has been deliberately trying to create that impression.'

'Oh, come, old man! That's a frightful thing to say about a chap. After all, he is one of us even if he is a Czech. And why in the world should he?'

'Because he wants to keep his hold over me. You know as well as I do that he and Iswick are virtually running the Board of Trustees at the moment. If it could be shown that I am unfitted to take over, they would go on running it. And that's what they want. That might benefit certain innocent parties too, Uncle; such as yourself but only for a time.'

'What the hell are you driving at?' he protested.

I shrugged, and put up my big bluff. 'Simply this. If Helmuth could get me certified you, as well as he, would continue to enjoy the directors' fees and other perks that you get from being a Trustee. But, clever as Helmuth is, he could not succeed in stalling me out of my inheritance indefinitely. Sooner or later the doctors are going to agree that I am fit to handle my affairs. Once that happens the balloon goes up. I'll be Jugg of Juggernauts and all the rest of the caboodle. For those who have stood by me nothing will be too good, but God help anyone who has lent Helmuth a hand, either actively or passively, to play his dirty game.'

I felt the time had come to be really tough; so after a moment's pause I went on: 'One way and another you've been jolly decent to me, Uncle Paul, and I'm very grateful to you; but you haven't been ill rewarded for giving me a home. The Trustees agreed that I should be brought up in the sort of surroundings I should have enjoyed if my father had still been alive. Queensclere and Kensington Palace Gardens were kept on, and you were allowed twenty thousand a year to maintain them as a suitable background

for me. I couldn't have cost you much more than a twentieth of that, and the rest was yours to play around with as you liked.

'For thirteen years you have lived like a Prince on my money. You have had your hunters, your racing stable, your shooting, and trips to Deauville and the South of France whenever you felt that way inclined. I don't grudge you one moment of the fun you've had. All I want to know this afternoon is if you wish it to go on?'

He stared at me, his mouth, under his brushed up Guards moustache, a little agape. Then he stammered: 'Isis this what you meant when you asked me to come down to see you about future financial arrangements?'

"That's it, Uncle,' I said. 'Until quite recently I have always had it in mind that, when I come of age, I would make a settlement to ensure that you and Julia should have everything in reason that you wanted for the rest of your lives. I'd still like to do that; but I'm in a spot. You may think some of my present views a little eccentric, but you know darned well that I am not insane. If anyone has gone a bit haywire it is Helmuth. But you have got ' to side with either him or me. I am appealing to you now as my legal Guardian; and if you do as I wish you are going to be in clover; not for a few months only but for good and all.

'If you prefer to shelve your responsibility and leave me in his hands, one fine morning you are going to wake up to find yourself stark naked in the breeze. Because from the moment I do get control of the Jugg millions you are going to be right back where you were thirteen years ago; and, as God is my witness, you shall never see another penny of them.'

I suppose it was pretty brutal, and I could never have put it so bluntly if Julia had been with him. Afterwards, I felt an awful cad about it, but not at the time; and it had a most curious effect on him. He hunched his shoulders and almost cowered away from me, as though he was a dog that I had been giving a beating. Then, when I'd done, he gave a slight shudder, and sighed:

'You mean that, Toby, don't you? Perhaps old Albert Abel was right to leave you the Jugg Empire, lock, stock and barrel, although you were only a kid. Perhaps, even then, he sensed that you had something of himself in you and would make a go of it. I believe you will, too, if you're ever able to get about again. Anyway he was right about me. There was too much money for me to have gambled it all away; but cads like Iswick would have had the breeches off me within a couple of years. They won't off you, though. When you were speaking just now it might have been your grandfather browbeating some wretched competitor into selling out. I had no idea you could be so hard.'

'I'm not being hard,' I countered. 'I'm only being logical. I'm up against it, and I'm simply using such weapons as I possess; that's all. I know you're frightened of Helmuth; everybody is; that's why I have to go the limit to get you on my side; otherwise I would never have put it the way I did.'

He nodded. 'I see your point, old man. Lot in it, too. Mind, I don't believe for a minute that you're right about Helmuth. He honestly thinks you've gone a bit queer, and that the fewer people who get to know about it the better. As he has been stopping your letters, and you couldn't let us know how you felt about wanting to leave Llanferdrack, I suppose there's quite a case for your having tried to escape on your own. But that nice young nurse of yours tells me that you've created merry hell here more than once, and used the most fearful language.'

'True enough,' I admitted. 'And wouldn't you, if you were treated like a prisoner? I'm not even allowed in the garden now; and look at this room. Can you possibly imagine anything more like a cell in the Bastille?'

'I could get Helmuth to alter all that,' he offered, a little more cheerfully, 'but as you say yourself, he's a tough proposition. I'm afraid it would take a greater nerve than I've got to sack him. Even if that were justified, which I don't think it is. And as the Trustees placed you in his care, I don't at all like the idea of telling him that I've made other plans for you.'

'You are going to, though; aren't you?' I insisted, striving to keep the anxiety out of my voice. 'Getting him to ease up the prison routine is not enough. I am relying on you to get me out of his clutches at once, and for good.'

'Yes, old man. I quite see that.' He stood up and, thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, began to pace agitatedly back and forth, evidently wondering how best he could set about the unpleasant task I had forced upon him. After a few turns, he stopped in his tracks and faced me:

'Look here, Toby, I can't tackle Helmuth alone. He's too fast for me. In any argument over you he'd win in a canter. You know that. You must give me a day or two to get a bit of help for the job.'

'What sort of help?' I asked suspiciously.

'Well, if I called a meeting of the Trustees, exclusive of

Helmuth, and they '

'No good,' I cut him short. 'It would take at least a week to get them together. I can't wait that long.'

'AH right, old man, all right. But I could have a word with one or two of them and get their backing. Iswick and Roberts are both still in London. Besides, I simply must talk to Julia about it. She'll fearfully upset, as she has always taken such a good view of Helmuth. But she's much cleverer than I am, and once she realises that you're dead set on being moved she'll think of some way of doing the trick neatly.'

I saw that if I forced him to act there and then he would only make a mess of things, so with considerable reluctance I said:

'Very well then. But the best I can do is to give you forty-eight hours. I hate to put it this way, Uncle, but I really did mean all I said a little while back. So, for your own sake as well as mine, don't let Iswick, or anyone, argue you round into doing nothing. I'm pretty well at the end of my tether, and if you haven't got me away from here by the weekend I shall consider that you have deliberately let me down. Is that clear?'

'Yes, old man.' Uncle Paul nodded vigorously. 'You've made it as plain as a pikestaff. Not giving me much time to work in, though, are you? I'd meant to stay here the night; but since you're in such a desperate hurry, perhaps I'd better travel back to London this evening.'

'I think that would be an excellent idea,' I agreed. 'As a matter of fact I meant to suggest it; because as things are I think it would be a very bad thing for you to spend the evening with Helmuth. Seeing that it's a fine afternoon, he is almost certain to be out at this hour; so if you telephone for a car at once you may be able to get away without even seeing him. Anyway, I'm sure you'd be well advised to avoid a long session with him tonight. He's a persuasive devil, and drinking a couple of bottles of Cockburn’s '12 with him after dinner might cost you a five figure income.'

He laughed, a little weakly. 'By gad, Toby, you've got a darned unpleasant sense of humour; but it's just like your grandfather's.'

'I wasn't being funny,' I said quietly.

After that we said goodbye, and he hurried off to order a car, and get his things repacked while waiting for it.

An hour and a half later Helmuth came in. He gave me a searching look and said: 'What's happened to your uncle? Why did he rush off like that?'

'How would I know?' I replied with a bland smile. 'He said something about not being able to stay the night because he had urgent business in London.'

A cat like grin spread over Helmuth's face and he gave a sudden sardonic laugh. 'If you think that your Uncle Paul is capable of removing you from my care, you are making a big mistake. Kill or cure, I mean to see this matter through; and you still have a lot to learn about my powers for asserting my will.' Then he turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

In spite of what he said, there was something in his manner which told me that he was both annoyed, and a little rattled, at Uncle Paul having sidestepped him. And I am pretty confident that I have really scared my uncle into taking action. So, although I'm very far from being out of the wood, I feel tonight that I can at least see a ray of daylight.

Friday, 5th June

I have solved the mystery of the footsteps. Doing so shook me to the core. I break out into a muck sweat when I recall the terror that engulfed me as a result of my curiosity overcoming my fears.

It was the knowledge that the odds are now on my being out of here before the weekend is over that had restored my nerve and tempted me into opening this Pandora's box. When I heard those steps on the stairs again last night at the usual hour, I plucked up all my courage and rapped with my knuckles sharply on the wainscoting behind the head of my bed.

The steps halted for a moment, then went on. I rapped again. They halted again; then there came a weird creaking sound.

It is now seven nights since the moon was full, so tomorrow she will be passing into her last quarter. The light she gives is already nowhere near as bright as it was. It does no more than make the grating stand out as a luminous patch in the middle of the wall, and dilute the darkness with a faint greyness. I could barely discern the outline of my bedside table, and the wall beyond it was a solid patch of blackness until, as the creaking sounded, it was split by a long, thin ribbon of light.

I held my breath and my heart began to thump. I wished to God that I had let sleeping dogs lie, but by then it was too late to do anything except curse myself for a fool.

A bony hand suddenly emerged from the strip of light. I saw it plainly. I cowered back. My teeth clenched in an instinctive effort to check the scream that rose to my throat.

It was a small hand; but the fingers were very long and the knuckles very pronounced. It seemed to claw at the nearest edge of the lighted strip. The creaking recommenced. The strip of light widened. I realised then that a panel in the wainscoting was being forced back. I wondered frantically what frightful thing I had so wantonly summoned to me. Something, 1 knew, was about to emerge from behind the panel into the room. Was the hand human or the limb of some ghastly, satanic entity, that had its origin in the Pit?

I was so overcome with fear as to what I might see next that I shut my eyes. The creaking ceased and was followed by a rustling sound. Then there was a faint clatter and a shuffling on the floor, only a yard from my bed. My eyes started open and I saw a vague grey figure leaning forward to peer at me. I shrunk away; thrusting out my hands to protect myself and moaning with terror.

Suddenly the figure laughed a high-pitched, unnatural, eerie cackle. The sound seemed to turn my blood to water. Then its voice came brittle but human, with a childlike treble note:

'Why, it's Toby Jugg. What are you doing up here?'

With a gasp of ineffable relief, I realised that this midnight visitor was only my poor, old, half-witted Great-aunt Sarah; and that the outer wall of the Castle must contain a secret stairway that she uses for some purpose of her own each night.

'God, what a fright you gave me!' I exclaimed, with a semi hysterical laugh. Then I levered myself up in the bed with my hands, till I was sitting propped against the pillows, to get a better look at her.

She had left her candle on the steps behind the opening of the panel through which she had come. By its light I could see now that she was wrapped in a long pale blue dressing gown, the skirts of which trailed on the floor. Her scant hair hung in grey wisps about her thin face, and her eyes gleamed with a bright, feverish light. As I took in the macabre figure that she cut I felt that I had no reason to be ashamed of the panic with which I had been seized at the first glimpse of her. Despite the fact that she entirely lacked the aura of Evil that had made my flesh creep with the coming of the Shadow, she was infinitely nearer to the ghost of tradition, and I am sure that on coming face to face with such an apparition at dead of night plenty of people far braver than I am would have lost their nerve.

Picking up her candlestick and holding the light aloft, so that she could see me better, she repeated in her shrill treble: 'What are you doing up here, Toby Jugg?'

Since my arrival at Llanferdrack I had seen her only about half a dozen times with her companion, in the garden; and, although I had exchanged a few words with the latter, she had never spoken to me herself, so I was surprised that she even knew who I was. Evidently the old girl was not entirely gaga, and as I wanted to find out what she was up to, I said as gently as I could:

'Dr. Lisicky had me moved up here a few days ago, Aunt Sarah. I'm living here now. You don't mind that, do you? But what are you doing? Why do you go down those stairs every night at eleven o'clock?'

'To dig my tunnel,' she replied at once. Then a sudden look of fear came into her eyes and she clapped a skinny hand over her mouth, like a child who realises that it has inadvertently let out a secret.

'Why are you digging a tunnel?' I asked quietly.

'You won't tell you won't tell! Please, Toby Jugg, please! Nettie must never know. She would stop me. He's waiting for me there. I am his only hope. You won't tell Nettie please, please!' Her words came tumbling out in a spate of apprehension. By 'Nettie' I guessed that she meant her old sourpuss of a companion, Miss Nettelfold.

'I wouldn't dream of telling anyone,' I assured her. 'But now you've told me about the tunnel there is no reason why you shouldn't share the rest of your secret with me, is there? Where does your tunnel go to; and who is "he"?'

'Why, he is Lancelot, of course.' Her eyes widened with surprise at my ignorance. 'Surely you know that she is keeping him a prisoner there, at the bottom of the lake?'

Bit by bit I got the whole story of the strange fancies that for many years have obsessed the poor old madwoman's brain.

The bare facts I already knew. When she was a girl of twenty she fell in love with the last Lord Llanferdrack, and he with her. She was many years younger than her only brother my grandfather so although he was not then the multimillionaire that he afterwards became, he had already amassed a considerable fortune. Nevertheless, the Llanferdracks were a proud old feudal family, and the young lord's mother was most averse to his marrying the sister of a jumped-up Yorkshire industrialist, so there was considerable opposition to the match.

All this happened well over forty years ago, and in Queen Victoria 's time young people were kept on a pretty tight rein; so for a while the lovers had great difficulty in even meeting in secret, and every possible pressure was put on young Lancelot Llanferdrack to make him give Great-aunt Sarah up. Probably it was that opposition which made them madder than ever about one another. Anyhow, they wouldn't give in, and eventually Albert Abel took matters in hand. He came down here to see old Lady Llanferdrack and, somehow, succeeded in fixing matters for his sister. The engagement was formally announced, and little Sarah Jugg was asked down to meet her fiancй’s family in the ancestral home.

She had been here only a few days when the most appalling tragedy occurred. They were out in a punt on the lake and Lancelot was fishing. He missed his footing and went in head down. It seems that he must have got caught in the weeds at the bottom of that first plunge, for he never came up. He simply disappeared before her eyes. The lake is very deep in parts and they never recovered his body.

The shock turned her brain. Against all reason she insisted that he would come up sooner or later, and that she must remain near the lake until he did. All efforts to persuade her to leave the district were in vain; and eventually Albert Abel bought the Castle from Lady Llanferdrack, so that poor Great-aunt Sarah could have her wish and live by the lake for the rest of her days.

That is where fact ends and the strange weaving of her own imagination begins. Perhaps her fiancй’s name having been Lancelot is the basis of the fancies that years of brooding over her tragedy have built up in her mind; or it may be that local tradition has it that this lake in the Welsh mountains is the original one of the Arthurian legend.

In any case, she believes that the Lady of the Lake lives in it and, being jealous of her, snatched Lancelot from her arms. She is convinced that he is still alive, but a prisoner at the bottom of the lake, and that her missions is to rescue him. This apparently can be done only by digging a tunnel, over half a mile long, through the foundations of the Castle and right out beneath the dead centre of the lake; then Lancelot will do a little digging on his own account, and having made a hole in its bottom over her tunnel, will escape through it to live with her happily ever after.

I asked her how far she still had to go, what the tunnel was like, and various other questions. It seems that it is only large enough to crawl through, and that she shores it up as she goes along with odd bits of floorboard and roofing that she collects from some of the rooms in the Castle that have been allowed to fall into ruin.

But progress is slow, and she does not get far enough to need a new roof prop more than about once in six weeks. It was the wizard Merlin who put her on to this idea for rescuing her lover, and he told her that the whole thing would prove a flop if she used a tool of any kind, or even a bit of stick to dig with, and that each night she must take ever scrap of dirt she removes out under her clothes; so it is a kind of labour of Hercules, and the poor old thing is doing the whole job with her bare hands.

Merlin also put another snag in it. He said that she must not arouse the Lady of the Lake 's suspicions by digging straight towards the centre of the lake; instead the tunnel must go the whole length of the chapel, then out as far as the bridge and, only there, turn in towards its final objective. On four occasions, too, while burrowing alongside the chapel, she came up against impenetrable walls of stone in the foundations, and after years of wasted work had to start again practically from the beginning.

That has worried her a lot, as she is a bit uncertain now in which direction she really is going; but she thinks it is all right, as she can hear Lancelot's voice calling to her and encouraging her more clearly than she could a few years ago. He is being very good and patient about the long delay in getting him out, and he must certainly be a knight sans peur et sans reproche, as he still refuses even to kiss the hand of the black-haired Circe who has made him her captive in spite of the fact that she comes and waggles herself at him nightly. At least, that's what he tells Great-aunt Sarah, and who am I to disbelieve him?

I should have thought that after the dark enchantress had put in her first twenty years attempting, every evening, to vamp Lancelot without success, she would have gone a bit stale on the type, and started looking around for a more responsive beau; but evidently she and my great-aunt are running about neck to neck in this terrific endurance contest.

After talking to the old girl for about half an hour I had got the whole pathetic business out of her. By then she was obviously anxious to get along down to her digging, so I once more promised that I wouldn't give her secret away, and, closing the secret panel carefully behind her, she left me.

So far, today has been one of the pleasantest that I have had for a long time. My quadrant of private terrace faces south southeast, so it gets full sunshine till well past midday, and all the morning I sat out there with Sally. I call Nurse Cardew Sally now, as she says she prefers it.

After we had been out there a little while she asked me if I thought it would be terribly unprofessional if she sunbathed; and you had something of himself in you and would make a go of it. I believe you will, too, if you're ever able to get about again. Anyway he was right about me. There was too much money for me to have gambled it all away; but cads like Iswick would have had the breeches off me within a couple of years. They won't off you, though. When you were speaking just now it might have been your grandfather browbeating some wretched competitor into selling out. I had no idea you could be so hard.'

'I'm not being hard,' I countered. 'I'm only being logical. I'm up against it, and I'm simply using such weapons as I possess; that's all. I know you're frightened of Helmuth; everybody is; that's why I have to go the limit to get you on my side; otherwise I would never have put it the way I did.'

He nodded. 'I see your point, old man. Lot in it, too. Mind, I don't believe for a minute that you're right about Helmuth. He honestly thinks you've gone a bit queer, and that the fewer people who get to know about it the better. As he has been stopping your letters, and you couldn't let us know how you felt about wanting to leave Llanferdrack, I suppose there's quite a case for your having tried to escape on your own. But that nice young nurse of yours tells me that you've created merry hell here more than once, and used the most fearful language.'

'True enough,' I admitted. 'And wouldn't you, if you were treated like a prisoner? I'm not even allowed in the garden now; and look at this room. Can you possibly imagine anything more like a cell in the Bastille?'

'I could get Helmuth to alter all that,' he offered, a little more cheerfully, 'but as you say yourself, he's a tough proposition. I'm afraid it would take a greater nerve than I've got to sack him. Even if that were justified, which I don't think it is. And as the Trustees placed you in his care, I don't at all like the idea of telling him that I've made other plans for you.'

'You are going to, though; aren't you?' I insisted, striving to keep the anxiety out of my voice. 'Getting him to ease up the prison routine is not enough. I am relying on you to get me out of his clutches at once, and for good.'

'Yes, old man. I quite see that.' He stood up and, thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, began to pace agitatedly back and

I said 'Of course not'; so she went in and changed into a frightfully fetching bathing dress white satin with no back and darned little front which she said she had bought at Antibes the summer before the war. She is a Junoesque wench, and it would take a man of my size to pick her up and spank her, but she has one hell of a good figure.

Before I had had a chance to take in this eyeful properly she started in to get my upper things off, and she stripped me to the waist, so that I could sunbathe too. Then she lay down on a rug near my chair and we spent the next two hours talking all sorts of nonsense.

But, of course, the thing that has really made such a difference to my outlook is my talk with Uncle Paul yesterday. I am certain that I scared the pants off him, and convinced him that he will practically be selling matches in the gutter unless he gets me out of this before I am a couple of days older.

Saturday, 6th June

Another lovely morning and more sunbathing with Sally on the terrace. After we had been chatting for a while I asked her if she really and truly believed that I was nuts, and would be prepared to take her oath to that effect in a court of law.

She looked up at me from where she was lying on her rug, and her nice freckled face was intensely serious as she replied:

'I'd hate to do that, but I'm afraid I'd have to, Toby. Of course, you're not out of your mind at all frequently, but very few mental people are all the time. I wouldn't have believed that you were mental at all if I hadn't seen you as you were last week, and known about your quite unreasoned hatred of Dr. Lisicky.'

'Surely,' I said, controlling my voice as carefully as I could, 'the riots you saw me create downstairs in the library, and after my escape, could easily be accounted for as outbursts of temper, due to the frustration felt by an invalid who believes that an undue restraint is being put upon him?'

She pulled hard on her cigarette. 'But that's just the trouble, Toby. You imagine that an undue restraint is being put upon you; but it isn't really so.'

'Are you absolutely convinced of that?'

'Absolutely. There is nothing whatever about the arrangements here, or Dr. Lisicky's treatment of you, to suggest that you are being persecuted. Yet you think you are. So I'm afraid there is no escaping the fact that you are suffering from a form of persecution mania.'

'All right, then,' I said after a moment. 'Naturally, I don't agree about that; but we'll let it pass. Do you think that my state would justify putting me in an asylum?'

'Oh, please, let's not talk about it,' she begged. 'Tell me about some of the exciting times you had when you were in the R.A.F.'

'No, Sally. I want you to answer my question,' I insisted.

'Well then,' she said in rather a small voice, 'if you must know, I think it might. That is, if these bouts of yours continue. You see, nearly all lunacy is periodic, and yours seems to take the classic form, in which the subject is affected by the moon. Dr. Lisicky says that you are perfectly normal during the rest of the month, but suffer from these outbreaks whenever the moon is near full. This last time you raved, used the most filthy language which I am sure you would never do in front of me when you are your real self wept and became violent.'

'And that,' I cut in, bitterly, 'is just what mad people do, isn't it?'

She nodded. 'I'm afraid it is. So you see, if you go on getting these attacks every month, it may become necessary to put you under restraint while they last. But that would be only for a few days each time, of course. And please don't worry yourself about it, because that sort of mental trouble is perfectly curable, and I'm sure that you'll be quite all right again in a few months.'

'Thanks, Sally,' I said. 'I'm very grateful to you for being honest with me. Now we'll talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings or of anything else that you like'; and we did for the rest of the morning.

All the same, I am damnably disturbed by what she said. She may admire Helmuth, but I am positive that she is not under his thumb to the extent of deliberately deceiving me on his instructions. She was speaking from her own convictions, and with considerable reluctance. I am certain of that, and it has given me furiously to think.

Of course she knows nothing of the huge financial interests that are involved in this question of my sanity or madness; and she knows nothing about the Horror which is the prime cause of my outbursts. But did I really see that Shadow or did I only think I did, owing to my mind having become subject to the malefic influence of the moon?

I can't help wishing now that I had never raised the matter with Sally and forced her to answer my questions.

Monday, 8th June

This journal has served an admirable purpose. Keeping it has helped to distract my thoughts from my anxieties for many hours during the past five weeks, but to continue it further is now pointless; so I am making this last entry simply to round it off neatly.

Some day, when I am quite well again mentally I mean I may read it through with interest and, I think, astonishment at the extraordinary thoughts that have recently agitated my poor mind; so it is worth the trouble of giving it a proper ending.

During the past forty-eight hours a lot has happened. Just before teatime on Saturday Uncle Paul returned, as he had promised, and he brought Julia with him. They had tea with me; over it they told me that they had already had a talk with Helmuth, and that he had said that he would not raise the slightest objection to their taking me away with them. He was sorry that I wished to remove myself from his care, and considered that I should be very ill-advised to do so, but if I decided to take that course I was perfectly free to go when and where I liked.

Naturally, at the time, I thought he was putting on a hypocritical act, to cover as best he could his inability to defy the Trustees openly. But I was greatly relieved to think that the matter was already settled and that I had in the end achieved my victory with so little trouble.

After tea Uncle Paul left Julia and I together, and we settled down to a real heart to heart.

She was looking as lovely as ever, and it seems impossible to believe that she is thirty-three. She has hardly changed at all since she reached the height of her beauty, and I don't think a stranger would take her for more than twenty-six, or seven. When I was a little boy I never understood why the angels in the Scripture books that Nanny Trotter used to read me were invariably portrayed as fair; and after I first saw Julia I always used to think of her as my dark angel.

Her big eyes and her hair which she has always worn in her own style, smoothly curling to her shoulders are as black as night, and her flawless skin has the matt whiteness of magnolia petals. She might well have sat as the model for a Madonna by one of the old masters, and perhaps one of her Colonna ancestresses did when the Italian school of painting was at its height. The only unsaintly thing about her is the exceptional fullness of her red lips. That makes her beauty rather startling, but even more subtly devastating, as it gives her a warm, human touch.

She began by reproaching me very gently for the way I had treated Uncle Paul. She said that I should have known that he would at once take all possible steps to safeguard my happiness, without my threatening to reduce him to penury. And that I must have known that would mean poverty for her too; so, after all we had been to one another, how could I even contemplate such a mean and ruthless act against two people who had given me their love?

I felt terribly guilty and embarrassed, but I tried to explain the dire necessity I had been under to get myself removed from Llanferdrack at all costs; and I began to tell her about the Horror.

After a bit she said: 'Please, darling, don't harass yourself further by reviving these horrid memories. I know all about it already. Helmuth gave me your letters the ones he stopped because he didn't want me to have fits about you before I came upstairs. I read them all, and I have them here.' Upon which she produced them from her bag.

'Then, if you know that part of the story,' I said quickly, 'you must understand how imperative I felt it to get away.'

She nodded, but a sad look came into her eyes. 'I do understand, darling. You must have been through a terrible time. But the thing that worries us all so much is that there has never been any suggestion before that this place is haunted; and we are afraid that you would have seen or thought you saw this terrifying apparition, during the periods of the full moon, if you had been with us at Queensclere, or anywhere else.'

'Then you don't believe that I really saw anything at all?' I challenged her.

'I wouldn't say that,' she replied thoughtfully. 'Helmuth does not believe in the Supernatural, but I do. I've never seen an apparition myself, but I am certain that the "burglar" that you saw when we were down at Kew was one. Perhaps you are more psychic than I am, and so more receptive to such influences.'

'I've never regarded myself as a psychic type,' I admitted. 'But you remember that business of the Abbot's grave at Weylands. After that horrible experience I described my sensations to you, and I had exactly the same feelings of cold, repulsion and stark terror down in the library here.'

'That could have been caused by a recurrence in your memory of the Weylands affair.' She took out a cigarette. I lit it for her, and she went on: 'I'll tell you what makes me doubt if you really did see anything. When Helmuth and your nurse were telling us all about it, before I came up, they described the night just a week ago when you started bawling barrack room choruses at the top of your voice, and they ran into your room. You pointed wildly to the bottom of the blackout curtain and yelled: "Look! Look! Do you call that an hallucination?" But neither of them saw anything; and I should have thought one or other of them would have, had there been anything to see.'

'Perhaps neither of them is psychic,' I argued a little weakly.

"That might be the explanation,' she shrugged, 'but I don't think so. I have been at sйances where trumpets and tambourines have floated in the air, and others where the medium has emitted large quantities of ectoplasm; and it is not just one or two people who see such manifestations, but the whole audience and sometimes some of them are convinced sceptics before the sйance starts.'

For quite a time we argued round the matter. She pointed out that although Great-aunt Sarah and Miss Nettelfold had lived here for a lifetime, no complaint had ever been made by them to the Trustees that Llanferdrack had a family horror which periodically gave trouble; and that although servants were usually the first to get the wind up about such things, none of the staff here had ever given notice on the grounds that the place had a bad atmosphere.

So, eventually, I was forced to agree that such evidence as we had to go on all pointed to the Shadow having no existence outside my imagination.

About seven o'clock Julia left me to go and change; but she said that she would have her dinner sent up on a tray with mine, so that we could dine together.

I think most beautiful women look their best in evening dress, and although Julia is a sight to gladden the heart in anything, she is certainly of the type whose proper setting is satin and pearls rather tan tweeds. She looked absolutely ravishing.

We had a couple of cocktails apiece, split a bottle of Burgundy and rounded things off with some Kummel. By the time we had finished I was feeling so good that I was almost resigned to the thought that I had gone a bit mental provided I could get away from Llanferdrack, and there was a decent hope of my being cured pretty quickly. But I was still of the opinion that Helmuth's conduct needed a lot of explaining, and when Konrad had carried away our dinner trays I started in on the subject.

We went into the whole business piece by piece: the letters, the blackout curtains, my telephone extension; the refusal to leave me my lamp, or get me a torch, or move my radio; or let me have more than one sleeping tablet; Helmuth's arbitrary treatment of Taffy, his stopping me from getting into the train and, finally, his virtually making me a prisoner in this old part of the Castle.

Looked at in retrospect, I must honestly confess that there was really very little to it all, if one once accepts the following premise:

(1) That shortly after my arrival here Helmuth began to suspect

that my injury and eight months in hospital had, to some degree,

affected the balance of my mind.

(2) That he at once began to keep me under observation and

opened my mail as part of the process.

(3) That, on finding his fears confirmed, he considered it his duty to my relations to save them from worry, and his duty to myself to take all possible steps to prevent the knowledge leaking out and prejudicing my future.

(4) That he hoped the rest and a regular routine would put me right, and decided that nothing must be done which would encourage me to believe that I was suffering from anything worse than nightmares.

The above is the gist of how he had put it to Julia, and as she passed it on to me. After thrashing the matter out we fell silent for a bit; then she suddenly said:

'Besides, what possible motive could he have for adopting such an extraordinary attitude towards you? I mean, trying to make things worse for you instead of better, as you still seem to half suspect?'

I was surprised that Uncle Paul had said nothing to her about my theory that there was a conspiracy to drive me insane; but perhaps he had thought it too farfetched to mention. I told her my ideas on that and her eyes widened in amazement as she listened.

'But Toby!' she exclaimed at last. 'How could you think such base thoughts of a man who has given some of the best years of his life to developing your mind and character? This is the first time that I have ever been ashamed of you.'

'Oh, come!' I protested a bit uncomfortably. 'After all, he was damn' well paid for what he did.'

She shook her head. 'One can't pay for care and affection with money, darling. Perhaps, though, I am being a little hard on you. To talk to, you are so perfectly normal that I forget about your not being quite well in your mind. It is only when you produce ideas like that of turning Paul and myself out into the street, or this one that Helmuth wants to lock you up and rob you, that I suddenly realise how right he is about your no longer being your real self.'

'All the same,' I argued, 'you must admit that the Trustees would stand to gain if a Board of Lunacy ruled that I was unfitted to inherit.'

'Not sufficiently to provide a motive for them to enter into a criminal conspiracy,' she countered. 'You seem to forget that most of them are immensely rich already. Paul, of course, is an exception, but he knows as well as I do that if you come into your money you will make a most generous provision for him; and Smith and Roberts don't stand to lose anything, because they are professional advisers and would go on drawing their fees just the same, whatever happens.'

"That still leaves Iswick and Helmuth.'

She laughed. 'Really, Toby darling, you're being too silly. We may all look on Harry Iswick as an awful little bounder, but he is as clever as a cartload of monkeys. In the past ten years he has made a fortune on his own account, and his interest in the Jugg combine is only a sideline with him now. I know that for a fact. As for Helmuth, surely you see that he has much more to lose than to gain from your being put in a home. Big business isn't really his line of country, so it is unlikely that he would be able to improve his position much by continuing as a Trustee. Whereas, with you in possession of your millions, he would have every right to expect you to find a suitable use for his abilities, at a handsome remuneration, in recognition of all he has done for you in the past. I give you my word, sweet, that this conspiracy idea is absolutely fantastic'

There seemed no answer to her arguments, and reviewing them again, now that I no longer have her glowing presence before me, I still don't think there is. But accepting them brought me face to face with the question of Helmuth, and I asked her what she thought I ought to do about him.

'Sleep on it, darling,' she advised me, 'and see how you feel about it in the morning. If you find that you really cannot rid yourself of this awful prejudice that you have built up in your mind against him, I think it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie. Later, perhaps, you will feel differently; then you can let him know how sorry you are that you suspected him so unjustly. But he is terribly fond of you, and must be feeling very hurt at the moment.

'So if all I have said has convinced you that you are in the wrong, the generous thing would be for you to let me bring him up to you tomorrow. You needn't eat humble pie, or be embarrassed about it; but must say that you realise now that you have not been quite yourself lately, and have given him a lot of unnecessary trouble. That's quite enough. He'll understand; and I am sure it would please him a lot to know that you bear him no ill will before you leave here.'

It was late when she left me, but I lay awake thinking about it a long time after she had gone. I came to the conclusion that in many respects Helmuth had shown very poor psychology in his treatment of me, and that the arbitrary way in which he had handled matters was enough to make anyone who was slightly mental develop a persecution complex, but that my conspiracy idea was the wildest nonsense, and that there was not one atom of proof to show that he had not acted throughout in what he believed to be my best interests.

In consequence, on Sunday morning I told Julia that I would like to see Helmuth, and later we had a grand reconciliation on my sunny terrace.

For such entertaining as my grandfather had to do, he bought anything that was going cheap in the City, in big parcels of forty or fifty cases at a time; so the cellar he left was not distinguished for either its variety or quality. But in the past thirteen years Uncle Paul has spared no pains to make up for those deficiencies, and soon after the war broke out he had a large part of the Queensclere and London cellars moved down here as a precaution against their being blitzed. So for us to celebrate he was able to order up a magnum of Krug, Private Cuvee 1926, and I don't think I have ever tasted better champagne in my life.

Everything went off remarkably easily. I said my piece and Helmuth met me more than halfway. He admitted that many of his acts must have seemed highhanded and even tyrannical, but he had been dominated by the one thought of preventing it from leaking out that I had become mental.

As he explained, it is just like a man going bankrupt; however unlucky he may have been, and even if he pays up one pound in the pound afterwards and gets an honourable discharge, it always prejudices his future commercial undertakings. So with mental trouble, the effect would be little short of disastrous to me as the head of the Jugg enterprises if it ever became known that I had once suffered from hallucinations.

He went on to say that he had moved me from downstairs only with the greatest reluctance, because he was most loath to give the servants grounds for talk; but that after my attempts to get away he had felt that to do so was the lesser evil. And that when he had decided to move me he had chosen this room because it was one of those furthest removed from the servants' quarters, so they were less likely to hear me if further attacks led to a renewal of my singing and shouting. He added, too, that he found it a considerably inconvenience to be deprived of Konrad's services, but he knew that the fellow could be trusted not to blab, so he had willingly given him up to me, rather than risk letting a new man, who might later prove untrustworthy, into our secret.

We went on then to discuss what should be done with me. Julia said that she would willingly have me at Queensclere; but the difficulty about that is that the house is occupied by the Army, and she and Uncle Paul have been allowed to retain only what amounts to a flat of half dozen rooms on the first floor. So, apart from the question of air raids, and the business of getting me down to a shelter which they insisted would have to be done if I went therein the event of my having further attacks it would be practically impossible to prevent the officers who are billeted in the house from learning about my condition.

Kensington Palace Gardens is out, because it has now been taken over to provide additional accommodation for the Soviet Embassy; so, of my own properties, that left only the little house on Mull. And if I were put into a nursing home it is a certainty, that the secret of my affliction would get out.

I suggested that a small house should be bought for me in Devonshire or Cornwall, but they all seemed to think that it would be practically impossible to find anything suitable at the present time, as every available property in the 'safe' areas had been taken over to house evacuees; and even if we could find one it raises the problem of who is going to run it and look after me.

Of course, the same thing applies to Mull, but eventually Helmuth offered to throw up his work here and take me up there. That was very decent of him, and it seemed a possible solution for the next few months. But it would be far from attractive as a permanency, as to have to winter there would be incredibly depressing and grim; and even during the summer we would have none of the good things, such as the garden produce, that we enjoy down here. Still, it seemed the best thing we could think of when lunchtime came, so they left me to think it over.

When they joined me again about three o'clock, Julia put it to me that, since I was now reconciled to Helmuth, did I really still feel so strongly about leaving Llanferdrack? She pointed out that, so far, I had been subject to attacks only while down in the library, and that now I had been moved I might not be afflicted with them any more. The advantages of Llanferdrack over Mull needed no stressing, and my acceptance of Helmuth's offer would mean sabotaging much of the fine war effort that he has built up here during the past two and a half years. Therefore, didn't I think that I could bring myself to stay on here for a time at least anyhow until the next full moon period and if it transpired that the attacks did recur, then I could always be removed at once.

Actually, while I had been eating my lunch, I had been thinking on much the same lines myself; so I agreed.

We then went into the question of my birthday and it was decided that, in present circumstances, it would not be a good thing to have the Trustees down here on the 20th. If Iswick, Roberts and the rest got the least suspicion that I was not quite normal they might consider it their duty to have me examined by a committee of brain specialists before agreeing to hand over.

In consequence Uncle Paul is going to inform the others that I hope to be fit enough to make a short visit to London in the latter part of July; so I have suggested that the whole business presents and everything shall be put off for a month, as it will be much more convenient' for them to meet me there.

It was agreed, too, that I should remain in this room; partly for the original reason that Helmuth put me here, and partly because there is no other except the library, downstairs which is at all suitable. Actually, this big chamber with its vaulted roof is not without its attractions. Even in summer it would ordinarily be a bit chilly, but every afternoon a fire is lit for me in the great open fireplace, and in the evenings its glow on the wainscoting and old stone makes the place rather cosy.

And I have come to love my little private terrace with its view over the lake. The only real snag is that it would require too much effort to get me to the nearest bathroom every evening; so I have to have my tub in an old-fashioned hipbath, for which Konrad has to boil up large kettles of water on the open fire. But, after all, the types who occupied this room for hundreds of years managed quite well that way; and lots of our chaps in the Western Desert, and elsewhere, are not lucky enough to get a bath at all.

Julia and Uncle Paul returned to London this morning, and Helmuth went with them, just for the night, as he has to attend a Board Meeting of one of the Companies tomorrow. Before they left we had a final chat, and Helmuth promised that as soon as the moon begins to wax again he will come in to me every night, round about midnight, to see that I am all right. If I am not, he will make arrangements to take me up to Mull as soon as possible, and, in the meantime, he will help me to fight my trouble.

He is a tower of strength, and I have been terribly unjust to him. He was absolutely right to keep me here and showed his true fondness for me in doing so. Only here am I really safe from prying eyes and whispering tongues. Here we can keep the secret of my miserable affliction safely concealed until I am well again.

We all feel now, though, that the change of room may do the trick. Regaining confidence in Helmuth has helped me enormously to regain it in myself, and I do not believe that there is the least danger of my becoming a mental case permanently. Therefore I am able to end this journal on an optimistic note; and, now that I really do know where I stand, there is no point in continuing it further.

Wednesday, 10th June

Here I am again. The fact is that I have become so used to setting down my private thoughts that yesterday, during the time I usually devote to these jottings, I felt quite at a loose end. I felt the same way this morning, until it occurred to me that it was the height of stupidity to stop doing anything that helped me to while away my time pleasantly, merely because the occupation in itself had ceased to have any serious purpose. Moreover, having got that far I realised that I have ‘something of considerable interest to record.

Helmuth did not get back from his trip to London until just before dinner last night; soon afterwards he came in to see me. He is usually rather restless when making casual conversation, but on this occasion he settled himself down in a way that showed he had something serious to say; then, after a bit, he started off more or less as follows:

'Now that we are friends again, Toby, we can talk freely together, just as we used to in the past. I have been wanting to have a heart-to-heart with you ever since you arrived here; but at first I didn't want to rush matters, and later I was afraid you might not feel like discussing your future plans with me. I am naturally deeply interested to know what they are. When you come into your inheritance, do you intend to assume control of the Companies, as far as your health permits, or will you continue to let other people handle matters for you?'

'I shall assume control,' I replied with a smile. 'At least, I hope so. After all the time and trouble you have given to educating me for the job I'd be a pretty poor specimen if I let you down to the extent of not even attempting to tackle it.'

He nodded. 'I'm glad you feel like that. I was afraid that your time in the Air Force might have altered your outlook. Since you are still prepared to take on this enormous responsibility it is doubly tragic that your health is likely to prove such a heavy handicap.'

'This new trouble may,' I agreed. 'But before that started I saw no reason why the injury to my spine should prevent me using my brain; so I had been toying with the idea of having a special motor ambulance caravan fitted out, in which to tour the factories. It would probably take me the best part of a year to get a real grip of things, and I had no intention of throwing my weight about to start with; but after a tour like that I should have picked up enough of the practical side to argue the pros and cons of the broader issues with my co directors.'

Helmuth nodded his white head again. 'That sounds an admirable scheme. You will have to continue to observe your rest hours, and be careful not to overdo it until your back is a bit stronger; but if all goes well in the other matter, I see no reason why you should not start on a tour of that kind in the autumn. It would certainly prove a most popular move with all your employees, and, as you say, give much more weight to your opinions when you do decide to give vent to them at Board Meetings. Yes, I congratulate you on that idea, Toby.'

'Thanks,' I said, and after a moment he went on:

'All the same, I wonder if you fully realise what you will be up against. However tactfully you set to work, most of these middle aged and elderly industrialists who are running your Companies at the present time are not going to take at all kindly to a young man of twenty-one walking in and insisting on changes in old established policies.'

'I hope that in most cases that will not be necessary.'

'My dear Toby; if it is not you will have put yourself to a great deal of trouble for nothing. The whole object of a new broom is to sweep clean. With your intelligence you are bound to spot all sorts of effort wasting, obsolete practices, incompetent executives and unnecessary wastages to which the others have become blind through seeing them go on for years. If you do not initiate reforms to abolish these weaknesses you will be letting yourself down as well as your shareholders, and never become a great leader of industry.'

'I suppose you are right,' I said thoughtfully. 'If that does prove the case, I shall certainly introduce reforms and endeavour to overcome any opposition that I may meet with.'

'It will take a lot of overcoming. Most of these men have had to fight hard to attain their present positions, and they will have an instinctive prejudice against your youth and inexperience. Those who are uncertain of themselves will combine against you from fear that you may think them not up to their jobs and get rid of them; while others, who are of stronger mettle, will do their utmost to dominate you and climb on your back to greater power.'

'You paint a gloomy picture,' I remarked. 'It looks as if instead of being able to devote most of my time to making my Companies more prosperous I shall have to spend it defending myself from the jealousy and intrigues of my co directors.'

'I think you will anyhow, to start with,' he said frankly. 'But, if you will let me, I can help you to overcome a great deal of such opposition.'

Naturally, I thought he was suggesting that I should make him my private adviser; and evidently he guessed what I was thinking, as he waved aside my murmur of thanks, and said quietly:

'If, later on, you find any use for my personal services I will give them gladly; but that was not what I had in mind. I expect you remember hearing about the Brotherhood when you were at Weylands?'

At that my ears pricked with interest. 'Rather! It was the great mystery of the place, and we all used to speculate on what went on at those meetings in the crypt of the old Abbey. It was a Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient, wasn't it?'

'No. A number of its members are also Freemasons who had been initiated on the Continent; so we use that Grand Orient story as cover; ours is a much older fellowship. The main reason why I tried to prevent you joining the R.A.F. was because I did not want you to miss initiation; but by running away you stymied me over that. However, it is not too late, and membership of the Brotherhood could be of immense value to you in your business life; so if you are agreeable, I propose to start preparing you for initiation now.'

'How thrilling!' I exclaimed. 'Do tell me about it. What is the object of the association, and what should I have to do?'

'It is a Brotherhood, based on the old principle that Union is Strength. Each member contributes to it according to his means and receives from it according to his needs.'

I laughed. 'That sounds rather like Socialism to me. As I am exceptionally rich it looks as if I should be expected to make a contribution out of all proportion to anything I was likely to get back.'

'It is Socialism, but on the highest plane. You need have no fears that your millions will be scattered to the masses.'

'My millions!' I echoed, raising an eyebrow at his joke.

He shrugged. 'Even if it cost you your whole fortune you would still be the gainer on balance. That may sound a tall statement, Toby; but in due course I believe you'll agree with me.'

'I'll be better able to form an opinion when I know more about

it,' I said, with a grin. 'If the rumours which used to circulate at

Weylands had any truth in them, the Brotherhood consists of a considerable number of people all of whom possess wealth, influence or brains; and are pledged to help one another. Is that a fact?'

As he nodded assent, I went on: 'I can fully appreciate that membership of such a fraternity must be extremely valuable; and I see now why you think it would prove a big asset to me in dealing with my fellow industrialists; but obviously there is a limit to what such secret assistance in one's dealings would be worth.'

'Why should there be?' he asked quite seriously. 'You are an immensely rich man. Your grandfather left in trust for you assets to the value of over fourteen million sterling. If that had happened half a century ago, by the reinvestment of the bulk of the income at cumulative interest during your minority, by now you would be worth something like thirty million.

'But time marches on; owing to your grandfather's death not having occurred till nineteen twenty nine, income and super tax had already risen to such heights that in the past thirteen years the Trustees have been able to add only a beggarly million and three-quarters to your original capital. Since the war the situation of people in the top income groups has deteriorated still further. By the time it ends you will be lucky if you are allowed to keep sixpence in the pound of what your money earns. So what will your fortune be worth to you then?'

I did a quick calculation. 'In Government stocks it would bring me in only about ten thousand a year, but in my own companies it should produce at least double that. And you forget the Directors' Fees that I should draw; they would easily amount to a further twenty thousand.'

It was Helmuth's turn to grin. 'My dear Toby, Directors' Fees are taxable, and twenty thousand sixpences comes to only five hundred pounds. On your own showing your net income would barely exceed twenty thousand a year, all told. You already allow your uncle that figure to keep up Queensclere and the London house, and I gather you have now promised that he shall lose nothing by your assuming control of your own money. Actually, of course, your tax free allowances for business expenses will save you from having to give up cocktails and cigarettes; but the sooner you disabuse yourself of the idea that the possession of millions still endows their owner with almost limitless spending power, the better.'

'You have shaken me quite a bit,' I confessed. 'I have been out of touch with all this sort of thing for so long that I had no idea that the picture had become so black for the working rich. Still, however high they raise income and super tax, a fortune is always a fortune; and, although Grandpapa Jugg might turn in his grave, I could sell out capital to ante up my income. Even if I live to be a hundred and spent twenty thousand a year from capital for the next eighty years, that would consume less than the million and three-quarter that has piled up during my minority. So I should still be able to leave my heirs the original fourteen million.'

Helmuth threw back his massive head and roared with laughter: 'Toby, Toby; did you think of nothing but Hurricanes and Heinkels while you were in the R.A.F. and in hospital? Time marches on, I tell you. If you do live to be a hundred, it is most unlikely that you will have fourteen thousand let alone million left to leave anybody; and if you have your heirs will be lucky if the Government of the day permits them to keep more than one, thousand of it.'

I smiled a little ruefully. 'Of course I know that death duties have been going up for years; and that even now they would cut the Jugg millions in half. But do you really think that in another fifty years or so there will be practically nothing left of them?'

'Indeed I do. By that time all public services and every form of industry will be State owned: and it is highly probable that private ownership of land, houses and investments will have been abolished. But you won't have to wait that long before the bulk of your fortune is taken from you.'

I said that I thought, myself, all the odds were on the Socialists coming to power soon after the war; but that most of their leaders were sensible enough to realise the danger of throwing the nation's economy out of gear by doing anything too drastic. Helmuth shrugged and replied:

"They will be moderate to start with, but as is always the case when the Left gets into the saddle, the masses expect a Silver Age if not a Golden one to dawn before very long. That gives the extremists a rod with which to beat the moderates. They will never be able to raise enough money by ordinary means to propitiate the Labour electorate, by carrying out all the Socialist conceptions; but it can be taken from those who have it.

'The wiser men will realise that it is suicidal to seize a large part of the wealth, which for generations has financed the nation's commerce and industry, and fritter it away in unproductive channels; but they will be forced to it. They will introduce some form of Capital Levy. And then, my dear Toby, what of your fine fortune?'

'That would be killing the Goose that lays the Golden Eggs,' I said, 'because if they do, it is inevitable that they will skim the top off the cream. Say they introduce legislation to collect a hundred million, the great bulk of that would come from people like myself who might be paying anything up to nineteen and sixpence in the pound in taxes already. That means that the following year there would be the equivalent number of nineteen and sixpences less to go into the exchequer. And not for one year only, but for good. It is far worse than anticipating taxes; it is destroying the source from which they come. We couldn't continue to pay on what we no longer had; so they would have to introduce new taxation affecting the lower income groups to make up the deficit. It would be a crazy policy, even from their own point of view, because sooner or later the masses themselves would be left holding the baby.'

'Of course,' Helmuth agreed. 'But political extremists are never statesmen; otherwise they would not be extremist. Such people allow their hatred of the rich to dominate every other consideration. And it would be done in gradual stages. That is the insidious part about it. As you say, they will go for the big fish first; and if you are forced to realise only half your holdings to pay up, very few people are going to think that you have been hardly done by.

'No one will squeal until some of their own savings are seized to pay the dole. You are right too about the drop in income and surtax receipts having to be made up from somewhere, but there is a limit to what can be got by normal means; so with each successive Budget the level at which the thrifty will be robbed of their savings will go down and down, until even the little man with his few hundreds tucked away in the Post Office will find himself caught.'

He paused for a moment, then went on: 'As for yourself, having paid the first time will not exonerate you from having to pay up the second, third and fourth. So, my poor friend, I fear you will find your rosy dream of being able to spend twenty thousand a year of your capital turning out to be moonshine, long before you are my age. It won't be there any longer for you to realise.'

It was a black future that he conjured up, but I had to admit to myself that his grim prognostications were based on a perfectly possible and logical sequence of events. For a bit we remained silent, then I said:

'Well, if you are right, I'll be in a pretty mess. But I suppose the State will take care of cripples?'

'Oh yes,' he smiled cynically. 'You'll get your keep in an institution and a pound a week. You might do quite a lot better, though, if you are prepared to follow my advice. All I have been endeavouring to show you is, that if you decide to play a lone hand your millions may be reduced to hundreds by the time you are forty.'

'Do you think, then, that by becoming one of the Brotherhood I could save them?'

'No, Toby; I don't think that. But I am confident that whatever loss of fortune may overtake anyone else and even themselves, individually, as far as the possession of shares, property and bank balances go the member of the Brotherhood will continue to enjoy comparative affluence, and even luxury to such a degree as it is obtainable, in a world where all but a very few will live on a miserable pittance as little cogs in the machinery of a vast slave State.'

'How would they manage to do that?' I enquired.

"There must always be rulers,' he said quietly; 'and we shall be the rulers of the Britain of tomorrow. The bulk of the upper classes are bound to be submerged, because they have no unity. But we shall survive, because we are bound together by an indissoluble bond, pledged to help one another to the limit, and holding all our assets in common. We already have men in all sorts of key positions, both here and abroad. Our level of intelligence is far higher than that of any ordinary group of professional politicians, and we have resources that such people do not possess. The attainment of power in all its forms is the object of our association, and that having been our special study ever since our foundation you may rest assured that you will be shown how to attain it too if you decide to join us.'

'I don't quite understand,' I said. 'One can study all sorts of subjects, a knowledge of which is valuable for attaining one's ends; but I shouldn't have thought that there could be any royal road to attaining power, as such.'

'Oh yes, there is,' he smiled, as he stood up, 'and at our next chat I will tell you something about it. But I must go now, as I have some letters to write. In the meantime, you might think over what I have said.'

I did think it over, and the whole thing's extremely intriguing; but I am far from certain that I would care to become involved in this Secret Society of his.

Of course, when he said that about my whole fortune not being too big a price to pay for membership, he could not have been speaking seriously. All the same it sounds as if from anyone as rich as myself they would expect the hell of a big cheque.

If Helmuth is right in his contention that when the Socialists do get in, after a time, the extremists will dominate the moderates, and introduce a series of Capital Levies which will eventually swallow up all private investments, great and small, it would certainly be worth my while to go into this thing as a form of insurance even if they did stick me for a hundred thousand pounds. Plenty of people used to pay that much in my grandfather's day for a title, and I shouldn't miss it.

But the thing that I don't like about it is this pooling of interests business. That is all very well in its way, but they might want me to do all sorts of things that I should not care about. Helmuth more or less inferred that in exchange for their help one became subject to some form of control by them. If that is the case, I would rather stand on my own feet and keep my freedom.

As I have decided to continue this journal, I may as well record a rather revealing conversation that I had with Sally this morning.

Some reference had been made to my weekend visitors, and I asked her if she did not think Julia one of the loveliest people she had ever seen.

'I didn't think her all that,' she replied. 'I suppose when she was young she must have been rather a poppet. But that's the worst of these Mediterranean types; they always age early.'

'Oh, come!' I protested. 'You talk as though she was middle aged already.'

She shrugged. 'Well, it all depends on what you call middle aged. I bet she'll never see thirty again.'

'She won't,' I agreed. 'But that's just the point, she doesn't look it.'

'Not to a man perhaps. Any woman, who has enough money to dress a shade eccentrically, and go to a first class beauty specialist for regular treatments, can pull the wool over a man's eyes about her age; but she can't deceive her own sex.'

I resisted the temptation to tell Sally that, however much money she had, no beauty specialist would ever succeed in turning her into a real lovely, and that I very much doubted if she would ever acquire the clothes sense to become even tolerably smart. But as I was thinking on those lines, she added with a laugh:

'Anyone could see that you think your aunt is tops. I suppose she sold you the idea that she is in the Mona Lisa class when you were in your cradle, and you have never got over it.'

I feel sure that normally Sally is not given to making catty remarks; so it was easy to guess which way the wind is blowing. Julia and Helmuth are such very old friends, that the gallantry with which he always treats her is accepted as a habit by all who know them. But Sally would not realise that, and seeing them together has made her jealous.

I knew she admired Helmuth, but evidently the handsome doctor has made a deeper impression on her than I realised. She was probably hoping that he would ask her to dine with him again over the weekend; and Julia being here put her nose completely out of joint.

Actually it is over a week now since the only occasion on which Helmuth asked her to dine. As he has not repeated the invitation it looks as if he found her too unsophisticated for his taste, and is not going to bother with her further.

On the other hand, his having turned the battery of his charm on her just for one evening and since treated her only with friendly politeness is well calculated to keep her guessing, and so predispose her to go halfway to meet him should he choose to make another move. He is up to all those tricks, and that may be the game he is playing.

I hope not, for if he does make a real set at her it is a sure thing that she will get the raw end of the deal. Of course, now that Helmuth and I are good friends again, I have nothing to lose if they do have an affair and she falls completely under his spell; but I can't help having a sort of protective feeling about her. God knows, I couldn't protect anyone from anything, as things are, but Helmuth has never made any secret to me of his attitude towards women, and I would hate to think of Sally becoming the plaything of a cynical roue.

Thursday, 11th June

I am profoundly disturbed. That is putting it mildly. I had another long talk with Helmuth yesterday evening and he told me a lot more about the Weylands Brotherhood. In view of the importance of this conversation I shall strive for the utmost accuracy in recording it.

As soon as he had settled himself comfortably in front of the fire, I said: 'Last night you were saying that there is a royal road to acquiring power. I'd be terribly interested to hear about it.'

'So you've thought things over and are inclined to regard my proposition favourably, eh?'

As I was curious to learn more, I saw no point in denying that, so I let it pass, and he went on:

'I am glad for both our sakes; and if what I said last night intrigued you, I am sure that what I have to say now will intrigue you to an infinitely greater degree. Power is the thing that men have craved more than any other, all through the ages. Now tell me, what would you say were the four most powerful forces in the world?'

I thought for a moment, then said: 'Faith, Love, Hunger and Money.'

'Wrong,' he declared. "They are the Elements Air, Earth, Fire and Water. If you can control those you can do anything.'

I nodded. 'I suppose Science is gradually succeeding in that. Gas and electricity are forms of fire; we harness rivers and the tides; and the Backroom boys of the R.A.F. are tackling the problem of dispersing fog.'

'Oh, Science plods along,' his tone was faintly contemptuous, 'but all those types of control require elaborate machinery to operate them. I was referring to the control of the elements by the human will.'

He saw my puzzled look, and added: 'For example, Jesus Christ walked upon the water.'

Never before had I heard him mention Christ's name except in connection with some sneer; and I said in surprise: 'But I thought you didn't believe in Him?'

'As a God, I don't,' came the quick reply, 'but there is no reason to doubt that he was an historic Personage, and that he had "power". However, there are innumerable other examples of the sort of thing I mean. There are well authenticated accounts of Indian Fakirs who have mastered the art of levitation; that is, defeating gravity by remaining suspended in midair. The witchdoctors of the North American Indians could walk on red hot embers without burning the soles of their feet. The juju men of Africa can bring rain when it suits their purpose.'

'Do you seriously mean that the members of the Brotherhood can perform such extraordinary feats?'

'Some of us can. But each feat requires long and exhausting training, and after all, what point is there in devoting years to learning such tricks? They are really rather childish, and have no practical value except to impress the vulgar; and we are not interested in attempting to attract the multitude. Most of us prefer to devote our energies to more subtle tasks, and use the special powers that we acquire in support of our worldly activities. If you think for a moment what that means, in conjunction with brains, wealth and influence, you will be able to appreciate, far better than you could yesterday, that not only will the Brotherhood survive the general destruction of the upper classes in this country, but eventually dominate it.'

'Ah this is so staggering,' I murmured, 'that you must forgive me if I haven't quite gripped it yet. Accepting what you say about the Brotherhood's powers to perform miracles, I still don't see how they can be applied to further your ends in modern political and commercial life.'

'Don't you!' he laughed. "Then I'll give you a few examples,

You have already stumbled on the fringe of the matter yourself

by using hypnotism to impose your will on people. You didn't

get far with Taffy, but for an amateur you were amazingly successful with Deb. Properly trained you could use it with considerable effect on many of your future business associates. The trained will can also read thoughts, and confer good or bad health on the operator's friends or enemies. It can '

'Could both my mental state and the injury to my spine be cured?' I interrupted. 'That is, if I become a member of the Brotherhood?'

He nodded. "The first would be simple. That was what I meant when I promised that if the attacks occurred again I would help you to fight them. You need have no further worries on that score. Your spine presents a more difficult problem, because it is a, physical injury. If a man has a limb shot off, no power, however great, can enable him to grow another in its place. But the will can perform incredible feats of healing; and I am reasonably confident that within a few months we could enable you to walk again.'

'I would give a lot to be able to do that,' I sighed. 'I have often wondered if anything could be done for me by faith healing.'

'This is much more than that,' he smiled, 'and far more potent, as it brings into play certain ancient laws which are entirely unknown to the ordinary faith healer. But I was telling you of some of the feats that the human will can perform when properly directed. Quite apart from the use of hypnotism it can put thoughts and impulses into other people's heads. It can attract women and dissipate their moral scruples, so that they surrender without even realising that they are acting entirely contrary to their original intentions. Given certain aids and great concentration of will, one can foresee glimpses of the future.

'By similar means one can also see what is going on through walls or at a distance. That is how I found out that you were preparing to escape with Deb's help, and was able to come down to the hall just as you were leaving. I should have found out that you were about to escape with Taffy too, if I had had my mental eye on you; but that night I was occupied with other matters. By projecting the will one can influence people through their dreams, and one can also ill wish them. As a last resort one can even cause them to decline and die. Those are only some of the weapons possessed by the members of the Brotherhood; and it is prepared to use them all in order to overcome such opposition as it encounters.'

I was silent for a moment; my brain whirling with the appalling thoughts he had conjured up. At length I said:

'Hypnotism, faith healing, thought reading and other mental processes where the operator imposes his will face to face with the subject, are recognised by the medical world and explainable by the direct human contact that takes place. But to see what is happening at a distance, to influence people's dreams, to be able to ill wish them and send them death, are surely powers which can be acquired only through God or the Devil.'

He shrugged. "That is an old fashioned way of putting it.'

'Perhaps it is,' I muttered. 'But you don't deny it; although you have always told me that you do not believe in either.'

'One may reject the teaching of the Bible, yet accept the fact that forces outside this world govern everything in it.'

Suddenly Helmuth stood up; his tawny eyes gleamed with a strange light and his foreign accent became more marked as he went on:

"The secret of willing down power, or, if you prefer it, setting great supernatural forces in motion on one's own behalf, has been known to the initiate from time immemorial. Generation by generation it has been handed down, and today this priceless knowledge is the greatest asset of the Brotherhood. To become an initiate one must take the oath of obedience, subscribe to certain tenets of faith and master various complicated rituals. Those rituals are the jealously guarded secret of the chosen few; but, once you have become adept at them, you can operate the forces which we term Supernatural, because they are beyond all normal experience; and, through them, achieve your ambitions and desires. Such power is infinitely greater than any that wealth alone can bring, and in the name of the Brotherhood I offer it to you.'

I collected my wits as quickly as I could, and said: 'To become one of such a gifted company would be a great honour; anybody could see that. But the whole thing is so astonishing so extraordinary so, well, so utterly fantastic by all ordinary standards, that I am still very much at sea.'

He grinned at me. 'Yes. It is hardly surprising that you should feel a bit bowled over on first learning the magnitude of the powers that the Brotherhood possesses. But now that you know the truth about it, if there are any questions you want to ask, fire away.'

Controlling my voice with an effort, I replied: 'You have already answered the one that interests me most: that about the possibilities of getting back my health. But there is one other thing I would like to know. To put it bluntly, what is it going to cost for me to become a member?'

'I thought I told you yesterday.' He raised the well marked dark eyebrows that contrast so strangely with his mane of white hair. 'In that way it is the same as joining a Religious Order. You would make over to the Brotherhood everything you possess. But there the resemblance ends; because the fact that you had done so would always be kept secret, and you would not be required to take a vow of poverty; so for all practical purposes you would continue in the full enjoyment of your fortune.'

'Isn't that a bit too much to ask?' I protested rather meekly. 'I mean, there can't be many new initiates who have more than a few thousand to make over; so why should the Brotherhood require the whole of the Jugg millions to accept me?'

With a wave of his hand he brushed the question aside. 'My dear Toby! The amount that an initiate can contribute in worldly wealth does not enter into the matter. Some who have practically nothing of a cash value to offer are accepted on account of their intelligence, or the promise they show in some other direction. You cannot expect an exception to be made for you in the rules of a foundation that has existed unchanged for countless centuries. It could not be considered even if you were the King of England.'

'I see,' I said, still very humbly. 'I only enquired because of my grandfather.'

'What has he to do with it?' Helmuth frowned.

I endeavoured to look as worried as I could. 'He made all this money; and he went to extraordinary lengths to leave his fortune to me intact even to spending a considerable portion of his income during the latter part of his life in insuring against death duties. In view of that I am wondering if I really have the right to part with the control of it.'

Helmuth took the scruple I had raised quite seriously. 'I see your point,' he said. 'But I am sure that, on consideration, you will feel that he would approve your surrendering the lesser power that his wealth can give you for the greater power that has now been placed within your grasp. Anyhow, the last thing I would wish is to influence you into doing anything against your conscience. There is no immediate hurry. Think it over, and we'll talk about it again tomorrow.'

So I succeeded in stalling him without arousing his suspicions. To fight for a little time seemed the only possible line that I could take. Had I, refused point blank I would not even have gained these few hours to prepare myself to face a renewal of his hostility. But at last the naked truth is out. Helmuth is a Satanist.

Friday, 12th June

Yesterday was, I think, the blackest of the many black days that have fallen to my wretched lot since I arrived at Llanferdrack. After I had written out the conversation I had with Helmuth the previous night as near word for word as I could remember it I spent practically the whole of the rest of the day turning over in my mind the terrible implications of his admissions about the Brotherhood.

Actually, except for what little sleep I got, I had been doing that ever since he left me; but as the day wore on my speculations plumbed ever grimmer depths. However, to record them would be pointless, as I have since seen Helmuth again, and he has come out into the open.

He came up here soon after tea, and Sally was still with me; so for about ten minutes the conversation was general. She remarked that although there must be thousands of books in the library she could not find a thing worth reading there. Upon which he laughed, told her about how old Albert Abel I had bought them for so much the yard, then added:

'But I have plenty of good modern books in my study. You had better dine with me again one evening; we'll go through them afterwards and you can see which you would like to borrow. My evenings are rather fully occupied at present, as I am getting out some special figures in connection with the estate; but how about Sunday?'

Sally accepted with obvious pleasure. Shortly afterwards she left us, and while her high heels were still echoing on the stone stairs Helmuth grinned across at me.

'What a splendid specimen of the female Homo sapiens', and what an interesting contrast to Deborah Kain! Such a simple, healthy young animal is certain to possess all the normal urges,, but it will be amusing to see how deeply they are overlaid by middleclass inhibitions.'

I did not reply. I've done my best to warn Sally, and if she still persists in sticking out her neck, that is her affair. I had far too much reason for acute anxiety on my own account to give it further thought at the moment; and, anyway, there was nothing I could do about it.

'Your mind is obviously on graver issues,' he remarked. 'What decision have you reached as a result of our talk yesterday?'

I took the only line I had been able to think of, and said as tactfully as I could that, while I greatly appreciated all he wished to do for me, I could not square it with my conscience to hand over my grandfather's fortune to anyone.

He stood up, thrust his hands in his pockets and began to pace up and down. Without inviting any comment from me he went on talking for a long time, and this is what he said:

'You are being very foolish, Toby; and I don't think that you can have yet fully appreciated your position.

'According to the last vetting by your doctors you are likely to remain a helpless cripple for a long time to come, if not for life. Added to which you have recently developed mental trouble, of which I will speak later. I have offered you a very good chance of being able to walk again within the next few months, and a definite cessation of what we will term your "hallucinations". Moreover, I have shown you that in ten or fifteen years at the most everything points to a Socialist Government depriving you of all but a fraction of your millions, and I have suggested a means by which, in spite of that, you may continue to enjoy all the benefits of wealth. Yet you pigheadedly refuse to accept my proposal.

'Now, I should like you to understand one thing clearly. No man can serve two masters; and I do not regard you as my master. My whole allegiance is given to the Brotherhood and all it stands for. I had hoped that while serving them I might also help you. But since you will not see reason I must proceed to carry out the project that I have in mind; even though it will result in what virtually amounts to your destruction.

'This project is no new idea conceived within the last few weeks. It was considered and approved by the Brotherhood many years ago while you were still a small boy; shortly after you came to Weylands. It was decided that, as soon as you came of age, the great fortune which is still being held in Trust for you must come under the Brotherhood's control; and I was selected to carry out the plan to secure it. That is why I have devoted so much of my life to you.

'By running away from Weylands and joining the R.A.F. you temporarily upset our calculations; because had you not done that you would have been initiated on leaving, at the end of nineteen thirty-nine. Like all our other scholars, life at the school had prepared you to accept initiation without question. Your mind had been conditioned to do so by the elimination of all moral scruples and primitive taboos. You would have thought the ancient mysteries fascinating, the rituals exciting, and the whole conception a perfect outlet for your abilities and ambitions. Had things panned out according to our original plan you would have been a member of the Brotherhood for two and a half years now; and on the twentieth of this month you would have handed over your fortune without the least hesitation or regret. But Fate decreed otherwise.

'If it had not been for your being shot down when you were we might have had some difficulty in getting you into our hands again; but, even if I had not succeeded in doing so, I think you may take it as certain that some of your old school friends would have appeared upon the scene, and sooner or later manoeuvred you into a position from which you would have found no escape but to join us.

'As things are, your crash brought you back to me with three clear months in which to work upon you before you attained your majority; so it turns out in the end that not a day will be lost in the Brotherhood assuming control of your money.

'When you arrived here, it did not take me long to see that life in the R. A.F. had undone a great part of the work that had been put in upon you during your school years. Many of the petty little ideals and outworn shibboleths of your brother officers had proved contagious. It would have taken years to argue you out of all of them, even if that had proved possible at all now that your mind has attained maturity and no longer has the plastic quality, of youth. So I had to adopt other measures.

'You have no doubt heard the expression "conditioning" as applied by the Gestapo's treatment of prisoners from whom they wish to extract confessions, and so on. I am told that they plunge them into baths of ice cold water, and tap their muscles gently for an hour or two each day with rubber truncheons. Well, during April and May, although the methods I employed were not of a violent nature, I have been conditioning you.'

'You filthy bastard!' I burst out; but he ignored me and went on:

"The object of the "conditioning" was, of course, to create a situation, and to bring you to a frame of mind, in which you would agree to sign certain papers on your birthday, and accept initiation into the Brotherhood as soon as that can be arranged.'

My temper snapped, and I shouted: 'I'll do neither! I'll be damned if I'll make my money over to a lot of Devil worshipping crooks!' He smiled sardonically. 'You may beg to be allowed to before

I am through with you. But by then it may be too late. Your state may be such that the Brotherhood would no longer consider it desirable to have you as a member.'

'Then you'd have cut off your nose to spite your face,' I retorted, 'for in that case they wouldn't get my money.'

'Oh yes, they would!' His smile broadened to a grin. 'At least, they would be able to control the use to which it is put; and that is really all they wish to do. It is to your mental state that I was referring, and if it had deteriorated to that degree you would be judged unfit to inherit. The Board of Trustees would then continue to administer your affairs; and it would not take me very long so to arrange matters that the Board's future decisions were in accordance with the wishes of the Brotherhood.'

Except that Helmuth would be acting as an agent, instead of on his own account, it was the very thing I had been fearing all through the latter half of May and early June. Yet, even so, it seemed as though a trap had suddenly snapped to behind me, when I heard it actually put into words. I swore at him again; but, once more, he ignored me, and launched out on another steady spate of words.

'You must not imagine that we abandoned our project just because you had run away to the Air Force; or that I remained idle about the matter all the time you were in it. Since I managed to get myself appointed as a Trustee in the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine I have spent thousands of hours going into your affairs, and I now know more about them than any man living. It was important that I should acquire this knowledge, because it will be my role to advise the Brotherhood on the Jugg Companies; and, if you have the sense to abandon your present attitude, give you their instructions regarding the policy they wish you to pursue. But it has also enabled me to make a personal assessment of each of my co Trustees, and prepare the way for disposing of those we do not wish to retain, so that the Board can be recreated with all its members our willing servants.

'Rootham and Bartorship are now in the Services, so we do not have to worry about them for the moment. Embledon and Smith are almost moribund, and no longer attend meetings. That leaves your uncle, Iswick, Roberts and myself.

'Your uncle will do what I tell him. Iswick is both ambitious and unscrupulous, but he is an extremely able financier, so I wish to retain his services. At the right moment he will be offered membership of the Brotherhood. Unless I am much mistaken he will jump at it. Should he not, I know enough about his financial dealings to put him in prison, so he will be compelled to play ball with me.

'Having secured him as my ally I shall tackle Roberts. It may surprise you to hear it, but that dried up old stick of an accountant is keeping a young woman in a flat in Maida Vale, and although he must be every day of sixty-eight, she has recently had a child by him. I feel sure he would not like his family and his fellow churchwardens at Berkhampstead to know that, and will much prefer to resign, having first put forward a resolution himself that for one member of his firm to have a seat on the Board will in future be considered sufficient. A member of the Brotherhood will be elected in his place.

'Next I shall deal with Embledon and Smith. Both will be asked to resign on account of their advanced age. If either or both refuse, appropriate steps will be taken. It is laid down in the Trust that should any Trustee fail to attend meetings for six consecutive months he thereby automatically forfeits his Trusteeship.

'At present both of them stagger up to London twice a year to fulfil this minimum requirement. However, a quite simple ritual, performed by myself, will be sufficient to ensure such a rapid deterioration in the health of these recalcitrant gentlemen that they will be compelled to exceed the limit. No excuses will be accepted, and that will be that. They will be replaced by two further members of the Brotherhood; and I shall then govern six seats out of eight.

"There remain Rootham and Bartorship. Both have been granted a special dispensation from attendance at meetings for the duration of the war; and I think the war will go on for quite a long time yet. By the time they do eventually return, my position will be impregnable; but I think, all the same, that they will both have to go. It could be arranged for Bartorship's firm to have been found negligent in some matter; and if six Trustees demand a change of Accountants to the Trust, he will have no option but to retire.

'Brigadier Rootham presents the most difficult problem, because he still has copies of all our papers sent to him, and I don't think he will like some of the transactions upon which we shall enter. He is an intelligent and determined man, so it is probable that he will come back spoiling for trouble. If he does he will be signing his own death warrant. A Chapter of the Brotherhood will have to perform a more serious ritual, to bring about his liquidation before he has a chance to ask too many awkward questions.'

I listened to this programme of trickery, blackmail and murder with cold horror. Even in my worst imaginings of Helmuth engineering such a plot, I had counted on Rootham and Bartorship going fully into matters when they got home, and insisting on coming to see me; which would provide a chance for me to secure release from captivity. But he had evidently given the matter more thought than I had, and got the whole setup taped.

'So you see the situation, Toby,' he went on. 'It will be easier for all concerned if only you will be sensible, and sign the papers that I intend to put before you on your birthday, without further argument. That would save me a lot of time and trouble, you a most unenviable fate, and several of your Trustees a considerable amount of pain and grief. But in the long run whether you do or don't will not make the slightest difference; because the Brotherhood will assume the direction of the Jugg enterprises, anyway. And there is nothing you can do to stop that.

'My "conditioning" of you produced exactly the results I intended. I knew that you would try to get Julia and Paul, and probably some of the other Trustees, down; but I didn't intend to let you succeed in that till I was ready for it. I stopped your letters because I wanted you to get really boiled up and desperate before there was a showdown. I wanted you to suspect that I was at the bottom of the trouble, and make all sorts of wild accusations against me that you could not prove. My only concern was that things should not go off at half-cocked; in case you kept some card up your sleeve to play later.

'But you didn't. You gambled all out to break my hold on you, and you've gone down for a grand slam. Just as I knew I would be able to, I took every trick in the game. By priming Julia, I manoeuvred you into admitting that you had become mentally unbalanced and that your accusations against myself were groundless; then agreeing to a reconciliation with me. I got you to decide for yourself that you could not do better than to remain in my care, and stay on at Llanferdrack. I even succeeded in scotching the visit that the other Trustees would normally have made here on the twentieth, by securing your consent to your official birthday being put off for a month.

'That will not prevent your inheriting, of course, and any document you sign from the twentieth on will be legally valid. But it has the twofold object of cutting your last possible lifeline to the outer world, and keeping the Board in being for a further period; so that, never having been dissolved, there will be no necessity to go through a complicated legal procedure to recreate it, should you continue to resist and so compel me to take steps which will result in your being certified as insane.

'If you do as I wish the Board will assemble either here or in London in five weeks' time, and formally hand over to you. If you don't, then you will simply have inherited for a short time without performing any act in connection with your properties; then the Board will learn that you have been pronounced medically unfit to handle your affairs, and automatically reassume control. So you see I've got you either way.

'You can write to Julia or Paul now to your heart's content; or if you like I will have you carried downstairs so that you can rave to them over the telephone. But they won't believe a word you say. They will only think: "Poor old Helmuth; what a time he must be having, trying to keep secret the affliction from which that unfortunate boy is suffering."

'Last weekend you burnt your boats, Toby. You are my prisoner now, as much as if I had you locked up in Brixton Jail. More so, in fact, for you are mine to do as I will with body and soul. There is nothing you can do about it, and if you have a grain of wisdom left you will submit with a good grace.

'The choice is still yours. But either you sign the papers that I Shall produce on the twentieth, and join the Brotherhood, or I shall have to step up the conditioning process just as the Gestapo do when they have reached the conclusion that a prisoner is of no further use. If you force me to it, I will drive you mad within a month.'

He walked to the door, turned at it, and added: 'I will come for your answer tomorrow night.'

Saturday, 13th June

I have entered on my fight. Helmuth's allusion to the Gestapo was more apt than he knew. In France, Holland, Norway, and lots of other places, there are hundreds of men of the Allied Nations and women too, who are being put through the mill by those, human beasts in black uniforms. Day after day they are appallingly maltreated and made to suffer the most degrading indignities. They have no hope of rescue or reprieve, but they don't give in lightly. Some of them crack before the finish; but many of them stick it out to the bitter end, and carry with them to an unknown grave the secrets that might aid the enemy.

One likes to think that none of us are given more to bear than ^c we can manage to sustain provided that we muster the greatest degree of fortitude of which we are capable; and that then we are overcome by a merciful oblivion. Perhaps it is like drowning, in which people usually come to the surface several times before they sink for good and all. I went under last night; but I've come up again this morning, and I still have a bit of kick left in me. Perhaps, though, that is due to Sally.

Yesterday's entry took me a long time to write; because I wanted to make it as complete and detailed as possible, in order that it may prove the more damning as an indictment of Helmuth if it ever reaches the hands of someone who is prepared to call him to account. When it was done I had not the energy left to set down my reactions, and they were too depressing to be of interest, anyhow.

It is clear beyond all doubt that he is a Satanist, and that when he spoke of 'conditioning' me he was referring to the Thing that menaced me from the courtyard. It can only be a manifestation of embodied Evil, that he called up with the deliberate intention of undermining my mental control. And, as he also spoke of performing mysterious rituals with the most monstrous intent, I spent most of the afternoon and evening in abject wretchedness, wondering what further horrors the future held for me.

The one thing that did bring me a ray of comfort, though, was the thought that the operation of his Satanic powers appeared to be dependent on bright moonlight; and we are still in the dark period of the month. The last full moon was on the 30th of May, so the new moon will not rise until the 20th; and, even after that, it will not reach the degree of brightness that I have come to regard as dangerous until several days later.

Alas for my hopes. Late last night they were shattered, in part at least. I had been buoying myself up with the idea that I could count on a minimum of ten clear days before Helmuth would be able to resume his ghastly 'conditioning' of me. God knows, my attempts to escape have so far ended in the most pitiful fiascos, but it is said that 'hope springs eternal in the human breast', and it did in mine, to the extent of desperately searching my mind for a way to make yet another attempt before he could get to work on me in earnest.

I am still doing that, as my belief that I shall not have to face the final crisis until towards the end of the month has been confirmed. But I am not to be given any peaceful respite to plan in; and it is now a question as to if I shall even be able to hang on to my sanity till then, let alone succeed in a last desperate bid to escape.

Yesterday evening I waited for Helmuth with mixed feelings of angry defiance and nervous apprehension, but he did not come at his usual time; nor did he come after dinner. Naturally, I could settle to nothing, and those hours seemed to drag interminably. At last Sally and Konrad settled me down for the night and I was left in the dark, still wondering why he had not come for his answer.

At length I dropped into a light sleep, but a little before midnight I was roused by hearing the creak of the hinges on the heavy oak door. And there he was, framed in its entrance, the light from the lamp he was carrying glinting on his mane of white hair and powerful features.

Having closed the door and set the lamp down, he said quietly: 'Well, Toby. What have you decided?'

Gripping the sides of the bed with my hands, I heaved myself up into a sitting position, and replied: 'To put a counterproposition to you.'

He shook his head. 'I am not interested.'

'I think you will be,' I insisted, 'when you hear what it is. I can quite understand what led you to join the Brotherhood and to work for it all these years. You love power and you are an ambitious man; but no good will come to you through seeking it this way. It is well known that the Devil always lets down his followers in the end. You would do far better to abandon the whole thing and find other channels for your energies. I can enable you to do that. If you will agree to have me sent to Queensclere, and to resign from the Board of Trustees, I will sign a document which we will have legally witnessed, promising to pay you the sum of half a million pounds, within one month of my twenty-first birthday.'

With a laugh of contempt he brushed my attempt to bribe him aside. 'Really, my dear Toby, you must take me for a fool. I hold. a high position in the Brotherhood, and its interests are identical with mine. Why should I be content with less than a thirtieth part of your fortune when I can have the whole of it for the taking? We need the control of your money to further the great work upon which we are engaged, and we mean to have it. The only question is, will you give it to us and thereby save yourself; or must we go to the trouble of taking it from you and, in the process, turn you from a man into a filthy, grovelling animal?'

'Get back to hell, where you belong!' I shouted at him.

He was careful to keep his distance, in case I grabbed him, pulled him to me, and attempted to strangle him; but he sat down just out of my reach on the end of the bed, and said:

'Since you insist upon it I must teach you a lesson. As you have rightly assumed, the irresistible force which we of the Brotherhood invoke is known to the vulgar as "the Devil"; but much of my personal power is derived through the agency of the moon. You will already have guessed that from your experiences down in the library on bright moonlit nights. If you remain adamant in your decision, I shall have to perform a solemn ritual to Our Lady Astoroth, when the moon is full again towards the end of the month. Once I have invoked her there will be no going back on that. All who have studied the esoteric doctrine agree that her appearance must be terrible beyond belief; for no man who has ever looked upon her face has been able afterwards even to recall his own name.

'But I still hope that extreme measure will not be necessary; and there are many other recourses of the Great Art known to me which do not require the propitiation of the Queen of the Dark Heaven.

'It may interest you to know that just as all Roman Catholics profess a special devotion to either their name saint or some other, so all members of the Brotherhood place themselves under the protection of one of the Princes who form the entourage of the Ancient of Days. Incidentally, he is so called because he is infinitely older than any of the false gods invented since by man. He existed before Earth was created, and was given it as his Province; so he is the true Lord of This World, and everyone in it owes him allegiance. For countless thousands of years primitive man knew no other Deity, and all the cults which have developed in historic times are heresies.

'Traces of the ancient religion are still clearly to be seen in the fact that all, so called, savage races are divided into tribes, each of which regards itself as related through remote ancestry with one of the Princes of the Satanic hierarchy, and venerates his symbol in the form of a totem. The Wolf, Leopard, Scorpion, Hyena and Serpent are examples of these; and today we who perpetuate the age old mysteries also associate ourselves with one or other of these powerful entities. My own totem is the Spider.'

I could not suppress a start, and my hands clenched spasmodically. I now knew what it was that had thrown the Shadow. That round body and the six hairy, tentacle like legs had been those of a spider without a doubt; but a spider the like of which has never been recorded in this world. The big tarantulas of the Amazon were like flies to a bumble bee in comparison with it. Each leg must have measured at least two feet, when fully extended, and its body had been the size of a fish kettle. Leaving aside its super natural aspect it would have proved a most formidable beast for any man to tackle.

Helmuth smiled as he saw my face whiten. 'My mention of spiders seems to call up disconcerting memories for you. If you tremble and sweat at the thought of a shadow what would you do if you were brought face to face with the Great Spider in the flesh?

"That is what he is, you know; the Great Spider. But I forgot. You would not know that as all nonhuman forms of life have only group souls their collective astral is always much bigger than the species it represents. The Great Hound is as big as a horse, and the Great Rat as a panther.

'I will tell you another thing, Toby. If one has materialised an astral and wishes it to solidify, one must nurture it on rotting offal, excrement or blood. Once it has taken sufficient sustenance to form a fleshy body of its own, it can look after itself; but it still needs and seeks food. Spiders are by nature bloodsucking animals and when the Great Spider has assumed material form he would not hesitate to attack a child or a cripple, Toby to satiate his lust for blood. What would you do if, one night, I let him into your room?'

I was sweating in earnest now; but I tried to put a bold face on matters, by muttering: 'I'd tear the brute limb from limb with my naked hands; I'd smash it to a pulp.'

He shook his head. 'Oh no you wouldn't. You might try, but you would not succeed. The Great Spider only borrows his coat of flesh. For him it is a fluid substance to which he gives form by his will; and he is indestructible. Your grip could squeeze but not injure his body, and if you tore off one of his legs it would immediately join itself on to him again.'

After pausing to let his horrible conception sink into my mind, Helmuth took a piece of candle from his pocket. It appeared to be made of black wax and was only about two inches long. He placed it in the centre of an ashtray which was well out of my reach, and said:

'I think that one night, before I call upon Our Lady Astoroth to destroy your mind utterly, I must introduce you to the Great Spider. I would not let him kill you, of course, but his embrace might bring you to your senses, or, alternatively, render an invocation to the Moon Goddess unnecessary. But to start with I will perform a minor magic for your edification.

'You will, no doubt, recall the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He piped all the rats out of the city, and then, because the citizens would not pay him the promised fee, he lured away their children. That is not fiction. It is an account of an actual happening in the remote past that has come down to us through folklore. The Pipe was a Mage, and one of considerable power, since he was able to entice the children of a whole township from their parents; but what concerns us is that his totem was the Rat, and it was that which enabled him to order the rats to follow him.

'But to return to ourselves. As I have already told you, my totem is the Spider. All spiders of every kind are my little brothers, and they will do my bidding.'

He lit the piece of black candle, and went on: "This is made out of bear's grease, sulphur, pitch and the fat of a toad. To use such ingredients in making a candle may sound to you the most childish nonsense, but, believe me, it is not. All material substances have astral qualities and when consumed by fire procure certain results owing to immutable laws which govern the relation of the natural to the supernatural. You will probably find the smell somewhat nauseating, but it will burn for some forty minutes and give you enough light to see by. I am now about to leave you. When I get back to my room I intend to send all my little brothers who inhabit the old ruin to pay you a visit. I hope the experience will prove to you that I am not to be trifled with further.'

A moment later he had picked up his lamp and gone. I was quite calm, but as I stared round the room I felt extremely uncomfortable. All he had said had seemed quite logical at the time, but a swift reaction now made me feel that much of it was the product of a distorted brain. It seemed impossible that he really had the power to summon all the spiders in the Castle to plague me; yet I had seen the shadow of the Great Spider, and felt the sickening, soul shaking waves of evil that radiated from it. That vile memory was real enough, and if he could materialise a demon such as that, where lay the limit to his potency for working these hideous miracles?

The candle burned with a steady blue flame, casting long shadows on the walls that reached up to merge into the darkness that still obscured the high, vaulted ceiling. The stench that came from the melting fat was most repulsive, and after a minute or two the fumes of the sulphur made my eyes water and got into my throat, making me cough.

Anxiously, I peered from side to side, watching for the first sign of movement which would indicate that he was succeeding in carrying out his fantastic threat. I gave a swift glance at my bedside clock. The hands stood at fourteen minutes to one; it had been just on twenty to one when he left me. Another minute passed; another and another; still nothing happened.

I tried to figure out how long it would take for Helmuth to get back to his room and perform the incantation, then for the spiders to reach me; but two of those three factors were imponderables; so the answer might be anything from ten minutes to half an hour. All the same, I felt that a quarter of an hour should really be enough for him to set moving any spiders that were in my immediate vicinity; and when the minute hand of my clock had passed five to one I began to hope that either he had tried to hypnotise me into seeing what he wished me to see, and failed, or had attempted a ritual which had proved too much for him.

As each additional minute ticked away I grew slightly more optimistic; yet I did not relax my vigilance. Quite automatically I had dropped into the old, familiar, steady head roll that was part of the drill for a Fighter Pilot when searching the skies for enemy aircraft. My glance went down to the floor at my left, slowly upwards, across the opposite wall, down to the floor at my right, and back again across the bed. Now and then the beastly sulphur fumes caused me to break the rhythm in a fit of coughing, and each time that happened I looked at the clock. At one minute to one I saw the first spider.

It was a small red one; but there was no mistaking what it was, as it was actually on the clock and stood out clearly against the white clock face.

After that things began to happen quickly. I spotted another, of the kind that have a tiny round body and very long legs, on the left hand bottom corner of my counterpane. A third ran swiftly across my bedside table and disappeared behind my cigarette box. There came a little 'plop' on my pillow, and jerking round my head I saw that a big, hairy, compact brute had fallen there from the ceiling. I made a swipe at it, and in doing so dislodged another that had just appeared over the edge of the bed. A tickling at the back of my neck caused me to clap my hand to it and at that moment a newcomer ran up the other sleeve of my pyjama jacket.

Within another minute the place was swarming with them. Minute little insects; things whose leg span would have covered half a crown; round bodied, oval bodied, waspwaisted, long legged, short legged, some hairy, some smooth, black, red, greyish brown and mottled with nasty whitish spots; they came in scores, in hundreds, from every corner of the room, until the bed, the table and myself were spotted with them as thickly as a summer night's sky is with stars.

Frantically I beat at them to try and drive them off. Here and there my slaps caught and killed one, causing it to fold up in a little ball and roll away; but the great majority were agile enough to evade my nailing hands, or seemed to protect themselves by taking cover in the folds of the bedclothes. In a dozen places at once I could feel them crawling over me; they ran across my face and got tangled in my hair.

There was nothing supernatural about them but, all the same, it was a beastly experience, as the irritation never ceased for a second and there was something loathsome about the feel of their cold little bodies coming in contact with one's skin. Somehow, too, the longer it lasted the worse it became. For the first few minutes my mind was fully occupied by my angry attempts to fight off the little pests; but it suddenly dawned upon me that my efforts were both futile and exhausting. There were too many and too agile, and for all my wild slapping I had not succeeded in hitting more than a dozen or two. So I gave up, and endeavoured to remain still. But I found I simply couldn't for more than a few seconds at a time. It was then that my nerve began to give way.

I suppose it was pretty wet of me to allow a lot of harmless little insects to have that effect; but it was partly the impossibility of sitting still while they crawled all over me and the equal impossibility of getting rid of them; and partly, I think, the horribly disturbing knowledge of how they came to be there. Anyhow, after a quarter of an hour, that seemed to last half the night, I broke down, and began to weep with rage and distress.

Helmuth came in a few minutes later, to see how I was taking things, and he must have been extremely gratified by what he saw.

The stinking bit of black candle had burnt down to a quarter of an inch. He snuffed it, put the heel in his pocket, then went over to the terrace door and opened it wide for a few moments till the rush of cool air had driven most of the smell out of the room. Next he pronounced several sentences of what sounded like gibberish, but were, I suppose, a magical formula from some dead language. On that his legion of spiders immediately left me and scuttled away out of sight through the cracks in the wainscoting.

Holding his lamp aloft, he looked at me and said: 'Perhaps after tonight's experience I shall find you in a more reasonable frame of mind tomorrow. If not, I shall have to give you a sharper lesson. There is one family of spiders living in the ruins that I refrained from sending. They are not poisonous but their bite is painful, and if I send them to you in the dark you will find it most unpleasant. You might think that over before you go to sleep.'

When he had gone I did think it over; and I was, and am, still determined to resist. Spider bites can be most unpleasant, but I can hardly believe that they will prove more painful than would a beating with thin steel rods by a gang of Gestapo toughs. And, so long as my mind remains unimpaired, I mean to stick any pain that Helmuth may inflict on me to the limit of my will.

Nevertheless, at the time, my nerves were still in a parlous state; and, having already given way to tears, I let myself go again in a flood of self pity. It was in that state that Sally found me.

I did not hear her come in, as my head was half buried in the pillow and my sobs drowned the sound of her footfalls. It was her voice, saying 'What is it, Toby? Whatever is the matter?' that made me start up and find her already leaning over me.

She was standing right beside my bed holding a torch. It dazzled me for a moment, but I could just make out that she was in a dressing gown and had her fluffy brown hair done up in a lot of little plaits. They stuck out absurdly, like a spiky halo, but made her look very young and rather pretty.

'What is it?' she repeated gently. 'Why are you crying like this? Have you had some awful nightmare? I've just had one about you. It was horrid. You were in bed here, and there was a great black thing over your face. I couldn't see what it was, but I knew that you were suffocating. When I woke I was so worried that I felt I must come up and see if you were all right.'

'I I had a nightmare too,' I gulped. It seemed the only thing to say. I could not possibly expect her to believe that Helmuth had done a Pied Piper of Hamelin on me with all the spiders in the place; but I snuffled out that I had dreamed that a horde of them was swarming all over me.

'There, there,' she murmured. 'It's all over now, and you'll soon forget it. But I'm very glad I followed my impulse to come up, all the same.'

Then she perched herself on the edge of the bed, drew my head down on her breast, and made comforting noises to me as though I were a small boy who had hurt himself.

By that time I had practically got control of myself again; but I must confess that I didn't hurry to show it. Perhaps Weylands made me rather a hard, self reliant type; anyhow, circumstances have never before arisen in which I have been comforted by a girl. It was an entirely new experience and I found it remarkably pleasant.

After a bit I could no longer disguise the fact that I was feeling better; so she said she was going to send me to sleep. She has marvellous hands; strong yet slim, and very sensitive as I already knew from her giving me my massage treatments. Having made me comfortable on my pillows, she started to stroke my forehead with a touch as light as swansdown. In no time at all I had forgotten about Helmuth and felt a gentle relaxation steal over me; a few moments later I was sleeping like a top.

Later

This morning Sally and I said nothing to one another about last night. I had half a mind to thank her for her kindness, but shyness got the better of me; and she probably refrained from mentioning the matter out of tactfulness, feeling that I wouldn't like it recalled that a girl had found me in tears.

All the same it did come up this afternoon. I was sitting in my wheelchair looking through one of my stamp albums I have five altogether, and two of them are now completely interleaved with these sheets, but this was one of the others and I found I was out of cigarettes. As Sally was near my bedside table I asked her to pass me the big silver box on it, so that I could refill my case. She did so, and opened it as she handed it to me. There was a dead spider inside.

'That's funny,' she said. 'When I was making your bed with Konrad this morning I found three dead spiders in it, and here's another. I wonder how it got inside the box?'

I knew the answer to that one. The box had been open when Helmuth had come in to me at midnight. Later, while slapping at the little brutes, I had evidently hit this one as my hand caught the lid and smacked it shut.

But, without waiting for me to reply, she went on: 'It was queer finding three of them in your bed, too. I've never seen any there before. Perhaps a nest of them has hatched out behind the wainscot. Anyhow I'm sure it must have been one of them running over your face that gave you that horrid dream.'

An almost overwhelming impulse urged me to tell her the truth; but I managed to fight it down. I'm very glad I did now, as a few dead spiders would not have been enough to convince her that I hadn't dreamed the whole thing, and that it was simply my old prejudice against Helmuth reasserting itself in my sleep.

All the same, I count her having found the spiders a great piece of good fortune, as it is one item of concrete evidence; and, although it may cost me pretty dear, if the next few days produce others the time may not be far off when I can spill the whole story and she will have to believe me. Sally is 100 per cent honest; I am sure of that; and if only I can convince her of the facts she will be 100 per cent for me. I have got to, for in her now lies my only hope.

As it was, I said: 'Yes, you're right. I can still feel the little devils crawling over my skin. But that doesn't explain your dream about me; how do you account for that?'

She shrugged. 'Perhaps I was worrying about you before I went to sleep. For a permanent invalid you are a wonderfully cheerful person, and in the early part of the week you were right on top of your form; but the past two days you've gone right off the boil. Naturally I've felt rather concerned about that.'

'I'm very grateful to you, Sally,' I said. 'And I'm particularly grateful to you for your kindness to me last night.'

Then an idea came to me, so I added: 'I think I can explain why I've been a bit under the weather recently. I sometimes get premonitions, and I had one about this spider dream that shook me up so. I've a feeling, too, that I'm in for another tonight. Would it be asking too much of you to sit up with a book this evening, and come in to see me round about twelve o'clock?'

She gave me a queer, half humorous, half annoyed look, then said a trifle sharply: 'Nothing doing, Toby Jugg. You were genuinely upset when I came in to you last night; but for a good ten minutes before I sent you to sleep you were shamming. Midnight visiting is not in the contract, and the proper relations between nurse and patient are going to be maintained. You needn't tell me that you never knew a mother's care, either; because I've¹ heard that one before.'

I was so taken aback that I could not think what to answer. She was right, of course, but I had no idea that she had spotted my manoeuvre. Evidently she thinks I was making up to her with ulterior motives; but she is quite wrong there. It was only that I have been rather starved of human affection and found comfort in the warmth of her evident concern for me. Since she assumes that by asking her to come to me again tonight I was contemplating making a pass at her, I find it distinctly humiliating that she should have shown so very plainly that she thinks me too poor a fish to bother with. Still, I suppose one can't blame her really what healthy girl would want to start an affaire with a poor devil of a cripple?

Sunday, 14th June

Helmuth carried out his threat, and the result was pretty bloody. He came in to me about eleven o'clock. There was the sort of scene which it has now become redundant to record. I called him by a string of unprintable names and he retorted with variations on the theme that I was a stiff necked little 'whatnot', whom he was determined to bring to heel.

The fun started half an hour after he had left me. As there was no hell broth candle on this occasion, and the fire had practically died out, I had no immediate warning before the attack. Something suddenly scurried across the back of my neck and bit me on the ear.

I shook my head violently, clapped a hand to the place, then quickly hauled myself up into a sitting position. Nothing more happened for a while; but I don't mind admitting that as I sat there in the darkness I had no mean fit of the jitters.

I could not help visualising swarms of the little brutes coming at me from every direction, as they had the night before, but this time every one of them having a nip like a pair of tweezers and intending to make their supper off me.

Thank God, it did not turn out to be as bad as all that, and the period of nerve-racking anticipation was really the worst part of the business. But the realisation was quite bad enough. Helmuth's pet family of 'little brothers' turned out to consist of about a score of small, active and persistent horrors, as far as I could judge although it was impossible to estimate with any certainty how many there were of them making darts at me in the darkness.

I think being in the dark made the bites seem more painful, as this morning there is not very much to show for them; but at the time each hurt like the cut of a small, sharp knife, and the shock of it coming without warning added to its intensity. It brought to my mind what I had read of a Chinese torture called 'the death of a thousand cuts' and, although of course I wasn't, I could not help believing that I must be bleeding in dozens of places from the bites on my face, arms, neck, hands and the upper part of my body.

How long the ordeal went on I don't quite know; but it must have been well over three quarters of an hour with a fresh bite about every minute. For the whole of that time I was jerking myself about and slapping at my unseen enemies; so when at last the biting ceased I was sweating like a pig thoroughly exhausted.

For a time I remained sitting tense and vigilant, waiting for the next bite to come; but when a considerable interval had elapsed without one I gradually relaxed, and began to wonder if Helmuth would soon appear to gloat over his blood-soaked victim. But he didn't, and some time later, still propped up against my pillows, I dropped off to sleep.

One good thing, at least, has come out of this last bedevilment. Sally found two more corpses in my bed this morning; and although there was no blood to show, my skin was red and slightly puffy where I had been bitten.

I twitted her, a little unfairly perhaps, on not having believed my prediction that I should be the victim of another 'nightmare'; but she took the matter seriously, and expressed contrition at having given me a raspberry instead of the benefit of the doubt.

At the moment, while I sit here writing this on the terrace, she is conducting a grand spider hunt in my room, and is dusting insect powder into the crevices of the wainscoting behind my bed. That will not stop the spiders, if Helmuth decides to send them again, as they come from all over the place; but, now that she is so concerned about it, he may abandon this form of tormenting me from fear that she will start agitating to have me moved again.

She said this morning that proper sleep was an essential to my recovery, and that if we couldn't get rid of the spiders she would have to speak to Helmuth about it. Moreover, she volunteered of her own accord to come in late tonight to see that I was all right.

I reminded her that she was dining with Helmuth, and suggested, with what I fear must have been rather a forced laugh, that she might find his books and his conversation so interesting that she would forget all about me.

To that I got the tart reply that a few hours' relaxation had never yet made her forget her professional duties.

Let's hope that tonight does not prove an exception. It would be a great triumph for me if she came in while a spider attack was in full progress, as I think that if I then told her the truth she might believe it. But will she come at all? She certainly won't if Helmuth gets really busy on her.

Later

I have spent a miserable afternoon. Not on account of any further threat from Helmuth, or my own situation which, God knows, is desperate enough but worrying about Sally.

I feel sure she has no idea what she may be letting herself in for tonight, and it would be futile to try to tell her. She would only put it down to a recurrence of the abnormal condition in which I am supposed to have sex on the brain, and I should risk disrupting to no purpose the excellent relations that now exist between us.

Sally has been here over a fortnight, and a cripple is naturally far more dependent than any other type of invalid on his nurse, so I have already spent many pleasant idle hours in her company. In fact, I have really seen much more of her than I did of any of the girls that I met casually, and ran around with for two or three months, while I was in the R.A.F.

I have come to like her enormously; and I am beginning to wonder if my intense repugnance to the thought of Helmuth getting hold of her is not partly inspired by jealousy. I have never been jealous of anyone before; the Weylands training eliminated that emotion in my makeup during my adolescence, and I thought it had done so for good; but now I am by no means certain.

Knowing Helmuth's attitude to women as I do, the thought of her spending a whole evening with him makes me squirm. I simply cannot bear the thought of his filling her up with drink, then pawing her about. Of course, she may not let him; but his personal magnetism is extraordinarily strong, and if he thinks she is likely to prove difficult he is quite capable of slipping something into her drink.

The terrible frustration that I am feeling, from being unable to protect her, can hardly be entirely attributed to a normal sense of chivalry; so I suppose there is no escaping the fact that jealousy must enter into it. If so it is a most hideous emotion; and, since jealousy of this type is a by-product of love, it brings me face to face with the question can I possibly be in love with Sally?

As I have never been in love, I honestly don't know. I have always thought of love in this sense as an extra intense form of physical desire, and Sally has not so far had any profound effect upon my passions. She has a lovely figure, and, although she is not beautiful in the accepted sense, her face is so expressive that it gives her an attraction all her own. There is, too, a rich warmth in her voice, and she is altogether a very cuddlesome person; but I certainly would not jump off Westminster Bridge for the privilege of sleeping with her. On the other hand I think I would jump off Westminster Bridge if by so doing I could prevent what is likely to happen tonight. Which strikes me as very queer.

Monday, 15th June

I am in love with Sally. I know that now, and I wonder more than ever what ill I can have done in my short life for God to have inflicted such a series of punishments on me. To be made a cripple at the age of twenty was a life sentence; to be left in Helmuth's clutches, with the end of the month approaching, and to date not even the germ of an idea for getting away from him, is pretty well as good as having added to the life sentence that it shall be spent in solitary confinement; and now this!

Last night I went through purgatory. Sally gave me my massage early so that she would have plenty of time to change for dinner; then she told me that Konrad would settle me down at ten o'clock and she hoped that I would soon get off to sleep; but she would peep in round about midnight, just in case the insect powder had not proved fully effective and some of the spiders were causing me to have another nightmare. After that she left me, and I spent five hours of unadulterated hell.

If this is love, God help every imaginative man or woman who falls into it, and ever has to remain inactive while knowing the person they love to be in the company of an unscrupulous rival. I knew both Helmuth and Sally, and the rooms in which they would pass the evening, sufficiently well to form a series of mental pictures, of their having cocktails together, dining, looking through his books, and of what might happen later.

Most of the time up till about half past nine my personal television set was jumping ahead, with only occasional flashbacks to what was probably happening at the moment; after that hour my imagination ran riot, and my torture was intensified a hundredfold by sickening visions of what might be taking place downstairs while I was actually thinking of it. No doubt many of the situations that I conjured up, with which to flay myself, were grossly beyond the probable, but, since Helmuth was concerned, they were never outside the bounds of the possible.

I see that I have written of Helmuth as my 'rival', which, of course, he is not, since I have never made even the suggestion of a declaration to Sally, and, if I did, I have not the least reason to suppose that she would reciprocate my feelings. On the contrary, she has already shown that, far from desiring any advance from me, she would regard it as most undesirable, on account of her professional status.

I cannot think that many young nurses allow medical etiquette to weigh much with them if they feel an inclination towards a patient; in fact, although it was officially frowned on, in the R.A.F. hospitals where I spent ten months lots of chaps had affairs with the V.A.D.s; so Sally's attitude with regard to myself must be taken as a clear indication that she has no time for me. On the other hand, she has never made any secret of her admiration for Helmuth, and she may quite well have been hoping for the past ten days or more that he would make love to her.

I don't know much about girls' reactions, but everything in such relationships must depend on the point of view. If a man of 45, like Helmuth, makes violent love to a girl of 22, like Sally, and she thinks him physically unattractive, she probably regards him as a 'beast', a 'dirty old man' and almost as a 'medical case who should have more control over himself at his age'; but if she is attracted to him she then regards his amorous assault as a compliment, and he becomes in her eyes an 'experienced lover', a 'real man of the world' and a 'connoisseur of women whom any girl of her age might be proud to have as a beau'.

If Sally's conception of Helmuth is on the latter lines, as well it may be, that would make the agonies I suffered last night all the more pointless and absurd. But they were none the less vivid and heartrending. And what makes things worse is that I have no idea how the party really went, or ended, as Sally is hardly on speaking terms with me this morning.

That is partly my fault, as I blotted it again, and badly; and she could hardly be expected to guess that I did so mainly out of concern for her.

Helmuth did not come in to me after tea; so there weren't even any further threats to distract my mind from Sally; and I knew that he would be too much occupied with her to come up and start an argument with me after dinner. So the spiders and myself were both given a night off.

From ten o'clock, when Konrad took my lamp away, the time dragged interminably. I thought it must be at least half past one, and that Sally had long since forgotten her promise to come and see that I was all right, when the sound of Great-aunt Sarah's footsteps, going down her secret staircase, told me that it was only just eleven.

She is as regular as a clock, and recently I have feared that Helmuth might hear her either coming or going on one of his late visits to me. If he did, he is quite capable of having her stopped out of pure malice, and it would be a wicked shame to interfere with the only thing that makes the poor old girl's life worth living; but, fortunately, he has never been here yet at the actual time she has passed. I thought more than once on both Friday and Saturday nights of calling her in to help me against the spiders, but gave the idea up from the feeling that it would not only be useless but scare her out of the few wits she has left.

Anyhow, her passing last night told me that I had another hour or so to wait for Sally, even if she came at all, and had not forgotten me owing to Helmuth's blandishments; or because she was lying half drugged and unable to think coherently. That hour seemed to stretch into an age long night, yet I knew that it could not be more than two hours at most, because Great-aunt Sarah always returns from her self-imposed toil at one; and she had not done so when I heard footsteps coming up the stone stairs outside my door.

It was Sally, but Helmuth was with her, and she was tight.

He held the lamp as she stumbled into the room in front of him. I had never seen her properly dressed up before. She was not wearing full evening dress, of course, but the sort of frock that girls use to dine out informally. Her eyes were abnormally bright and her face was flushed. My heart gave an extra thump as I suddenly realised that she can look damn' pretty; but almost simultaneously I realised the state she was in, and I was filled with rage and apprehension.

Helmuth had knocked back his share of the drink. I could tell that by the slant of his tawny eyes; but he knows how to hold his liquor and, as usual when he is wearing a dinner jacket, he looked very distinguished.

While he remained standing in the doorway, Sally came over to me with what I suppose she thought was a cheerful smile, but was actually a sick making grin, on her face, and said:

'Well, I promised I'd come, and here I am. Any spiders?'

'No,' I said. 'You've brought the only one with you.'

Her face went stupidly blank, but Helmuth understood me and laughed. 'There you are! What did I tell you? Poor Toby's got them again. In an old place like this there are bound to be a certain number of spiders hatching out at this time of year, and because you found a few about the room he now thinks that I am one.'

'Silly boy!' She suppressed a hiccup. 'You mustn't get spiders on the brain. It's bad for you! I'm your nurse and I want you to be a credit to me. Be good now, and go to sleep.'

'It is you who needs sleep at the moment,' I said sharply. 'And as you are now you are no credit to your profession or yourself. You're tight, Sally. Get to bed and sleep it off.'

I shot that line in the hope that it would pull her together, although I knew I was taking a chance that it might put her against me. It did, and came back like a boomerang on my unhappy head. She swore that she was not tight and called on the grinning Helmuth as witness to the gratuitous insult I had offered her. Then she called me an ungrateful little so and so for dragging her up here only to be rude, swore that she would never come near me after ten o'clock again, and flounced a trifle unsteadily out of the room. Helmuth gave me a parting leer as he turned away to light her down the stairs; and that was that.

What happened after that I have no idea. Up to the time that I saw them, the fact that Sally was in such rollicking form showed that Helmuth could not so far have tried anything on to which she had not been a willing party. But there might have been a very good reason for that. If she told Helmuth quite early in the evening that she had promised to come up and see me at midnight, he is shrewd enough to have realised that, should she insist on keeping her promise, it would probably upset his seduction act just as he was getting going; so he might have decided to spend the first part of the evening filling her up with drink and hold the rough stuff till after their visit.

All I do know is that she is looking like the wrath of God this morning, and has one hell of a hangover.

Later

After lunch Helmuth came in to see me. He announced that he is going away this afternoon and will not be back till Friday. The surprise, relief and excitement that I felt on hearing this can well be imagined.

The length of his proposed absence is accounted for by the fact that he is going to spend two days at Weylands, and getting from central Wales to Cumberland is a most hideous cross-country journey. By road it is about three hundred miles, so could be. done in a day, but wartime restrictions make going by car out of the question, and by rail there is no connection which makes the trip possible without lapping over into a second day. He is catching the afternoon train to Birmingham and spending the night there, as if he caught the night train on he would only find himself marooned at Carlisle at some godless hour of the morning; so he will travel north tomorrow, spend Tuesday night and the whole of Wednesday at Weylands, start back on Thursday after lunch and arrive here midday Friday.

He seemed to take a special delight in describing to me the object of his journey. For a long time it has been one of his ambitions to have the chapel here dedicated to his Infernal Master, and at last the Brotherhood have agreed. The ceremony is to take place on St. John's Eve that is, Midsummer eve Tuesday the 23rd of June. Apparently it is the second most important feast in the Satanic calendar, the first being Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve the 30th of April.

That, no doubt, explains why it was that I suffered the worst of the early attacks by the Horror in the courtyard on April the 30th. Evidently, too, it was not coincidence that it should have been on a 30th of April that I caught a glimpse of the Brotherhood gathering at Weylands, and had the fright of my young life on breaking open the old tomb. I am inclined to think now, though, that the tomb had nothing to do with it, and that I ran into some incredibly evil presence that the Satanists at Weylands had conjured up to protect their meeting from being spied upon.

Anyway, there is to be a full-scale Sabbath held here tomorrow week. Helmuth is going up to Weylands to arrange the final details and the Brotherhood is coming in force from all parts to attend it. So I know now why it was that when I looked through the grating I saw that instead of being half full of rubble the chapel had recently been cleaned out.

He asked me again if I had reconsidered matters, and on my replying in the negative, he said;

'That is a pity, as I should like to have taken north with me the news of your willingness to accept initiation. However, the Midsummer night’s ceremony will provide a perfect opportunity for that, and I still hope to induce you to see reason before then. If I. fail, instead of your receiving initiation that night, we shall have to invoke the Lady Astoroth. The circumstances for such a ritual are not always propitious, but they will be on that date and that will be the end of you. But I shall be back on Friday and able to give my entire attention to you over the weekend. By the twentieth the moon will be entering her second quarter; so if you are still recalcitrant I shall summon the Great Spider, and we will see what effect a meeting with him will have on you.'

Later

All the afternoon I have been desperately racking my wits for a way to take advantage of Helmuth's absence. It is a God-given chance to escape, and the last I will ever get. I have three clear days to work in, but even that is all too little to prepare for a breakout, and to pull it off.

The physical difficulties alone are immense. That morning when I was hauled back from the railway station, and Helmuth and

Sally were discussing in the car how I could be prevented from getting away again, she was so right in pointing out that I am too heavy to be carried, so that even with help I could get very little distance without my wheelchair. And it is such a weighty contraption that it would take more than one person to get it downstairs. Then there is the problem of getting me down after it; and the whole job would have to be done at night without arousing any of the household.

Still, I've a feeling that I would find a way to surmount such obstacles if only I were not so utterly alone and tied. If I had someone to get me from my bed into the chair, and help me out of it on to the top step of the stairs, I believe the getting down could be managed. While they supported and guided the chair from behind, I could take its weight against the back of my shoulders and lever myself down in a sitting position, taking my weight on my hands, a step at a time. But it would be utterly impossible to perform such a feat on my own, and none of the servants ever come here, except Konrad. To hope for any help from him is out of the question. So the problem really boils down to, can I or can I not win Sally over before Helmuth gets back?

Unfortunately she is sadly changed from yesterday; and goodness knows what Helmuth said or did to her, but he must now be very confident in her loyalty to him to go off like this leaving me in her charge. It was probably with his journey in view that he put off having a party with her until last night. That would be just like him. The odds are that he is not the least attracted by her, otherwise he would have done something about it before this, but he decided that it was important to secure her allegiance, and that the best way to do so was to create a strong emotional bond between them, just before his departure.

He is also, no doubt, relying to some extent on my isolated situation, up here at the top of this spiral staircase, and on Konrad keeping an eye on things for him. But Konrad, although sly and cunning, is not overburdened with brains; so it should not be difficult to outwit him. Therefore it must be principally on Sally that Helmuth is counting to keep me a prisoner here, and prevent me from obtaining any outside help, during his absence.

The fact that she is like a bear with a sore head today, and has so far treated me with frigid abruptness, is partly due to her hangover and partly to her annoyance at my having seen her tight last night. But I have an uneasy feeling that there is also something else behind it from the way she avoids my glance. Perhaps Helmuth told her about how I hypnotised Deb and warned her not to look me in the face for more than a few seconds at a time.

Since she first arrived it has occurred to me more than once to try out my hypnotic powers on her, but I felt that Helmuth would be watching for such a move on my part and be certain to nip it in the bud. Later, after Julia's visit, there was no point in attempting it until Helmuth came out in his true colours a few days ago. That was followed almost immediately by the first spider attack, after which Sally came and comforted me. I am sure now it was that episode which led up to my present feelings for her, and there seems to me something definitely wrong about attempting to impose one's will by such means on a girl with whom one has fallen in love.

An attempt to bribe her is equally repugnant; but my situation is so desperate that I am positively forced to try one means or the other. Of the two, to offer her a bribe seems the less unpleasant course, and the one more likely to succeed. At least she could not afterwards accuse me of having interfered with her free will, and if Helmuth has primed her against my hypnotic powers I might find it impossible to make any impression on her except, if she guesses what I am at, to make her more prejudiced than ever against me.

Even if she did become Helmuth's mistress when she was tight last night, she may be regretting it by now. But, in any case, I can hardly believe that in an affaire of such short duration he could have secured such a hold over either her affections or her mind as to make her completely oblivious to her future interests.

Sally is much better born than I am. She comes of a long line of Naval people, one of whom was a Cavalier who commanded a ship in Charles I's time. She was brought up to understand and appreciate nice things, although her family has fallen on hard times and lost nearly all their money. She is quite philosophical about the fact that she would have to earn her own living even if the war did not make that compulsory; but at times I am sure she thinks it a little hard that she should have to, while all her ancestors for many generations back have enjoyed the comfort, elegance and freedom to live as they chose, which was the natural birthright of the English gentry.

I could give her all that, and with no strings attached. If only she will get me away from Llanferdrack I'll be as rich as Croesus this time next week. However right Helmuth may be in his prediction that the Socialists will reduce the whole nation to the level of beggary in a few years' time, the Jugg millions are still mine at the moment to do what. I like with, if only I can get my hands on them. I'll offer to make over to her a sum which will keep her in luxury for the rest of her life. But I have no time to lose. I must tackle her tonight, after dinner. She is bound to accept; she would be mad to refuse.