The Haunting of Toby Jugg (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, 8th May

Another quiet night, although rather a restless one, owing to Julia never having turned up yesterday evening, as I hoped she would. Perhaps she decided to put off her visit till today and then stay over the weekend.

Fortunately, I became so interested in writing the account of my ‘burglar’ that I continued at it after dinner, and that occupied my mind enough to prevent my fretting over her non-appearance until Deb settled me down for the night.

I had better finish it off now. Actually, there is little more to tell; and I find it difficult to doubt that Florrie Meddows’ explanation of the vanishing without trace of the figure that I saw must be the true one.

People do not tell children ghost stories or give them books about ghouls and vampires to read. Tales of witches who turn princes into frogs and giants who carry off princesses—yes; but anything to do with the after-life or the supernatural is taboo. Therefore, at the age of eight-and-a-half I can scarcely have known what the word ‘ghost’ implied, hence my immediate assumption that the thing I saw was a man.

It is this, I think, that gives the occurrence peculiar and outstanding weight as proof that astral bodies are at times visible to humans. Everyone else in that house knew what was going on there, so, if any of them had seen what I did, one might fairly argue that thinking about the séances had played Old Harry with their nerves, and that they had imagined it. But I could not possibly have done so, because before one can make a mental concept of anything it is essential to have some basic knowledge of it, and in my case this was entirely lacking.

The next time I saw Julia I tackled her about it. At first she hedged and pretended to have forgotten the whole affair; but when I told her about my meeting with Florrie she shrugged and said with her lazy smile:

‘Of course it was an astral, darling. It’s quite true that when you first came to us at The Willows we used to hold séances now and then. But only for fun; and after you saw your “burglar” we were much too frightened ever to hold one again. When Paul had searched the house we knew that it couldn’t have been a man who had scared you, and the only possible explanation was that one of our controls must be hovering about in visual form. Naturally, as you were only a child, we concealed the truth from you and tried to make you forget the fright you’d had as quickly as we could. I don’t mind admitting now that we were pretty scared ourselves, and I was thankful that we had already arranged to move from The Willows soon after Christmas.’

I tried to get her to tell me about the séances they had held, but she insisted that there was really nothing to tell, as she hadn’t
proved a very good medium and, apart from the totally unexpected appearance of my burglar, the results had been disappointing; so I did not press her. The important point is that she fully confirmed all that Florrie had said.

I’m glad that I took the trouble to write all this out, as recalling the affair in detail makes me as nearly certain as anyone can be, that I
did
see a supernatural manifestation when I was a healthy, innocent child; and that gives real, solid support to my belief that I am not imagining things now.

However, the fact that I have good grounds for supposing that apparitions do appear to humans raises again the question of Good and Evil; and I would like to clear my mind a bit on that. It is an axiom that nothing happens without a cause; so who pulls the wires behind the scenes? Is it always the Devil, or sometimes God? What is the object of such operations? And can humans really command spirits to do their will?

If the manifestation occurs without our seeking it, is some power beyond earth attempting to influence us, or could it have been sent by some evilly disposed human? Again, if through a medium, or the exercise of our own will employed in some ancient mystery, we provoke the supernatural occurrence, is it, in the first place, really a response from some loved one who has passed over and, in the second, a minor entity compelled to obey us; or, in both cases, have the forces of Evil accepted our rash invitation to emerge from some dark and hideous cavern of the underworld?

All these questions seethe in my tired brain when I cannot sleep at night, and fear that at any moment instinct may again make my flesh begin to creep at the approach of the Thing in the courtyard.

At least, as a starting point, I feel justified in assuming that the Otherworld must be another dimension of this one, and that its denizens have the power, given suitable conditions, to impinge upon our consciousness.

There seems, too, no reason to suppose that the will of a spirit in a physical body is necessarily weaker than that of a spirit in limbo. So the former may prove equal to forcing the latter to do its bidding; and that, no doubt, is the secret of the supernormal
powers with which all the great occultists have been credited. From the same premises, though, should the disembodied entity prove stronger than the will of the living person who has conjured it up, woe betide the occultist; for it would then be he who would find himself the slave of some strange, potent, and almost certainly malignant force.

By worldly and academic standards Florrie Meddows is a person of the lower orders and mean intelligence; yet surely she voiced the sound sense and clear vision so often inherited through many generations of humble folk when she said to me: ‘No good ever comes of calling on the spirits.’

However cautious and intelligent a seeker after occult power may be, or one who endeavours to gain information by consulting a professional psychic, it does not seem to me that they possess any yardstick with which to measure the results that they obtain. How can they possibly tell if the entities they contact are good or evil, or be certain that they are not being deceived by malicious spirits and led on to their ultimate ruin?

In my own case, God knows, I have not deliberately tempted Providence by seeking to probe these dark secrets, but

Later

I had to stop writing this morning because Deb came in. She doesn’t often do so, between eleven and one on a wet day, but as it had stopped raining by a quarter to twelve she wanted me to take my daily turn round the garden before lunch; so that she would be free this afternoon to have tea with the village schoolmaster, who is a friend of hers.

Her unexpected appearance gave me furiously to think. I am most anxious that no one should learn about this journal—in case they get the idea that I’ve got a screw loose—and Deb, Taffy and Helmuth are all liable to barge in here without warning from time to time. I have been writing in an old exercise book, and if they notice that I’ve taken to scribbling as a habit one of them is bound to ask what I am writing about. Then if I said that I was trying my hand at a short story, or something like that, they would be certain to want to read it.