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 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 counter-proposition 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 resources 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 supernatural 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 non-human 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 blood-sucking 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, wasp-waisted, 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 flailing 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 wheel-chair 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’ve 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 manœuvre. 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?