The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  Inattentively, she gulped at the coffee the secretary had handed her.

  “I keep wondering whether I forgot to lock the door—when I went out this morning—the super found it open, that was why he phoned the police—I was so nervous—in a hurry—did I forget to lock it?”

  “Oh, no!” Middlemass exclaimed, horrified. “You don’t mean to say that you were nervous because of me—because your lesson was going to be observed—that on account of that you might have forgotten to lock up—?”

  “Of course I was nervous!” she said. “Naturally I was nervous! Excuse me—they want me right away—I must go back to the classroom and collect my things—”

  “I am most sorry this has happened,” he said, following her back along the corridor, wondering if his words were getting through to her at all. “I had been enjoying your lesson so much—it seemed to me one of the most interesting and original discourses that I have ever listened to—”

  In his own ears, his voice sounded horribly forced and insincere. He wondered if that was one of the things he had learned from her lesson. How to detect the falsity in human utterance? And yet what he had said was the truth—meant to be the truth, he told himself. He noticed the blond boy’s eyes on him, assessing, skeptical.

  “I’m going to give you a very good report,” he told poor Mrs. Schaber, as she began collecting her gear in the classroom. “If that helps to cheer you up at all—”

  “Well—thank you—of course it does,” she answered distractedly, shoveling tapes into a big worn woolen bag, filled already with a mass of untidy odds and ends. It was evident that she heard him only with a single thread of attention; the rest of her mind was elsewhere. “It’s like having lost a whole continent, a whole world,” she murmured. “Years and years of work.”

  “Well, you’ve still got the Congo forest, because you had it here,” the blond boy reminded her, and at that she suddenly gave him her flashing urchin grin, thrusting forward the long lower jaw and lower lip, nodding her head up and down.

  “That’s true! One forest left—perhaps it will seed itself. But there’s not all that amount of time left.”

  When Mrs. Schaber had gone, Middlemass walked out of the college. He felt too disturbed to want to eat in the cafeteria and talk to colleagues; he wanted a long period of time and solitude to settle his feelings. Poor little woman, so stricken and bereft—he thought of her returning to her wrecked apartment, like a bird to its robbed nest. And the worst of it was the anxiety as to whether it had been her own carelessness that had invited the thieves; he knew how such an idea would haunt him, if he had been the victim. He imagined her trying and trying again to resurrect the process of her departure in the morning, to discover whether she had in fact let the door unlocked—had she taken the key out of her purse, had she put it back—as if it could make any real difference to the disaster itself.

  Walking along Fifty-seventh Street, Middlemass tried to calm his mind by wandering into a number of art galleries, at random, looking first at a show of nineteenth-century portrait photographs, then at some watercolor landscapes, then some classic Matisses, magically soothing, then some semiabstract sculpture, recognizable articles broken into fragments and reunited into strange disjointed forms—then a show of cartoons—a collection of Japanese prints—one of book illustrations from the ’nineties. He was moving westwards all the time; he thought he would presently buy a sandwich and eat it in the park. The day was still idyllically fine and warm.

  In a small room adjoining the exhibition of book illustrations there was a show by a minor artist whose name was unknown to him; the title of the exhibition was simply “Collages.” Through the open door he caught a glimpse of quiet, restful black and white forms. He stepped inside, meaning to give the show a quick two minutes and then go in search of his sandwich.

  The collages, contained inside plain wood frames, were made up from all kinds of materials—fabrics, press cuttings, bits of wood, of metal, of oilcloth, tar cloth, wire netting, string, bent wire, gauze, clay, foam rubber—all dyed or stained either black or white. They had been assembled, molded, pressed, organized into shapes that were vaguely human, vaguely monstrous in outline: straining bodies were suggested, extended limbs, odd movements of exuberant dance, of cowering terror, of sad, limp resignation. The titles, on labels beside the frames, were all single words: Waiting; Fearing; Hoping; Expecting; Exulting.

  Despite a general feeling of distaste for what he considered rather pretentious, facile stuff, without the merit of true creativity, Middlemass found himself oddly struck by these forms—they seemed to touch on some nerve in him that was not normally affected but had, perhaps, been bruised already that day. He walked slowly around the room, considering the occupant of each frame in turn—as if they had been creatures in cages, he told himself.

  Returning, finally, toward the door, he looked at the last frame, which had the title “Begging.” A crippled, bandaged creature crouched, huddled, in the middle of the frame; its head, composed of wire netting, seemed to be swathed in wrappings and gave the impression of blind, listening urgency. One of its limbs, a bent pipe wrapped in tarred rag, extended, pleadingly, right out of the frame, and was flattened at the extremity into the approximate form of a hand; to this hand a small white square of paper in the shape of a visiting card had been fastened by staples.

  Moving closer, to discover whether the tiny characters on the card were real letters, real words, he received a shock. Neatly printed across the white, in black India ink, he read his own name: JOHN MIDDLEMASS, M.D.

  He gasped and then laughed. Turning to the girl at the desk, in an attempt to cover the extraordinary agitation he felt at this strange, this outrageous portent, he said:

  “What an amazing thing! The name—this name here, in the picture—on the card—it’s my name, John Middlemass!—Only I’m not a doctor,” he added.

  “Is that so?” The girl—thin, dark, long-haired, wan—looked at him with a wholly uninterested, lackluster indifference which immediately seemed to reduce the coincidence to minimal proportions. After all, her look suggested, somebody in the whole of New York has to have that name—what’s so peculiar about your having it? Why are you making such a to do? “Perhaps the artist got it out of the phone book,” she suggested, yawning. “But you’re not a doctor, you say?” she added kindly, as if to humor him.

  “No, no, I’m a teacher—” Feeling foolish, as if he had made a fuss about nothing at all, he left the gallery and went to buy his sandwich. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato. Then he walked up Madison Avenue, feeling the sun warm on his shoulder blades, and turned left, toward the park. He could hear sparrows chirping and one shrill bird cry, far in the distance, that took him back in memory to a spring holiday on Cape Cod.

  The day was so warm that all the park benches were filled. Finally, unable to find a seat on one, he settled on a slope of warm rock near the pond, looking south toward the Plaza Hotel. The water in the pond was low, and patches of reeds stood out on small mud islands; as he ate his sandwich, he noticed how neatly gulls landed on the surface of the water to swim and drink and preen themselves and how clumsily pigeons, unable to land on the water, thumped down on an island of rock and then waddled to the edge in order to drink. Planes droned overhead, and helicopters stuttered; an ambulance siren wailed and gibbered not far off on its way across town.

  Presently Middlemass began to be aware of the couple who sat on the end of the bench nearest him, a girl and a boy, intent on their conversation with each other. It was not so much the human pair he noticed as their animals. The boy had a dog, which he allowed to roam loose: a kind of black mongrel with traces of retriever. A loose-jointed, floppy, active dog that went on forays, dashing off splashily round the verge of the pond, and returned every now and then, damp, smiling, panting, to lavish affection on its master.

  But the girl had a cat; making the s
econd cat I’ve seen today, thought Middlemass with a sudden shiver, remembering his earlier horrible experience. What a strange day it had been! But that was how life piled up in the city, one event splashing on top of another like lava from a volcanic eruption, hardly time to assimilate an experience before the next one came tumbling about you.

  This cat, though, the cat in the park, was a very different creature from that poor, dead, expensive, elegant piece of fur that had no doubt long since been shoveled off the sidewalk and into some garbage can. This cat in the park was half white, half ginger in color. It was an old cat; its fur was patchy, molting, dusty, its ears were tattered, its nose was scarred, its tail looked moth-eaten. The girl had it on a leash, but she was paying no attention to it, and while she talked to her boyfriend the cat sulked, squatting behind the bench on which the pair sat, with its head thrust forward, as if it found the whole park, the dusty ground, the beaten-up grass, the muddy pond, the dingy sparrows, hopelessly distasteful, as if it were fed up with the world and its own ancient disheveled body.

  Every now and then the black dog, returning from one of its excursions, would suddenly, with a kind of delighted surprise, rediscover the sulky cat and would then roll it over and over, tousling and biting it, rubbing its fur in the dust. The cat retaliated with what seemed a kind of resigned rage, spitting and kicking, tail bushed out, ears flattened.

  “Don’t do that, Buster,” the boy would call absently, and the girl would say, “Oh, it’s all right, never mind, Ginger quite enjoys it really,” a statement which Middlemass, watching, considered to be quite patently untrue; it seemed to him that the cat disliked the dog’s teasing roughness to the whole of its capacity for feeling.

  Presently the couple rose to walk away. The dog instantly darted off ahead, delighted to be on the move again; but the cat, as if obstinately determined not to cooperate in any way during this disagreeable outing, now refused to budge. Before, it had sat sulkily ignoring its surroundings; now it wished to delay and sniff round the legs of the bench. The girl, impatient to be gone, jerked crossly at its lead, and, when it still would not follow, dragged it up bodily by the leash so that it hung in its collar, choking and scowling.

  “Don’t do that to the cat,” Middlemass wanted to call out. “Pick it up properly!” But rage choked him, quite as much as its collar was choking the cat. When the girl put it down it did slowly begin to follow, trotting a few steps, then stopping to sniff things at the side of the path; its pace was not nearly fast enough to satisfy its mistress, who several times either dragged it along bodily, sliding on its feet, or again hoisted it up on the end of the leash. Middlemass felt an intense relief when the couple had passed out of view. He hated that girl; he really loathed her—But the cat was an old one, he told himself; it must have become used to such treatment years ago—No, it was no use; how could the horrible girl be so insensitive to the feelings of the creature she lived with?

  His hands were clenched so tightly that the knuckles, when he finally relaxed them, felt swollen and quite painful. He looked down at his hands, thinking ruefully, not so elastic as they used to be. I am growing old. I should have interfered. Why didn’t I? Because if I had, the girl would only have thought that I was a meddlesome old busybody. “Mind your own business, Mister,” she would have said. “This cat belongs to me and I can do what I like with it.”

  Interfering gets you nowhere. And where does noninterfering get you?

  The day had clouded and cooled. He walked over to Fifth Avenue to catch a bus home, thinking about the various disagreeable tasks that awaited him: tax forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, household articles to be repaired, business letters to be written. However inconspicuously we endeavor to conduct our lives, creeping along, keeping our heads well down out of the line of fire, still in the end we fall prey to circumstances, he thought, and I suppose the final knockout is not one single blow, so much as a whole series of minor assaults, to which, in the end, we wearily succumb.

  I’d just as soon be nibbled to death by ducks, he remembered somebody saying; where in the world could that extraordinary phrase have come from?

  His bus drew to a stop, and he climbed on to it and walked along the aisle, hoping for a seat in the back row, so that he need not travel sitting sideways, which he disliked. My life, he thought, is assembled out of an endless procession of unimportant choices.

  The back row was all occupied, so he took the last of the side seats, in hopes that presently somebody might get off, and then he could switch seats. The bus had a long way to go, all down Fifth Avenue. As it slowly jerked and clanked through the heavy afternoon traffic, his mind went back to Mrs. Schaber; poor woman, she would be at home now, examining her wrecked possessions, listening to the callous comments of the police, who,s as Middlemass knew from experience, never offered the slightest hope of getting back any of the lost property. They were not interested in that; the only thing that concerned them at all was the possibility of identifying the thieves.

  “It’s like losing a whole world,” she had moaned.

  But at least, thought Middlemass, she had a world to lose.

  At Twenty-eighth Street he suddenly thought of the cat—the first cat. It must have happened just about here. You’d never guess it now. People were darting to and fro on the pavement at that point, with their usual manic speed. The patch of blood would have been sanded over and swept away. So we come; so we go. What had made him think of the cat? Before that his mind had been on Mrs. Schaber and her loss.

  Then he heard the sound again: a faint, querulous grumbling mew; the sigh of meow let out by a cat who is shut up, bored, exasperated, wishing to remind its owner of the tedium of its plight: a kvetch in cat language.

  For a moment Middlemass wondered if perhaps he might be going mad; haunted by the ghost of a cat; of two cats. But then, turning his head slightly, he saw the girl close beside him on his right, sitting at the window end of the row of back seats, had a covered basket on her lap. And as the quiet, complaining conversational mew came again, she bent her head close over the basket, opened the lid a crack, and murmured to the occupant: “Hush. Hush! We’ll be home very soon.”

  Looking up she met the eyes of Middlemass. He smiled at her—she was a small, thin, dark girl, not unlike the one at the desk in the gallery. And, like the girl in the gallery, she did not return his smile, just gave him a steady, thoughtful look, as if it would take much more than a smile to make her trust him, or allow him to impinge on any of her concerns.

  Rebuffed, he turned his head away and rose to his feet; the bus had reached his stop, anyway.

  Returned home, he sat down at his desk, impatiently turning his back on the untidiness which, hurrying out into the sunny morning, he had promised himself that he would later set to rights.

  He pulled an official college report form toward him, and, in the blank for Instructor’s Name, printed mrs. marcia schraber. In the blank for Subject, he wrote listening. In the blank for Observer, he wrote his own name, Prof. John Middlemass, and the date. Then, in the section headed “Comments” he began to write:

  “Mrs. Schraber has something very important to teach her students, but I am not sure what it is. . . .”

  There he stopped, holding the pen, staring at the blank form and his own name printed across the Observer space, while his mind’s eye went back to fix, again, on that melancholy, huddled, crippled figure, gagged, blindfold, beseeching, mutely extending his own name out of the wooden frame.

  Lob’s Girl

  Some people choose their dogs, and some dogs choose their people. The Pengelly family had no say in the choosing of Lob; he came to them in the second way, and very decisively.

  It began on the beach, the summer when Sandy was five, Don, her older brother, twelve, and the twins were three. Sandy was really Alexandra, because her grandmother had a beautiful picture of a queen in a diamond tia
ra and high collar of pearls. It hung by Granny Pearce’s kitchen sink and was as familiar as the doormat. When Sandy was born everyone agreed that she was the living spit of the picture, and so she was called Alexandra and Sandy for short.

  On this summer day she was lying peacefully reading a comic and not keeping an eye on the twins, who didn’t need it because they were occupied in seeing which of them could wrap the most seaweed around the other one’s legs. Father—Bert Pengelley—and Don were up on the Hard painting the bottom boards of the boat in which Father went fishing for pilchards. And Mother—Jean Pengelly—was getting ahead with making the Christmas puddings because she never felt easy in her mind if they weren’t made and safely put away by the end of August. As usual, each member of the family was happily getting on with his or her own affairs. Little did they guess how soon this state of affairs would be changed by the large new member who was going to erupt into their midst.

  Sandy rolled onto her back to make sure that the twins were not climbing on slippery rocks or getting cut off by the tide. At the same moment a large body struck her forcibly in the midriff and she was covered by flying sand. Instinctively she shut her eyes and felt the sand being wiped off her face by something that seemed like a warm, rough, damp flannel. Its owner was a large and bouncy young Alsatian, or German shepherd, with topaz eyes, black-tipped prick ears, a thick, soft coat, and a bushy black-tipped tail.

  “Lob!” shouted a man further up the beach. “Lob, come here!”

  But Lob, as if trying to atone for the surprise he had given her, went on licking the sand off Sandy’s face, wagging his tail so hard all the while that he kept knocking up more clouds of sand. His owner, a gray-haired man with a limp, walked over as quickly as he could and seized him by the collar.