The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  Presently a tired, thin, intelligent-looking man in a white coat came downstairs, with an impressive, silver-haired man in a dark suit, and there was a low-voiced discussion. Granny Pearce eyed them, biding her time.

  “Frankly . . . not much to lose,” said the older man. The man in the white coat approached Granny Pearce.

  “It’s strictly against every rule, but as it’s such a serious case we are making an exception,” he said to her quietly. “But only outside her bedroom door—and only for a minute or two.”

  Without a word, Granny Pearce rose and stumped upstairs. Lob followed close to her skirts, as if he knew his hope lay with her.

  They waited in the green-floored corridor outside Sandy’s room. The door was half shut. Bert and Jean were inside. Everything was terribly quiet. A nurse came out. The white-coated man asked her something and she shook her head She had left the door ajar and through it could now be seen a high, narrow bed with a lot of gadgets around it. Sandy lay there, very flat under the covers, very still. Her head was turned away. All Lob’s attention was riveted on the bed. He strained toward it, but Granny Pearce clasped his collar firmly.

  “I’ve done a lot for you, my boy, now you behave yourself,” she whispered grimly. Lob let out a faint whine, anxious and pleading.

  At the sound of that whine Sandy stirred just a little. She sighed and moved her head the least fraction. Lob whined again. And then Sandy turned her head right over. Her eyes opened, looking at the door.

  “Lob?” she murmured—no more than a breath of sound. “Lobby, boy?”

  The doctor by Granny Pearce drew a quick, sharp breath. Sandy moved her left arm—the one that was not broken—from below the covers and let her hand dangle down, feeling, as she did in the mornings, for Lob’s furry head. The doctor nodded slowly.

  “All right,” he whispered. “Let him go to the bedside. But keep a hold of him.”

  Granny Pearce and Lob moved to the bedside. Now she could see Bert and Jean, white-faced and shocked, on the far side of the bed. But she didn’t look at them. She looked at the smile on her granddaughter’s face as the groping fingers found Lob’s wet ears and gently pulled them. “Good boy,” whispered Sandy, and fell asleep again.

  Granny Pearce led Lob out into the passage again. There she let go of him and he ran off swiftly down the stairs. She would have followed him, but Bert and Jean had come out into the passage, and she spoke to Bert fiercely.

  “I don’t know why you were so foolish as not to bring the dog before! Leaving him to find the way here himself—”

  “But, Mother!” said Jean Pengelly. “That can’t have been Lob. What a chance to take! Suppose Sandy hadn’t—” She stopped, with her handkerchief pressed to her mouth.

  “Not Lob? I’ve known that dog nine years! I suppose I ought to know my own granddaughter’s dog?”

  “Listen, Mother,” said Bert. “Lob was killed by the same truck that hit Sandy. Don found him—when he went to look for Sandy’s schoolbag. He was—he was dead. Ribs all smashed. No question of that. Don told me on the phone—he and Will Hoskins rowed a half mile out to sea and sank the dog with a lump of concrete tied to his collar. Poor old boy. Still—he was getting on. Couldn’t have lasted forever.”

  “Sank him at sea? Then what—?”

  Slowly old Mrs. Pearce, and then the other two, turned to look at the trail of dripping-wet footprints that led down the hospital stairs.

  In the Pengelly’s garden they have a stone, under the palm tree. It says: “Lob. Sandy’s dog. Buried at sea.”

  Old Fillikin

  Miss Evans, the math teacher, had thick white skin, pocked like a nutmeg grater; her lips were pale and thick, often puffed out in annoyance; her thick hair was the drab color of old straw that has gone musty; and her eyes, behind thick glass lenses, stared angrily at Timothy.

  “Timothy, how often have I told you?” she said. “You have got to show your working. Even if these were the right answers—which they are not—I should give you no marks for them, because no working is shown. How, may I ask, did you arrive at this answer?”

  Her felt-tip made two angry red circles on the page. All Timothy’s neat layout—and the problems were tidily and beautifully set out, at least—all that neat arrangement had been spoiled by a forest of furious red X’s, underlinings, and crossings-out that went from top to bottom of the page, with a big W for Wrong beside each answer. The page was horrible now—like a scarred face, like a wrecked garden. Timothy could hardly bear to look at it.

  “Well? How did you get that answer? Do you understand what I’m asking you?”

  The trouble was that when she asked him a sharp question like that, in her flat, loud voice, with its aggressive north-country vowels—answer, ask, with a short a as in grab or bash—he felt as if she were hammering little sharp nails into his brain. At once all his wits completely deserted him, the inside of his head was a blank numbness, empty and echoing like a hollow pot, as if his intelligence had escaped through the holes she had hammered.

  “I don’t know,” he faltered.

  “You don’t know? How can you not know? You must have got those answers somehow! Or do you just put down any figures that come into your head? If you’d gotten them right, I’d assume you’d copied the answers from somebody else’s book—but it’s quite plain you didn’t do that.”

  She stared at him in frustrated annoyance, her eyes pinpointed like screw-tips behind the thick glass.

  Of course he would not be such a fool as to copy someone else’s book. He hardly ever got a sum right If he had a whole series correct, it would be grounds for instant suspicion.

  “Well, as you have this whole set wrong—plainly you haven’t grasped the principle at all—I’ll just have to set you a new lot. Here—you can start at the beginning of Chapter VIII, page 64, and go as far as page 70.”

  His heart sank horribly. They were all the same kind—the kind he particularly hated—pages and pages of them. It would take him the whole weekend—and now, late on Friday evening—for she had kept him after class—he was already losing precious time.

  “Do you understand? Are you following me? I’d better explain the principle again”

  And she was off, explaining; her gravelly voice went on and on, about brackets, bases, logarithms, sines, cosines, goodness knows what, but now, thank heaven, his mind was set free, she was not asking questions, and so he could let his thoughts sail off on a string, like a kite flying higher and higher. . . .

  “Well?” she snapped. “Have you got it now?”

  “Yes—I think so.”

  “What have I been saying?”

  He looked at her dumbly.

  But just then a merciful bell began to ring, for the boarders’ supper.

  “I’ve got to go,” he gasped, “or I’ll miss my bus.”

  Miss Evans unwillingly gave in.

  “Oh, very well. Run along. But you’ll have to learn this, you know—you’ll never pass exams, never get anywhere, unless you do. Even farmers need math. Don’t think I enjoy trying to force it into your thick head—it’s no pleasure to me to have to spend time going over it all again and again.”

  He was gathering his books together—the fat, ink-stained gray textbook, the glossy blue new one, the rough notebook, the green exercise book filled with angry red corrections—horrible things, he loathed the very sight and feel of them. If only he could throw them down the well, burn them, never open them again, Some day he would be free of them.

  He hurried out, ran down the steps, tore across the school courtyard. The bus was still waiting beyond the gate; with immense relief he bounded into it and flung himself down on the prickly moquette seat.

  If only he could blot Miss Evans and the hateful math out of his mind for two days; if only he could sit out under the big waln
ut tree in the orchard and just draw and draw and let his mind fly like a kite, and think of nothing at all but what picture was going to take shape under his pencil, and in what colors, later, he could paint it; but now that plan was spoiled, he would have to work at those horrible problems for hours and hours, with his mind jammed among them, like a mouse caught in some diabolical machinery that it didn’t invent and doesn’t begin to understand.

  The bus stopped at a corner by a bridge, and he got out, climbed a fence, and walked across fields to get to the farm where he lived. There was a way around by a cart track, the way the postman came, but it took longer. The fields smelled of warm hay, and the farmyard of dry earth, and cattle cake, and milk, and tractor oil; a rooster crowed in the orchard, and some ducks quacked close at hand; all these were homely, comforting, familiar things, but now they had no power to comfort him; they were like helpless friends holding out their hands to him as he was dragged away to prison.

  “These are rules, can’t you see?” Miss Evans had stormed at him. “You have to learn them.”

  “Why?” he wanted to ask. “Who made those rules? How can you be certain they were right? Why do you turn upside down and multiply? Why isn’t there any square root of minus one?”

  The next morning he went out and sat with his books in the orchard, under the big walnut, by the old well. It would have been easier to concentrate indoors, to work on the kitchen table, but the weather was so warm and still that he couldn’t bear not to be out of doors. Soon the frosts would begin; already the walnut leaves, yellow as butter, were starting to drift down, and the squashy walnut rinds littered the dry grass and stained his bare feet brown. The nights were drawing in.

  For some reason he remembered a hymn his granny used to say to him:

  Every morning the red sun

  Rises warm and bright,

  But the evening soon comes on

  And the dark cold night.

  The words had frightened him, he could not say why.

  He tried to buckle his mind to his work. “If r ≥ 4, r weighings can deal with 2r - 1 loads—” but his thoughts trickled away like a river in sand. He had been dreaming about his grandmother, who had died two years ago. In his dream they had been here, in the orchard, but it was winter, thick gray frost all over the grass, a fur of frost on every branch and twig and grass-blade. Granny had come out of the house with her old zinc pail to get water from the well.

  “Tap water’s no good to you,” she always used to say. “Never drink water that’s passed through metal pipes. It’ll line your innards with tin, you’ll end up clinking like a moneybox. Besides, tap water’s full of those floorides and kloorides and wrigglers they put in it—letting on as if it’s for your good—hah! I’d not pay a penny for a hundred gallons of the stuff. Well water’s served me all my life long, and it’ll go on doing. Got some taste to it—not like that nasty flat stuff.”

  “I’ll wind up the bucket for you, Granny,” he said, and took hold of the heavy well handle.

  “That’s me boy! One hundred and eight turns.”

  “A hundred and eight is nine twelves. Nine tens are ninety, nine elevens are ninety-nine, nine twelves are a hundred and eight.”

  “Only in your book, lovie. In mine it’s different. We have different ones!”

  An ironic smile curved her mouth, she stood with arms folded over her clean blue-and-white print apron while he wound and counted. Eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two . . .

  When he had the dripping, double-cone-shaped well bucket at the top and was going to tilt it, so as to fill her small pail, she had exclaimed, “Well, look who’s come up with it! Old Fillikin!”

  And that, for some reason, had frightened him so much that he had not dared look into the bucket but dropped it, so that it went clattering back into the well and he woke up.

  This seemed odd, remembering the dream in daylight, for he had loved his grandmother dearly. His own mother had died when he was two, and Granny had always looked after him. She had been kind, impatient, talkative, always ready with an apple, a hug, a slice of bread-and-dripping if he was hungry or hurt himself. She was full of unexpected ideas and odd information.

  “Husterloo’s the wood where Reynard the fox keeps his treasure. If we could find that, I could stop knitting, and you could stop thinking. You think too much, for a boy your age.”

  “The letter N is a wriggling eel. His name is No one, and his number is Nine.”

  “Kings always die standing up, and that’s the way I mean to die.”

  She had, too, standing in the doorway, shouting after the postman, “If you don’t bring me a letter tomorrow, I’ll write your name on a leaf and shut it in a drawer!”

  Some people had thought she was a witch because she talked to herself such a lot, but Timothy found nothing strange about her; he had never been in the least frightened of her.

  “Who were you talking to, Granny?” he would say, if he came into the kitchen when she was rattling off one of her monologues.

  “I was talking to Old Fillikin,” she always answered, just as, when he asked, “What’s for dinner, Granny?” she invariably said “Surprise pie with pickled questions.”

  “Who’s Old Fillikin?” he asked once, and she said, “Old Fillikin’s my friend. My familiar friend. Every man has a friend in his sleeve.”

  “Have I got one, Granny?”

  “Of course you have, love. Draw his picture, call him by his name, and he’ll come out.”

  Now, sitting by the well, in the warm, hazy sunshine, Timothy began to wonder what Old Fillikin, Granny’s familiar friend, would have looked like if he had existed. The idea was, for some reason, not quite comfortable, and he tried to turn his mind back to his math problem.

  “R weighings can deal with 2r - 1 loads . . .” but somehow the image of Old Fillikin would keep sneaking back among his thoughts, and, almost without noticing that he did so, he began to doodle in his rough notebook.

  Old Fillikin fairly leaped out of the page: every stroke, every touch of the point filled him in more swiftly and definitely. Old Fillikin was a kind of hairy frog; he looked soft and squashy to the touch—like a rotten pear, or a damp eiderdown—but he had claws too, and a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. His eyes were very shrewd—they were a bit like Granny’s eyes—but there was a sad, lost look about them too, as there had been about Granny’s, as if she were used to being misunderstood. Old Fillikin was not a creature you would want to meet in a narrow high-banked lane with dusk falling. At first Timothy was not certain of his size. Was he as big as an apple, so that he could float, bobbing, in a bucket drawn up from a well, or was he, perhaps, about the size of Bella the Tamworth sow? The pencil answered that question, sketching in a gate behind Old Fillikin, which showed that he was at least two feet high.

  “Ugh!” said Timothy, quite upset at his own creation, and he tore out the page from his notebook, crumpled it up, and dropped it down the well.

  dy = lim f(x+dx) – f(x)

  — ——— ——————

  dx = dx –> 0 x

  “Numbers!” he remembered Granny scoffing, year ago, when he was hopelessly bogged down in his seven times table. “Some people think they can manage everything by numbers. As if they were set in the ground like bricks!”

  “How do you mean, Granny?”

  “As if you daren’t slip through between!”

  “But how can you slip between them, Granny? There’s nothing between one and two—except one and a half.”

  “You think there’s only one lot of numbers?”

  “Of course! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Or in French,” he said grandly, “it’s un, deux, trois—”

  “Hah!” she said. “Numbers are just a set of rules that some bonehead made up. They’re just the fence
he built to keep fools from falling over the edge.”

  “What edge?”

  “Oh, go and fetch me a bunch of parsley from the garden!”

  That was her way of shutting him up when she’d had enough. She liked long spells by herself, did Granny, though she was always pleased to see him again when he came back.

  “The arrow –> tends to a given value as a limit . . .”

  “Timothy!” called his father. “Aunt Di says it’s lunchtime.”

  “Okay! Coming!”

  “Did I see you drop a bit of paper down the well just now?”

  “Yes, I did,” he admitted, rather ashamed.

  “Well, don’t! Just because we don’t drink the water doesn’t mean that the well can be used as a rubbish dump. After dinner you go and fish it out.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  During the meal his father and Aunt Di were talking about a local court case: a man who had encouraged, indeed trained, his dog to go next door and harass the neighbors, bite their children, and dig holes in their flowerbeds. The court had ordered the dog to be destroyed. Aunt Di, a dog lover, was indignant about this.

  “It wasn’t the dog’s fault! It was the owner. They should have had him destroyed—or sent him to prison!”

  If I had a dog, thought Timothy, I could train it to go and wake Miss Evans every night by barking under her window, so that she’d fall asleep in class. Or it could get in through her cat door and pull her out of bed . . .

  “Wake up, boy, you’re half asleep,” said his father. “It’s all that mooning over schoolbooks, if you ask me. You’d better come and help me cart feed this afternoon.”

  “I’ve got to finish my math first. There’s still loads to do.”