The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  “They give them too much homework, if you ask me,” said Aunt Di. “Addles their minds.”

  “Well, you get that bit of paper out of the well, anyway,” said his father.

  He could see it, glimmering white down below; it had caught on top of the bucket, which still hung there, though nobody used it. He had quite a struggle to wind it up—the handle badly needed oiling and shrieked at every turn. At last, leaning down, he was able to grab the crumpled sheet; then he let go of the handle, which whirled around crazily as the bucket rattled down again.

  But, strangely enough, the crumpled sheet was blank. Timothy felt half relieved, half disappointed; he had been curious to see if his drawing of Old Fillikin was as nasty as he had remembered. Could he have crumpled up the wrong sheet? But no other had a picture on it. At last he decided that the damp atmosphere in the well must have faded the pencil marks. The paper felt cold, soft, and pulpy—rather unpleasant. He carried it indoors and poked it into the kitchen coal stove.

  Then he did another hour’s work indoors, scrambling through the problems somehow, anyhow. Miss Evans would be angry again, they were certain to be wrong—but, for heaven’s sake, he couldn’t spend the whole of Saturday at the horrible task. He checked the results, where it was possible to do so, on his little pocket calculator; blessed, useful little thing, it came up with the results so humbly and willingly, flashing out solutions far faster than his mind could. Farmers need math too, he remembered Miss Evans saying; but when I’m a farmer, he resolved, I shall have a computer to do all those jobs, and I’ll just keep to the practical work.

  Then he was free, and his father let him drive the tractor, which of course was illegal, but he had been doing it since he was ten and drove better than Kenny the cowman. “You can’t keep all the laws,” his father said. “Some just have to be broken. All farmers’ sons drive tractors. Law’s simply a system invented to protect fools,” as Granny had said about the numbers.

  That night Timothy dreamed that Old Fillikin came up out of the well and went hopping and flopping across the fields in the direction of Markhurst Green, where Miss Evans lived. Timothy followed in his dream and saw the ungainly yet agile creature clamber in through the cat door. “Don’t! Oh, please, don’t!” he tried to call. “I didn’t mean—I never meant that—”

  He could hear the flip-flop as it went up the stairs, and he woke himself, screaming, in a tangle of sheet and blanket.

  On Sunday night the dream was even worse. That night he took his little calculator to bed with him and made it work out the nine-times table until there were no more places on the screen.

  Then he recited Granny’s hymn: “Every morning the red sun/Rises warm and bright,/But the evening soon comes on/And the dark cold night.”

  If only I could stop my mind working, he thought. He remembered Granny saying, “If we could find Reynard’s treasure in Husterloo wood, I could stop knitting and you could stop thinking.” He remembered her saying, “Kings die standing, that’s the way I mean to die.”

  At last he fell into a light, troubled sleep.

  On Mondays, math was the first period, an hour and a half. He had been dreading it, but in another way he was desperately anxious to see Miss Evans, to make sure that she was all right. In his second dream, Old Fillikin had pushed through her bedroom door, which stood ajar, and hopped across the floor. Then there had been a kind of silence filled with little fumbling sounds; then a most blood-curdling scream—like the well handle, as the bucket rattled down.

  It was only a dream, Timothy kept telling himself as he rode to school on the bus; nothing but a dream.

  But the math class was taken by Mr. Gillespie. Miss Evans, they heard, had not come in. And, later, the school grapevine passed along the news. Miss Evans had suffered a heart attack last night; died before she could be taken to the hospital.

  When he got off the bus that evening and began to cross the dusk-filled fields toward home, Timothy walked faster than usual and looked warily about him.

  Where—he could not help wondering—was Old Fillikin now?

  She Was Afraid of Upstairs

  My cousin Tessie, that was. Bright as a button, she was, good as good, neat as ninepence. And clever, too. Read anything she would, time she were five. Papers, letters, library books, all manner of print. Delicate little thing, peaky, not pretty at all, but, even when she was a liddle un, she had a way of putting things into words that’d surprise you. “Look at the sun a-setting, Ma,” she’d say. “He’s wrapping his hair all over his face.” Of the old postman, Jumper, on his red bike, she said he was bringing news from Otherwhere. And a bit of Demerara on a lettuce leaf—that was her favorite treat—a sugarleaf, she called it. “But I haven’t been good enough for a sugarleaf today,” she’d say. “Have I, Ma?”

  Good she mainly was, though, like I said, not a bit of harm in her.

  But upstairs she would not go.

  Been like that from a tiny baby, she had, just as soon as she could notice anything. When my Aunt Sarah would try to carry her up, she’d shriek and carry on, the way you’d think she was being taken to the slaughterhouse. At first they thought it was on account she didn’t want to go to bed, maybe afraid of the dark, but that weren’t it at all. For she’d settle to bed anywhere they put her, in the back kitchen, the broom closet under the stairs, in the lean-to with the copper, even in the coal-shed, where my Uncle Fred once, in a temper, put her cradle. “Let her lie there,” he said, “if she won’t sleep up in the bedroom, let her lie there.”

  And lie there she did, calm and peaceable, all the livelong night, and not a chirp out of her.

  My Aunt Sarah was fair put about with this awkward way of Tessie’s, for they’d only the one downstairs room, and evenings, you want the kids out of the way. One that won’t go upstairs at night is a fair old problem. But, when Tessie was three, Uncle Fred and Aunt Sarah moved to Birmingham, where they had a back kitchen and a little bit of garden, and in the garden my Uncle Fred built Tessie a tiny cabin, not much bigger than a packing-case it wasn’t, by the back kitchen wall, and there she had her cot, and there she slept, come rain, come snow.

  Would she go upstairs in the day?

  Not if she could help it.

  “Run up, Tessie, and fetch me my scissors—or a clean towel—or the hair brush—or the bottle of chamomile,” Aunt Sarah might say, when Tessie was big enough to walk and to run errands. Right away, her lip would start to quiver and that frantic look would come in her eye. But my Aunt Sarah was not one to trifle with. She’d lost the big battle, over where Tessie was to sleep. She wasn’t going to have any nonsense in small ways. Upstairs that child would have to go, whether she liked it or not. And upstairs she went, with Aunt Sarah’s eye on her, but you could hear, by the sound of her feet, that she was having to drag them, one after the other, they were so unwilling it was like hauling rusty nails out of the wood. And when she was upstairs, the timid tiptoeing, it was like some wild creature, a squirrel or a bird that has got in by mistake. She’d find the thing, whatever it was, that Aunt Sarah wanted, and then, my word, wouldn’t she come dashing down again as if the Militia were after her, push the thing, whatever it might be, into her mum’s hands, and then out into the garden to take in big gulps of the fresh air. Outside was where she liked best to be, she’d spend whole days in the garden, if Aunt Sarah left her. She had a little patch, where she grew lettuce and cress, Uncle Fred got the seeds for her, and then people used to give her bits of slips and flower-seeds, she had a real gift for getting things to grow. That garden was a pretty place, you couldn’t see the ground for the greenstuff and flowers. Narcissus, bluebells, sweetpeas, marigolds.

  Of course the neighbors used to come and shove their oar in. Neighbors always will. “Have a child that won’t go upstairs? I’d not allow it if she were mine,” said Mrs. Oakley that lived over the way. “It’s fair
daft if you ask me. I’d soon leather her out of it.” For in other people’s houses Tessie was just the same—when she got old enough to be taken out to tea. Upstairs she would not go. Anything but that.

  Of course they used to try and reason with her, when she was old enough to express herself.

  “Why won’t you go, Tessie? What’s the matter with upstairs? There’s nothing bad up there. Only the beds and the chests-of-drawers. What’s wrong with that?”

  And Aunt Sarah used to say, laughing, “You’re nearer to heaven up there.”

  But no, Tessie’d say, “It’s bad, it’s bad! Something bad is up there.” When she was very little she’d say, “Darkwoods. Darkwoods.” And, “Grandfather Moon! I’m frightened, I’m frightened!” Funny thing that, because, of the old moon itself, a-sailing in the sky, she wasn’t scared a bit, loved it dearly, and used to catch the silvery light in her hands, if she were out at night, and say that it was like tinsel falling from the sky.

  Aunt Sarah was worried what would happen when Tessie started school. Suppose the school had an upstairs classroom, then what? But Uncle Fred told her not to fuss herself, not to borrow trouble; very likely the child would have got over all her nonsense by the time she was of school age, as children mostly do.

  A doctor got to hear of her notions, for Tessie had the diptheery, one time, quite bad, with a thing in her throat, and he had to come ever so many times.

  “Tis isn’t a proper place to have her,” he says, for her bed was in the kitchen—it was winter then, they couldn’t expect the doctor to go out to Tessie’s little cubbyhole in the garden. So Aunt Sarah began to cry and carry on, and told him how it was.

  “I’ll soon make an end of that nonsense,” says he, “for now she’s ill she won’t notice where she is. And then, when she’s better, she’ll wake up and find herself upstairs, and her phobia will be gone.” That’s what he called it, a phobia. So he took Tessie out of her cot and carried her upstairs. And, my word, didn’t she create! Shruk! You’d a thought she was being skinned alive. Heads was poking out of windows all down the street. He had to bring her down fast. “Well, she’s got a good strength in her, she’s not going to die of the diptheery, at all events,” says he, but he was very put out, you could see that. Doctors don’t like to be crossed. “You’ve got a wilful one there, Missus,” says he, and off he goes, in high dudgeon. But he must have told another doctor about Tessie’s wilfulness, for a week or so later, along comes a Doctor Trossick, a mind doctor, one of them pussycologists, who wants to ask Tessie all manner of questions. Does she remember this, does she remember that, when she was a baby, and why won’t she go upstairs, can’t she tell him the reason, and what’s all this about Grandfather Moon and Darkwoods? Also, what about when her Ma and Pa go upstairs, isn’t she scared for them too?

  “No, it’s not dangerous for them,” says Tessie. “Only for me.”

  “But why is it dangerous for you, child? What do you think is going to happen?”

  “Something dreadful! The worst possible thing!”

  Dr. Trossick made a whole lot of notes, asked Tessie to do all manner of tests on a paper he’d brought, and then he tried to make her go upstairs, persuading her to stand on the bottom step for a minute, and then on the next one, and the one after. But by the fourth step she’d come to trembling and shaking so bad, with the tears running down, that he hadn’t the heart to force her any farther.

  So things stood, when Tessie was six or thereabouts. And then one day the news came: the whole street where they lived was going to be pulled down. Redevelopment. Rehousing. All the little two-ups, two-downs were to go, and everybody was to be shifted to high-rise blocks. Aunt Sarah, Uncle Fred, and Tessie were offered a flat on the sixteenth floor of a block that was already built.

  Aunt Sarah was that upset. She loved her little house. And as for Tessie—“It’ll kill her for sure,” Aunt Sarah said.

  At that, Uncle Fred got riled. He was a slow man, but obstinate.

  “We can’t arrange our whole life to suit a child,” he said. “We’ve been offered a Council flat—very good, we’ll take it. The kid will have to learn she can’t have her own way always. Besides,” he said, “there’s lifts in them blocks. Maybe when she finds she can go up in a lift, she won’t take on as much as if it was only stairs. And maybe the sixteenth floor won’t seem so bad as the first or second. After all, we’ll all be on one level—there’s no stairs in a flat.”

  Well, Aunt Sarah saw the sense in that. And the only thing she could think of was to take Tessie to one of the high-rise blocks and see what she made of it. Her cousin Ada, that’s my Mum, had already moved into one of the tower blocks, so Aunt Sarah fetched Tessie over to see us one afternoon.

  All was fine to start with, the kid was looking about her, interested and not too bothered, till they went into the lift and the doors closed.

  “What’s this?” says Tessie then.

  “It’s a lift,” says Aunt Sarah, “and we’re going to see your Auntie Ada and Winnie and Dorrie.”

  Well, when the lift started going up, Aunt Sarah told us, Tessie went white as a dishclout, and time it got up to the tenth, that was where we lived, she was flat on the floor. Fainted. A real bad faint it was, she didn’t come out of it for ever so long, and Aunt Sarah was in a terrible way over it.

  “What have I done, what have I done to her,” she kept saying.

  We all helped her get Tessie home again. But after that the kid was very poorly. Brain fever, they’d have called it in the old days, Mum said. Tossing and turning, hot as fire, and delirious with it, wailing and calling out about Darkwoods and Grandfather Moon. For a long time they was too worried about her to make any plans at all, but when she begun to mend, Aunt Sarah says to Uncle Fred, “Now what are we going to do?”

  Well, he was very put out, natural, but he took his name off the Council list and began to look for another job, somewhere else, where they could live on ground level. And at last he found work in a little seaside town, Topness, about a hundred miles off. Got a house and all, so they was set to move.

  They didn’t want to shift before Tessie was middling better, but the Council was pushing and pestering them to get out of their house, because the whole street was coming down; the other side had gone already, there was just a big huge stretch of grey rubble, as far as you could see, and half the houses on this side was gone too.

  “What’s happening?” Tessie kept saying as she looked out of the window. “What’s happening to our world?”

  She was very pitiful about it.

  “Are they going to do that with my garden too?” she’d say. “All my sweetpeas and marigolds?”

  “Don’t you worry, dearie,” says Aunt Sarah. “You can have a pretty garden where we’re going.”

  “And I won’t have to sleep upstairs?”

  “No, no, Dad’ll fix you a cubbyhole, same as he has here.”

  So they packed up all their bits and sticks and they started off. Sam Whitelaw lent them his grocery van for the move, and he drove it too.

  It was a long drive—over a hundred miles, and most of it through wild, bare country. Tessie liked it all right at first. She stared at the green fields and the sheep, she sat on Aunt Sarah’s lap and looked out of the window, but after a few hours, when they were on the moor, she began to get very poorly, her head was as hot as fire, and her hands too. She didn’t complain, but she began to whimper with pain and weakness, big tears rolled down, and Aunt Sarah was bothered to death about her.

  “The child wasn’t well enough to shift yet. She ought to be in a bed. What’ll we do?”

  “We’re only halfway, if that,” says Mr. Whitelaw. “D’you want to stop somewhere, Missus?”

  The worst of it was, there weren’t any houses round here—not a building to be seen for miles and miles.

  On t
hey went, and now Tessie was throwing herself from side to side, delirious again, and crying fit to break her mother’s heart.

  At last, ahead of them—it was glimmery by then, after sunset of a wintry day—they saw a light, and came to a little old house, all by itself, set a piece back off the road against a wooded scawp of hill.

  “Should we stop here and see if the folk will help us?” suggested Mr. Whitelaw, and Aunt Sarah says, “Oh, yes. Yes! Maybe they have a phone and can send for a doctor. Oh I’m worried to death,” she says. “It was wicked to move the child so soon.”

  The two men went and tapped at the door and somebody opened it. Uncle Fred explained about the sick child, and the owner of the house—an old, white-haired fellow, Aunt Sarah said he was—told them, “I don’t have a phone, look’ee, I live here all on my own. But you’re kindly welcome to come in and put the poor little mawther in my bed.”

  So they all carried Tessie in among them—by that time she was hardly sensible. My poor aunt gave a gasp when she stepped inside, for the floor was really naught but a barn or shippen, with a floor of beaten earth and some farm stuff, tumbrils and carts and piles of turnips.

  “Up here,” says the old man, and shows them a flight of stone steps by the wall.

  Well, there was nothing for it; up they had to go.

  Above was decent enough, though. The old fellow had two rooms, fitted up as bedroom and kitchen, with an iron cooking-stove, curtains at all the windows, and a bed covered with old blankets, all felted-up. Tessie was almost too ill to notice where she’d got to. They put her on the bed, and the old man went to put on a kettle—Aunt Sarah thought the child should have a hot drink.

  Uncle Fred and Mr. Whitelaw said they’d drive on in the van and fetch a doctor, if the old man could tell them where to find one.