The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (25 page)

Now, what in the world can have become of Watkyn? wondered the vicar.

“Talked to W. on the subject of Redemption . . .” The text trailed away.

Miss Sibley celebrated her first night of residence in Hasworth Mill by making a Swiss roll. Not surprisingly, it was a total disaster. What she had thought to be one of the most simple, basic, and boring of cakes is, on the contrary, the most tricky and delicate, on no account to be attempted by a beginner. The flour must be of a special kind, the eggs carefully chosen, the oven well trained, familiar to the cook, and under perfect control. Not one of these factors obtained at the mill. It was the first time Miss Sibley had used her new oven, which was not yet correctly adjusted; the flour was damp and in any case not a good brand. The eggs were a mixed lot. The cake turned out sodden, leathery, and had to be scraped from the bottom of the pan, like badly laid cement. Not surprisingly, after eating a mouthful or two, Miss Sibley went to bed very quenched and dejected and then found it almost impossible to fall asleep in her bare and paint-scented bedroom.

A gusty and fidgety wind had blown up. As Miss Sibley sat after supper in her warm kitchen, she could see, through the great pane of clear glass, long, dangling fronds of the willows in wild and eldritch motion, blown and wrung and swung like witches’ locks. And after she retired to bed, her high window, facing out over the water-meadow, showed the row of Lombardy poplars like a maniac keep-fit class, violently bowing and bending their slender shafts in each and every direction.

Miss Sibley could not hear the wind, for, to anybody inside the mill house, the roar of water drowned out any external sound. But as the gale increased, she
could
hear that, somewhere within the house a door had begun to bang; and after ten minutes or so of increasing irritation she left her bed to find the source of the annoyance and put a stop to it.

The offending door proved to be the one opening into her little library room.

Queer, thought Miss Sibley; the window in here is shut; why should there be a draft? Why should the door bang?

And then she noticed the high black square in the wall, the cavity where the panel door stood open. That’s very peculiar, she reflected. I’m sure Mr. Hoskins had left it closed when the men went off work, and I certainly haven’t opened it, so how in the world could it have come open all by itself? But perhaps this wild and drafty wind somehow undid the catch. At any rate I may as well close it up again; it is letting a nasty lot of cold air into the upper story.

Since the panel door and its catch were too high for her to reach, she pushed a table, which she proposed to use as a writing desk, across the small room, perched a chair on the table, and then climbed up onto the chair.

She was in the act of closing the door when she thought she heard, from inside the little upper room, a faint and piteous moan. She paused, listened harder, but there was no repetition of the sound.

I was mistaken, decided Miss Sibley. She closed the panel, climbed down from the table, and was about to return to bed, when, from inside the panel, came three, loud, measured knocks.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Then a moment’s silence. Then the three knocks again.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Can that be the wind? Miss Sibley wondered and, after a moment’s hesitation and just a little nervous this time, she climbed up onto the table once more, reopened the door, and peered inside. There was nothing to be seen.

But again, after the door was shut, before she had left the room, she heard the three knocks: Bang. Bang. Bang.

“This is perfectly ridiculous,” said Miss Sibley angrily. “However, I certainly can’t lie all night listening to those thumps, so I suppose I shall have to investigate further. But I’m not going dressed like this.”

Accordingly she returned to her bedroom, pulled on a pair of trousers and thick cardigan, and equipped herself with a powerful flashlight, which she had bought in case of any trouble with the newly installed electrical system. Once again she climbed onto the table, and this time scrambled right up into the panel entrance.

No sooner was she well inside the entrance than the door swung violently closed behind her and latched itself. She hard the spring click into place.

Miss Sibley was a calm and level-headed person. But even so, well aware that there was no means of opening the panel from the inside, she felt an acute lowering of the spirits. For she recalled also that tomorrow was Saturday, when the builders did not come to the house, and that was inevitably followed by Sunday, so that it might be at least fifty hours before anybody became aware of her plight and set her free.

What was she to do in the meantime?

I may as well survey my assets, she thought sensibly, and climbed the stair into the odd-shaped little room above.

The beam of her flashlight, exploring it, showed that the builders had cleared away the dust and left it clean, at least, and bare. There was no indication of anything that might have caused the bangs. Furnishings there were none; Miss Sibley could sit either on the floor or, rather uncomfortably, on one of the cross-beams or joists about a foot above floor level, which meant that she would not be able to raise her head without banging it on the roof behind her.

Oh, well, she thought, at least it is a seat, and she chose the beam, reflecting, with some irony, that she had felt sorry for herself earlier, lying in a comfortable bed, because indigestion prevented her from sleeping; how luxurious, in retrospect, that bed now seemed!

Something scuttled in the corner, and she flinched uncontrollably, catching her breath in what was almost, but not quite, a scream; if there was one thing in the world that filled Miss Sibley with disgust and terror, it was a rat.

“You don’t like rats, and yet you’re going to live in a mill which must be full of them?” a surprised acquaintance at the bank had inquired, and Miss Sibley had pointed out that the mill had not been working as a mill for at least forty years and had been uninhabited for a further twenty; such rats as there might once have been must surely long since have migrated to more inviting premises and choicer pickings. “I suppose there might be water rats,” she said doubtfully, “but they are not nearly so disagreeable, and besides I presume they will stay in the water.”

But here, now, was something moving and rustling in that speedy, furtive, stealthy, and, above all, uncontrollable and unpredictable manner so horridly characteristic of rodents; Miss Sibley gave a jump of fright and, doing so, banged her head violently on the roof tiles above.

The pain was severe; she saw stars, and tears flooded her eyes, tears of pain and shock. She gasped out her very worst expletive: “
Oh, blast
”—and then, somehow, an entirely different deluge of feeling swept over her, different from anything she had ever experienced in her life before, a drenching, mountainous weight of intolerable woe. Like a rock dislodged in a landslip, Miss Sibley toppled to the floor and lay on the boards, with her head pillowed on her arms, drowned in a tidal wave of tears, weeping her heart out.

What for? If asked, she could not possibly have said: for wasted life, for love lost, young years misspent in dusty, unproductive work, for chances mislaid, lapsed friendships, the irretrievable past.

How long she wept she had no notion; hours may have gone by.

But at last, at very long last, like a tiny spark at the end of an immeasurably long tunnel, came into her head a faint thought:
Yet, after all, here you are, in a mill, as you have always wanted to be, and about to begin making cakes, just as you have always planned?

That is true, she answered, surprised, and the voice, the thought, which seemed to exist outside, rather than inside her, added,
Perhaps this oddly shaped little room where you find yourself shut up at the moment is like a comma in your life?

A comma?

A comma, a pause, a break between two thoughts, when you take breath, reconsider, look about, wait for something new to strike you.

Something new.

What in the world am I doing here on the floor, all quenched and draggled, Miss Sibley asked herself, and she raised her head. Unconsciously she had laid her right arm over the joist, and she now noticed, with a frown of surprise, that there was a patch of light on her right wrist, which looked like a luminous watch.

Then, blinking the tears from her eyes, she saw that it was no such thing.

Luminous it
was
, thought not very; a faint phosphorescent radiance glimmered from it, similar to that on stale fish, fish that is not all it should be. And two very bright sparks were set close together at one end; and the thing, which was about the size of a bantam’s egg, suddenly moved, turning on her wrist, so that the sparks went out and reappeared in a different place.

Miss Sibley’s first violent impulse was to shake her arm, jerk her wrist, rid herself of the thing, whatever it was—bat, vampire, death’s-head moth? were some of the wilder notions that flashed into her head.

The second impulse, even more powerful, born of the thought that just a moment before had come to her, was to remain quite still, hold her breath, watch, wait, listen.

She kept still. She waited. She watched the faint luminosity on her wrist.

And she was rewarded.

After a long, quiet, breathing pause, it grew brighter and became recognizable.

Not
a rat; definitely not big enough for a rat. But perhaps too large for a common house mouse?

A field mouse?

The thought slipped gently into her head, as had the suggestion about the comma. Wee, sleekit, cowering, something beastie, she thought. Field mice, I’ve heard, move indoors when autumn winds turn cold; perhaps this one had done that once. It must have been long, long ago, for the mouse was now completely transparent; it had started climbing gently up her arm and the stripes of the cardigan sleeve, red and blue, showed clearly through it.

Of course! Miss Sibley thought. I know who you are! You must be Mr. Watkyn. Dear and charming Watkyn.

A thought like a smile passed across the space between them.

That was Gabriel, yes. He named me. And I, in turn, was able to help him. So we can open doors for one another. When he left—

Yes? When he left?

He left me changed; brought forward, you might say. In this attic here, now, there is still some residue of Gabriel: the pain, the fear; as well as the hope, comfort, friendship that we two built between us. Gabriel is buried by now in the churchyard, Watkyn is a pinch of bones and fur long since swallowed by some barn owl; but the product of them lives on and will live on as long as hope lives, and hearts to feel hope.

Thank you, Watkyn, said Miss Sibley then; thank you for helping me, and I hope I, too, can help somebody, someday, in the same degree.

Oh, never doubt it,
said the voice, closer now, and Miss Sibley lay down to sleep, comfortably, on the flat boards, with Watkyn a faint glimmer of light by her right shoulder.

On Saturday morning Mr. Hoskins visited the mill to pick up a tool he had left there; Mr. Wakehurst, the vicar, had come too, calling, at the same time, to thank Miss Sibley again for the immeasurably valuable gift of the diary; together, with concern, not finding the lady in her kitchen, they searched the house, and she, hearing voices, ran down the little stair and banged on the inside of the panel door until, aghast, they let her out.

“
Miss Sibley! What happened!
”

“Oh, the door blew closed, in the gale, and shut me in,” she said gaily. “You were quite right, Mr. Hoskins; we must change the catch so that can’t happen again.”

“But you—you are all right? You have been there all night? You were not frightened?” asked the vicar, looking at her searchingly. “Nothing—nothing of an unfortunate nature—occurred?”

“Unfortunate?
No!
Nothing so fortunate has ever happened to me in my whole life!” she told him joyfully, thinking of her future here, decided on, it seemed, so carelessly, in such random haste. And yet what could be more appropriate than to make cakes, to bake beautiful cakes in Hasworth Mill? She would learn the necessary skill, her cakes would grow better and better; and if, at first, a few turned out badly—well, after all, who are more appreciative of cake crumbs than mice?

Publication History

“Introduction” copyright © 2016 Kelly Link.

“The Power of Storytelling: Joan Aiken’s Strange

Stories” copyright © 2016 Elizabeth Delano Charlaff

Stories previously published in Joan Aiken collections as follows: “The People in the Castle,” “A Room Full of Leaves,” “Some Music for the Wicked Countess,” “The Mysterious Barricades,” in
More Than You Bargained For,
Cape 1955 © Joan Aiken.

“A Leg Full of Rubies,” in
A Small Pinch of Weather,
Cape 1969 © Joan Aiken.

“Sonata for Harp and Bicycle,” in
The Green Flash,
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971 © Joan Aiken.

“The Dark Streets of Kimball’s Green,” “Hope,” “Humblepuppy,” in
A Harp of Fishbones,
Cape, 1972, © Joan Aiken.

“The Man Who Had Seen the Rope Trick,” “The Cold Flame,” “Furry Night,” in
A Bundle of Nerves,
Gollancz, 1976 © Joan Aiken.

“Listening,” in
A Touch of Chill,
Gollancz, 1979 © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“She Was Afraid of Upstairs,” in
A Touch of Chill,
Delacorte, 1980 © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“Old Fillikin,” in
A Whisper in the Night,
Gollancz, 1982, © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“The Last Specimen,” “Lob’s Girl,” in
A Whisper in the Night
, Delacorte 1984, © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“A Portable Elephant,” in
Up the Chimney Down,
Cape, 1984 © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“The Lame King,” in
A Goose on Your Grave,
Gollancz, 1987 © Joan Aiken Enterprises.

“Watkyn, Comma,” in
A Fit of Shivers,
Gollancz, 1990, © Joan Aiken Enterprises.