The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (19 page)

He licked his finger.

“Well? does it taste?”

“
No taste.
” But he smiled, and bringing out a wad of cotton tissue, stuffed a piece of it into the mouth of the flask, which he handed to Emmeline.

“This is yours, my child. Guard it well! Now, as to your friend Scrawny—I will go and see Mrs. Vaughan tomorrow, if you can protect him until then.”

“Thank you!” she said. “The drink
must
be making you brave!”

Above their heads the clock of St. Chad had tolled six.

“I must be off to the West End,”
Mr. Iachimo said.
“And you had better run home to supper. Till tomorrow, then—and a thousand, thousand thanks for your help.”

He gave her a deep, foreign bow and limped, much faster than usual, away down the hill.

“Oh, do let it work,” Emmeline thought, looking after him.

Then she ran home to Mrs. Vaughan’s.

Supper was over; Colin, thank goodness, did not come in, and Mrs. Vaughan wanted to get through and be off; Emmeline bolted down her food, washed the plate, and was dismissed to the streets again.

As she ran up to the churchyard wall, with her fingers tight clenched round the precious little flask, a worrying thought suddenly struck her.

The magic drink had mead in it. Suppose the mead were to give Mr. Iachimo hiccups? But there must be very little mead in such a tiny drop, she consoled herself; the risk could not be great.

When she pulled her book from the hole in the wall a sound met her ears that made her smile with relief: old Scrawny’s mew of greeting, rather creaking and scratchy, as he dragged himself yawning, one leg at a time, from a clump of ivy on top of the wall.

“
There
you are, Scrawny! If you knew how I’d been worrying about you!”

She tucked him under one arm, put the book under the other, and made her way to the telephone box. Scrawny settled on her feet for another nap, and she opened
The Ancient History of Kimball’s Green
. Only one chapter remained to be read; she turned to it and became absorbed. St. Chad’s clock ticked solemnly round overhead.

When Emmeline finally closed the book, tears were running down her face.

“Oh, Scrawny!—they didn’t win! They
lost!
King Cunobel’s men were all killed—and the Druids too, defending the stronghold. Every one of them. Oh, how can I bear it? Why did it have to happen, Scrawny?”

Scrawny made no answer, but he laid his chin over her ankle. At that moment the telephone bell rang.

Emmeline stared at the instrument in utter consternation. Scrawny sprang up; the fur along his back slowly raised, and his ears flattened. The bell went on ringing.

“But,” whispered Emmeline, staring at the broken black receiver, “it’s out of order. It
can’t
ring! It’s never rung! What shall I do, Scrawny?”

By now, Scrawny had recovered. He sat himself down again and began to wash. Emmeline looked up and down the empty street. Nobody came. The bell went on ringing.

At the same time, down below the hill and some distance off, in Wansea High Street, ambulance attendants were carefully lifting an old man off the pavement and laying him on a stretcher.

“
Young brutes,
” said a bystander to a policeman who was taking notes. “It was one of those gangs of young hooligans from up Kimball’s Green way; I’d know several of them again if I saw them. They set on him—it’s the old street musician who comes from up there too. Seems he was coming home early tonight, and the boys jumped on him—you wouldn’t think they’d bother with a poor fellow like him, he can’t have much worth stealing.”

But the ambulance men were gathering up handlfuls of half-crowns and two-shilling pieces which had rolled from Mr. Iachimo’s pockets; there were notes as well, ten shillings, a pound, even five-and ten-pound notes. And a broken flute.

“It was certainly worthy their while tonight,” the policeman said. “He must have done a lot better than usual.”

“He was a game old boy—fought back like a lion; marked some of them, I shouldn’t wonder. They had to leave him and run for it. Will he be all right?”

“We’ll see,” said the ambulance man, closing the doors.

“I’d better answer it,” Emmeline said at last. She picked up the receiver, trembling as if it might give her a shock.

“Hullo?” she whispered.

And a voice—
a faint, hoarse, distant voice
—said,

“This is King Cunobel. I cannot speak for long. I am calling to warn you. There is danger on the way—great danger coming towards you and your friend. Take care! Watch well!”

Emmeline’s lips parted. She could not speak.

“There is danger—danger!” the voice repeated. Then the line went silent.

Emmeline stared from the silent telephone to the cat at her feet.

“Did you hear it too, Scrawny?”

Scrawny gazed at her impassively, and washed behind his ear.

Then Emmeline heard the sound of running feet. The warning had been real. She pushed the book into her pocket and was about to pick up Scrawny, but hesitated, with her fingers on the little flask.

“Maybe I ought to drink it, Scrawny? Better that than have it fall into the enemy’s hands. Should I? Yes, I will! Here, you must have a drop too.”

She laid a wet finger on Scrawny’s nose; out came his pink tongue at once. Then she drained the bottle, picked up Scrawny, opened the door, and ran.

Turning back once more to look, she could see a group of dark figures coming after her down the street. She heard someone shout,

“That’s her, and she’s got the cat too! Come on!”

But beyond, behind and
through
her pursuers, Emmeline caught a glimpse of something else: a high, snow-covered hill, higher than the hill she knew, crowned with great bare trees. And on either side of her, among and in front of the dark houses, as if she were seeing two pictures, one printed on top of the other, were still more trees, and little thatched stone houses. Thin animals with red eyes slunk silently among the huts. Just a glimpse she had, of the two worlds, one behind the other, and then she had reached Mrs. Vaughan’s doorstep and turned to face the attackers.

Colin Vaughan was in the lead; his face, bruised, cut, and furious, showed its ugly intention as plainly as a raised club.

“Give me that damn cat. I’ve had enough from you and your friends. I’m going to wring its neck.”

But Emmeline stood at bay; her eyes blazed defiance and so did Scrawny’s; he bared his fangs at Colin like a sabre-toothed tiger.

Emmeline said clearly, “Don’t you dare lay a finger on me, Colin Vaughan. Just don’t you dare touch me!”

He actually flinched, and stepped back half a pace; his gang shuffled back behind him.

At this moment Mrs. Vaughan came up the hill; not at her usual smart pace but slowly, plodding, as if she had no heart in her.

“Clear out, the lot of you,” she said angrily. “
Poor old Mr. Iachimo
’s in the Wansea Hospital, thanks to you. Beating up old men! That’s all you’re good for. Go along, scram, before I set the back of my hand to some of you. Beat it!”

“But we were going to wring the cat’s neck. You wanted me to do that,” Colin protested.

“Oh, what do I care about the blame cat?” she snapped, turning to climb the steps, and came face to face with Emmeline.

“
Well, don
’t
you
stand there like a lump,” Mrs. Vaughan said angrily. “Put the blasted animal down and get to bed!”

“I’m not going to bed,” Emmeline said. “I’m not going to live with you any more.”

“Oh, indeed? And where are you going, then?” said Mrs. Vaughan, completely astonished.

“I’m going to see poor Mr. Yakkymo. And then I’m going to find someone who’ll take me and Scrawny, some place where I shall be happy. I’m never coming back to your miserable house again.”

“Oh, well suit yourself,” Mrs. Vaughan grunted. “You’re not the only one. I’ve just heard: fifty years in this place and then fourteen days’ notice to quit; in two weeks the bulldozers are coming.”

She went indoors.

But Emmeline had not listened; clutching Scrawny, brushing past the gang as if they did exist, she ran for the last time down the dark streets of Kimball’s Green.

The Lame King

Crumbling rainbows are useless as a diet,” said Mrs. Logan. “
I don
’t like ’em. Prefer something solid to bite on.”

Under her breath in the front passenger’s seat, Mrs. Logan’s daughter-in-law Sandra muttered, “Shut up, you dotty old bore.” And, above her breath, she added to her husband, “
Can’t
you drive a bit faster, Philip? It will be terribly late by the time we get home. There’s the sitter’s fee, don’t forget. And we’ve got all our packing to do.”

“You have all tomorrow to do it in,” mildly pointed out her father-in-law from the backseat.

She flashed him an angry diagonal glance, and snapped, “There’s plenty of other things to do, as well as packing. Cancel the milk, take Buster to the dog’s hotel, fill out all the notification forms—”

“I would have done that, if you had let me,” said old Mr. Logan in his precise tones. He had been a headmaster. Sandra made no answer to this, merely pressed her lips tight together and clenched her gloved hands in her lap. “Do drive faster, Philip,” she said again.

Philip frowned and slightly shook his head, without taking his eyes off the road. He was tall and pale, with a bony righteous face and eyes like faded olives. “Can’t; you know that perfectly well; it’s illegal to go over sixty with senior citizens in the car,” he said in a low voice.

His remark was drowned, anyway, by the voice of his mother, old Mrs. Logan, who called from the back, “
Oh, no, don
’t drive faster, Philip dear, please don’t drive any faster! I am so
loving
this landscape—
I don
’t want to lose a moment of it! Our heroine, speeding to who knows where or what destination, is reminded of childhood—those bare trees, the spring mornings passed paddling in brooks when the water went over the tops of your wellies—the empty fields—”

Old Mr. Logan gently took her hand in his, which had the effect of checking her.

“It
is
a pretty country,” he said. “I like all the sheep. And the shapes of the hills around here.”

“How much farther?” said Sandra to her husband.

“About another four hours’ driving. We’d better stop for a snack at a Cook’s Tower.”

“Oh, why?” Sandra said crossly, in a low tone. “It’s just a waste of money giving them a—”

“No wolves now. It must have been so exciting for shepherds in the old days,” dreamily remarked old Mrs. Logan. “Virginia came down like a wolf on the . . . but then when you try and fold on the dotted line it
never
tears straight. That is one thing they should put right in the next world.”

“And I’m sure they will,” said her husband comfortingly.

“I hope my thoughts are not without sense.”

“Never to me, my love. Look at that farm, tucked so snugly in the hollow.”

“Will the place we are going to be like that?”

“Anyway the tank needs filling,” said Philip to his wife.

“What this trip will have
cost
,” she muttered.

“It had to be taken sometime. And we’ll get the Termination Grants, don’
t forget,
” Philip reminded his wife in a murmur.

“Well, but then you have to deduct all the expenses—”

“Sometimes I think my daughter-in-law treads in the footsteps of Sycorax,” absently remarked old Mrs. Logan, who sometimes caught Sandra’s tone, though not the things she actually said.

“Oh, come, you would hardly call little Kevin a Caliban?” her husband remonstrated mildly.

“Parting from Kevin is the least of my regrets. He is all the chiefs and none of the Indians. And stubborn! Combs his hair five times and then says ‘
I don
’t want to go.’”

“Kevin will grow up by and by. If he were a character in one of your books, you would know how to make him grow up.”

“Ah,” she said with a sigh, “no story would grow in my hands now. It would fly apart in a cloud of feathers. You say a few words—and they come back and hit you like boomerangs. What did Western man do before he know about the boomerang? What did swallows do before they invented telegraph wires? Language is so inexact—I do not mean to assert that swallows themselves invented the wires—”

“For God’s
sake
, shut up,” muttered young Mrs. Logan in the front seat. Old Mr. Logan laid an arm protectively round his wife’s shoulders. She, with an alert, happy face, white hair flying around in wisps, continually gazed out of the window as the car sped along. “Haven’t seen so much grass in ten years,” she whispered. Her elderly husband looked at her calmly and fondly. Sometimes a shadow of pain flitted across his face, like that of a high jet over a huge field, but it was gone the moment after.

“There’s a place,” said Philip. “We’ll stop there.”

A Cook
’s Tower had come in sight: square white pillar, castellated at the top, with red zigzags all the way down, and a wide parking lot glittering with massed vehicles.

“Park somewhere close in, we don’t want to waste twenty minutes helping them hobble,” muttered Sandra.

“I’ll park as close as I can,” replied Philip with a frown, and called to the pair in the back, “Fancy a snack, Mum and Dad? Cup o’
tea? Sandwich?
”

He tried to make his voice festive.

“Oh, there’s no need for that, my boy,” said his father. “We’re all right, we’re not hungry. Save your money.” But his mother called, “Oh, yes! A nice cup of tea and a last rock cake. Rock of ages cleft for me. . . . A book called
The Last Rock Cake
, now . . . that would have been a certain seller, once; these days, I suppose,
The Last Croissant
. Take the queen
en croissant
; a husband in Bohemia would be a Czech mate. Oh, cries his poor silly wife, I am nothing but a blank Czeque; good for nothing but to be wheeled away to the Death House.”

“
Will
you be quiet, Mother?” gritted Sandra, turning to the rear of the car a face of real ferocity.

“Never mind, my dear, you won’t have us for much longer. It has been a stony row, I know, but tomorrow this time you will be en route for Ibiza—”

Philip, who had been weaving thoughtfully through the parking lot, eyes veering sharply this way and that, now whipped his Algonquin neatly into a just-vacated gap close to the main entrance.

Inside, at this time of day, the Quick-Snak cafeteria was half empty; most customers were up on the top floor having the Three Course Special.

“
You sit here.
”

Philip edged his parents alongside a glass-topped table by the window.

“Sandra and I will forage at the counter. What’s it to be? Buttered toast?”

“A rock cake,”
sighed Mrs. Logan.
“Just a rock cake. To remind me of our honeymoon in Lynmouth.”

Mr. Logan said he wanted nothing but a cup of tea. He placed a careful hand to his side. Mrs. Logan noticed this and sighed again, but said nothing.

Their table was littered with crumby plates, crumpled napkins, half-empty cups, and, on the windowsill, a grease-smeared, dog-eared paperback.

“Why, look, my dear,” said old Mr. Logan, turning it over. “It’s one of yours.
The Short Way Back.
Now, isn’t that a remarkable coincidence. A good omen, wouldn’t you say?”

They gazed at each other, delighted.

“I was only twenty-five when I wrote that one,” sighed his wife. “Philip already on the way. . . . How could I
do
it? What came into my head?
Now
, I couldn’t. . . .”

She handled the book gently, affectionately, smiling at the absurd picture on the front.

“Nothing to do with what’s inside. But then, whatever is?”

A small old man, limping, passed by their table. His heavy metal tray held a glass of stout, black, froth-topped, and a shiny Bath bun.

“
That
looks good,
” said Mrs. Logan to him confidentially. “Now I’m sorry that I didn’t ask for stout. And a Bath bun. . . . Do you know what? We found, we actually found a book I once wrote, lying here on a windowsill. Now isn’t that a thing!”

“Well, I never!” The man with the stout beamed at her. “So you’re a book writer, are you?” His voice held a slight regional burr. Welsh? Wondered Mrs. Logan. Or Scottish?

“Was once. In those
jeunesse dorée
days. Do re me, lackaday dee—” she sang softly.

“He sipped no sup and he craved no crumb,” joined in the old man with the tray, “as he sighed for the love of a lady.”

“Why!” exclaimed Mrs. Logan in astonished pleasure. “Now you remind me—you remind me of somebody I once knew—”

“I was just thinking the very same thing!” said her husband. “But who—?”

All three looked at one another in excitement and suspense.

“Now when was it, where was it?” murmured Mrs. Logan.

But at this moment Philip came back with a tray, followed by Sandra, with another.

“Excuse
me
,” he said with brisk chill, and the old man with the stout moved quickly on his way.

“
Really
, Mother,” snapped Sandra, “must you get into conversation with all and sundry?” and she thumped down in front of her mother-in-law a thick china plate on which lay a flat pale macaroon, ninety-percent gray pastry, with a flat wan dob of fawn-colored substance in the middle.

“Oh, but I asked for a rock cake. This isn’t—”

“No rock cakes. Only jam tarts, buns, or macaroons.”

Mrs. Logan drank her tea but declined the macaroon. “Too hard on my teeth. You have it, love.” So Philip ate it, after his ham roll, with the harassed air of doing so only because it had been paid for and must not go to waste. Sandra nibbled a salad which was largely cress. She looked repeatedly at her watch.

“Philip, we should be getting on. Need the Ladies, Mother? You’d better, you don’t know what there will be at—”

Rather reluctantly Mrs. Logan rose to her feet and followd her daughter-in-law to the pink boudoir, peppered over with hearts and cupids.

“
Sandra,
” she said—and for the first time a slight tremor entered her voice—“Sandra, will it be
frightening
, do you think—where we’re going?”

Sandra angrily banged at her nose with a makeup puff and skated a comb through her perm. “Frightening? Why should it? Everyone’s got to go through it sometime, haven’t they? Not just you. We’ll have to, too, Philip and me, when our turn comes. There’s nothing
frightening
about it. Come along—the others will be waiting. Hurry up!”

Philip and his father waited at the window table. Philip had impatiently piled together all the used cups, plates, napkins, and the paperback book, without observing its title.

“Women take so long, always,” he muttered. “Can’t think what they get up to.”

The limping old man passed their table again and nodded in a friendly way at Mr. Logan.

“On the way to Last House, are you?”

“Why should you ask that?” said Philip sharply.

“Many who stop here are going that way. There’s a bad greasy patch at the S-bend going over Endby Hill—you’ll want to watch it there. Quite a few have come off at that corner.”

“Thank you,” said old Mr. Logan. “We’ll remember.”

Philip gave a curt nod, as if he needed no lame old strangers to teach him about careful driving, and Mr. Logan added cheerfully,

“It’d be a piece of irony, wouldn’t it, if just when you were taking us—
there
—we all went off the road and ended up together!”

“Father!
Really!
”

“Little Kevin would have to go into an orphanage.”

“Here come the girls,” said Philip, with a jocularity he did not feel.

“What’s that about an orphanage?” inquired his mother, who, her husband noticed, had a drawn and anxious look on her face. She plunged into the conversation as if trying to distract her own mind. “They say many a home is worse than an orphanage. Remember, some also agree that impatience is the worst sin. I suffered from it myself, to an extreme degree, when I was young. . . .”

“Come along, let’s go,” said Philip, showing signs of suffering from the worst sin himself.

A frail dusk had begun to fall as they resumed their journey. The landscape became ghostly, wreathed in layers of mist. Trees loomed, fringed by creepers, then swung past; the road wound uphill through forest.

“I wonder if there will be a view?” murmured old Mrs. Logan, more to herself than to her companions. Her husband took her hand, holding it close and firmly. She went on, still to herself, “He was
always delighted with your comments on landscape, chaffinches, and so forth; I wonder if he would be still? That was a curious encounter, a curious coincidence. Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd . . .
I wonder what candied
gourd
would be like? Not very nice, I’d think. But then the whole of that picnic sounded decidedly sickly—lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon;
not
what one would wish on one’s bed in the middle of the night.”

“Please be quiet, Mother,” said Philip edgily. “There’s a bad place along here, we were warned about it; I don’t want any distraction, if you would be so kind.”

“Of course, Philip, of course. I am so very sorry, I know I am a nuisance to you.”

The bad place was negotiated, and passed, in complete silence. The elderly pair at the back drew close together in the darkness until they seemed like one person. The headlights in front converged to a sharp white V through the foggy murk.

At last the car rolled to a stop.

“Is this the place?” Mrs. Logan’s voice quavered a very little.

“This is it.”

Philip, relieved at having completed the outward trip, stamped to get the stiffness out of his knees; his voice was rather too cheerful. “Come along, Mother, Dad; we’ll just get you registered, then we must be on our way; we’re going to have to hurry to get home by the time the sitter wants to leave—”

The old people crept awkwardly out from the back of the car.

“One thing, there’s no luggage to bother about,” muttered Sandra. “But you would think they’d make these places more accessible—”

The small group of persons passed inside a building which was so closely surrounded by creeper-hung trees of large size that, in the foggy dark, no architectural detail was visible; it was like walking into a grove, Mrs. Logan thought.