The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (24 page)

Soon she appeared with a tray.

“It was a Western,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “The hero comes riding into this little town, you see, and he pretends he’s a horse-dealer but really he’s the D.A. in disguise. So he finds that the rustling is being run by the saloon keeper—”

“
Oh, for goodness
’ sake,
must
you talk all the time,” snapped the doctor. Then he stopped short and looked at her aghast.

A dreadful change had come over her. The gay print apron and hair ribbon dropped off her and instead he saw her clad in her white and gray robes and wreathed about with all her magic. Even as she held out her hands to him despairingly she seemed to be drawn away and vanished through the thick curtains.

“Helen!” he cried. There was no answer. He flung open the door and ran frantically up the steps to the castle. It was vacant and dark. The grass in the great hall was stiff with frost and the night sky showed pale above him in the roofless tower.

“Helen, Helen,” he called, until the empty walls re-echoed, but no one replied. He made his way slowly down the steps again and back to his warm study where the steam was still rising from the two bowls of soup.

From that day the townspeople noticed a change in their doctor. He had been hermit-like before; now he was morose. He kept the castle gates locked except for the office hours and disconnected his telephone. No longer was there a pretty wife to tell them that the doctor would see them now; instead they were confronted by a closed door with a little grille, through which they were expected to recite their symptoms. When they had done so, they were told to go around by an outside path to another door, and by the time they reached it they found the necessary pill or powder and written instructions lying outside on the step. So clever was the doctor that even with this unsatisfactory system he still cured all his patients, and indeed it seemed as if he could tell more about a sick person through a closed door than other doctors could face to face; so that although people thought his treatment strange, they went on coming to him.

There were many queer tales about him, and everyone agreed that night after night he was heard wandering in the ruined castle calling “Helen! Helen!” but that no one ever answered him.

Twenty years went by. The doctor became famous for his books, which had earned him honorary degrees in all the universities of the world. But he steadfastly refused to leave his house, and spoke to no one, communicating with the tradespeople by means of notes.

One day as he sat writing he heard a knock on the outer gate, and something prompted him to go down and open it. Outside stood a curious looking little woman in black academic robes and hood, who nodded to him.

“I am Dr. Margaret Spruchsprecher, Rector of the University of Freiherrburg,” she said, walking composedly up the path before him and in at his front door. “I have come to give you the degree of Master of Philosophy at our University, as you would not come to us or answer our letters.”

He bowed awkwardly and took the illuminated parchment she offered him.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he said, finding his voice with difficulty. “I am most honored that you should come all this way to call on me.”

“Perhaps now that I have come so far I can help you,” she said. “You are seeking something, are you not? Something besides knowledge? Something that you think is in the castle, up there on the hill?”

He nodded, without removing his gaze from her. The keen, piercing look in her old eyes reminded him vividly of the King.

“Well! Supposing that all this time what you seek is not
inside
, but has gone
outside
; supposing that you have been sitting at the mouth of an empty mousehole; what then?” There was something brisk, but not unkindly, in her laugh as she turned and made off down the path again, clutching the voluminous black robes around herself as the wind blew them about. The gate slammed behind her.

“
Wait
—” the doctor called and ran after her, but it was too late. She was lost in the crowded High Street.

He went out into the town and wandered distractedly about the streets staring into face after face, in search of he hardly knew what.

“Why, it’s the doctor, isn’t it?” a woman asked. “My Teddy’s been a different boy since that medicine you gave him, Doctor.”

Someone else came up and told him how thankful they were for his advice on boils.

“My husband’s never forgotten how you cured his earache when he thought he’d have to throw himself out of the window, the pain was so bad.”

“I’ve always wanted to thank you, Doctor, for what you did when I was so ill with the jaundice—”

“You saved my Jennifer that time when she swallowed the poison—”

The doctor felt quite ashamed and bewildered at the chorus of thanks and greeting which seemed to rise on every side. He finally dived into a large doorway which seemed to beckon him, and sank relieved into a dark and sound-proof interior—the cinema.

For a long time he took no notice of the film which was in progress on the screen, but when he finally looked up his attention was attracted by the sight of galloping horses; it was a Western. All of a sudden the memory of Helen came so suddenly and bitterly into his mind that he nearly cried aloud.

“Excuse me, sir, that’s the one and nine’s you’re sitting in. You should be in the two and three’s.”

He had no recollection of having bought any ticket, but obediently rose and followed his guide with her darting torch. His eyes were full of tears and he stumbled; she waited until he had caught up with her and then gave him a hand.

It was a thin hand, very cool; it gave him a gentle tug. He stood still, put his other hand over it and muttered:

“Helen.”

“Hush, you’ll disturb people.”

“Is it you?”

“Yes. Come up to the back and we can talk.”

The cinema was pitch dark and full of people. As he followed her up to the rampart at the back he could feel them all about him.

“Have you been here all these years?”

“All these years?” she whispered, mocking him. “It was only yesterday.”

“But I’m an old man, Helen. What are you? I can’t see you. Your hand feels as young as ever.”

“Don’
t worry,
” she said soothingly. “We must wait until this film ends—this is the last reel—and then we’ll go up to the castle. My father will be glad to see you again. He likes your books very much.”

He was too ashamed to ask her to come back to him, but she went on:

“And you had better come up and live with us in the castle now.”

A feeling of inexpressible happiness came over him as he stood patiently watching the galloping horses and feeling her small, cool hand in his.

Next day the castle gates were found standing ajar, and the wind blew through the open doors and windows of the doctor’s house. He was never seen again.

Watkyn, Comma

When Miss Harriet Sibley, not in her first youth, received an unexpected legacy from a great-uncle she had never met, there was not a single moment’s hesitation in her mind. I shall give up my job at the bank, she thought, and live by making cakes.

Miss Sibley had never baked a cake in her life, nor was she even a great cake eater; once in a while, perhaps, she might nibble a thin slice of Madeira, or a plain rice bun; but rice buns were becoming exceedingly hard to find.

All the more reason why I should start up a little baking business, thought Miss Sibley triumphantly. I need not have a shop. I can do it from home. Word about good cakes very soon gets passed around.

And she began hunting for suitable premises.

Due to soaring house prices, she encountered difficulty in finding anything that lay within her means. For months every Saturday and Sunday was passed in the search. From cottages she turned to warehouses, from warehouses to barns. Even a ruined barn, these days, fetched hundreds of thousands.

But at last she came across exactly what she wanted, and the price, amazingly, was not unreasonable. Miss Sibley did not waste any time investigating possible disagreeable reasons for this; if there are drawbacks, I will deal with them as they come up, she decided in her usual swift and forthright way, and she made an offer for the ruins of Hasworth Mill. Her offer was instantly accepted, and she engaged a firm of local builders to render the ruins habitable.

The building stood on a small island, with the river Neap on one side, describing a semicircle, and the millrace on the other, spanned by a three-arched bridge.

What better place to bake cakes than a mill? thought Miss Sibley.

When she inquired why the place had remained uninhabited for so long, she received a variety of answers. The mill itself had ceased to grind corn after the closure of Hasworth Station and its branch railway line, which had made the transport of corn and flour so much more costly. Then there had been legal disputes between the heirs of the last owner. One had been in Canada, one in Australia; the affair had dragged on for years. Meanwhile the damp rotted the woodwork as the mill stood empty. Purchasers don’t like damp, Miss Sibley was told. But damp is, after all, to be expected if you live on an island, she replied sensibly. Then there were the trees, very large: a huge cedar, twice the height of the mill, guarded the approach bridge; some willows grew on the island; a row of Lombardy poplars screened the meadow beyond. Trees make a place dark; some people dislike it.

Miss Sibley had lived all her life on a brick street; to her the prospect of owning twelve Lombardy poplars, five willows, and a giant cedar was intoxicating.

The word
haunted
never passed anyone’
s lips.

The island itself was small; not much bigger than a tennis court. During the years that the mill had stood empty, brambles had proliferated and the place was a wilderness; Miss Sibley looked forward to turning it into a garden by and by. Meanwhile the builders used it as a dumping place for their loads of brick and stacks of new timber The brambles were cut and trampled down, and some of them dug up as new drains had to be laid and damp-proof foundations inserted; in the process of this digging a male skeleton was unearthed.

It had been buried with care, and quite deep, handsomely coffined and wrapped in some half-rotted piece of brocade material, which Dr. Adams, the coroner, who was also a keen local historian, inspected carefully and pronounced to be the remains of an altar cloth or consecrated banner.

“In fact, my dear Miss Sibley, the body is probably that of a Catholic priest who died here while on an undercover mission during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and was secretly buried. The age of the remains make that the most likely hypothesis.”

“But why should he be buried on my island?” crossly demanded Miss Sibley.

“Why, Jeffrey Howard, the miller at that period, had been suspected of being an undeclared papist. This seems to confirm it. Perhaps he was giving hospitality to one of the traveling priests who rode about in disguise, saying a secret Mass here and there. I suppose there was some fatality. That would account—” began Dr. Adams, and stopped short.

“So what happens now?” inquired Miss Sibley, not noticing this.

“
Oh, we
’ll have him reburied properly in the graveyard, poor fellow,”
said Dr. Adams cheerfully.
“The vicar won’t mind a bit. He’ll enjoy an excuse for some research into the background of it all.”

Once the coffin and its melancholy contents had been removed, Miss Sibley put the matter out of her mind. She was much too busy, buying curtain material and discussing fitments with the builders to trouble her head about old unhappy far-off things. Her new kitchen was taking shape, a fine, spacious room with a view through dangling willow fronds over the white, frothy, and turbulent millpond. The sun blazed through the wide new south window, her large modern oven would soon keep the kitchen warm and airy.

Miss Sibley had a deep trunk full of cake recipes which, all her life, she had been cutting out of newspapers. She could hardly wait to get started. Waffles, Aberdeen butteries, orange and walnut cake, tipsy cake, scruggin cake, apricot-caramel cake, mocha layer cake, Tivoli cake, orange tea bread, date shorties, fat rascals, cut-and-come-again cake, honey and walnut scone ring, Lancashire wakes cakes, nut crescent, currant roll-ups, rum baba—these names sang themselves through her head like a glorious invocation.

Just wait till I can get the builders out of here, she thought. And shelves put up in the little room and my cookery books on them.

She had collected cookbooks with the enthusiasm of an autograph hunter. Not a recipe had yet been tried.

To encourage them, Miss Sibley pampered her builders in every way possible. She brewed them cups of tea five or six times daily, accompanied by store bought biscuits. She mailed letters, took messages, phoned their wives, and ran errands for them. But none of this disguised her extreme impatience to see them leave. As soon as it was at all possible, she planned to move from her rented room over the post office into the mill; meanwhile she visited the site daily and dug up brambles on the island. She was therefore on hand when Mr. Hoskins, the foreman, came to say, “Beg your pardon, mum, but we found something you should see.”

“And what is that?” asked Miss Sibley. The seriousness of his tone made her heart tip over most anxiously. What could the wretches have found
now?
A plague pit? A cavern under the foundation, requiring ninety tons of concrete? Some terrible gaping crack that would entail construction of five expensive buttresses?

“It’s a room,” said Mr. Hoskins.

“
A room? A
room?
Surely there are plenty of those?”

“One we didn’t know of,” replied Mr. Hoskins, who had lived in the village all his life. “Halfway up a wall. Come and see, mum.”

Her curiosity kindled, Miss Sibley came and saw.

The room was approached by a paneled door, neatly concealed at one side over the mantel in a small upstairs bedroom. The panel door was operated by a hidden spring, which one of the workmen had accidentally released. Inside, a flight of narrow dark stairs led up to a small, low, irregularly shaped chamber with a sloped ceiling and several oak beams passing through the floor at odd angles. The place was not much larger than a coat closet and was dimly lit by a tiny window, made of thick greenish glass tiles, which also admitted a little fresh air.

“Why has no one ever noticed the window?” demanded Miss Sibley.

“’Tis hid by the ivy, you see, mum, and also ’tis tucked in under the overhang of the eaves, like, where you’d never notice it,” Mr. Hoskins pointed out.

Later, going outside, Miss Sibley verified this, and the fact that a projecting lower gable concealed the window from anyone standing on the ground.

Disappointingly the room held no furniture.

“But we did find this,” said Mr. Hoskins, and handed Miss Sibley a small grimed leather-bound book. “’Twas tucked on the joist.”

Opening the book, Miss Sibley found that the pages were handwritten. It seemed to be a diary.

“Thank you, Mr. Hoskins,” she said.

“Would you want the room decorated, miss?”

“On the whole, no, thank you, Mr. Hoskins. I don’t imagine I shall be using it a great deal. If you could just clear away the dust. . . .”

Miss Sibley’s mind was already floating back to Sicilian chocolate cheesecake.

But she did take a cursory glance at the diary, which was written in faded brown ink and a decidedly crabbed and difficult handwriting.

“I, Gabriel Jerome Campion, S.J., leave this journal as a memorial in case it should happen that I do not quit this place a living man. And I ask whomsoever shall find it to pray for the repose of my soul. . . .”

Well, of course I will do that for the poor man, thought Miss Sibley, and she methodically tied a knot in her handkerchief to remind herself.

I wonder if he was in here for very long, and what did happen to him?

“Thank you, Mr. Hoskins,” she repeated absently and withdrew down the narrow approach stair to the builder’s stepladder, which stood below the panel opening.

“Woud you wish me to put a different fastening on the door, mum?”

“Why, no, thank you, I think the existing one will do well enough.”

“Or build a flight of steps so’s to reach the door?”

“No,” said Miss Sibley, “as you may recall, I plan to turn this little bedroom into my cookery library, so I shall want shelves built across those two facing walls for my cookbooks. And then, you see, I’ll buy one of those little library stepladders, so if I ever should wish to enter the secret room (which is not very likely), I can use the stepladder. Thank you, Mr. Hoskins. Gracious me—it is teatime already; I’ll just run and put on the kettle.”

Dr. Adams and Mr. Wakehurst the vicar were greatly excited by the discovery of the diary, news of which reached them that evening by village grapevine; and the next day Mr. Wakehurst came around to ask if he might borrow the document?

“This, you know, clears up a four-hundred-year-old mystery,” said he, happily. “There is a local legend about a black-coated stranger who was heard asking the way to Hasworth Mill and was then never seen again. But that was the winter of the great flood, when the Neap overran its banks and covered all the land as far as the foot of Tripp Hill (where the deserted station now stands). Various people from the village were drowned in the floods, including Howard the miller. It was supposed that the stranger must have been drowned, too, and his body washed downstream to Shoreby. Now we can guess that he had been billeted in the secret room by Howard, who no doubt proposed to see him off the premises when the coast was clear; but because of his death in the flood he never did return. So the poor priest probably starved to death. Howard’s son, a sailor who returned from the sea to claim his inheritance, no doubt found and secretly interred the body. Poor fellow, what a miserable, lonely end.”

“Oh, he wasn’t lonely,” said Miss Sibley. “Somebody called Mr. Watkyn kept him company. He wrote, several times, in his diary, ‘
I don
’t know how I should have managed to remain tranquil and composed without the company of my dear and charming Watkyn.’”

“
Indeed?
” exclaimed the vicar, with the liveliest curiosity. “Now I
do
wonder who Watkyn can have been?”

“Another priest, I daresay,” remarked Miss Sibley without a great deal of interest, and she handed Mr. Wakehurst the fragile and grimy little volume. “Please do keep it, Vicar, it is of no great interest to me.”

“May I really? I shall write a paper on it for the Wessex Archaeological Society,” cried the vicar joyfully, and hastened away with his treasure before she could change her mind.

At the door he turned, remembering his manners, to ask, “When do you plan to move in, Miss Sibley?”

“Why, tonight,” said she. “There are still quite a few things to be done, but the kitchen stove works now, and the hot water is on, and one of the bedrooms is finished, so there is no reason why I can’t sleep here. That way I shall be even more on the spot if there are any problems—not that I anticipate any.”

Mr. Wakehurst
’s face wore a slightly doubtful, frowning look as he crossed the three-arched bridge and looked down at the careering millrace and swirling millpond. But what, after all, are ghosts? he thought. Some people never see them at all. And, as the century nears its end, they seem to be losing their power. And Miss Sibley is such a sensible, practical person, it would be a most unpardonable piece of folly to confuse her mind with ideas about things that may never happen.

Poor Father Gabriel! As good a man as ever stepped, I daresay, even if he did hold erroneous, wrongheaded religious opinions. In any case, we are all so much more ecumenical and broad-minded now.

I do wonder who Watkyn can have been? And why no other body was found? Dear me, how very, very interested Adams will be in this discovery.

Besides, nobody has actually seen anything in the mill. Or not that I have been told of. It is only some exaggerated stories about what people felt, or fancied they felt, or heard, or fancied they heard.

He hurried on, under a threatening and plum-colored sky, absorbed by the diary, which he read as he walked.

“Conducted a long dialogue on transubstantiation with Watkyn, which served to distract me from the pangs of hunger. His is a surpassingly sympathetic and comprehending nature. And his expression is so captivatingly cordial! If he chose, I know that he would confide in me all his innermost thoughts.”

Can Watkyn have been a mute? wondered Mr. Wakehurst. Or a foreigner, speaking no English?

“I have confessed to Watkyn not only my major transgressions but the most minor peccadilloes, the kind of small sins that, in the presence of a confessor, one is often almost ashamed to mention. Watkyn, now, knows more of my faults than any other living being. He does not behave any less kindly. And I feel a wondrous easement of soul. Sick enfeebled, confused as I begin to grow, I do not at all fear to meet my Maker. And it is all thanks to my good Watkyn. If only I could bestow a like grace on him!”

“Another discussion with W. on the subject of miracles,” recorded Father Gabriel a day later, in a hand that was perceptibly weaker.