The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories (18 page)

“What was that?” one of them called.

“A cat.”

“Let’s go after it!”

“
No good. It
’
s gone.
”

When they got to Mrs. Vaughan their chief left the others and came over to Emmeline.

“It’s you, is it, Misery?” he said. “Where’s Ma?”

“
Out at bingo.
”

“She would be. I wanted to get a bit of the old girl’s pension off her before she spent it all.”

He gave Emmeline’s hair a yank and flipped her nose, hard and painfully, with his thumbnail. She looked at him in stony silence, biting her lip.

“Who’s
she
, Col?” a new gang-member asked. “Shall we chivvy her?”

“She’s one of my Ma’s orphanage brats—just a little drip. Ma won’t let me tease her, so long as she’s indoors, or on the step. But watch it, you, if we catch you in the street.” Colin flipped Emmeline’s nose again and they drifted off, kicking at anything that lay on the pavement.

At half-past eleven Mrs. Vaughan came home from her bingo and let in the shivering Emmeline, who went silently up to her bed in the attic. At eleven thirty-five old Scrawny jumped with equal silence on to her stomach, and the two friends curled round each other for warmth.

Colin was not at breakfast next morning. Often he spent nights on end away from home; his mother never bothered to ask where.

Emmeline had to run errands and do housework in the morning but in the afternoon Mrs. Vaughan, who wanted a nap, told her to clear off and not show her face a minute before six. That gave her five whole hours for reading; she dragged on her old coat and flew up to the churchyard.

The door in the high black wall was always kept locked, but someone had once left a lot of rusty old metal pipes stacked in an angle of the wall; Emmeline, who weighed very little more than old Scrawny, clambered carefully up them, and so over.

Inside, the churchyard was completely overgrown. Blackthorn, plane and sycamore trees were entangled with great clumps of bramble. Groves of mares’-tails, chin-high to Emmeline, covered every foot of the ground. It made a perfect place to come and hide by day, but was too dark at night and too full of pitfalls; pillars and stone slabs leaned every which way, hidden in the vegetation.

Emmeline flung herself down on the flat tomb of Admiral Sir Horace Tullesley Campbell and read her book; for three hours she never moved; then she closed it with a sigh, so as to leave some for the evening in case Mrs. Vaughan went out.

A woodpecker burst yammering from the tallest tree as Emmeline shut the book. Could that be the Druids’ oak, she wondered, and started to push her way through to it. Brambles scratched her face and tore her clothes; Mrs. Vaughan would punish her but that couldn’t be helped. And at last she was there. The tree stood in a little clear space of bare leaf-mould. It was an oak, a big one, with a gnarled, massive trunk and roots like knuckles thrusting out of the ground. This made an even better secret place for reading than the Admiral’s tomb, and Emmeline wished once again that it wasn’t too dark to read in the churchyard at night.

St. Chad’s big clock said a quarter to six, so she left
The Ancient History of Kimball’s Green
in its plastic bag hidden in a hollow of the tree and went draggingly home; then realized, too late, that her book would be exceedingly hard to find once dark had fallen.

Mrs. Vaughan, who had not yet spent all her week’s money, went out to bingo again that evening, so Emmeline returned to the telephone box and rang up King Cunobel.

“Is that the King? I have to tell you that your enemies are five miles nearer. Queen Belavaun is driving a chariot with scythes on its wheels, and her wicked son Coluon leads a band of savage followers; he carries a sling and a gold-handled javelin and is more cruel than any of the band. Has the Chief Druid prepared the magic drink yet?”

She listened and old Scrawny, who was as usual sitting at her feet, said “Prtnrow?””

“The Chief Druid says they have made the drink, Scrawny, and put it in a flagon of beaten bronze, which has been set beneath the sacred oak until it is needed. Meanwhile the warriors are feasting on wheat-cakes, boars’ flesh and mead.”

Next she rang up Queen Belavaun and hissed, “Oh, wicked queen, your enemies are massing against you! You think you will triumph, but you are wrong! Your son will be taken prisoner, and you will be turned out of your kingdom; you will be forced to take refuge with the Iceni or the Brigantes.”

It was still only half-past nine and Mr. Iachimo probably would not come this evening, for two nights out of three he went to play his flute outside a theatre in the West End of London.

“Long ago I was a famous payer and people came from all over Europe to hear me,” he had told Emmeline sadly, one wet evening when they were sheltering together in the church porch.

“What happened? Why aren’t you famous now?”

“I took to drink,” he said mournfully. “Drink give you hiccups. You can’t play the flute with hiccups.”

“You don’t seem to have hiccups now.”

“Now I can’t afford to drink any longer.”

“So you can play the flute again,” Emmeline said triumphantly.

“True,” he agreed; he pulled out his instrument and blew a sudden dazzling shower of notes into the rainy dark. “But now it is too late. Nobody listens; nobody remembers the name of Iachimo. And I have grown too old and tired to make them remember.”

“
Poor Mr. Yakkymo,
” Emmeline thought, recalling this conversation. “He could do with a drop of King Cunobel’s magic drink; then he’d be able to make people listen to him.”

She craned out of the telephone box to look at St. Chad’s clock: quarter to ten. The streets were quiet tonight: Colin’s gang had got money from somewhere and were down at the Wansea Palais.

“I’m going to get my book,” Emmeline suddenly decided. “At least I’m going to try. There’s a moon, it shouldn’t be too dark to see. Coming, Scrawny?”

Scrawny, intimated, stretching, that he didn’t mind.

The churchyard was even stranger under the moon than by daylight; the mares’-tails threw their zebra-striped shadows everywhere and an owl flew hooting across the path; old Scrawny yakkered after it indignantly to come back and fight fair, but the owl didn’t take up his challenge.

“
I don
’t suppose it’s really an owl,” Emmeline whispered. “Probably one of Queen Belavaun’s spies. We must make haste.”

Finding the oak tree was not so hard as she had feared, but finding the book was a good deal harder, because under the tree’s thick leaves and massive branches no light could penetrate; Emmeline groped and fumbled among the roots until she was quite sure she must have been right round the tree at least three times. At last her right hand slipped into a deep crack; she rummaged about hopefully, her fingers closed on something, but what she pulled out was a small object tapered at one end. She stuck it in her coat pocket and went on searching. “The book must be here somewhere, Scrawny; unless Queen Belavaun’s spy has stolen it.”

At last she found it; tucked away where she could have sworn she had searched a dozen times already.

“Thank goodness! Now we’d better hurry, or there won’t be any time for reading after all.”

Emmeline was not sorry to leave the churchyard behind; it felt
crowded
, as if King Cunobel’s warriors were hiding there, shoulder to shoulder among the bushes, keeping vigilant watch; Sylvan Street outside was empty and lonely in comparison. She scurried into the phone box, clutching Scrawny against her chest.

“Now listen while I read to you about the Druids, Scrawny; they wore long white robes and they liked mistletoe—there’s some mistletoe growing on that oak tree, I’m positive!—and they used rings of sacred stones, too. Maybe some of the stones in the churchyard are left over from the Druids.”

Scrawny purred agreeingly, and Emmeline looked up the hill, trying to move St. Chad’s church out of the way and replace it by a grove of sacred trees with aged, white-robed men among them.

Soon it was eleven o’clock: time to hide the book behind the stone and wait for Mrs. Vaughan on the doorstep. Along with his mother came Colin, slouching and bad-tempered.

“Your face is all scratched,” he told Emmeline. “You look a sight.”

“What have you been up to?” Mrs. Vaughan said sharply.

Emmeline was silent but Colin said, “Reckon it’s that mangy old cat she’s always lugging about.”

“Don’t let me see you with a cat around
this
house,” Mrs. Vaughan snapped. “Dirty, sneaking things, never know where they’ve been. If any cat comes in here, I tell you, I’ll get Colin to wring its neck!”

Colin smiled; Emmeline’s heart turned right over with horror. But she said nothing and crept off upstairs to bed; only, when Scrawny arrived later, rather wet because it had begun to rain, she clutched him convulsively tight; a few tears wouldn’t make much difference to the dampness of his fur.

“Humph!” said Mrs. Vaughan, arriving early and unexpectedly in Emmeline’
s attic.
“I thought as much!”

She leaned to slam the window but Scrawny, though startled out of sleep, could still move ten times faster than any human; he was out and over the roof in a flash.

“Look at that!” said Mrs. Vaughan. “Filthy, muddy cat’s footprints all over my blankets! Well that’s one job you’ll do this morning my young madam—you’ll wash those blankets. And you’ll have to sleep without blankets till they’
ve dried
—I’m not giving you any other. Daresay they’re all full of fleas’ eggs too.”

Emmeline, breakfastless, crouched over the tub in the back wash-house; she did not much mind the job, but her brain was giddy with worry about Scrawny; how could she protect him? Suppose he were to wait for her, as he sometimes did, outside the house. Mrs. Vaughan had declared that she would go after him with the chopper if she set eyes on him; Colin had sworn to hunt him down.

“All right, hop it now,” Mrs. Vaughan said, when the blankets satisfied her. “Clear out, don’t let me see you again before six. No dinner? Well, I can’t help that, can I? You should have finished the washing by dinner-time. Oh, all right, here’s a bit of bread and marge, now make yourself scarce. I can’t abide kids about the house all day.”

Emmeline spent most of the afternoon in a vain hunt for Scrawny. Perhaps he had retired to some hidey-hole for a nap, as he often did at that time of day; but perhaps Colin had caught him already?

“Scrawny, Scrawny,” she called softly and despairingly at the mouths of alleys, outside gates, under trees and walls; there was no reply. She went up to the churchyard, but a needle in a hundred haystacks would be easier to find than Scrawny in that wilderness if he did not choose to wake and show himself.

Giving up for the moment Emmeline went in search of Mr.
Iachimo, but he was not to be found either; he had never told Emmeline where he lived and was seldom seen by daylight; she thought he
probably inhabited one of the condemned houses and was ashamed of it.

It was very cold; a grey, windy afternoon turning gloomily to dusk. Emmeline pushed cold hands deep in her pockets; her fingers met and explored a round, unusual object. Then she remembered the thing she had picked up in the dark under the oak tree. She pulled it out, and found she was holding a tiny flask, made of some dark lustreless metal tarnished with age and crusted with earth. It was not quite empty; when Emmeline shook it she could hear liquid splashing about inside, but very little, not more than a few drops.

“Why,” she breathed, just for a moment forgetting her fear in the excitement of this discovery, “It is—it
must
be the Druids’ magic drink! But why, why didn’t the warriors drink it?”

She tried to get out the stopper; it was made of some hard blackish substance, wood, or leather that had become hard as wood in the course of years.

“Can I help you, my child?” said a gentle voice above her head.

Emmeline nearly jumped out of her skin—but it was only Mr. Iachimo, who had hobbled silently up the street.

“Look-look, Mr. Yakkymo! Look what I found under the big oak in the churchyard! It must be the Druids’ magic drink—mustn’t it? Made of mallow and vetch and succory, steeped in mead, to give warriors courage. It must be!”

He smiled at her; his face was very kind. “Yes, indeed it must!” he said.

But somehow, although he was agreeing with her, for a moment Emmeline had a twinge of queer dread, as if there were nothing—nothing at all—left in the world to hold on to; as if even Mr. Iachimo were not what he seemed but, perhaps, a spy sent by Queen Belavaun to steal the magic flagon.

Then she pushed down her fear, taking a deep breath, and said, “Can you get the stopper out, Mr. Yakkymo?”

“I can try,” he said, and brought out a tiny foreign-looking penknife shaped like a fish with which he began prising at the fossil-hard black substance in the neck of the bottle. At last it began to crumble.

“Take care—do take care,” Emmeline said. “There’s only a very little left. Perhaps the defenders did drink most of it. But anyway there’s enough left for you, Mr. Yakkymo.”

“For me, my child? Why for me?”

“Because you meed to be made brave so that you can make people listen to you play your flute.”

“Very true,” he said thoughtfully. “But do not you need bravery too?”

Emmeline’
s face clouded.
“What good would bravery do me?” she said. “
I’m
all right—it’s old Scrawny I’m worried about. Oh, Mr. Yakkymo, Colin and Mrs. Vaughan say they are going to
kill
Scrawny. What can I do?”

“You must tell them they have no right to.”

“
That
wouldn’t do any good,”
Emmeline said miserably.
“Oh!—You’ve got it out!”

The stopper had come out, but it had also crumbled away entirely.

“
Never mind,
” Emmeline said. “You can put in a bit of the cotton-wool that you use to clean your flute. What does it smell of, Mr. Yakkymo?”

His face had changed as he sniffed; he looked at her oddly. “Honey and flowers,” he said.

Emmeline sniffed too. There was a faint—very faint—aromatic, sweet fragrance.

“Wet your finger, Mr. Yakkymo, and lick it! Please do! It’ll help you, I know it will!”

“Shall I?”

“Yes, do, do!”

He placed his finger across the opening, and quickly turned the bottle upside down and back, then looked at his fingertip. There was the faintest drop of moisture on it.

“Quick—don’t waste it,” Emmeline said, breathless with anxiety.