We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.

But what does it MEAN

Blackwoods had always lived in our house, and kept their things in order; as soon as a new Blackwood wife moved in, a place was found for her belongings, and so our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.

I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.

I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

Without looking I could see the grinning and the gesturing; I wished they were all dead and I was walking on their bodies.

I suppose the crack was there, like a finger pointing, from the time when the village was first put together out of old grey wood and the ugly people with their evil faces were brought from some impossible place and set down in the houses to live.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world;

“Can’t you make them stop?” I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love. “Can’t you make them stop?”

On Tuesdays and Fridays I went into the village, and on Thursday, which was my most powerful day, I went into the big attic and dressed in their clothes.

?

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

I decided that I would choose three powerful words, words of strong protection, and so long as these great words were never spoken aloud no change would come.

but the air of change was so strong that there was no avoiding it; change lay over the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog.

“He thought I was Aunt Dorothy, and he held my hand and said, ‘It’s terrible to be old, and just lie here wondering when it will happen.’

There was no change coming, I thought here, only spring; I was wrong to be so frightened. The days would get warmer, and Uncle Julian would sit in the sun, and Constance would laugh when she worked in the garden, and it would always be the same.

“We’ll always be here together, won’t we, Constance?” “Don’t you ever want to leave here, Merricat?” “Where could we go?” I asked her. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.”

I heard her move in the kitchen, but Uncle Julian had called at that moment, and she went in to him, leaving the heart of our house unguarded.

Shirley Jackson & the anatomy of a home

On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.

I saw Jonas in the doorway and Constance by the stove but they had no color. I could not breathe, I was tied around tight, everything was cold.

I still could not see him clearly, perhaps because he was a ghost, perhaps because he was so very big.

“I mean,” Charles said, “can’t it all be forgotten? There’s no point in keeping those memories alive.” “Forgotten?” Uncle Julian said. “Forgotten?”

Already the house smelled of him, of his pipe and his shaving lotion, and the noise of him echoed in the rooms all day long; his pipe was sometimes on the kitchen table and his gloves or his tobacco pouch or his constant boxes of matches were scattered through our rooms.

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself.

I sat very quietly, listening to what she had almost said. Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me.

When I opened the kitchen door to go inside I could feel at once that the house still held anger, and I wondered that anyone could keep one emotion so long; I could hear his voice clearly from the kitchen, going on and on.

I smiled at her and went into the hall, with the voice still talking behind me. There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

I thought that we had somehow not found our way back correctly through the night, that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale.

for one quick minute the great shadowy room came back together again, as it should be, and then fell apart forever.

I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.

Slowly the pattern of our days grew, and shaped itself into a happy life.

Most of the dirt and the soot had blown away and the air around the garden was fresh and clean, but the smoke was in the ground and I thought it would always be there.

I looked at Constance and thought she had never seen Charles so truly before. “Connie?” She knew now that Charles was a ghost and a demon, one of the strangers.

“I am so happy,” Constance said at last, gasping. “Merricat, I am so happy.” “I told you that you would like it on the moon.”

Jackson’s great subject was precisely the opposite of paranormality. The relentless, undeniable core of her writing—her six completed novels and the twenty-odd fiercest of her stories—conveys a vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self.

Like Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Jackson’s keynotes were complicity and denial, and the strange fluidity of guilt as it passes from one person to another.

Jackson devoted herself to burrowing deeper inside the feelings that appalled her, to exploring them from within.

The hostility of the villagers helped shape Jackson’s art, a process that eventually redoubled, so that the latter fed the former.

Jackson delegates the halves of her psyche into two odd, damaged sisters: the older Constance Blackwood, hypersensitive and afraid, unable to leave the house; and the younger Merricat Blackwood, a willful demon prankster attuned to nature, to the rhythm of the seasons, and to death,

Indeed, typically for Jackson, sexuality is barely present in the book and, needless to say, sexuality is therefore everywhere in its absence.

better to incinerate the female stronghold than allow it to be invaded.