We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

I can’t help it when people are frightened; I always want to frighten them more.”

All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

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.

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

I took a glass from the cabinet, and said the word very distinctly into the glass, then filled it with water and drank.

MELODY GLOUCESTER PEGASUS,

It was really too late, although I did not know it then; he was already on his way to the house.

“I was thinking that you might make a gingerbread man, and I could name him Charles and eat him.”

Foodoo

No one but me noticed that he knew where it had been kept.