We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it.

The blight on the village never came from the Blackwoods; the villagers belonged here and the village was the only proper place for them.

I wish you were all dead, I thought, and

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and

Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate

There was something so simple and silly about the spoon going around

I am living on the moon, I told myself, I

I liked my house on the moon, and I put a fireplace in it and a garden outside (what would flourish, growing on the moon? I must ask Constance) and I was going to have lunch outside in my garden on the moon. Things on the moon were very bright, and odd colors; my little house would be blue.

I thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I

Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and

Our mother disliked the sight of anyone who wanted to walking past our front

house. “I

“whether the Carringtons would bring me a horse if I asked them.

it was Helen Clarke who was far more eccentric than Uncle

Go away, I told her in my mind. Go away, go

I began dressing Helen Clarke in my mind, putting her in a bathing suit on a snow bank, setting her high in the hard branches of a tree in a dress of flimsy pink ruffles that caught and pulled and tore; she was tangled in the tree and screaming and I almost laughed.

You want to come to people of your own kind, Constance. They don’t talk about us.

John Blackwood took pride in his table, his family, his position in the world.”

A woman born for tragedy, perhaps, although inclined to be a little

We relied upon Constance for various small delicacies which only she could provide; I

she should not have been doing the cooking if her intention was to destroy all of us with

My niece Constance washed it before the doctor or the police had

The other dishes used at dinner were still on the table, but my niece took the sugar bowl to the kitchen, emptied it, and scrubbed it thoroughly with boiling water. It was a curious act.”

body.” “It was Constance who saw them dying around her like flies—I do beg your pardon—and never called a doctor until it was too late.

in

I was allowed to carry dirty dishes but not to wash

I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. 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.

tired.” “If I had a winged horse I could fly him to the moon; he would be more comfortable there.”

spring

You have been a good niece to me, although

My brother sometimes remarked upon what we ate, my wife and I; he was a just man, and never stinted his food, so long as we did not take too much.

this was to be a day of long thin things, since there had already been a hair in my toothbrush, and a fragment of a string was caught on the side of my chair and I could see a splinter broken off the back step.

I found a nest of baby snakes near the creek and killed them all; I dislike snakes and Constance had never asked me not to.

they always knew her name. They knew her name and Uncle Julian’s name and how she wore her hair and the color of the three dresses she had to wear in court and how old she was and how she talked and moved and when they could they looked close in her face to see if she was crying. “I want to talk to Constance,” he said outside, the way they always did.

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.”

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

And

he cut off a small piece of pancake and brought it to his mouth, but could not bring himself to put it inside.

if Charles had not gone away before three days I would smash the mirror in the hall.

I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings;

I was trying to think charitably of him, since I would never be able to speak kindly until I did, but whenever I thought of his big white face grinning at me across the table or watching me whenever I moved I wanted to beat at him until he went away, I wanted to stamp on him after he was dead, and see him lying dead on the grass.

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.

Eliminating Charles from everything he had touched was almost impossible, but it seemed to me that if I altered our father’s room, and perhaps later the kitchen and the drawing room and the study, and even finally the garden, Charles would be lost, shut off from what he recognized, and would have to concede that this was not the house he had come to visit and so would go away.

I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth.

Mary Katherine must never be punished. Must never be sent to bed without her dinner. Mary

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.

one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night.

I knew he was happy because he had been so discourteous to

When I listened particularly for the fire I could hear it, a singing hot noise upstairs, but over and around it, smothering it, were the voices of the men inside and the voices of the people watching outside

no one could see us yet except Helen Clarke and she stared at the house.