We Have Always Lived in the Castle

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead, and the people of the village have always hated us. We live in the Blackwood house, shielded from the world by our father's fence and the trees he let grow wild. Our days follow a quiet, careful pattern. Constance never goes past her own garden, so on Tuesdays and Fridays, I must walk into the village for library books and groceries. I play a game to keep myself safe, moving from the library to the grocery to Stella's coffee shop, trying to avoid losing turns to the staring, hating faces and the mocking voices of the men on the benches. “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?” the children sing. “Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.” But once I lock the gate behind me, I am home, and safe.

Our life is contained within the kitchen, the garden, and the back rooms of the house. Constance, who is beautiful and golden, presides over it all. She cooks and preserves, tending to the rows of jewel-colored jars in the cellar, a poem written by generations of Blackwood women. She tends to me, and she tends to our Uncle Julian, who lives in his wheelchair in a warm room off the kitchen. He spends his days sifting through his papers, trying to write a definitive account of the last day, six years ago, when everyone else was poisoned by arsenic in the sugar bowl. “My niece, after all, was acquitted of murder,” he tells visitors with a happy, terrible pride. “There could be no possible danger in visiting here now.” Constance and I never speak of it, but it is always there, a story Uncle Julian tells to himself, and to us, over and over.

One day, a change comes. A man arrives, a stranger who looks like our father. He calls himself our cousin Charles Blackwood. He says he has come to help us, but I know at once that he is a ghost, a demon sent to disrupt our world. He walks into our kitchen as if he belongs there, his heavy footsteps sounding where only our soft ones should be. He talks of money, of the safe in our father's study, of bringing us back into the world. He brings newspapers into the house, and the smell of his pipe smoke clings to the curtains. He wants to take Constance away from me.

I try to drive him away with my own magic. I bury my box of silver dollars by the creek to keep us safe, and nail our father's book to a tree in the woods. When Charles finds the book has fallen, he gets in. So I must use stronger magic. I take our father's gold watch chain from the drawer where Charles has been looking, and I nail it to the tree instead. When he finds it, his face twists with anger. “What kind of a house is this?” he shouts. I smash the mirror in his room and scatter leaves and dirt on the floor, trying to erase his presence, to make the house reject him. But he only grows stronger, turning Constance against me with his talk of the outside world. “It's all been my fault,” she says, her eyes clouded. “I've been hiding here.”

I know then that I must use the strongest magic of all. While they are at dinner, I go upstairs to his room. His pipe is burning on a saucer beside the bed, left on top of a pile of newspapers. It is a simple thing to brush the pipe and the saucer into the wastebasket. The fire starts quietly. Downstairs, I hear Charles say, “I smell smoke,” and then he is running, screaming, “Fire! The whole damn house is on fire!” He runs out into the night, shouting for help, but Constance and I only watch as the smoke pours down the stairs. The fire is ours, a clean, bright fire to burn away the poison of his presence.

The fire brings the village. They come not to help, but to watch. The fire engine arrives, and then all the cars, their lights turning our lawn into a stage. They stand outside, their faces lifted and hungry in the flickering light. When the fire is finally out, one of them, Jim Donell, picks up a rock and smashes one of our mother's tall drawing-room windows. A roar of laughter goes up, and then they move like a wave, pouring into our house, breaking and tearing and destroying everything they can touch. They smash our dishes, overturn our furniture, and throw our mother's Dresden figurines against the porch rail. Through the noise, they chant their song: “Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”

Just as they close in on us, huddled on the lawn, a voice cuts through the chaos. “Julian Blackwood is dead.” The villagers fall back, suddenly silent and afraid. In the quiet, we slip away into the woods, to my secret hiding place by the creek. There, in the darkness, with the sounds of the ruined world fading behind us, the last silence is broken. “I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die,” I whisper. Constance stirs beside me. “The way you did before?” she asks. It has never been spoken between us. “Yes,” I say. “The way I did before.”

We return in the morning to a house that is a shell, the roof burned away to the sky, the inside a wasteland of shattered treasures. But the kitchen is mostly whole, and the cellar with its rows of preserves is untouched. We sweep the wreckage of the dining room and drawing room behind closed doors, sealing them away forever. We board up the windows and lock the doors, and the house becomes our fortress, a dark, quiet castle. We are all that is left of our family, and we are enough.

Slowly, the villagers begin to leave offerings on our front step. A roasted chicken, a blueberry pie, a basket of fresh eggs. They are baskets of apology, of fear. We take them in after dark, leaving the empty baskets on the porch for them to find. The children still play on our lawn, whispering stories about the ladies who live inside, who never come out except at night to hunt for bad children. They cannot see us, sitting quietly on either side of the locked front door, peering out through tiny cracks in the boards. They see only a ruined house, overgrown with vines. But inside, we are safe. We have our kitchen, and our garden, and each other. “Oh, Constance,” I say, “we are so happy.”