Read The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories for Free Online Page B

a line, made a net from it, and packed up Noel’s fodder. Taking a sandwich and flask of mint tea for herself, she climbed on to Noel’s back and rode to the edge of the forest. Here, as she had hoped, she was able to pick up branches blown down in gales, just a few of them sufficiently long and straight and sappy for her purpose. When she had found five or six of these, with the suspicious frontier guards training their guns on her, she retreated out of danger. Then, while Noel watched, she made a kite, splicing her word-patchwork across the frame she had constructed, and fastening it tight. The kite, when completed, was big and handsome, like a great multicoloured star.
    “ Looks all right, Leon my boy,” she said to the watching elephant. “But the thing is, will it fly?”
    At first it would not; until she had made a tail from a series of words linked together, new appeal fashion trendy custom-made love tender true. Then it shot up into the sky like a live thing, wheeling about in the last light of the sun, which was sinking into a nest of storm clouds, while the wind sang and thrummed past the long line of linked sentences. Noel, with cocked head and outspread ears, threw up his trunk joyfully and followed the flight of the word-bird as it swooped and danced overhead.
    “The next thing is, Leon,” said Hannah, “will it carry us? That’s what we shan’t know till we try. And we can’t try till after dark, or those fellows on their lookout will fill us so full of bullets that we shall look like Eccles cakes.”
    While twilight fell, she played her kite in the black and green curdled sky, as a fisherman plays a fish, letting it out as far as the line would take it, then reeling in again till the kite bucked and shied and flounced just above their heads. The wind blew stronger and stronger, towards the forest; they could, even from where they were, hear the trees groan and shriek and thrash their branches.
    “There’ll be some shelter down below, I expect, Leon my duck,” said Hannah. “And somewhere under those trees we’ll meet Selim again. You’ll be glad to see him, eh?”
    Noel crooned with pleasure at the name.
    “You missed your bath today, boy,” Hannah said. “Better have a splash in the river before we take off.”
    So while she ate her sandwich, Noel rinsed himself enjoyably in the water which looked dark as tar in the fading light. All the time the night grew darker and the wind blew harder; then Hannah hooked the kite line on to a strap made from word-webbing which she had buckled round Noel’s midriff. She passed the line under a similar belt around herself, and waited for a really strong gust. When that came, she pulled in hard on the line, and felt the force of the wind lift both Noel and herself clean off the ground. Noel hooted with alarm and startled delight as he found himself suddenly swaying three metres above ground level at the rope’s end.
    “Just keep calm, Leon my lad,” said Hannah, clutching a fold of his ear with one hand while she paid out line with the other. “The way this wind is setting, it will lift us nicely over the wire.”
    They were following the course of the river. Below them, they could see its dim gleam as they skimmed along, three or four metres above the surface.
    “Just a little higher, to lift us over the wire,” muttered Hannah, hauling in on the line. Up above them in the sky, which was now almost totally dark, the kite could be seen giving out a faint glow, like a luminous light-switch, as it raced ahead of them.
    Then suddenly Noel let out a strange cry—like that of a dog who sees his master being carried past him on a train.
    “What is it, Leon, old love?” said Hannah. “Don’t be nervous. The ride won’t last much longer.”
    But Noel was pointing with his trunk at a huddled figure on the river bank who sat and gazed into the soupy depths—Noel was pointing and crying and tooting all at the same time with the same trunk.
    “Good