Castleview by Gene Wolfe

decided to go—I wasn’t even thinking about it when I left you and Merc at the motel. Where did you park her, anyway?”
    “Just left her there,” Ann said. “She didn’t want to come. She’s probably gone out to get something to eat.”
    As if on cue, the waiter returned with a tray of covered dishes. He put clean and much larger plates in front of them before ceremoniously setting out the biggest. “Peking Orange Duck. Very fine.”
    Ann said, “I certainly hope so,” and the tip of her tongue made a brief patrol of her lips.
    “Also have shredded beef oyster sauce, fried bean curd and plenty rice. Szechwan double-cooked pork, got very hot spices. All very fine. Imperial dinner three—plenty food! Other one come soon?”
    “I don’t know,” Shields told him. “You weren’t born here, were you, waiter? Born in this country?”
    Ann said sharply, “Willie!”
    “No, sir. Born Hong Kong. Have many cousin here, bring me, own Golden Dragon.”
    “So you’ve been in Castleview for … ?”
    “Two year, almost.”
    Shields nodded encouragement. “And have you ever seen the castle?”
    The waiter turned away. “No see.”
    “Willie!” Ann paused in the act of ladling duck onto her plate.
    Shields watched the waiter’s retreating back, shrugged, and turned to lift the cover of the Szechwan pork.
    “Willie, what sort of service do you think we’re going to get after that?”
    He shrugged again. “I wanted to find out if he’d seen it. Whether someone from another culture would see it.”
    “And you didn’t find out a thing.”
    “Certainly I did. He’s seen something. If he hadn’t, he would have laughed and said so. But he’s seen the castle, or anyway
he’s seen something; and he was fascinated and frightened, just like I was. I’d love to know exactly what it was he saw—whether he saw the same thing that I did, or at least the same sort of thing.”
    Ann chewed and swallowed. “Well, it can’t be helped now, I suppose. If we need service, I’ll shoot up a flare or whatever. Was the museum nice?”
    “No,” he told her. “No, it wasn’t.” He seemed to feel the chill of its lofty rooms once more, a freezing dampness that had left him feeling that he had been in a cavern beneath the ocean. “It’s an old house, almost as old as the Howard house, that was built by some doctor. Dark wallpaper in all the rooms, or oak paneling; a lot of carved moldings stained black. Lots of dusty glass cases—one got broken, did I tell you that?”
    Ann shook her head and sipped tea. “Are we going to have to pay for it?”
    “I don’t think so. I think it was broken by whoever took Bob. It was very strange.”
    Ann had been tasting. “They probably use mandarin oranges, or maybe tangerines. Not Valencia oranges—they’d be too sweet. Do you know about Valencia oranges, Willie?”
    He shook his head and spooned Szechwan pork onto his still-empty plate.
    “Well, what we Americans think of as ‘oranges’ are really Valencia oranges, just that single variety out of a hundred or so. It’s just like we think of lager as ‘beer.’ Practically all of the oranges anybody grows here are Valencias—that’s in Florida and California too. The reason California oranges are different, less messy, is the climate; they’re really the same variety. How’s the pork?”
    He chewed and swallowed, hungry again, and took a sip of water. “Hot spice, like the man said. Don’t you think we ought to call the motel?”
    “I wouldn’t,” Ann decided. “She probably walked into town to get a hamburger when the rain stopped. It’s really not very far. She will have eaten, and your food will get cold.”
    “All right.”
    “You’re worried about her, Willie. I can see you are. But how many times have you been every bit as worried when nothing’s happened? Tell me about the glass. It wasn’t a window?”
    “No, it was a display case. There was an old diary in it, and somebody took it. It belonged to