House of Small Shadows (23 page)

Her useless fingers could not find the neck of the lamp. She was certain the trespasser was swiftly bustling around the outside of the bed, was moments from touching her in the lightless void of
the bedroom. When her desperate fingers found the lamp switch, the act of turning the light on took what was left of her strength. Dizzy with terror, she thought she might faint.

Ox-blood walls reappeared around the bed. On the brink of a scream Catherine turned to face the intruder. Her vision swam and settled. The figure was still there, immobile, faceless,
waiting.

The dressmaker’s dummy. And hung upon shoulders that were positioned as if the missing head was proudly raised, was the dress Edith had picked out for her to wear to the pageant.

The crashing of relief left her panting like a tired dog. A dull concussive ache returned to the place behind her eyes, as did the burning sensation in her throat. She was nauseous too, as if
whatever was in her system was wearing off and leaving side effects.

What had they given her to drink? Were the ingredients of the medicinal concoction so old they’d become toxic? Laudanum? A tincture of opium, wasn’t that bitter tasting? The very
idea they took opiates here wasn’t implausible. She imagined old, frail, untrained hands pouring a white powder into the liquid she had struggled to get down. But she was soporific long
before she swallowed the ‘tonic’. Something in her food then? Hadn’t Edith said as much about Maude?

The mute housekeeper must have carried the dress and dummy inside the room as she slept. And Catherine had been talking to the dummy, mistaken the vague presence of a dressed bust as company,
jabbered to it in her delirium. If she wasn’t so shaken she would have felt foolish.

She fingered her face. Her forehead and cheeks were cold, she had no temperature and wasn’t feverish. Her state was akin to waking up drunk. But wakefulness did not dispel unease. She had
heard no one enter the room, nor did she have any recollection of a light being turned on by whoever had come in. How was that possible? And why was it necessary to bring the horrid maternity
dress, that Edith’s mother had worn nearly a century before, in here while she slept?

She felt too woozy and too weak to decide whether this was another strange arrangement, some protocol of the Red House, or whether it ranked as another sinister tactic to unsettle her.

Catherine sank into the pillows, shifted her position to the portion of the bed not moist and creased. She pulled her knees up and into her belly, cradled her head with her hands and tried to
figure out what to do. With the harsh grit of Maude’s medicine tainting her gums and tongue, she passed into, and back out of, and then into a semblance of sleep.

Catherine roused again with a sense of her own voice loud within the room. Her eyes were already wide open when she came to.

She rose from the bedclothes gasping from another delirious episode that felt uncomfortably similar to a trance. From deep sleep into a trance again? Never happened before. They only occurred
when she was absent-minded, but awake.

The second unbearably vivid dream receded. Though not quickly enough. A group of small figures had been stood in a row at the foot of her bed. Or they were children wearing masks. Faces she
recalled in unpleasant flashes.

She flopped against the headboard with her face clutched in her hands to stop the swaying of her vision and the motion sickness it caused.

Two of the figures had been smiling and holding the ceramic hands of the dressmaker’s dummy. A girl in a tatty bonnet, and a figure with the stature of a boy and the bearing of a doll.
Real hair had been threaded into his colourless porcelain scalp. An old-fashioned tailored suit had made a tight fit on his small limbs, like the boy had outgrown the suit or been given a younger
child’s clothes. The girl’s face within the bonnet was too withdrawn to offer anything but the glimmer of a bony chin and one row of discoloured wooden teeth.

But in the nightmare, the dummy’s shoulders had carried a head. A white face. With moist black eyes, partly obscured by a veil attached to a wide-brimmed hat. The hat had been decorated
with dark flowers like an ancient wedding cake.

Among the other childish figures, there had been a wrinkled and leathery black face, the eyes white and horribly eager. A small mouth in the tar-black face had been open, gleefully revealing
yellow peg teeth. The ape from the film that made off with Strader’s head?

Another of the small shapes looked to have suffered an accident, or been misused. Its pottery face was discoloured, cracked, and there were small punctures or scars. The Master of the
Revels?

Elsewhere amongst the crowd, she retained a suggestion of uneven whiskers sprouting from a threadbare head of a large hare. It must have been a mask concealing something much worse underneath.
The face hidden by the hare’s pelt had painted wooden eyes, adrift from the sockets of the outer skin.

Behind the figures she’d received the impression of tails swishing with impatience, and then whipping with excitement for the entire time she spoke to them. They’d riposted with
nonsense and rhyme she couldn’t remember in any detail, but their jaunty words had made her want to get up and skip around the room like a child.

Catherine trembled for a while, her eyes searching every inch of the visible room, until the impact of the dream lessened and she was certain she was alone.

She had dreamed of the dolls in Edith’s bedroom, and in her state amalgamated the dolls with the murky features of Mason’s puppets from the BBC film.
Please let it be that.
If she could rely on one thing in her life, it would be her imagination turning against her in the worst circumstances.

Her body now felt as desiccated as one of Mason’s preserved creations. The medicine she had been given –
but for what? –
maintained the mineral rime around her tongue
and lips. It was all she could taste, and she was desperate to swill it away with water. Her glass lay empty upon the floor.

Each step she took towards the enormous washstand fired a jolt of pain through her skull. She touched her arms and face, which registered in her mind as being hot and tender, but were actually
cold and clammy. Her nightie and underwear were wet. She picked up and clutched the dressing gown around her shivering body.

There was no water in the basin of the washstand, or in the jug beneath the bowl. No taps, it wasn’t plumbed. She thought she might cry. She needed painkillers for the incessant judders in
her head, not some ancient sickening tonic concocted from stale ingredients.

Nausea took her back to her bed, where she sat and peered at the door. She would have to go and find the nearest bathroom and source of water, a medicine cabinet. What was the time? Her phone
claimed it was 2:30 a.m.
Is that all?
Now she thought about it, her writhing and gibbering seemed to have stretched into days. Catherine closed her eyes. If they had poisoned her she
should try and be sick.

They had drugged her to take her out of her life, out of the world. The dress on the dummy was a new skin, a new identity. They were refashioning her, to become one of them.

Stop it!

She had a chill, a virus. New places, new bacteria.

That’s all.

Stress has made it worse. That’s all.

That’s all it is.

Outside her room she again failed to find the light switches on the walls between the doors in the long passage. There was a switch at the mouth of the corridor by the landing
and stairwell. She was sure of this, but by day had previously been guided by the window overlooking the garden at the passage’s end. The window was no help now, so only the glow of her
bedroom door and phone screen guided her through the heavy darkness that pressed inwards and swallowed the Red House. The lightlessness had crept inside and filled the old spaces, clothing timbers
and bricks. But with the dark came a shift in character. One she remembered noticing before.

The house was colder than it had been during the previous night, as if the building was now open to the elements. She could smell damp in fabric and wood, the pungency of black spores on
water-softened plaster, as if the garden’s decay had seeped inside the building. Even the unseen floor felt rough beneath her bare soles. So vivid was the change in character, within the
pathetic halo of greenish light cast by her phone screen, she had to make sure the Red House was as she remembered it to be, by pushing her face an inch from the wall to see the wallpaper’s
pattern.

When she found it, the air of the closest bathroom was icy. As though her life depended upon the tooth-aching water, she bent to gulp at the ropes of freezing liquid that thundered from the tap
above the sink. She needed to dilute the disorientation, the inebriation of illness and sleepiness.

Behind the wall, pipes juddered, clanged.

Too ill to care about the noise, she left the bathroom, but made sure the door stayed open, same with her bedroom door, so at least some of the grubby light fell into the passageway from two lit
rooms. It would allow her to do more than stumble through the hideous absence.

How could they stand it here? Perhaps darkness was more of a natural state than daylight. Weren’t stars just pieces of glittering debris slowly winking out on their journey to entropy? So
what came after?

Stop it!

No light pollution here. This is how it is in the country.

By the time she reached the landing about the stairwell, a door below clicked open, and then closed. Briefly, a dim but comforting glow appeared downstairs. Catherine paused to listen. A second
door opened more slowly, deeper inside the vast building.

Maude.

She wanted to be reassured by the idea of the housekeeper being up and about at this hour, but wasn’t. Would the scowling drudge be of any assistance with anything but another home-made
remedy, or poison?

But these women were old, their joints must ache, Maude limped, Edith was in a wheelchair, so there had to be modern pain relief somewhere inside the house. And she must take enough of it to
drive home. In strange dark houses you needed a goal, and she made this her purpose as she descended the first flight of stairs. If need be, she’d search every one of their bathrooms and
kitchen cupboards.

On the way down to the first floor, she gripped the banister rail. The mere effect of moving this far left her breathless and dizzy.

Peeking over the railing, some thin light was reflected off the polished wood of the hall floor. Light originating from the adjoining utility corridor that contained the tableau, workshops,
perhaps the kitchen, and Maude’s room.

The first floor was dark. But a few feet of sight was afforded by her phone screen, so at least she could see each step ahead of her.

She moved across the first-floor landing to the next set of stairs, her eyes imploring the oblivion that encroached upon the feeble glow of her phone, which returned nothing to her eyes besides
the glimmers of brass door-handles. She was at the top of the next staircase when the movement below began.

She peered over the banister and caught sight of a small shadow fall across the faint light on the hall floor. A scuffle of cloth accompanied the motion. Instinct told her that announcing her
position was a bad idea.

And there it was again, what she understood to be a scampering, close to the floor, in pursuit, she intuited, of the first figure. Neither noise resembled Maude’s distinctive side-to-side
shuffle. The noise suggested a small group or pack of animals.

Cats?

Rats.

Catherine stifled a scream. The Red House could be teeming with rats at night. Had she not heard them last night too? A fitting revenge for M. H. Mason’s extermination of the species, but
not a vengeance that offered Catherine a shred of comfort while on the stairs.

The screen of her phone winked off. As it periodically did to save the battery if she didn’t keep the pitiful glow activated. And just before the screen light came back on, there was no
question in her mind that footsteps had just announced themselves on the staircase behind her.

She turned quickly, lost balance and thumped down four steps, flailing at the banister with her free hand. Before unintentionally casting her phone away, the handset lit up the silhouette of a
small head. And what might have been hands covered its face.

The fact the figure behind her had been so close was worse than what she thought she had actually seen. Whimpering on her hands and knees she cast about to retrieve the phone. She snatched it up
and held it before her face fearfully, as if expecting a blow from out of the darkness above her.

The pallid phosphorescence of the screen cast its meagre range onto empty wooden steps and the banister rail. There was nothing there and could not have been. She raised the phone higher and her
own shadow stretched up the empty staircase wall.

A mind made strange with inebriation in oppressive darkness could see anything it wanted. Despite telling herself this, she struggled to rid her imagination of the notion that a small head,
further up inside the darkness, was now turned in her direction and watching her.

Silence returned to the stairwell. She chose to suppress, rather than dwell on, the scent of cold outdoor air brought in on someone’s clothes that gathered around her. Catherine peered
over the banister rail, but saw and heard nothing more from down there. Rodents were scared of humans,
weren’t they?
Clutching her phone as if it was a flame and her only hope of
rescue and survival, she continued down.

Stood in the middle of the hall, she looked up and into the stairwell. The darkness was total. A swirl of vertigo, and a panic that she could be hoisted up and into the space by something above,
seized her. When the fear passed another replaced it. Whatever she thought had been following her down the stairs might drop upon her, from up there.

At the walls of the hall, she pawed the wooden panels looking for light switches. Something that was becoming an unpleasant habit for her in this house. There were at least three switches down
here. She had noticed them –
hadn’t she? –
between the framed photographs. One of which her phone screen illumined. A black-and-white picture taken of the Masons in their
garden.