House of Small Shadows (24 page)

In the photograph they appeared older and thinner than she’d seen them before, but were dressed as formally as ever. Sunlight reflected off their bespectacled eyes. Violet Mason wore a
white hat to match her dress and carried a parasol. M. H. Mason wore a black suit. Behind the Masons’ straight forms, some of the trees were hazy as if moving in a breeze. What was visible of
the puppet theatre between the Masons’ heads was blurred, as if active with motion too rapid for the shutter speed of the camera. Either a child, or a figure on the backdrop, seemed to be
running sideways. There was a small black arm and a distorted head emerging from the unclear portion of the photograph.

She’d not looked at many of the pictures closely during her tour with Edith, but wished she had done so. If she had, she might not be on her own in the darkness looking at one right
now.

Towards the dimly glowing mouth of the passage leading to the service area, she moved with her arms stretched out.

At the end of the corridor, on the left-hand side, was a slot of rectangular light, as if a small lamp were switched on in a large room with the door mostly closed. From here, the thin light on
the hall floor that she had seen from upstairs originated.

A cold draught swept her hands and face in a steady stream. She suspected the door to the garden, at the far end of the corridor, had also been opened upon the cold night. The current of chilly
air was too concentrated to be coming from a room indoors.

The draught built into a breeze and she stifled the idea that it wasn’t a door or window open at the end of the passage, but a much bigger portal ahead of her in the darkness.

The moving air was either entirely without sound, or her own hoarse breath was so loud about her face she was drowning out the sound of the wind.

Stumbling through what now smelled like an unlit tunnel, her situation began to feel like she’d passed out of the Red House and was now journeying beneath its walls. The idea of being
beneath the house seemed far worse than the frightful apprehension of being inside it. Only the approaching luminance of the partially open door assured her she was still inside the building.

‘Maude. Maude,’ she called, in a voice just above a whisper. But didn’t know if she was announcing herself or calling for help. She felt an urge to scream, and a competing urge
to sit down in petrified silence and to wait for whatever came next from out of the darkness. Why was she even down here? She should have stayed in bed.

With her phone screen creating a small, weak sphere about her face, she almost broke into a run to reach the partially open door. Because someone must be awake. It was her only motivation for
putting one foot in front of the other, and so quickly now.

Mere feet from the door, the intensification of the chemical pungency hit her full and stinging in the face and brought her to a stop. The stench came from the entrance to what she knew, but
didn’t want to acknowledge, was Mason’s workshop.
Why was it open at this hour?
The light bleeding thinly from the space beyond the door now resembled light issued from ashes
glowing in a gate, or a small desk lamp with a crimson shade.

With one hand clasped across her mouth and nose, she peered through the gap.

And looked away. She heard herself whimper and say, ‘God.’

She glanced back into the dim ruby air and again saw the vertebrae of an impossibly curved spine, and so pronounced beneath the dead white skin, the bone joints seemed in danger of breaking
through the bloodless flesh of the small figure hunched over inside the galvanized metal tub. Mason’s ethanol bath. In which, what must have been Edith sat facing forward.

Without the cottage-loaf wig of rags and false hair, the back of a mostly hairless skull confronted Catherine. The shoulders were so narrow and pinched and the scapula so defined, she was not
sure anything so wizened could still be living. But it was the mere glimpse of the scar, from a long dorsal incision, reaching from the nape of the scrawny neck to the black water’s
lap-lap-lapping edge, for which her shock and revulsion were mostly saved.

A second figure she could not see, but heard sobbing, was also inside the room.

Maude?

Catherine fell as much as fled back through the oblivion of the utility corridor to the front door of the house. In the surreal confusion of her partial sight, the image of that emaciated form
shivering within the black water hounded her. And she knew she would rather risk freezing to death outside than spend any more of this night under the same roof as these grim creatures that
conducted such ghastly rituals in the early hours of the morning, in a house alive with rats.

For the first time in her friendship with Leonard, she felt hot knots of anger towards him.

The two great front doors of the Red House were locked. And whoever had locked the doors had taken the keys.

When she awoke, the bedroom was still lit by the small lamp.

Catherine sat up slowly and held her head in both hands until the swoops settled. The concussive ache in her head had lifted, as had the shivering and sensitivity of her skin. Maybe the hot
constriction in her throat had awoken her, because the need to gulp at cold water was urgent again.

A great distance of time and space separated her from the memory of running through the house to her bed. Her recollections of the previous night were murky. While more conscious than she had
been in some time, she still struggled to distinguish between what had been a nightmare or delirium, and what had been real. Poor bald, scarred Edith, that had been real.
Or had it?
The
children in the costumes a dream? And the mannequin with the head?
Impossible.
Just part of a nightmare.

Illness, being drugged with what the old fools thought of as medicine, must have opened a distant region of her mind. The part she used for dreaming had accelerated its activity when she was
half awake. Her trances verified she was susceptible to this. And God only knew she’d had a few of those. Until she could get out of the building and get home, she could not afford to
consider her experience to be anything else. Her sanity was dependent upon it.

She opened the heavy drapes and looked out at an indigo sky from which the light dissolved. Catherine quickly checked the time on her phone. 8 p.m.
Not possible.

Surely it was 8 a.m. and the last vestiges of night were surrendering to the dawn. She had dropped the phone on the stairs the night before, her fingers had been clumsy about the handset’s
controls, she might have accidentally reset the clock.

Weak and unsteady on her feet, she opened and fired up her laptop on the writing table. Like the phone the computer showed a red battery level. But she had been recharging them. She remembered
doing it.

She reattached both chargers to the wall sockets. Even though there had never been a signal here, the idea of the phone and laptop being lifeless suddenly seemed too terrible to consider when
surrounded by such ponderous antiquity.

Once the laptop screen loaded, she was confronted by the horrible shock of having slept all day following the troubled night.

8 p.m.

Her stomach was cavernous and burned with hunger. It’s why she was so clumsy, so weak, why her thoughts were struggling to coordinate beyond bursts of clarity in a fog of bewilderment.
She’d been out of it for twenty-four hours with little water and without food.

The door to her room was locked from the inside. At the thought of being here again after dark, she twisted the key then yanked the door open. And stared down at an antique silver tray, filled
with cutlery, plates, two silver tureens. An envelope rested between the teapot and butter dish. Beside it, a red hatbox, with a folded cream garment laid upon its lid, and a pair of narrow white
slippers.

Carefully, Catherine brought the tray inside and placed it on the writing table. The tureens were cold. But she’d eat the old hat before she touched another morsel of Maude’s food.
Where did they even buy it from? The presence of food in the house was incongruous. Nothing, nothing at all, was making sense. Three days to be upset by a horrid film, frightened repeatedly, chased
through the grounds by flies, to suffer the kind of delusions she attributed to the insane . . . Edith in that metal tub. The smells. The stairs. ‘Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.’

She had come here as a valuer of antiques, but that role now seemed so distant as to be irrelevant. She hadn’t valued a single item. Because they were still testing her, assessing her.
Maybe no stranger from the outside world could just saunter in here and make off with the kind of haul that would make international news. Or was all of this preparation?

But for what?

Her hunch about Edith’s dementia extended into fears of a dreadful complicity, as if she had made an agreement with something poorly explained to her, or deliberately concealed.

Catherine could smell the delicate floral perfume wafting from the ancient lace of the gown upon the wooden dummy. It tried to insinuate its presence inside her head. She fingered the yellowing
cotton of the hat; the silk flowers piled about its brim were brittle with age. The embroidered shawl was probably a hundred years old and even touching it made her shudder. So small and stiff were
the handmade shoes she could tell at a glance she wouldn’t get three toes inside them.

She tore open the envelope and drew out the stiff paper, watermarked with Mason’s initials. The same stationery posted to the office and hand-delivered to her home.

She struggled through the contents of the note, written in Edith’s unsteady hand. When she finished she slumped on the bed and stared at the dark window.

Was he truly here? Had Mike come for her? The very idea of him being close made her feel sicker. No, he had not come to save her, because he had come with a girl.
Her.
Mike had brought
her,
Tara, with him. Such an act of feckless cruelty suddenly suggested to her that she had never really known him, and may only have been prey to her own wishful thinking for the entire
duration of their relationship. How could she have been so wrong? On what level, and in what way, were his actions even remotely acceptable?

And why was he here? How did he find it? Leonard! Leonard may have confronted him and let it slip out. Or even told him she needed help, reassurance, a friendly face, something like that, after
she’d made the emotional phone call to her boss at the end of her first day. The very idea of Leonard interfering made her furious. It would mean Leonard had ignored her wishes, and thought
he knew what was best for her. If he still wanted to sell M. H. Mason’s shit, after what she had been through, she’d wheel him here and he could do the valuation himself. Time for her
boss to step up because she was stepping down.

Tara was now within the orbit of the Red House, and its considerable treasures. So maybe this had nothing to do with Leonard, because Mike may have already told Tara about what Catherine was
valuing here, the Mason originals, and Tara had insisted they come here.
Bitch.
Tara would have smelled the house’s immaculate antiquities from the porch.

Tara had taken her boyfriend, but that was not enough. She’d be pitching for a television documentary by tomorrow morning. While she’d been reduced to delirium and a half-crazed
paranoia, Tara had come to spoil her and Leonard Osberne’s exclusivity.

She suddenly felt so deeply persecuted she thought herself condemned. Her past, her trances and her enemies all seemed to have gathered here, in some dreadful critical mass, specifically for the
purpose of destroying what was left of her mind. She sensed a powerful controlling force, behind her life, tactically planning her downfall. Maybe it had always been there, as she had often
suspected, and she was a hapless marionette in a cruelty play that began the day she’d been born and given away by her natural mother.

‘Oh Christ. Oh Jesus Christ.’

She felt unstable. Dangerously volatile, like she could hurt herself out of sheer frustration.

Clothes, bag, camera, laptop, phone.
Get your shit together, girl, and just go.

No, wait. To flee in her car would mean passing through the hideous village and the pageant. But there was no other way out. The Red House was a trap at the end of the lane. The village a
gatehouse.

They all wanted her at the pageant. The festival needed a fool. A star attraction to be mocked, betrayed, and deceived.

But who could possibly be down there? The idea of a pageant in that place was patently ridiculous. Another delusion of two twisted old women who’d either drugged her, or made her condition
worse to keep her here. What she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, of the village’s residents weren’t fit to participate in anything but their own funerals.