House of Small Shadows (26 page)

Desperate for embellishment, for an explanation, she moved down to the next drawer, at the bottom of the cabinet. The final drawer was comprised entirely of folders containing pictures of the
night sky and moon in its various stages, as if Mason had picked up astronomy as one of his compulsions during an enigmatic journey that included marionette theatre and the extermination of
thousands of small mammals. His approach to whatever interested him was always fastidious, even scientific, but his goals still utterly bemused her. This was no good to her, to what she wanted to
know. She kicked the final drawer shut.

Catherine moved her attention to the second cabinet. Its contents were more in keeping with what she expected from Mason, but soon regressed into a creative degeneracy that made her feel so
sick, she wondered if she would ever recover from what she saw.

The dissection, emptying of internal organs and then meticulous fleshing of hides, of what were undoubtedly small animals, filled the entirety of the top drawer. She looked at no more than seven
of the pictures – four rats, a squirrel and what resembled a peeled badger upon a slab – before she had to look away and press her knuckles to her lips. But it was the final picture
that most affected her.

At first, she was convinced Mason had been preserving a dark-skinned child. A closer, less horrified scrutiny, revealed it to be an ape that Mason had photographed after making a long dorsal
incision in its back. At that point in the procedure, the monkey’s arms draped long black rags of hairy skin that had been rolled down from its hands. The empty strips of flesh looked like
Opera-length gloves.

On the reverse side, Mason had written ‘Felix Hessen’s Hoolock Gibbon from Regent Park Zoo’. So perhaps it had been a private commission to preserve an ape. The shock of
believing, for just a moment, that Mason had been skinning a child forced Catherine to slam this drawer shut.

The collection in the next section of the cabinet was equally disturbing. Carefully indexed photographs featured the still-articulated bones from animal remains, augmented with line drawings of
wooden limbs replicating the true movement of joints. Several large albums’ worth of individual doll parts had also been photographed against black cloth. Body parts removed from what had
once belonged to a set of expensive and lifelike J.D. Kestner and Simon and Halbig dolls. Jointed limbs, mohair wigs, rotatable hands, the bisque socket heads of female dolls, and torsos moulded
out of porcelain to resemble children’s bodies abounded. The classic blue glass eyes and open mouths lined with little moulded teeth were the giveaway that they were German. After opening
thousands of animals, Mason seemed to have progressed to disarticulating the more sophisticated varieties of doll.

The files of photographs that followed the doll parts forced Catherine to utter, ‘Dear God’ into the air of the now stifling room, so fragrant with stale tobacco, brittle paper and
polished wood.

A vast collection of amputee photographs from the Boer war, Great War and even the American Civil War awaited, as did line drawings and photographs of tin and wooden limbs, alongside their laced
leather harnesses and the complicated hydraulic systems that replicated human joints. One-hundred-year-old catalogues, featuring the most sophisticated prosthetic limb designs, from Gustav Hermann
and Giuliano Vanghetti, had been slipped amongst the antique medical photographs.

Mason may have mastered taxidermy to a level unmatched in his lifetime, or since, but it had surely functioned as a precursor to the next step: an obsession with real surgery, and with the
fitting of prosthetic limbs to stumps, and with suturing torn human flesh.

Randomly, Catherine flicked through half a dozen of the medical photographs, and saw all of the dead skin, patch-worked with stitches, that she ever cared to see. She closed the drawer using
what little strength remained in her arms.

Incapacity. Disability. Deformity. Amputees. The horrors of the front. His own facial disfigurement. Callipers, crutches and wheelchairs. It all swirled like a horrible carousel through her
mind, and made her nausea worse. The man had been traumatized by his experience of war and his great personal loss to such an extent that he must have been insane the entire time he lived in this
house after coming home from the front. He’d incubated here, cultivating his regressive, though artful, vision. He had evolved here. But into what?

The contents of the penultimate drawer seemed to attest to her theory, and revealed evidence of experiments of a far more intimate nature that so shocked Catherine she knew that when she left
the house tonight she would never return.

Amongst a sizeable private collection of Victorian Momento Mori photographs, featuring doleful families in their Sunday best, sat around the smartly dressed and waxen-faced cadavers of their
recently deceased infants, Mason’s curious obsession had turned to his sister.

In the 1940s, according to the dates on the rear of the pictures, printed in Roman numerals alongside more of the Greek code, he had photographed his own sister in a variety of foundation wear
and crippling S-Bend corsets against a black backdrop. Despite the severe countenance of his sister’s thin masculine face, the pictures issued an uncomfortably erotic charge. Though the
composition and style of the photographs still suggested an artistic purpose was behind their creation.

Violet Mason’s flesh was never naked. From the throat down, she had been stitched into some kind of patchwork second skin, made from the type of brown cloth once used to manufacture the
stuffed bodies of dolls, at a time when only the heads and hands of dolls were constructed from china or porcelain. Over the tight sackcloth skin, layered petticoats were then arranged, layer by
layer, to eventually produce a complete constriction, a muffling of the flesh. In addition, Violet’s middle was always bound tightly to shape her torso.

Her legs were gripped by iron callipers and thick leather boots, as if she suffered some crippling disability. The arrangement also resembled a form of punishment. Perhaps it was. Edith must
have been an illegitimate child. So was this Mason’s reaction to his sister taking a lover?

On two pictures, prior to the layers of boned foundation wear and underwear being built over her thin body, Violet’s loins were revealed. Stitched with an alarming suggestion of
permanence, her abdomen had been fitted into what resembled brown leather shorts.

Applied over a layer of the cloth-like skin, the leather breeches were sown up her inner thighs, in the same way Mason had stitched closed the skin of an animal over an artificial wooden body,
or a plaster mould in other pictures. It looked like a primitive chastity device.

After each binding session, Violet Mason must have been cut out of the shorts and cloth suit, or the stitches would have been unpicked. At least, Catherine hoped so.

What was being done to Violet Mason’s head was equally strange and sinister. Perpetually built up to grotesque levels, her hair was intricately piled in the cottage-loaf style that Edith
had replicated. Catherine knew from other pictures that Mason’s sister had thin black hair, so the seemingly endless array of profiles of his sister’s head proved that the elaborate
styles that dwarfed her bony face had been constructed from donor hair and rags.

As the studies of the head section of the pictorial archive progressed, the face of Violet was consistently overlaid with a series of veils from the broad brims of Watteau hats. Behind the sheer
face veils, the Masons had begun experimenting with a crude form of masking combined with theatrical make-up. Violet’s face was often so tightly bound with gauze, her features were restricted
into a narrow pout, with her mouth forming a small dollish O.

Increasingly, her eyes were painted on too, over closed eyelids, with huge black lashes strikingly visible through the layers of netting. She had also worn porcelain masks that had either been
decorated with cosmetics, or were actual life-sized doll faces, but always further obscured through a layering of veils.

It was as if M. H. Mason was fetishizing his sister as a doll, or perfecting something upon a living model that Catherine did not want to consider.

Before opening the final drawer, she questioned whether she could tolerate any more. What had begun as a frenzy of rummaging had tailed off into an appalled gaping.

She steeled herself, knelt down, and opened the last compartment, silently praying for a collection of seamstress dress patterns.

Catherine held onto the cabinet to prevent herself from sitting down and allowing the shaking to take over.

Her recognition of the buildings, photographed in black and white and collected at the front of the first drawer, had been immediate. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education. The home. The
special school for special children in Ellyll Fields.

An earlier incarnation of the institution than the one she had known, this version had lawns cut and trimmed within paths, long black windows, and old cars parked out front. But what had Mason
been doing messing around with that school, and a place within a few hundred yards of her home? She scrabbled through the pictures looking for dates. 1951, 1952, 1957 in Roman numerals. Long before
her time. It offered some relief, though not much.

Inside another file she saw a face she had known since childhood, a face of an innocent, smiling girl with sightless eyes that had always filled her with dread: little Angela Prescott. The blind
girl of her nan’s stories, who had been snatched from Magnis Burrow before Catherine was born. This was the iconic face of Ellyll Fields that most of its inhabitants had tried to forget.

The photograph of Angela had been cut out of a newspaper. As had the likenesses of Margaret Reid and Helen Teme, her companions in tragedy, that were also stored in the same file. The cuttings
were inside a transparent envelope, the type stamp collectors used. The same images from newspaper clippings that her nan once kept in a biscuit tin.

The connection of Mason to the abducted girls filled her mind with a static of confusion that was underpinned with a dread so cold it made her shiver. The shock settled into a feeling of nausea,
and a fear for her own safety that made the hair follicles of her scalp prickle. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths to settle herself.

Mason was an old man when the girls went missing. And at the time he was also a man not long for the world. He’d killed himself in the early sixties. Cut his throat. So was this why?
Because of what he had done to little girls? From animals to puppets to children . . .

She thought of the pretty little kittens in dresses. And the demented, but grotesquely beautiful world of preserved animals and dolls he had created inside his own home. His connection to the
missing girls suddenly seemed plausible. Back in the fifties would anyone even have thought twice about an elderly man, with a priestly bearing, taking photographs of a school?

Or was he just an archivist, or a historian of the locale’s stranger byways and most curious events?
Please let him be.

There was nothing else in the two Magnis Burrow files to condemn him as a kidnapper and murderer. Just the clippings and scores of photographs of the school and its grounds.

She shouldn’t even be in the room, she was trespassing, but she suddenly wanted to confront Edith with the pictures.

Her horror dwindled into confusion when she perused the next file. The photographs were mounted in embossed paper frames and all featured another child, but one she did not recognize. Judging by
the quality of the paper and the tones in the photographs, she guessed they were developed in the forties. Dates on the rear confirmed her hunch.

The first picture showed a little boy sat in a wheelchair outside a stone cottage. His legs were withered. The same boy appeared in two other pictures taken on the perfect lawn of a large
orderly garden. In the first garden picture he was alone, smiling at the camera. In the second picture he sat watching the blurred activity upon the stage of Mason’s theatre. So the latter
two pictures must have been taken in the rear garden of the Red House. There had been a disabled child at the Red House around the time of the Second World War.

Catherine screwed up her eyes and scrutinized the blurred frenzy of activity on the stage of the puppet theatre. But the only details she could determine were suggestions of an old bonnet around
an indistinct face, and what appeared to be two thin arms thrust into the wavy air above the bonneted figure’s head. She looked away, dizzy from a powerful jolt of déjà vu.

Questions darted through her mind but would not settle into coherent answers. Maybe this was Edith’s son? She might have followed her mother’s example and had a child out of wedlock.
There was no evidence of Edith’s father in the house. And she had been too polite to ask about Edith’s dad.

If Edith was his mother, the boy could have been carrying the same congenital deformity that beset Edith. But Edith had lived to her nineties, so where was the child now?

In another picture the disabled boy sat between Violet and what Catherine assumed was a young Edith Mason. Violet wore a long black dress that concealed her feet at one end and pinched her
throat at the other extremity. Edith was dressed in a near-identical fashion. The severe expression on Edith’s face matched her mother’s. Only the boy was smiling, and he held
Edith’s pale hand.

Catherine’s trembling fingers, that she could not still, loosened another photograph from out of the paper folder. The picture featured the boy in the wheelchair and M. H. Mason, the
patriarch, sat in a garden chair. Mason wore a white linen suit and hat, but had failed to fully conceal the devastated side of his face, even with his head angled away.

Behind the boy’s chair, Edith, draped in her widow’s weeds, stood ramrod-straight without the aid of a wheelchair. So she had not been disabled when younger. Her face was as
bloodless and long with misery as it seemed to have remained into her ninth decade. Catherine wondered if Violet had been the photographer.