House of Small Shadows (29 page)

‘Edith.’

‘Yeah, Edith. Tara wanted to talk to her about a film. Edith said she would be here, with you. But we couldn’t find Edith, and Tara hasn’t come back out of that church. This is
all wrong. Jesus, this place. We should just go, now.’

‘Keys. The car keys! We’ve got to find your bitch.’

‘Hey, I told you. I messed up. I was wrong.’

‘Bit late for that, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t go up there. I’m not. Not again. It’s . . . I think it was a funeral, or something. I can’t look at that woman again, in the coffin.’

‘What woman? What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t know. She was in this case. It was all lit with these red lights. I was watching from the door. Then the lights went out. The doors shut. But Tara was still inside. What the
fuck are they doing in the dark?’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Catherine began walking to the church. She would get the keys, but she wouldn’t look at the woman in the case. Almost certainly more of Mason’s handiwork.
She’d seen enough of that for a lifetime.

‘Don’t go.’

‘What about the car keys, you moron!’

Mike bit the inside of his mouth. She’d never seen his eyes so wild-looking before, never seen him this frightened.

‘Fuck the keys. Let’s walk out of here. But I’m not going back in there. I’m taking off.’

‘I don’t have any shoes! How can I walk?’

‘Shit! Look, if we get split up, I’m going to wait for you. By the car, yeah? It’s parked in that lane, by the pole. I’m not leaving you out here. This place is all
wrong. I’ll be waiting, yeah? Cath! Cath!’

‘My hero!’

‘I don’t care what you think of me. But I won’t leave you here. If you two go back to that house, I’m coming up there to get you, yeah?’

She was right. Tara had come here. No doubt with the sense of the antiques documentary story of the decade filling her nostrils, as well as a perfectly laid-out vengeance narrowing her reptile
eyes with anticipation. Take Mike and break off their relationship. Show up at the Red House and inveigle herself into Edith’s confidence, as only Tara could do, to spoil the valuation and
auction with promises of a lucrative television contract, augmented with lies about what Catherine had done at Handle With Care. Edith would be thrilled by the subterfuge and scandal. Her lonely,
mad existence would be lit up with even more of Catherine’s misery, and with new talk of the greater riches available through Tara’s influence.

‘I’ll kill . . .’ Catherine’s attempt to speak broke into a sob of rage that felt like it could damage her.

But then she smiled, and she felt as if a terrible constriction had been released from around her heart.

Let her have it. Let her waste her time.

Even if Edith had been in possession of the Rothman treasures, lost when the
Titanic
went down, Catherine knew she’d rather die than value the Mason estate. Tara was welcome to
the Red House. And she was welcome to Edith. It would all be evidence soon, in a police investigation. There would be yellow tape strung across that porch not long after she found a phone signal
and directed the authorities up that lane.

‘Cath! Cath! Cath!’ she could hear Mike’s voice behind her.

Catherine pinched her nose to stop whatever was running out of it, and even more strongly now, and carried on to the church. As she moved she located the wet wipes in her bag and tore one free
to wipe at her face.

Once she was level with the gaping red doorway of the shabby scout hall, a needle was scraped out of a groove inside the church. The awful metallic rendition of ‘Greensleeves’
stopped abruptly.

In the sudden silence, behind her and further down the street, a door slammed shut.

She turned her head to see if her craven ex-boyfriend had followed her up the street.

The blood-light from the church and scout hall dwindled into shadows as it bled down the narrow lane. But Mike was no longer standing where she’d left him only moments before. In fact,
there was no one behind her, or even present in the lane.

But all considerations of her ex-boyfriend were erased at the sight of the vessel, as well as its murky occupant, that lumbered through the light of the church vestry. An object preceded by a
bustling crowd in vintage costume.

The casket was lowered to skim beneath the arch, but then rose, shaking, as if those who transported it had suddenly stood up straight.

Catherine took the long box for an antique coffin, made out of long glass panes held together by iron brackets. Some kind of sarcophagus as Mike had suggested.

What she could see of the occupant of the rectangular casket looked like a mannequin. A small female dummy dressed in a lavish black gown and sat upon a high-backed chair; tiny and immobile,
save for the wobbles as it was clumsily manoeuvred down the church path. Nothing of the face, beside a small whitish oval, could be seen behind its black veil.

She began to fear she might be in the presence of an embalmed body of local significance. Thoughts of Edith’s mother came to her again and were as unwelcome as before. Had Violet Mason
been preserved as a saint and locked inside the wretched church? But if she’d died after her brother, then who had preserved Violet?

But then, it couldn’t be Violet; the body was too small.

Since her first visit to the Red House she wondered if anything seen thus far had filled her with as much revulsion as the strange glass canister and its shrunken occupant. She tried desperately
to convince herself that the effigy had been constructed from papier-mâché and dressed in funereal black clothing. Unless a child had been employed to represent a female character
pertinent to the tradition of the village.

A float draped in black silk followed from the church to join with and to bear the horrible cargo.

The crowd chattered excitedly in voices too low to hear. They merged into one messy column in the shadows before the front of the scout hall.

Catherine looked back down the lane. Mike had gone. But this is what he had seen. Something that really upset him. She understood why.

Catherine took two steps away from the scout hall. But while she’d been staring with a horrified fascination at the relic, the crowd and their effigy had produced a ring around the front
of the hall and church, blocking the entire width of the lane. They moved the wobbling sarcophagus right at her.

Again, with what felt like a horrible inevitability, she was trapped. She retreated up the little path and ducked inside the hall. There was nowhere else to go. And nothing could have tempted
her to stand her ground and be made to peer inside the upright glass cabinet. If she hadn’t moved so swiftly she would have been forced to see the occupant of the sarcophagus in much greater
detail. She would have been face to face with it.

Inside the hall she came upon multiple rows of collapsible wooden chairs older than the narrow building that encased the furniture. The only light was frail and filtered
through the dirty glass of three small stage lights, fixed above the curtained podium at the far end of the hall.

Catherine moved along the back row of seats and sat in a tiny uncomfortable chair at a distance from the aisle, and as far away as she could get from a small wooden stage draped in velvet
curtains.

She bit her bottom lip, and dabbed a wet wipe at the fresh blood gathering under her nose. She must look a fright. Barefoot in the white dress with blood running over her mouth. Somehow her
ghastly appearance seemed fitting.

Tara must still be close. She must have been inside the church to watch whatever pageant service had recently been conducted. Tara hadn’t come out of the church but may have been at the
end of the procession. Maybe she was with Edith. If Tara entered the scout hall with the crowd, Catherine would have to get the car keys off her, find the car and leave. But how would she get the
keys?

When she realized her hands were shaking, she clasped them together in her lap. Maybe it was the thought of seeing
her
again that contributed to her palsy, or perhaps she had entirely,
finally, lost her wits.

All she had seen this night might appear eccentric but unthreatening to a mind less disturbed than her own. It was possible that her sanity had unravelled and she was now stuck in a continuous
loop of grotesque fantasy erupting from her subconscious mind. In fact, within near total darkness in unfamiliar surroundings, she must remember that anything could seem to be just that:
possible.

She prayed she was delusional, ill, drugged, anything but fully lucid. Because if she were mad, at least what she was experiencing was imagined and not real.

And into the hall they came. They hobbled and they scuttled. They shuffled and they crept. But moved in haste to find seats.

Some of the little figures crowded the floor before the stage like children before a Punch and Judy show, until the hall was filled with the groans and squeaks of small bodies shifting upon the
wooden chairs. And they all looked forward, at the stage.

Catherine suspected they were aware of her, but deliberately ignoring her.

The members of the audience were so shrunken in their capes she doubted a single one was younger than ninety. But how had some of them moved so swiftly outside?

In the vague burgundy light she also stared at enough vintage millinery and evening dress to fill a small museum. Watteau hats and great headdresses drooped with leaves and half-roses, forming
misshapen rows of black humps up to the stage.

The closest veils in her row were black, some spotted, some patterned, and all covered hints of bleached faces. Gauzy and spangled fans quickly spread. All of the men needed a haircut. She felt
like she was stuck in some vast and surreal Memento Mori photograph.

Hair and nails continue to grow after death.

She stopped the train of thought, because it led to assumptions that would be unbearable while trapped in the dark among these ‘people’.

There was still no sign of Tara, or Edith or Maude for that matter.

From the seats before her, the fragrance of musty fabric began to drift and settle about her, as if the garments had only been recently released from confinement in damp, airless spaces. In
unheated rooms in old houses. She knew the odour from the house clearances she had attended. Old bottled scents similar to Edith’s perfumery had been lavishly applied to cover the smells of
age, and to conceal something else: a trace of the chemical pungency of the Red House. It made her sick in Mason’s workshop and began to turn her stomach again now.

She rummaged in her bag for more scented wet wipes so she could hold a handful against her nose and mouth. It was too late to stand up and make her way out. She would draw attention to herself
as she climbed over the little laps in the dark.

She would be forced to sit in the stench. The hall was airless, the windows blacked out; if the door closed she might faint.

Where was Tara if she had not come in with the congregation? And Mike? He was there, behind her in the street, and then . . . Could he have moved out of the lane so quickly? And had Tara left
the church and found Mike? Would they leave without her? She swallowed a sob.

Directly beside her, though the small woman had covered her face with a fan, her neighbour’s exposed lower legs distracted Catherine. Wool gaiters were side-buttoned over the woman’s
high-cut shoes. Above the covered ankles, two pale legs were visible.

As if aware of her scrutiny, the legs withdrew beneath the seat of the chair. But not soon enough to prevent Catherine’s glimpse of what resembled carved ivory limbs within iron callipers;
legs that curved out of a hint of leather straps about the knees.

Catherine made to stand up and get out. But the doors were now closed.

The glass sarcophagus stood upright before the sealed entrance, as if the figure inside was present to watch a performance. The wooden throne inside the glass case was festooned with briars and
flowers were entwined around the legs of the chair. The tiny figure upon the throne remained still, the veiled face obscured. Before the lights dimmed even further, Catherine noticed a tiny hand
upon the armrest. It was as white as bone.

She stifled a scream.

The whispers, shuffles and creaks around her settled to silence and anticipation inside the black hall. Only the stage was now visible.

Her sense of the walls and ceiling and floor slipped away with the going of the light. All was removed from the world and the invisible audience hung in darkness before the stage. Where she was
in space and even time, she feared she was now losing her grasp of.

The curtains shrieked across their rails and revealed the stage.

In the tense darkness the din of applause subsided.

Catherine was sure the audience had been stamping the heels of their feet against the floorboards. But the noise of applause, the sound of wood knocking against wood, was too high up and she
felt no vibrations through the soles of her shoes. So they must have been banging their chairs with hard objects and not clapping with wooden hands. An idea her paranoia was only too happy to
revive.

Now the performance had ended, the stage lights slowly glowed red, but illumined little beyond the head of the hall. When as much light returned as the tired bulbs were able to emit, she was
relieved to see that the curtains around the stage were closed. The performance had drained her. She would be unsteady on her feet if she tried to stand.

Now the tired old world had re-formed around her, its dusty ruins could not compete with the vitality of the drama. The duration of the play was intentionally short, because no one could have
withstood any more of it.

What she had seen through her fingers in snatches was all she had been able to bear in the reeking darkness of the blacked-out hall. The recording of what must have been the voices of M. H.
Mason and his sister, Violet, she had plugged her ears against with torn wet wipes.

What the script had been based upon she did not want to guess. What she’d heard of the narration accompanying the activity of the marionettes had been as original and insane as what Mason
had left in his study.