House of Small Shadows (35 page)

This new light must be another trick of the Red House, of Maude, the killer, or both.

Or whatever else inhabited the building that could not be seen.

Stop it!

She steadied herself against a wall before moving on. She was being directed to something she could not second-guess.

Play along and identify it.

Sudden jolts of recollection made her whimper. Edith’s collapsed and lifeless body. The separation of flesh on Mike’s back, that black slit. A cold, bloodless breast above the murky
surface of the fluid in the bath. The crinkled face of Edith’s mother, those supple but limp hands. Catherine tried to douse the sparks of recent memory before they lit her up with panic.

The preposterous and sickening nature of what she had been made to confront in both the workshop and the attic she didn’t so much refuse to examine, but was now unable to consider. If she
even tried to, she knew she would fall to pieces and not be able to put herself back together again.

She raised her face to sniff at the air that now blossomed with a floral aroma. The corridor was infused with a scent of roses. And the air was warm enough for the blood to return to her
skin.

Perhaps it was another trick, or a late welcome from a building she must resist. But she could not suppress her gratitude for the return of her sight, and for a smell beyond the caustic burn of
the chemicals, and for something to touch her skin that wasn’t cold.

The Red House was silent.

She moved on with the scalpel held out front. As she passed the closed doors in the passage, she watched them closely and felt her neck tense once they were behind her. She was as wary of the
building as she would be of a violent bully that occasionally smiled at her.

At the stairwell she looked over her shoulder. The corridor remained empty and well lit.

The fragrance of flowers was even more potent by the stairs, as if the aroma filled the great stairwell to the roof. The wooden floors and walls of the adjoining passage were also lit with a
hearty crimson radiance from wall lights that had previously emitted a murky glow.

She peered over the banister rail. The hall floor looked as if it had been recently polished and buffed. She went to the arched window of the landing, opposite the corridor that held
Edith’s room and the nursery. Drew the heavy curtains to be confronted with a wooden shutter. She opened the shutters and peered through.

Saw nothing but her own pale and haggard face in the reflection. The glass was so clean and the world beyond the window so black, the pane functioned as a mirror. Over her shoulders, she saw the
second floor of the Red House tunnel away into the distance.

A casement window. She put the scalpel down upon the little padded bench before the pane of glass and gripped the latch. Turned it and gingerly pushed the window open onto cold air and a night
so still, lightless and silent, she could have been looking into a void. The windows of the ground floor must have been concealed behind drapes and shutters too, because not a streak of light
escaped from below to illumine the absence.

Where had the people with the candles gone?
Were they like Edith and Mason, the fly-keeper? Did they come alive and then fall down like dolls?
She killed the train of thought because it
made her hands tremble.

Catherine sat down upon the window seat and pulled her ankles together, placed her hands between her knees and began to rock backwards and forwards. She did it out of habit in moments of great
anxiety, and God knew there had been a few of those.

What to do?

The doors to the rooms downstairs were locked and their windows were unavailable to her for an escape. She would never be able to bring herself to jump from a first-floor window, unless the
place was on fire.

Had the world truly been removed from outside these solid walls?

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Where was Maude? She must have turned up the lights and locked the front and back doors. Catherine stood up. Her vision blurred with hot tears. ‘Maude! Maude!’

No one answered.

She clenched her jaws and looked at the scalpel to usher a spurt of lunatic courage, then ran back at the corridor housing Edith’s bedroom and the nursery. She turned the door handle of
the nursery. Locked. Ran to the door across the corridor and tried that. Locked. Worked her way back down to the end of the passage and yanked at the handle of every door. Locked, locked, locked,
locked.

She wanted to scream again, but doing something, anything, kept her mind off matters her chaotic mind must be prevented from dwelling upon.

Catherine arrived back to where she’d started her search and stood outside Edith’s bedroom. Without much vigour left in her limp arm, she pushed the handle. The door clicked
open.

She went through and shut the door behind her, then locked it. This room she was allowed inside. She was allowed to see the attic and she was allowed to see the workshop. Something without
speech, perhaps even without a tongue, was telling her a story. It was like walking through the cells of a horrible comic book with red pages that smelled of flowers. And on this page she was
allowed inside Edith’s bedchamber.

Scores of dolls watched her with their perfect and placid faces. Their tiny glass eyes caught the scarlet light. The bedside lamps, the standing lamp and the ceiling light all burned brightly.
The curtains were drawn against the absence beyond the windows.

Catherine raised the skirts of the heavy eiderdown and looked under the bed, but refused to contemplate what she was looking for. She saw nothing down there besides a ceramic chamber pot.

She opened each of the great wardrobes and then pulled the hung clothes back and forth with one hand. In the other hand, the scalpel was ready to jab. She opened drawers and raised the lacy
tablecloths on the small tables. She peered behind the great mirror of the dressing table. She filled the grate of the fireplace with spare bedlinen and packed it in tight, before concealing the
aperture with the black iron cover.

She sat in the middle of the bed and watched the door. She rested the hand that grasped the scalpel beside her thigh, and waited.

When Catherine awoke with a gasp, she was still propped up in the middle of the bed, inside Edith’s room, with a row of plump cushions supporting her back.

The back of her eyes felt bruised and she was nauseous. All of the muscles in her legs ached, her feet were terribly sore. She was ill, exhausted, fatigued by going in and out of shock, still
drugged, but she had only passed out from sheer exhaustion. And for no more than a few seconds before some inner alarm jolted her awake.

About the room, the lights still burned and the house remained perfumed with the sweet scent of roses. Though the room had taken on a new aspect. All of its dimensions and accoutrements were as
she remembered before she nodded off, but the air had changed. Had become delicate.

The alteration might have been imperceptible were her situation not so desperate, but she identified a lessening of the density and pressure of the room’s atmosphere. It was also no longer
warm and airless. The space she occupied felt softer and flimsier, cooler. Perhaps it was her imagination, and despite her physical discomforts, she no longer felt so heavy, but was marginally more
buoyant, or even insubstantial, upon the bedding.

Catherine climbed off the bed and approached the door. She glanced up at the dolls and refused to engage with a sense that they appeared happier. Beneath the bottom of the door a hint of white
light had appeared on the floorboards.

Making as little noise as possible she turned the key in the well-crafted lock. The key turned and issued the merest click. Catherine inched the door open. And blinked in sunlight.

On the landing, and at the end of the corridor, the curtains and shutters had been opened and the corridor was flooded with strong unseasonal sunlight. Down below, she received an impression
that the heavy front doors had been cast aside as she slept, and that each and every arched window on the ground floor had been thrown wide to welcome the light, as well as the crisp warm air and
its scents: a bouquet of freshly cut grass and crowded flower beds sweet with pollen.

From above, the scarlet glower of the stained glass had been replaced by a pinkish hue that tinted the air in a way she thought enchanting. She couldn’t have been asleep for more than a
few seconds, of that she was almost certain, but somehow she had woken in daylight.

The great perfumed house seemed joyous at her waking, keen to show itself as a place of luxury and discernment, as she had once hoped it would be; a peaceful magnificence that guarded the beauty
and craftsmanship of an age she had studied and admired her whole adult life. It was no longer a place of small shadows and a murderer’s light. The stench of death had left its rooms. It was
making a new declaration of intent:
This is a house you would not wish to leave, and you could only dream of a return to a house on the borderland of wonders.

She visualized the dusty lane that she must run down to get away. Restraining her desire to rush madly for the front doors, she descended the stairs slowly, her eyes everywhere, especially up
the stairwell to spot small faces that might peer down. There were none. Then her scrutiny turned to the ground floor where a lumpen figure, with a thatch of white hair, might be ready to welcome
her with a fleshing tool, or worse. But Maude was nowhere to be seen either.

Catherine paused in the hall as her nerves cried for her to delay no longer, and to rush at the front doors before they were closed and locked upon her as they had been the night before.

The light outside the Red House was near blinding. Here was the first sunlit and cloudless day of summer, but one that burned stronger than any she had known.

The arched doorframe resembled a planetary eclipse, as if some great star moved through the firmament. The light that entered the building infused her, began to open a receptivity to a sense of
beauty and hope she had received but glimmers of before. It was irresistible. Childlike excitement fizzed awake and tingled in every cell of her body. A broad comprehension of something significant
that remained indefinable, tried to spread through her with the warmth and light. True meaning was within her grasp and an anticipation of the revelation shortened her breath. A sense of something
her conscious mind resisted by trying to confront and understand.

When she looked into the light her mind had never been so clear, so awake, so vital. Every sense and nerve ending stretched to its euphoric pinnacle.

She shielded her eyes as she took a few steps closer to the entrance. Through the glare she could see a cultivated front garden, and beyond the garden wall a great ocean of meadowland stretching
to the shore of distant, pleasingly rounded hills that shimmered in a nourishing heat.

You could walk forever in that direction, but you would return here.

She paused on the threshold. This world outside was lit by a great white sun, one that complemented the vista as if her own eyes were covered with a camera’s soft filters. It was like she
was in the same building as yesterday, but somewhere else too. If she were to walk down the lane she would arrive at the village and the church. Any further in that direction and all would be
unrecognizable. She sensed this, but didn’t know how.

She turned and looked behind her. Beyond the hall and at the far end of the utility corridor, the distant back door of the Red House was now open. The doorway was a rectangle that issued an even
more intense light into the building. Light that flooded the previously unlit passage.

The dazzling rear doorway briefly flickered as someone moved across it. From the aperture she heard the distant clink of cutlery upon china. Above the fragrance of the flowers wafted the aroma
of warm cakes and fresh bread. She smelled hot sweet tea and the refreshing zest of chilled summer wines. Her mouth watered. She drank deep of the breeze that refreshed her face like a plunge into
transparent seawater on a stifling day.

Her face was wet with tears.

She crossed the hall and walked towards the back door. Out there were her answers. The lump in her throat was the most tangible and solid part of her weightless body and its effortless drift
towards that square of light.

She covered the distance quickly, between rose-tinted walls. Proud doors were shut on wonders that would surely overwhelm her if she entered any room. She approached the light of the garden
without fear and near burst through the portal that beckoned her with such urgency.

So verdant was the garden, the sun’s reflection on the lawn made her shield her eyes. She’d never seen land so fertile. Intensely green foliage and grass, sprayed with orange,
buttercup and purple flowers rendered her breathless at the beauty she surveyed.

Behind the glinting panes of the greenhouse came the suggestions of great waxy tropical plants. The garden furniture was as white as a cricket pavilion in a dream. The wood of the theatre
gleamed between velvet wings and below a watercolour backdrop Monet might have painted. Beyond the trees that bordered the garden’s far boundary she caught glimpses of a vast English meadow
that shimmered in the heat.

The bee-keeper raised his gloved hand and waved from behind a trellis, from which roses both entwined and burst red, white and pink. Behind the mesh of his hood she could see no face, she was
too far away. But the gentle grandfatherly ease with which he moved amongst the indistinct hives faded her memory of the unpleasant thing she had so recently seen in the same outfit.

Seated at the wrought-iron table, its paint so brilliant a white it made her squint, the two women, dressed from throat to foot in black gowns, sat within the shade of a tree. Veils had been
unfurled from wide-brimmed hats, and obscured the blanched faces they had turned towards her. Their pale hands matched the china of their raised teacups. A third chair was drawn back from the
table.