House of Small Shadows (6 page)

Catherine took a step inside as though the floor was ice, her hands outstretched, her eyes so wide they stung in their sockets. The air was close, humid, thick with the scent of polished wood
and the chemical taint. Which was stronger, more pungent the further she moved through the darkness.

‘Stay on the left. The left!’ Edith warned, though a stern tone did not disguise her mirth, if not glee, at Catherine’s discomfort.

The low heels of Catherine’s sandals clattered and scraped across the floorboards, the sound rang hollow in what she sensed was a large room. There was nothing soft inside the space to
cushion the noise or to protect her.

Catherine looked back at the grotesque but featureless silhouette of Edith Mason, framed by the faint ruddy light of the ground-floor passage. The figure was motionless, propped upright, the
outline of the head ungainly and vast upon wizened shoulders.

Groping through oblivion in the unfamiliar room of a sinister house suddenly felt like a test combined with a childish dare and a horrible prank designed by a cruel mind. She was doing this for
the contract and she loathed herself for it, her actions were suddenly unacceptable to her. She was allowing herself to be goaded, to be manipulated, to be bullied for some illusory promise of
advancement. Was that not part of the reason she left London? She’d not even been here an hour and she was frightened in the dark and Edith Mason was inside her head. She grimaced at the
elderly woman’s silhouette and despised it.

‘Don’t pout, dear.’

Catherine flinched.
How could she see?

‘You wanted to see them. That’s why you came here. You must work for your supper.’

Part of her also wanted to shriek with laughter at the absurdity of the situation. How was this possible? She had not long been in her car driving through a recognizable world. No one would
believe her about this. It was surreal. It was mad. But there was nothing entertaining about the experience, not in the smelly darkness.
And what was that?

‘You . . . lied.’ Catherine turned and looked into the nothingness opposite the door she had just crept through. She’d heard it once, to her right on what she guessed was the
far side of the room. A shifting of fabric across wood. Against the floor. Or had someone just slid off a chair?
The child.

‘What did you say?’ Edith said from the doorway, the outrage in her tone barely contained.

‘There is somebody in here. You tricked me. I don’t find this funny.’

‘You are alone in there.’ Now her voice seemed cruelly playful. ‘Nothing else is living, though it may appear so.’ If this was intended as reassurance it had no effect.
If the old woman closed and locked the door, she would be trapped.

Quickly, Catherine decided to go for the window she had been promised. But why had she stayed? What had she been thinking? The face at the window, the dog arranged to startle her, the horrid
outfits, Maude’s unpleasant silence, and she had been called a whore, there was definitely an inference. She was the victim of an elaborate joke, played on a commoner who had come here to
finger the family silver.

She raked her hands through the void, fingers scrabbling for purchase while anger got her to the curtains. Of which there were many layers. Her fingernails scraped down what felt like heavy
velvet, but it would not part, so she edged sideways, breathless with anxiety.

‘That’s it. You’re nearly there. I can hear your progress.’

Catherine glanced again at the doorway. And realized Edith’s silhouette was no longer looking in her direction, but to the side of the unlit room, opposite the door. From which direction
there now issued a scraping. Sharp metal against masonry, but faint. And then a flap of cloth. She would have screamed if her air wasn’t sealed inside her petrified lungs.

She turned back to claw at the curtains until her hands found where they parted in the middle. When she tugged the drapes apart there was no light. She was still sealed in darkness. Her fingers
found more fabric; it was thinner. She tugged at it.

‘Be careful with my curtains!’

Slowing herself with the last shred of her composure, Catherine found her hands and wrists to be tangled in what felt like lace, swathes of it. Beyond that layer of fabric her fingernails
scraped at wood. And for a horrible second in which she felt true paralysis, she realized it really was a trap. She had been sent to a false window. The door to the room would now slam shut, a key
would turn in the large brass mortise lock that she had admired like a fool. It was as if she was stuck fast inside the dream that began when she left her car. She blinked her sightless eyes and
wanted to dig her nails into her wrists until they bled. Opening her mouth wide she swallowed the darkness, then clenched her teeth shut.

‘The shutters are retractable,’ Edith called from the doorway, her voice now flat and merely imparting instructions. ‘There is a latch in the middle. Unlock it. But be careful!
Those shutters have protected that window since 1863. Push them back to the sides. Oh, do hurry, you’re wasting time, dear.’

Catherine found the little lock and unlatched the wooden shutters. Creaking like an old sailing boat, they moved to the sides with little resistance. And she stood, dazed and empty, with her
face seared by a white light that came directly from salvation, from heaven.

She turned to face the harmless old woman in the wheelchair. Tension softened from her shoulders and her pulse eased. Until she saw what was kept inside the dark room under lock and key.

Under an overhead light, suspended from a black chain that dropped from a plaster ceiling rose, the great display case was raised from the ground to the height of an average
table. It must have been six metres long, four wide and one deep.

About the tableau, the walls were papered with the medieval design she had seen elsewhere on the unpanelled walls of the Red House, in a rich burgundy colour that sucked at the natural light.
There was a high wooden skirting board and a long cornice around the room’s edges, a simple iron fireplace, and one plain wooden stool at the head of the case, but nothing else. No other
furniture or decoration was allowed to impede or distract the viewer’s horrified fascination of what M. H. Mason had created and displayed in his home.

Catherine remained speechless long enough for Edith to visibly enjoy her mute gawping. Perhaps that was why Maude never spoke, and why Edith spent her life surrounded by a silent and captive
audience of rodents and woodland animals. Other personalities just interfered.

‘It often took my uncle years to finish a tableau. This one took ten, and one year of planning before he skinned the first rat.’

Catherine was still unable to respond.

‘There are six hundred and twenty-three individual figures inside the case. The dogs caught them all. Dogs taught not to mutilate their prey. And there haven’t been rats at the Red
House in decades. Perhaps they still remember.’ Edith grinned at her own jest. ‘My uncle became so proficient, he could set up a rat in sixteen hours. But he planned the pose of each
one to the minutest detail before he made the first incision. The legs of rats are terribly thin and they were the most difficult parts of the animals to position, but he became expert. And they
were all individually measured for their uniforms by my mother.’

Catherine wheeled Edith before her along one side of the great wooden case. After a series of darting glances that made her dizzy, she still failed to comprehend the complexity of the
diorama.

The viewing pane offered a window into hell. ‘I don’t understand . . . why has no one seen this?’ The wheels of the chair squeaked, the floor groaned, the sound felt as
unwelcome as her voice inside the space, as if the room had been asleep.

Edith smiled. ‘Oh they did, once. But you are privileged, Miss Howard. You are the first person, outside of this family, to see
Glory
in seventy years. Though many wished to, once
they’d heard of its existence from the few that actually did see it. That was before my uncle realized the futility of the piece as a warning. It was once displayed in Worcester before the
Second World War, but only briefly. He hoped it might act as a deterrent to another grand slaughter. But he wasn’t happy with the reactions to his work. The papers called him unpatriotic and
cruel. Someone wrote that he was deranged, dear. Schoolboys loved it for the wrong reasons. So my uncle brought it home. It divides into ten cases. I declined every request to see it once it came
into my care, on my uncle’s instructions, until people forgot about it. Now, I have little choice. But my uncle understands.’

‘He . . .’ But Catherine soon lost her train of thought, and also failed to ask Edith what might have caused the disturbance in the room she had just floundered through in the dark.
It had been paramount in her mind after she’d opened the blinds. But before
Glory
one could think of nothing else.

‘You must understand, my uncle came home from the front a changed man. His experiences in the Great War devastated him. He may have enlisted as a non-combatant, but he went to the front
line to be with his men. And to give them what little comfort was available in horrors we cannot imagine. He saw such sights . . . things. He lost his faith. Not just in God. But in men. In
society. In humanity. His loss of faith was colossal. You could say it was total. A terrible burden to endure for a chaplain.’

‘Chaplain? He was . . . ’

‘A man of God, yes. The village was once his parish. He became a chaplain in the thirty-eighth Welsh Division. A private project. There were lots of them at the time. But he volunteered in
1915, not long after his two younger brothers. They were beloved to him and he hoped to take care of them.’

Edith sighed, and raised eyebrows neatly drawn upon her alabaster forehead. ‘Harold, the youngest, fell at Mametz Wood. In 1916. Not long after they arrived. It was one of the battles of
the Somme. Their division was then engaged in the third battle of Ypres and Lewis fell at Pilkem one year after Harold. Poor Lewis was gassed.’

And all of the rats in the mud were Mason’s recovery, or a meticulous continuation of the nightmare. Catherine gazed again at what she had, at first, thought were little men, because so
lifelike were their postures upon their hind legs, so animate and human were their expressions of terror and pain and despair and shock, and so convincing were their little uniforms and weapons, as
was their suffering in the soil, that for a few seconds she was sure she had been looking at a crowd of tiny men mired in one of hell’s inner circles.

The black landscape itself was so convincing, wet and churned and colourless, she imagined she could smell it through the glass. The sides of the case were painted with photographic precision to
continue the vision of trenches, torn wire, shell blasts, mine craters, thick smoke and splintered trees, as if to infinity in every direction.

It was the most animate she had seen Edith too. The spiky and hostile persona she’d endured unto the threshold of this room appeared to have retreated at this chance to hold forth about
her uncle, a man cherished in her long memory. ‘After Lewis was killed, my uncle was invalided out with enteric fever and dysentery. He’d been suffering from both for some time. My
mother said it wasn’t the fever, but heartbreak that brought him home that first time. And he could have sat out the war, but he returned to his company and to action as soon as he was well
enough. To continue his duty. My mother told me, when I was old enough to understand, that he was determined to die at the front. So that he could be with his brothers.

‘But he was chosen to live, my dear. He came home again in 1918, wounded this time. At the Battle of Cambrai. When his division captured Villers-Outreaux my uncle suffered a terrible head
wound from shrapnel. It disfigured him. But may have saved his life.’

‘I didn’t know.’ Catherine swallowed the emotion that had come into her throat. ‘It’s . . .’ she didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s a terrible
and sad story.’ And it was odd, because in the Red House, it felt like she had just heard recent news. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Should such things be forgotten? My uncle didn’t think so. He wouldn’t allow himself to. After the war he lived here in seclusion with his sister. My mother, Violet. She
brought him back to the world. Because they had work to do. They did everything together. I suppose you will have to itemize them all?’

‘Yes.’

‘It cannot be dismantled. That is our only stipulation. It must remain intact.’

‘Of course. Who would even think of it?’ But many would, as well she knew. If there was not a sole buyer at the right price, each of the ten sections, or worse, would need to be sold
off piecemeal. The diorama was magnificent, but it was also dreadful, and she struggled to imagine anyone who would want to look at it for long. A museum might be interested, though their best hope
would be an art gallery. Because that’s what it was, it was art. Edith was right, M. H. Mason had been an artist. And a very great one to have affected her so profoundly. She thought she
could have stood in the room for one entire day and still not have seen half the detail inside the case.

‘Time for one more. And that will be sufficient for one afternoon.’

‘There’s another?’

‘There are four.’

You can’t sell them
, she wanted to shout.
They must be exhibited, in a place where everyone can see them
. Otherwise the auction catalogue would be the
only record of M. H. Mason’s intact collection, and his work could be scattered throughout the world to never come back together, after over half a century undisturbed inside the Red
House.

‘I . . . I just can’t believe it.’ The next room featured a gas attack. And it seemed all of the creator’s wrath, grief and anguish at young Lewis’s death had been
invested into the one hundred rats, dressed in muddied khaki, that rolled and choked and kicked and bled in the communication trench, while all around their position the air sparked with shell
bursts and was strewn with fetid vapours.