Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

‘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.’