Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

She wondered how much she would be able to stand. Knew she wasn’t up to the visit after the break-up with Mike, and the return of the trances. The quick reminder of Mike and her episodes made her feel weak and sick. The distractions she’d hoped to find here were almost certainly unreachable. ‘I’m sorry. Look, I don’t think I—’

‘Quiet! The door. There. There, girl.’

Catherine reached for the brass handle set within an escutcheon of metal in an oval shape.

‘Don’t touch it! How will they make sense to you if I don’t guide you?’

‘I don’t understand what you want.’

‘They are no longer accustomed to audiences. To strangers. One must be careful. Respectful. Always. My uncle taught me their nature.’

Who or what Edith was referring to was lost on Catherine. She was stuck inside a nonsensical dream. The world within the building never settled into familiarity, it perpetually became unreal, even surreal.

Edith lowered her voice to a reverential whisper. ‘They are shy and gentle creatures. Once they performed freely. But they have not done so in a long time. They are fragile like people, as innocent as children. And can be as cruel. They are blameless and they may seem impassive while they dream. But they are not inert. They wait. Like they waited for my uncle. But like all children, dear, they grow up and they go their own way.’

Catherine closed her eyes and wished she could also close her ears to the nonsense coming out of Edith’s ghastly mouth. The visit wasn’t going to work out. No genuine inventory could be recorded. No auction would take place. Because Edith Mason was insane. Nothing would be possible here, beside her bafflement and torment, before what age and isolation had done to these pitiful old creatures.

The conspiratorial look in Edith’s eyes intensified. ‘They enchanted us once, but they are not toys. They are too powerful to be played with. As my uncle used to say, to truly know them is to know suffering. And dread. For they are a tragic people. One does well to tread carefully, fearfully and respectfully among them.’ The mad utterance was said as a rebuke, or even a warning.

Catherine’s response was silence.

After such an introduction she was not sure she wanted to even see them. Nor was she keen to regard what she assumed were marionettes as living beings, to maintain a pretence which seemed mandatory in Edith’s company around the preserved animals, and most probably the dolls too. But the charade would need to be maintained throughout her dealings with the estate. Others at the auction would also be expected to adopt such a ludicrous attitude towards stuffed squirrels and antique German dolls. The situation was absurd.

Perhaps all of this was an elaborate joke being played upon her by the elderly woman. A prank the mute servant may have tried to warn her about.

Edith looked at the door with a respect born of wonder and fear, and nodded her head, sagely, as if satisfied she had been understood. ‘Now, if you feel able to treat them as you would wish to be treated, we may go inside,’ she said, as if hearing a response from the other side of the door to an entreaty neither of them had made.

Catherine opened the door upon darkness. Within she heard the faintest creak issue from an item of furniture. Then came silence.

‘The light. There. On the wall. There,’ Edith whispered with an urgency that panicked Catherine.

She found the light switch and clunked it down. A thin yellow glow spread from a dim bulb in a heavy glass shade suspended from the ceiling on a chain.

It was a large room, and unlike the other rooms of the Red House, the walls were painted white and decorated by hand under the picture rail. Frescoes of animals dressed as people encircled the long rectangular space. But before Catherine could properly assess the decor, her attention was stolen by the array of small white beds with metal frames. Children’s beds in a room for children. It was a nursery.

She wanted to throw her head back and shriek with laughter, and also scream, though she didn’t know why.

‘Come, we may go further inside,’ Edith said. And they did, but as they entered Catherine became aware that within each of the ten little beds a small head lay at rest upon each small pillow. She was glad that the heads she could see were turned away from the door.

‘Stop. Here is far enough,’ Edith said and raised one gloved hand when they had moved no more than one full rotation of the chair’s wheels inside the room.

But Catherine needed little encouragement to stop. She didn’t like puppets and never had done. As a child she was always nervous when a puppet first moved, that lazy uncoordinated wobble when a marionette rose from being seated to standing, or the sway before a puppet leapt about a stage. The thin legs had always made her afraid they might step off a set and venture beyond the illusion of reality they commanded on television or a stage, that a step of a small wooden foot through a proscenium arch, and into the audience, was possible.

A ventriloquist’s dummy on television once made her duck behind the sofa of her nan’s house. The waver of an animal’s thin furred legs in a children’s television programme that she vaguely remembered as an infant, even though the long-eared creature’s strings were visible, had endured in her imagination as a thing of a most sinister nature.

And even on occasion in her professional life, she could still feel uneasy when left alone with a lifelike antique doll in a shop. It often struck her as odd that her aversion had become part of her profession. This was not the first time she’d wondered if some terrible and intangible internal magnetism had pulled her towards what she’d feared as a child.

Her unease at the threshold of the nursery room also grew to a suspicion that she wasn’t at the Red House to perform a valuation at all. That her presence was an unwitting invitation to mix in the old woman’s delusions, cruel fantasies and dementia. To participate. She was a novelty and her purpose was still being defined. She was being taken advantage of by an elderly woman who might turn on her, banish her, and end the opportunity of her lifetime. Because there would never, in all of the world, be another like this one.

Edith touched the back of one of Catherine’s hands. The fingertips were hard as if she wore thimbles inside the white satin gloves. ‘Do not touch them. They do not wish it.’

Catherine was happy to comply, and relieved she could see no more than their heads in the thin light. Judging by the pointy lumps of the small bodies under the neat bedclothes, they appeared to be about as large as ten-year-old children, but with some exaggeration to the size of the partially visible heads. Their dimensions were unappealing. She’d hoped for fragile figures hung on a plethora of tiny threads, and crafted exquisitely down to the minute details of their costumes by Edith’s talented mother. But not this.

The fact that most of the heads were covered, or near-covered with a sheet, and turned to face the shuttered windows at the head of the room, gave her the unwelcome impression of the figures mimicking naughty children, who feigned sleep and stoppered their giggles by stuffing bedclothes into their little mouths. The nursery also resembled a room crowded with small dead people whose winding sheets improperly covered their faces.

Protruding from the bedclothes on the bed closest to her, from what little she could see, the puppet was a depiction of an animal more than a recreation of a human character. The tatty brown head of the hare had its black mouth open too, which was heavily whiskered and jagged with ivory teeth.

What may have once been a fox or a badger, wearing a bonnet, lay in the bed beside the hare. And she realized with distaste that the puppets were probably an extension of Mason’s taxidermy, constructed or adapted from preserved animal remains.