Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

The first figure to distinguish itself from the shabby peasants was hooded and reached out a long pair of furred arms to seize and snatch away the head of the executed prisoner. The thief then crept to the front of the stage and caressed the long tresses of the stolen head with its black hands. But what was more appalling than the careful stroking of the leathery fingers through the feminine curls was the dark ape-like face that leered out of its hood to bare teeth at the audience. At some point it appeared Mason had come into possession of a primate.

Behind the monkey beggar clutching the disembodied head, the rest of the cast began pulling at, shaking, and tugging the remains of the executed man until he came apart in their mostly wooden hands. At one point the plucking of his parts became a frenzy.

Once a substantial item had been secured, and often from the ground it had fallen to, the piece would be snatched up and coveted against the chest of a peasant and carried off by the scuttling, hunched-over figure, seemingly in rapture with its booty. One by one, the marionettes departed the stage until nothing remained on the cartwheel or the horrible ground below.

The Master of Revels who opened the performance returned for the final scene, and took quick steps on its hind legs to centre stage. Once in place, it directed the audience’s attention to the collection of ornaments and cases mounted upon little Doric pedestals across the rear of the stage. The receptacles had been painted and designed to resemble ornate jewellery boxes or elaborate urns. One object resembled a book, opened to reveal a tiny skeletal hand where there should have been pages. A gilded box fitted with a glass screen contained a foot. A small trunk lined with a silken material stored a jaw bone. She understood this to be a reliquary of the condemned man’s constituent parts.

Catherine’s curiosity about the identity of the condemned, executed, dismembered, and now martyred man was overshadowed by her deep concern for the damaged mind behind this portrayal of the character’s hideous end in the filthy street. Mason may have changed his medium from rats to marionettes, but the themes appeared to be the same.

The film flickered to an end and Catherine groped her way to the light switch. Behind her, the loose end of the film slapped in a still-turning reel. The screen glared white.

For a while Catherine was left alone. While she waited she studied the little white chairs, and wondered if Mason and his sister arranged screenings for their hideous creations, or whether children had once been here to watch the actual cruelty plays. Neither option made her feel any better and an urge to flee the house nearly overwhelmed her into actual flight.

Rats she understood. The war tableau expressed a sensitive man’s trauma at the loss of his young brothers and at what he had experienced in war. But this slide into the grotesque and primitivism suggested a bloody and inhuman version of justice from the medieval era, within a Tudor and Stuart aesthetic. A regression into even darker times. But quite how he arrived there from the Great War mystified her.

The narrative of the play had been simple and sensational. A lurid tale for the unsophisticated with a crude and ugly cast, grubby animalistic presentations of the semi-human, the mob as animal. Mason’s insanity must have been fullblown by the fifties. But the film had been affecting. That she could not deny, even from a bad print without sound projected onto a white cloth.

There was none of the rapid jerking of early films or any sense of a miniaturized world. Onstage the figures had not glided like rod puppets, or bobbed in the telltale style of string puppetry, and she could not be certain she had seen any silvery threads against the background, even when it was black.

The stage was large enough to host child actors, but the figures could not have been children in costume because of the animal legs of some of the characters. All had moved according to what they had been constructed from. Animal limbs moved naturally, articulated wooden limbs moved as one would have expected them to move. So the play must have either been filmed slowly with cameras, frame by frame, or Edith’s uncle had employed several masterly puppeteers.

And the cast must have been comprised of the marionettes she had seen in the nursery. The heads were too similar to be anything else. Mason had indeed taken his bizarre and unpleasant art to a whole new level of artistry. And she’d been the first person to see it in decades.

The cinema screen was made from a rough weave of plain cloth. Multiple layers of fabric backdrops were tucked away in the wings, ready to be drawn by a flyman, when the stage was used for drama. The back of the theatre was pressed against the wall, but looking up from the front of the stage, Catherine could see no portable bridge, or platform behind the proscenium arches on which Mason or his sister would have knelt and concealed themselves from the audience without making a sound. If they were the puppeteers, they would have needed to crouch behind the stage, or stand behind the backcloth.

On closer inspection she found the joinery of the theatre to be masterful. A series of detachable wooden pegs allowed dismantling prior to transit and reassembly piecemeal. And the curtains were handmade by a highly skilled seamstress; Edith’s mother, Violet.

The ground-floor room must have become the theatre’s final resting place once public performance had been exhausted or found unfit for purpose, and perhaps once Mason was too old to continue the shows. But who was their intended audience, or what was the purpose of any of this?

Outside the room, the sound of Edith’s wheelchair prompted Catherine to step away from the stage. Being caught conducting an uninvited inspection would not go over well. Or, at least, she had a feeling that it would not.

By the time the door to the room had clicked open, Catherine had resumed her seat beside the antique projector.

‘Won’t you stop it!’

‘Sorry, what?’

‘It overheats!’

‘I don’t know how. I didn’t want to touch it.’

Maude bustled behind her chair and brought the whipping tail of the film to a clanking halt. To escape the glare from Edith’s red-rimmed eyes, Catherine went to the window, drew back the layered curtains and retracted the shutters quickly, as if she was desperate for clean air.

‘Well?’

‘It was…’

‘What? Speak, girl.’

‘Very clever. For its time. The movement of the pieces… Was it still-frame?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The animation. It must have taken hours.’

‘Nonsense. They were artists. They rehearsed. The performance was second nature. Shows in my uncle’s day were performed in one take. Once my uncle was satisfied with rehearsals he was never required to interfere with a performance.’

Catherine’s thoughts stumbled in an attempt to follow the conversation. She felt she was being given misleading information before a crowd of strangers who all stared at her. ‘Your uncle didn’t work alone?’

‘He trusted no one but my mother who was wardrobe and set designer.’

The self-serious tone Edith adopted about her uncle’s work suddenly made Catherine want to laugh madly again. Did the woman believe that what she had just watched was real? Edith was not going to be much help in understanding her uncle’s marionettes.

‘One can only admire how such small actors could issue such power, don’t you think?’

‘Quite.’

‘It is the greatest testament to my uncle’s art that he can still captivate an audience, even with this poor facsimile of the original, more colourful, work.’

Perhaps it was time to play along with the woman’s enthusiasm and delusions. This was no place for logic. Maybe her visit could only be survived by collusion with fantasy.