Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Catherine walked to the stairwell and winced at the intermittent creaks of the floorboards. She passed closed doors she remembered and fumbled for light switches she couldn’t remember and door handles she could not see. She found two handles but the doors were locked.

On the landing she identified the source of the dim whitish glow. As she suspected the light originated from the passage that held Edith’s bedroom.

She leant over the banister and the lightless hole of the stairwell, and felt she was listening with her entire body. Nothing but her indistinct feet was visible. If a voice was to rise out of the darkness beneath her toes it would stop her heart. None came, but she did receive an unwelcome sense of movement below, and probably from the ground floor.

Catherine thought she could hear the subtle shift of what sounded like limbs within clothing. But circling down there in the darkness. Round and round beyond her feeble vision. Maybe a ring of silent infants, looking upwards with plaster faces. She pulled her head back and repressed the careless byway of her imagination.

Animals, rats, something that crept indoors and roamed at night inside old houses.

She padded across the landing, but kept close to the inner wall, until she was able to peer into the adjacent passage. The doorway emitting the pale light was some way down the corridor. The door was only ajar. Edith’s bedroom was near the stairwell and the door was closed. The room next to Edith’s was the nursery and it was from here that the light issued.

Catherine turned and fumbled away, stifling her frantic breath as best she could. As she bumped against the walls and swatted her hands through the darkness like a blind woman, she heard a scattering of motion in different directions, two floors down and out of sight. And it was then she remembered Edith’s final words that evening. ‘It would be better to go to your room. And to stay there.’

‘That smell…’ The odour she detected on her first visit, and had been aware of intermittently since, had been seeping out of this room, Mason’s workshop.

‘I’m so used to it. I barely notice unless I come in here.’ Edith smiled. ‘Would you believe it brings me comfort?’

The odour hit Catherine like heat outside an air-conditioned building, and the miasma stung her eyes. She cleared her throat. ‘Chemicals?’

‘Perhaps it is the soap. Shredded soap and chalk in white arsenic. It could be the formalin. Or perhaps a residue of my uncle’s formulas.’

The stench was more than a residue. To linger decades after the space was used suggested it was highly toxic.

‘To this day my uncle’s pickling and tanning processes have remained highly guarded secrets. There were some who would have paid dearly to understand how he achieved such remarkable results. And this is where my uncle spent much of his life. We have left it as he left it. I so wanted to show you.’

The workshop was as perfectly preserved as the creatures he’d restored. Catherine once read how a taxidermist at the Museum of Natural History had been baffled by how the tension in the whiskers and mouth had been achieved in a surviving Mason piece. ‘May I?’ Catherine held up her camera. She hoped to fill the memory card in her camera today, too, to make the best use of her time during daylight hours. Because she was not spending another night here, though she hadn’t told Edith that yet. Her experience during the previous night was not one she was eager to repeat. During breakfast in the dining room, she’d tried to engage Edith’s interest about what she’d heard and seen, or thought she’d seen. Edith had mocked her tentative queries, and made her feel like a foolish, jittery child. Maude, apparently, was a light sleeper. And ‘often roamed’. As was Edith. Catherine’s insistence that she must have heard an animal was met with a snort of derision and the conversation was over.

Edith looked at her camera with distaste, but nodded.

Catherine took pictures of the tiled floor and the iron drain-grate in the middle of the room. ‘Was this once a scullery?’

‘It was adapted. The mangle and range our old housekeeper used are still in the laundry. A much smaller room.’

The shallow Belfast sink dated from the 1800s, and the glazed ceramic was one of the few items in the house that showed signs of wear. The rest of the room was free of dust, so Maude must have cleaned it ahead of her visit. A hot-water copper and cold-water hand pump stood beside the sink. When she neared it, a small window above the copper looked and smelled to have been recently washed with vinegar. Branches from a bush pressed against the glass.

‘This house went on forever. Or so I thought as a child. To me it never ended.’ Edith peered up at the iron drying racks that hung over the long workbench. ‘My uncle needed the space in here for messy work. And he put it to good use, as you have seen.’ The woman’s smile looked like an indication of delight at her guest’s discomfort.

Catherine forced a smile of her own until her mouth ached. She focussed her camera on the long and bewildering rows of ceramic and glass jars shelved above the workbench. Photographs would provide good illustrative material for the auction catalogue, though final print copy would require the work of a professional. These pictures she took for Leonard. She doubted another example of an early-twentieth-century taxidermist’s workshop existed. A great many historians would kill to see the room. Perhaps English Heritage would want to reassemble and display it.

‘Be careful not to touch anything. Sodium arsenite is a poison. Quite deadly. My uncle also used borax, but preferred arsenic.’

Catherine photographed acetic acid beside alizine beside alum and asbestos. She zoomed in and shot pictures of beeswax, boric acid, carbolic, chloroform and cornmeal. Mason had been meticulous with his labelling, with alphabetizing his ingredients.

‘He killed some of the animals with chloroform. You can see it right in front of you.’

‘How… where did they come from? The animals?’

‘Our neighbours. The farmer’s dogs caught the rats, along with my uncle’s rat catchers. And there was a time when only one kitten from a litter was kept. But all of our dear neighbours knew where to bring a litter so he could take his pick. The squirrels were trapped and shot. The foxes, badgers, weasels and stoats too.’

Catherine turned her face away from Edith to conceal her distaste. The thought of small animals destroyed on an industrial scale, twinned with the appalling stench, made her light-headed. Nausea wasn’t far away. So she would have to be quick, but wanted more pictures.

She photographed the jars of ether, formaldehyde and glycerine, and unsuccessfully tried to ignore Edith’s enthusiastic narration. When she focussed on the sulphuric acid, Edith said, ‘He made his pickling solution from that. He often allowed me to watch him work and always warned me about that jar. “You must never touch this, Edie. It could burn you!” Beside it you will see the tow. He used tow on every single rat in his tableau. For winding. For their necks and tails. Their legs are very short. Always the hardest part to get right. My uncle—’

‘I feel a bit funny. Sorry.’ If she wasn’t mistaken, she could detect an underlying odour of micturition, of decay. Catherine wondered if she’d also inhaled something poisonous.

Once again, Edith demonstrated her uncanny ability to follow her thoughts. ‘If you can only imagine how many skins were fleshed and degreased in here, Catherine. And some of the carcasses were not fresh when they were brought here as gifts. My uncle was no stranger to the smell of death. Nor was I.’