Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘His tools.’

‘You will not find a finer collection in the county.’

Or even the world, and they were probably made to order. Each handle was inlaid with rosewood. The metal components were oiled and glinted. She couldn’t see a speck of rust upon a single item. As she raised her camera with weak arms and photographed what resembled implements of torture, she knew she had no stomach for learning their true function.

‘My uncle measured everything first, and made plaster casts before the animals were skinned. The callipers were used to take the most minute measurements for the artificial bodies. The distance between the outside of the eyes was very important, in order to create the desired expression.’

Catherine repressed a reaction from the smoked kipper she had felt obliged to swallow at the breakfast table. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Isn’t it!’ Edith had never been so excited. ‘Above you. Look there. There! To the right. You will see the carving tools. Look. Look up, dear! He first made the heads from balsa and plaster moulds. But found the natural skulls were far better. He would clean the flesh away. Boil it off. You can see the brain spoons. Not there, dear. There! He refashioned the muscles of the head with tow and cotton. A master sculptor could not have bettered the facial expressions of my uncle’s pieces.’

The room seemed to grow darker as the terrible smell overwhelmed Catherine’s sinuses, and then the entire space of her skull. She looked at the window with longing. Wanted to cast it open so she could gulp at the air. The flies were back. As heavy as ripe blackberries they circled the window and occasionally propelled themselves against the panes of glass. There were at least a dozen. Two landed and investigated the frame for access. She intuited a will, a desire to get inside. ‘I don’t feel—’

‘That knife was his favourite. It was always in his hand. The long blade disjointed the larger bones.’

Catherine held her breath for a while, but felt heavy and exhausted and almost began to pant. ‘The garden. May I? Which way?’

‘But you haven’t seen the awls and curriers’ knives. His diagonal cutters were made for him specially, in Birmingham. They were adapted for the smallest bones. How else do you think he managed so many rats?’

Edith’s thin, pale face was alive with an excitement that might also have been rage, or even ecstasy. It was hard to tell in Catherine’s swimming vision. Her scalp chilled and her vision speckled with tiny flashes. She tried to get around the wheelchair, but it filled and blocked the doorway. A shadow passed across the small window, as if someone had leant down to peer inside. Either that, or she was about to faint. The stench had poisoned her. ‘Another time.’

Edith’s voice seemed to come to her from a great distance, and then it reappeared inside her ears as if through headphones. ‘Look, look. The ear openers. They may look like a jeweller’s pliers, but they open the other way. He used them on every set of rat ears. Can you imagine the patience that required, dear? You haven’t even seen the needles. Don’t you want pictures? Three-cornered for the hides. Surgeons’ needles for the thicker pelts. Those are the curved ones. You are not looking, dear.’

‘I’m… sick. Please.’ Catherine fell as much as stumbled to the large galvanized metal tub and seized the side with both hands to prevent herself from toppling over.

‘Be careful. Don’t lean on that.’

The blocked window, the cruel locks and chains looping like serpents from the drying racks, Edith’s discoloured teeth inside the lipless mouth, the brain spoons, all floated through her liquid vision. She leant her head over the side of the tub.

‘It’s had gallons of ethanol inside it, dear. It’s poisonous. It’s where my uncle pickled—’

She didn’t hear the rest. Only the noise of her own gullet emptying itself of Maude’s oatmeal and kippers onto thin sheet metal.

Outside of her blindness and choking, her panic and misery, Edith’s handbell began a terrible racket close to her head. She wished and she wished that it would stop.

Blue-black, the heavens pressed at the earth with an angry weight, as though night was too close to a summer sky and breaking through. A storm, anticipated by the warm motionless air. Occasional gaps in the funnelling hedgerow allowed Catherine glimpses of the sky, the fields. Above the pink and yellow flowers and the golden waves of the meadow, the air shimmered in a thick heat.

But the further she walked from the Red House the more her senses and her head, and so much more, began to clear. The bone-deep weariness and pallor that overwhelmed her in Mason’s workshop dissipated. She tugged the fragrant air into her lungs, and after running from the house without looking for the kitchen she longed for a bottle of water.

Her red Mini was like the sight of a familiar face after days amongst hostile strangers. Through the car windows the sight of her AA map, sunglasses, chewing gum in the coin holder, even the steering lock, hit her with a sudden awareness of modernity. An impulse to clamber into the car, drive away and return to a world that made sense, was wrestled down with reluctance.

She caught a whiff of the terrible chemical stink that hid traces of decay. It was in her hair, or on her skin, or caught within her clothing. Even outdoors she reeked of the Red House and its artful mutilations. She panicked at the idea of being tainted.

She desperately wanted a breeze to air her clothes of the stink. But the air did not move at all here, it never did during her visits. Was always still and heavy, weighted by expectation, or exhausted and snatching a reprieve after some mighty exertion that was soon to resume.

The more she looked at the great indigo sky and the waist-high meadow grasses, the more she felt too visible, but also insignificant, alien even, and defenceless, tense. Being physically free of the house only made her think of being inside it. Where she was manipulated. Prepared. Introduced to terrible things that weren’t right. Unnatural things that had no place or context beyond that huddle of spiny roofs and between those murder-red walls.

The horrid old women were trying to asphyxiate her with terror and nauseate her with disgust. She’d begun to hate them. Yes, they were horrifying her. Deliberately. All of what she had experienced had been staged. She was sure of it. They were hamming it up, even Edith was wearing costumes. Tricksters. How could they be bothered at their age? She’d thought as much while being sick into the horrid tin bath, with the plump bodies of flies crawling around the window. She was being tormented, unwound and rewound back to times and feelings she’d long tried to forget. But why? It felt horribly personal, and prescribed, if not inevitable. Either the world was unpleasant or she evoked its harms. She was never sure.

Or perhaps her hosts had lost the ability to behave in any other way, while her paranoia and anxiety had been kick-started by it. It was hard to tell. Here, the mad led the mad.

Edith had not wanted her to go outside for a walk. Had asked that she would remain inside and ‘accompany’ her to the stifling drawing room, to sit amidst the clutter of dead animals and their antics amongst the busy ornaments. Edith wanted her sealed inside like another doll added to her collection. ‘But we must do the fitting, dear. There is no time for strolls.’ The fitting. What was that? She hadn’t paused to ask.

‘And the pageant is nearly upon us. You must be correctly outfitted. It comes but once a year.’

In her haste to get into fresh air she’d also lacked the presence of mind to ask about this pageant. The will of Edith and the will of the house were terrible, tangible. A constriction against her thoughts. She’d been rejected by the present, was confined by the past. Totally enclosed. Her journey had taken a detour she had no control over. She felt as if she was being pulled back rapidly towards something she could not define, and wanted to see coming before she was lost.