Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

She fingered her face. Her forehead and cheeks were cold, she had no temperature and wasn’t feverish. Her state was akin to waking up drunk. But wakefulness did not dispel unease. She had heard no one enter the room, nor did she have any recollection of a light being turned on by whoever had come in. How was that possible? And why was it necessary to bring the horrid maternity dress, that Edith’s mother had worn nearly a century before, in here while she slept?

She felt too woozy and too weak to decide whether this was another strange arrangement, some protocol of the Red House, or whether it ranked as another sinister tactic to unsettle her.

Catherine sank into the pillows, shifted her position to the portion of the bed not moist and creased. She pulled her knees up and into her belly, cradled her head with her hands and tried to figure out what to do. With the harsh grit of Maude’s medicine tainting her gums and tongue, she passed into, and back out of, and then into a semblance of sleep.

Catherine roused again with a sense of her own voice loud within the room. Her eyes were already wide open when she came to.

She rose from the bedclothes gasping from another delirious episode that felt uncomfortably similar to a trance. From deep sleep into a trance again? Never happened before. They only occurred when she was absent-minded, but awake.

The second unbearably vivid dream receded. Though not quickly enough. A group of small figures had been stood in a row at the foot of her bed. Or they were children wearing masks. Faces she recalled in unpleasant flashes.

She flopped against the headboard with her face clutched in her hands to stop the swaying of her vision and the motion sickness it caused.

Two of the figures had been smiling and holding the ceramic hands of the dressmaker’s dummy. A girl in a tatty bonnet, and a figure with the stature of a boy and the bearing of a doll. Real hair had been threaded into his colourless porcelain scalp. An old-fashioned tailored suit had made a tight fit on his small limbs, like the boy had outgrown the suit or been given a younger child’s clothes. The girl’s face within the bonnet was too withdrawn to offer anything but the glimmer of a bony chin and one row of discoloured wooden teeth.

But in the nightmare, the dummy’s shoulders had carried a head. A white face. With moist black eyes, partly obscured by a veil attached to a wide-brimmed hat. The hat had been decorated with dark flowers like an ancient wedding cake.

Among the other childish figures, there had been a wrinkled and leathery black face, the eyes white and horribly eager. A small mouth in the tar-black face had been open, gleefully revealing yellow peg teeth. The ape from the film that made off with Strader’s head?

Another of the small shapes looked to have suffered an accident, or been misused. Its pottery face was discoloured, cracked, and there were small punctures or scars. The Master of the Revels?

Elsewhere amongst the crowd, she retained a suggestion of uneven whiskers sprouting from a threadbare head of a large hare. It must have been a mask concealing something much worse underneath. The face hidden by the hare’s pelt had painted wooden eyes, adrift from the sockets of the outer skin.

Behind the figures she’d received the impression of tails swishing with impatience, and then whipping with excitement for the entire time she spoke to them. They’d riposted with nonsense and rhyme she couldn’t remember in any detail, but their jaunty words had made her want to get up and skip around the room like a child.

Catherine trembled for a while, her eyes searching every inch of the visible room, until the impact of the dream lessened and she was certain she was alone.

She had dreamed of the dolls in Edith’s bedroom, and in her state amalgamated the dolls with the murky features of Mason’s puppets from the BBC film. Please let it be that. If she could rely on one thing in her life, it would be her imagination turning against her in the worst circumstances.

Her body now felt as desiccated as one of Mason’s preserved creations. The medicine she had been given — but for what? — maintained the mineral rime around her tongue and lips. It was all she could taste, and she was desperate to swill it away with water. Her glass lay empty upon the floor.

Each step she took towards the enormous washstand fired a jolt of pain through her skull. She touched her arms and face, which registered in her mind as being hot and tender, but were actually cold and clammy. Her nightie and underwear were wet. She picked up and clutched the dressing gown around her shivering body.

There was no water in the basin of the washstand, or in the jug beneath the bowl. No taps, it wasn’t plumbed. She thought she might cry. She needed painkillers for the incessant judders in her head, not some ancient sickening tonic concocted from stale ingredients.

Nausea took her back to her bed, where she sat and peered at the door. She would have to go and find the nearest bathroom and source of water, a medicine cabinet. What was the time? Her phone claimed it was 2:30 a.m. Is that all? Now she thought about it, her writhing and gibbering seemed to have stretched into days. Catherine closed her eyes. If they had poisoned her she should try and be sick.

They had drugged her to take her out of her life, out of the world. The dress on the dummy was a new skin, a new identity. They were refashioning her, to become one of them.

Stop it!

She had a chill, a virus. New places, new bacteria.

That’s all.

Stress has made it worse. That’s all.

That’s all it is.

Outside her room she again failed to find the light switches on the walls between the doors in the long passage. There was a switch at the mouth of the corridor by the landing and stairwell. She was sure of this, but by day had previously been guided by the window overlooking the garden at the passage’s end. The window was no help now, so only the glow of her bedroom door and phone screen guided her through the heavy darkness that pressed inwards and swallowed the Red House. The lightlessness had crept inside and filled the old spaces, clothing timbers and bricks. But with the dark came a shift in character. One she remembered noticing before.

The house was colder than it had been during the previous night, as if the building was now open to the elements. She could smell damp in fabric and wood, the pungency of black spores on water-softened plaster, as if the garden’s decay had seeped inside the building. Even the unseen floor felt rough beneath her bare soles. So vivid was the change in character, within the pathetic halo of greenish light cast by her phone screen, she had to make sure the Red House was as she remembered it to be, by pushing her face an inch from the wall to see the wallpaper’s pattern.

When she found it, the air of the closest bathroom was icy. As though her life depended upon the tooth-aching water, she bent to gulp at the ropes of freezing liquid that thundered from the tap above the sink. She needed to dilute the disorientation, the inebriation of illness and sleepiness.

Behind the wall, pipes juddered, clanged.

Too ill to care about the noise, she left the bathroom, but made sure the door stayed open, same with her bedroom door, so at least some of the grubby light fell into the passageway from two lit rooms. It would allow her to do more than stumble through the hideous absence.

How could they stand it here? Perhaps darkness was more of a natural state than daylight. Weren’t stars just pieces of glittering debris slowly winking out on their journey to entropy? So what came after?

Stop it!

No light pollution here. This is how it is in the country.