Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

By the time she reached the landing about the stairwell, a door below clicked open, and then closed. Briefly, a dim but comforting glow appeared downstairs. Catherine paused to listen. A second door opened more slowly, deeper inside the vast building.

Maude.

She wanted to be reassured by the idea of the housekeeper being up and about at this hour, but wasn’t. Would the scowling drudge be of any assistance with anything but another home-made remedy, or poison?

But these women were old, their joints must ache, Maude limped, Edith was in a wheelchair, so there had to be modern pain relief somewhere inside the house. And she must take enough of it to drive home. In strange dark houses you needed a goal, and she made this her purpose as she descended the first flight of stairs. If need be, she’d search every one of their bathrooms and kitchen cupboards.

On the way down to the first floor, she gripped the banister rail. The mere effect of moving this far left her breathless and dizzy.

Peeking over the railing, some thin light was reflected off the polished wood of the hall floor. Light originating from the adjoining utility corridor that contained the tableau, workshops, perhaps the kitchen, and Maude’s room.

The first floor was dark. But a few feet of sight was afforded by her phone screen, so at least she could see each step ahead of her.

She moved across the first-floor landing to the next set of stairs, her eyes imploring the oblivion that encroached upon the feeble glow of her phone, which returned nothing to her eyes besides the glimmers of brass door-handles. She was at the top of the next staircase when the movement below began.

She peered over the banister and caught sight of a small shadow fall across the faint light on the hall floor. A scuffle of cloth accompanied the motion. Instinct told her that announcing her position was a bad idea.

And there it was again, what she understood to be a scampering, close to the floor, in pursuit, she intuited, of the first figure. Neither noise resembled Maude’s distinctive side-to-side shuffle. The noise suggested a small group or pack of animals.

Cats?

Rats.

Catherine stifled a scream. The Red House could be teeming with rats at night. Had she not heard them last night too? A fitting revenge for M. H. Mason’s extermination of the species, but not a vengeance that offered Catherine a shred of comfort while on the stairs.

The screen of her phone winked off. As it periodically did to save the battery if she didn’t keep the pitiful glow activated. And just before the screen light came back on, there was no question in her mind that footsteps had just announced themselves on the staircase behind her.

She turned quickly, lost balance and thumped down four steps, flailing at the banister with her free hand. Before unintentionally casting her phone away, the handset lit up the silhouette of a small head. And what might have been hands covered its face.

The fact the figure behind her had been so close was worse than what she thought she had actually seen. Whimpering on her hands and knees she cast about to retrieve the phone. She snatched it up and held it before her face fearfully, as if expecting a blow from out of the darkness above her.

The pallid phosphorescence of the screen cast its meagre range onto empty wooden steps and the banister rail. There was nothing there and could not have been. She raised the phone higher and her own shadow stretched up the empty staircase wall.

A mind made strange with inebriation in oppressive darkness could see anything it wanted. Despite telling herself this, she struggled to rid her imagination of the notion that a small head, further up inside the darkness, was now turned in her direction and watching her.

Silence returned to the stairwell. She chose to suppress, rather than dwell on, the scent of cold outdoor air brought in on someone’s clothes that gathered around her. Catherine peered over the banister rail, but saw and heard nothing more from down there. Rodents were scared of humans, weren’t they? Clutching her phone as if it was a flame and her only hope of rescue and survival, she continued down.

Stood in the middle of the hall, she looked up and into the stairwell. The darkness was total. A swirl of vertigo, and a panic that she could be hoisted up and into the space by something above, seized her. When the fear passed another replaced it. Whatever she thought had been following her down the stairs might drop upon her, from up there.

At the walls of the hall, she pawed the wooden panels looking for light switches. Something that was becoming an unpleasant habit for her in this house. There were at least three switches down here. She had noticed them — hadn’t she? — between the framed photographs. One of which her phone screen illumined. A black-and-white picture taken of the Masons in their garden.

In the photograph they appeared older and thinner than she’d seen them before, but were dressed as formally as ever. Sunlight reflected off their bespectacled eyes. Violet Mason wore a white hat to match her dress and carried a parasol. M. H. Mason wore a black suit. Behind the Masons’ straight forms, some of the trees were hazy as if moving in a breeze. What was visible of the puppet theatre between the Masons’ heads was blurred, as if active with motion too rapid for the shutter speed of the camera. Either a child, or a figure on the backdrop, seemed to be running sideways. There was a small black arm and a distorted head emerging from the unclear portion of the photograph.

She’d not looked at many of the pictures closely during her tour with Edith, but wished she had done so. If she had, she might not be on her own in the darkness looking at one right now.

Towards the dimly glowing mouth of the passage leading to the service area, she moved with her arms stretched out.

At the end of the corridor, on the left-hand side, was a slot of rectangular light, as if a small lamp were switched on in a large room with the door mostly closed. From here, the thin light on the hall floor that she had seen from upstairs originated.

A cold draught swept her hands and face in a steady stream. She suspected the door to the garden, at the far end of the corridor, had also been opened upon the cold night. The current of chilly air was too concentrated to be coming from a room indoors.

The draught built into a breeze and she stifled the idea that it wasn’t a door or window open at the end of the passage, but a much bigger portal ahead of her in the darkness.

The moving air was either entirely without sound, or her own hoarse breath was so loud about her face she was drowning out the sound of the wind.

Stumbling through what now smelled like an unlit tunnel, her situation began to feel like she’d passed out of the Red House and was now journeying beneath its walls. The idea of being beneath the house seemed far worse than the frightful apprehension of being inside it. Only the approaching luminance of the partially open door assured her she was still inside the building.

‘Maude. Maude,’ she called, in a voice just above a whisper. But didn’t know if she was announcing herself or calling for help. She felt an urge to scream, and a competing urge to sit down in petrified silence and to wait for whatever came next from out of the darkness. Why was she even down here? She should have stayed in bed.

With her phone screen creating a small, weak sphere about her face, she almost broke into a run to reach the partially open door. Because someone must be awake. It was her only motivation for putting one foot in front of the other, and so quickly now.

Mere feet from the door, the intensification of the chemical pungency hit her full and stinging in the face and brought her to a stop. The stench came from the entrance to what she knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge, was Mason’s workshop. Why was it open at this hour? The light bleeding thinly from the space beyond the door now resembled light issued from ashes glowing in a gate, or a small desk lamp with a crimson shade.