Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Was he truly here? Had Mike come for her? The very idea of him being close made her feel sicker. No, he had not come to save her, because he had come with a girl. Her. Mike had brought her, Tara, with him. Such an act of feckless cruelty suddenly suggested to her that she had never really known him, and may only have been prey to her own wishful thinking for the entire duration of their relationship. How could she have been so wrong? On what level, and in what way, were his actions even remotely acceptable?

And why was he here? How did he find it? Leonard! Leonard may have confronted him and let it slip out. Or even told him she needed help, reassurance, a friendly face, something like that, after she’d made the emotional phone call to her boss at the end of her first day. The very idea of Leonard interfering made her furious. It would mean Leonard had ignored her wishes, and thought he knew what was best for her. If he still wanted to sell M. H. Mason’s shit, after what she had been through, she’d wheel him here and he could do the valuation himself. Time for her boss to step up because she was stepping down.

Tara was now within the orbit of the Red House, and its considerable treasures. So maybe this had nothing to do with Leonard, because Mike may have already told Tara about what Catherine was valuing here, the Mason originals, and Tara had insisted they come here. Bitch. Tara would have smelled the house’s immaculate antiquities from the porch.

Tara had taken her boyfriend, but that was not enough. She’d be pitching for a television documentary by tomorrow morning. While she’d been reduced to delirium and a half-crazed paranoia, Tara had come to spoil her and Leonard Osberne’s exclusivity.

She suddenly felt so deeply persecuted she thought herself condemned. Her past, her trances and her enemies all seemed to have gathered here, in some dreadful critical mass, specifically for the purpose of destroying what was left of her mind. She sensed a powerful controlling force, behind her life, tactically planning her downfall. Maybe it had always been there, as she had often suspected, and she was a hapless marionette in a cruelty play that began the day she’d been born and given away by her natural mother.

‘Oh Christ. Oh Jesus Christ.’

She felt unstable. Dangerously volatile, like she could hurt herself out of sheer frustration.

Clothes, bag, camera, laptop, phone. Get your shit together, girl, and just go.

No, wait. To flee in her car would mean passing through the hideous village and the pageant. But there was no other way out. The Red House was a trap at the end of the lane. The village a gatehouse.

They all wanted her at the pageant. The festival needed a fool. A star attraction to be mocked, betrayed, and deceived.

But who could possibly be down there? The idea of a pageant in that place was patently ridiculous. Another delusion of two twisted old women who’d either drugged her, or made her condition worse to keep her here. What she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, of the village’s residents weren’t fit to participate in anything but their own funerals.

She hurriedly packed her things away, then turned to the chest of drawers to retrieve her clothes.

The drawer was empty. Her clothes were gone. Had been taken. Her dirty laundry had been inside a tote bag, and there had been one day of fresh clothing. Catherine looked at the hideous white gown upon the manikin’s torso and swallowed a sob. Slumped on the bed beside her belongings, she drew her fingers down her pale face.

She had to stay strong, not make bad decisions. When you are ill, and on your own, you can’t afford to. Hadn’t she learned this the hard way before? And was she now alone within the Red House?

Tonight she was transformed into a woman in white. Had become a flitting spirit from another era, barefoot like an urchin, playing a part in a performance foisted upon her because the house seemed intent on turning everything into a drama.

She was wanted at the pageant, where the rest of the cast and audience had gathered, but she would not go. She would speed through the village in her car and leave them all behind without a word, leave everything behind if necessary, even Leonard, who had introduced her to this mess and may have brought serpents back into her life. She could even go missing. Had often fantasized about disappearing, as if such an act of desperation presented great life-changing opportunities, not tragedy. It was time to improvise, to tear up the script.

But she would not leave before she explored this terrible old house and understood it, demystified it. Edith may have scattered the truth like crumbs but an opportunity to better know the Red House, and the instability of its occupants, had presented itself. For the sake of her own long-term sanity, she could not risk her mind’s entrapment beneath this spiky roof.

And nor could she deny that she was still captivated by the mystery, by the sheer impossibility that such a place could exist in the modern world. She needed to know how this house was possible. Here, the house was still here. Like this. With Edith and Maude inside it. Who felt like a facade for something else, behind the scenes.

But what?

If any of these doors were unlocked, she would go through them.

Catherine walked through the Red House and switched on every light she passed. She told herself she would not be frightened. She would be as alert and as focussed as her enemies were. Time to turn back the tide of fear and bafflement, a tide scouring her shores since she’d arrived, and for a lifetime before that too.

The dull pressure of the receding headache still made her squint, her balance had not returned to normal, and her skin was coated with a sheen of cooling sweat, but on through the passages she went. In her wake, light burnished and lacquered the timber panels and floors of the second storey with a bloody sheen.

In the second passage that led to the stairwell she found three unlocked bedrooms; all empty of life and filled with treasures unused since the death of M. H. Mason. Spaces that waited in faint light for guests who never arrived.

Without fear of rebuke, she entered Edith’s bedroom. A room also left unlocked. Perhaps it was permanently unsecure, so Maude could make swift passage to her ailing mistress.

Catherine photographed the wall of doll faces. Open-eyed, impassive, lifeless expressions in wood and cloth and ceramics, who had watched over Edith Mason since she had been a little girl.

Once open, the two great wardrobes and the chest of drawers confirmed her preposterous suspicion that Edith only possessed clothes predating the Second World War. Edith had mimicked her mother and uncle in their prime, long after they had died. But had she also worn her mother’s clothes while her mother was alive? Had Edith truly existed for so long inside one place, with no curiosity of what stretched into infinity outside of the grounds? It seemed so.

Catherine photographed the dresses and the contents of the drawers. She would have photographs and prove to herself and others that she was not mad. This was all here, really here.

Once the overhead light had been switched on, the next room she surveyed from the doorway shook her so profoundly, it took most of her will not to scream as she steadied herself against the doorframe. The nursery was a place she could not bring herself to enter.

Ten small beds aligned in two rows, beneath walls hand-painted with scenes of animals dressed as people. Animals that took tea, sailed little boats, flew kites, and ran in eager groups with wild white eyes and clawed feet as they chased rats.