Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Another bundle of brittle photographic paper revealed dramas in progress upon the stage of the theatre. Mason and his sister were absent from the murky pictures and must have been behind the scenes operating the marionettes. The shots were all taken directly before the front of the stage, perhaps on a timer. Little detail of the activity on stage was revealed. The motion was always blurred, as if the antics of the puppets were too quick for the shutter speed.

There were a great many pictures on browning paper of the derelict church she had seen at the head of the village. And even more of the perimeter walls, the oldest headstones and their indecipherable inscriptions. Much attention had been paid to one dingy and poorly lit corner of the cemetery.

In another folder, there were hundreds of photographs of some kind of excavation, or earthworks, on the side of a small hill surrounded by open ground, though she had no idea of the location, which wasn’t marked in anything but some sort of code that resembled ancient Greek interspersed with Roman numerals. But it looked as though something was in the process of being dug up. What appeared to be small bones and fragments of cloth were set beside a measuring tape.

The next drawer down repeated the obsessional character of the collection, though these pictures featured small paths and lanes, captured from all angles, upon open countryside. From a hill, the tracks had been traced onto some photographs with ink, like grooves in the earth.

Desperate for embellishment, for an explanation, she moved down to the next drawer, at the bottom of the cabinet. The final drawer was comprised entirely of folders containing pictures of the night sky and moon in its various stages, as if Mason had picked up astronomy as one of his compulsions during an enigmatic journey that included marionette theatre and the extermination of thousands of small mammals. His approach to whatever interested him was always fastidious, even scientific, but his goals still utterly bemused her. This was no good to her, to what she wanted to know. She kicked the final drawer shut.

Catherine moved her attention to the second cabinet. Its contents were more in keeping with what she expected from Mason, but soon regressed into a creative degeneracy that made her feel so sick, she wondered if she would ever recover from what she saw.

The dissection, emptying of internal organs and then meticulous fleshing of hides, of what were undoubtedly small animals, filled the entirety of the top drawer. She looked at no more than seven of the pictures — four rats, a squirrel and what resembled a peeled badger upon a slab — before she had to look away and press her knuckles to her lips. But it was the final picture that most affected her.

At first, she was convinced Mason had been preserving a dark-skinned child. A closer, less horrified scrutiny, revealed it to be an ape that Mason had photographed after making a long dorsal incision in its back. At that point in the procedure, the monkey’s arms draped long black rags of hairy skin that had been rolled down from its hands. The empty strips of flesh looked like Opera-length gloves.

On the reverse side, Mason had written ‘Felix Hessen’s Hoolock Gibbon from Regent Park Zoo’. So perhaps it had been a private commission to preserve an ape. The shock of believing, for just a moment, that Mason had been skinning a child forced Catherine to slam this drawer shut.

The collection in the next section of the cabinet was equally disturbing. Carefully indexed photographs featured the still-articulated bones from animal remains, augmented with line drawings of wooden limbs replicating the true movement of joints. Several large albums’ worth of individual doll parts had also been photographed against black cloth. Body parts removed from what had once belonged to a set of expensive and lifelike J.D. Kestner and Simon and Halbig dolls. Jointed limbs, mohair wigs, rotatable hands, the bisque socket heads of female dolls, and torsos moulded out of porcelain to resemble children’s bodies abounded. The classic blue glass eyes and open mouths lined with little moulded teeth were the giveaway that they were German. After opening thousands of animals, Mason seemed to have progressed to disarticulating the more sophisticated varieties of doll.

The files of photographs that followed the doll parts forced Catherine to utter, ‘Dear God’ into the air of the now stifling room, so fragrant with stale tobacco, brittle paper and polished wood.

A vast collection of amputee photographs from the Boer war, Great War and even the American Civil War awaited, as did line drawings and photographs of tin and wooden limbs, alongside their laced leather harnesses and the complicated hydraulic systems that replicated human joints. One-hundred-year-old catalogues, featuring the most sophisticated prosthetic limb designs, from Gustav Hermann and Giuliano Vanghetti, had been slipped amongst the antique medical photographs.

Mason may have mastered taxidermy to a level unmatched in his lifetime, or since, but it had surely functioned as a precursor to the next step: an obsession with real surgery, and with the fitting of prosthetic limbs to stumps, and with suturing torn human flesh.

Randomly, Catherine flicked through half a dozen of the medical photographs, and saw all of the dead skin, patch-worked with stitches, that she ever cared to see. She closed the drawer using what little strength remained in her arms.

Incapacity. Disability. Deformity. Amputees. The horrors of the front. His own facial disfigurement. Callipers, crutches and wheelchairs. It all swirled like a horrible carousel through her mind, and made her nausea worse. The man had been traumatized by his experience of war and his great personal loss to such an extent that he must have been insane the entire time he lived in this house after coming home from the front. He’d incubated here, cultivating his regressive, though artful, vision. He had evolved here. But into what?

The contents of the penultimate drawer seemed to attest to her theory, and revealed evidence of experiments of a far more intimate nature that so shocked Catherine she knew that when she left the house tonight she would never return.

Amongst a sizeable private collection of Victorian Momento Mori photographs, featuring doleful families in their Sunday best, sat around the smartly dressed and waxen-faced cadavers of their recently deceased infants, Mason’s curious obsession had turned to his sister.

In the 1940s, according to the dates on the rear of the pictures, printed in Roman numerals alongside more of the Greek code, he had photographed his own sister in a variety of foundation wear and crippling S-Bend corsets against a black backdrop. Despite the severe countenance of his sister’s thin masculine face, the pictures issued an uncomfortably erotic charge. Though the composition and style of the photographs still suggested an artistic purpose was behind their creation.

Violet Mason’s flesh was never naked. From the throat down, she had been stitched into some kind of patchwork second skin, made from the type of brown cloth once used to manufacture the stuffed bodies of dolls, at a time when only the heads and hands of dolls were constructed from china or porcelain. Over the tight sackcloth skin, layered petticoats were then arranged, layer by layer, to eventually produce a complete constriction, a muffling of the flesh. In addition, Violet’s middle was always bound tightly to shape her torso.

Her legs were gripped by iron callipers and thick leather boots, as if she suffered some crippling disability. The arrangement also resembled a form of punishment. Perhaps it was. Edith must have been an illegitimate child. So was this Mason’s reaction to his sister taking a lover?

On two pictures, prior to the layers of boned foundation wear and underwear being built over her thin body, Violet’s loins were revealed. Stitched with an alarming suggestion of permanence, her abdomen had been fitted into what resembled brown leather shorts.