Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Applied over a layer of the cloth-like skin, the leather breeches were sown up her inner thighs, in the same way Mason had stitched closed the skin of an animal over an artificial wooden body, or a plaster mould in other pictures. It looked like a primitive chastity device.

After each binding session, Violet Mason must have been cut out of the shorts and cloth suit, or the stitches would have been unpicked. At least, Catherine hoped so.

What was being done to Violet Mason’s head was equally strange and sinister. Perpetually built up to grotesque levels, her hair was intricately piled in the cottage-loaf style that Edith had replicated. Catherine knew from other pictures that Mason’s sister had thin black hair, so the seemingly endless array of profiles of his sister’s head proved that the elaborate styles that dwarfed her bony face had been constructed from donor hair and rags.

As the studies of the head section of the pictorial archive progressed, the face of Violet was consistently overlaid with a series of veils from the broad brims of Watteau hats. Behind the sheer face veils, the Masons had begun experimenting with a crude form of masking combined with theatrical make-up. Violet’s face was often so tightly bound with gauze, her features were restricted into a narrow pout, with her mouth forming a small dollish O.

Increasingly, her eyes were painted on too, over closed eyelids, with huge black lashes strikingly visible through the layers of netting. She had also worn porcelain masks that had either been decorated with cosmetics, or were actual life-sized doll faces, but always further obscured through a layering of veils.

It was as if M. H. Mason was fetishizing his sister as a doll, or perfecting something upon a living model that Catherine did not want to consider.

Before opening the final drawer, she questioned whether she could tolerate any more. What had begun as a frenzy of rummaging had tailed off into an appalled gaping.

She steeled herself, knelt down, and opened the last compartment, silently praying for a collection of seamstress dress patterns.

Catherine held onto the cabinet to prevent herself from sitting down and allowing the shaking to take over.

Her recognition of the buildings, photographed in black and white and collected at the front of the first drawer, had been immediate. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education. The home. The special school for special children in Ellyll Fields.

An earlier incarnation of the institution than the one she had known, this version had lawns cut and trimmed within paths, long black windows, and old cars parked out front. But what had Mason been doing messing around with that school, and a place within a few hundred yards of her home? She scrabbled through the pictures looking for dates. 1951, 1952, 1957 in Roman numerals. Long before her time. It offered some relief, though not much.

Inside another file she saw a face she had known since childhood, a face of an innocent, smiling girl with sightless eyes that had always filled her with dread: little Angela Prescott. The blind girl of her nan’s stories, who had been snatched from Magnis Burrow before Catherine was born. This was the iconic face of Ellyll Fields that most of its inhabitants had tried to forget.

The photograph of Angela had been cut out of a newspaper. As had the likenesses of Margaret Reid and Helen Teme, her companions in tragedy, that were also stored in the same file. The cuttings were inside a transparent envelope, the type stamp collectors used. The same images from newspaper clippings that her nan once kept in a biscuit tin.

The connection of Mason to the abducted girls filled her mind with a static of confusion that was underpinned with a dread so cold it made her shiver. The shock settled into a feeling of nausea, and a fear for her own safety that made the hair follicles of her scalp prickle. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths to settle herself.

Mason was an old man when the girls went missing. And at the time he was also a man not long for the world. He’d killed himself in the early sixties. Cut his throat. So was this why? Because of what he had done to little girls? From animals to puppets to children…

She thought of the pretty little kittens in dresses. And the demented, but grotesquely beautiful world of preserved animals and dolls he had created inside his own home. His connection to the missing girls suddenly seemed plausible. Back in the fifties would anyone even have thought twice about an elderly man, with a priestly bearing, taking photographs of a school?

Or was he just an archivist, or a historian of the locale’s stranger byways and most curious events? Please let him be.

There was nothing else in the two Magnis Burrow files to condemn him as a kidnapper and murderer. Just the clippings and scores of photographs of the school and its grounds.

She shouldn’t even be in the room, she was trespassing, but she suddenly wanted to confront Edith with the pictures.

Her horror dwindled into confusion when she perused the next file. The photographs were mounted in embossed paper frames and all featured another child, but one she did not recognize. Judging by the quality of the paper and the tones in the photographs, she guessed they were developed in the forties. Dates on the rear confirmed her hunch.

The first picture showed a little boy sat in a wheelchair outside a stone cottage. His legs were withered. The same boy appeared in two other pictures taken on the perfect lawn of a large orderly garden. In the first garden picture he was alone, smiling at the camera. In the second picture he sat watching the blurred activity upon the stage of Mason’s theatre. So the latter two pictures must have been taken in the rear garden of the Red House. There had been a disabled child at the Red House around the time of the Second World War.

Catherine screwed up her eyes and scrutinized the blurred frenzy of activity on the stage of the puppet theatre. But the only details she could determine were suggestions of an old bonnet around an indistinct face, and what appeared to be two thin arms thrust into the wavy air above the bonneted figure’s head. She looked away, dizzy from a powerful jolt of déjà vu.

Questions darted through her mind but would not settle into coherent answers. Maybe this was Edith’s son? She might have followed her mother’s example and had a child out of wedlock. There was no evidence of Edith’s father in the house. And she had been too polite to ask about Edith’s dad.

If Edith was his mother, the boy could have been carrying the same congenital deformity that beset Edith. But Edith had lived to her nineties, so where was the child now?

In another picture the disabled boy sat between Violet and what Catherine assumed was a young Edith Mason. Violet wore a long black dress that concealed her feet at one end and pinched her throat at the other extremity. Edith was dressed in a near-identical fashion. The severe expression on Edith’s face matched her mother’s. Only the boy was smiling, and he held Edith’s pale hand.

Catherine’s trembling fingers, that she could not still, loosened another photograph from out of the paper folder. The picture featured the boy in the wheelchair and M. H. Mason, the patriarch, sat in a garden chair. Mason wore a white linen suit and hat, but had failed to fully conceal the devastated side of his face, even with his head angled away.

Behind the boy’s chair, Edith, draped in her widow’s weeds, stood ramrod-straight without the aid of a wheelchair. So she had not been disabled when younger. Her face was as bloodless and long with misery as it seemed to have remained into her ninth decade. Catherine wondered if Violet had been the photographer.

Her fascination soon turned to panic.