Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

The figures dispersed around her, as if terribly eager not to miss something up ahead in the street. As they fled, Catherine received an impression of yoke collars and floor-length pleated skirts. She saw the back of an Eton jacket with swallow tails and a short knitted cape. Clothes that hadn’t been fashionable in a century.

They were all covered from chin to toe. And again, all she had made out through their patterned veils were smudges of white. Their faces must have been coated in stage make-up, or were clad in colourless masks.

Their wake was a thick scent cloud of lavender. An odour failing to mask the competing ones of camphor and the mustiness of clothes left in damp conditions.

‘What… Hello, wait! I’m looking for…’

Her plea was ignored. There was a snigger at her outburst from another direction. Which was shushed. The cackler desisted, but whoever had scolded the giggler now laughed, too, before darting away.

If they’re laughing at me they should see themselves.

At the end of the street she discovered another iron candy-striped pole blocking access to the village. She wanted to scream.

Beyond the barrier was a darkness unrelieved by a tree-line, hedgerow or moon-silvered fields. Her imagination suggested the world reached its edge at the horizontal pole. And it was too dark beyond the barrier to see any evidence of the car that must have brought Mike and Tara to Magbar Wood.

Huddled together beside the beery light of the last window of the street, a small gathering of silent, rapt shapes distracted her.

An elderly figure in the centre of the group performed a curious skipping upon the narrow pavement. She caught glimpses of its prancing between the vast hats of the onlookers. The dance had long passed from fashion, or perhaps never extended beyond the borders of the village, and what she could see of the dancer’s head was mostly engulfed by a black wig. Where the tresses parted, the revealed features were covered in white greasepaint. The cheeks were rouged and the eyes decorated with long lashes like an aged cross-dresser. Around his throat the dancer wore a Mr Toby ruffle. His painted eyes were closed in concentration. His grin was pure music-hall farce. Clackclack clack clack went his tap shoes upon the paving.

Having seen more than she cared to, Catherine turned about to head back to her car. She’d sit in it and sound the horn. Mike would hear it. If whatever functioned as officialdom at the pageant also heard the horn, she would demand the maypoles that blocked the road be removed. And inside a locked car she would feel safer.

Her decision was thwarted by the sudden electric crackle and hiss from the adjoining lane. The interference was followed by a brassy groan like the iron hull of a ship grinding against stone.

Catherine clutched her ears. A burst of music followed, that suggested it had been made at the dawn of recorded sound and was being played at the wrong speed through ancient speakers. A discordant, metallic fanfare. Loud music played tunelessly, but still recognizable as ‘Greensleeves’ as if blasted from out of an ice-cream van decades before.

The crowd about Catherine paused, in what she took to be awe, before they all turned towards the junction of the two lanes.

The shock of the reappearance of ‘Greensleeves’ in her life made her want to sit down in the street and sob. And the music was clearly a summons to those gathered for the pageant, who now tapped and rustled through the darkness, between the stone gulley formed by the houses, towards the intersection.

‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’ she called, on the verge of tears, to a figure that hurried past her with the aid of two walking sticks. She thought the old woman smiled behind the netting that dropped from the wide brim of her hat, but she did not answer.

Two small men bent double with age tottered on frail legs to move around her. ‘Please. Sir. Can you…’ Their narrow faces were hints of white beneath the brims of ill-fitting Homburg hats, that failed to contain unkempt hair that trailed over their collars.

She reached out and seized one of the men by the upper arm. And quickly released the limb. Not only because it was as thin as a wooden flute beneath its drapery of black cloth, but because the man let out a shriek and fell.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I never meant… Here. Let me help…’

He was soon back on his feet, helped up by a man in a three-button frock coat and someone of indeterminable gender swallowed by a tweed cape. With their gloved hands they snatched at the elderly figure who had virtually disappeared against the unlit road surface.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Catherine said to the back of their hats.

She joined the crowd’s momentum, if it could be called that, with the intention of returning to her car at the opposite end of the lane. Which wasn’t far, though the determined crowd either blocked what little light issued from the windows of the houses, or the lights had dimmed in some coordinated fashion, which was impossible and must have been her imagination.

Perhaps a residual effect of Maude’s tonic still ran strong in her blood, because she endured a few terrifying moments in which she thought she hung within a moving nothingness. There was no edge or border to the night, no horizon, and she wanted to crouch and place her hands on the earth, until the rustling of old limbs in vintage cloth had ceased in their surges about her.

Only as the vestiges of the motley horde thinned, and the most infirm of their number tottered and guided each other around the obstacle of her body, did some of the whisky-tinted light cast enough of a glow for her to move again, and without the sensation of falling backwards.

Once more, the world around her had become insubstantial and unreal. Maude’s tonic must have combined with the cold and darkness, and with her being ill, and her meddling with old dolls, antiques and taxidermy. All this had integrated to contribute to her disorientation. She also wondered when she would stop seeing things not as they were, but transformed.

She needed to calm down and stay upright and clear of the small shadows that hobbled about her. And she must remove herself from Magbar Wood, because hysteria wasn’t far away.

When she reached the place where the two lanes merged, she could see that the doors of the derelict church were now open. A full blare of the hurdy-gurdy fairground melody clanged against the stone walls of the chapel and bulged outwards. A dim red light was emitted.

Before the covered gate of the churchyard, the glow was joined by a ruddy luminance from the doors of the neighbouring scout hall, as if this was now the heart of the pageant. Catherine continued towards her car.

A hand gripped her elbow. ‘You won’t find this in the Guardian Guide .’

She shrieked.

Mike.

‘What are you fucking doing here?’ It was out of her mouth before she knew it, when she only wanted to fall against him and sob.

He released her arm and stepped away. The smile receded from his mouth and vanished from his eyes. Mike looked away, then at his feet. ‘Leonard called me. Said you would be here, he said you needed help. He told me to come and bring you home.’

‘Leonard?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cath. You don’t know how much. About… Look, forget that. We need to get out of here. Tara’s car is… Your nose is bleeding.’

The strange night sounds and sights retreated, and her focus on Mike’s pale and miserable face surprised her, as if she had awoken from a trance she’d endured for so long it had begun to feel normal, only to rediscover her will once the soporific spell had broken. Her chin and lips were indeed wet.

‘How could you? How could you, with her .’