Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Where was Tara if she had not come in with the congregation? And Mike? He was there, behind her in the street, and then… Could he have moved out of the lane so quickly? And had Tara left the church and found Mike? Would they leave without her? She swallowed a sob.

Directly beside her, though the small woman had covered her face with a fan, her neighbour’s exposed lower legs distracted Catherine. Wool gaiters were side-buttoned over the woman’s high-cut shoes. Above the covered ankles, two pale legs were visible.

As if aware of her scrutiny, the legs withdrew beneath the seat of the chair. But not soon enough to prevent Catherine’s glimpse of what resembled carved ivory limbs within iron callipers; legs that curved out of a hint of leather straps about the knees.

Catherine made to stand up and get out. But the doors were now closed.

The glass sarcophagus stood upright before the sealed entrance, as if the figure inside was present to watch a performance. The wooden throne inside the glass case was festooned with briars and flowers were entwined around the legs of the chair. The tiny figure upon the throne remained still, the veiled face obscured. Before the lights dimmed even further, Catherine noticed a tiny hand upon the armrest. It was as white as bone.

She stifled a scream.

The whispers, shuffles and creaks around her settled to silence and anticipation inside the black hall. Only the stage was now visible.

Her sense of the walls and ceiling and floor slipped away with the going of the light. All was removed from the world and the invisible audience hung in darkness before the stage. Where she was in space and even time, she feared she was now losing her grasp of.

The curtains shrieked across their rails and revealed the stage.

In the tense darkness the din of applause subsided.

Catherine was sure the audience had been stamping the heels of their feet against the floorboards. But the noise of applause, the sound of wood knocking against wood, was too high up and she felt no vibrations through the soles of her shoes. So they must have been banging their chairs with hard objects and not clapping with wooden hands. An idea her paranoia was only too happy to revive.

Now the performance had ended, the stage lights slowly glowed red, but illumined little beyond the head of the hall. When as much light returned as the tired bulbs were able to emit, she was relieved to see that the curtains around the stage were closed. The performance had drained her. She would be unsteady on her feet if she tried to stand.

Now the tired old world had re-formed around her, its dusty ruins could not compete with the vitality of the drama. The duration of the play was intentionally short, because no one could have withstood any more of it.

What she had seen through her fingers in snatches was all she had been able to bear in the reeking darkness of the blacked-out hall. The recording of what must have been the voices of M. H. Mason and his sister, Violet, she had plugged her ears against with torn wet wipes.

What the script had been based upon she did not want to guess. What she’d heard of the narration accompanying the activity of the marionettes had been as original and insane as what Mason had left in his study.

The hanging of the Martyr, Barnaby Pettigrew, and the burning of the Martyr, Wesley Spettyl, had nearly made her sick. The audience had wept and groaned as if at a funeral.

During the execution scenes, most of the marionettes had posed as children. Ragged, terrified children who watched their masters’ ghastly public demises carried out by court order and mob respectively; executed for witchcraft and necromancy, or so the crackling voice of the narrator had droned from somewhere behind the stage. Something only Jacobean playwrights would have dreamed of depicting in such detail.

Before each scene, the plaster-faced Master of Revels had walked centre stage upon its canine hind legs, grinning despite missing a nose, to deliver soliloquies in what Catherine guessed was a mostly indecipherable English in the Tudor idiom.

She’d once heard a fragment of Tennyson, recorded on a few surviving wax cylinders, reciting his poetry, and the narration to the M. H. Mason play had been about as clear. She hated the idea her imagination mooted that the script was far older than Mason, and had been transmitted to him from the past. No wonder the BBC had packed up and run in the fifties.

At its heart the drama was some kind of morality play. In her glimpses of it, the hare-headed puppet and the bonneted girl with the long chestnut hair had presided over the sentencing of Pettigrew and Spettyl, in some distant court or municipal authority. The same roles they had played in the smashing of Henry Strader upon the wheel in the BBC film.

But in return for the sentences they’d handed down to the puppet masters accused of sorcery, the marionette cast had visited the judges in their beds at night and hauled them away in their nightwear, to wooded scenes depicted by a backdrop, where a grisly revenge was taken and fates were decided.

What had been most disturbing in the haphazard fragments of the drama she had seen, were the episodes that featured the judges yanked off the stage and upwards into darkness. The judges had kicked their legs as they went. At the same time the recording had unleashed the sound of animal screams. To which the crowd had twitched and hissed with excitement.

If their diminishing though continuing cries could be trusted, the violent ascents of the judges into the air didn’t so much indicate the end of their lives, but the beginning of less merciful torments. All this in return for what they had done to the Martyrs.

The procession of the performers at the play’s conclusion depicted the cast as ragged urchins and stumbling invalids who disappeared, one by one, through a hole in the cloth wings of the stage. An aperture they drifted towards on strings Catherine had been unable to make out at any time during the performance.

She’d also scanned the cast to catch sight of the figure of the wooden-faced boy from Mason’s photographs, from her childhood trances, and from her own memory. All of the marionettes were in various costumes in each scene, but there had been crowd scenes in which she had seen something with girlish curls bouncing upon its small head. From where she was seated at the back, in what little she could bear to watch, that character had also seemed disinclined to show its face to the audience. She was now paranoid enough to believe the figure had known she was seated in the hall and was deliberately concealing itself from her.

When the performance finally ended she’d found herself breathing hard into her hands, which covered her face. The doors to the hall were open and the effigy sealed within glass had been taken away. What was left of the crowd had jostled from the hall with a weary determination. Most members of the audience had already found their way outside in total darkness while she still waited in petrified silence, praying there would be no encore.

At least the terrible movements of so many small limbs in rustling fabric, all about her in the darkness, was over. What the village had dressed and gathered for had finished, perhaps for another year.

But why keep it alive?

Beside her on an empty chair her bag gaped open. During the performance, it had been somewhere by her feet. But now the bag was upon the seat next to her.

The bag was empty, ransacked. A white piece of aged paper was all that had been left behind by the thief. Had it been the elderly woman in the vintage dress?

Catherine took out the notepaper, opened it. And tried not to cry.

YOU LOK SO PRITY SO STITCH UP YOR CUNT ELSE HE’LL PUT HIS PIZLE IN THAR AND BRAKE YOR HART APART.