Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Catherine dropped the piece of paper and moved quickly to the doors of the empty hall. As she ran she knocked aside the little chairs on both sides of the row. It was like running through a large Wendy house.

Amidst the clatter of her rout, she looked to the distant curtains of the stage, terrified they might open again. The only goal to her purposeful scrabble was the dark lane that led out of Magbar Wood, and the car that must be waiting there for her. Mike would not let Tara leave without her. And despite all Mike was guilty of, she now wanted to cling to him like he was driftwood in a freezing black ocean.

As part of the incongruous irrelevancy that can accompany the exhaustion of fear, she wondered if she should post Violet Mason’s antique maternity dress back to Edith. Which made her wonder whether the Red House was even visited by the postal service. It must be, because Edith had said they received enquiries about her uncle. They also had food, so Maude’s fare had to be procured and delivered from somewhere. These little shreds of evidence that Magbar Wood and the Red House were real, while the horrid suggestions of the things she had half seen in them were not real, were all she clung to as she walked, as quickly as it was possible to walk without breaking into a run, out of the hall and down the lane from the church. Which now looked to be deserted again. The lights were out, the doors were closed.

But the small theatre crowd had not dispelled. It milled in the distance, in the adjoining street she would have to cross to reach the barrier pole and the lane that led away from the village. The people had gathered about their icon; the glass in their midst was catching the thin light.

As she neared, the crowd appeared less animate but more organized. The attitude of the mob suggested it was waiting for her, like the girls at school had once waited outside the main gates. She recognized the feigned indifference of small bodies about to circle. Her scalp iced with panic.

She told herself she couldn’t be in any danger. They were elderly people. Cut off in a rural backwater and just going through the routine of a tradition. One revived by the mad old Masons who had the local population under their influence. She had been ill, Maude had drugged her, and they had put someone up to stealing from her and inserting the obscene message inside her bag.

The ghastly nonsense of the Red House and of M. H. Mason had postured for long enough as some form of alternate reality. She had to fight its influence with every ounce of strength in her mind and her body.

But the horrible notion that she was part of a scripted performance, that had yet to reach its final scene, persisted.

Catherine broke into a run.

She was having a breakdown. She thought she had become better when she moved home to Worcester. But you are only better as long as nothing goes wrong. Mike had gone wrong. Tara had come back. She had been lured to the Red House. She was being dragged back to the condition of her childhood. The will and fates of the world had reasserted themselves into her life.

At several times in her thirty-eight years, she’d come to believe the world was a wholly insidious place. Tonight confirmed it. And now she just had to get out and away, and keep running as far as her unshod feet could take her. Maybe until she reached the sea, where she could crawl around the coastline and find a tiny spot where she would be left alone.

Where the two streets met, three small figures stepped through a doorway to vanish inside a house. From her angle of observation, they appeared to step upwards and disappear into a fold of nothingness rather than merely enter an unlit doorway.

To cleanse her eyes of any more hallucinations she looked up. But the sky seemed closer than it should have been to any part of the earth. She returned her gaze to the ground only to see the faces of the remaining crowd all turned in her direction.

A shuffle of small shapes came towards her. She avoided looking directly at them in case acknowledgement allowed them access to her. They didn’t need permission.

By the time she was hurrying past the encroaching group, she overheard things she was sure were intended for her, but indirectly as if the speakers feigned fragments of conversation she happened to overhear in the street.

‘There’ll be some raw-meating soon, my love.’

‘Aye, let porcelain mingle with flesh. One be smooth, one be wet.’

‘There’s them… hobble on wooden stumps.’

‘. little boots… ’

‘Stitchin’ eh, stitchin’ to be sure.’

‘Needles need work.’

‘Brace us neck and pop in cold eyes.’

‘Salt the hide, keep out grubs. Stuffin’s sawdusty dry.’

‘They’s come in all right, they’s don’t get out, does her.’

‘Stop it!’ she screamed before she reached the end of the miserable collection of buildings and ran at the darkness, towards the memory of where she had seen the candy-striped pole at the border of Magbar Wood.

‘Hearken her,’ someone said, and cackled.

On the other side of the barrier, Catherine groped with outstretched arms, her fingers spread wide in the dark.

Her hands met nothing but empty air.

It was as if existence and matter had ceased to be. When she looked down she failed to see her own feet where they slapped about the uneven road surface.

She wondered if she was now somewhere else, lost and blind beneath the stars of a different night.

Where was Tara’s car, and where was the hedgerow? The lane seemed much wider than it could possibly be.

She had walked a few hundred metres into a cold absence and found nothing. She couldn’t see anything, let alone a parked car, and would never know for certain whether she had stumbled past it.

Maybe the car wasn’t there any more. She would have seen headlights or an interior light if it was occupied. Had they already fled and left her behind?

Her imagination stood in for logic. Cars were not welcome and were removed, and there were never any other cars here because the village had remained unchanged for a century, perhaps longer. Mason had somehow preserved the place and its occupants like he’d preserved the rats of his dioramas. The people had not been wearing costume, but their actual clothes. The entire area was a cruelty play that repeated its trickery like a vast clockwork toy, year after year.

A surge of panic overwhelmed what little of her reason had just driven her into the lane. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ came as a mantra through her startled breaths. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

She tried not to cry. Useless shrieks issued from an inner room in her mind. Her body felt weightless like all of the blood had suddenly evaporated through her skin.

It would take her all night to walk a few miles in such a lightless void. Beneath the soft soles of her feet, sharp stones on the rural lane were already making her hop and wince. Even the dim amber glow of the village buildings appeared reassuring compared to the pitch-black lane.

She gripped both sides of her face to slow everything down inside her head. Mike. Mike had said he would go back to the house to find her if she didn’t return to the car. Mike wouldn’t leave her out here alone.

He might have already gone on ahead while she was trapped in the scout hall. She had been foolish and wilful and should have stayed with him when she had the chance. If Mike was up at the house, they could find a way out together. A flicker of comfort, little more, but it gave her a tenuous purpose.

But whether he was there or not, she would have to return to the Red House. She would freeze out here. The village was hostile. The Red House was, at least, familiar. It had lights, or a more reasonable excuse for light than Magbar Wood, where she could not bear to remain.