Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

‘Sick! You little fool. Is not the world that persecuted them sick? The world that burned and broke and hanged their fathers sick? They only want to save you. Save you as they saved the other poor wretches that were discarded. They have only ever offered sanctuary to those who are as broken as they were broken.’

Edith seemed to lose interest in her after the outburst, and looked fondly at the kittens in their glass cabinet. Wide of eye, curtseying, their tiny furred faces seemed scandalized behind the spread fans.

Catherine had come up to this room in desperation. And she had run back to the Red House because there was nowhere else for her to go. Don’t even think that! But on reflection, she wished she’d just hobbled into the darkness on the road leading away from the village, or clambered across a ditch and fled into an unlit open field. Even if those old things, those people from the village, had come after her, and moved around her, whispering in the void, it would have been better than this.

Catherine backed towards the door. She fought hard to suppress all of the instincts that tried to make her accept something impossible. She fought against thoughts that wanted to become as insane as the Masons and the house they had filled with so much confusion and horror.

In the doorway, she weighed up her options, which still didn’t add up to much more than an escape through the meadows at the back of the property, in complete darkness, alone.

‘My parents will be looking for me. You understand that don’t you? My colleague Leonard will tell them.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes! The police will come here!’

‘I hope not. They’ll waste a great deal of their time, because they won’t find us. This is one of those houses where an invitation is necessary.’

‘Stop it! Mike. Where is Mike? You said he came here. He wasn’t invited—’

‘Are you sure of that? And they will not let go of those they love. Not again. Not ever. We are the exhibits to small tyrants. You were never our guest, but theirs. No one is ever anything else here.’

‘Tell me where he is. Tell me!’

‘And they will remake their guardians in their own image as angels have always done.’

‘Shut up you horrible bitch!’

The fact that the face Edith turned upon Catherine was veiled, she considered a mercy. ‘The salacious ape that followed your scent? Is that all you can think of at a time like this, when you witness miracles? Your hosts will be so disappointed in you, Catherine.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Your beau was invited inside to wait for you, and wait he does. You will find him in my uncle’s workshop. With his lover. Those who wrong you will always be taken care of by those who love you. Your mother certainly was, after she gave you away.’

‘My mother…’

‘Has known such torments for what she did. They saw how you suffered. They shared the pain in your dear little heart. Now you are here her suffering can end.’

‘What are you saying?’

Edith grinned. ‘Here you are wanted. Here you are loved.’

‘I don’t want to be loved by anything here!’

‘But you do. It’s what you’ve always wanted. Your heart bled in the right place at the right time. They came to you, like they came to my uncle. They came to bring you home. Where wonders never cease. Where you will be loved.’

For several seconds the suggestions behind Edith’s words did not register. Catherine’s entire mind was one morbid but half-conscious blank in which she could hear the rushing of her blood mixing with the cacophony of the pageant outside the front of the house.

She slipped into one of those rare episodes when the separation of her consciousness into three divisible minds occurred. One was frantic with fear and panic about a terrible outcome. Beneath that maelstrom she was aware of a strange feeling of acceptance that almost cried out for calm. Deeper still, was the edge of an awareness that partially understood the impossible, and had always done so, but never converted comprehension into a lasting belief or wisdom she could call upon.

She decided she must be stuck in someone else’s nightmare, as if she were trapped in the residue of M. H. Mason’s consciousness, or Edith’s, and whatever it was that consumed this house. The sense of this idea retracted as soon as it had begun and was submerged again. Only fear and despair were left behind.

She’d been driven to what she sensed was the end of her mind. The situation even stopped feeling peculiar. And for barely a moment she came near to a precipice of understanding something much bigger than anything she had ever known. She was brushing against something so monumental her reaction to it would be pure terror. But she must get beyond the terror and find peace or she would break.

She found the strength to run, out of the drawing room and into the dimly lit passage beyond. It was there, as she fled for the stairs to the ground floor, that she heard Edith’s final words. ‘They are the ones who offer justice now, my dear. And their justice can be terrible… what they did to your poor mother.’

By the time she made the ground floor and stood within the hall, another voice spoke. To her? She couldn’t be sure. But it groaned and circled down the stairwell as if from beyond the roof of the Red House, like some great unseen mouth now covered the place where the skylight of red glass was normally positioned.

It was a voice she recognized. A man’s voice. The one narrating the play in the village. And one just as unclear and obscured by static, as if broadcast through poor reception across a great distance of time. Another old recording, because no voice spoken in the present day was capable of such solemn and dour intonation, with a timbre degraded so horribly by age.

Keep one kitten, destroy the rest…

Much of the speech she didn’t catch, words slipped into white noise and became garbled. What she did hear she wanted to block her ears against.

Drowning is the preferred method… up by the hind legs, a quick blow to the back of the head…

Catherine moved across the hall.

Bind the tow with cotton threads… Push the wires through the false body… Pack soft stuffing around the wires…

She looked at the gaping front doors. The music in the lane had stopped. She could see nothing but the tips of blood-lit weeds beyond the porch and a long line of candle flames.

Treat larger mammals in the field… depends upon the circumstances… the trap… placement, temperature… before you carry it indoors… never cut the throat…

‘Mike!’ Catherine screamed and ran into the unlit passage that led to the back of the house. At the far end of the utility area of the building one door was open and its murky light served as a beacon. ‘Mike!’

The voice from above came down and filled the spaces of the Red House, to both push and chase her through the corridor.

A ventral incision through the belly, or a dorsal entry through the back… Breastbone to tailbone… undress from the incision… scissors to disjoint the arms and legs. Pull down the skin to the toes… cut across the foot…

Without light, because her slapping hands failed to find the switches, she was at once ungainly and glanced off a wall. The blow forced her to slow down. To all but stop moving.

She could not see what was around her feet any more. Had something moved near her feet? Was that a quick series of bumps close by, footsteps? Maude. Was Maude a child killer? Catherine imagined the woman’s mute head, mopped in white hair, close by. Waiting with one of Mason’s fleshing blades in her angry old hand. It must be a trap. Edith had lied about Mike to get her down here. They’d stolen her car and bag and phone. Cut her off and were tormenting her. Was that how it went down here?