Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

How did they know she was adopted? Had they killed her natural mother? Isn’t that what Edith had said? For giving her away? No, Edith had said that her mother’s suffering would end now she was here, which implied her mother was alive. But where was she?

Lies. Half-truths and manipulation; all she had ever been offered in this house. But Alice? They knew about Alice.

Go through, Alice. Go through, Alice. Go first. Go first. It’s all right… Don’t! Alice, Alice, come back. It’s not safe. Alice. Please, Alice. We’re not allowed. Come back.

She cupped her hands over her ears to drive out the sound of her own memories and the drone of the man’s voice, which made her nerve endings shriek. The static-corroded voice was inside her head. Such was her disorientation she thought she might fall in the dark and not be able to get up again. She swatted her hands about her body to ward off what she thought was Maude.

Trim close to the skull. Around the eye orbit detach the lids. Remove the eyes. The lids must be arranged under a magnifying visor as microbes are moved beneath a microscope. The smallest adjustments give the effects of panic and terror.

‘Stop! Stop it!’

She ran to the open door of the workshop, to the dim, dirty light. There was no other light here. It was a place where you squinted and crept and tottered and brushed against things in the darkness you could not identify.

Trim the ear to the base, separate the skin from the cartilage… then turn the ear inside out… unglove the head with sharp tugs.

‘Mike. Mike. Mike,’ she cried at the open door of Mason’s workshop.

Flesh the meat from off the skin… Degrease the skin. Rinse in plain water.

She looked inside the workshop for a moment that seemed much longer than a moment. Then sat down just inside the room with her back against the wall. The wall held the weight of her body that her legs could no longer support.

A degreased skin can pickle for months and incur no damage…

The flesh of the lovers was pale. Only what looked like a long sideways mouth, which ran down Mike’s entire back, offered any variation to the dull gleam of his skin.

Before him sat a woman whose face Catherine did not need to see to know her identity. She knew it was a woman because one of her heavy breasts, as white as a fish’s belly with a nipple like a bruise, was visible between Mike’s elbow and ribs.

Their dark, wet heads rested together, forehead to forehead, as if they shared a whispered secret like a boyfriend and girlfriend in a scented bath. A dark fluid filled the tin tub to their upper arms.

Unmoving, Catherine looked at them for a while, nonsensically feeling her presence was an intrusion upon a moment of deep intimacy. She also felt the cold shock of carnal betrayal. A disgust at death. And grasped the horribly simple fact that someone could be alive, but go to the wrong place and then not be alive.

Some time passed before she realized the unfamiliar sound in the room came from the pit of her own stomach, rhythmic, like hard breaths. The sound of a stranger in a dark room.

Catherine left the lovers and walked to the back door of the house. The sound was still coming out of her mouth like she was giving birth. It was strangely reassuring because it made her aware she was still alive and real, for a bit longer.

The back door was locked. Of course it is locked. She peered through the little panes of glass in the top half of the door and saw stars. She looked down upon stars too, or was that a strange effect of light upon the glass? What light? But the very thought that there was nothing outside any more, no earth or trees or sky, didn’t surprise her. She didn’t really know what this place was, could only be certain of one thing: she was tired of running. It didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. She felt like she had swum the English Channel in her clothes. So if there was no more running in her, or point to it, there was only here. And her walking through this place and not thinking much for a while, like she’d reached the end of something important. Herself.

In her right fist she held tight the rosewood handle of a scalpel she had taken from the workshop. She wondered if she would be capable of using it on anyone who came near her in the dark corridor, or who tried to prevent her from leaving the house. Or maybe she could use it on herself to frighten them. That would be easier. She used to stamp on her glasses at school and slap her own head until a teacher came. One of the quiet girls with white socks pulled up to the knee, who would never be her friend, would always run for a teacher when she went crazy. Crazy, she learned when very young, was as good a defence as any if you wanted to be left alone. The Red House, she mused, had played the same card.

From up above, came the crackle-static-fizz of the old recording. The great M. H. Mason she had come here for, continued to speak across time in a place he’d curated into an elegant hell, one that smelled of that which disguised death. For posterity he’d recorded his apocryphal madness to inspire others.

They are illusion and deception.

She caught snatches of the dreary announcements within the interference, and only half heard them when the voice passed into clearer bursts.

They are conjured. Their history is obscure and…

Along the length of the utility corridor she met no interference. She tried all of the doors because the rooms beyond had windows big enough to smash and they faced the outside. If there was nothing beyond the panes of glass then maybe nothing was still better than this.

Every door was locked. The passage was a funnel, it had led her to the workshop and demanded she come back out again.

The front door was also shut against whatever was out there, too, or had been out there. There was no more music, no more ‘Greensleeves’, the things with the candles had not followed her inside.

Were they ever there?

From the inside, the doors had been secured and the keys removed from the brass-framed keyholes in the locks. So someone was inside the house with her, securing doors behind her? They could see in the dark and they had something special planned for her. Maude. You mute bitch. Catherine turned and headed for the stairs.

I find the presence of immobile rats far more confirming and comforting than I find the company of my own species.

She had to stay within the fraying boundary rope of reason. Even though her thoughts and half-thoughts and assumptions were being blown about by currents of fear and confusion, there was an explanation, a rational explanation for this situation.

Edith was no killer. She was too infirm. Maude? Maybe. M. H. Mason and Violet Mason had once been real, mad but real. Yet Maude and Edith were behind this. They were continuing whatever M. H. Mason and Violet Mason had started.

Think. Think. Think.

Edith and Maude must have taken Alice all those years ago. With help. There must have been a team effort behind the abductions of Alice and all of those helpless children who went missing from Magnis Burrow, the ones her nan had told her about. M. H. Mason and Violet had begun something here, others had continued the tradition. Wasn’t that what Edith was getting at?

And in the Red House M. H. Mason’s descendants had continued to play out their fantasies, their psychopathic delusions about some nonsensical but hideous legacy of marionette theatre, and upon her, too, whom they had long coveted because she got away in 1981.

Edith was now trying to make her accept the surreal rites of her family, trying to insert them into her thoughts as some kind of alternative reality, some bending out of shape of natural law.