Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

It was preposterous, and she wasn’t entirely convinced by her theory, but it was all she had to go on.

But were they going to kill her? Was she right now being batted about like a mouse in sharp claws before the coup de grâce?

Making herself acknowledge that this was all for real, gave her a cruel sense of comfort. Because above all else, she must refuse to accept the impossible things the Red House and its constituency were suggesting to her. Otherwise she was lost.

Catherine stood in the middle of all the small, finely dressed animals. As she stared at an empty wheelchair Horatio watched her with an eternally wet eye. M. H. Mason’s niece, his loyal priestess, was missing from the drawing room.

The absence of Edith mingled with recent memories she no longer wanted, of the old figures prancing about the pageant and of something jabbering from behind a door down there. Her coma of numbness, her brief spell of reason broke. She shook. She sucked at, more than breathed, the air. To fight the swoops of nausea that circled her cold scalp, she sat upon the rug.

A small avalanche of dust in the fireplace made her shriek. She sat back on her heels and stared into the great centrepiece of the room. Another trickle fell into the clean black grate. This time she just flinched. She could hear nothing but the droning of the recording. Which seemed to come out of the fireplace, too, now.

In the corridor outside the drawing room, and about the stairwell, Catherine went and patted her hands along the wood panels for the light switches that blended with the walls. Those she found she slapped on to commit more of the dim ruby glow to the staircase. They have electricity, they must pay bills, people know they live here.

The two adjoining corridors of the first floor remained in darkness. Going inside the lightless mouth of either to find a switch was more than she could endure. They wanted her to go up.

The children must dance for someone…

Maybe she should start the cutting up there.

Though they were both in no condition to do anything but loll like mannequins upon their seats, if either of the occupants of the attic were to move, she believed she would pass out.

Catherine imagined she was in the attic room of a doll’s house, equipped with two dolls, and filled with the amplified noise of a badly tuned radio. Under the roof the noise of static and the metallic voice was so loud, she looked up to make sure she had not walked beneath an enormous asthmatic mouth with a microphone pressed to its lips.

Thrust out before her, level with her shoulders, the scalpel trembled because she held the handle so tightly. Her other hand was clamped across her mouth to smother the kind of whimpers most people never hear themselves utter in an entire lifetime.

The walls of the space she had entered were cluttered and obscured by old wooden tea chests, a set of dining chairs under dust sheets, and a painted rocking horse as big as a pony. Her vision flashed across all of these things and more that didn’t even register, as she searched for movement amongst the furniture. None was forthcoming.

As the terrible voice buzzed, she detected the whir of a clockwork toy. Mechanical parts in what looked like a Frenophone in perfect condition. She’d once seen one in a museum, but it had not been as polished and shiny as the one sat upon the little collapsible table. The device looked like a gramophone but it didn’t play records. It was designed to pick up faint radio signals. And it was operated manually. Hanging from the side of the wooden box was a black handle.

But who had turned it?

She returned her attention to the two bodies in the attic. Surely the withered figure slumped upon the chair behind the table had been incapable of operating the Frenophone. Dressed from head to toe in a white suit and apron, the hands concealed in buff-coloured protective gloves, was the fly-keeper she had seen in the overgrown garden.

Scalpel leading the way, she approached the table at which the figure may have once sat upright, and stood as close as she dared in case it twitched. Through the gauzy front of the mask an indistinct head was just visible.

Catherine tugged off the mask and stared at what remained of a yellowing face, as dry as parchment like that of a pharaoh on display in a museum. Some of the face was missing, burrowed back above one eye socket. The lipless mouth was open and as dry as a bone inside. The gleam and lustre of the open and static eyes assured her they were made of glass. The dried sinews of the throat were neatly sown together by a line of stitches. It was M. H. Mason.

The protective clothing seemed to have settled around the thin and collapsed shape inside. But it could move, she had seen it move. How? At the sudden recollection of its movements between the trees at the foot of the garden, Catherine withdrew from the table.

She promised herself that what she had seen in the garden, that vestige of humanity in white clothing, was not some old toy, wound up to stagger feebly through an old routine, as if set off by a mischievous child trying to get her attention. There were no scarecrows of poorly preserved human remains temporarily occupied by what other life existed here, or behind here, or was close to here, that Edith had alluded to. A force she thought she had sensed, but could not see. Because thinking like that, and believing such things, was just what Edith wanted her to do, and she must not accept Edith’s lies.

So there was another occupant of the Red House who had worn this outfit in the garden on that first day. A third inhabitant. There was Maude, Edith, and one other who had waved to her from the foot of the garden. And she had seen faces at windows, disguised faces. So maybe this other she had yet to meet was the killer of Mike and Tara, and little Alice. Perhaps he was the disabled child from the old photos in Mason’s study. The one she guessed might be Edith’s son. He would be very old by now, past seventy.

Under his mother’s tutelage, Edith’s son may even have preserved his grandmother and great uncle. The house was so insane anything now seemed possible. And it could also have been this other she’d heard creeping around the house at night. Crawling outside of her room.

Catherine turned to the second occupant of the attic, who sat and grinned inside the casket like a satanic version of the Madonna. It was the relic she had seen at the pageant. Housed within glass, she made an educated guess that this was almost certainly Edith’s mother, Violet Mason. A woman now revered as a saint by the local vestiges of life, if you could even consider them as the living.

Under closer inspection, the facial skin of Violet Mason’s remains was as pale as an unearthed grub and as wrinkled as a wet cotton sheet. So shrunken was the form, the crumpled features under the great black hat and behind the patterned veil would have been at home upon the head of a child. The eyes were open and bright and almost certainly made of glass. German. The dress was made of finely embroidered black silk and covered the figure’s limbs. Only the hands were visible. They were as colourless as putty, with fingers as thin as pencils, but looked alarmingly soft. The garlands inside the casket were fresh, as if plucked that very day from the meadows.

Someone had preserved Violet and stored her and her brother’s remains up here. It was ghastly, but Catherine knew she must stay on the side of reason or she was lost, completely gone. These were embalmed corpses, they were not living.

But how was Violet’s corpse transported up here? The corpse had been in the village, then in the lane. How? How? How?

When she was in shock, in the workshop, Edith’s emissaries must have carried the glass casket up here. Maybe while Maude took Edith from her chair in the drawing room and carried her away, somewhere. This all could still make sense. Only just, but stay with it.