Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

She wanted to scream again, but doing something, anything, kept her mind off matters her chaotic mind must be prevented from dwelling upon.

Catherine arrived back to where she’d started her search and stood outside Edith’s bedroom. Without much vigour left in her limp arm, she pushed the handle. The door clicked open.

She went through and shut the door behind her, then locked it. This room she was allowed inside. She was allowed to see the attic and she was allowed to see the workshop. Something without speech, perhaps even without a tongue, was telling her a story. It was like walking through the cells of a horrible comic book with red pages that smelled of flowers. And on this page she was allowed inside Edith’s bedchamber.

Scores of dolls watched her with their perfect and placid faces. Their tiny glass eyes caught the scarlet light. The bedside lamps, the standing lamp and the ceiling light all burned brightly. The curtains were drawn against the absence beyond the windows.

Catherine raised the skirts of the heavy eiderdown and looked under the bed, but refused to contemplate what she was looking for. She saw nothing down there besides a ceramic chamber pot.

She opened each of the great wardrobes and then pulled the hung clothes back and forth with one hand. In the other hand, the scalpel was ready to jab. She opened drawers and raised the lacy tablecloths on the small tables. She peered behind the great mirror of the dressing table. She filled the grate of the fireplace with spare bedlinen and packed it in tight, before concealing the aperture with the black iron cover.

She sat in the middle of the bed and watched the door. She rested the hand that grasped the scalpel beside her thigh, and waited.

When Catherine awoke with a gasp, she was still propped up in the middle of the bed, inside Edith’s room, with a row of plump cushions supporting her back.

The back of her eyes felt bruised and she was nauseous. All of the muscles in her legs ached, her feet were terribly sore. She was ill, exhausted, fatigued by going in and out of shock, still drugged, but she had only passed out from sheer exhaustion. And for no more than a few seconds before some inner alarm jolted her awake.

About the room, the lights still burned and the house remained perfumed with the sweet scent of roses. Though the room had taken on a new aspect. All of its dimensions and accoutrements were as she remembered before she nodded off, but the air had changed. Had become delicate.

The alteration might have been imperceptible were her situation not so desperate, but she identified a lessening of the density and pressure of the room’s atmosphere. It was also no longer warm and airless. The space she occupied felt softer and flimsier, cooler. Perhaps it was her imagination, and despite her physical discomforts, she no longer felt so heavy, but was marginally more buoyant, or even insubstantial, upon the bedding.

Catherine climbed off the bed and approached the door. She glanced up at the dolls and refused to engage with a sense that they appeared happier. Beneath the bottom of the door a hint of white light had appeared on the floorboards.

Making as little noise as possible she turned the key in the well-crafted lock. The key turned and issued the merest click. Catherine inched the door open. And blinked in sunlight.

On the landing, and at the end of the corridor, the curtains and shutters had been opened and the corridor was flooded with strong unseasonal sunlight. Down below, she received an impression that the heavy front doors had been cast aside as she slept, and that each and every arched window on the ground floor had been thrown wide to welcome the light, as well as the crisp warm air and its scents: a bouquet of freshly cut grass and crowded flower beds sweet with pollen.

From above, the scarlet glower of the stained glass had been replaced by a pinkish hue that tinted the air in a way she thought enchanting. She couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few seconds, of that she was almost certain, but somehow she had woken in daylight.

The great perfumed house seemed joyous at her waking, keen to show itself as a place of luxury and discernment, as she had once hoped it would be; a peaceful magnificence that guarded the beauty and craftsmanship of an age she had studied and admired her whole adult life. It was no longer a place of small shadows and a murderer’s light. The stench of death had left its rooms. It was making a new declaration of intent: This is a house you would not wish to leave, and you could only dream of a return to a house on the borderland of wonders.

She visualized the dusty lane that she must run down to get away. Restraining her desire to rush madly for the front doors, she descended the stairs slowly, her eyes everywhere, especially up the stairwell to spot small faces that might peer down. There were none. Then her scrutiny turned to the ground floor where a lumpen figure, with a thatch of white hair, might be ready to welcome her with a fleshing tool, or worse. But Maude was nowhere to be seen either.

Catherine paused in the hall as her nerves cried for her to delay no longer, and to rush at the front doors before they were closed and locked upon her as they had been the night before.

The light outside the Red House was near blinding. Here was the first sunlit and cloudless day of summer, but one that burned stronger than any she had known.

The arched doorframe resembled a planetary eclipse, as if some great star moved through the firmament. The light that entered the building infused her, began to open a receptivity to a sense of beauty and hope she had received but glimmers of before. It was irresistible. Childlike excitement fizzed awake and tingled in every cell of her body. A broad comprehension of something significant that remained indefinable, tried to spread through her with the warmth and light. True meaning was within her grasp and an anticipation of the revelation shortened her breath. A sense of something her conscious mind resisted by trying to confront and understand.

When she looked into the light her mind had never been so clear, so awake, so vital. Every sense and nerve ending stretched to its euphoric pinnacle.

She shielded her eyes as she took a few steps closer to the entrance. Through the glare she could see a cultivated front garden, and beyond the garden wall a great ocean of meadowland stretching to the shore of distant, pleasingly rounded hills that shimmered in a nourishing heat.

You could walk forever in that direction, but you would return here.

She paused on the threshold. This world outside was lit by a great white sun, one that complemented the vista as if her own eyes were covered with a camera’s soft filters. It was like she was in the same building as yesterday, but somewhere else too. If she were to walk down the lane she would arrive at the village and the church. Any further in that direction and all would be unrecognizable. She sensed this, but didn’t know how.

She turned and looked behind her. Beyond the hall and at the far end of the utility corridor, the distant back door of the Red House was now open. The doorway was a rectangle that issued an even more intense light into the building. Light that flooded the previously unlit passage.

The dazzling rear doorway briefly flickered as someone moved across it. From the aperture she heard the distant clink of cutlery upon china. Above the fragrance of the flowers wafted the aroma of warm cakes and fresh bread. She smelled hot sweet tea and the refreshing zest of chilled summer wines. Her mouth watered. She drank deep of the breeze that refreshed her face like a plunge into transparent seawater on a stifling day.

Her face was wet with tears.