Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

She crossed the hall and walked towards the back door. Out there were her answers. The lump in her throat was the most tangible and solid part of her weightless body and its effortless drift towards that square of light.

She covered the distance quickly, between rose-tinted walls. Proud doors were shut on wonders that would surely overwhelm her if she entered any room. She approached the light of the garden without fear and near burst through the portal that beckoned her with such urgency.

So verdant was the garden, the sun’s reflection on the lawn made her shield her eyes. She’d never seen land so fertile. Intensely green foliage and grass, sprayed with orange, buttercup and purple flowers rendered her breathless at the beauty she surveyed.

Behind the glinting panes of the greenhouse came the suggestions of great waxy tropical plants. The garden furniture was as white as a cricket pavilion in a dream. The wood of the theatre gleamed between velvet wings and below a watercolour backdrop Monet might have painted. Beyond the trees that bordered the garden’s far boundary she caught glimpses of a vast English meadow that shimmered in the heat.

The bee-keeper raised his gloved hand and waved from behind a trellis, from which roses both entwined and burst red, white and pink. Behind the mesh of his hood she could see no face, she was too far away. But the gentle grandfatherly ease with which he moved amongst the indistinct hives faded her memory of the unpleasant thing she had so recently seen in the same outfit.

Seated at the wrought-iron table, its paint so brilliant a white it made her squint, the two women, dressed from throat to foot in black gowns, sat within the shade of a tree. Veils had been unfurled from wide-brimmed hats, and obscured the blanched faces they had turned towards her. Their pale hands matched the china of their raised teacups. A third chair was drawn back from the table.

There was no surprise or tension in the posture of the three people in the garden. They were casually waiting for her to join them.

Catherine turned to face the presence she sensed behind her, deep within the Red House. And started at the sight of the three figures stood where the utility corridor met the hall.

There was no mistaking the thick limbs and stocky torso of Maude. Even from a distance, the mannish face beneath the thick hair, cut so crudely and unstyled, expressed such a longstanding dissatisfaction with a housekeeper’s lot that her patient resignation seemed to have passed into weariness. How was that possible on such a day as this?

Catherine’s interest moved to the housekeeper’s two small companions. They stood on either side of Maude and each of the children had one hand enclosed within the housekeeper’s thick fingers.

The disabled boy with the wooden face and thick black wig was dressed in the same dated suit he had worn the last time Catherine had seen him so vividly, when she was a child, and his thin legs were still encased by a scaffold of calliper. He raised his free hand into the air, as he had done when Catherine was only a child who peered through a wire fence at the derelict and vandalized school for special children. The little raised hand and its fingers were either closed, moulded or carven. The face on the tiny wooden head that confronted her across the distance between them was painted on. It smiled sadly under the encroach of the unruly hair.

On the other side of Maude, light glinted off the thick lenses in the plastic frames of the little girl’s glasses. One eye looked unusual at a distance, and Catherine guessed the eye socket was filled with gauze and the lens of her glasses was still covered in sticking plaster, as it had been when Alice was six, the last time Catherine had seen her childhood friend. The only other feature that struck her, and with a suddenness that made her scalp chill, was Alice’s teeth. And she hoped their exposure formed part of a friendly smile.

Catherine awoke, propped upright in the middle of the bed inside Edith’s room. Behind her the cushions had slid about as she’d moved in her sleep.

Without having been conscious of them being open, her eyes stung. Her chin was wet and her mouth dry from where it had gaped for… how long? The white light of day under the door had vanished. She was returned to night.

The door to the room was still locked. The scalpel lay on the bedclothes where she’d dropped it.

She had been in a trance like no other. She clutched her face and almost cried at the thought of having departed the profound vision only to find herself still trapped.

But what she had just seen was surely too vivid to have been a trance. There had been such strong smells and temperatures. She’d come out of it with a clear, but diminishing notion of being intensely happy.

Not since her childhood had she been rendered so incapable and woken so fatigued by an ‘episode’. Their early potency and the narratives in her mind she had been unable to adequately hold in her memory. But she knew hours had passed during the more arresting episodes when she had been a girl. Her mother used to call them ‘one of your naps’, but they both knew they weren’t naps. What she had just experienced exceeded even her most intense childhood trance.

She had been inside the Red House too. Alice had been present, and the boy from her childhood trances. And it was as if whatever was in the building, or perhaps the Red House itself, was trying to reveal its connection to her childhood, an unseen bond that had always been in place. Her instincts suggested this. But the idea didn’t frighten her as much as it had done before. Because of Alice and the strange boy with the wooden face. The same boy she’d imagined as a child and once thought real, even a saviour. It was like the return of the boy’s presence had added a different atmosphere to the Red House.

In the intense vision, it had also been morning and the sun was bright, the day beautiful. A light of salvation. The light of her childhood trances. All over again she’d felt the joy of being taken out of herself; removed from a world that tormented her.

She was no longer being hunted in the dream, no longer frightened. In the dream she had been welcome. She knew that much. The Masons had also been present, but alive and all too real within the beautiful garden, a place she had only ever known as a repository for weeds, flies and decay. And she’d awoken feeling the dream had provided some much needed hope of liberation.

As recovery from a trance often encouraged her to do, she tried to re-engage with the physical world, and the one she’d grown up to accept was the only world. A world she’d slipped away from too easily since her arrival here. Catherine clambered off the bed and stumbled for the door. Then found she didn’t have the courage to open it. She hesitated, fretted, tried to hold back tears.

Logic attempted a brutish and clumsy reappearance. Why would Maude, and possibly a second presence she had yet to see, kill Edith and throw her remains in the attic trunk, as well as start the Frenophone to frighten her?

She held her face and muttered to herself, trying to force an explanation that would deliver her from a confusion so awful she thought she might have a seizure. Maybe the body of Edith in the trunk had been an effigy and Edith was still playing an elaborate trick on her. She came from a family of performers. Or had Edith been playing dead? And maybe the lights were on dimmer mechanisms. Had to be, because they weren’t so bright now. The interior was returned to its usual obscurity and horrible dim light verging on no light.

The scent? The scent of roses could have been created by some kind of infusion.

Mike and Tara? She tried desperately to think of how they fitted. The household and the village suggested they were some kind of clan protecting awful secrets. She felt this instinctively. And if Edith had become aware of Catherine’s return to Worcester, tracked her down and invited her here, then Mike and Tara may have inadvertently become embroiled in some protracted ritual. One that only made sense to a couple of isolated and deranged elderly women, and those in their service.