Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Cascading about the outside of the mask, and down past his bony shoulders, were luxuriant black curls of hair. The horribly feminine tresses reached his protruding ribs.

The rest of the man’s body that she could see was naked, save for a soiled bandage around one thigh, visible when he unlocked the metal gate built into the security fence. Carrying a grey sack, he walked up the path, under the porch roof and out of her view.

She became aware that she was now panting against the rough wooden planks, but her breath was weak, soundless, and must have been muted against the wood.

Blind with panic, as much as going blind among the black spaces between the thin shards of white light in the room, she fumbled around the wet crumbling walls and used her hands to feel her way to the door. Little impeded her stagger. There was a hole where a handle once turned.

She stepped through the doorway and into a vista of ruin. Behind her, the door drifted shut.

The Red House was derelict. The air inside was cold and lightened enough to suggest the great skylight of crimson glass was no more.

No rugs, no carpets, no pictures, no light fittings either. A great pungency of damp wood and urine assaulted her senses.

The stairwell was missing most of its banisters. The ends of the two corridors were lost to darkness. Floorboards were warped and even absent above what looked like deep black cavities about her feet. Leaves had blown in from somewhere and settled into mounds of mulch against the walls, joined by fallen chunks of plaster.

But down below there was movement. And a sound she had heard before. A sound she was too transfixed with fear to investigate as it shambled through the neglect and half-light, two storeys down, out of sight. Footsteps. The distinctive side-to-side shuffle of a heavy-set woman with a limp. Maude. From deep within the bowels of the building the housekeeper now moved into the hall directly beneath the stairwell, as she had once walked to collect Catherine so long ago.

A chain slid through a metal loop. Down there. Metal was rattled and wood groaned out its resistance at being moved. The great front doors were unlocked and the light increased in the stairwell as the doors were opened. And then they were closed and locked again with the same slow procedure. The light downstairs dimmed.

Two sets of feet scuffled and creaked across what was left of the hall floor. But there were no voices, no greetings between the housekeeper and her visitor, which was even worse than the sound of their feet beginning a noisy ascent of the stairs.

Carefully, upon the broken and uneven floor, Catherine slipped backwards and into the mouth of the corridor she had come out of. Once back within the shadows of the passage, she crouched down and tensed. With her cheek pressed into the moist, crumbling plaster of the wall, she peeked out at the stairwell.

In a grotesque and nonchalant parade, Leonard came into view with Maude following. The naked and scarred body of the old man she had come to love and trust moved with a casual ease up the stairs, his spine too straight for a man of his age, his head and upper body covered by the horrid locks that swayed as he walked. His face was blanked out by the old leather mask that offered no suggestion of eyes, mouth, or nose in the dank and dim space the shaggy head rose through.

Behind Leonard, with her face cast into the usual dour indifference, Maude dragged her bandaged foot upwards, one step at a time.

Catherine did not want that black leathery face turning in her direction so she slipped backwards without a sound, deeper into the corridor, as her captors made the second-floor landing. Her mind scrabbled for a solution of where to flee if they came for her.

Fear turned to relief when she heard their footsteps crunch, bump and scuffle into the adjoining corridor that housed the bedroom she had stayed in.

Behind her, and next to Edith’s disused bedroom, she could see the vague outline of the nursery doorway. It was open.

She eased herself to the empty doorframe and peered inside. In a haze of light emitted around the hardwood board, that had come loose in both top corners over the far window, she could see that the shadowy space was empty. The walls were as softened by moisture and mould as the walls in the rest of this building that she had awoken within, so confused and frightened.

She fled back to the landing and listened. In the distance, from out of the adjoining passageway, she heard the muffled sounds of something being dragged around a floor and knocked about a distant room.

Catherine fled across the landing and began a descent of the stairs, her only relief being her skill at moving so quietly and swiftly down to the floor below.

On the first floor, the wooden walls had been smashed through or were black and buckled with damp. A quick look into the gap that had once been the entrance to Edith’s drawing room revealed it to be an empty shell that stank of urine and worse. Somehow the curtain rail above the boarded-over window had survived. She made haste to the ground floor.

Some of the floorboards of the hall were missing to reveal rubbish-filled spaces and crumbling cement between crossbeams. Great rusted nails reared like small serpents in the thin light, and she delicately moved her feet around them to prevent spearing the sole of a bare foot.

The front doors had been shut behind the visitor. A dull glimmer of iron chain looped about the handles suggested they were secure.

Catherine turned and fled into the dark utility corridor, keen on reaching the back door while Maude and Leonard were upstairs.

They must have come out of the corridor on the second floor because she heard their feet creak and bang about the upper storeys. They must be looking for her and were going to search Edith’s room. The thought made her need to escape greater.

There would be time enough to fathom what had happened here, how she had been kept prisoner and mesmerized or drugged. Or whatever they had done to make her experience a derelict building in its former glory, an illusion generated by her own imagination.

Mason’s magic worked.

Bewitched.

Impossible.

Stop it!

There will be time, there will be time.

There would be time, and for the rest of her life, but for now she begged herself just to get outside.

It was dark in the utility corridor and she could not always see where her pale feet stepped. But through some of the gaping doorways smidgens of daylight fell around the boards nailed across all of the windows.

She quickly peered inside the rooms she passed, and there were no longer any great tableaux beneath glass. Each room was empty. One squalid room had the remnants of a wet sleeping bag bunched up amongst plastic bottles, piled at the foot of a stained wall.

There was some evidence of an old kitchen, with a few cardboard boxes and plastic bags scattered across the wooden counters that had not yet been torn from the patchy walls. The grocery bags and the messy assortment of discarded tins and glass jars were modern and new. A loaf of bread spilled white slices onto a murky bench surface. So someone had been feeding themselves and using that space to prepare basic food. Maude? Oh Jesus Christ. So what had she really been eating here? It didn’t appear to have been pheasant.

Catherine slowed down as she approached the workshop, not just because of what she remembered having seen in that terrible space, but because it was the only room in the corridor with the door in place. Not an old door either, but a temporary one, the kind she had seen in chipboard walls around scaffolding on building sites. The door was closed, padlocked.

As was the back door she had run to. And the door was not only closed, but also sealed with a padlock and chain and fresh hardwood panels that had been added to the frame at some point recently. The acrid smell of new wet timber was still detectable about the surface she ran her hands across.