Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

In desperation, Catherine began to cry and whisper and whimper as her pawing became clawing and scraping and a hopeless shoving at the wood of the back door. Until she disturbed whatever, or whoever, it was that began to fumble about inside the sealed workshop. And whatever was inside the workshop soon scratched at the other side of the makeshift door. The pattern of footsteps and the incoherent grunts suggested an animal, or someone helplessly drunk had been imprisoned within the room.

Catherine backed away, up the corridor towards the doorway of the stinking kitchen area.

The figure contained within the workshop began to moan and then bark like a dog with something stuck in its throat. The scratching of the fingers evolved into an angry hammering. She realized she wasn’t so much afraid of who was on the other side of the door as much as she was afraid of why they were being kept inside the room.

Because they kept captives here, drugged captives, and killed them. Leonard was in on it. He was the Masons’ accomplice. He had set her up. The valuation, her entire job, was a sham, a prelude to this. Maude was his ally. It must have been going on for years. Since before she had been a child in dismal Ellyll Fields. She thought again of Alice clambering up the riverbank to the hole in the green wire fence, of the black and white faces of the disabled girls in Mason’s study. Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott, Helen Teme. They must have all been brought here.

How had they snatched the first three girls? Using children, like those she had seen in the special school, dressed as Mason’s marionettes? On M. H. Mason’s orders? With the intention of drugging and killing disabled and vulnerable girls here? Were they still doing it?

Leonard and his confederates must have waited for Catherine all these years too, for decades. Because she was a witness to Alice?

Preposterous, because Alice was still a child here, or had that been a hallucination? And where, or what, was Edith Mason?

The house… the house could not have altered so radically. There was no drug in existence that could make her see it as it had been, that gloomy, oppressive, but perfectly preserved, revival house. It was not possible.

Her situation was impossible, like the story in a horror film, and her explanations didn’t work. But here she was, right now, in a place as real and as vivid as any she had known in her life.

From the other end of the corridor the sound of two sets of feet descending the stairs to the hallway compelled Catherine to duck inside the kitchen and to press her back against the far wet wall.

Briefly, she inspected the kitchen windows to see if one of the boards could be levered off. The bottom panel had been kicked in at some point and clumsily reattached. The wood looked like wet cardboard. She tried to peel the sheet of chipboard away from the nails as quietly as possible. In the distance of the house she heard a chain slide through door handles.

They were going then? Leaving?

She crept to the doorway of the kitchen and noticed a small camp bed pushed against the wall, on the side of the room opposite the window. A mottled pillow without a case, indented by the impression of a head, lay at the top of a single tartan blanket. So who slept here? Maude?

When they had a victim to torture and kill.

Catherine stuffed her fingers inside her mouth to still her whimpers and to hold her jaw that was now quivering uncontrollably from shock and fear.

She peered out into the utility corridor.

In the distant gloom, Maude dragged M. H. Mason’s leather trunk through the hall and into the little reception corridor before the open front doors. Leonard carried bedding folded over his arms. Was that what she been sleeping on? If so, were they taking evidence of her visit out of the ruined building to dispose of? Perhaps that’s why they had been in her room, to remove traces of her now the time had come to kill her and finish this deranged ritual they had started when she was sent to value antiques.

Oh God Oh God Oh God.

Who were these people? Was Edith still inside that trunk they must have fetched from the attic? And if so, was Edith Mason alone inside it?

She was going mad from the impossibility of it all, from the continuing maelstrom of confusion and terror the house would give her no respite from.

Footsteps approached. Someone was walking through the utility corridor. Catherine cast about the kitchen, found a breadknife in a tub of margarine crawling with ants. Pulled the knife free and backed against the wall beside the window, out of sight of the corridor, and waited. She stayed silent, trembling as the two sets of feet shuffled and bumped outside in the utility corridor.

No one came into the kitchen, but she could not believe they were unaware of her.

She heard Leonard and Maude unlock the workshop door.

What they pulled out of the room did not put up a struggle. It came out groaning and coughing and seemed to be willingly led by its silent captors through the utility corridor towards the hall.

Crouching in the stinking darkness against the wall, Catherine waited and listened until she was sure there were three sets of footsteps moving away from her position and back towards the front of the house. When she was certain they were returning to the hall, she peered around the kitchen’s doorframe and saw a clump of slowly moving figures blocking the light that seeped into the passage.

Once the group had struggled out of the utility corridor and into the hall, they were lit up by the light falling through the broken skylight and by what shone through the open front doors. And what she saw fused her enduring terror with a greater incomprehension, so quickly, she thought she might faint.

Between the skinny, naked figure of Leonard and the squat, lumpen Maude, was the silhouette of a woman in what appeared to be a long grey dress and white apron; the same outfit Maude wore. A bag, or a garment like a hood, was pulled over the figure’s head.

The woman was unsteady on her feet and occasionally issued a grunt or piteous cry as she was shoved about the hallway. When Leonard and Maude released her arms, the captive spread pale hands as if she were suddenly finding her feet upon an icy pavement.

Catherine clutched her ears to try and stop the spinning inside her skull that demanded she just run down there, screaming, and get it over with. Just have them put an end to her, and this tortuous theatre of cruelty she was still stumbling around as an unwitting player.

She had been on centre stage. It had been all about her. But since she had woken in the derelict building she seemed to have been marginalized. This notion should have brought comfort, but instead, the greater and more sinister mystery the day had introduced was taking her to a point where death might even be something of a blessing. She thought she had been here before, at school as a child; in London; when Mike left her; even inside this house. But none of that had even been preparation for this morning.

As she continued to gape at the grotesque spectacle within the dilapidated hall, Catherine became attuned to a scrutiny that made her shiver from head to toe. Taking her horrified stare from the tall upright figure with the hooded head, that grunted and swiped at the air about its concealed face, Catherine looked at Leonard and was quite sure the emaciated naked figure had now turned its indistinct leather face in her direction.

She ducked back inside the kitchen and was sure if she heard a single footstep approach her position her heart would simply stop.

The next thing she heard, from the front of the house, was the doors being closed and chained shut from outside the building.

Catherine peered out again. And saw the thin hooded figure in the housekeeper’s uniform, alone and stood within a broad shaft of dusty sunlight falling from above. The slow, painful and wretched fumbling of the thing commenced, and the draped head groaned as if in pain while reaching for what it couldn’t see.