Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Leonard and Maude were no longer inside the great hall. They had gone, left the building. The doors of the Red House were closed and sealed again. Why? Why had they left the hooded captive inside the hall, as if for her to find?

Catherine left the kitchen.

Hesitantly, she walked towards the ghastly hooded occupant of the hall. The woman was tall and thin. And as she drew closer, she was reminded of someone who had just stumbled away from a traffic accident. The woman was in shock after what had been done to her, which might also account for the sounds she made.

Catherine glanced around the hall and up the staircase to the next floor. Empty. Maude and Leonard had really departed and left her alive and alone with this bizarre spectacle of helplessness dressed in a vintage housekeeper’s uniform.

Upon the head of the tall woman was a sack, not a hood. A dirty old sack that fell to the woman’s collarbones.

Inside the hall Catherine cleared her throat. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

The woman let forth a surprised grunt. Her hands rose and batted at the air as if she was trying to fend Catherine away, or reach whoever had just spoken and broken the silence.

‘Don’t move. The floor isn’t safe. Have they gone? Can you hear me, have they gone?’

The woman oriented her frail body to where Catherine’s voice had risen. As she turned she nearly fell.

Catherine moved to her and held her elbow. With her other hand she tugged the sack off the woman’s head.

Transformed by the dress and apron, making sounds unrecognizable as even human, and the fact that the woman had been harrowed by torments that had seen her blinded, still could not disguise Tara. Not even the glass eyes fitted into the red eye sockets, or the fact that no tongue moved within her wide open mouth, could protect the appalling creature’s identity.

The sound of Catherine’s whispers in the airy hall unbalanced Tara. She broke from Catherine’s hold and fell against the grubby wall, where she crouched near the broken skirting boards with her dead glass eyes open wide and her bloodless hands clasped to her cheeks. Her mouth gaped, but nothing save a rasp seeped out as if the disfigured creature was losing the last of its air. And probably dearly wished that it was.

‘Oh God,’ Catherine heard herself say. ‘What have they done to you?’

When she was struck by the notion that what had been done to Tara had been done on her behalf, Catherine then felt as if everything had stopped moving inside her body. For her. She remembered Edith’s words and began to shake. They are the ones who offer justice now, my dear. And their justice can be terrible.

This was for her. But it wasn’t possible. Tara had been killed with Mike. They had been slaughtered and drained. She had seen the livid sutures upon his back in the metal tub, the tub in which the balding Edith had also once shivered like a wet foal, unleashed from some hideous womb. But if Tara was still alive, then what about Mike? Where was Mike? And what had they done to him?

Keep one kitten, destroy the rest.

Catherine thought of the rotten hives hectic with corpulent flies and whimpered.

She had been sure that Tara was also lifeless in that ethanol tub. Had she been alive but unconscious? But how could she have survived the awful wounds inflicted upon her head?

Catherine looked to the stairs. She thought again of Edith so lifeless inside the trunk that she had just seen removed from the building, and she thought of Edith’s mother and uncle sat like motionless mannequins inside the attic. Whatever hope drained from her body during this moment of reflection, she knew would not be returning anytime soon. ‘No. No. Please, God, no. Oh God…’

She ran across the broken floor to the staircase. And seemingly without breathing, leapt as much as she ran, with her foul skirt hitched up to her thighs, to the first floor and across its landing, and up the next staircase and onto the next landing, and down the first corridor to the room she had so recently awoken inside. Edith’s bedroom. The room of dolls.

She never made it far inside the room.

‘Who are you? Who are you?’ she screamed at the figure sat upright upon the bedframe surrounded by so much rot and decay. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She settled upon her knees. ‘Please. Please. Tell me. Tell me, please. Please.’

The skein of light that had originally roused her now fell upon the figure sat upright upon the bed. A woman with a face Catherine recognized as her own. The very same pallid face that Catherine had seen, only partially reflected, in the shard of mirrored glass.

‘You’re not real. You’re not the real one. You’re not. You’re not. You’re fucking not!’

As she drew closer to the bed she saw that the seated figure’s mouth was open, and about the mouth the flesh was purple, as if there had been a struggle to push something past a resisting jaw. The front teeth were broken.

From the dark lump of the body, left so lifeless and without rigidity, the arms had flopped hopelessly. After some vigorous commotion had occurred upon the rusty metal of the old iron bedframe, the hands had fallen open upon the unclothed springs, wrists upturned, one featuring a small vertical cut from a scalpel.

A magnetism came with an abruptness that seemed to pull Catherine from where she stood at the foot of the bed, and jolted her head forward. She thought she might faint within the eager force that sucked her towards the ghastly figure of herself propped up on the bed. Until some new and unwelcome instinct suspected that if she were to lie upon the bed, she would join in some unnatural union with the lifeless figure, only to have to break apart from it again.

Flashes of things sparked across her mind: a bee-keeper raising a hidden face within an overgrown garden, a figure standing up behind the counter of an abandoned village store, the scurrying aged of the pageant.

Catherine stumbled away from the bed and sat down hard upon the floor. She recalled the rushing of small feet through the house to the door of her room, and the sense of a frenzied activity around her face… before she had awoken here, in the ruined house. The real version.

So where had she been all that time when it had looked so different? Did it also exist… in another place? Places? And if that was her body upon the bed, then…

Into her thoughts came a memory of Edith’s lipless mouth, spouting its madness. Small things were repaired, my dear. And there was resurrection, blessed resurrection, for them and those who revered them… She had said something about their guardians being remade ‘in their own image’, like angels had done. They tutored Mason in the Great Art…

Dear God, what did you bring into this house?

No. The thing on the bed was not real, was not her. This was still a dream, she was still imprisoned within a trance. Her entire consciousness was now a trance.

On the floor she was jerked into an awareness of the car engine being turned over in the lane outside.

Catherine crawled to the window and pulled herself up the wall. Slammed her hands against the wood. She was real, not dead, not a ghost; the thing on the bed was an effigy. She could hear the sound of her hands against the wood. Yes, she could. They had only made an effigy of her. They must have done because she could think and feel and move. Edith had been able to move and talk too. And Catherine could still move ever so swiftly… she had virtually glided up and down those stairs… over broken floorboards and rusted nails without incurring a scratch. The cold was not unpleasant…

She snatched out her hair and screamed. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

But down there, between the security fence and the brick walls of the Red House, Maude stood in profile and did not even turn towards Catherine’s cries. Maude had raised her chin, but betrayed no emotion beside the usual stern disapproval on a long-suffering face. She had also raised her arms, as if it were her turn to be measured for a fitting.