Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

Naked but masked, Leonard stood before Maude. An open straight razor filled one of Leonard’s bony hands, his other hand gripped Maude’s throat like she was livestock.

The blade glinted silvery in the mackerel light of this terrible dawn. His leather face was angled towards Catherine, to where she peeked from between the planks of wood, and the eyes behind the featureless mask, she knew, were fixed upon her window. Because he wanted her to watch. Had waited for her to look out and to witness this.

With a quick jerk of a bony arm, the taut bicep so bumpy with scar tissue, Leonard sliced the razor against Maude’s rotund belly, then punched his whole hand inside her. And deep within the unresisting lump of the woman’s dense body, his hand went to work.

He tugged the razor upwards like he was trying to free a stuck zipper on the compliant servant’s clothes. With quick, hard jerks, and sometimes a sawing motion, he worked his hand up until the razor was buried between Maude’s heavy bosom. Through the gaps in the wooden boards Catherine heard the ripping of linen and worse.

And in shocked stupefaction, she watched Leonard hold the housekeeper upright by the throat, while his other hand unspooled the housekeeper into the overgrown grass.

Catherine’s muffled grunts that came around the fingers she’d stuffed inside her mouth failed to obliterate the sound of Maude’s spilled innards dropping heavily into the weeds.

The squat figure seemed to sag and deflate forward, onto her executioner, like a sack of emptying meal slit down the side. Ungraciously, Leonard tugged and pulled the collection of rags and string and tow and sawdust and hard brown lumps from out of the loosening skin of the housekeeper, which soon flopped about his shoulder, the head still heavy and bobbing like a waterlogged football.

His coup de grâce was to yank the white wig off Maude’s scalp, which was revealed to be stitched like a moccasin. And the neck supporting the pale head never recovered its posture. The heap of clothing and thick lifeless limbs that once was Maude was stuffed untidily into a grey mail sack that lay waiting in the wet grass.

Catherine watched Leonard drag the full sack out of the gate and toss it into the back of the green van.

So complete was her horror Catherine remained still and silent. Empty and numb. Until the final part of the truth appeared to her in the form of a memory; a recollection of the insane words that had croaked from Edith Mason’s horrid mouth. About her mother. Her real mother. Who had suffered. Who had known torments for giving her away. Who would be released…

Those who wrong you will always be taken care of by those who love you. Your mother certainly was, after she gave you away…

Maude.

DON’T NEVER COME BACK.

The housekeeper’s eyes wet with tears when she put Catherine to bed when she was ill.

The sound of her sobbing in a dark room while Edith bathed…

Because she knew what was happening. Something she could not stop. A terrible sequence of events she was commanded to take part in. She had been neither alive nor dead. Here, they had done away with such distinctions.

Maude.

Mother.

After the door was slammed, this old man of great and inhuman strength that she knew nothing of, stood alone beside the van in the lane, and angled his leather face up to the Red House as if in awe of it. He raised his two thin scarred arms to the air in salute, or as if he was making a command that she did not hear, nor would understand if she had. And just for a few seconds, she thought, but was not sure, the air around his black wigged head shimmered like summer heat above a meadow.

When the green van was long gone, Catherine rose from where she had been slumped upon the floor. She walked past her body upon the bed and drifted down the stairs of the Red House.

In the hall Tara still leant against the wall, but had found her feet again and gingerly prodded one dirty bare foot about. Within the housekeeper’s dress her body trembled. If Catherine were to undress her old nemesis, and check her flesh, she knew she would find a long scar.

The new housekeeper’s hands were raised, but performed no meaningful function. At least she had fallen silent. Not from acceptance, but perhaps from what preceded acceptance.

Tara flinched when she became aware of Catherine’s silent presence moving down the stairs.

When she reached the hallway, Catherine had no curiosity left about what would happen next, but inexplicably in her shock, knew the worst was over. But she did wonder again, in a vague and emotionless way, about what would happen if she were to lie down upon the bed with her old self. She knew it wasn’t allowed yet, and that it would be a struggle for her to get off that bed again. But when she did, at least there was a wheelchair and someone in the house to push it.

There was work to be done upon the specimen upstairs. When she looked at Tara, and when she thought of Maude and Edith and the old keeper of flies that was M. H. Mason, and Violet Mason in her case, and the population of Magbar Wood, she understood this. And she knew bitterly that the things she had seen in the attic, and the one slumped upon that bed upstairs, had been left as a form of explanation that no words could ever suffice to explain.

And Catherine wasn’t to remain here for long. Not in the building as it was here, but as it was in another place. In other places and in other forms that she had already seen. Now she had stopped screaming and sobbing and banging her hands against the damp wooden planks, the knowledge came to her as naturally as anything she could ever remember. Because the old house was telling her things now and she needed to listen. And when the awareness had dawned and broken through shock and resistance and fear and regret, and the daze that all of those things had reduced her to, she had risen and come down the stairs.

Perhaps Tara was to for ever remain as a hobbled ruin in the great house, as her mother had existed here, in whatever state the great house chose to show itself. Maybe Tara was here now to serve a new mistress, until the time came when the housekeeper would also be opened and emptied into the grass outside, and put inside the sack by the man in the mask. As Tara’s predecessor had been, as Catherine’s natural mother had just been, right before her eyes. One day perhaps this housekeeper would have her suffering relieved too. It seemed to be the way of things. She didn’t know, but she knew something would tell her soon.

The sound of the back door opening, and the sudden warmth and brightness of the light that spilled through, made Catherine and her unseeing companion turn towards the rear of the house. One woman turned towards the sound, the other turned to see the light that reached through and reddened the timbers and burnished the polished floors.

And outside, from the beautiful garden, came the sound of voices. The voices of many children, high and chaotic with the joy of play, circling like a flock of excited birds.

This place of decay began to fall away in the swift tide of transforming light, that rushed through to alter every brick within the brightness of a world older than the one she was about to leave, for ever.

Against the silhouette of the distant doorframe, as if a new sun of a new world was beaming onto the rear of the Red House, other figures moved and threw their small shadows onto the increasingly visible walls inside the building. Bright-blooded walls that soon reached the hall as it too was filled with a glorious light. A light she remembered from childhood, a light of comfort and confirmation and of safety and love that vanished whenever she’d awoken from a trance.