Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

The first-floor walls were wooden like the hall below, which increased the dimness, and all of the doors she could see were six-panelled, the top two fitted with red stained glass.

Maude moved to a door at the heel of the L-section and listened for a moment before she knocked.

‘Enter,’ said a distant voice.

With an expression of morose disapproval on her crumpled face, the servant held the door open for Catherine. Around the housekeeper’s bulky shape, she caught glimpses of a room better lit than the communal areas. A room intense with distractions about its walls, and one she didn’t make it far inside before coming to a shocked standstill.

Catherine thought she’d walked into another world. An enchanted but nightmarish glade of an artificial Victorian forest. One in which scores of small bright eyes watched her from every surface they had clambered upon.

Speechless, Catherine turned about. And saw red squirrels in frock coats paused in the eating of nuts upon the piano. She looked away and a fox grinned at her from the low table it stalked across. A company of rats in khaki uniforms all stood on their hind legs on parade on the mantel.

She turned again and came face to face with a crowd of pretty kittens in colourful dresses, jostling to get a look at her from inside a tall cabinet. Some of them were taking tea. Others curtsied.

Animals cluttered the room, all silent and still with what felt like caution at her intrusion. Or perhaps they were poised in anticipation of their next moves. Not a square foot of any surface was free of them.

Beside a vast ornamental fireplace of marble, Edith Mason sat alone within the confines of a black antique wheelchair and seemed pleased with her guest’s reaction. Beside the chair, a long red setter had stretched itself around one wheel. A dog that watched Catherine with a single wet brown eye under a raised brow. In the sunlight that fell through the arched windows the dog’s ruby fur shimmered. The dog, at least, must be real.

‘Even now my uncle’s marvels can still affect me, and I see them every day. But for you, I think the cat will have your tongue a while yet.’ The woman smiled and her thin teeth looked yellow within the small mouth. ‘Please take a seat. Maude will bring tea,’ Edith Mason spoke without acknowledging the presence of the housekeeper, whose removal from the room was announced by the angry thud of the door pulled shut.

But even a perfectly conserved Victorian drawing room filled with preserved animals could not upstage the visage of Edith Mason in the flesh. So much powder clung to the woman’s ancient face that the skin papered to the bony features looked bleached, and her tiny eyes were made ghastly by their red rims. The lips about the teeth were non-existent and the nose was a blade, the light seemed to pass through the side as if it were pure cartilage. It was a difficult face to look at and Catherine struggled to do so.

Her scrutiny moved to the elaborate hair, styled about the shrunken head in a cottage-loaf fashion. A mass of silver hairpieces threaded with the woman’s own grey wisps. There must have been a kilo of padding inside the arrangement. Catherine had only seen the style in costume dramas, or photos of women in the early 1900s. She was tempted to believe the outfit was for her benefit, some bizarre display of fancy dress prepared and laid on for the valuation. She didn’t know how to react, what to say, or do. She just stared.

‘I’m ninety-three, my dear. And I have not once been tempted to paint that hideous rouge upon my mouth.’ Edith Mason stared hard at Catherine’s lips. ‘Once upon a time it was considered offensive. The mark of a whore.’ Whore came across the room with sufficient force to make Catherine blink. The word was delivered with spite, a riposte to her horrified leering at the elderly woman’s head.

She should leave. Despite the evident riches a single room promised her bewildered eyes, her most trusted instincts warned that if she were to stay, she would be made to suffer. In her professional experience, the greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.

‘But what do you girls know? You are slaves to so much. And we girls have never had much say in the way of things.’ The old woman smiled, but this time with her eyes too.

Catherine was compelled to return the smile, though her body felt ready to shatter like the porcelains at an end of the mantel that two stoats in convict uniforms were entwined about.

‘Please.’ Edith Mason wafted one bony hand in the air. So pallid were the fingers before the black silk of the woman’s high-necked dress, Catherine’s eyes followed the hand’s trajectory as if mesmerized. And she was glad to see the hand was, in fact, gloved. ‘Take a look. I know you must be dying to mooch among our things. I bet you can’t wait to get your hands on them. To put prices on them.’

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Don’t be coy with me. I have no patience with all that. So let’s be clear about one thing: we did not invite just anyone here to dismember our estate. Things that no soul in this world has the skill to craft now. Let alone appreciate their true value and meaning. We want someone who will understand what was once created here. We may have dealt with your firm in a satisfactory manner before, but only when we have found a person with the necessary insight and sensitivity will we allow an auction. So consider this an interview.’ The word ‘auction’ seemed to cause the old woman great pain and she grimaced. If Catherine were not mistaken, her eyes also shone with tears before she looked away to the windows.

‘Your home…’ Catherine didn’t know what to say, but felt she had to say something. ‘Is incredible.’

The woman’s expression changed swiftly and Catherine struggled not to recoil in distaste. Edith Mason’s smile had broadened to reveal more of her teeth and what gums were left to hold them in place. ‘If only you knew how unique. But perhaps you will come to.’ The smile turned into a glare. ‘If we decide to employ your firm.’

‘We’re so excited about this opportunity. To be invited here and to—’

‘Yes, yes. All right, dear. I was starting to like you. From the moment I saw you in that lane I knew you had humility. That it was genuine. And we like good manners here, Miss Howard. We like silence. We like to be left alone with our endeavours… But we don’t like…’ Her train of thought drifted and she stared out across the room again, as if listening to an earpiece. A trickle of soot struck the grate inside the fireplace. They both flinched.

Edith looked to that side of her chair, warily, then returned her terrible stare to Catherine. ‘What do you know of my uncle?’

Catherine glanced at the floor to evade a scrutiny she found awful, and saw hand-woven carpets with oriental rugs arranged over them. She tried to organize her thoughts that reared and fell over themselves. The medieval geometric design of burgundy and green in the carpet weave bombarded her mind. Small lifelike eyes watched her from every angle, gleeful at her awkwardness. Only the dog appeared to feel sorry for her.

She doubted she would be given much space here to talk in, and that nothing she said would be of interest to the elderly woman. If she did speak, she assumed what she said would only serve as ammunition, that she would be rebuffed and contradicted. An attitude she’d never become accustomed to, even after a lifetime of practice.

She forced herself to concentrate. ‘We know…’

‘Not we, you .’

‘I… I am, of course, aware of his skill. As a taxidermist.’ She thought of the catalogue copy she’d mentally drafted the previous week. ‘From what little of his work has ever been shown, perhaps he was the greatest of them all. And my colleague tells me your uncle was also a legendary puppeteer—’