House of Small Shadows

TWENTY-EIGHT

She struggled to remember where she was. For a moment she believed herself to be underground because she could smell cold earth and wet timber. And she continued to mumble to the white-eyed hare of her dream as it pranced back and forth within a dark space, like a tunnel, that she had been trying to escape from. The wild hare had swung its large head about with a fierce and nonsensical joy.

Squirrels in red hunting coats had promised to show her a way out of the earthen tunnel, but that only led to a tea party of saucer-eyed kittens who spoke in tiny voices and said that she should stay inside because of what was up in the sky. She didn’t remember anything else.

Now she was awake, she lay rigid, too frightened to move. Her hair was damp upon the pillow. Distant bumps filled her ears, and then her head with desperate ideas about what caused them. Stupidly, she thought of Maude moving furniture in the middle of the night. Maybe it was morning and the curtains were so thick they had shut out the light. She checked her phone: 3 a.m.

Sounds of an old house and its shifting timbers, it could be nothing more. Unfamiliar sounds in unfamiliar places, and there was always a rational explanation for what caused them. But now came a rhythm, like a small, hard hand striking a door. Not her door, but one in the distance. And also a suggestion of movement in the corridor outside her room, somewhere between her room and the knocking. Further along the corridor, nearer the staircase, came a swish and bump, swish and bump, like a crowd of children jostling within a school corridor. Yes, and now there were feet going up and down distant stairs. Maude?

The noises separated and coalesced into one, then distinguished themselves again in separate origins at different distances.

There are no children here.

Outside in the corridor came a sudden shuffle that moved across the face of her door and then paused. Catherine said, ‘Maude,’ but hardly heard herself. She noisily cleared her throat in warning and moved within the bed to make it creak.

A faint scuffle across a floorboard.

She received the impression that someone, or an animal, now waited beyond the door of her room to listen to her movements.

Catherine sat up, wondered what she should do. She pushed the heavy covers off her lap and stared at the door. There was a key in the lock. She hadn’t thought it her place to lock herself inside a room in someone else’s house. A consideration she now regretted.

She swung her legs out of the bedclothes and placed her feet on the floor as quietly as she could manage. She tiptoed to the door and placed her ear against the wooden panel to listen.

In the distance the bumps and jostle — and were there voices now, low voices? — passed beyond the range of her hearing as if the sounds were descending the stairs. Outside her door someone passed quickly again but in the opposite direction, back towards the staircase. It sounded as if they were low to the floor like a dog. Into her imagination came an impression of Edith Mason with her bleached face, red-rimmed eyes and yellow teeth, crawling down one side of the passageway on all fours, using the skirting board as a guide to find her way back to her room.

Catherine went back to bed for a while until she believed her own promise to herself that there were only three people inside the building.

When she’d mustered the courage to return to the bedroom door, she opened it more noisily than she would have wished and stared into darkness. Poking her head further out, she peered to the right, down to where the passage opened onto the L-shaped landing and stairwell beneath.

There was some light down there. The kind of luminance that glows from a distant open door, but one out of sight, as if a door in the next passage that contained Edith’s bedroom, were open.

The elderly slept little at night. Maybe Edith had summoned Maude who had knocked at her door. Yes, she had heard Maude on the stairs and then Edith being carried downstairs, as opposed to being transported in the clanking lift. Not a pleasant thought, but it was all she had to go on.

So what had been outside her door? A cat, a dog, a rat, an animal of some kind had come in through a window. Those meadows were uncultivated. The garden was overgrown. This was deep country. Anything could find a way in.

Against the distant halo of light that defined the silhouette of the corridor’s far mouth, and what must have been a vague banister rail beyond, came a sudden movement. But her eyes must have deceived her, because it looked as if a figure might have stood up and passed out of the corridor. An ill-defined shape. About the size of a large dog rising and fleeing. It must have been an animal because it was on all fours. Or was it? She couldn’t tell, it had moved so quickly.

The face at the window, on her first day. Could there be a child here? One concealed from her. Had it been on the floor outside her room, crawling? Neither idea reduced her confusion and unease. Ridiculous. An animal. It must have been an animal that had crawled inside the house.

Catherine hastily swiped on the overhead light in her room to augment the weak offering from the bedside lamp. The new light was mostly stifled by the sombre wooden panels and dark-red drapes, but some of it fell into the corridor outside. Into which she ventured, shivering from the cold.

In the passage she had another idea, one worse than the first two. Had she just witnessed, or at least half seen, some kind of impromptu nocturnal marionette show operated by Maude, using something from the nursery. Don’t Never Come Back. Was the mannish drudge trying to frighten her away from the only home she knew, that Catherine had come to destroy?

From the more frantic wings of her imagination she saw Edith proclaiming, ‘My uncle and mother often took the troupe out at night to amuse me. How many ten-year-old girls have been so lucky?’

In her state, at this hour, she genuinely doubted the Red House would ever run out of traditions, rituals and habits passed down from the deranged to the demented, just to horrify a guest. Leonard had warned her of tricks, and now anger began to warm and eclipse her fear. But she didn’t want to jump. Anything moving suddenly in the dark would make her scream. She hated being surprised. Her youth had been plagued by wretched practical jokes and she despised those that played pranks.

Catherine walked to the stairwell and winced at the intermittent creaks of the floorboards. She passed closed doors she remembered and fumbled for light switches she couldn’t remember and door handles she could not see. She found two handles but the doors were locked.

On the landing she identified the source of the dim whitish glow. As she suspected the light originated from the passage that held Edith’s bedroom.

She leant over the banister and the lightless hole of the stairwell, and felt she was listening with her entire body. Nothing but her indistinct feet was visible. If a voice was to rise out of the darkness beneath her toes it would stop her heart. None came, but she did receive an unwelcome sense of movement below, and probably from the ground floor.

Catherine thought she could hear the subtle shift of what sounded like limbs within clothing. But circling down there in the darkness. Round and round beyond her feeble vision. Maybe a ring of silent infants, looking upwards with plaster faces. She pulled her head back and repressed the careless byway of her imagination.

Animals, rats, something that crept indoors and roamed at night inside old houses.

She padded across the landing, but kept close to the inner wall, until she was able to peer into the adjacent passage. The doorway emitting the pale light was some way down the corridor. The door was only ajar. Edith’s bedroom was near the stairwell and the door was closed. The room next to Edith’s was the nursery and it was from here that the light issued.

Catherine turned and fumbled away, stifling her frantic breath as best she could. As she bumped against the walls and swatted her hands through the darkness like a blind woman, she heard a scattering of motion in different directions, two floors down and out of sight. And it was then she remembered Edith’s final words that evening. ‘It would be better to go to your room. And to stay there.’