House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-FOUR

‘You’s comin’ up the big house wiv us, Caff?’

Catherine stood up in the wet den and started to cry.

Up on the hill of the special school, the boy with the painted wooden face held the hand of her best friend, Alice, who had been missing for three months. One lens of Alice’s glasses shone in the grey light of late afternoon.

Catherine was forbidden to come here. She’d returned to remember Alice.

The last time she visited the den, that distant, bright time with sunlight bathing the ecstasy of finishing a school year, Alice went through the hole Catherine made in the green fence. In July. It was September now, and only four months until Christmas.

Alice started down the grassy slope towards the new fence the council had built. ‘They’s callin’, Caff. Hear it?’

And that was exactly what Alice said to her as Catherine poured invisible tea into greening plastic teacups at the beginning of the summer on the very day Alice vanished. And precisely what Catherine had told her parents when she arrived home, wet through and crying. It was also what she had told Alice’s mother and the police ladies and her nan.

Catherine had heard the call back then too, just like she heard it now. ‘Greensleeves’ from a distant ice-cream van. Coming out of those red-brick buildings with plywood over the windows.

That first time, Alice said, ‘I’s going, Caff. Comin’?’ but nothing else. Splashing through the stream and scrabbling up the riverbank to the hole in the fence before Catherine could stop her; up the grassy bank the little figure had climbed on her hands and knees, as Catherine stood motionless with fright behind the wire fence. She’d whispered for Alice to come back. ‘Don’t, Alice. Don’t. We’re not supposed to. You’re not allowed to.’

But Alice had continued up the grass bank to the school where the air was going all wavy up there, over the black roofs, because the special schoolchildren were also moving up the far side of the hill to the buildings. Alice hadn’t seen the ragged shapes intent on meeting her at the summit. And Alice never turned around once, or even seemed to hear Catherine, who stayed behind and gripped the links of the fence.

When Alice disappeared from view amongst the buildings that the other children had reached first and hid within, Catherine wet herself in fright. It was the last time she saw Alice.

Catherine had run and fallen, run and fallen, all the way home. Then shut herself inside her room and stayed there until Alice’s mum came round.

But today Alice was back. And coming closer to the green fence, while the boy with the painted wooden face stayed up on the hill and watched from the distance. And it really was Alice, with the same tangled hair, the pale bespectacled face. Only Alice was happy now.

‘There’s nice kids up there, Caff. There’s Margaret and Annie and all them others. Nice kids. Like us. Come away, come away wiv us, Caff. They’s got nice fings to eat. Ladies in dresses, and flowers. They’s got mices fightin’ battles. Cats is princesses. Foxes wear hats. Them puppet shows from olden times. Everyfing. Always sunny there, Caff. There’s a rabbit that talks and a monkey in a dress. Better than down ’ere.’

Catherine came awake and gasped for air. And some of the dream came out with her, then dissolved and left her thinking of being taken for tests, seeing specialists, being diagnosed as a slow learner. A Mongol, a retard, a thicky.

The bullying at the second school was worse than the first, mainly because the tormenting skills of infants hadn’t sufficiently developed in junior school. She remembered feeling so sick with nerves each morning for the best part of two years that she could barely eat and spent most of her playtimes and dinner breaks hidden in various parts of the small school.

As a child she prayed and wished and prayed, until she gave herself headaches, that the children of the special school would come back and take her away like they did Alice. She’d had her chance when Alice came back for her that afternoon in September, and she’d just relived it in her sleep as clearly as the day it happened. She’d even remembered all of the words.

Had she been asleep or was it another trance? Consciousness had withdrawn so far inside her, the external world was still blurred.

These weren’t memories, she urgently reminded herself. These were childhood fantasies constructed to explain the abduction of Alice. Her friend had never said anything about the Red House on the day she imagined the little girl had come back for her. Or had she? She didn’t know.

The time the boy with the wooden face came into the playground to save her, and the reason why all the children suddenly stopped bullying her, as well as the belief that the teachers were frightened of her, was not real either. None of it.

She felt nauseous in the darkness of the room, as if her brain had just slipped sideways. The slide had been accompanied by a fear of falling, and had jolted her back to the world. Her chin was wet with what she guessed was blood. Thick vestiges of the trance were unclear, but stayed trapped behind her eyes.

Moving into a sitting position hurt her back, her neck, and she suffered a sense of overbalancing. Either that or the room tilted and the bed moved along the floor. She could not see her hands, arms, or the bed in the darkness.

Her skin shivered inside the long gown provided at her bedside. Accepting the nightdress had felt like dependence, or even sublimation. Another item she had been too tired to resist. The ancient garment was ruffled into wet creases along her spine.

The bed she’d awoken in was also dampened by sweat gone cold. Her eyes had been open for some time, too, but she had not been awake. A sense of her jaw being active lingered around her mouth. She must have been talking or crying in her trance.

The bitter, chalky residue left by Maude’s tonic for her chill grew stronger on her tongue. She swallowed and her throat burned. The room stank of wet wood and unclean air.

She groped about the bedside table for the lamp, for the water Maude provided. Her fingertips found the glass and she guzzled the stale liquid, but she could not fit her other hand under the lampshade to find the switch and couldn’t see what she was doing. Her fumbling bumped her phone, which fell off the bedside table and thumped the rug below. As the handset bounced the small screen lit up, casting a pale-green glow over the bed.

Faint underwater light bathed a dense black shape at the foot of her bed, upright, but poised as if to lean over. Either that or it had just retracted from reaching for her.

Her phone settled on its front and smothered the frail light of the screen, leaving her inside a greater darkness than before. Catherine dropped the glass onto the bedspread.

She couldn’t breathe for fright. Her limbs had seized. Beside the thump of a heart that felt too big for her chest, she could think of nothing but the presence at the foot of her bed, one that must have stood inches from her feet as she slept.

Kicking at the sheets she twisted onto her knees, upsetting the glass, which fell and rolled off the mattress to the rug, and onto the wooden floorboards. Around her skull the sound of the rolling glass circled, as if it were inside her head grinding through her panic.

Her useless fingers could not find the neck of the lamp. She was certain the trespasser was swiftly bustling around the outside of the bed, was moments from touching her in the lightless void of the bedroom. When her desperate fingers found the lamp switch, the act of turning the light on took what was left of her strength. Dizzy with terror, she thought she might faint.

Ox-blood walls reappeared around the bed. On the brink of a scream Catherine turned to face the intruder. Her vision swam and settled. The figure was still there, immobile, faceless, waiting.

The dressmaker’s dummy. And hung upon shoulders that were positioned as if the missing head was proudly raised, was the dress Edith had picked out for her to wear to the pageant.

The crashing of relief left her panting like a tired dog. A dull concussive ache returned to the place behind her eyes, as did the burning sensation in her throat. She was nauseous too, as if whatever was in her system was wearing off and leaving side effects.

What had they given her to drink? Were the ingredients of the medicinal concoction so old they’d become toxic? Laudanum? A tincture of opium, wasn’t that bitter tasting? The very idea they took opiates here wasn’t implausible. She imagined old, frail, untrained hands pouring a white powder into the liquid she had struggled to get down. But she was soporific long before she swallowed the ‘tonic’. Something in her food then? Hadn’t Edith said as much about Maude?

The mute housekeeper must have carried the dress and dummy inside the room as she slept. And Catherine had been talking to the dummy, mistaken the vague presence of a dressed bust as company, jabbered to it in her delirium. If she wasn’t so shaken she would have felt foolish.

She fingered her face. Her forehead and cheeks were cold, she had no temperature and wasn’t feverish. Her state was akin to waking up drunk. But wakefulness did not dispel unease. She had heard no one enter the room, nor did she have any recollection of a light being turned on by whoever had come in. How was that possible? And why was it necessary to bring the horrid maternity dress, that Edith’s mother had worn nearly a century before, in here while she slept?

She felt too woozy and too weak to decide whether this was another strange arrangement, some protocol of the Red House, or whether it ranked as another sinister tactic to unsettle her.

Catherine sank into the pillows, shifted her position to the portion of the bed not moist and creased. She pulled her knees up and into her belly, cradled her head with her hands and tried to figure out what to do. With the harsh grit of Maude’s medicine tainting her gums and tongue, she passed into, and back out of, and then into a semblance of sleep.

Catherine roused again with a sense of her own voice loud within the room. Her eyes were already wide open when she came to.

She rose from the bedclothes gasping from another delirious episode that felt uncomfortably similar to a trance. From deep sleep into a trance again? Never happened before. They only occurred when she was absent-minded, but awake.

The second unbearably vivid dream receded. Though not quickly enough. A group of small figures had been stood in a row at the foot of her bed. Or they were children wearing masks. Faces she recalled in unpleasant flashes.

She flopped against the headboard with her face clutched in her hands to stop the swaying of her vision and the motion sickness it caused.

Two of the figures had been smiling and holding the ceramic hands of the dressmaker’s dummy. A girl in a tatty bonnet, and a figure with the stature of a boy and the bearing of a doll. Real hair had been threaded into his colourless porcelain scalp. An old-fashioned tailored suit had made a tight fit on his small limbs, like the boy had outgrown the suit or been given a younger child’s clothes. The girl’s face within the bonnet was too withdrawn to offer anything but the glimmer of a bony chin and one row of discoloured wooden teeth.

But in the nightmare, the dummy’s shoulders had carried a head. A white face. With moist black eyes, partly obscured by a veil attached to a wide-brimmed hat. The hat had been decorated with dark flowers like an ancient wedding cake.

Among the other childish figures, there had been a wrinkled and leathery black face, the eyes white and horribly eager. A small mouth in the tar-black face had been open, gleefully revealing yellow peg teeth. The ape from the film that made off with Strader’s head?

Another of the small shapes looked to have suffered an accident, or been misused. Its pottery face was discoloured, cracked, and there were small punctures or scars. The Master of the Revels?

Elsewhere amongst the crowd, she retained a suggestion of uneven whiskers sprouting from a threadbare head of a large hare. It must have been a mask concealing something much worse underneath. The face hidden by the hare’s pelt had painted wooden eyes, adrift from the sockets of the outer skin.

Behind the figures she’d received the impression of tails swishing with impatience, and then whipping with excitement for the entire time she spoke to them. They’d riposted with nonsense and rhyme she couldn’t remember in any detail, but their jaunty words had made her want to get up and skip around the room like a child.

Catherine trembled for a while, her eyes searching every inch of the visible room, until the impact of the dream lessened and she was certain she was alone.

She had dreamed of the dolls in Edith’s bedroom, and in her state amalgamated the dolls with the murky features of Mason’s puppets from the BBC film. Please let it be that. If she could rely on one thing in her life, it would be her imagination turning against her in the worst circumstances.

Her body now felt as desiccated as one of Mason’s preserved creations. The medicine she had been given — but for what? — maintained the mineral rime around her tongue and lips. It was all she could taste, and she was desperate to swill it away with water. Her glass lay empty upon the floor.

Each step she took towards the enormous washstand fired a jolt of pain through her skull. She touched her arms and face, which registered in her mind as being hot and tender, but were actually cold and clammy. Her nightie and underwear were wet. She picked up and clutched the dressing gown around her shivering body.

There was no water in the basin of the washstand, or in the jug beneath the bowl. No taps, it wasn’t plumbed. She thought she might cry. She needed painkillers for the incessant judders in her head, not some ancient sickening tonic concocted from stale ingredients.

Nausea took her back to her bed, where she sat and peered at the door. She would have to go and find the nearest bathroom and source of water, a medicine cabinet. What was the time? Her phone claimed it was 2:30 a.m. Is that all? Now she thought about it, her writhing and gibbering seemed to have stretched into days. Catherine closed her eyes. If they had poisoned her she should try and be sick.

They had drugged her to take her out of her life, out of the world. The dress on the dummy was a new skin, a new identity. They were refashioning her, to become one of them.

Stop it!

She had a chill, a virus. New places, new bacteria.

That’s all.

Stress has made it worse. That’s all.

That’s all it is.

Outside her room she again failed to find the light switches on the walls between the doors in the long passage. There was a switch at the mouth of the corridor by the landing and stairwell. She was sure of this, but by day had previously been guided by the window overlooking the garden at the passage’s end. The window was no help now, so only the glow of her bedroom door and phone screen guided her through the heavy darkness that pressed inwards and swallowed the Red House. The lightlessness had crept inside and filled the old spaces, clothing timbers and bricks. But with the dark came a shift in character. One she remembered noticing before.

The house was colder than it had been during the previous night, as if the building was now open to the elements. She could smell damp in fabric and wood, the pungency of black spores on water-softened plaster, as if the garden’s decay had seeped inside the building. Even the unseen floor felt rough beneath her bare soles. So vivid was the change in character, within the pathetic halo of greenish light cast by her phone screen, she had to make sure the Red House was as she remembered it to be, by pushing her face an inch from the wall to see the wallpaper’s pattern.

When she found it, the air of the closest bathroom was icy. As though her life depended upon the tooth-aching water, she bent to gulp at the ropes of freezing liquid that thundered from the tap above the sink. She needed to dilute the disorientation, the inebriation of illness and sleepiness.

Behind the wall, pipes juddered, clanged.

Too ill to care about the noise, she left the bathroom, but made sure the door stayed open, same with her bedroom door, so at least some of the grubby light fell into the passageway from two lit rooms. It would allow her to do more than stumble through the hideous absence.

How could they stand it here? Perhaps darkness was more of a natural state than daylight. Weren’t stars just pieces of glittering debris slowly winking out on their journey to entropy? So what came after?

Stop it!

No light pollution here. This is how it is in the country.

By the time she reached the landing about the stairwell, a door below clicked open, and then closed. Briefly, a dim but comforting glow appeared downstairs. Catherine paused to listen. A second door opened more slowly, deeper inside the vast building.

Maude.

She wanted to be reassured by the idea of the housekeeper being up and about at this hour, but wasn’t. Would the scowling drudge be of any assistance with anything but another home-made remedy, or poison?

But these women were old, their joints must ache, Maude limped, Edith was in a wheelchair, so there had to be modern pain relief somewhere inside the house. And she must take enough of it to drive home. In strange dark houses you needed a goal, and she made this her purpose as she descended the first flight of stairs. If need be, she’d search every one of their bathrooms and kitchen cupboards.

On the way down to the first floor, she gripped the banister rail. The mere effect of moving this far left her breathless and dizzy.

Peeking over the railing, some thin light was reflected off the polished wood of the hall floor. Light originating from the adjoining utility corridor that contained the tableau, workshops, perhaps the kitchen, and Maude’s room.

The first floor was dark. But a few feet of sight was afforded by her phone screen, so at least she could see each step ahead of her.

She moved across the first-floor landing to the next set of stairs, her eyes imploring the oblivion that encroached upon the feeble glow of her phone, which returned nothing to her eyes besides the glimmers of brass door-handles. She was at the top of the next staircase when the movement below began.

She peered over the banister and caught sight of a small shadow fall across the faint light on the hall floor. A scuffle of cloth accompanied the motion. Instinct told her that announcing her position was a bad idea.

And there it was again, what she understood to be a scampering, close to the floor, in pursuit, she intuited, of the first figure. Neither noise resembled Maude’s distinctive side-to-side shuffle. The noise suggested a small group or pack of animals.

Cats?

Rats.

Catherine stifled a scream. The Red House could be teeming with rats at night. Had she not heard them last night too? A fitting revenge for M. H. Mason’s extermination of the species, but not a vengeance that offered Catherine a shred of comfort while on the stairs.

The screen of her phone winked off. As it periodically did to save the battery if she didn’t keep the pitiful glow activated. And just before the screen light came back on, there was no question in her mind that footsteps had just announced themselves on the staircase behind her.

She turned quickly, lost balance and thumped down four steps, flailing at the banister with her free hand. Before unintentionally casting her phone away, the handset lit up the silhouette of a small head. And what might have been hands covered its face.

The fact the figure behind her had been so close was worse than what she thought she had actually seen. Whimpering on her hands and knees she cast about to retrieve the phone. She snatched it up and held it before her face fearfully, as if expecting a blow from out of the darkness above her.

The pallid phosphorescence of the screen cast its meagre range onto empty wooden steps and the banister rail. There was nothing there and could not have been. She raised the phone higher and her own shadow stretched up the empty staircase wall.

A mind made strange with inebriation in oppressive darkness could see anything it wanted. Despite telling herself this, she struggled to rid her imagination of the notion that a small head, further up inside the darkness, was now turned in her direction and watching her.

Silence returned to the stairwell. She chose to suppress, rather than dwell on, the scent of cold outdoor air brought in on someone’s clothes that gathered around her. Catherine peered over the banister rail, but saw and heard nothing more from down there. Rodents were scared of humans, weren’t they? Clutching her phone as if it was a flame and her only hope of rescue and survival, she continued down.

Stood in the middle of the hall, she looked up and into the stairwell. The darkness was total. A swirl of vertigo, and a panic that she could be hoisted up and into the space by something above, seized her. When the fear passed another replaced it. Whatever she thought had been following her down the stairs might drop upon her, from up there.

At the walls of the hall, she pawed the wooden panels looking for light switches. Something that was becoming an unpleasant habit for her in this house. There were at least three switches down here. She had noticed them — hadn’t she? — between the framed photographs. One of which her phone screen illumined. A black-and-white picture taken of the Masons in their garden.

In the photograph they appeared older and thinner than she’d seen them before, but were dressed as formally as ever. Sunlight reflected off their bespectacled eyes. Violet Mason wore a white hat to match her dress and carried a parasol. M. H. Mason wore a black suit. Behind the Masons’ straight forms, some of the trees were hazy as if moving in a breeze. What was visible of the puppet theatre between the Masons’ heads was blurred, as if active with motion too rapid for the shutter speed of the camera. Either a child, or a figure on the backdrop, seemed to be running sideways. There was a small black arm and a distorted head emerging from the unclear portion of the photograph.

She’d not looked at many of the pictures closely during her tour with Edith, but wished she had done so. If she had, she might not be on her own in the darkness looking at one right now.

Towards the dimly glowing mouth of the passage leading to the service area, she moved with her arms stretched out.

At the end of the corridor, on the left-hand side, was a slot of rectangular light, as if a small lamp were switched on in a large room with the door mostly closed. From here, the thin light on the hall floor that she had seen from upstairs originated.

A cold draught swept her hands and face in a steady stream. She suspected the door to the garden, at the far end of the corridor, had also been opened upon the cold night. The current of chilly air was too concentrated to be coming from a room indoors.

The draught built into a breeze and she stifled the idea that it wasn’t a door or window open at the end of the passage, but a much bigger portal ahead of her in the darkness.

The moving air was either entirely without sound, or her own hoarse breath was so loud about her face she was drowning out the sound of the wind.

Stumbling through what now smelled like an unlit tunnel, her situation began to feel like she’d passed out of the Red House and was now journeying beneath its walls. The idea of being beneath the house seemed far worse than the frightful apprehension of being inside it. Only the approaching luminance of the partially open door assured her she was still inside the building.

‘Maude. Maude,’ she called, in a voice just above a whisper. But didn’t know if she was announcing herself or calling for help. She felt an urge to scream, and a competing urge to sit down in petrified silence and to wait for whatever came next from out of the darkness. Why was she even down here? She should have stayed in bed.

With her phone screen creating a small, weak sphere about her face, she almost broke into a run to reach the partially open door. Because someone must be awake. It was her only motivation for putting one foot in front of the other, and so quickly now.

Mere feet from the door, the intensification of the chemical pungency hit her full and stinging in the face and brought her to a stop. The stench came from the entrance to what she knew, but didn’t want to acknowledge, was Mason’s workshop. Why was it open at this hour? The light bleeding thinly from the space beyond the door now resembled light issued from ashes glowing in a gate, or a small desk lamp with a crimson shade.

With one hand clasped across her mouth and nose, she peered through the gap.

And looked away. She heard herself whimper and say, ‘God.’

She glanced back into the dim ruby air and again saw the vertebrae of an impossibly curved spine, and so pronounced beneath the dead white skin, the bone joints seemed in danger of breaking through the bloodless flesh of the small figure hunched over inside the galvanized metal tub. Mason’s ethanol bath. In which, what must have been Edith sat facing forward.

Without the cottage-loaf wig of rags and false hair, the back of a mostly hairless skull confronted Catherine. The shoulders were so narrow and pinched and the scapula so defined, she was not sure anything so wizened could still be living. But it was the mere glimpse of the scar, from a long dorsal incision, reaching from the nape of the scrawny neck to the black water’s lap-lap-lapping edge, for which her shock and revulsion were mostly saved.

A second figure she could not see, but heard sobbing, was also inside the room.

Maude?

Catherine fell as much as fled back through the oblivion of the utility corridor to the front door of the house. In the surreal confusion of her partial sight, the image of that emaciated form shivering within the black water hounded her. And she knew she would rather risk freezing to death outside than spend any more of this night under the same roof as these grim creatures that conducted such ghastly rituals in the early hours of the morning, in a house alive with rats.

For the first time in her friendship with Leonard, she felt hot knots of anger towards him.

The two great front doors of the Red House were locked. And whoever had locked the doors had taken the keys.