House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-FIVE

When she awoke, the bedroom was still lit by the small lamp.

Catherine sat up slowly and held her head in both hands until the swoops settled. The concussive ache in her head had lifted, as had the shivering and sensitivity of her skin. Maybe the hot constriction in her throat had awoken her, because the need to gulp at cold water was urgent again.

A great distance of time and space separated her from the memory of running through the house to her bed. Her recollections of the previous night were murky. While more conscious than she had been in some time, she still struggled to distinguish between what had been a nightmare or delirium, and what had been real. Poor bald, scarred Edith, that had been real. Or had it? The children in the costumes a dream? And the mannequin with the head? Impossible. Just part of a nightmare.

Illness, being drugged with what the old fools thought of as medicine, must have opened a distant region of her mind. The part she used for dreaming had accelerated its activity when she was half awake. Her trances verified she was susceptible to this. And God only knew she’d had a few of those. Until she could get out of the building and get home, she could not afford to consider her experience to be anything else. Her sanity was dependent upon it.

She opened the heavy drapes and looked out at an indigo sky from which the light dissolved. Catherine quickly checked the time on her phone. 8 p.m. Not possible.

Surely it was 8 a.m. and the last vestiges of night were surrendering to the dawn. She had dropped the phone on the stairs the night before, her fingers had been clumsy about the handset’s controls, she might have accidentally reset the clock.

Weak and unsteady on her feet, she opened and fired up her laptop on the writing table. Like the phone the computer showed a red battery level. But she had been recharging them. She remembered doing it.

She reattached both chargers to the wall sockets. Even though there had never been a signal here, the idea of the phone and laptop being lifeless suddenly seemed too terrible to consider when surrounded by such ponderous antiquity.

Once the laptop screen loaded, she was confronted by the horrible shock of having slept all day following the troubled night.

8 p.m.

Her stomach was cavernous and burned with hunger. It’s why she was so clumsy, so weak, why her thoughts were struggling to coordinate beyond bursts of clarity in a fog of bewilderment. She’d been out of it for twenty-four hours with little water and without food.

The door to her room was locked from the inside. At the thought of being here again after dark, she twisted the key then yanked the door open. And stared down at an antique silver tray, filled with cutlery, plates, two silver tureens. An envelope rested between the teapot and butter dish. Beside it, a red hatbox, with a folded cream garment laid upon its lid, and a pair of narrow white slippers.

Carefully, Catherine brought the tray inside and placed it on the writing table. The tureens were cold. But she’d eat the old hat before she touched another morsel of Maude’s food. Where did they even buy it from? The presence of food in the house was incongruous. Nothing, nothing at all, was making sense. Three days to be upset by a horrid film, frightened repeatedly, chased through the grounds by flies, to suffer the kind of delusions she attributed to the insane… Edith in that metal tub. The smells. The stairs. ‘Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.’

She had come here as a valuer of antiques, but that role now seemed so distant as to be irrelevant. She hadn’t valued a single item. Because they were still testing her, assessing her. Maybe no stranger from the outside world could just saunter in here and make off with the kind of haul that would make international news. Or was all of this preparation?

But for what?

Her hunch about Edith’s dementia extended into fears of a dreadful complicity, as if she had made an agreement with something poorly explained to her, or deliberately concealed.

Catherine could smell the delicate floral perfume wafting from the ancient lace of the gown upon the wooden dummy. It tried to insinuate its presence inside her head. She fingered the yellowing cotton of the hat; the silk flowers piled about its brim were brittle with age. The embroidered shawl was probably a hundred years old and even touching it made her shudder. So small and stiff were the handmade shoes she could tell at a glance she wouldn’t get three toes inside them.

She tore open the envelope and drew out the stiff paper, watermarked with Mason’s initials. The same stationery posted to the office and hand-delivered to her home.

She struggled through the contents of the note, written in Edith’s unsteady hand. When she finished she slumped on the bed and stared at the dark window.

My Dear Catherine

We did not wish to disturb your rest, but have been called away to supervise tonight’s events. Maude has left you supper. Refreshments will be provided after the performance of The Martyrs of Rod and String. A more modern drama from the Caroline period. We do trust you are now well enough to join us. Our theatre is a spectacular local tradition, with origins pre-dating the first Roman footstep on British soil. Though exactly when they started I cannot tell you. My uncle thought he knew and told me, but I forget.

Your dress has been altered. A hat and shawl have been provided. Do take care of my mother’s things, they will not be easy to replace. We begin when the first stars unveil.

With kind regards, your fond friend

Edith Mason.

P.S. There was a gentleman caller, a Michael, here this afternoon. A very agitated and persistent individual, who seemed keen to speak with you. We told him you were unwell and resting. And he brought a girl with him who had far too much to say for herself. I did not catch her name, though that hardly matters. We sent them away to the pageant to wait for you. In future will you please inform us when we are to receive visits from strangers! I thought I had made myself perfectly clear about our desire for privacy.

Was he truly here? Had Mike come for her? The very idea of him being close made her feel sicker. No, he had not come to save her, because he had come with a girl. Her. Mike had brought her, Tara, with him. Such an act of feckless cruelty suddenly suggested to her that she had never really known him, and may only have been prey to her own wishful thinking for the entire duration of their relationship. How could she have been so wrong? On what level, and in what way, were his actions even remotely acceptable?

And why was he here? How did he find it? Leonard! Leonard may have confronted him and let it slip out. Or even told him she needed help, reassurance, a friendly face, something like that, after she’d made the emotional phone call to her boss at the end of her first day. The very idea of Leonard interfering made her furious. It would mean Leonard had ignored her wishes, and thought he knew what was best for her. If he still wanted to sell M. H. Mason’s shit, after what she had been through, she’d wheel him here and he could do the valuation himself. Time for her boss to step up because she was stepping down.

Tara was now within the orbit of the Red House, and its considerable treasures. So maybe this had nothing to do with Leonard, because Mike may have already told Tara about what Catherine was valuing here, the Mason originals, and Tara had insisted they come here. Bitch. Tara would have smelled the house’s immaculate antiquities from the porch.

Tara had taken her boyfriend, but that was not enough. She’d be pitching for a television documentary by tomorrow morning. While she’d been reduced to delirium and a half-crazed paranoia, Tara had come to spoil her and Leonard Osberne’s exclusivity.

She suddenly felt so deeply persecuted she thought herself condemned. Her past, her trances and her enemies all seemed to have gathered here, in some dreadful critical mass, specifically for the purpose of destroying what was left of her mind. She sensed a powerful controlling force, behind her life, tactically planning her downfall. Maybe it had always been there, as she had often suspected, and she was a hapless marionette in a cruelty play that began the day she’d been born and given away by her natural mother.

‘Oh Christ. Oh Jesus Christ.’

She felt unstable. Dangerously volatile, like she could hurt herself out of sheer frustration.

Clothes, bag, camera, laptop, phone. Get your shit together, girl, and just go.

No, wait. To flee in her car would mean passing through the hideous village and the pageant. But there was no other way out. The Red House was a trap at the end of the lane. The village a gatehouse.

They all wanted her at the pageant. The festival needed a fool. A star attraction to be mocked, betrayed, and deceived.

But who could possibly be down there? The idea of a pageant in that place was patently ridiculous. Another delusion of two twisted old women who’d either drugged her, or made her condition worse to keep her here. What she’d seen, or thought she’d seen, of the village’s residents weren’t fit to participate in anything but their own funerals.

She hurriedly packed her things away, then turned to the chest of drawers to retrieve her clothes.

The drawer was empty. Her clothes were gone. Had been taken. Her dirty laundry had been inside a tote bag, and there had been one day of fresh clothing. Catherine looked at the hideous white gown upon the manikin’s torso and swallowed a sob. Slumped on the bed beside her belongings, she drew her fingers down her pale face.

She had to stay strong, not make bad decisions. When you are ill, and on your own, you can’t afford to. Hadn’t she learned this the hard way before? And was she now alone within the Red House?