House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-SIX

Tonight she was transformed into a woman in white. Had become a flitting spirit from another era, barefoot like an urchin, playing a part in a performance foisted upon her because the house seemed intent on turning everything into a drama.

She was wanted at the pageant, where the rest of the cast and audience had gathered, but she would not go. She would speed through the village in her car and leave them all behind without a word, leave everything behind if necessary, even Leonard, who had introduced her to this mess and may have brought serpents back into her life. She could even go missing. Had often fantasized about disappearing, as if such an act of desperation presented great life-changing opportunities, not tragedy. It was time to improvise, to tear up the script.

But she would not leave before she explored this terrible old house and understood it, demystified it. Edith may have scattered the truth like crumbs but an opportunity to better know the Red House, and the instability of its occupants, had presented itself. For the sake of her own long-term sanity, she could not risk her mind’s entrapment beneath this spiky roof.

And nor could she deny that she was still captivated by the mystery, by the sheer impossibility that such a place could exist in the modern world. She needed to know how this house was possible. Here, the house was still here. Like this. With Edith and Maude inside it. Who felt like a facade for something else, behind the scenes.

But what?

If any of these doors were unlocked, she would go through them.

Catherine walked through the Red House and switched on every light she passed. She told herself she would not be frightened. She would be as alert and as focussed as her enemies were. Time to turn back the tide of fear and bafflement, a tide scouring her shores since she’d arrived, and for a lifetime before that too.

The dull pressure of the receding headache still made her squint, her balance had not returned to normal, and her skin was coated with a sheen of cooling sweat, but on through the passages she went. In her wake, light burnished and lacquered the timber panels and floors of the second storey with a bloody sheen.

In the second passage that led to the stairwell she found three unlocked bedrooms; all empty of life and filled with treasures unused since the death of M. H. Mason. Spaces that waited in faint light for guests who never arrived.

Without fear of rebuke, she entered Edith’s bedroom. A room also left unlocked. Perhaps it was permanently unsecure, so Maude could make swift passage to her ailing mistress.

Catherine photographed the wall of doll faces. Open-eyed, impassive, lifeless expressions in wood and cloth and ceramics, who had watched over Edith Mason since she had been a little girl.

Once open, the two great wardrobes and the chest of drawers confirmed her preposterous suspicion that Edith only possessed clothes predating the Second World War. Edith had mimicked her mother and uncle in their prime, long after they had died. But had she also worn her mother’s clothes while her mother was alive? Had Edith truly existed for so long inside one place, with no curiosity of what stretched into infinity outside of the grounds? It seemed so.

Catherine photographed the dresses and the contents of the drawers. She would have photographs and prove to herself and others that she was not mad. This was all here, really here.

Once the overhead light had been switched on, the next room she surveyed from the doorway shook her so profoundly, it took most of her will not to scream as she steadied herself against the doorframe. The nursery was a place she could not bring herself to enter.

Ten small beds aligned in two rows, beneath walls hand-painted with scenes of animals dressed as people. Animals that took tea, sailed little boats, flew kites, and ran in eager groups with wild white eyes and clawed feet as they chased rats.

The only significant difference to the room on this visit was that each of the little white beds was now empty. And all of the bedclothes were neatly made, to suggest the beds had been unoccupied for a while. The vintage leather passenger trunk was also absent, as were the small leather boots and silken slippers that had been at the foot of each bed.

The absence of Mason’s morbid creations was reassuring, but only superficially. Catherine recalled her notion that small forms had followed her down the staircase the night before, and inhabited the lightless spaces below.

No!

The marionettes had been removed by people, to be used in some vile performance at the pageant. She told herself this as she stood frozen in the doorway of the room. And then she told herself the same thing again. The second time her lips moved.

After taking one photograph, she closed the nursery door and walked to the far end of the passage, where an alcove was visible beside the arched window overlooking the garden. Inside the alcove four narrow steps ascended to a rosewood door. There was an iron handle in the shape of a ring. It would lead to the attic under the pointed roofs with the thin arched window casements that she had seen from outside. The door was locked. She stood against it and listened.

Did she hear a tap tap tap from the other side? In the distance. Maybe. Yes, a faint far-off knocking. Wood on wood. Up there. A rhythmic motion. Something stirred by the wind. Or a mechanism. Could be anything. She pulled away from the door when she thought of the chipped wooden hands of the Master of Revels clapping.

On the first floor, Catherine made hesitant progress. She avoided Edith’s drawing room due to an irrational fear that the preserved animals would tell their owner she had been inside the room without permission.

Next to the drawing room, she peered into a games room. There was a long-unused billiard table and an iron fireplace. The part of herself that used to evaluate houses and their contents felt peculiarly distant, but tried to revive itself when she looked inside the library.

The Eastlake bookcases that housed Mason’s books, she was sure would fetch between five hundred and a thousand pounds each. The first editions lining the shelves she could not even begin to evaluate. There were at least a thousand volumes.

She traced her finger along the spines closest to the door: Preparation of Scientific Specimens of Mammals in the Field, 1931, Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan; Directions for Preserving Specimens of Large Mammals, 1911, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley.

The door beside the library opened onto light produced from twin desk lamps, as if the room was in use. This was the study. The place of M. H. Mason’s death.

Catherine half expected to see someone rise from the chair before the desk, or to turn away from the bookcases that were packed tight with more leathery book spines and bundles of paper tied with twine. Before the one window, a draughtsman’s drawing board was angled to catch what light fell through the glass.

She sniffed at the air. A trace of stale pipe tobacco. Leonard coated the office with a similar odour. But how had this room still retained a vestige of M. H. Mason’s own pipe smoke?

She sensed a lingering presence, that of a man driven and uncompromising, who would tolerate no intrusion or interference with work that had been encyclopaedic, and curious, with unfathomable goals. Work that had eventually killed him.

Whatever he had achieved inside this house, she was seeing mere residues. An old, damaged, grotesque film, poorly lit photographs in dim corridors, a room populated with preserved mammals, beehives crawling with bluebottle flies, a nursery of marionettes with an ancestry Edith preposterously claimed stretched back centuries. But his vision was greater. She could sense this, but not define it. M. H. Mason’s endgame eluded her. His niece spoke only to obscure and tantalize and mislead. And half of what she said was fantasy. But Mason’s ultimate goal seemed intent on suggesting itself to her in terms that could not be understood logically.

Her irrational instincts suggested that her recent dreams offered a more suitable path to enlightenment. Could she be stuck inside a giant doll’s house? They had even got her to dress the part. Or maybe the Red House was a continuous puppet show in a vast theatre, in which the cast performed nonsensical and abstract scenes from dramas composed by a once-fine mind, long-since damaged and haunted into the grim-surreal.

She cut off the suggestions from her imagination when she realized this was how the mad must consider the world.

Edith declared the rooms of the house had remained completely unaltered since her uncle’s death. If it were true, the pipe and open earthenware tobacco jar, and the neat arrangement of pencils beside the open notebooks upon the huge desk, had stayed in the same position for fifty years. As had the crystal tumbler, and what had evaporated to leave a brownish stain at the bottom of the glass. Perhaps only Maude’s duster had made contact with anything within this capsule, frozen from the moment its master expired by his own hand.

‘You crazy bitches.’ Catherine confirmed her gravest fear when she spotted the ancient black stain spread across the leather desktop. Mason must have opened his throat over the desk. And Edith’s mother had left the blood to dry. Catherine took one photograph and looked away.

But Edith’s curatorial integrity had been compromised by one thing. The straight razor was missing. It should have been upon the desktop, or beside the chair where it fell from cold white fingers. Perhaps the sight of that was too much, even for Violet Mason. And for Edith too.

The household, his own family, had fostered Mason’s delusions and morbid insanity. When he had gone, they’d preserved it. Why? The dying village honoured him with a pageant. Why? It was incredible, and incredibly sick. What was the attraction? If the devotion to his legacy was not inspired by any kind of charismatic allure that she could determine, or sustained by any attempt by the creator to conceal what was evidently misguided and unhealthy, and if loyalty was not rewarded with material wealth, then what kind of a hold did a deranged former army chaplain still command over the entire area and his only surviving relative?

Gingerly, Catherine approached the first wooden cabinet in the study. The thought of actually touching anything in M. H. Mason’s study made her giddy, excited like a child. The cabinet was similar to the kind of furniture that held index cards in old university libraries. The drawers were unlabelled, but the top drawer contained hundreds of letters. As did the three drawers beneath. She walked her fingers across the top of the ancient paper. At random she pulled out envelopes.

A great many had been sent to him by a Hessen, Felix. The name meant nothing to her. Coldwell, Eliot, also appeared in abundance in the top drawer. She had never heard that name before either. Many of the Coldwell letters seemed more recent. He had been writing to Mason as late as the early sixties. The index cards were alphabetized and Coldwell and Hessen consumed most of the top two drawers. There were also a great many letters from someone called Mathers, Samuel, catalogued with S.R.I.A beside his name. Mason had once conducted lengthy correspondences with a small number of people, but she had no idea who any of these men were.

The adjacent cabinet was filled to capacity with ageing photographs protected within dividers made from brown card. She raised a folio at random and leafed through the pictures. They featured the construction of the puppet theatre upon the rear lawn when it had known better days. Mason must have been behind the camera. Whenever she was featured, Violet Mason was dressed like a man in dark overalls and worked without looking at the camera. The construction appeared to be highly organized, if not systematic, with the building materials laid out beside large paper plans.

Another bundle of brittle photographic paper revealed dramas in progress upon the stage of the theatre. Mason and his sister were absent from the murky pictures and must have been behind the scenes operating the marionettes. The shots were all taken directly before the front of the stage, perhaps on a timer. Little detail of the activity on stage was revealed. The motion was always blurred, as if the antics of the puppets were too quick for the shutter speed.

There were a great many pictures on browning paper of the derelict church she had seen at the head of the village. And even more of the perimeter walls, the oldest headstones and their indecipherable inscriptions. Much attention had been paid to one dingy and poorly lit corner of the cemetery.

In another folder, there were hundreds of photographs of some kind of excavation, or earthworks, on the side of a small hill surrounded by open ground, though she had no idea of the location, which wasn’t marked in anything but some sort of code that resembled ancient Greek interspersed with Roman numerals. But it looked as though something was in the process of being dug up. What appeared to be small bones and fragments of cloth were set beside a measuring tape.

The next drawer down repeated the obsessional character of the collection, though these pictures featured small paths and lanes, captured from all angles, upon open countryside. From a hill, the tracks had been traced onto some photographs with ink, like grooves in the earth.

Desperate for embellishment, for an explanation, she moved down to the next drawer, at the bottom of the cabinet. The final drawer was comprised entirely of folders containing pictures of the night sky and moon in its various stages, as if Mason had picked up astronomy as one of his compulsions during an enigmatic journey that included marionette theatre and the extermination of thousands of small mammals. His approach to whatever interested him was always fastidious, even scientific, but his goals still utterly bemused her. This was no good to her, to what she wanted to know. She kicked the final drawer shut.

Catherine moved her attention to the second cabinet. Its contents were more in keeping with what she expected from Mason, but soon regressed into a creative degeneracy that made her feel so sick, she wondered if she would ever recover from what she saw.

The dissection, emptying of internal organs and then meticulous fleshing of hides, of what were undoubtedly small animals, filled the entirety of the top drawer. She looked at no more than seven of the pictures — four rats, a squirrel and what resembled a peeled badger upon a slab — before she had to look away and press her knuckles to her lips. But it was the final picture that most affected her.

At first, she was convinced Mason had been preserving a dark-skinned child. A closer, less horrified scrutiny, revealed it to be an ape that Mason had photographed after making a long dorsal incision in its back. At that point in the procedure, the monkey’s arms draped long black rags of hairy skin that had been rolled down from its hands. The empty strips of flesh looked like Opera-length gloves.

On the reverse side, Mason had written ‘Felix Hessen’s Hoolock Gibbon from Regent Park Zoo’. So perhaps it had been a private commission to preserve an ape. The shock of believing, for just a moment, that Mason had been skinning a child forced Catherine to slam this drawer shut.

The collection in the next section of the cabinet was equally disturbing. Carefully indexed photographs featured the still-articulated bones from animal remains, augmented with line drawings of wooden limbs replicating the true movement of joints. Several large albums’ worth of individual doll parts had also been photographed against black cloth. Body parts removed from what had once belonged to a set of expensive and lifelike J.D. Kestner and Simon and Halbig dolls. Jointed limbs, mohair wigs, rotatable hands, the bisque socket heads of female dolls, and torsos moulded out of porcelain to resemble children’s bodies abounded. The classic blue glass eyes and open mouths lined with little moulded teeth were the giveaway that they were German. After opening thousands of animals, Mason seemed to have progressed to disarticulating the more sophisticated varieties of doll.

The files of photographs that followed the doll parts forced Catherine to utter, ‘Dear God’ into the air of the now stifling room, so fragrant with stale tobacco, brittle paper and polished wood.

A vast collection of amputee photographs from the Boer war, Great War and even the American Civil War awaited, as did line drawings and photographs of tin and wooden limbs, alongside their laced leather harnesses and the complicated hydraulic systems that replicated human joints. One-hundred-year-old catalogues, featuring the most sophisticated prosthetic limb designs, from Gustav Hermann and Giuliano Vanghetti, had been slipped amongst the antique medical photographs.

Mason may have mastered taxidermy to a level unmatched in his lifetime, or since, but it had surely functioned as a precursor to the next step: an obsession with real surgery, and with the fitting of prosthetic limbs to stumps, and with suturing torn human flesh.

Randomly, Catherine flicked through half a dozen of the medical photographs, and saw all of the dead skin, patch-worked with stitches, that she ever cared to see. She closed the drawer using what little strength remained in her arms.

Incapacity. Disability. Deformity. Amputees. The horrors of the front. His own facial disfigurement. Callipers, crutches and wheelchairs. It all swirled like a horrible carousel through her mind, and made her nausea worse. The man had been traumatized by his experience of war and his great personal loss to such an extent that he must have been insane the entire time he lived in this house after coming home from the front. He’d incubated here, cultivating his regressive, though artful, vision. He had evolved here. But into what?

The contents of the penultimate drawer seemed to attest to her theory, and revealed evidence of experiments of a far more intimate nature that so shocked Catherine she knew that when she left the house tonight she would never return.

Amongst a sizeable private collection of Victorian Momento Mori photographs, featuring doleful families in their Sunday best, sat around the smartly dressed and waxen-faced cadavers of their recently deceased infants, Mason’s curious obsession had turned to his sister.

In the 1940s, according to the dates on the rear of the pictures, printed in Roman numerals alongside more of the Greek code, he had photographed his own sister in a variety of foundation wear and crippling S-Bend corsets against a black backdrop. Despite the severe countenance of his sister’s thin masculine face, the pictures issued an uncomfortably erotic charge. Though the composition and style of the photographs still suggested an artistic purpose was behind their creation.

Violet Mason’s flesh was never naked. From the throat down, she had been stitched into some kind of patchwork second skin, made from the type of brown cloth once used to manufacture the stuffed bodies of dolls, at a time when only the heads and hands of dolls were constructed from china or porcelain. Over the tight sackcloth skin, layered petticoats were then arranged, layer by layer, to eventually produce a complete constriction, a muffling of the flesh. In addition, Violet’s middle was always bound tightly to shape her torso.

Her legs were gripped by iron callipers and thick leather boots, as if she suffered some crippling disability. The arrangement also resembled a form of punishment. Perhaps it was. Edith must have been an illegitimate child. So was this Mason’s reaction to his sister taking a lover?

On two pictures, prior to the layers of boned foundation wear and underwear being built over her thin body, Violet’s loins were revealed. Stitched with an alarming suggestion of permanence, her abdomen had been fitted into what resembled brown leather shorts.

Applied over a layer of the cloth-like skin, the leather breeches were sown up her inner thighs, in the same way Mason had stitched closed the skin of an animal over an artificial wooden body, or a plaster mould in other pictures. It looked like a primitive chastity device.

After each binding session, Violet Mason must have been cut out of the shorts and cloth suit, or the stitches would have been unpicked. At least, Catherine hoped so.

What was being done to Violet Mason’s head was equally strange and sinister. Perpetually built up to grotesque levels, her hair was intricately piled in the cottage-loaf style that Edith had replicated. Catherine knew from other pictures that Mason’s sister had thin black hair, so the seemingly endless array of profiles of his sister’s head proved that the elaborate styles that dwarfed her bony face had been constructed from donor hair and rags.

As the studies of the head section of the pictorial archive progressed, the face of Violet was consistently overlaid with a series of veils from the broad brims of Watteau hats. Behind the sheer face veils, the Masons had begun experimenting with a crude form of masking combined with theatrical make-up. Violet’s face was often so tightly bound with gauze, her features were restricted into a narrow pout, with her mouth forming a small dollish O.

Increasingly, her eyes were painted on too, over closed eyelids, with huge black lashes strikingly visible through the layers of netting. She had also worn porcelain masks that had either been decorated with cosmetics, or were actual life-sized doll faces, but always further obscured through a layering of veils.

It was as if M. H. Mason was fetishizing his sister as a doll, or perfecting something upon a living model that Catherine did not want to consider.

Before opening the final drawer, she questioned whether she could tolerate any more. What had begun as a frenzy of rummaging had tailed off into an appalled gaping.

She steeled herself, knelt down, and opened the last compartment, silently praying for a collection of seamstress dress patterns.

Catherine held onto the cabinet to prevent herself from sitting down and allowing the shaking to take over.

Her recognition of the buildings, photographed in black and white and collected at the front of the first drawer, had been immediate. The Magnis Burrow School of Special Education. The home. The special school for special children in Ellyll Fields.

An earlier incarnation of the institution than the one she had known, this version had lawns cut and trimmed within paths, long black windows, and old cars parked out front. But what had Mason been doing messing around with that school, and a place within a few hundred yards of her home? She scrabbled through the pictures looking for dates. 1951, 1952, 1957 in Roman numerals. Long before her time. It offered some relief, though not much.

Inside another file she saw a face she had known since childhood, a face of an innocent, smiling girl with sightless eyes that had always filled her with dread: little Angela Prescott. The blind girl of her nan’s stories, who had been snatched from Magnis Burrow before Catherine was born. This was the iconic face of Ellyll Fields that most of its inhabitants had tried to forget.

The photograph of Angela had been cut out of a newspaper. As had the likenesses of Margaret Reid and Helen Teme, her companions in tragedy, that were also stored in the same file. The cuttings were inside a transparent envelope, the type stamp collectors used. The same images from newspaper clippings that her nan once kept in a biscuit tin.

The connection of Mason to the abducted girls filled her mind with a static of confusion that was underpinned with a dread so cold it made her shiver. The shock settled into a feeling of nausea, and a fear for her own safety that made the hair follicles of her scalp prickle. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths to settle herself.

Mason was an old man when the girls went missing. And at the time he was also a man not long for the world. He’d killed himself in the early sixties. Cut his throat. So was this why? Because of what he had done to little girls? From animals to puppets to children…

She thought of the pretty little kittens in dresses. And the demented, but grotesquely beautiful world of preserved animals and dolls he had created inside his own home. His connection to the missing girls suddenly seemed plausible. Back in the fifties would anyone even have thought twice about an elderly man, with a priestly bearing, taking photographs of a school?

Or was he just an archivist, or a historian of the locale’s stranger byways and most curious events? Please let him be.

There was nothing else in the two Magnis Burrow files to condemn him as a kidnapper and murderer. Just the clippings and scores of photographs of the school and its grounds.

She shouldn’t even be in the room, she was trespassing, but she suddenly wanted to confront Edith with the pictures.

Her horror dwindled into confusion when she perused the next file. The photographs were mounted in embossed paper frames and all featured another child, but one she did not recognize. Judging by the quality of the paper and the tones in the photographs, she guessed they were developed in the forties. Dates on the rear confirmed her hunch.

The first picture showed a little boy sat in a wheelchair outside a stone cottage. His legs were withered. The same boy appeared in two other pictures taken on the perfect lawn of a large orderly garden. In the first garden picture he was alone, smiling at the camera. In the second picture he sat watching the blurred activity upon the stage of Mason’s theatre. So the latter two pictures must have been taken in the rear garden of the Red House. There had been a disabled child at the Red House around the time of the Second World War.

Catherine screwed up her eyes and scrutinized the blurred frenzy of activity on the stage of the puppet theatre. But the only details she could determine were suggestions of an old bonnet around an indistinct face, and what appeared to be two thin arms thrust into the wavy air above the bonneted figure’s head. She looked away, dizzy from a powerful jolt of déjà vu.

Questions darted through her mind but would not settle into coherent answers. Maybe this was Edith’s son? She might have followed her mother’s example and had a child out of wedlock. There was no evidence of Edith’s father in the house. And she had been too polite to ask about Edith’s dad.

If Edith was his mother, the boy could have been carrying the same congenital deformity that beset Edith. But Edith had lived to her nineties, so where was the child now?

In another picture the disabled boy sat between Violet and what Catherine assumed was a young Edith Mason. Violet wore a long black dress that concealed her feet at one end and pinched her throat at the other extremity. Edith was dressed in a near-identical fashion. The severe expression on Edith’s face matched her mother’s. Only the boy was smiling, and he held Edith’s pale hand.

Catherine’s trembling fingers, that she could not still, loosened another photograph from out of the paper folder. The picture featured the boy in the wheelchair and M. H. Mason, the patriarch, sat in a garden chair. Mason wore a white linen suit and hat, but had failed to fully conceal the devastated side of his face, even with his head angled away.

Behind the boy’s chair, Edith, draped in her widow’s weeds, stood ramrod-straight without the aid of a wheelchair. So she had not been disabled when younger. Her face was as bloodless and long with misery as it seemed to have remained into her ninth decade. Catherine wondered if Violet had been the photographer.

Her fascination soon turned to panic.

In a separate envelope, the disabled boy reappeared as the subject of two further photographs. This time none of the Mason family were in shot, though the little boy was not alone. Because it appeared that one of Mason’s troupe of marionettes had joined him for a photographic opportunity.

‘No.’ Catherine wanted to unsee the figure perched upon the disabled boy’s lap in the manner of an ancient ventriloquist’s dummy.

The puppet was almost the same size as the boy, its callipered legs at least as long and thin. But what was most striking about the puppet in the little tight suit was its wooden face and long black hair.

She’d seen this odd and scruffy thing before, in her own childhood trances, at her school that one time in the playground, and outside of her den on the other side of the green fence that Alice had climbed through… Which would mean her trances were memories? Albeit repressed, but true recollections?

Catherine hung her head between her shoulders and took long deep breaths to try and stop the shaking that had come to her limbs.

But Mason was long dead when she was a child, had been gone twenty years. Violet would have been dead by then too, or extremely aged. So had Edith, Maude, or their collaborators, brought this troupe to the derelict Magnis Burrow School, and into her life when she was a six-year-old child?

And if the figure with the wooden face and callipered legs, that Catherine had seen when she was a child, was no hallucination — it couldn’t have been — the figure could not have been a puppet either, because when she had seen it, there had been no puppeteer.

The thing with the wooden face must have been an actual child then, wearing a mask and dressed as one of Mason’s puppets.

But if a costumed child had been at the Red House in the 1940s, to be photographed with the disabled boy in the wheelchair, then who had worn the same outfit in the early eighties, when she had seen the figure with her own immature, six-year-old eyes?

Had she caught a glimpse of a similar figure, right here, in the nursery, too? There had been a mostly concealed head with that kind of wig. She had seen its messy black curls, but no face. She wondered if it had featured in the BBC film of Henry Strader’s execution; she couldn’t be sure, as the puppets had been in period costume, and she’d kept covering her eyes.

‘You sick, sick fucks.’ A terrible suggestion arrested her mind, which still felt like it was swimming with drugs and aching from trying to process so much unpleasant imagery and information. But had the Mason family snatched all of the little disabled children from the Magnis Burrow School in Ellyll Fields in the fifties and sixties? Had the Masons been befriending lonely and disabled children in that school with a patsy: a costumed, masked go-between? Perhaps using other children dressed as Mason’s beloved troupe of marionettes to function as mimics, as saviours to the defenceless and vulnerable? The disabled boy in the wheelchair might have been just such an abductee, maybe one of the first in the forties.

In her trances, Catherine had seen what she’d thought of as strange children within the buildings of Magnis Burrow, as Alice had climbed the grassy bank leading up to the school. She hadn’t imagined it. She wasn’t crazy. Here was proof. And her trances may have been submerged traumas. Her contact, or her reunion, with the Red House must have brought the memories back with force. There was a connection.

If two generations of Masons had been haunting that school for decades, they would have taken Alice. And would have wanted Catherine too.

But then who were the children disguised in the marionette costumes? Other abducted children? Vulnerable children groomed, recruited, and then made to star in the sick plays of the Mason family, upon their lawn, for years? And to lure others to the party at the Red House? Alice too?

Alice…

If her suspicions were true, no wonder the Masons were still hiding from the world. Which begged another question she wanted the answer to: was Edith really broke and looking to sell up, or was she confessing to Catherine? Or doing something much worse? Now that Catherine was a woman, who had once been the child that got away, because she hadn’t followed Alice through the fence, was Edith Mason hoping to resolve unfinished business? It was possible.

‘Oh God, oh God.’ Had they come back for her, these two horrid old women, to finish the child-snatching work that M. H. Mason had started decades before she’d even been born?

Had she not seen a child in the Red House too, at the window, on her first visit? Or was that a doll? Someone had pressed a doll’s face against the window when she was returning from the hives too. Maybe that wasn’t a doll and there was actually a child or children here.

The locked attic! A cellar! What had really been in those nursery beds? The movements at night. A small figure standing up at the end of a dark corridor… What she had thought was a trick, or an animal.

Catherine clutched her face with her hands. She felt weak, woozy, wanted to throw up all over Mason’s hideous study. It was preposterous. She didn’t know what to think. Maybe it was her that was truly mad, eaten alive by paranoia, and she was only rationalizing her presence within this building, as well as its very connection to what had always been dismissed as her childhood hallucinations. The worst thing about being mad was not realizing that you were mad.

Evidence, she needed more evidence.

Those few scrolls of parchment she still had the stomach to take down from the honeycomb of boxes in the study, and to untie, were all written in what she thought was ancient Greek. As were the bound volumes of Mason’s black notebooks that filled a small bookcase. Same again with the four upon the desk he had filled with writing right up until his death. The neat but incomprehensible text was only ever relieved by chemical compositions, and what looked like trigonometry.

The M. H. Mason legacy didn’t need a valuer or an auction, it needed a psychiatrist, and a secure archive within a private hospital, where the monomania that his niece had mistaken for genius could be studied at length by those accustomed to the sophisticated expressions of the incurably damaged.

Catherine ran back to her room and grabbed her bags. Then made her way down to the ground floor with her car keys clenched between her teeth.