House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-EIGHT

In the tense darkness the din of applause subsided.

Catherine was sure the audience had been stamping the heels of their feet against the floorboards. But the noise of applause, the sound of wood knocking against wood, was too high up and she felt no vibrations through the soles of her shoes. So they must have been banging their chairs with hard objects and not clapping with wooden hands. An idea her paranoia was only too happy to revive.

Now the performance had ended, the stage lights slowly glowed red, but illumined little beyond the head of the hall. When as much light returned as the tired bulbs were able to emit, she was relieved to see that the curtains around the stage were closed. The performance had drained her. She would be unsteady on her feet if she tried to stand.

Now the tired old world had re-formed around her, its dusty ruins could not compete with the vitality of the drama. The duration of the play was intentionally short, because no one could have withstood any more of it.

What she had seen through her fingers in snatches was all she had been able to bear in the reeking darkness of the blacked-out hall. The recording of what must have been the voices of M. H. Mason and his sister, Violet, she had plugged her ears against with torn wet wipes.

What the script had been based upon she did not want to guess. What she’d heard of the narration accompanying the activity of the marionettes had been as original and insane as what Mason had left in his study.

The hanging of the Martyr, Barnaby Pettigrew, and the burning of the Martyr, Wesley Spettyl, had nearly made her sick. The audience had wept and groaned as if at a funeral.

During the execution scenes, most of the marionettes had posed as children. Ragged, terrified children who watched their masters’ ghastly public demises carried out by court order and mob respectively; executed for witchcraft and necromancy, or so the crackling voice of the narrator had droned from somewhere behind the stage. Something only Jacobean playwrights would have dreamed of depicting in such detail.

Before each scene, the plaster-faced Master of Revels had walked centre stage upon its canine hind legs, grinning despite missing a nose, to deliver soliloquies in what Catherine guessed was a mostly indecipherable English in the Tudor idiom.

She’d once heard a fragment of Tennyson, recorded on a few surviving wax cylinders, reciting his poetry, and the narration to the M. H. Mason play had been about as clear. She hated the idea her imagination mooted that the script was far older than Mason, and had been transmitted to him from the past. No wonder the BBC had packed up and run in the fifties.

At its heart the drama was some kind of morality play. In her glimpses of it, the hare-headed puppet and the bonneted girl with the long chestnut hair had presided over the sentencing of Pettigrew and Spettyl, in some distant court or municipal authority. The same roles they had played in the smashing of Henry Strader upon the wheel in the BBC film.

But in return for the sentences they’d handed down to the puppet masters accused of sorcery, the marionette cast had visited the judges in their beds at night and hauled them away in their nightwear, to wooded scenes depicted by a backdrop, where a grisly revenge was taken and fates were decided.

What had been most disturbing in the haphazard fragments of the drama she had seen, were the episodes that featured the judges yanked off the stage and upwards into darkness. The judges had kicked their legs as they went. At the same time the recording had unleashed the sound of animal screams. To which the crowd had twitched and hissed with excitement.

If their diminishing though continuing cries could be trusted, the violent ascents of the judges into the air didn’t so much indicate the end of their lives, but the beginning of less merciful torments. All this in return for what they had done to the Martyrs.

The procession of the performers at the play’s conclusion depicted the cast as ragged urchins and stumbling invalids who disappeared, one by one, through a hole in the cloth wings of the stage. An aperture they drifted towards on strings Catherine had been unable to make out at any time during the performance.

She’d also scanned the cast to catch sight of the figure of the wooden-faced boy from Mason’s photographs, from her childhood trances, and from her own memory. All of the marionettes were in various costumes in each scene, but there had been crowd scenes in which she had seen something with girlish curls bouncing upon its small head. From where she was seated at the back, in what little she could bear to watch, that character had also seemed disinclined to show its face to the audience. She was now paranoid enough to believe the figure had known she was seated in the hall and was deliberately concealing itself from her.

When the performance finally ended she’d found herself breathing hard into her hands, which covered her face. The doors to the hall were open and the effigy sealed within glass had been taken away. What was left of the crowd had jostled from the hall with a weary determination. Most members of the audience had already found their way outside in total darkness while she still waited in petrified silence, praying there would be no encore.

At least the terrible movements of so many small limbs in rustling fabric, all about her in the darkness, was over. What the village had dressed and gathered for had finished, perhaps for another year.

But why keep it alive?

Beside her on an empty chair her bag gaped open. During the performance, it had been somewhere by her feet. But now the bag was upon the seat next to her.

The bag was empty, ransacked. A white piece of aged paper was all that had been left behind by the thief. Had it been the elderly woman in the vintage dress?

Catherine took out the notepaper, opened it. And tried not to cry.

YOU LOK SO PRITY SO STITCH UP YOR CUNT ELSE HE’LL PUT HIS PIZLE IN THAR AND BRAKE YOR HART APART.

Catherine dropped the piece of paper and moved quickly to the doors of the empty hall. As she ran she knocked aside the little chairs on both sides of the row. It was like running through a large Wendy house.

Amidst the clatter of her rout, she looked to the distant curtains of the stage, terrified they might open again. The only goal to her purposeful scrabble was the dark lane that led out of Magbar Wood, and the car that must be waiting there for her. Mike would not let Tara leave without her. And despite all Mike was guilty of, she now wanted to cling to him like he was driftwood in a freezing black ocean.

As part of the incongruous irrelevancy that can accompany the exhaustion of fear, she wondered if she should post Violet Mason’s antique maternity dress back to Edith. Which made her wonder whether the Red House was even visited by the postal service. It must be, because Edith had said they received enquiries about her uncle. They also had food, so Maude’s fare had to be procured and delivered from somewhere. These little shreds of evidence that Magbar Wood and the Red House were real, while the horrid suggestions of the things she had half seen in them were not real, were all she clung to as she walked, as quickly as it was possible to walk without breaking into a run, out of the hall and down the lane from the church. Which now looked to be deserted again. The lights were out, the doors were closed.

But the small theatre crowd had not dispelled. It milled in the distance, in the adjoining street she would have to cross to reach the barrier pole and the lane that led away from the village. The people had gathered about their icon; the glass in their midst was catching the thin light.

As she neared, the crowd appeared less animate but more organized. The attitude of the mob suggested it was waiting for her, like the girls at school had once waited outside the main gates. She recognized the feigned indifference of small bodies about to circle. Her scalp iced with panic.

She told herself she couldn’t be in any danger. They were elderly people. Cut off in a rural backwater and just going through the routine of a tradition. One revived by the mad old Masons who had the local population under their influence. She had been ill, Maude had drugged her, and they had put someone up to stealing from her and inserting the obscene message inside her bag.

The ghastly nonsense of the Red House and of M. H. Mason had postured for long enough as some form of alternate reality. She had to fight its influence with every ounce of strength in her mind and her body.

But the horrible notion that she was part of a scripted performance, that had yet to reach its final scene, persisted.

Catherine broke into a run.

She was having a breakdown. She thought she had become better when she moved home to Worcester. But you are only better as long as nothing goes wrong. Mike had gone wrong. Tara had come back. She had been lured to the Red House. She was being dragged back to the condition of her childhood. The will and fates of the world had reasserted themselves into her life.

At several times in her thirty-eight years, she’d come to believe the world was a wholly insidious place. Tonight confirmed it. And now she just had to get out and away, and keep running as far as her unshod feet could take her. Maybe until she reached the sea, where she could crawl around the coastline and find a tiny spot where she would be left alone.

Where the two streets met, three small figures stepped through a doorway to vanish inside a house. From her angle of observation, they appeared to step upwards and disappear into a fold of nothingness rather than merely enter an unlit doorway.

To cleanse her eyes of any more hallucinations she looked up. But the sky seemed closer than it should have been to any part of the earth. She returned her gaze to the ground only to see the faces of the remaining crowd all turned in her direction.

A shuffle of small shapes came towards her. She avoided looking directly at them in case acknowledgement allowed them access to her. They didn’t need permission.

By the time she was hurrying past the encroaching group, she overheard things she was sure were intended for her, but indirectly as if the speakers feigned fragments of conversation she happened to overhear in the street.

‘There’ll be some raw-meating soon, my love.’

‘Aye, let porcelain mingle with flesh. One be smooth, one be wet.’

‘There’s them… hobble on wooden stumps.’

‘. little boots… ’

‘Stitchin’ eh, stitchin’ to be sure.’

‘Needles need work.’

‘Brace us neck and pop in cold eyes.’

‘Salt the hide, keep out grubs. Stuffin’s sawdusty dry.’

‘They’s come in all right, they’s don’t get out, does her.’

‘Stop it!’ she screamed before she reached the end of the miserable collection of buildings and ran at the darkness, towards the memory of where she had seen the candy-striped pole at the border of Magbar Wood.

‘Hearken her,’ someone said, and cackled.

On the other side of the barrier, Catherine groped with outstretched arms, her fingers spread wide in the dark.

Her hands met nothing but empty air.

It was as if existence and matter had ceased to be. When she looked down she failed to see her own feet where they slapped about the uneven road surface.

She wondered if she was now somewhere else, lost and blind beneath the stars of a different night.

Where was Tara’s car, and where was the hedgerow? The lane seemed much wider than it could possibly be.

She had walked a few hundred metres into a cold absence and found nothing. She couldn’t see anything, let alone a parked car, and would never know for certain whether she had stumbled past it.

Maybe the car wasn’t there any more. She would have seen headlights or an interior light if it was occupied. Had they already fled and left her behind?

Her imagination stood in for logic. Cars were not welcome and were removed, and there were never any other cars here because the village had remained unchanged for a century, perhaps longer. Mason had somehow preserved the place and its occupants like he’d preserved the rats of his dioramas. The people had not been wearing costume, but their actual clothes. The entire area was a cruelty play that repeated its trickery like a vast clockwork toy, year after year.

A surge of panic overwhelmed what little of her reason had just driven her into the lane. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God,’ came as a mantra through her startled breaths. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

She tried not to cry. Useless shrieks issued from an inner room in her mind. Her body felt weightless like all of the blood had suddenly evaporated through her skin.

It would take her all night to walk a few miles in such a lightless void. Beneath the soft soles of her feet, sharp stones on the rural lane were already making her hop and wince. Even the dim amber glow of the village buildings appeared reassuring compared to the pitch-black lane.

She gripped both sides of her face to slow everything down inside her head. Mike. Mike had said he would go back to the house to find her if she didn’t return to the car. Mike wouldn’t leave her out here alone.

He might have already gone on ahead while she was trapped in the scout hall. She had been foolish and wilful and should have stayed with him when she had the chance. If Mike was up at the house, they could find a way out together. A flicker of comfort, little more, but it gave her a tenuous purpose.

But whether he was there or not, she would have to return to the Red House. She would freeze out here. The village was hostile. The Red House was, at least, familiar. It had lights, or a more reasonable excuse for light than Magbar Wood, where she could not bear to remain.

Catherine turned about and began fumbling her way back towards the village.

On the other side of the village, in the lane that would return her to the Red House, only when she had grasped the unruly intrusions of the hedgerows did she stop hobbling.

She knew at once that her own car was no longer where she had left it.

They had stolen it with the same spiteful intent with which they’d emptied her bag. But when did they steal it, and how, let alone why? She’d not heard a car engine anywhere near the village. And surely the population was too old for car theft.

Had they taken Tara’s car too?

None of them were allowed to leave.

Stop it!

Catherine glanced back at Magbar Wood. She’d just run through it, huddled into herself, too afraid to look up and about. But she’d known the night’s celebrations were far from over.

As she’d run through the village, she’d hoped the effigy in the glass cabinet would have been returned to the church and that the pageant crowd would have begun dispersing. But the crowd appeared to be regrouping. Perhaps for the next stage of the pageant. A notion reinforced by the formation of one purposeful mass in the main lane, and what now appeared to be a lit procession about the relic that had been mounted onto the float.

Horrified, she stood and watched the glass casket glitter amidst a haphazard concentration of candles at the intersection of the two lanes, no more than twenty metres away from where she stood shaking.

She was sure the veiled face inside the transparent case was now watching her.

Catherine turned and ran.

Every step further away from Magbar Wood became one step closer to what she guessed was the destination of the ghastly parade: the Red House.

Behind her, the discordant rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ fog-horned and twisted its horrible ditty into the air.