House of Small Shadows

FORTY-TWO

Though they were both in no condition to do anything but loll like mannequins upon their seats, if either of the occupants of the attic were to move, she believed she would pass out.

Catherine imagined she was in the attic room of a doll’s house, equipped with two dolls, and filled with the amplified noise of a badly tuned radio. Under the roof the noise of static and the metallic voice was so loud, she looked up to make sure she had not walked beneath an enormous asthmatic mouth with a microphone pressed to its lips.

Thrust out before her, level with her shoulders, the scalpel trembled because she held the handle so tightly. Her other hand was clamped across her mouth to smother the kind of whimpers most people never hear themselves utter in an entire lifetime.

The walls of the space she had entered were cluttered and obscured by old wooden tea chests, a set of dining chairs under dust sheets, and a painted rocking horse as big as a pony. Her vision flashed across all of these things and more that didn’t even register, as she searched for movement amongst the furniture. None was forthcoming.

As the terrible voice buzzed, she detected the whir of a clockwork toy. Mechanical parts in what looked like a Frenophone in perfect condition. She’d once seen one in a museum, but it had not been as polished and shiny as the one sat upon the little collapsible table. The device looked like a gramophone but it didn’t play records. It was designed to pick up faint radio signals. And it was operated manually. Hanging from the side of the wooden box was a black handle.

But who had turned it?

She returned her attention to the two bodies in the attic. Surely the withered figure slumped upon the chair behind the table had been incapable of operating the Frenophone. Dressed from head to toe in a white suit and apron, the hands concealed in buff-coloured protective gloves, was the fly-keeper she had seen in the overgrown garden.

Scalpel leading the way, she approached the table at which the figure may have once sat upright, and stood as close as she dared in case it twitched. Through the gauzy front of the mask an indistinct head was just visible.

Catherine tugged off the mask and stared at what remained of a yellowing face, as dry as parchment like that of a pharaoh on display in a museum. Some of the face was missing, burrowed back above one eye socket. The lipless mouth was open and as dry as a bone inside. The gleam and lustre of the open and static eyes assured her they were made of glass. The dried sinews of the throat were neatly sown together by a line of stitches. It was M. H. Mason.

The protective clothing seemed to have settled around the thin and collapsed shape inside. But it could move, she had seen it move. How? At the sudden recollection of its movements between the trees at the foot of the garden, Catherine withdrew from the table.

She promised herself that what she had seen in the garden, that vestige of humanity in white clothing, was not some old toy, wound up to stagger feebly through an old routine, as if set off by a mischievous child trying to get her attention. There were no scarecrows of poorly preserved human remains temporarily occupied by what other life existed here, or behind here, or was close to here, that Edith had alluded to. A force she thought she had sensed, but could not see. Because thinking like that, and believing such things, was just what Edith wanted her to do, and she must not accept Edith’s lies.

So there was another occupant of the Red House who had worn this outfit in the garden on that first day. A third inhabitant. There was Maude, Edith, and one other who had waved to her from the foot of the garden. And she had seen faces at windows, disguised faces. So maybe this other she had yet to meet was the killer of Mike and Tara, and little Alice. Perhaps he was the disabled child from the old photos in Mason’s study. The one she guessed might be Edith’s son. He would be very old by now, past seventy.

Under his mother’s tutelage, Edith’s son may even have preserved his grandmother and great uncle. The house was so insane anything now seemed possible. And it could also have been this other she’d heard creeping around the house at night. Crawling outside of her room.

Catherine turned to the second occupant of the attic, who sat and grinned inside the casket like a satanic version of the Madonna. It was the relic she had seen at the pageant. Housed within glass, she made an educated guess that this was almost certainly Edith’s mother, Violet Mason. A woman now revered as a saint by the local vestiges of life, if you could even consider them as the living.

Under closer inspection, the facial skin of Violet Mason’s remains was as pale as an unearthed grub and as wrinkled as a wet cotton sheet. So shrunken was the form, the crumpled features under the great black hat and behind the patterned veil would have been at home upon the head of a child. The eyes were open and bright and almost certainly made of glass. German. The dress was made of finely embroidered black silk and covered the figure’s limbs. Only the hands were visible. They were as colourless as putty, with fingers as thin as pencils, but looked alarmingly soft. The garlands inside the casket were fresh, as if plucked that very day from the meadows.

Someone had preserved Violet and stored her and her brother’s remains up here. It was ghastly, but Catherine knew she must stay on the side of reason or she was lost, completely gone. These were embalmed corpses, they were not living.

But how was Violet’s corpse transported up here? The corpse had been in the village, then in the lane. How? How? How?

When she was in shock, in the workshop, Edith’s emissaries must have carried the glass casket up here. Maybe while Maude took Edith from her chair in the drawing room and carried her away, somewhere. This all could still make sense. Only just, but stay with it.

The glass coffin had been placed before an antique telescope made from brass and mounted on a wooden tripod. The lens faced an arched window. Catherine had seen the window from outside the building when down in the lane. She remembered the star charts and photographs of the night sky in M. H. Mason’s study; the obsessiveness of a talented amateur that was barely scientific. This is where Mason had looked to further reaches, and implored the sky for a meaning that he had found an absence of in his own world.

As he went mad.

Catherine turned her attention to the monogrammed leather trunk, but made sure to cast her eyes into the shadows between the hummocks of sheeted storage, though she wasn’t sure what she suspected could move within these darker places. But this was definitely the same leather trunk she had seen in the unoccupied hotel room in Green Willow after Edith first made contact. She had seen it again in the nursery.

The brass clasps were turned upwards, the trunk was unlocked.

Catherine took her hand from her mouth and steadied her fingers enough to hold the clasps. She stifled her breath, then tugged the lid of the trunk upwards with all of her might. The lid flipped backwards with a squeak and slapped against the rear panel.

She stepped away, sunk to a crouch, the scalpel held out front.

The top of the case was fully open. It was lined with what looked like oilcloth. Nothing rose from the musty confines.

She leant forward and peered inside.

When the noise from the Frenophone abruptly stopped, the sudden silence of the attic was obliterated by her own scream.

Catherine couldn’t stop her body shaking. It took a while to realize she was also stepping from one foot to another, as if wet and trying to dry off and keep warm. Using what remained of her wits, she guessed she was going into shock.

Because Edith’s lifeless form lay inside the trunk. Collapsed like a doll with its mouth open. Entirely white eyes were turned upwards inside the small skull. And Catherine knew from a glance there wasn’t a single breath of life inside the woman. It appeared the figure had just been dropped inside. Perhaps once some unspeakable function was over.

Uncovered by the disordered hem of the gown she wore, Edith Mason’s little feet were sealed inside ankle boots that buttoned up the side. Fixed to the heels of her footwear were ugly iron callipers, which disappeared inside the multitude of petticoats and skirts beneath the black dress.

Catherine didn’t know where to go next, but she moved to the staircase she had climbed to enter the attic. She was only able to focus on getting out of the foul room at the summit of the house, one step at a time.

On her way down the flight of stairs, she became aware she was descending into bright red light. The second-floor passageway that contained the attic entrance was now better lit than she thought it was possible for the corridor to be.

Down each side of the wood-panelled walls the glass shades of the lamps now burned brightly and the light issued was no longer murky like sunlight trapped inside syrup. Instead the wall lights possessed an incandescence that stimulated an emotion within her that was so unfamiliar, it took her a few moments to identify her reaction to the new visibility: reassurance.

This new light must be another trick of the Red House, of Maude, the killer, or both.

Or whatever else inhabited the building that could not be seen.

Stop it!

She steadied herself against a wall before moving on. She was being directed to something she could not second-guess.

Play along and identify it.

Sudden jolts of recollection made her whimper. Edith’s collapsed and lifeless body. The separation of flesh on Mike’s back, that black slit. A cold, bloodless breast above the murky surface of the fluid in the bath. The crinkled face of Edith’s mother, those supple but limp hands. Catherine tried to douse the sparks of recent memory before they lit her up with panic.

The preposterous and sickening nature of what she had been made to confront in both the workshop and the attic she didn’t so much refuse to examine, but was now unable to consider. If she even tried to, she knew she would fall to pieces and not be able to put herself back together again.

She raised her face to sniff at the air that now blossomed with a floral aroma. The corridor was infused with a scent of roses. And the air was warm enough for the blood to return to her skin.

Perhaps it was another trick, or a late welcome from a building she must resist. But she could not suppress her gratitude for the return of her sight, and for a smell beyond the caustic burn of the chemicals, and for something to touch her skin that wasn’t cold.

The Red House was silent.

She moved on with the scalpel held out front. As she passed the closed doors in the passage, she watched them closely and felt her neck tense once they were behind her. She was as wary of the building as she would be of a violent bully that occasionally smiled at her.

At the stairwell she looked over her shoulder. The corridor remained empty and well lit.

The fragrance of flowers was even more potent by the stairs, as if the aroma filled the great stairwell to the roof. The wooden floors and walls of the adjoining passage were also lit with a hearty crimson radiance from wall lights that had previously emitted a murky glow.

She peered over the banister rail. The hall floor looked as if it had been recently polished and buffed. She went to the arched window of the landing, opposite the corridor that held Edith’s room and the nursery. Drew the heavy curtains to be confronted with a wooden shutter. She opened the shutters and peered through.

Saw nothing but her own pale and haggard face in the reflection. The glass was so clean and the world beyond the window so black, the pane functioned as a mirror. Over her shoulders, she saw the second floor of the Red House tunnel away into the distance.

A casement window. She put the scalpel down upon the little padded bench before the pane of glass and gripped the latch. Turned it and gingerly pushed the window open onto cold air and a night so still, lightless and silent, she could have been looking into a void. The windows of the ground floor must have been concealed behind drapes and shutters too, because not a streak of light escaped from below to illumine the absence.

Where had the people with the candles gone? Were they like Edith and Mason, the fly-keeper? Did they come alive and then fall down like dolls? She killed the train of thought because it made her hands tremble.

Catherine sat down upon the window seat and pulled her ankles together, placed her hands between her knees and began to rock backwards and forwards. She did it out of habit in moments of great anxiety, and God knew there had been a few of those.

What to do?

The doors to the rooms downstairs were locked and their windows were unavailable to her for an escape. She would never be able to bring herself to jump from a first-floor window, unless the place was on fire.

Had the world truly been removed from outside these solid walls?

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

Where was Maude? She must have turned up the lights and locked the front and back doors. Catherine stood up. Her vision blurred with hot tears. ‘Maude! Maude!’

No one answered.

She clenched her jaws and looked at the scalpel to usher a spurt of lunatic courage, then ran back at the corridor housing Edith’s bedroom and the nursery. She turned the door handle of the nursery. Locked. Ran to the door across the corridor and tried that. Locked. Worked her way back down to the end of the passage and yanked at the handle of every door. Locked, locked, locked, locked.

She wanted to scream again, but doing something, anything, kept her mind off matters her chaotic mind must be prevented from dwelling upon.

Catherine arrived back to where she’d started her search and stood outside Edith’s bedroom. Without much vigour left in her limp arm, she pushed the handle. The door clicked open.

She went through and shut the door behind her, then locked it. This room she was allowed inside. She was allowed to see the attic and she was allowed to see the workshop. Something without speech, perhaps even without a tongue, was telling her a story. It was like walking through the cells of a horrible comic book with red pages that smelled of flowers. And on this page she was allowed inside Edith’s bedchamber.

Scores of dolls watched her with their perfect and placid faces. Their tiny glass eyes caught the scarlet light. The bedside lamps, the standing lamp and the ceiling light all burned brightly. The curtains were drawn against the absence beyond the windows.

Catherine raised the skirts of the heavy eiderdown and looked under the bed, but refused to contemplate what she was looking for. She saw nothing down there besides a ceramic chamber pot.

She opened each of the great wardrobes and then pulled the hung clothes back and forth with one hand. In the other hand, the scalpel was ready to jab. She opened drawers and raised the lacy tablecloths on the small tables. She peered behind the great mirror of the dressing table. She filled the grate of the fireplace with spare bedlinen and packed it in tight, before concealing the aperture with the black iron cover.

She sat in the middle of the bed and watched the door. She rested the hand that grasped the scalpel beside her thigh, and waited.