House of Small Shadows

FORTY-FIVE

She came awake with her fingers clutching cold metal on either side of her hips. Old steel bedsprings protested with enough groans and squeaks she barely heard herself whimper, ‘God.’

Sunlight slotted through chinks in wooden boards nailed across the window frame. A draught scented with earth and dew brushed her face.

She remembered she had been stood before a window looking at the children in the garden. Then she had come back to Edith’s bedroom and fallen upon the bed, where she must have passed out… but she hadn’t passed out on this bed.

What came after her return to the room was vague, or receded to fragments, and no matter how hard she swiped at the pieces of memory they mostly sought oblivion. Perhaps mercifully. Because there had been a commotion. A rushing of small feet towards the room. And then inside the room there had been a bustling. The activity had been all about her face, accompanied by the smell of old clothes, of neglect, and fresh earth, winter air. She remembered the sounds and the smells… had a wooden face pressed itself close? And then…

Nothing.

Bits of another bad dream between other bad dreams.

She must have dreamt that she had seen children in the garden, wearing masks, but looking up at the window she peered through. Before that there had been another dream of the Red House filled with sunlight, the perfume of flowers. People had waited for her in the garden.

All of this must have been part of a trance. Imagined. She’d had two trances then. Or three? Or one so powerful it had felt like several. She didn’t know because the passage from one place to another, and now to here, was less like waking from a deep sleep filled with vivid, urgent dreams and more like waking into a new day, with the actual memories of the last time she was conscious quickly fading.

It was not possible for such hallucinations to feel like actual memories. Her visions were delusions. That was one thing she must not kid herself about.

In the reeking darkness of the strange room, she was too stiff with fright to move. So she remained motionless, no less inert than a doll, but one filled with horror. Until the terror subsided and she thought she had been emptied of the capacity to feel anything.

Her skin was cold as if she’d been exposed to the elements all night, or even longer. But though she was cold the sensation wasn’t one of physical discomfort.

Shock also rendered her unable to speak, or even cry out. Thick-headed, she could have been mistaken for thinking she hadn’t slept in weeks, or maybe she’d slept for weeks and only half awoken.

She pinched her wrist. As she performed the simple manoeuvre her arms were numb, heavy, cold, her fingers thick, half paralysed. But she was awake. This was real.

A thin cut on her forearm poked beneath her sleeve, and had recently begun to scab over.

She could not see the scalpel or any bedclothes. And what was she lying on? Bare springs, because there was no mattress.

In the vague light that passed through the boarded-up window she could also see that she had been changed into a garment that looked and felt like a dress. Even her throat was covered by something tight, a stiff collar. The gown reached her ankles and she could feel its constriction about her hips. The garment was old. What she could see of it was grubby, once white.

The light was dim, but she was also certain there were no dolls on the far wall, or furniture in the room. Where they ended their journey, the shards of white daylight struck unclean walls.

So had she been drugged, which had made her imagine everything? She couldn’t accept that, her recollections of the house and all that had happened were too sharp, too vital.

While she was unconscious her clothes must have been changed, and someone had left her sitting on bare metal springs, slumped against a metal headboard. But inside a new place, another building, or maybe in a part of the Red House she had never seen before. Or the physical world had been transformed again, and in a manner more radical than ever before.

The idea that she was still inside the Red House, and still in Edith Mason’s bedroom, and lying upon her actual bed, grew through her bewilderment and close to a horrible acceptance of the impossible. And if she needed prompt confirmation, beside the bed was a great black wheelchair, tipped on its side upon the bare wooden floor.

Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Mould blackened the walls she could see lit up by bands of watery daylight. And that’s what she could smell. She recalled noticing the same odours before, in the darkness of her room, in the corridor outside her room, and inside the dining room.

Most of the remaining wallpaper was mottled into neglect. Leaves and loose bricks lay upon the floorboards. Part of the ceiling had fallen in too, because slats of wood were visible. The wiring had been stripped from the walls. A decomposing mattress was slumped against where she remembered a mirror to be. Continents of black stains had joined up on the mattress. Parts of the fabric and stuffing formed wet lumps on the floor.

She clutched her face with hands so cold and heavy they felt like they belonged to someone else, or were, at the very least, near paralysed. Her features were slippery with some kind of cream or ointment. She looked at the sleeve of the ancient white nightgown from which an unfamiliar perfume drifted. Gingerly, she touched her head. Her hair was pinned up inside a cap across which her numb fingers scraped.

On the floor beside the bed were shards of mirrored glass, smashed out of a frame many years before and now glimmering among the detritus. With a slow and ungainly arm, she reached down and picked up the closest piece, breaking it free from a rime of dust and a glimmer of silvery insect trails. She rubbed the section of dull speckled glass with a thumb. Turned it to her face. And stared at the sight of something so pale it was almost blue. Whitened skin, her skin.

From outside came a sound she never thought she would hear again. The rumble of a car engine and the ripple-pop of tyres across a rough surface. Beyond the sound of the car birds issued terse cries into the cool air.

Stepping off the bed took all of her strength. For a moment she’d thought she was fastened to it. But once she was up and on her ungainly feet, moving was much easier than the act of pinching her flesh, or picking up the broken piece of mirror. Now she was upright she even felt agile, nimble.

Through the unlit room her legs carried her swiftly across the dross and wet bricks to the blocked window. Frantically, she moved her face behind the rough, damp-darkened boards until she found a suitable gap to peer through.

A vehicle came into view. A green van, an old model, even vintage, that was driven carefully. It stopped moving at the end of the overgrown front garden. An area now protected by a metal chainlink fence she had never seen before. Most of the brick wall she remembered was missing.

The sight of the man who stepped out of the car made her dizzy, and then relieved, and then close to paralysis.

Without the aid of his wheelchair, Leonard Osberne stood beside the open driver’s-side door. He then walked stiffly around the bonnet of this vehicle she had never seen before, and stood before the fence.

He held something in his hands, something black and hairy that he placed with great care upon the roof of the van. He turned to face the house. He removed his jacket slowly, his trousers from his thin legs, his shirt. And all with deliberate care as if his actions were rehearsed or a prelude to a special act. By the time he was looping his underwear over one unshod foot, Catherine had closed her eyes upon the sight of his pallid and wizened torso, separated into a patchwork of thick lines faded purple and white. Scars.

When she reopened her eyes, she dug her fingers between two of the wooden boards nailed across the casement frame and clung on to them to stay on her feet, because Leonard Osberne’s face was no longer visible.

Leonard’s head was titled upwards, towards the front of the house, and was covered in a dark leather mask. The mask was featureless. And that, she considered, was the only mercy in what she was being forced to endure.

Cascading about the outside of the mask, and down past his bony shoulders, were luxuriant black curls of hair. The horribly feminine tresses reached his protruding ribs.

The rest of the man’s body that she could see was naked, save for a soiled bandage around one thigh, visible when he unlocked the metal gate built into the security fence. Carrying a grey sack, he walked up the path, under the porch roof and out of her view.

She became aware that she was now panting against the rough wooden planks, but her breath was weak, soundless, and must have been muted against the wood.

Blind with panic, as much as going blind among the black spaces between the thin shards of white light in the room, she fumbled around the wet crumbling walls and used her hands to feel her way to the door. Little impeded her stagger. There was a hole where a handle once turned.

She stepped through the doorway and into a vista of ruin. Behind her, the door drifted shut.

The Red House was derelict. The air inside was cold and lightened enough to suggest the great skylight of crimson glass was no more.

No rugs, no carpets, no pictures, no light fittings either. A great pungency of damp wood and urine assaulted her senses.

The stairwell was missing most of its banisters. The ends of the two corridors were lost to darkness. Floorboards were warped and even absent above what looked like deep black cavities about her feet. Leaves had blown in from somewhere and settled into mounds of mulch against the walls, joined by fallen chunks of plaster.

But down below there was movement. And a sound she had heard before. A sound she was too transfixed with fear to investigate as it shambled through the neglect and half-light, two storeys down, out of sight. Footsteps. The distinctive side-to-side shuffle of a heavy-set woman with a limp. Maude. From deep within the bowels of the building the housekeeper now moved into the hall directly beneath the stairwell, as she had once walked to collect Catherine so long ago.

A chain slid through a metal loop. Down there. Metal was rattled and wood groaned out its resistance at being moved. The great front doors were unlocked and the light increased in the stairwell as the doors were opened. And then they were closed and locked again with the same slow procedure. The light downstairs dimmed.

Two sets of feet scuffled and creaked across what was left of the hall floor. But there were no voices, no greetings between the housekeeper and her visitor, which was even worse than the sound of their feet beginning a noisy ascent of the stairs.

Carefully, upon the broken and uneven floor, Catherine slipped backwards and into the mouth of the corridor she had come out of. Once back within the shadows of the passage, she crouched down and tensed. With her cheek pressed into the moist, crumbling plaster of the wall, she peeked out at the stairwell.

In a grotesque and nonchalant parade, Leonard came into view with Maude following. The naked and scarred body of the old man she had come to love and trust moved with a casual ease up the stairs, his spine too straight for a man of his age, his head and upper body covered by the horrid locks that swayed as he walked. His face was blanked out by the old leather mask that offered no suggestion of eyes, mouth, or nose in the dank and dim space the shaggy head rose through.

Behind Leonard, with her face cast into the usual dour indifference, Maude dragged her bandaged foot upwards, one step at a time.

Catherine did not want that black leathery face turning in her direction so she slipped backwards without a sound, deeper into the corridor, as her captors made the second-floor landing. Her mind scrabbled for a solution of where to flee if they came for her.

Fear turned to relief when she heard their footsteps crunch, bump and scuffle into the adjoining corridor that housed the bedroom she had stayed in.

Behind her, and next to Edith’s disused bedroom, she could see the vague outline of the nursery doorway. It was open.

She eased herself to the empty doorframe and peered inside. In a haze of light emitted around the hardwood board, that had come loose in both top corners over the far window, she could see that the shadowy space was empty. The walls were as softened by moisture and mould as the walls in the rest of this building that she had awoken within, so confused and frightened.

She fled back to the landing and listened. In the distance, from out of the adjoining passageway, she heard the muffled sounds of something being dragged around a floor and knocked about a distant room.

Catherine fled across the landing and began a descent of the stairs, her only relief being her skill at moving so quietly and swiftly down to the floor below.

On the first floor, the wooden walls had been smashed through or were black and buckled with damp. A quick look into the gap that had once been the entrance to Edith’s drawing room revealed it to be an empty shell that stank of urine and worse. Somehow the curtain rail above the boarded-over window had survived. She made haste to the ground floor.

Some of the floorboards of the hall were missing to reveal rubbish-filled spaces and crumbling cement between crossbeams. Great rusted nails reared like small serpents in the thin light, and she delicately moved her feet around them to prevent spearing the sole of a bare foot.

The front doors had been shut behind the visitor. A dull glimmer of iron chain looped about the handles suggested they were secure.

Catherine turned and fled into the dark utility corridor, keen on reaching the back door while Maude and Leonard were upstairs.

They must have come out of the corridor on the second floor because she heard their feet creak and bang about the upper storeys. They must be looking for her and were going to search Edith’s room. The thought made her need to escape greater.

There would be time enough to fathom what had happened here, how she had been kept prisoner and mesmerized or drugged. Or whatever they had done to make her experience a derelict building in its former glory, an illusion generated by her own imagination.

Mason’s magic worked.

Bewitched.

Impossible.

Stop it!

There will be time, there will be time.

There would be time, and for the rest of her life, but for now she begged herself just to get outside.

It was dark in the utility corridor and she could not always see where her pale feet stepped. But through some of the gaping doorways smidgens of daylight fell around the boards nailed across all of the windows.

She quickly peered inside the rooms she passed, and there were no longer any great tableaux beneath glass. Each room was empty. One squalid room had the remnants of a wet sleeping bag bunched up amongst plastic bottles, piled at the foot of a stained wall.

There was some evidence of an old kitchen, with a few cardboard boxes and plastic bags scattered across the wooden counters that had not yet been torn from the patchy walls. The grocery bags and the messy assortment of discarded tins and glass jars were modern and new. A loaf of bread spilled white slices onto a murky bench surface. So someone had been feeding themselves and using that space to prepare basic food. Maude? Oh Jesus Christ. So what had she really been eating here? It didn’t appear to have been pheasant.

Catherine slowed down as she approached the workshop, not just because of what she remembered having seen in that terrible space, but because it was the only room in the corridor with the door in place. Not an old door either, but a temporary one, the kind she had seen in chipboard walls around scaffolding on building sites. The door was closed, padlocked.

As was the back door she had run to. And the door was not only closed, but also sealed with a padlock and chain and fresh hardwood panels that had been added to the frame at some point recently. The acrid smell of new wet timber was still detectable about the surface she ran her hands across.

In desperation, Catherine began to cry and whisper and whimper as her pawing became clawing and scraping and a hopeless shoving at the wood of the back door. Until she disturbed whatever, or whoever, it was that began to fumble about inside the sealed workshop. And whatever was inside the workshop soon scratched at the other side of the makeshift door. The pattern of footsteps and the incoherent grunts suggested an animal, or someone helplessly drunk had been imprisoned within the room.

Catherine backed away, up the corridor towards the doorway of the stinking kitchen area.

The figure contained within the workshop began to moan and then bark like a dog with something stuck in its throat. The scratching of the fingers evolved into an angry hammering. She realized she wasn’t so much afraid of who was on the other side of the door as much as she was afraid of why they were being kept inside the room.

Because they kept captives here, drugged captives, and killed them. Leonard was in on it. He was the Masons’ accomplice. He had set her up. The valuation, her entire job, was a sham, a prelude to this. Maude was his ally. It must have been going on for years. Since before she had been a child in dismal Ellyll Fields. She thought again of Alice clambering up the riverbank to the hole in the green wire fence, of the black and white faces of the disabled girls in Mason’s study. Margaret Reid, Angela Prescott, Helen Teme. They must have all been brought here.

How had they snatched the first three girls? Using children, like those she had seen in the special school, dressed as Mason’s marionettes? On M. H. Mason’s orders? With the intention of drugging and killing disabled and vulnerable girls here? Were they still doing it?

Leonard and his confederates must have waited for Catherine all these years too, for decades. Because she was a witness to Alice?

Preposterous, because Alice was still a child here, or had that been a hallucination? And where, or what, was Edith Mason?

The house… the house could not have altered so radically. There was no drug in existence that could make her see it as it had been, that gloomy, oppressive, but perfectly preserved, revival house. It was not possible.

Her situation was impossible, like the story in a horror film, and her explanations didn’t work. But here she was, right now, in a place as real and as vivid as any she had known in her life.

From the other end of the corridor the sound of two sets of feet descending the stairs to the hallway compelled Catherine to duck inside the kitchen and to press her back against the far wet wall.

Briefly, she inspected the kitchen windows to see if one of the boards could be levered off. The bottom panel had been kicked in at some point and clumsily reattached. The wood looked like wet cardboard. She tried to peel the sheet of chipboard away from the nails as quietly as possible. In the distance of the house she heard a chain slide through door handles.

They were going then? Leaving?

She crept to the doorway of the kitchen and noticed a small camp bed pushed against the wall, on the side of the room opposite the window. A mottled pillow without a case, indented by the impression of a head, lay at the top of a single tartan blanket. So who slept here? Maude?

When they had a victim to torture and kill.

Catherine stuffed her fingers inside her mouth to still her whimpers and to hold her jaw that was now quivering uncontrollably from shock and fear.

She peered out into the utility corridor.

In the distant gloom, Maude dragged M. H. Mason’s leather trunk through the hall and into the little reception corridor before the open front doors. Leonard carried bedding folded over his arms. Was that what she been sleeping on? If so, were they taking evidence of her visit out of the ruined building to dispose of? Perhaps that’s why they had been in her room, to remove traces of her now the time had come to kill her and finish this deranged ritual they had started when she was sent to value antiques.

Oh God Oh God Oh God.

Who were these people? Was Edith still inside that trunk they must have fetched from the attic? And if so, was Edith Mason alone inside it?

She was going mad from the impossibility of it all, from the continuing maelstrom of confusion and terror the house would give her no respite from.

Footsteps approached. Someone was walking through the utility corridor. Catherine cast about the kitchen, found a breadknife in a tub of margarine crawling with ants. Pulled the knife free and backed against the wall beside the window, out of sight of the corridor, and waited. She stayed silent, trembling as the two sets of feet shuffled and bumped outside in the utility corridor.

No one came into the kitchen, but she could not believe they were unaware of her.

She heard Leonard and Maude unlock the workshop door.

What they pulled out of the room did not put up a struggle. It came out groaning and coughing and seemed to be willingly led by its silent captors through the utility corridor towards the hall.

Crouching in the stinking darkness against the wall, Catherine waited and listened until she was sure there were three sets of footsteps moving away from her position and back towards the front of the house. When she was certain they were returning to the hall, she peered around the kitchen’s doorframe and saw a clump of slowly moving figures blocking the light that seeped into the passage.

Once the group had struggled out of the utility corridor and into the hall, they were lit up by the light falling through the broken skylight and by what shone through the open front doors. And what she saw fused her enduring terror with a greater incomprehension, so quickly, she thought she might faint.

Between the skinny, naked figure of Leonard and the squat, lumpen Maude, was the silhouette of a woman in what appeared to be a long grey dress and white apron; the same outfit Maude wore. A bag, or a garment like a hood, was pulled over the figure’s head.

The woman was unsteady on her feet and occasionally issued a grunt or piteous cry as she was shoved about the hallway. When Leonard and Maude released her arms, the captive spread pale hands as if she were suddenly finding her feet upon an icy pavement.

Catherine clutched her ears to try and stop the spinning inside her skull that demanded she just run down there, screaming, and get it over with. Just have them put an end to her, and this tortuous theatre of cruelty she was still stumbling around as an unwitting player.

She had been on centre stage. It had been all about her. But since she had woken in the derelict building she seemed to have been marginalized. This notion should have brought comfort, but instead, the greater and more sinister mystery the day had introduced was taking her to a point where death might even be something of a blessing. She thought she had been here before, at school as a child; in London; when Mike left her; even inside this house. But none of that had even been preparation for this morning.

As she continued to gape at the grotesque spectacle within the dilapidated hall, Catherine became attuned to a scrutiny that made her shiver from head to toe. Taking her horrified stare from the tall upright figure with the hooded head, that grunted and swiped at the air about its concealed face, Catherine looked at Leonard and was quite sure the emaciated naked figure had now turned its indistinct leather face in her direction.

She ducked back inside the kitchen and was sure if she heard a single footstep approach her position her heart would simply stop.

The next thing she heard, from the front of the house, was the doors being closed and chained shut from outside the building.

Catherine peered out again. And saw the thin hooded figure in the housekeeper’s uniform, alone and stood within a broad shaft of dusty sunlight falling from above. The slow, painful and wretched fumbling of the thing commenced, and the draped head groaned as if in pain while reaching for what it couldn’t see.

Leonard and Maude were no longer inside the great hall. They had gone, left the building. The doors of the Red House were closed and sealed again. Why? Why had they left the hooded captive inside the hall, as if for her to find?

Catherine left the kitchen.

Hesitantly, she walked towards the ghastly hooded occupant of the hall. The woman was tall and thin. And as she drew closer, she was reminded of someone who had just stumbled away from a traffic accident. The woman was in shock after what had been done to her, which might also account for the sounds she made.

Catherine glanced around the hall and up the staircase to the next floor. Empty. Maude and Leonard had really departed and left her alive and alone with this bizarre spectacle of helplessness dressed in a vintage housekeeper’s uniform.

Upon the head of the tall woman was a sack, not a hood. A dirty old sack that fell to the woman’s collarbones.

Inside the hall Catherine cleared her throat. ‘Don’t be frightened.’

The woman let forth a surprised grunt. Her hands rose and batted at the air as if she was trying to fend Catherine away, or reach whoever had just spoken and broken the silence.

‘Don’t move. The floor isn’t safe. Have they gone? Can you hear me, have they gone?’

The woman oriented her frail body to where Catherine’s voice had risen. As she turned she nearly fell.

Catherine moved to her and held her elbow. With her other hand she tugged the sack off the woman’s head.

Transformed by the dress and apron, making sounds unrecognizable as even human, and the fact that the woman had been harrowed by torments that had seen her blinded, still could not disguise Tara. Not even the glass eyes fitted into the red eye sockets, or the fact that no tongue moved within her wide open mouth, could protect the appalling creature’s identity.

The sound of Catherine’s whispers in the airy hall unbalanced Tara. She broke from Catherine’s hold and fell against the grubby wall, where she crouched near the broken skirting boards with her dead glass eyes open wide and her bloodless hands clasped to her cheeks. Her mouth gaped, but nothing save a rasp seeped out as if the disfigured creature was losing the last of its air. And probably dearly wished that it was.

‘Oh God,’ Catherine heard herself say. ‘What have they done to you?’

When she was struck by the notion that what had been done to Tara had been done on her behalf, Catherine then felt as if everything had stopped moving inside her body. For her. She remembered Edith’s words and began to shake. They are the ones who offer justice now, my dear. And their justice can be terrible.

This was for her. But it wasn’t possible. Tara had been killed with Mike. They had been slaughtered and drained. She had seen the livid sutures upon his back in the metal tub, the tub in which the balding Edith had also once shivered like a wet foal, unleashed from some hideous womb. But if Tara was still alive, then what about Mike? Where was Mike? And what had they done to him?

Keep one kitten, destroy the rest.

Catherine thought of the rotten hives hectic with corpulent flies and whimpered.

She had been sure that Tara was also lifeless in that ethanol tub. Had she been alive but unconscious? But how could she have survived the awful wounds inflicted upon her head?

Catherine looked to the stairs. She thought again of Edith so lifeless inside the trunk that she had just seen removed from the building, and she thought of Edith’s mother and uncle sat like motionless mannequins inside the attic. Whatever hope drained from her body during this moment of reflection, she knew would not be returning anytime soon. ‘No. No. Please, God, no. Oh God…’

She ran across the broken floor to the staircase. And seemingly without breathing, leapt as much as she ran, with her foul skirt hitched up to her thighs, to the first floor and across its landing, and up the next staircase and onto the next landing, and down the first corridor to the room she had so recently awoken inside. Edith’s bedroom. The room of dolls.

She never made it far inside the room.

‘Who are you? Who are you?’ she screamed at the figure sat upright upon the bedframe surrounded by so much rot and decay. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ She settled upon her knees. ‘Please. Please. Tell me. Tell me, please. Please.’

The skein of light that had originally roused her now fell upon the figure sat upright upon the bed. A woman with a face Catherine recognized as her own. The very same pallid face that Catherine had seen, only partially reflected, in the shard of mirrored glass.

‘You’re not real. You’re not the real one. You’re not. You’re not. You’re fucking not!’

As she drew closer to the bed she saw that the seated figure’s mouth was open, and about the mouth the flesh was purple, as if there had been a struggle to push something past a resisting jaw. The front teeth were broken.

From the dark lump of the body, left so lifeless and without rigidity, the arms had flopped hopelessly. After some vigorous commotion had occurred upon the rusty metal of the old iron bedframe, the hands had fallen open upon the unclothed springs, wrists upturned, one featuring a small vertical cut from a scalpel.

A magnetism came with an abruptness that seemed to pull Catherine from where she stood at the foot of the bed, and jolted her head forward. She thought she might faint within the eager force that sucked her towards the ghastly figure of herself propped up on the bed. Until some new and unwelcome instinct suspected that if she were to lie upon the bed, she would join in some unnatural union with the lifeless figure, only to have to break apart from it again.

Flashes of things sparked across her mind: a bee-keeper raising a hidden face within an overgrown garden, a figure standing up behind the counter of an abandoned village store, the scurrying aged of the pageant.

Catherine stumbled away from the bed and sat down hard upon the floor. She recalled the rushing of small feet through the house to the door of her room, and the sense of a frenzied activity around her face… before she had awoken here, in the ruined house. The real version.

So where had she been all that time when it had looked so different? Did it also exist… in another place? Places? And if that was her body upon the bed, then…

Into her thoughts came a memory of Edith’s lipless mouth, spouting its madness. Small things were repaired, my dear. And there was resurrection, blessed resurrection, for them and those who revered them… She had said something about their guardians being remade ‘in their own image’, like angels had done. They tutored Mason in the Great Art…

Dear God, what did you bring into this house?

No. The thing on the bed was not real, was not her. This was still a dream, she was still imprisoned within a trance. Her entire consciousness was now a trance.

On the floor she was jerked into an awareness of the car engine being turned over in the lane outside.

Catherine crawled to the window and pulled herself up the wall. Slammed her hands against the wood. She was real, not dead, not a ghost; the thing on the bed was an effigy. She could hear the sound of her hands against the wood. Yes, she could. They had only made an effigy of her. They must have done because she could think and feel and move. Edith had been able to move and talk too. And Catherine could still move ever so swiftly… she had virtually glided up and down those stairs… over broken floorboards and rusted nails without incurring a scratch. The cold was not unpleasant…

She snatched out her hair and screamed. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

But down there, between the security fence and the brick walls of the Red House, Maude stood in profile and did not even turn towards Catherine’s cries. Maude had raised her chin, but betrayed no emotion beside the usual stern disapproval on a long-suffering face. She had also raised her arms, as if it were her turn to be measured for a fitting.

Naked but masked, Leonard stood before Maude. An open straight razor filled one of Leonard’s bony hands, his other hand gripped Maude’s throat like she was livestock.

The blade glinted silvery in the mackerel light of this terrible dawn. His leather face was angled towards Catherine, to where she peeked from between the planks of wood, and the eyes behind the featureless mask, she knew, were fixed upon her window. Because he wanted her to watch. Had waited for her to look out and to witness this.

With a quick jerk of a bony arm, the taut bicep so bumpy with scar tissue, Leonard sliced the razor against Maude’s rotund belly, then punched his whole hand inside her. And deep within the unresisting lump of the woman’s dense body, his hand went to work.

He tugged the razor upwards like he was trying to free a stuck zipper on the compliant servant’s clothes. With quick, hard jerks, and sometimes a sawing motion, he worked his hand up until the razor was buried between Maude’s heavy bosom. Through the gaps in the wooden boards Catherine heard the ripping of linen and worse.

And in shocked stupefaction, she watched Leonard hold the housekeeper upright by the throat, while his other hand unspooled the housekeeper into the overgrown grass.

Catherine’s muffled grunts that came around the fingers she’d stuffed inside her mouth failed to obliterate the sound of Maude’s spilled innards dropping heavily into the weeds.

The squat figure seemed to sag and deflate forward, onto her executioner, like a sack of emptying meal slit down the side. Ungraciously, Leonard tugged and pulled the collection of rags and string and tow and sawdust and hard brown lumps from out of the loosening skin of the housekeeper, which soon flopped about his shoulder, the head still heavy and bobbing like a waterlogged football.

His coup de grâce was to yank the white wig off Maude’s scalp, which was revealed to be stitched like a moccasin. And the neck supporting the pale head never recovered its posture. The heap of clothing and thick lifeless limbs that once was Maude was stuffed untidily into a grey mail sack that lay waiting in the wet grass.

Catherine watched Leonard drag the full sack out of the gate and toss it into the back of the green van.

So complete was her horror Catherine remained still and silent. Empty and numb. Until the final part of the truth appeared to her in the form of a memory; a recollection of the insane words that had croaked from Edith Mason’s horrid mouth. About her mother. Her real mother. Who had suffered. Who had known torments for giving her away. Who would be released…

Those who wrong you will always be taken care of by those who love you. Your mother certainly was, after she gave you away…

Maude.

DON’T NEVER COME BACK.

The housekeeper’s eyes wet with tears when she put Catherine to bed when she was ill.

The sound of her sobbing in a dark room while Edith bathed…

Because she knew what was happening. Something she could not stop. A terrible sequence of events she was commanded to take part in. She had been neither alive nor dead. Here, they had done away with such distinctions.

Maude.

Mother.

After the door was slammed, this old man of great and inhuman strength that she knew nothing of, stood alone beside the van in the lane, and angled his leather face up to the Red House as if in awe of it. He raised his two thin scarred arms to the air in salute, or as if he was making a command that she did not hear, nor would understand if she had. And just for a few seconds, she thought, but was not sure, the air around his black wigged head shimmered like summer heat above a meadow.