House of Small Shadows (28 page)

For one horrible moment she thought of herself as an animal being run to ground, incrementally worn out by the patient circling of a pack. Or were they just as equally fascinated by her, as she
was by them?

There was nothing she could see to account for such agitation in the crowd either. Or was it excitement? No concessions, as she hoped, offered food or souvenirs on either side of the lane, so
where were they all headed?

Under closer scrutiny, the energy of the crowd now struck her as being akin to the jostling she associated with festival crowds in the darkness of night, before a star attraction came on stage,
suggesting all here were waiting for something that had not yet happened.

A woman whose footsteps Catherine tried to follow stepped into a brief wash of light to reveal a three-quarter-length cape and high Medici collar tied about her neck. The woman’s tiny head
was concealed by a Pompadour dome of what must have been, at one time, someone else’s hair. It was now puffed out on an invisible wire frame and held in place by tortoiseshell combs, and what
looked like long iron pins. Propped upon the elaborate wig was a little Juliet cap constructed from pearl beads.

On a sudden whim to ask who was authorized to remove the barrier pole so she could drive through the village, Catherine reached for the woman’s elbow.

The little woman altered her course and crossed the street. But not before Catherine had seen half of a deeply lined face beneath several layers of black netting. In the brassy light, the skin
of the woman’s face was as white as a clown’s in full make-up.

Catherine turned round. Because the three figures whom she confronted with her shocked silence, also stopped moving at the same time as she did. She was sure they had been whispering.

The figures dispersed around her, as if terribly eager not to miss something up ahead in the street. As they fled, Catherine received an impression of yoke collars and floor-length pleated
skirts. She saw the back of an Eton jacket with swallow tails and a short knitted cape. Clothes that hadn’t been fashionable in a century.

They were all covered from chin to toe. And again, all she had made out through their patterned veils were smudges of white. Their faces must have been coated in stage make-up, or were clad in
colourless masks.

Their wake was a thick scent cloud of lavender. An odour failing to mask the competing ones of camphor and the mustiness of clothes left in damp conditions.

‘What . . . Hello, wait! I’m looking for . . .’

Her plea was ignored. There was a snigger at her outburst from another direction. Which was shushed. The cackler desisted, but whoever had scolded the giggler now laughed, too, before darting
away.

If they’re laughing at me they should see themselves.

At the end of the street she discovered another iron candy-striped pole blocking access to the village. She wanted to scream.

Beyond the barrier was a darkness unrelieved by a tree-line, hedgerow or moon-silvered fields. Her imagination suggested the world reached its edge at the horizontal pole. And it was too dark
beyond the barrier to see any evidence of the car that must have brought Mike and Tara to Magbar Wood.

Huddled together beside the beery light of the last window of the street, a small gathering of silent, rapt shapes distracted her.

An elderly figure in the centre of the group performed a curious skipping upon the narrow pavement. She caught glimpses of its prancing between the vast hats of the onlookers. The dance had long
passed from fashion, or perhaps never extended beyond the borders of the village, and what she could see of the dancer’s head was mostly engulfed by a black wig. Where the tresses parted, the
revealed features were covered in white greasepaint. The cheeks were rouged and the eyes decorated with long lashes like an aged cross-dresser. Around his throat the dancer wore a Mr Toby ruffle.
His painted eyes were closed in concentration. His grin was pure music-hall farce.
Clackclack clack clack
went his tap shoes upon the paving.

Having seen more than she cared to, Catherine turned about to head back to her car. She’d sit in it and sound the horn. Mike would hear it. If whatever functioned as officialdom at the
pageant also heard the horn, she would demand the maypoles that blocked the road be removed. And inside a locked car she would feel safer.

Her decision was thwarted by the sudden electric crackle and hiss from the adjoining lane. The interference was followed by a brassy groan like the iron hull of a ship grinding against
stone.

Catherine clutched her ears. A burst of music followed, that suggested it had been made at the dawn of recorded sound and was being played at the wrong speed through ancient speakers. A
discordant, metallic fanfare. Loud music played tunelessly, but still recognizable as ‘Greensleeves’ as if blasted from out of an ice-cream van decades before.

The crowd about Catherine paused, in what she took to be awe, before they all turned towards the junction of the two lanes.

The shock of the reappearance of ‘Greensleeves’ in her life made her want to sit down in the street and sob. And the music was clearly a summons to those gathered for the pageant,
who now tapped and rustled through the darkness, between the stone gulley formed by the houses, towards the intersection.

‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’ she called, on the verge of tears, to a figure that hurried past her with the aid of two walking sticks. She thought the old woman smiled
behind the netting that dropped from the wide brim of her hat, but she did not answer.

Two small men bent double with age tottered on frail legs to move around her. ‘Please. Sir. Can you . . .’ Their narrow faces were hints of white beneath the brims of ill-fitting
Homburg hats, that failed to contain unkempt hair that trailed over their collars.

She reached out and seized one of the men by the upper arm. And quickly released the limb. Not only because it was as thin as a wooden flute beneath its drapery of black cloth, but because the
man let out a shriek and fell.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I never meant . . . Here. Let me help . . .’

He was soon back on his feet, helped up by a man in a three-button frock coat and someone of indeterminable gender swallowed by a tweed cape. With their gloved hands they snatched at the elderly
figure who had virtually disappeared against the unlit road surface.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Catherine said to the back of their hats.

She joined the crowd’s momentum, if it could be called that, with the intention of returning to her car at the opposite end of the lane. Which wasn’t far, though the determined crowd
either blocked what little light issued from the windows of the houses, or the lights had dimmed in some coordinated fashion, which was impossible and must have been her imagination.

Perhaps a residual effect of Maude’s tonic still ran strong in her blood, because she endured a few terrifying moments in which she thought she hung within a moving nothingness. There was
no edge or border to the night, no horizon, and she wanted to crouch and place her hands on the earth, until the rustling of old limbs in vintage cloth had ceased in their surges about her.

Only as the vestiges of the motley horde thinned, and the most infirm of their number tottered and guided each other around the obstacle of her body, did some of the whisky-tinted light cast
enough of a glow for her to move again, and without the sensation of falling backwards.

Once more, the world around her had become insubstantial and unreal. Maude’s tonic must have combined with the cold and darkness, and with her being ill, and her meddling with old dolls,
antiques and taxidermy. All this had integrated to contribute to her disorientation. She also wondered when she would stop seeing things not as they were, but transformed.

She needed to calm down and stay upright and clear of the small shadows that hobbled about her. And she must remove herself from Magbar Wood, because hysteria wasn’t far away.

When she reached the place where the two lanes merged, she could see that the doors of the derelict church were now open. A full blare of the hurdy-gurdy fairground melody clanged against the
stone walls of the chapel and bulged outwards. A dim red light was emitted.

Before the covered gate of the churchyard, the glow was joined by a ruddy luminance from the doors of the neighbouring scout hall, as if this was now the heart of the pageant. Catherine
continued towards her car.

A hand gripped her elbow. ‘You won’t find this in the
Guardian Guide
.’

She shrieked.

Mike.

‘What are you fucking doing here?’ It was out of her mouth before she knew it, when she only wanted to fall against him and sob.

He released her arm and stepped away. The smile receded from his mouth and vanished from his eyes. Mike looked away, then at his feet. ‘Leonard called me. Said you would be here, he said
you needed help. He told me to come and bring you home.’

‘Leonard?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cath. You don’t know how much. About . . . Look, forget that. We need to get out of here. Tara’s car is . . . Your nose is
bleeding.’

The strange night sounds and sights retreated, and her focus on Mike’s pale and miserable face surprised her, as if she had awoken from a trance she’d endured for so long it had
begun to feel normal, only to rediscover her will once the soporific spell had broken. Her chin and lips were indeed wet.

‘How could you? How could you, with
her
.’

‘I’m sorry. Sorry.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Look, when you told me about the girl that you hurt, in London, I only answered her messages because . . . I wanted to hear from her. About what happened. Before we got any deeper. Her
side of it.’

‘And then you met her!’

‘I wish I never had. You were right. She’s poison. She’s been using me. I can see that now. And I’m a bloody idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘I bloody well do!’

‘Things weren’t great between us, Cath. Not since . . . you know. I didn’t know what to do . . . shit!’ He swallowed at the bolus of pain that constricted his throat. But
was he swallowing his anguish at being betrayed by Tara, or remorse at what he had done to Catherine?

‘You slept with that horse-faced bitch.’

‘I . . . Look . . .’

And for the second time in her life she struck someone’s face. This time there was no closed fist, but an open hand.

Catherine turned towards the church as if it offered some hope of sanctuary. Through her blurred vision, trembling from the emotion that shook her body, she was sure the aged and diminutive
members of the tatty assembly had all gathered at the top of the lane and were turned in her direction, to watch the confrontation of two strangers on the border of their village.

‘Cath, something’s not right here. I mean it.’

Catherine turned away from the church to find Mike so close they both flinched. ‘No shit! You don’t even know the half of it. ’

‘You can hate me for ever. I don’t expect you to forgive me, or to even talk to me again. But come home with me, yeah? Tonight. Please.’

‘Where’s that bitch’s car?’

‘In the lane. On the other side of that pole. But I can’t find her. She’s gone.’

‘Gone? What are you saying?’

‘We got split up. We went up to that church. She went inside. I didn’t . . . I didn’t want to. Didn’t like it. But she hasn’t come back out. I can’t find her.
She’s got the car keys. We all need to get out of here.’

‘She’s still in there?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe. I saw . . . I don’t know. Up there, I saw something really weird. Horrible. What the fuck is this place? Leonard had to show me on a map.’

‘But you still brought her here. You betrayed me with that bitch, and then you brought her here too. Were you thinking of her career? Because I know she was!’

‘What could I do? I shouldn’t have said anything about the house. I know. Damn it, I know. But I did, before I knew what she was doing to us. Then it was too late. And she wanted to
see it, the antiques and stuff. This guy, Mason. His animals. She knew about him.’

‘You stupid bastard.’

Mike held her arm. ‘She would have come out here anyway. She’s already been looking for that house since I told her about the animals. But she couldn’t find the village. I
still have no clue how we found it today. By accident, I think. But I needed her to drive me. When Leonard said you were in trouble, I had no choice. I don’t have the money for that kind of
cab fare from Worcester. I told her I wanted to find you, told her it’s you I really care about.’

‘Liar!’

‘This is all so messed up.’

‘You messed it up.’

‘Tara didn’t care. She just wanted to get here to see the house. She’s so driven, she’s mad. Even after what she’s done to us, she didn’t care about a
confrontation with you, as long as she could get to see the house.’ Mike clenched his fists as if he were going to punch himself. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

Catherine looked at the church. The strained and rapid rotations of ‘Greensleeves’ swirled about her and grew louder. Even the stars moved in a circle above her tormented mind, or so
she imagined.

‘That bitch is up there?’ Her chest felt like it had been pierced by something cold and made her breath shuddery. This night was the endgame to what started in the torture chambers
of tarmacked junior school playgrounds.
Of course!
But at last she could see the end. Fuck therapy. What could a counsellor or doctor do to prevent destiny? She had been right all along.
She knew it. Beneath all of the reassurances, she had always known that other forces guided her down the tragic spiral of life like magnetic fields sucking water through a grate, a circular but
inevitable descent. You either endured it and suffered, or you did the unthinkable to your enemies and at least went down with a sense of justice being served.

Mike’s voice brought her out of her miserable absorption. ‘There was some kind of service in there. Singing. Around this glass coffin, or something. Pretty damn sinister. I split,
but Tara waited to see if she could find that crazy old woman we met up at the house, the one in the wheelchair. To see about looking at the stuff in the house.’