House of Small Shadows (34 page)

From up above, came the crackle-static-fizz of the old recording. The great M. H. Mason she had come here for, continued to speak across time in a place he’d curated into an elegant hell,
one that smelled of that which disguised death. For posterity he’d recorded his apocryphal madness to inspire others.

They are illusion and deception.

She caught snatches of the dreary announcements within the interference, and only half heard them when the voice passed into clearer bursts.

They are conjured. Their history is obscure and . . .

Along the length of the utility corridor she met no interference. She tried all of the doors because the rooms beyond had windows big enough to smash and they faced the outside. If there was
nothing beyond the panes of glass then maybe nothing was still better than this.

Every door was locked. The passage was a funnel, it had led her to the workshop and demanded she come back out again.

The front door was also shut against whatever was out there, too, or had been out there. There was no more music, no more ‘Greensleeves’, the things with the candles had not followed
her inside.

Were they ever there?

From the inside, the doors had been secured and the keys removed from the brass-framed keyholes in the locks. So someone was inside the house with her, securing doors behind her? They could see
in the dark and they had something special planned for her.
Maude. You mute bitch.
Catherine turned and headed for the stairs.

I find the presence of immobile rats far more confirming and comforting than I find the company of my own species.

She had to stay within the fraying boundary rope of reason. Even though her thoughts and half-thoughts and assumptions were being blown about by currents of fear and confusion, there was an
explanation, a rational explanation for this situation.

Edith was no killer. She was too infirm. Maude? Maybe. M. H. Mason and Violet Mason had once been real, mad but real. Yet Maude and Edith were behind this. They were continuing whatever M. H.
Mason and Violet Mason had started.

Think. Think. Think.

Edith and Maude must have taken Alice all those years ago. With help. There must have been a team effort behind the abductions of Alice and all of those helpless children who went missing from
Magnis Burrow, the ones her nan had told her about. M. H. Mason and Violet had begun something here, others had continued the tradition. Wasn’t that what Edith was getting at?

And in the Red House M. H. Mason’s descendants had continued to play out their fantasies, their psychopathic delusions about some nonsensical but hideous legacy of marionette theatre, and
upon her, too, whom they had long coveted because she got away in 1981.

Edith was now trying to make her accept the surreal rites of her family, trying to insert them into her thoughts as some kind of alternative reality, some bending out of shape of natural
law.

It was preposterous, and she wasn’t entirely convinced by her theory, but it was all she had to go on.

But were they going to kill her? Was she right now being batted about like a mouse in sharp claws before the coup de grâce?

Making herself acknowledge that
this
was all for real, gave her a cruel sense of comfort. Because above all else, she must refuse to accept the impossible things the Red House and its
constituency were suggesting to her. Otherwise she was lost.

Catherine stood in the middle of all the small, finely dressed animals. As she stared at an empty wheelchair Horatio watched her with an eternally wet eye. M. H. Mason’s
niece, his loyal priestess, was missing from the drawing room.

The absence of Edith mingled with recent memories she no longer wanted, of the old figures prancing about the pageant and of something jabbering from behind a door down there. Her coma of
numbness, her brief spell of reason broke. She shook. She sucked at, more than breathed, the air. To fight the swoops of nausea that circled her cold scalp, she sat upon the rug.

A small avalanche of dust in the fireplace made her shriek. She sat back on her heels and stared into the great centrepiece of the room. Another trickle fell into the clean black grate. This
time she just flinched. She could hear nothing but the droning of the recording. Which seemed to come out of the fireplace, too, now.

In the corridor outside the drawing room, and about the stairwell, Catherine went and patted her hands along the wood panels for the light switches that blended with the walls. Those she found
she slapped on to commit more of the dim ruby glow to the staircase.
They have electricity, they must pay bills, people know they live here.

The two adjoining corridors of the first floor remained in darkness. Going inside the lightless mouth of either to find a switch was more than she could endure. They wanted her to go up.

The children must dance for someone . . .

Maybe she should start the cutting up there.

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
.