House of Small Shadows (38 page)

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.’