House of Small Shadows (25 page)

She hurriedly packed her things away, then turned to the chest of drawers to retrieve her clothes.

The drawer was empty. Her clothes were gone. Had been taken. Her dirty laundry had been inside a tote bag, and there had been one day of fresh clothing. Catherine looked at the hideous white
gown upon the manikin’s torso and swallowed a sob. Slumped on the bed beside her belongings, she drew her fingers down her pale face.

She had to stay strong, not make bad decisions.
When you are ill, and on your own, you can’t afford to.
Hadn’t she learned this the hard way before? And was she now alone
within the Red House?

Tonight she was transformed into a woman in white. Had become a flitting spirit from another era, barefoot like an urchin, playing a part in a performance foisted upon her
because the house seemed intent on turning everything into a drama.

She was wanted at the pageant, where the rest of the cast and audience had gathered, but she would not go. She would speed through the village in her car and leave them all behind without a
word, leave everything behind if necessary, even Leonard, who had introduced her to this mess and may have brought serpents back into her life. She could even go missing. Had often fantasized about
disappearing, as if such an act of desperation presented great life-changing opportunities, not tragedy. It was time to improvise, to tear up the script.

But she would not leave before she explored this terrible old house and understood it, demystified it. Edith may have scattered the truth like crumbs but an opportunity to better know the Red
House, and the instability of its occupants, had presented itself. For the sake of her own long-term sanity, she could not risk her mind’s entrapment beneath this spiky roof.

And nor could she deny that she was still captivated by the mystery, by the sheer impossibility that such a place could exist in the modern world. She
needed
to know how this house was
possible.
Here,
the house was still
here.
Like this. With Edith and Maude inside it. Who felt like a facade for something else, behind the scenes.

But what?

If any of these doors were unlocked, she would go through them.

Catherine walked through the Red House and switched on every light she passed. She told herself she would not be frightened. She would be as alert and as focussed as her enemies were. Time to
turn back the tide of fear and bafflement, a tide scouring her shores since she’d arrived, and for a lifetime before that too.

The dull pressure of the receding headache still made her squint, her balance had not returned to normal, and her skin was coated with a sheen of cooling sweat, but on through the passages she
went. In her wake, light burnished and lacquered the timber panels and floors of the second storey with a bloody sheen.

In the second passage that led to the stairwell she found three unlocked bedrooms; all empty of life and filled with treasures unused since the death of M. H. Mason. Spaces that waited in faint
light for guests who never arrived.

Without fear of rebuke, she entered Edith’s bedroom. A room also left unlocked. Perhaps it was permanently unsecure, so Maude could make swift passage to her ailing mistress.

Catherine photographed the wall of doll faces. Open-eyed, impassive, lifeless expressions in wood and cloth and ceramics, who had watched over Edith Mason since she had been a little girl.

Once open, the two great wardrobes and the chest of drawers confirmed her preposterous suspicion that Edith only possessed clothes predating the Second World War. Edith had mimicked her mother
and uncle in their prime, long after they had died. But had she also worn her mother’s clothes while her mother was alive? Had Edith truly existed for so long inside one place, with no
curiosity of what stretched into infinity outside of the grounds? It seemed so.

Catherine photographed the dresses and the contents of the drawers. She would have photographs and prove to herself and others that she was not mad. This was all
here,
really here.

Once the overhead light had been switched on, the next room she surveyed from the doorway shook her so profoundly, it took most of her will not to scream as she steadied herself against the
doorframe. The nursery was a place she could not bring herself to enter.

Ten small beds aligned in two rows, beneath walls hand-painted with scenes of animals dressed as people. Animals that took tea, sailed little boats, flew kites, and ran in eager groups with wild
white eyes and clawed feet as they chased rats.

The only significant difference to the room on this visit was that each of the little white beds was now empty. And all of the bedclothes were neatly made, to suggest the beds had been
unoccupied for a while. The vintage leather passenger trunk was also absent, as were the small leather boots and silken slippers that had been at the foot of each bed.

The absence of Mason’s morbid creations was reassuring, but only superficially. Catherine recalled her notion that small forms had followed her down the staircase the night before, and
inhabited the lightless spaces below.

No!

The marionettes had been removed by people, to be used in some vile performance at the pageant. She told herself this as she stood frozen in the doorway of the room. And then she told herself
the same thing again. The second time her lips moved.

After taking one photograph, she closed the nursery door and walked to the far end of the passage, where an alcove was visible beside the arched window overlooking the garden. Inside the alcove
four narrow steps ascended to a rosewood door. There was an iron handle in the shape of a ring. It would lead to the attic under the pointed roofs with the thin arched window casements that she had
seen from outside. The door was locked. She stood against it and listened.

Did she hear a
tap tap tap
from the other side? In the distance. Maybe. Yes, a faint far-off knocking. Wood on wood. Up there. A rhythmic motion. Something stirred by the wind. Or a
mechanism. Could be anything. She pulled away from the door when she thought of the chipped wooden hands of the Master of Revels clapping.

On the first floor, Catherine made hesitant progress. She avoided Edith’s drawing room due to an irrational fear that the preserved animals would tell their owner she had been inside the
room without permission.

Next to the drawing room, she peered into a games room. There was a long-unused billiard table and an iron fireplace. The part of herself that used to evaluate houses and their contents felt
peculiarly distant, but tried to revive itself when she looked inside the library.

The Eastlake bookcases that housed Mason’s books, she was sure would fetch between five hundred and a thousand pounds each. The first editions lining the shelves she could not even begin
to evaluate. There were at least a thousand volumes.

She traced her finger along the spines closest to the door:
Preparation of Scientific Specimens of Mammals in the Field,
1931, Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan;
Directions
for Preserving Specimens of Large Mammals,
1911, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Berkeley.

The door beside the library opened onto light produced from twin desk lamps, as if the room was in use. This was the study. The place of M. H. Mason’s death.

Catherine half expected to see someone rise from the chair before the desk, or to turn away from the bookcases that were packed tight with more leathery book spines and bundles of paper tied
with twine. Before the one window, a draughtsman’s drawing board was angled to catch what light fell through the glass.

She sniffed at the air. A trace of stale pipe tobacco. Leonard coated the office with a similar odour. But how had this room still retained a vestige of M. H. Mason’s own pipe smoke?

She sensed a lingering presence, that of a man driven and uncompromising, who would tolerate no intrusion or interference with work that had been encyclopaedic, and curious, with unfathomable
goals. Work that had eventually killed him.

Whatever he had achieved inside this house, she was seeing mere residues. An old, damaged, grotesque film, poorly lit photographs in dim corridors, a room populated with preserved mammals,
beehives crawling with bluebottle flies, a nursery of marionettes with an ancestry Edith preposterously claimed stretched back centuries. But his vision was greater. She could sense this, but not
define it. M. H. Mason’s endgame eluded her. His niece spoke only to obscure and tantalize and mislead. And half of what she said was fantasy. But Mason’s ultimate goal seemed intent on
suggesting itself to her in terms that could not be understood logically.

Her irrational instincts suggested that her recent dreams offered a more suitable path to enlightenment. Could she be stuck inside a giant doll’s house? They had even got her to dress the
part. Or maybe the Red House was a continuous puppet show in a vast theatre, in which the cast performed nonsensical and abstract scenes from dramas composed by a once-fine mind, long-since damaged
and haunted into the grim-surreal.

She cut off the suggestions from her imagination when she realized this was how the mad must consider the world.

Edith declared the rooms of the house had remained completely unaltered since her uncle’s death. If it were true, the pipe and open earthenware tobacco jar, and the neat arrangement of
pencils beside the open notebooks upon the huge desk, had stayed in the same position for fifty years. As had the crystal tumbler, and what had evaporated to leave a brownish stain at the bottom of
the glass. Perhaps only Maude’s duster had made contact with anything within this capsule, frozen from the moment its master expired by his own hand.

‘You crazy bitches.’ Catherine confirmed her gravest fear when she spotted the ancient black stain spread across the leather desktop. Mason must have opened his throat over the desk.
And Edith’s mother had left the blood to dry. Catherine took one photograph and looked away.

But Edith’s curatorial integrity had been compromised by one thing. The straight razor was missing. It should have been upon the desktop, or beside the chair where it fell from cold white
fingers. Perhaps the sight of that was too much, even for Violet Mason. And for Edith too.

The household, his own family, had fostered Mason’s delusions and morbid insanity. When he had gone, they’d preserved it. Why? The dying village honoured him with a pageant. Why? It
was incredible, and incredibly sick. What was the attraction? If the devotion to his legacy was not inspired by any kind of charismatic allure that she could determine, or sustained by any attempt
by the creator to conceal what was evidently misguided and unhealthy, and if loyalty was not rewarded with material wealth, then what kind of a hold did a deranged former army chaplain still
command over the entire area and his only surviving relative?

Gingerly, Catherine approached the first wooden cabinet in the study. The thought of actually touching anything in M. H. Mason’s study made her giddy, excited like a child. The cabinet was
similar to the kind of furniture that held index cards in old university libraries. The drawers were unlabelled, but the top drawer contained hundreds of letters. As did the three drawers beneath.
She walked her fingers across the top of the ancient paper. At random she pulled out envelopes.

A great many had been sent to him by a Hessen, Felix. The name meant nothing to her. Coldwell, Eliot, also appeared in abundance in the top drawer. She had never heard that name before either.
Many of the Coldwell letters seemed more recent. He had been writing to Mason as late as the early sixties. The index cards were alphabetized and Coldwell and Hessen consumed most of the top two
drawers. There were also a great many letters from someone called Mathers, Samuel, catalogued with S.R.I.A beside his name. Mason had once conducted lengthy correspondences with a small number of
people, but she had no idea who any of these men were.

The adjacent cabinet was filled to capacity with ageing photographs protected within dividers made from brown card. She raised a folio at random and leafed through the pictures. They featured
the construction of the puppet theatre upon the rear lawn when it had known better days. Mason must have been behind the camera. Whenever she was featured, Violet Mason was dressed like a man in
dark overalls and worked without looking at the camera. The construction appeared to be highly organized, if not systematic, with the building materials laid out beside large paper plans.

Another bundle of brittle photographic paper revealed dramas in progress upon the stage of the theatre. Mason and his sister were absent from the murky pictures and must have been behind the
scenes operating the marionettes. The shots were all taken directly before the front of the stage, perhaps on a timer. Little detail of the activity on stage was revealed. The motion was always
blurred, as if the antics of the puppets were too quick for the shutter speed.

There were a great many pictures on browning paper of the derelict church she had seen at the head of the village. And even more of the perimeter walls, the oldest headstones and their
indecipherable inscriptions. Much attention had been paid to one dingy and poorly lit corner of the cemetery.

In another folder, there were hundreds of photographs of some kind of excavation, or earthworks, on the side of a small hill surrounded by open ground, though she had no idea of the location,
which wasn’t marked in anything but some sort of code that resembled ancient Greek interspersed with Roman numerals. But it looked as though something was in the process of being dug up. What
appeared to be small bones and fragments of cloth were set beside a measuring tape.

The next drawer down repeated the obsessional character of the collection, though these pictures featured small paths and lanes, captured from all angles, upon open countryside. From a hill, the
tracks had been traced onto some photographs with ink, like grooves in the earth.