House of Small Shadows (27 page)

Her fascination soon turned to panic.

In a separate envelope, the disabled boy reappeared as the subject of two further photographs. This time none of the Mason family were in shot, though the little boy was not alone. Because it
appeared that one of Mason’s troupe of marionettes had joined him for a photographic opportunity.

‘No.’ Catherine wanted to unsee the figure perched upon the disabled boy’s lap in the manner of an ancient ventriloquist’s dummy.

The puppet was almost the same size as the boy, its callipered legs at least as long and thin. But what was most striking about the puppet in the little tight suit was its wooden face and long
black hair.

She’d seen this odd and scruffy thing before, in her own childhood trances, at her school that one time in the playground, and outside of her den on the other side of the green fence that
Alice had climbed through . . . Which would mean her trances were memories? Albeit repressed, but true recollections?

Catherine hung her head between her shoulders and took long deep breaths to try and stop the shaking that had come to her limbs.

But Mason was long dead when she was a child, had been gone twenty years. Violet would have been dead by then too, or extremely aged. So had Edith, Maude, or their collaborators, brought this
troupe to the derelict Magnis Burrow School, and into her life when she was a six-year-old child?

And if the figure with the wooden face and callipered legs, that Catherine had seen when she was a child, was no hallucination –
it
couldn’t have been – the figure
could not have been a puppet either, because when she had seen
it,
there had been no puppeteer.

The thing with the wooden face must have been an actual child then, wearing a mask and dressed as one of Mason’s puppets.

But if a costumed child had been at the Red House in the 1940s, to be photographed with the disabled boy in the wheelchair, then who had worn the same outfit in the early eighties, when she had
seen the figure with her own immature, six-year-old eyes?

Had she caught a glimpse of a similar figure, right here, in the nursery, too? There had been a mostly concealed head with that kind of wig. She had seen its messy black curls, but no face. She
wondered if it had featured in the BBC film of Henry Strader’s execution; she couldn’t be sure, as the puppets had been in period costume, and she’d kept covering her eyes.

‘You sick, sick fucks.’ A terrible suggestion arrested her mind, which still felt like it was swimming with drugs and aching from trying to process so much unpleasant imagery and
information. But had the Mason family snatched all of the little disabled children from the Magnis Burrow School in Ellyll Fields in the fifties and sixties? Had the Masons been befriending lonely
and disabled children in that school with a patsy: a costumed, masked go-between? Perhaps using other children dressed as Mason’s beloved troupe of marionettes to function as mimics, as
saviours to the defenceless and vulnerable? The disabled boy in the wheelchair might have been just such an abductee, maybe one of the first in the forties.

In her trances, Catherine had seen what she’d thought of as strange children within the buildings of Magnis Burrow, as Alice had climbed the grassy bank leading up to the school. She
hadn’t imagined it. She wasn’t crazy. Here was proof. And her trances may have been submerged traumas. Her contact, or her reunion, with the Red House must have brought the memories
back with force. There was a connection.

If two generations of Masons had been haunting that school for decades, they would have taken Alice. And would have wanted Catherine too.

But then who were the children disguised in the marionette costumes? Other abducted children? Vulnerable children groomed, recruited, and then made to star in the sick plays of the Mason family,
upon their lawn, for years? And to lure others to the party at the Red House? Alice too?

Alice . . .

If her suspicions were true, no wonder the Masons were still hiding from the world. Which begged another question she wanted the answer to: was Edith really broke and looking to sell up, or was
she confessing to Catherine? Or doing something much worse? Now that Catherine was a woman, who had once been the child that got away, because she hadn’t followed Alice through the fence, was
Edith Mason hoping to resolve unfinished business? It was possible.

‘Oh God, oh God.’ Had they come back for her, these two horrid old women, to finish the child-snatching work that M. H. Mason had started decades before she’d even been
born?

Had she not seen a child in the Red House too, at the window, on her first visit? Or was that a doll? Someone had pressed a doll’s face against the window when she was returning from the
hives too. Maybe that wasn’t a doll and there was actually a child or children here.

The locked attic! A cellar! What had really been in those nursery beds? The movements at night. A small figure standing up at the end of a dark corridor . . . What she had thought was a
trick, or an animal.

Catherine clutched her face with her hands. She felt weak, woozy, wanted to throw up all over Mason’s hideous study. It was preposterous. She didn’t know what to think. Maybe it was
her that was truly mad, eaten alive by paranoia, and she was only rationalizing her presence within this building, as well as its very connection to what had always been dismissed as her childhood
hallucinations. The worst thing about being mad was not realizing that you were mad.

Evidence, she needed more evidence.

Those few scrolls of parchment she still had the stomach to take down from the honeycomb of boxes in the study, and to untie, were all written in what she thought was ancient Greek. As were the
bound volumes of Mason’s black notebooks that filled a small bookcase. Same again with the four upon the desk he had filled with writing right up until his death. The neat but
incomprehensible text was only ever relieved by chemical compositions, and what looked like trigonometry.

The M. H. Mason legacy didn’t need a valuer or an auction, it needed a psychiatrist, and a secure archive within a private hospital, where the monomania that his niece had mistaken for
genius could be studied at length by those accustomed to the sophisticated expressions of the incurably damaged.

Catherine ran back to her room and grabbed her bags. Then made her way down to the ground floor with her car keys clenched between her teeth.

Before Catherine moved any further from her car, she tried to identify the source of the dim, coppery illumination at street level in the village of Magbar Wood. The light
appeared to originate from within the houses, which barely qualified as silhouettes, bordering the two streets that formed the entire village. The faint glow seemed to emit from weak bulbs,
screened behind the net curtains and grubby windows she’d seen during her last visit.

The light barely touched those gathered for the pageant, and only occasionally made the jerky suggestions of a crowd visible. But a bustle was evident down there, a milling of shapes, though
there were no raised or excited voices.

She guessed that around a score of people were scattered along the visible portion of the two lanes, moving between the flat facades of the stone cottages. Buildings she was certain were near
deserted during her last trip.

From where the crowd had gathered was a mystery. It seemed impossible those assembled were indigenous to this place due to its state of dereliction. If they had travelled from neighbouring
locales to celebrate the memory of M. H. Mason, then she could only assume they were privy to a secret tradition, and also mad.

A candy-striped pole of metal blocked the narrow road that led into the village. Hidden within the hedgerow on either side of the lane, her desperate hands had just passed over two stone
bollards upon which the pole was chained in place. She would get no further by car.

It was as if her movements had been anticipated.

Maude had even stolen her shoes, because Edith wouldn’t let her leave. Beneath the soles of her bare feet, the stones dug deep and made her shift her position. And now that her unprotected
feet were moving across the ground, she knew there was little chance of her reaching the nearest A road. She could barely even see her feet, let alone road signs.

Above her, the great canopy of black sky featured an array of stars unobscured by cloud. And for a moment she stared upwards at the heavens and felt she could have been on a mountain summit,
surrounded by thin air.

The black eternity resembled a night sky she had once seen in Northern Spain, one immediately unfamiliar and too vast. A sky that frightened her with the sense of belittlement that comes swiftly
downwards in a sudden awareness that one stood insignificant, nullified by an infinite surrounding void.

As she had done in her room during her first night, Catherine looked away from the sky before the realization became too complete.

She dithered beside her car, nervously watching the village from a distance. Just getting out of the car had taken all of her willpower.

Currents of cold air pressed through the thin white dress that had been laid out for her. She shivered while her thoughts scratched about for an escape route. Because that was what she had been
reduced to,
escape.
The nightmare she had stumbled into at Green Willow, when she stood amongst the dolls in the room of a scruffy guest house, would not end.

Without an alternative, Catherine climbed over the pole and entered the village.

The first heads she saw were crowned with large hats. Little more of the figures was visible. The people would veer close to the lit windows, then shuffle away.

She wanted to believe the crowd moved about refreshments and concessions on the narrow pavements. But the motion of the throng also suggested some kind of dance was being performed, as the
movement of the half-lit shapes seemed to replicate itself in a pattern.

The poor light, combined with her fragile senses, may have warped her perspective too, because the people seemed too small to be adults.
Children?
The harder she stared, the energy of
the assembly also struck her as similar to that of excitable toddlers released from houses to play outdoors.

She wished she were not wearing white. A desire that grew with every step deeper inside the village. And where would Edith, Maude, Mike and Tara be, the only guests she could count upon as being
familiar? The sole buildings representing any kind of communal area were the Sea Scout hall and the church.

A desire to sneak to the far side of the village, and then keep on creeping for as long as her bare feet lasted, felt urgent enough to be desperate. But she had to find Mike. If her suspicions
about the Masons’ legacy of abduction were true, then Mike needed to be warned. Tara could go to hell.

Would she get past pain and rage if she saw Mike? She would have to, because Mike had come here in a car; Tara’s car, because Mike couldn’t drive. To get out she had to find Mike and
the bitch he had come here with. Tara’s car must be parked on the road that ran into Magbar Wood from the other end of the village high street.

She told herself, then reminded herself, that Edith and Maude were hardly threatening, physically, as long as she didn’t swallow anything they gave her. But were the two elderly women
working alone? This is what she needed to know. She thought of the thin bee-keeper beckoning to her from the garden as she stood at the window. And were they still using a child?

But what happened to the children of the Red House when they grew up?

She needed to get far enough away to pick up a phone signal to call the police. Her story would be preposterous, but then so was the household she was trying to flee. Whatever had happened at
the Red House in the past, it was up to the authorities now to fathom out.

The sparse crowd withdrew at her passage inside the village. She offered a nervous smile to the vague covered heads of what she was now sure were elderly adults. She had encountered at least one
here before. Children wouldn’t be out so late, unaccompanied by adults. All of the people were small because they must be wizened by age. Though the two capering figures that passed a lit
window to her left, as if keeping pace with her, made her anxious. Their antics, even in darkness, suggested something unsupervised and out of control. Her attempt at a friendly smile ached like
the rictus of an insincere grin maintained before a bad joke.

At the intersection of the two lanes she looked to the church and scout hall, but could see no further than the last residential buildings in the second lane. When she looked at the houses, only
glimmers of flat dirty stone and coppery light behind calcified nets was visible. Inside the open doorways there was darkness.

Two women tottered past her and were either veiled, masked, or had painted their obscured faces. Because faces could not be so pale without embellishment.

The efforts at masking failed to conjure any sense of romance, or the illicit behaviour associated with masquerades. What the women’s outfits did inspire was a deep uneasiness about the
intent and purpose of the tradition being celebrated within the miserable village. Thoughts of Violet Mason’s bony face, half concealed behind netting, were inevitable but unwelcome.

Unless you are one of them you cannot know them.

But what could these frail old things do to her even if they wished her harm?

Moving past the intersection and towards the far side of the main lane, her vision jumped and flitted as she searched for Mike. But if she wasn’t mistaken, her progress was now being
thwarted by changes in direction from the stooped-over figures moving closer to the house fronts.

The people who slowed her progress appeared to hobble across her path, as if wearing shoes that were too tight on their hidden feet. An observation she soon heard, and occasionally saw,
augmented by the rapid patter of the metal tips of canes across tarmac and cement.