House of Small Shadows (33 page)

Edith continued reminiscing, as if Catherine had not even spoken. Nothing had changed between them, even now. ‘To my uncle, I think they returned changed. Much changed. They were not so
gentle then. No, dear. You see, in their beginnings, the troupe hid while the savagery of this world was unveiled. Oh, they saw injustice and tragedy unfold upon those they loved, and those who
loved them. Tragedy that you can’t imagine. It’s why they made the cruelty plays to remember those who were murdered. But my uncle found the troupe damaged. As children are disturbed.
As we are all changed by adversity when we are tender and innocent. By terror. By cruelty. Such things change us, dear. Shape us.’

Edith spread her spidery white fingers. They were back inside the tight silk gloves, for which Catherine was glad, as they had been so cold upon her scalp. She wasn’t sure who Edith even
spoke to any more, but the woman kept on talking. The brittle voice filled her head. She briefly imagined being trapped inside the Red House, listening to the woman’s words, for ever. She
wanted to scream.

‘They recognized my uncle’s suffering. It was akin to their own. And he put a troupe of those wretched shadows back together, as others had done before him. Through him they
continued the tradition. And they are very much looking forward to picking up with you too, from where they left things. A long time ago. But not so long for them, dear. Or Alice.’

‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! You don’t know me. Who I am. You know nothing about me. You are frightening me. Please. I just want to go home.’ She looked at the window as the
discord of ‘Greensleeves’ neared the Red House. ‘You’re sick. Your uncle was sick. This house is sick. You took those girls. Alice.’

‘Sick! You little fool. Is not the world that persecuted them sick? The world that burned and broke and hanged their fathers sick? They only want to save you. Save you as they saved the
other poor wretches that were discarded. They have only ever offered sanctuary to those who are as broken as they were broken.’

Edith seemed to lose interest in her after the outburst, and looked fondly at the kittens in their glass cabinet. Wide of eye, curtseying, their tiny furred faces seemed scandalized behind the
spread fans.

Catherine had come up to this room in desperation. And she had run back to the Red House because there was nowhere else for her to go.
Don’t even think that!
But on reflection,
she wished she’d just hobbled into the darkness on the road leading away from the village, or clambered across a ditch and fled into an unlit open field. Even if those old things, those
people
from the village, had come after her, and moved around her, whispering in the void, it would have been better than this
.

Catherine backed towards the door. She fought hard to suppress all of the instincts that tried to make her accept something impossible. She fought against thoughts that wanted to become as
insane as the Masons and the house they had filled with so much confusion and horror.

In the doorway, she weighed up her options, which still didn’t add up to much more than an escape through the meadows at the back of the property, in complete darkness, alone.

‘My parents will be looking for me. You understand that don’t you? My colleague Leonard will tell them.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes! The police will come here!’

‘I hope not. They’ll waste a great deal of their time, because they won’t find us. This is one of those houses where an invitation is necessary.’

‘Stop it! Mike. Where is Mike? You said he came here. He wasn’t invited—’

‘Are you sure of that? And they will not let go of those they love. Not again. Not ever. We are the exhibits to small tyrants. You were never our guest, but theirs. No one is ever anything
else here.’

‘Tell me where he is. Tell me!’

‘And they will remake their guardians in their own image as angels have always done.’

‘Shut up you horrible bitch!’

The fact that the face Edith turned upon Catherine was veiled, she considered a mercy. ‘The salacious ape that followed your scent? Is that all you can think of at a time like this, when
you witness miracles? Your hosts will be so disappointed in you, Catherine.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Your beau was
invited
inside to wait for you, and wait he does. You will find him in my uncle’s workshop. With his lover. Those who wrong you will always be taken care of
by those who love you. Your mother certainly was, after she gave you away.’

‘My mother . . .’

‘Has known such torments for what she did.
They
saw how you suffered.
They
shared the pain in your dear little heart. Now you are here her suffering can end.’

‘What are you saying?’

Edith grinned. ‘Here you are wanted. Here you are loved.’

‘I don’t want to be loved by anything here!’

‘But you do. It’s what you’ve always wanted. Your heart bled in the right place at the right time. They came to you, like they came to my uncle. They came to bring you home.
Where wonders never cease. Where you will be loved.’

For several seconds the suggestions behind Edith’s words did not register. Catherine’s entire mind was one morbid but half-conscious blank in which she could hear the rushing of her
blood mixing with the cacophony of the pageant outside the front of the house.

She slipped into one of those rare episodes when the separation of her consciousness into three divisible minds occurred. One was frantic with fear and panic about a terrible outcome. Beneath
that maelstrom she was aware of a strange feeling of acceptance that almost cried out for calm. Deeper still, was the edge of an awareness that partially understood the impossible, and had always
done so, but never converted comprehension into a lasting belief or wisdom she could call upon.

She decided she must be stuck in someone else’s nightmare, as if she were trapped in the residue of M. H. Mason’s consciousness, or Edith’s, and whatever it was that consumed
this house. The sense of this idea retracted as soon as it had begun and was submerged again. Only fear and despair were left behind.

She’d been driven to what she sensed was the end of her mind. The situation even stopped feeling peculiar. And for barely a moment she came near to a precipice of understanding something
much bigger than anything she had ever known. She was brushing against something so monumental her reaction to it would be pure terror. But she must get beyond the terror and find peace or she
would break.

She found the strength to run, out of the drawing room and into the dimly lit passage beyond. It was there, as she fled for the stairs to the ground floor, that she heard Edith’s final
words. ‘They are the ones who offer justice now, my dear. And their justice can be terrible . . . what they did to your poor mother.’

By the time she made the ground floor and stood within the hall, another voice spoke.
To her?
She couldn’t be sure. But it groaned and circled down the stairwell as if from beyond
the roof of the Red House, like some great unseen mouth now covered the place where the skylight of red glass was normally positioned.

It was a voice she recognized. A man’s voice. The one narrating the play in the village. And one just as unclear and obscured by static, as if broadcast through poor reception across a
great distance of time. Another old recording, because no voice spoken in the present day was capable of such solemn and dour intonation, with a timbre degraded so horribly by age.

Keep one kitten, destroy the rest . . .

Much of the speech she didn’t catch, words slipped into white noise and became garbled. What she did hear she wanted to block her ears against.

Drowning is the preferred method . . . up by the hind legs, a quick blow to the back of the head . . .

Catherine moved across the hall.

Bind the tow with cotton threads . . . Push the wires through the false body . . . Pack soft stuffing around the wires . . .

She looked at the gaping front doors. The music in the lane had stopped. She could see nothing but the tips of blood-lit weeds beyond the porch and a long line of candle flames.

Treat larger mammals in the field . . . depends upon the circumstances . . . the trap . . . placement, temperature . . . before you carry it indoors . . . never cut the throat . . .

‘Mike!’ Catherine screamed and ran into the unlit passage that led to the back of the house. At the far end of the utility area of the building one door was open and its murky light
served as a beacon. ‘Mike!’

The voice from above came down and filled the spaces of the Red House, to both push and chase her through the corridor.

A ventral incision through the belly, or a dorsal entry through the back . . . Breastbone to tailbone . . . undress from the incision . . . scissors to disjoint the arms and legs. Pull down
the skin to the toes . . . cut across the foot . . .

Without light, because her slapping hands failed to find the switches, she was at once ungainly and glanced off a wall. The blow forced her to slow down. To all but stop moving.

She could not see what was around her feet any more. Had something moved near her feet? Was that a quick series of bumps close by, footsteps?
Maude.
Was Maude a child killer? Catherine
imagined the woman’s mute head, mopped in white hair, close by. Waiting with one of Mason’s fleshing blades in her angry old hand. It must be a trap. Edith had lied about Mike to get
her down here. They’d stolen her car and bag and phone. Cut her off and were tormenting her. Was that how it went down here?

How did they know she was adopted? Had they killed her natural mother? Isn’t that what Edith had said? For giving her away? No, Edith had said that her mother’s suffering would end
now she was here, which implied her mother was alive. But where was she?

Lies. Half-truths and manipulation; all she had ever been offered in this house. But Alice? They knew about Alice.

Go through, Alice. Go through, Alice. Go first. Go first. It’s all right . . . Don’t! Alice, Alice, come back. It’s not safe. Alice. Please, Alice. We’re not allowed.
Come back.

She cupped her hands over her ears to drive out the sound of her own memories and the drone of the man’s voice, which made her nerve endings shriek. The static-corroded voice was inside
her head. Such was her disorientation she thought she might fall in the dark and not be able to get up again. She swatted her hands about her body to ward off what she thought was Maude.

Trim close to the skull. Around the eye orbit detach the lids. Remove the eyes. The lids must be arranged under a magnifying visor as microbes are moved beneath a microscope. The smallest
adjustments give the effects of panic and terror.

‘Stop! Stop it!’

She ran to the open door of the workshop, to the dim, dirty light. There was no other light here. It was a place where you squinted and crept and tottered and brushed against things in the
darkness you could not identify.

Trim the ear to the base, separate the skin from the cartilage . . . then turn the ear inside out . . . unglove the head with sharp tugs.

‘Mike. Mike. Mike,’ she cried at the open door of Mason’s workshop.

Flesh the meat from off the skin . . . Degrease the skin. Rinse in plain water.

She looked inside the workshop for a moment that seemed much longer than a moment. Then sat down just inside the room with her back against the wall. The wall held the weight of her body that
her legs could no longer support.

A degreased skin can pickle for months and incur no damage . . .

The flesh of the lovers was pale. Only what looked like a long sideways mouth, which ran down Mike’s entire back, offered any variation to the dull gleam of his skin.

Before him sat a woman whose face Catherine did not need to see to know her identity. She knew it was a woman because one of her heavy breasts, as white as a fish’s belly with a nipple
like a bruise, was visible between Mike’s elbow and ribs.

Their dark, wet heads rested together, forehead to forehead, as if they shared a whispered secret like a boyfriend and girlfriend in a scented bath. A dark fluid filled the tin tub to their
upper arms.

Unmoving, Catherine looked at them for a while, nonsensically feeling her presence was an intrusion upon a moment of deep intimacy. She also felt the cold shock of carnal betrayal. A disgust at
death. And grasped the horribly simple fact that someone could be alive, but go to the wrong place and then not be alive.

Some time passed before she realized the unfamiliar sound in the room came from the pit of her own stomach, rhythmic, like hard breaths. The sound of a stranger in a dark room.

Catherine left the lovers and walked to the back door of the house. The sound was still coming out of her mouth like she was giving birth. It was strangely reassuring because
it made her aware she was still alive and real,
for a bit longer.

The back door was locked.
Of course it is locked.
She peered through the little panes of glass in the top half of the door and saw stars. She looked down upon stars too, or was that a
strange effect of light upon the glass?
What light?
But the very thought that there was nothing outside any more, no earth or trees or sky, didn’t surprise her. She didn’t
really know what this place was, could only be certain of one thing: she was tired of running. It didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. She felt like she had swum the English Channel in her
clothes. So if there was no more running in her, or point to it, there was only here. And her walking through this place and not thinking much for a while, like she’d reached the end of
something important. Herself.

In her right fist she held tight the rosewood handle of a scalpel she had taken from the workshop. She wondered if she would be capable of using it on anyone who came near her in the dark
corridor, or who tried to prevent her from leaving the house. Or maybe she could use it on herself to frighten them. That would be easier. She used to stamp on her glasses at school and slap her
own head until a teacher came. One of the quiet girls with white socks pulled up to the knee, who would never be her friend, would always run for a teacher when she went crazy. Crazy, she learned
when very young, was as good a defence as any if you wanted to be left alone. The Red House, she mused, had played the same card.