House of Small Shadows (37 page)

She remembered she had been stood before a window looking at the children in the garden. Then she had come back to Edith’s bedroom and fallen upon the bed, where she must have passed out .
. . but she hadn’t passed out on this bed.

What came after her return to the room was vague, or receded to fragments, and no matter how hard she swiped at the pieces of memory they mostly sought oblivion. Perhaps mercifully. Because
there had been a commotion. A rushing of small feet towards the room. And then inside the room there had been a bustling. The activity had been all about her face, accompanied by the smell of old
clothes, of neglect, and fresh earth, winter air. She remembered the sounds and the smells . . . had a wooden face pressed itself close? And then . . .

Nothing.

Bits of another bad dream between other bad dreams.

She must have dreamt that she had seen children in the garden, wearing masks, but looking up at the window she peered through. Before that there had been another dream of the Red House filled
with sunlight, the perfume of flowers. People had waited for her in the garden.

All of this must have been part of a trance. Imagined.
She’d had two trances then. Or three?
Or one so powerful it had felt like several. She didn’t know because the passage
from one place to another, and now to here, was less like waking from a deep sleep filled with vivid, urgent dreams and more like waking into a new day, with the actual memories of the last time
she was conscious quickly fading.

It was not possible for such hallucinations to feel like actual memories. Her visions were delusions. That was one thing she must not kid herself about.

In the reeking darkness of the strange room, she was too stiff with fright to move. So she remained motionless, no less inert than a doll, but one filled with horror. Until the terror subsided
and she thought she had been emptied of the capacity to feel anything.

Her skin was cold as if she’d been exposed to the elements all night, or even longer. But though she was cold the sensation wasn’t one of physical discomfort.

Shock also rendered her unable to speak, or even cry out. Thick-headed, she could have been mistaken for thinking she hadn’t slept in weeks, or maybe she’d slept for weeks and only
half awoken.

She pinched her wrist. As she performed the simple manoeuvre her arms were numb, heavy, cold, her fingers thick, half paralysed. But she was awake. This was real.

A thin cut on her forearm poked beneath her sleeve, and had recently begun to scab over.

She could not see the scalpel or any bedclothes. And what was she lying on? Bare springs, because there was no mattress.

In the vague light that passed through the boarded-up window she could also see that she had been changed into a garment that looked and felt like a dress. Even her throat was covered by
something tight, a stiff collar. The gown reached her ankles and she could feel its constriction about her hips. The garment was old. What she could see of it was grubby, once white.

The light was dim, but she was also certain there were no dolls on the far wall, or furniture in the room. Where they ended their journey, the shards of white daylight struck unclean walls.

So had she been drugged, which had made her imagine everything? She couldn’t accept that, her recollections of the house and all that had happened were too sharp, too vital.

While she was unconscious her clothes must have been changed, and someone had left her sitting on bare metal springs, slumped against a metal headboard. But inside a new place, another building,
or maybe in a part of the Red House she had never seen before. Or the physical world had been transformed again, and in a manner more radical than ever before.

The idea that she was still inside the Red House, and still in Edith Mason’s bedroom, and lying upon her actual bed, grew through her bewilderment and close to a horrible acceptance of the
impossible. And if she needed prompt confirmation, beside the bed was a great black wheelchair, tipped on its side upon the bare wooden floor.

Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Mould blackened the walls she could see lit up by bands of watery daylight. And that’s what she could smell. She recalled noticing the same
odours before, in the darkness of her room, in the corridor outside her room, and inside the dining room.

Most of the remaining wallpaper was mottled into neglect. Leaves and loose bricks lay upon the floorboards. Part of the ceiling had fallen in too, because slats of wood were visible. The wiring
had been stripped from the walls. A decomposing mattress was slumped against where she remembered a mirror to be. Continents of black stains had joined up on the mattress. Parts of the fabric and
stuffing formed wet lumps on the floor.

She clutched her face with hands so cold and heavy they felt like they belonged to someone else, or were, at the very least, near paralysed. Her features were slippery with some kind of cream or
ointment. She looked at the sleeve of the ancient white nightgown from which an unfamiliar perfume drifted. Gingerly, she touched her head. Her hair was pinned up inside a cap across which her numb
fingers scraped.

On the floor beside the bed were shards of mirrored glass, smashed out of a frame many years before and now glimmering among the detritus. With a slow and ungainly arm, she reached down and
picked up the closest piece, breaking it free from a rime of dust and a glimmer of silvery insect trails. She rubbed the section of dull speckled glass with a thumb. Turned it to her face. And
stared at the sight of something so pale it was almost blue. Whitened skin, her skin.

From outside came a sound she never thought she would hear again. The rumble of a car engine and the ripple-pop of tyres across a rough surface. Beyond the sound of the car birds issued terse
cries into the cool air.

Stepping off the bed took all of her strength. For a moment she’d thought she was fastened to it. But once she was up and on her ungainly feet, moving was much easier than the act of
pinching her flesh, or picking up the broken piece of mirror. Now she was upright she even felt agile, nimble.

Through the unlit room her legs carried her swiftly across the dross and wet bricks to the blocked window. Frantically, she moved her face behind the rough, damp-darkened boards until she found
a suitable gap to peer through.

A vehicle came into view. A green van, an old model, even vintage, that was driven carefully. It stopped moving at the end of the overgrown front garden. An area now protected by a metal
chainlink fence she had never seen before. Most of the brick wall she remembered was missing.

The sight of the man who stepped out of the car made her dizzy, and then relieved, and then close to paralysis.

Without the aid of his wheelchair, Leonard Osberne stood beside the open driver’s-side door. He then walked stiffly around the bonnet of this vehicle she had never seen before, and stood
before the fence.

He held something in his hands, something black and hairy that he placed with great care upon the roof of the van. He turned to face the house. He removed his jacket slowly, his trousers from
his thin legs, his shirt. And all with deliberate care as if his actions were rehearsed or a prelude to a special act. By the time he was looping his underwear over one unshod foot, Catherine had
closed her eyes upon the sight of his pallid and wizened torso, separated into a patchwork of thick lines faded purple and white. Scars.

When she reopened her eyes, she dug her fingers between two of the wooden boards nailed across the casement frame and clung on to them to stay on her feet, because Leonard Osberne’s face
was no longer visible.

Leonard’s head was titled upwards, towards the front of the house, and was covered in a dark leather mask. The mask was featureless. And that, she considered, was the only mercy in what
she was being forced to endure.

Cascading about the outside of the mask, and down past his bony shoulders, were luxuriant black curls of hair. The horribly feminine tresses reached his protruding ribs.

The rest of the man’s body that she could see was naked, save for a soiled bandage around one thigh, visible when he unlocked the metal gate built into the security fence. Carrying a grey
sack, he walked up the path, under the porch roof and out of her view.

She became aware that she was now panting against the rough wooden planks, but her breath was weak, soundless, and must have been muted against the wood.

Blind with panic, as much as going blind among the black spaces between the thin shards of white light in the room, she fumbled around the wet crumbling walls and used her hands to feel her way
to the door. Little impeded her stagger. There was a hole where a handle once turned.

She stepped through the doorway and into a vista of ruin. Behind her, the door drifted shut.

The Red House was derelict. The air inside was cold and lightened enough to suggest the great skylight of crimson glass was no more.

No rugs, no carpets, no pictures, no light fittings either. A great pungency of damp wood and urine assaulted her senses.

The stairwell was missing most of its banisters. The ends of the two corridors were lost to darkness. Floorboards were warped and even absent above what looked like deep black cavities about her
feet. Leaves had blown in from somewhere and settled into mounds of mulch against the walls, joined by fallen chunks of plaster.

But down below there was movement. And a sound she had heard before. A sound she was too transfixed with fear to investigate as it shambled through the neglect and half-light, two storeys down,
out of sight. Footsteps. The distinctive side-to-side shuffle of a heavy-set woman with a limp. Maude. From deep within the bowels of the building the housekeeper now moved into the hall directly
beneath the stairwell, as she had once walked to collect Catherine so long ago.

A chain slid through a metal loop. Down there. Metal was rattled and wood groaned out its resistance at being moved. The great front doors were unlocked and the light increased in the stairwell
as the doors were opened. And then they were closed and locked again with the same slow procedure. The light downstairs dimmed.

Two sets of feet scuffled and creaked across what was left of the hall floor. But there were no voices, no greetings between the housekeeper and her visitor, which was even worse than the sound
of their feet beginning a noisy ascent of the stairs.

Carefully, upon the broken and uneven floor, Catherine slipped backwards and into the mouth of the corridor she had come out of. Once back within the shadows of the passage, she crouched down
and tensed. With her cheek pressed into the moist, crumbling plaster of the wall, she peeked out at the stairwell.

In a grotesque and nonchalant parade, Leonard came into view with Maude following. The naked and scarred body of the old man she had come to love and trust moved with a casual ease up the
stairs, his spine too straight for a man of his age, his head and upper body covered by the horrid locks that swayed as he walked. His face was blanked out by the old leather mask that offered no
suggestion of eyes, mouth, or nose in the dank and dim space the shaggy head rose through.

Behind Leonard, with her face cast into the usual dour indifference, Maude dragged her bandaged foot upwards, one step at a time.

Catherine did not want that black leathery face turning in her direction so she slipped backwards without a sound, deeper into the corridor, as her captors made the second-floor landing. Her
mind scrabbled for a solution of where to flee if they came for her.

Fear turned to relief when she heard their footsteps crunch, bump and scuffle into the adjoining corridor that housed the bedroom she had stayed in.

Behind her, and next to Edith’s disused bedroom, she could see the vague outline of the nursery doorway. It was open.

She eased herself to the empty doorframe and peered inside. In a haze of light emitted around the hardwood board, that had come loose in both top corners over the far window, she could see that
the shadowy space was empty. The walls were as softened by moisture and mould as the walls in the rest of this building that she had awoken within, so confused and frightened.

She fled back to the landing and listened. In the distance, from out of the adjoining passageway, she heard the muffled sounds of something being dragged around a floor and knocked about a
distant room.

Catherine fled across the landing and began a descent of the stairs, her only relief being her skill at moving so quietly and swiftly down to the floor below.

On the first floor, the wooden walls had been smashed through or were black and buckled with damp. A quick look into the gap that had once been the entrance to Edith’s drawing room
revealed it to be an empty shell that stank of urine and worse. Somehow the curtain rail above the boarded-over window had survived. She made haste to the ground floor.

Some of the floorboards of the hall were missing to reveal rubbish-filled spaces and crumbling cement between crossbeams. Great rusted nails reared like small serpents in the thin light, and she
delicately moved her feet around them to prevent spearing the sole of a bare foot.

The front doors had been shut behind the visitor. A dull glimmer of iron chain looped about the handles suggested they were secure.

Catherine turned and fled into the dark utility corridor, keen on reaching the back door while Maude and Leonard were upstairs.

They must have come out of the corridor on the second floor because she heard their feet creak and bang about the upper storeys. They must be looking for her and were going to search
Edith’s room. The thought made her need to escape greater.

There would be time enough to fathom what had happened here, how she had been kept prisoner and mesmerized or drugged. Or whatever they had done to make her experience a derelict building in its
former glory, an illusion generated by her own imagination.

Mason’s magic worked.

Bewitched.

Impossible.