House of Small Shadows (39 page)

The skein of light that had originally roused her now fell upon the figure sat upright upon the bed. A woman with a face Catherine recognized as her own. The very same pallid face that Catherine
had seen, only partially reflected, in the shard of mirrored glass.

‘You’re not real. You’re not the real one. You’re not. You’re not. You’re fucking not!’

As she drew closer to the bed she saw that the seated figure’s mouth was open, and about the mouth the flesh was purple, as if there had been a struggle to push something past a resisting
jaw. The front teeth were broken.

From the dark lump of the body, left so lifeless and without rigidity, the arms had flopped hopelessly. After some vigorous commotion had occurred upon the rusty metal of the old iron bedframe,
the hands had fallen open upon the unclothed springs, wrists upturned, one featuring a small vertical cut from a scalpel.

A magnetism came with an abruptness that seemed to pull Catherine from where she stood at the foot of the bed, and jolted her head forward. She thought she might faint within the eager force
that sucked her towards the ghastly figure of herself propped up on the bed. Until some new and unwelcome instinct suspected that if she were to lie upon the bed, she would join in some unnatural
union with the lifeless figure, only to have to break apart from it again.

Flashes of things sparked across her mind: a bee-keeper raising a hidden face within an overgrown garden, a figure standing up behind the counter of an abandoned village store, the scurrying
aged of the pageant.

Catherine stumbled away from the bed and sat down hard upon the floor. She recalled the rushing of small feet through the house to the door of her room, and the sense of a frenzied activity
around her face . . . before she had awoken here, in the ruined house.
The real version.

So where had she been all that time when it had looked so different? Did it also exist . . . in another place?
Places?
And if that was her body upon the bed, then . . .

Into her thoughts came a memory of Edith’s lipless mouth, spouting its madness.
Small things were repaired, my dear. And there was resurrection, blessed resurrection, for them and
those who revered them . . .
She had said something about their guardians being remade ‘in their own image’, like angels had done. They tutored Mason in the
Great Art . .
.

Dear God, what did you bring into this house?

No. The thing on the bed was not real, was not her. This was still a dream, she was still imprisoned within a trance. Her entire consciousness was now a trance.

On the floor she was jerked into an awareness of the car engine being turned over in the lane outside.

Catherine crawled to the window and pulled herself up the wall. Slammed her hands against the wood. She was real, not dead, not a ghost; the thing on the bed was an effigy. She could hear the
sound of her hands against the wood. Yes, she could. They had only made an effigy of her. They must have done because she could think and feel and move. Edith had been able to move and talk too.
And Catherine could still move ever so swiftly . . . she had virtually glided up and down those stairs . . . over broken floorboards and rusted nails without incurring a scratch. The cold was not
unpleasant . . .

She snatched out her hair and screamed. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

But down there, between the security fence and the brick walls of the Red House, Maude stood in profile and did not even turn towards Catherine’s cries. Maude had raised her chin, but
betrayed no emotion beside the usual stern disapproval on a long-suffering face. She had also raised her arms, as if it were her turn to be measured for a fitting.

Naked but masked, Leonard stood before Maude. An open straight razor filled one of Leonard’s bony hands, his other hand gripped Maude’s throat like she was livestock.

The blade glinted silvery in the mackerel light of this terrible dawn. His leather face was angled towards Catherine, to where she peeked from between the planks of wood, and the eyes behind the
featureless mask, she knew, were fixed upon her window. Because he wanted her to watch. Had waited for her to look out and to witness this.

With a quick jerk of a bony arm, the taut bicep so bumpy with scar tissue, Leonard sliced the razor against Maude’s rotund belly, then punched his whole hand inside her. And deep within
the unresisting lump of the woman’s dense body, his hand went to work.

He tugged the razor upwards like he was trying to free a stuck zipper on the compliant servant’s clothes. With quick, hard jerks, and sometimes a sawing motion, he worked his hand up until
the razor was buried between Maude’s heavy bosom. Through the gaps in the wooden boards Catherine heard the ripping of linen and worse.

And in shocked stupefaction, she watched Leonard hold the housekeeper upright by the throat, while his other hand unspooled the housekeeper into the overgrown grass.

Catherine’s muffled grunts that came around the fingers she’d stuffed inside her mouth failed to obliterate the sound of Maude’s spilled innards dropping heavily into the
weeds.

The squat figure seemed to sag and deflate forward, onto her executioner, like a sack of emptying meal slit down the side. Ungraciously, Leonard tugged and pulled the collection of rags and
string and tow and sawdust and hard brown lumps from out of the loosening skin of the housekeeper, which soon flopped about his shoulder, the head still heavy and bobbing like a waterlogged
football.

His coup de grâce was to yank the white wig off Maude’s scalp, which was revealed to be stitched like a moccasin. And the neck supporting the pale head never recovered its posture.
The heap of clothing and thick lifeless limbs that once was Maude was stuffed untidily into a grey mail sack that lay waiting in the wet grass.

Catherine watched Leonard drag the full sack out of the gate and toss it into the back of the green van.

So complete was her horror Catherine remained still and silent. Empty and numb. Until the final part of the truth appeared to her in the form of a memory; a recollection of the insane words that
had croaked from Edith Mason’s horrid mouth. About her mother. Her real mother. Who had suffered. Who had known torments for giving her away. Who would be released . . .

Those who wrong you will always be taken care of by those who love you. Your mother certainly was, after she gave you away . . .

Maude.

DON’T NEVER COME BACK.

The housekeeper’s eyes wet with tears when she put Catherine to bed when she was ill.

The sound of her sobbing in a dark room while Edith bathed . . .

Because
she
knew what was happening. Something she could not stop. A terrible sequence of events she was commanded to take part in. She had been neither alive nor dead. Here, they had
done away with such distinctions.

Maude.

Mother.

After the door was slammed, this old man of great and inhuman strength that she knew nothing of, stood alone beside the van in the lane, and angled his leather face up to the Red House as if in
awe of it. He raised his two thin scarred arms to the air in salute, or as if he was making a command that she did not hear, nor would understand if she had. And just for a few seconds, she
thought, but was not sure, the air around his black wigged head shimmered like summer heat above a meadow.

When the green van was long gone, Catherine rose from where she had been slumped upon the floor. She walked past her body upon the bed and drifted down the stairs of the Red
House.

In the hall Tara still leant against the wall, but had found her feet again and gingerly prodded one dirty bare foot about. Within the housekeeper’s dress her body trembled. If Catherine
were to undress her old nemesis, and check her flesh, she knew she would find a long scar.

The new housekeeper’s hands were raised, but performed no meaningful function. At least she had fallen silent. Not from acceptance, but perhaps from what preceded acceptance.

Tara flinched when she became aware of Catherine’s silent presence moving down the stairs.

When she reached the hallway, Catherine had no curiosity left about what would happen next, but inexplicably in her shock, knew the worst was over. But she did wonder again, in a vague and
emotionless way, about what would happen if she were to lie down upon the bed with her old self. She knew it wasn’t allowed yet, and that it would be a struggle for her to get off that bed
again. But when she did, at least there was a wheelchair and someone in the house to push it.

There was work to be done upon the specimen upstairs. When she looked at Tara, and when she thought of Maude and Edith and the old keeper of flies that was M. H. Mason, and Violet Mason in her
case, and the population of Magbar Wood, she understood this. And she knew bitterly that the things she had seen in the attic, and the one slumped upon that bed upstairs, had been left as a form of
explanation that no words could ever suffice to explain.

And Catherine wasn’t to remain here for long. Not in the building as it was here, but as it was in another place. In other places and in other forms that she had already seen. Now she had
stopped screaming and sobbing and banging her hands against the damp wooden planks, the knowledge came to her as naturally as anything she could ever remember. Because the old house was telling her
things now and she needed to listen. And when the awareness had dawned and broken through shock and resistance and fear and regret, and the daze that all of those things had reduced her to, she had
risen and come down the stairs.

Perhaps Tara was to for ever remain as a hobbled ruin in the great house, as her mother had existed here, in whatever state the great house chose to show itself. Maybe Tara was here now to serve
a new mistress, until the time came when the housekeeper would also be opened and emptied into the grass outside, and put inside the sack by the man in the mask. As Tara’s predecessor had
been, as Catherine’s natural mother had just been, right before her eyes. One day perhaps this housekeeper would have her suffering relieved too. It seemed to be the way of things. She
didn’t know, but she knew something would tell her soon.

The sound of the back door opening, and the sudden warmth and brightness of the light that spilled through, made Catherine and her unseeing companion turn towards the rear of the house. One
woman turned towards the sound, the other turned to see the light that reached through and reddened the timbers and burnished the polished floors.

And outside, from the beautiful garden, came the sound of voices. The voices of many children, high and chaotic with the joy of play, circling like a flock of excited birds.

This place of decay began to fall away in the swift tide of transforming light, that rushed through to alter every brick within the brightness of a world older than the one she was about to
leave, for ever.

Against the silhouette of the distant doorframe, as if a new sun of a new world was beaming onto the rear of the Red House, other figures moved and threw their small shadows onto the
increasingly visible walls inside the building. Bright-blooded walls that soon reached the hall as it too was filled with a glorious light. A light she remembered from childhood, a light of comfort
and confirmation and of safety and love that vanished whenever she’d awoken from a trance.

The visitors all seemed eager to get past Alice, and the three little girls beside her, who walked so slowly and in such an ungainly fashion. Because those others that entered the Red House
behind the lame girls were keen to greet the mistress they had chosen and the servant they had provided.

And so together, the troupe of little tatty figures came inside from the divine garden to be with her. And to stay with her for some time to come.

Catherine knelt on the floor and opened her arms.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Decorating and furnishing The Red House was aided by
The Victorian House Explained
by Trevor Yorke, and The
Victorian House Style Handbook
by Linda Osband
(ed. Paul Atterbury). The function and history of its owner, M. H. Mason, was abetted by
Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy
by Melissa Milgrom;
Walter Potter and his Museum of Curious
Taxidermy
by P. A. Morris;
An Annotated Bibliography on Preparation, Taxidermy, and Collection Management of Vertebrates with Emphasis on Birds
by Rogers, Schmidt and Gütebier;
Taxidermy Step by Step
by Waddy F. McFall;
A Chaplain at Gallipoli: The Great War Diaries of Kenneth Best
, ed. Gavin Roynon.

Filling the house with its occupants was enriched by
Puppets Through the Ages: An Illustrative History
by Günter Böhmer;
The History of the English Puppet Theatre
by
George Speight;
The Complete Book of Puppetry
by George Latshaw;
The Handbook of English Costume in the 20th Century
by Alan Mansfield and Phillis Cunnington;
The Ultimate
Doll Book
by Caroline Goodfellow;
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe
(ed. Bagnoli, Klein, Mann, Robinson). And in the first place, were I not such an
admirer of the work of Thomas Ligotti, I may never have written this book. The short story by Reggie Oliver, ‘The Children of Monte Rosa’
,
introduced me to the existence of
preserved animals in tableaux, and also inspired me to write about them.

At the risk of absurdity, I must acknowledge the effects of the old ATV television puppet shows,
The Pipkins
(and its star Hartley Hare) and
The Adventures of Rupert Bear.
In
addition one third of
A Trilogy of Terror
(1975), and
Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang
, may have been the two most frightening things I watched on television in the first
half of my life. A long time ago they all captivated and terrified me in a manner unique to puppets. It was only a matter of time before these influences clambered out of their dusty trunks to
perform for me once again.