House of Small Shadows

THIRTY-SEVEN

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.

For one horrible moment she thought of herself as an animal being run to ground, incrementally worn out by the patient circling of a pack. Or were they just as equally fascinated by her, as she was by them?

There was nothing she could see to account for such agitation in the crowd either. Or was it excitement? No concessions, as she hoped, offered food or souvenirs on either side of the lane, so where were they all headed?

Under closer scrutiny, the energy of the crowd now struck her as being akin to the jostling she associated with festival crowds in the darkness of night, before a star attraction came on stage, suggesting all here were waiting for something that had not yet happened.

A woman whose footsteps Catherine tried to follow stepped into a brief wash of light to reveal a three-quarter-length cape and high Medici collar tied about her neck. The woman’s tiny head was concealed by a Pompadour dome of what must have been, at one time, someone else’s hair. It was now puffed out on an invisible wire frame and held in place by tortoiseshell combs, and what looked like long iron pins. Propped upon the elaborate wig was a little Juliet cap constructed from pearl beads.

On a sudden whim to ask who was authorized to remove the barrier pole so she could drive through the village, Catherine reached for the woman’s elbow.

The little woman altered her course and crossed the street. But not before Catherine had seen half of a deeply lined face beneath several layers of black netting. In the brassy light, the skin of the woman’s face was as white as a clown’s in full make-up.

Catherine turned round. Because the three figures whom she confronted with her shocked silence, also stopped moving at the same time as she did. She was sure they had been whispering.

The figures dispersed around her, as if terribly eager not to miss something up ahead in the street. As they fled, Catherine received an impression of yoke collars and floor-length pleated skirts. She saw the back of an Eton jacket with swallow tails and a short knitted cape. Clothes that hadn’t been fashionable in a century.

They were all covered from chin to toe. And again, all she had made out through their patterned veils were smudges of white. Their faces must have been coated in stage make-up, or were clad in colourless masks.

Their wake was a thick scent cloud of lavender. An odour failing to mask the competing ones of camphor and the mustiness of clothes left in damp conditions.

‘What… Hello, wait! I’m looking for…’

Her plea was ignored. There was a snigger at her outburst from another direction. Which was shushed. The cackler desisted, but whoever had scolded the giggler now laughed, too, before darting away.

If they’re laughing at me they should see themselves.

At the end of the street she discovered another iron candy-striped pole blocking access to the village. She wanted to scream.

Beyond the barrier was a darkness unrelieved by a tree-line, hedgerow or moon-silvered fields. Her imagination suggested the world reached its edge at the horizontal pole. And it was too dark beyond the barrier to see any evidence of the car that must have brought Mike and Tara to Magbar Wood.

Huddled together beside the beery light of the last window of the street, a small gathering of silent, rapt shapes distracted her.

An elderly figure in the centre of the group performed a curious skipping upon the narrow pavement. She caught glimpses of its prancing between the vast hats of the onlookers. The dance had long passed from fashion, or perhaps never extended beyond the borders of the village, and what she could see of the dancer’s head was mostly engulfed by a black wig. Where the tresses parted, the revealed features were covered in white greasepaint. The cheeks were rouged and the eyes decorated with long lashes like an aged cross-dresser. Around his throat the dancer wore a Mr Toby ruffle. His painted eyes were closed in concentration. His grin was pure music-hall farce. Clackclack clack clack went his tap shoes upon the paving.

Having seen more than she cared to, Catherine turned about to head back to her car. She’d sit in it and sound the horn. Mike would hear it. If whatever functioned as officialdom at the pageant also heard the horn, she would demand the maypoles that blocked the road be removed. And inside a locked car she would feel safer.

Her decision was thwarted by the sudden electric crackle and hiss from the adjoining lane. The interference was followed by a brassy groan like the iron hull of a ship grinding against stone.

Catherine clutched her ears. A burst of music followed, that suggested it had been made at the dawn of recorded sound and was being played at the wrong speed through ancient speakers. A discordant, metallic fanfare. Loud music played tunelessly, but still recognizable as ‘Greensleeves’ as if blasted from out of an ice-cream van decades before.

The crowd about Catherine paused, in what she took to be awe, before they all turned towards the junction of the two lanes.

The shock of the reappearance of ‘Greensleeves’ in her life made her want to sit down in the street and sob. And the music was clearly a summons to those gathered for the pageant, who now tapped and rustled through the darkness, between the stone gulley formed by the houses, towards the intersection.

‘Can you tell me what’s happening?’ she called, on the verge of tears, to a figure that hurried past her with the aid of two walking sticks. She thought the old woman smiled behind the netting that dropped from the wide brim of her hat, but she did not answer.

Two small men bent double with age tottered on frail legs to move around her. ‘Please. Sir. Can you…’ Their narrow faces were hints of white beneath the brims of ill-fitting Homburg hats, that failed to contain unkempt hair that trailed over their collars.

She reached out and seized one of the men by the upper arm. And quickly released the limb. Not only because it was as thin as a wooden flute beneath its drapery of black cloth, but because the man let out a shriek and fell.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I never meant… Here. Let me help…’

He was soon back on his feet, helped up by a man in a three-button frock coat and someone of indeterminable gender swallowed by a tweed cape. With their gloved hands they snatched at the elderly figure who had virtually disappeared against the unlit road surface.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Catherine said to the back of their hats.

She joined the crowd’s momentum, if it could be called that, with the intention of returning to her car at the opposite end of the lane. Which wasn’t far, though the determined crowd either blocked what little light issued from the windows of the houses, or the lights had dimmed in some coordinated fashion, which was impossible and must have been her imagination.

Perhaps a residual effect of Maude’s tonic still ran strong in her blood, because she endured a few terrifying moments in which she thought she hung within a moving nothingness. There was no edge or border to the night, no horizon, and she wanted to crouch and place her hands on the earth, until the rustling of old limbs in vintage cloth had ceased in their surges about her.

Only as the vestiges of the motley horde thinned, and the most infirm of their number tottered and guided each other around the obstacle of her body, did some of the whisky-tinted light cast enough of a glow for her to move again, and without the sensation of falling backwards.

Once more, the world around her had become insubstantial and unreal. Maude’s tonic must have combined with the cold and darkness, and with her being ill, and her meddling with old dolls, antiques and taxidermy. All this had integrated to contribute to her disorientation. She also wondered when she would stop seeing things not as they were, but transformed.

She needed to calm down and stay upright and clear of the small shadows that hobbled about her. And she must remove herself from Magbar Wood, because hysteria wasn’t far away.

When she reached the place where the two lanes merged, she could see that the doors of the derelict church were now open. A full blare of the hurdy-gurdy fairground melody clanged against the stone walls of the chapel and bulged outwards. A dim red light was emitted.

Before the covered gate of the churchyard, the glow was joined by a ruddy luminance from the doors of the neighbouring scout hall, as if this was now the heart of the pageant. Catherine continued towards her car.

A hand gripped her elbow. ‘You won’t find this in the Guardian Guide.’

She shrieked.

Mike.

‘What are you fucking doing here?’ It was out of her mouth before she knew it, when she only wanted to fall against him and sob.

He released her arm and stepped away. The smile receded from his mouth and vanished from his eyes. Mike looked away, then at his feet. ‘Leonard called me. Said you would be here, he said you needed help. He told me to come and bring you home.’

‘Leonard?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cath. You don’t know how much. About… Look, forget that. We need to get out of here. Tara’s car is… Your nose is bleeding.’

The strange night sounds and sights retreated, and her focus on Mike’s pale and miserable face surprised her, as if she had awoken from a trance she’d endured for so long it had begun to feel normal, only to rediscover her will once the soporific spell had broken. Her chin and lips were indeed wet.

‘How could you? How could you, with her.’

‘I’m sorry. Sorry.’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Look, when you told me about the girl that you hurt, in London, I only answered her messages because… I wanted to hear from her. About what happened. Before we got any deeper. Her side of it.’

‘And then you met her!’

‘I wish I never had. You were right. She’s poison. She’s been using me. I can see that now. And I’m a bloody idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘I bloody well do!’

‘Things weren’t great between us, Cath. Not since… you know. I didn’t know what to do… shit!’ He swallowed at the bolus of pain that constricted his throat. But was he swallowing his anguish at being betrayed by Tara, or remorse at what he had done to Catherine?

‘You slept with that horse-faced bitch.’

‘I… Look…’

And for the second time in her life she struck someone’s face. This time there was no closed fist, but an open hand.

Catherine turned towards the church as if it offered some hope of sanctuary. Through her blurred vision, trembling from the emotion that shook her body, she was sure the aged and diminutive members of the tatty assembly had all gathered at the top of the lane and were turned in her direction, to watch the confrontation of two strangers on the border of their village.

‘Cath, something’s not right here. I mean it.’

Catherine turned away from the church to find Mike so close they both flinched. ‘No shit! You don’t even know the half of it. ’

‘You can hate me for ever. I don’t expect you to forgive me, or to even talk to me again. But come home with me, yeah? Tonight. Please.’

‘Where’s that bitch’s car?’

‘In the lane. On the other side of that pole. But I can’t find her. She’s gone.’

‘Gone? What are you saying?’

‘We got split up. We went up to that church. She went inside. I didn’t… I didn’t want to. Didn’t like it. But she hasn’t come back out. I can’t find her. She’s got the car keys. We all need to get out of here.’

‘She’s still in there?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, maybe. I saw… I don’t know. Up there, I saw something really weird. Horrible. What the fuck is this place? Leonard had to show me on a map.’

‘But you still brought her here. You betrayed me with that bitch, and then you brought her here too. Were you thinking of her career? Because I know she was!’

‘What could I do? I shouldn’t have said anything about the house. I know. Damn it, I know. But I did, before I knew what she was doing to us. Then it was too late. And she wanted to see it, the antiques and stuff. This guy, Mason. His animals. She knew about him.’

‘You stupid bastard.’

Mike held her arm. ‘She would have come out here anyway. She’s already been looking for that house since I told her about the animals. But she couldn’t find the village. I still have no clue how we found it today. By accident, I think. But I needed her to drive me. When Leonard said you were in trouble, I had no choice. I don’t have the money for that kind of cab fare from Worcester. I told her I wanted to find you, told her it’s you I really care about.’

‘Liar!’

‘This is all so messed up.’

‘You messed it up.’

‘Tara didn’t care. She just wanted to get here to see the house. She’s so driven, she’s mad. Even after what she’s done to us, she didn’t care about a confrontation with you, as long as she could get to see the house.’ Mike clenched his fists as if he were going to punch himself. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

Catherine looked at the church. The strained and rapid rotations of ‘Greensleeves’ swirled about her and grew louder. Even the stars moved in a circle above her tormented mind, or so she imagined.

‘That bitch is up there?’ Her chest felt like it had been pierced by something cold and made her breath shuddery. This night was the endgame to what started in the torture chambers of tarmacked junior school playgrounds. Of course! But at last she could see the end. Fuck therapy. What could a counsellor or doctor do to prevent destiny? She had been right all along. She knew it. Beneath all of the reassurances, she had always known that other forces guided her down the tragic spiral of life like magnetic fields sucking water through a grate, a circular but inevitable descent. You either endured it and suffered, or you did the unthinkable to your enemies and at least went down with a sense of justice being served.

Mike’s voice brought her out of her miserable absorption. ‘There was some kind of service in there. Singing. Around this glass coffin, or something. Pretty damn sinister. I split, but Tara waited to see if she could find that crazy old woman we met up at the house, the one in the wheelchair. To see about looking at the stuff in the house.’

‘Edith.’

‘Yeah, Edith. Tara wanted to talk to her about a film. Edith said she would be here, with you. But we couldn’t find Edith, and Tara hasn’t come back out of that church. This is all wrong. Jesus, this place. We should just go, now.’

‘Keys. The car keys! We’ve got to find your bitch.’

‘Hey, I told you. I messed up. I was wrong.’

‘Bit late for that, don’t you think?’

‘Don’t go up there. I’m not. Not again. It’s… I think it was a funeral, or something. I can’t look at that woman again, in the coffin.’

‘What woman? What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t know. She was in this case. It was all lit with these red lights. I was watching from the door. Then the lights went out. The doors shut. But Tara was still inside. What the fuck are they doing in the dark?’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Catherine began walking to the church. She would get the keys, but she wouldn’t look at the woman in the case. Almost certainly more of Mason’s handiwork. She’d seen enough of that for a lifetime.

‘Don’t go.’

‘What about the car keys, you moron!’

Mike bit the inside of his mouth. She’d never seen his eyes so wild-looking before, never seen him this frightened.

‘Fuck the keys. Let’s walk out of here. But I’m not going back in there. I’m taking off.’

‘I don’t have any shoes! How can I walk?’

‘Shit! Look, if we get split up, I’m going to wait for you. By the car, yeah? It’s parked in that lane, by the pole. I’m not leaving you out here. This place is all wrong. I’ll be waiting, yeah? Cath! Cath!’

‘My hero!’

‘I don’t care what you think of me. But I won’t leave you here. If you two go back to that house, I’m coming up there to get you, yeah?’

She was right. Tara had come here. No doubt with the sense of the antiques documentary story of the decade filling her nostrils, as well as a perfectly laid-out vengeance narrowing her reptile eyes with anticipation. Take Mike and break off their relationship. Show up at the Red House and inveigle herself into Edith’s confidence, as only Tara could do, to spoil the valuation and auction with promises of a lucrative television contract, augmented with lies about what Catherine had done at Handle With Care. Edith would be thrilled by the subterfuge and scandal. Her lonely, mad existence would be lit up with even more of Catherine’s misery, and with new talk of the greater riches available through Tara’s influence.

‘I’ll kill…’ Catherine’s attempt to speak broke into a sob of rage that felt like it could damage her.

But then she smiled, and she felt as if a terrible constriction had been released from around her heart.

Let her have it. Let her waste her time.

Even if Edith had been in possession of the Rothman treasures, lost when the Titanic went down, Catherine knew she’d rather die than value the Mason estate. Tara was welcome to the Red House. And she was welcome to Edith. It would all be evidence soon, in a police investigation. There would be yellow tape strung across that porch not long after she found a phone signal and directed the authorities up that lane.

‘Cath! Cath! Cath!’ she could hear Mike’s voice behind her.

Catherine pinched her nose to stop whatever was running out of it, and even more strongly now, and carried on to the church. As she moved she located the wet wipes in her bag and tore one free to wipe at her face.

Once she was level with the gaping red doorway of the shabby scout hall, a needle was scraped out of a groove inside the church. The awful metallic rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ stopped abruptly.

In the sudden silence, behind her and further down the street, a door slammed shut.

She turned her head to see if her craven ex-boyfriend had followed her up the street.

The blood-light from the church and scout hall dwindled into shadows as it bled down the narrow lane. But Mike was no longer standing where she’d left him only moments before. In fact, there was no one behind her, or even present in the lane.

But all considerations of her ex-boyfriend were erased at the sight of the vessel, as well as its murky occupant, that lumbered through the light of the church vestry. An object preceded by a bustling crowd in vintage costume.

The casket was lowered to skim beneath the arch, but then rose, shaking, as if those who transported it had suddenly stood up straight.

Catherine took the long box for an antique coffin, made out of long glass panes held together by iron brackets. Some kind of sarcophagus as Mike had suggested.

What she could see of the occupant of the rectangular casket looked like a mannequin. A small female dummy dressed in a lavish black gown and sat upon a high-backed chair; tiny and immobile, save for the wobbles as it was clumsily manoeuvred down the church path. Nothing of the face, beside a small whitish oval, could be seen behind its black veil.

She began to fear she might be in the presence of an embalmed body of local significance. Thoughts of Edith’s mother came to her again and were as unwelcome as before. Had Violet Mason been preserved as a saint and locked inside the wretched church? But if she’d died after her brother, then who had preserved Violet?

But then, it couldn’t be Violet; the body was too small.

Since her first visit to the Red House she wondered if anything seen thus far had filled her with as much revulsion as the strange glass canister and its shrunken occupant. She tried desperately to convince herself that the effigy had been constructed from papier-mâché and dressed in funereal black clothing. Unless a child had been employed to represent a female character pertinent to the tradition of the village.

A float draped in black silk followed from the church to join with and to bear the horrible cargo.

The crowd chattered excitedly in voices too low to hear. They merged into one messy column in the shadows before the front of the scout hall.

Catherine looked back down the lane. Mike had gone. But this is what he had seen. Something that really upset him. She understood why.

Catherine took two steps away from the scout hall. But while she’d been staring with a horrified fascination at the relic, the crowd and their effigy had produced a ring around the front of the hall and church, blocking the entire width of the lane. They moved the wobbling sarcophagus right at her.

Again, with what felt like a horrible inevitability, she was trapped. She retreated up the little path and ducked inside the hall. There was nowhere else to go. And nothing could have tempted her to stand her ground and be made to peer inside the upright glass cabinet. If she hadn’t moved so swiftly she would have been forced to see the occupant of the sarcophagus in much greater detail. She would have been face to face with it.

Inside the hall she came upon multiple rows of collapsible wooden chairs older than the narrow building that encased the furniture. The only light was frail and filtered through the dirty glass of three small stage lights, fixed above the curtained podium at the far end of the hall.

Catherine moved along the back row of seats and sat in a tiny uncomfortable chair at a distance from the aisle, and as far away as she could get from a small wooden stage draped in velvet curtains.

She bit her bottom lip, and dabbed a wet wipe at the fresh blood gathering under her nose. She must look a fright. Barefoot in the white dress with blood running over her mouth. Somehow her ghastly appearance seemed fitting.

Tara must still be close. She must have been inside the church to watch whatever pageant service had recently been conducted. Tara hadn’t come out of the church but may have been at the end of the procession. Maybe she was with Edith. If Tara entered the scout hall with the crowd, Catherine would have to get the car keys off her, find the car and leave. But how would she get the keys?

When she realized her hands were shaking, she clasped them together in her lap. Maybe it was the thought of seeing her again that contributed to her palsy, or perhaps she had entirely, finally, lost her wits.

All she had seen this night might appear eccentric but unthreatening to a mind less disturbed than her own. It was possible that her sanity had unravelled and she was now stuck in a continuous loop of grotesque fantasy erupting from her subconscious mind. In fact, within near total darkness in unfamiliar surroundings, she must remember that anything could seem to be just that: possible.

She prayed she was delusional, ill, drugged, anything but fully lucid. Because if she were mad, at least what she was experiencing was imagined and not real.

And into the hall they came. They hobbled and they scuttled. They shuffled and they crept. But moved in haste to find seats.

Some of the little figures crowded the floor before the stage like children before a Punch and Judy show, until the hall was filled with the groans and squeaks of small bodies shifting upon the wooden chairs. And they all looked forward, at the stage.

Catherine suspected they were aware of her, but deliberately ignoring her.

The members of the audience were so shrunken in their capes she doubted a single one was younger than ninety. But how had some of them moved so swiftly outside?

In the vague burgundy light she also stared at enough vintage millinery and evening dress to fill a small museum. Watteau hats and great headdresses drooped with leaves and half-roses, forming misshapen rows of black humps up to the stage.

The closest veils in her row were black, some spotted, some patterned, and all covered hints of bleached faces. Gauzy and spangled fans quickly spread. All of the men needed a haircut. She felt like she was stuck in some vast and surreal Memento Mori photograph.

Hair and nails continue to grow after death.

She stopped the train of thought, because it led to assumptions that would be unbearable while trapped in the dark among these ‘people’.

There was still no sign of Tara, or Edith or Maude for that matter.

From the seats before her, the fragrance of musty fabric began to drift and settle about her, as if the garments had only been recently released from confinement in damp, airless spaces. In unheated rooms in old houses. She knew the odour from the house clearances she had attended. Old bottled scents similar to Edith’s perfumery had been lavishly applied to cover the smells of age, and to conceal something else: a trace of the chemical pungency of the Red House. It made her sick in Mason’s workshop and began to turn her stomach again now.

She rummaged in her bag for more scented wet wipes so she could hold a handful against her nose and mouth. It was too late to stand up and make her way out. She would draw attention to herself as she climbed over the little laps in the dark.

She would be forced to sit in the stench. The hall was airless, the windows blacked out; if the door closed she might faint.

Where was Tara if she had not come in with the congregation? And Mike? He was there, behind her in the street, and then… Could he have moved out of the lane so quickly? And had Tara left the church and found Mike? Would they leave without her? She swallowed a sob.

Directly beside her, though the small woman had covered her face with a fan, her neighbour’s exposed lower legs distracted Catherine. Wool gaiters were side-buttoned over the woman’s high-cut shoes. Above the covered ankles, two pale legs were visible.

As if aware of her scrutiny, the legs withdrew beneath the seat of the chair. But not soon enough to prevent Catherine’s glimpse of what resembled carved ivory limbs within iron callipers; legs that curved out of a hint of leather straps about the knees.

Catherine made to stand up and get out. But the doors were now closed.

The glass sarcophagus stood upright before the sealed entrance, as if the figure inside was present to watch a performance. The wooden throne inside the glass case was festooned with briars and flowers were entwined around the legs of the chair. The tiny figure upon the throne remained still, the veiled face obscured. Before the lights dimmed even further, Catherine noticed a tiny hand upon the armrest. It was as white as bone.

She stifled a scream.

The whispers, shuffles and creaks around her settled to silence and anticipation inside the black hall. Only the stage was now visible.

Her sense of the walls and ceiling and floor slipped away with the going of the light. All was removed from the world and the invisible audience hung in darkness before the stage. Where she was in space and even time, she feared she was now losing her grasp of.

The curtains shrieked across their rails and revealed the stage.