FORTY-ONE

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.

From up above, came the crackle-static-fizz of the old recording. The great M. H. Mason she had come here for, continued to speak across time in a place he’d curated into an elegant hell, one that smelled of that which disguised death. For posterity he’d recorded his apocryphal madness to inspire others.

They are illusion and deception.

She caught snatches of the dreary announcements within the interference, and only half heard them when the voice passed into clearer bursts.

They are conjured. Their history is obscure and . . .

Along the length of the utility corridor she met no interference. She tried all of the doors because the rooms beyond had windows big enough to smash and they faced the outside. If there was nothing beyond the panes of glass then maybe nothing was still better than this.

Every door was locked. The passage was a funnel, it had led her to the workshop and demanded she come back out again.

The front door was also shut against whatever was out there, too, or had been out there. There was no more music, no more ‘Greensleeves’, the things with the candles had not followed her inside.

Were they ever there?

From the inside, the doors had been secured and the keys removed from the brass-framed keyholes in the locks. So someone was inside the house with her, securing doors behind her? They could see in the dark and they had something special planned for her. Maude. You mute bitch. Catherine turned and headed for the stairs.

I find the presence of immobile rats far more confirming and comforting than I find the company of my own species.

She had to stay within the fraying boundary rope of reason. Even though her thoughts and half-thoughts and assumptions were being blown about by currents of fear and confusion, there was an explanation, a rational explanation for this situation.

Edith was no killer. She was too infirm. Maude? Maybe. M. H. Mason and Violet Mason had once been real, mad but real. Yet Maude and Edith were behind this. They were continuing whatever M. H. Mason and Violet Mason had started.

Think. Think. Think.

Edith and Maude must have taken Alice all those years ago. With help. There must have been a team effort behind the abductions of Alice and all of those helpless children who went missing from Magnis Burrow, the ones her nan had told her about. M. H. Mason and Violet had begun something here, others had continued the tradition. Wasn’t that what Edith was getting at?

And in the Red House M. H. Mason’s descendants had continued to play out their fantasies, their psychopathic delusions about some nonsensical but hideous legacy of marionette theatre, and upon her, too, whom they had long coveted because she got away in 1981.

Edith was now trying to make her accept the surreal rites of her family, trying to insert them into her thoughts as some kind of alternative reality, some bending out of shape of natural law.

It was preposterous, and she wasn’t entirely convinced by her theory, but it was all she had to go on.

But were they going to kill her? Was she right now being batted about like a mouse in sharp claws before the coup de grâce?

Making herself acknowledge that this was all for real, gave her a cruel sense of comfort. Because above all else, she must refuse to accept the impossible things the Red House and its constituency were suggesting to her. Otherwise she was lost.

Catherine stood in the middle of all the small, finely dressed animals. As she stared at an empty wheelchair Horatio watched her with an eternally wet eye. M. H. Mason’s niece, his loyal priestess, was missing from the drawing room.

The absence of Edith mingled with recent memories she no longer wanted, of the old figures prancing about the pageant and of something jabbering from behind a door down there. Her coma of numbness, her brief spell of reason broke. She shook. She sucked at, more than breathed, the air. To fight the swoops of nausea that circled her cold scalp, she sat upon the rug.

A small avalanche of dust in the fireplace made her shriek. She sat back on her heels and stared into the great centrepiece of the room. Another trickle fell into the clean black grate. This time she just flinched. She could hear nothing but the droning of the recording. Which seemed to come out of the fireplace, too, now.

In the corridor outside the drawing room, and about the stairwell, Catherine went and patted her hands along the wood panels for the light switches that blended with the walls. Those she found she slapped on to commit more of the dim ruby glow to the staircase. They have electricity, they must pay bills, people know they live here.

The two adjoining corridors of the first floor remained in darkness. Going inside the lightless mouth of either to find a switch was more than she could endure. They wanted her to go up.

The children must dance for someone . . .

Maybe she should start the cutting up there.