House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill Page B

understand, dear, that my mother and uncle were Victorians. They believed animals had souls. That they were good and evil. The Victorians were fascinated by an animal’s
true nature. So they depicted it.’ Edith looked to the red squirrels prancing upon the piano forte and smiled.
    And rats are most like us. Pests. Vermin. Scurrying. Frenzied. Determined to survive in any landscape and in any conditions.
    ‘I think you understand, Miss Howard. Understand perfectly.’ Edith smiled as if acknowledging Catherine’s thoughts that she had heard as loud as the handbell the old woman
began to ring. ‘I’m afraid I must rest now. It’s time for you to go. But before you leave your home on Monday, do not pack too much. We don’t like our home cluttered with
things that don’t belong here. Just prepare your toilet. We have everything else you will need.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘While you work to prepare the world for our treasures, you shall live upstairs with me.’
    Catherine nearly choked as she smothered the gasp of horror that tried to slip out. Then felt paralysed by a sense of social awkwardness she imagined growing to unbearable proportions if she
ever spent one night beneath the roof of the Red House. ‘No, I really couldn’t impose like—’
    ‘Nonsense!’
    Catherine flinched. Her watery, perfumed tea slopped over the saucer’s edge and on to her skirt.
    ‘Time is wasted with all this toing and froing in your motor car. The matter has been decided. Maude has prepared your room.’
    Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘She has?’
    ‘But you must be patient with us. We are unaccustomed to guests.’
    From shock at the very prospect of staying at the Red House, her head felt empty, her mind a void. No thoughts echoed inside her. She felt like a doll; something to be positioned by the
insistent and capricious will of a nasty little girl.

 
NINETEEN
    Catherine had been waiting in her dad’s car for three hours when she saw them together.
    Mike opened the little iron gate at the front of the short path that led to the terraced house he shared with two trainee teachers in Worcester, and he paused to look out at the street.
Surreptitiously, so the woman beside him wouldn’t notice he had done so. So
she
, the woman he had left her for, would be untroubled by the gesture. It was like Mike expected
Catherine to be there, watching. Because she had form. She was a nutcase.
    Catherine had parked tight to the curb, positioned some distance from the house so Mike wouldn’t see her when he left or entered the building. He always walked up the street and away from
the shops in St John’s Wood. She’d never known him approach the house from any other direction, so was sure he would not see her position when he came home,
if he came home
. To
make herself harder to identify while she conducted surveillance, she’d even borrowed her father’s car. Her red Mini would have revealed her pitiful behaviour even in Mike’s
peripheral vision.
    She was there because what had given her no peace since he dumped her at the dinner table in public was the fact that he still had not attempted contact, in any medium. Not even an apologetic
text message, or a letter including reasons, explanations, an insincere desire to remain friends, or any other insulting platitude designed to make her feel better. Nothing.
    Catherine could think too easily of reasons why he’d rejected her. He’d probably known her at her best, each time they had been together, so even at her best she’d been made to
remember she was intolerable. But before she went away for a few days to work in residence at the Red House, she urgently needed to know the exact reason why he had broken her heart. And now she
did.
    Mike had offered no opportunity for discourse because communication would have forced his hand. Explanations would have been required. Disclosure of motive for what he had done. Who he had met
and replaced her with.
    Mike’s flight