The House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill

Author:Adam Nevill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466837386
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

THIRTY-TWO

Even when in sight of the Red House’s chimneys, the dreary and abandoned spirit of the village still discoloured her thoughts. Turned them into an old photograph, dour and brown with age, corrupted by blemishes.

Maybe this great house, this mausoleum that honoured loss and madness, had drawn all the colour, light and life out of the village. Bled its vitality up the lane years ago, to this dreadful edifice. Itself erected on ground verdant with meadows, briars, thorns, and tough grasses, as if the land was also returned to some former time that no hedgerow or wall could restrain. All around the Red House was forgotten, untended, and left to grow wild, while the building remained perfectly preserved.

Catherine patted down her damp and clinging dress. The cloudburst had been short, but ferocious enough to soak her to her underwear. She hurried through the hawthorn tunnel and returned to sunlight to continue drying out.

The front door was open as she had left it, the house silent, the grounds wet and sparkling as they dried. She checked her watch. Edith would be sleeping. Maude in her scullery, washing the dishes from the luncheon she’d missed.

But before she went inside, she wanted to inspect the garden to discover what it was the bee-keeper had been doing beneath her window. She desperately wanted something to start making sense around here, and had a savage impulse to smack her own face until reason returned and stayed put.

Guests still had rights and she was done with being kept in the dark, and distracted, manipulated. Mike, Tara, Edith, Maude, they were all taking and taking and taking something from her. Even if they were not present, their bullying influences were. Here, at best, she was being humoured, but also deceived. She’d tried to loosen the noose, but the village thwarted her.

It was irrational to think this.

Why did she allow people to affect her so much?

Beside the porch she found vestiges of a path made from greening flagstones that hugged the foundations of the building. Catherine followed the path, often untangling the hem of her skirt from the prickly things with rhubarb-red stalks that intruded upon the narrow space between the house’s walls and the garden’s overrun borders.

Her progress along the side of the house was enclosed by shadow, and slow, and impeded by great rose stems that adhered to the bricks like tropical vines. She grazed her bare legs, cut the back of one hand. The abrasions stung and her skin itched.

When she rounded the rear corner of the house she was presented with a view of the snarled orchard and lawns grown to the top of her thighs. The flies were also waiting, fat and lazy, corpulent with easy nourishment. But noisy and angry in their defence of some boundary she had unwittingly crossed. They circled, bumped her arms and face. She flailed her hands and thought of going in search of the back door. But the idea of Maude’s scorn kept her outside.

Discomfort combined with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.