Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  “I suppose you noticed he’s soaking wet?” Piper said. “Please don’t tell Dad that he’s been outside. None of us are supposed to leave the house if the weather’s bad. Dad will go mad if he finds out.”

  “Of course,” I replied. The last thing I wanted was to get Cameron in trouble, especially since he already seemed to have taken a dislike to me.

  Piper smiled and then called up the stairs, “Cameron! Dinner’s ready!”

  He didn’t reply, but she didn’t seem to expect him to.

  “Come on,” she said. “Dad and Lilias are already in there.”

  I followed her to the hall. The lights on the sitting-room side were switched off but the spotlights above the dining table were turned on, bathing the table in a pool of too-bright light that threw everything else into shadow. Uncle James and Lilias were already sitting there and, for a weird moment, the spotlights on them almost made it look like this was the stage of a play and they were just actors in it, rather than a family about to eat dinner.

  I followed Piper across the room to the table. Uncle James sat at one end with Lilias to his right. “I set your place here next to me,” Piper said. “Sit down and I’ll get the food.”

  She left the room and came back a moment later with a large dish of vegetables, which she placed in the middle of the table. Cameron arrived just as she headed back into the kitchen.

  “Oh, so you’ve decided to grace us with your presence at last?” Uncle James said, as Cameron pulled out the chair at the opposite end of the table. I noticed that he kept his right hand hidden in his pocket and only used his left. He’d towel-dried his hair but it was still noticeably damp and I wondered if Uncle James suspected that he’d been outside. “Have you said hello to your cousin at least?”

  “We met upstairs,” Cameron replied, without looking at me.

  “Here we are,” Piper said brightly, appearing with two steaming plates in her hands. “Eat up before it gets cold.”

  It was steak with a Béarnaise sauce on top. I was very impressed – I could barely manage to produce beans on toast or boil an egg, but when I said as much, Piper laughed. “I probably shouldn’t admit this but I didn’t cook it myself. It’s one of those luxury ready meals. I wanted to serve something a bit more exciting than pizza for your first night with us.”

  “It looks wonderful,” Uncle James said.

  “Yes, this looks very appetizing, Piper, but how exactly am I supposed to eat it?” Cameron asked from the end of the table.

  “Oh.” Piper looked flustered. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think. Here, let me cut it up for you.”

  I watched in surprise as Piper got to her feet, rushed to Cameron’s side and proceeded to cut his steak up into bite-size chunks, while he held his fork loosely in his left hand and watched her with an unreadable expression on his face. It was an embarrassing moment and no one offered any explanation but I realized that Cameron’s burnt hand must mean that he couldn’t use a knife properly.

  “Your mother tells me you’re quite the photographer, Sophie,” Uncle James said.

  “Oh, well… I’m nothing special at it or anything but I do enjoy taking photos,” I said. I was very aware of Cameron’s blue eyes fixed on me from the other end of the table.

  “It’s no use trying to keep young people inside, I know,” Uncle James said, “but I must insist that you stick to the paths. There are some beautiful clifftop walks around here but it isn’t safe to wander from them. Just this summer a tourist died when they went too close to the edge.” He shook his head. “Such a waste. Apparently he was trying to get a better photograph to take home with him, but I hope I can trust you to be more sensible than that? And make sure you go with Piper or Cameron the first time. They know which areas are safe and which aren’t.”

  “We’ll go and explore tomorrow,” Piper said, smiling at me.

  “And Lilias,” Uncle James said, “don’t you have something to say to your cousin?”

  “Sorry for running away, and not giving you a proper welcome, and being so rude,” Lilias said, like an actor reading out one of her lines.

  “That’s all right,” I said, giving her a smile.

  “I drew you a picture,” Lilias said.

  “Good girl,” Uncle James said in an approving tone.

  She produced a piece of paper from underneath the table and started to slide it across to me. I saw Cameron glance at the drawing as it went past his plate and then, inexplicably, he dropped his fork, snatched the drawing from Lilias and crumpled it up in his fist.

  “Cameron!” Uncle James snapped. “Don’t start any of your nonsense. Give the drawing to Sophie.”

  “I don’t think she wants this one,” Cameron replied, quite calmly.

  “Give it to her now,” Uncle James said through gritted teeth.

  For a moment they stared at each other across the table. Finally, Cameron shrugged and straightened out the drawing as best he could with only one hand. His right remained hidden from sight under the table. He handed the drawing to me with a look that was almost apologetic.

  As soon as I took the drawing, I knew why he hadn’t wanted me to see it. Lilias had drawn the picture using just two crayons, black and red. It was a house with a family lined up outside it – so far, so normal – except the family were all dead. There seemed to be parents and three children, and they were all lying in puddles of blood, scribbled in with angry, jagged red lines. At the top, in her childish, wobbly handwriting, Lilias had written a title for her ghoulish picture: The Murder House.

  “He killed them all while they were asleep,” Lilias said, in the same self-satisfied tone of voice in which a magician would say “ta-da!” after finishing a magic trick.

  “Who did?” Uncle James said, giving her a startled look.

  “No one knows. They never caught him.”

  “She’s been watching that unsolved crime show again,” Cameron said, picking up his fork and returning to his dinner as if this was something quite normal. “She drew another one of those murder scenes.”

  “Oh, Lilias,” Uncle James groaned. “For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t you have drawn a flower or something?” He glanced at me and said, “I’m sorry – she’s going through a bit of a macabre phase at the moment. I suppose all children do at some point, don’t they?”

  I nodded, but couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever gone around drawing grisly murder scenes and presenting them to people as gifts.

  “It happened at night,” Lilias said, looking at me. “They all went to bed and someone killed them while they were asleep. He hacked them up with an axe as they lay in their beds. Chop, chop! Like that.”

  “Lilias, that’s enough!” Uncle James said. He sounded exasperated. “Not at the dinner table, please. Remember your manners.”

  “Sophie will think she’s come to a house of horrors,” Piper said, with a forced laugh. She turned to Cameron and said, “You must play the piano for Sophie while she’s here.” She spoke in a bright tone and I guessed she was trying to get the conversation back to a more normal topic. “Perhaps you could play something after dinner?”

  She glanced to the other end of the room. With the lights turned off, the stage and the piano were cloaked in shadows, so when a discordant chord suddenly rang out, I almost jumped out of my seat, my knife and fork falling to the table with a clatter.

  “Who’s that?” I asked, straining my eyes in the direction of the stage, trying to make out the piano and wondering whether there could be a fifth member of the Craig family I didn’t know about. Someone was pressing the piano keys on the other side of the room. There came several more chords, all wrong and out of tune, as if the person didn’t know how to play and was just pressing keys at random.

  Cameron laughed, the first time I’d heard him do so since I’d arrived. But it wasn’t a friendly sound. “Relax,” he said. “It’s only Shellycoat.”

  There was more tuneless clanging, a soft thump and, a few seconds later, a grey cat tro
tted out of the shadows and jumped straight on to Cameron’s lap. “I must have forgotten to close the lid over the keys,” Cameron said, still looking amused.

  I looked down at my food, feeling embarrassed. “Shellycoat is an unusual name for a cat,” I said, just for the sake of something to say.

  “Oh, she’s named after a Scottish folk legend,” Piper said. “A shellycoat is a kind of Scottish monster. It haunts streams and rivers and has long, wet, black hair, and wears a coat of shells – small ones from water snails and whelks and things like that, which means you can hear it coming at least. If they’re not able to drown people, shellycoats delight in humiliating them instead, so they say.”

  That was the second time today that someone had mentioned drowning to me. It wouldn’t have bothered me before Jay died, but since then I didn’t want to hear that word or think about it. I still wasn’t sure whether Uncle James and his family knew what had just happened to my best friend, but Piper seemed to sense my discomfort because hurriedly she changed the subject by gesturing towards the cat and saying, “Rebecca named her.”

  At the mention of her name, there was a sudden total silence. Everyone seemed to freeze in their seats. Rebecca’s death had been a tragedy, so I hadn’t expected her to be a light-hearted subject, but I hadn’t expected this kind of reaction either. Everyone was staring at Piper as if she’d just said the foulest swear word imaginable.

  Cameron was the first to recover. He skewered a bite-size chunk of his steak and put it in his mouth, chewing it slowly, watching Piper the whole time. Uncle James set his glass down on the table so hard that some wine slopped out of it, staining the tablecloth. Lilias slammed her knife down into her steak, and there was a thud as it made contact with bone.

  And that was when she started screaming.

  It was a proper, blood-curdling shriek that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. For a confused moment I was sure Lilias must have chopped her finger off, the way she was yelling. If there had been any neighbours nearby, they would surely have called the police, absolutely convinced that a murder was being committed.

  With a hiss, the cat shot out of Cameron’s lap, and he was on his feet a second later, closely followed by Uncle James. They both rushed over to Lilias and Cameron shoved her plate of food across the table, as if it were a bomb that might go off at any second. I noticed that Cameron’s hand was bleeding and realized that the cat must have scratched him as it ran away. A few drops fell on to the tablecloth.

  “It’s all right, Lilias,” Cameron said. “Remember what you have to do. Just breathe. Just breathe.”

  I could see Lilias trying, but it was as if she was so terrified that she couldn’t physically draw in the air. She was shaking from head to toe, like she was having some kind of fit. It took them several minutes to calm her down, all the while Piper kept saying, over and over again, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. The packet said they were boneless. I checked and double checked!”

  Finally, when Lilias had calmed down a little, Cameron said, “I’ll take her to bed.” And in one fluid motion he picked her up and she wrapped both arms around his neck, her face pressed into his shoulder. He scooped up the ostrich, lying discarded on the table, and strode from the room without another word.

  Uncle James sat down heavily in his chair, Piper had both hands clamped over her mouth and, for a moment, there was a strained silence.

  “Is… Is she going to be OK?” I finally asked.

  “She’ll be fine,” Uncle James replied. “You must be wondering about what you just saw, Sophie. I’m afraid that Lilias has a condition. She’s receiving treatment for it. She goes to a therapist in town once a week.”

  “What kind of condition?” I asked.

  “It’s called cartilogenophobia,” Uncle James said. “Fear of bones.”

  Piper lowered her hands from her mouth and I could see that they were trembling slightly. “I don’t know how this could have happened,” she whispered. “The box said there were no bones. There must have been some mix up at the factory. I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Uncle James replied. He glanced at me and said, “You might as well know that Lilias is scared of all bones, even the ones inside her own body. She’s been gradually improving since she started therapy but we never serve any food with bones in it and … and just as an extra precaution we keep all the kitchen knives in a locked drawer. A couple of years ago Lilias got hold of one and tried to cut out one of her collarbones. She survived, obviously – Cameron caught her in the act otherwise God knows what would have happened, and I don’t think she’d try to do it again but … we don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Of course not,” I said, hardly knowing what else to say. I wondered whether that was why Lilias had been wearing a turtleneck – to hide whatever scars remained from what she’d tried to do.

  Cameron and Lilias did not return to the table and their food slowly congealed and cooled on their plates. Piper, Uncle James and I finished our meals in strained silence and it was a relief when it was over and I could finally return to my bedroom.

  The smell of rotting flowers greeted me as soon as I opened the door. To my surprise, the purple butterworts by my bedside table seemed to have shrivelled up and died while I’d been downstairs. The change seemed so fast that I almost wondered whether someone could have sneaked in here and swapped the living flowers for dead ones.

  As I got changed I wondered what on earth Jay would say about all this if he were here. Probably something like: “They’re all barking mad, Sophie. I’d scarper if I were you, before they turn you into a basket case too. I’ll still come and visit you in the loony bin, though – if you go off your rocker, I mean. You’ll always have me. You know that, right?”

  Sometimes, I could hear his voice so clearly in my mind that it was almost like he was still here with me, like I could reach out and touch him.

  “I won’t leave,” I said, talking to Jay even though I knew he wasn’t really there. “No matter how much I want to, I won’t leave until I find out the truth about what happened to you.”

  The room felt muggy and warm but when I went over to the window to let in a blast of fresh sea air, I found that it had been sealed shut with some kind of black sealing wax. The window wouldn’t budge – I couldn’t even open it a crack.

  I groaned. It was so hot – perhaps those flowers had died naturally after all. I switched off the lamp, climbed into bed and tried to lie as still as possible so that I might cool down a bit.

  I didn’t think I would fall asleep very easily that night but in fact I fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down, and probably would have slept soundly all the way through till morning if I hadn’t been woken up a few hours later by cold fingers wrapping themselves tightly around my ankle.

  Chapter Four

  In a village fifteen miles away,

  Was to be a ball that night.

  And though the air was heavy and cold,

  Her heart was warm and light.

  The fingers were cold as ice, so cold that they seemed to burn and blister my skin. I gasped in the dark and tried to sit up to reach for the bedside lamp, but then another cold hand grabbed my wrist and pinned it to the bed. Fingers entwined through my hair, yanking my head back down to the pillow. And suddenly there were cold hands all over me – they seemed to come straight up out of the bed, pinching and scratching and clawing at my skin, like a hundred tiny birds pecking me to death.

  I opened my mouth to scream and found the hands were in my mouth as well, tiny little cold fingers far too small to be human. They were more like dolls’ hands, squeezing around my tongue, scratching at my teeth, poking the inside of my mouth and crawling down my throat, choking me and making it impossible to breathe.

  I thrashed and flailed and fought them as hard as I could, but I was helpless in the grip of so many hands and I knew that they were winning, I knew that they meant to kill me.

  Then a voice whispered in my ear, and
it was a warm, sweet voice, a voice I knew so well.

  “Wake up, Sophie,” Jay said. “It’s only a dream. Time to wake up now.”

  And I could have cried because Jay wasn’t really dead, he was right here with me and it had all just been a terrible nightmare. The knowledge gave me the strength to fight the cold hands that were trying to drag me down into the darkness. With a final burst of effort I managed to yank one of my arms free and lash out at them. My hand slapped someone hard in the dark. I felt skin tear and warm blood seep out beneath my nails.

  And then that voice again: “Wake up, Sophie! You’re dreaming!”

  Only it wasn’t Jay’s voice this time; it was Cameron’s.

  I blinked in confusion, trying to work out what was happening. The lights were on and I saw that I was in the guest bedroom at Uncle James’s house. Cameron was leaning over me, his dark hair all tousled from sleep, both hands gripping my arms. A deep scratch ran down his cheek, bleeding slightly.

  “You’re dreaming,” he said again. “It’s just a nightmare – you’re safe.”

  Cameron’s left hand felt warm and normal on my skin but his right felt strange – hard and rubbery, as if he was wearing some kind of glove. I looked down and gasped in shock at the sight of his right hand. Even though I’d known it was burnt, I wasn’t prepared for the sight of that shrivelled, ruined skin that completely covered his palm and reached all the way up past his wrist.

  It reminded me of the waitress back at the café. I could still hear her scream ringing in my ears, could still smell that awful smell of burning hair and human flesh. I shuddered at the memory, but Cameron clearly thought it was the sight of his hand that had made me shudder. He snatched his hands away as if I’d given him an electric shock, and stepped back from the bed so fast that he stumbled slightly. His trousers didn’t have any pockets so he put his hand behind his back instead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “I wouldn’t have come in here like this, only I heard you cry out and I thought—” He broke off abruptly, and I got the impression that he’d suddenly changed his mind about what he’d been going to say. “I thought you might wake the whole house,” he said instead.