Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  Despite the fact I knew it had just been a dream, I still felt the need to look around the bed, still half expecting to see hands poking up out of the mattress or curling around the pillow. Of course, there was nothing there but crumpled sheets, damp with sweat. The room was hot enough to suffocate.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just… I guess I was having a nightmare.”

  “So it would seem,” he replied. He raised an eyebrow. “Is this going to happen every night, do you think?”

  I could feel myself blushing furiously. Cameron hadn’t exactly seemed delighted to see me as it was, and waking him up in the middle of the night like this was definitely not giving a good first impression. “It’s never happened before,” I said. Then I saw the scratch on his face and groaned aloud before I could stop myself. “Did I do that?”

  “I couldn’t wake you,” he replied. Then added, “You’re stronger than you look.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said again.

  He inclined his head slightly. “Forget it. It’s not the first time I’ve been slapped by a girl, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Do you think you’ll be all right now?”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t need to keep apologizing,” Cameron said, already turning away.

  I called goodnight to him but he didn’t reply as he walked out the door, carefully moving his burnt hand in front of him so that I wouldn’t see it as he left.

  I lay awake for the next few minutes feeling terrible, hating myself for reacting to Cameron’s hand like that. If I hadn’t been still half tangled up in the nightmare, as well as reminded of that burnt waitress, I would never have behaved that way. I thought about trying to explain to Cameron in the morning, but was worried that would only make an even bigger issue out of it.

  When I rested back down on the pillows, I still felt nervous of the bed, half fearing that the cold hands might come back the moment I turned out the light.

  I shook my head, disgusted with myself. I’d be screaming at shadows next. I reached out and firmly snapped off the light.

  The moment I did so, someone downstairs started to laugh.

  It wasn’t like any laughter I had ever heard before and I snapped the light back on at once.

  Then the laugh came again.

  God, it was a weird sound, and suddenly I was sitting bolt upright, my heart thumping in my chest. The laughter was shrill and high-pitched but it sounded all wrong, as if the person wasn’t actually amused and didn’t even understand what laughter was, but was just going through the motions of making the sound.

  I made myself get out of bed and tiptoe out to the balustrades. I knew they looked over the entrance hall by the front door but, in the darkness, I couldn’t see whoever was down there. I could hear them, though, clearer than ever. And, as I stood there, the laughing stopped and the person suddenly spoke.

  “Monstrous,” they said, quite clearly. Then, “Monstrous, monstrous.”

  A cold horror prickled over my skin. There was something wrong with the voice, something dreadfully wrong, as if the speaker was not quite right in the head, demented somehow, or inhuman in some way. No normal person would speak like that. I couldn’t even tell if it was male or female. It was high-pitched but didn’t quite sound like either. Whoever they were, they were down there in the lobby, talking to themselves in the dark.

  I thought of the awful murder scene that Lilias had been talking about at dinner, and I knew I had to wake someone up and tell them there was an intruder so that we could call the police. I wondered how long it would take for them to arrive at this lonely clifftop spot. The nearest house must be several miles away. We could all be butchered in our beds and no one would find out about it for hours and hours.

  “Never do that again,” the high voice downstairs said. “Never do that again. There’s blood under the rug!”

  I backed away from the balustrade, trying to remember where Uncle James’s room was but, at that moment, a door down the corridor opened and Cameron stepped out. Despite the heat, he’d put on a dressing gown over his pyjamas, and his right hand was buried in his pocket.

  I gestured to him frantically. “There’s someone down there!” I whispered as he came towards me.

  “Yes, I know,” Cameron replied. “It’s Dark Tom.”

  “Monstrous,” the voice said softly. “Monstrous.”

  My fingers gripped the banister hard. “Who’s Dark Tom?” I whispered.

  “Piper’s African Grey, of course.” Then, when I still looked blank, Cameron added, “Her pet parrot. His cage is tucked into the alcove by the front door. Didn’t she introduce you to him?”

  I was so relieved that I could have hugged him. “No, she didn’t,” I said, relaxing my grip on the banister.

  “I suppose you imagined that we were all about to be axed in our beds by a lunatic,” Cameron said. “I did try to warn you not to look at Lilias’s drawing.” In the dim light I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I could hear the amusement in his voice. “Are you always this nervous?” he asked.

  “He just startled me,” I snapped. “That’s all. How many words can he say anyway?”

  “Oh, loads. He’s got an amazing vocabulary. We loved teaching him new words when we were kids. He’ll repeat anything if he hears it often enough. Sometimes he’ll even repeat things he’s heard only once.”

  “He was talking about blood under the rug.”

  “Yes. Well. Dark Tom’s heard a lot of unspeakable things in this house, I’m afraid. Don’t be offended if he starts swearing at you. His manners are appalling. He’s a horrible old thing, really. I don’t know why we put up with him.” Cameron leaned over the balustrades and said in a harsh whisper, “Tom! Be quiet! Or you’ll get no fruit for breakfast tomorrow!”

  “Blood,” Dark Tom said sullenly, “under the rug.”

  “I mean it, Tom!” Cameron hissed.

  And the parrot finally fell silent.

  “Well,” Cameron said, turning to me and raising his eyebrow slightly, “what an exciting night we seem to be having. If Tom wakes you again just tell him to pipe down. You have to be firm with him. Get Piper to introduce you in the morning. But don’t expect him to make friends with you, he pretty much hates everyone. And don’t stick your fingers into his cage, whatever you do. He’ll have them off if he gets half the chance.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. “And for … for earlier.”

  Cameron looked at me in the dark and there was silence between us for a moment. I heard him draw breath and thought he was going to say something else but, in the end, he just said, “Well, goodnight then.”

  And he went back to his room, closing the door firmly behind him.

  There were no more disturbances that night and I managed to sleep until the morning. When I woke up, the first thing I noticed was the dappled light dancing on the ceiling, reflecting off the sea, and the sound of seagulls calling to each other in the distance.

  I got up and went to the window, which looked out on to the garden at the back of the house, with the ocean beyond. But the thing that caught my attention straight away was the burnt tree. It was a black dead thing, with spindly branches poking up into the air like twisted fingers. It was hard to tell because everything was so black, but I thought I could make out a few rotting planks of wood nestled among the branches, as if there’d been some kind of tree house there once.

  When I looked at my watch I was startled to see that it was gone ten. I’d slept much later than I’d meant to, so I dressed quickly in a tank top and jeans and went downstairs. Now that the sun was shining through the windows, I noticed the alcove Cameron had mentioned. The parrot’s cage was tucked in the corner, almost out of sight. He was extremely handsome, with sleek grey feathers and keen intelligent eyes that watched me the entire time.

  “Hello,” I said. “You gave me quite a fright last night.”

  “Fright,” Dark Tom said, tilting his head
this way and that, as if trying the new word out to see if he liked it. “Fright. Fright. Fright!”

  Although I knew the parrot didn’t understand the word, and that he was only repeating it back at me, he seemed to say it with a kind of relish that sent a shiver down my spine.

  Piper must have heard me come down because she emerged from the living room a second later.

  “You naughty thing, waking Sophie up like that!” Her strawberry-blonde hair was down today, tumbling loose over her shoulders in soft waves that made her look even more like a mermaid.

  She gave me an apologetic look and said, “Cameron told me Tom gave you a scare in the night. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s OK. It’s lucky Cameron came out when he did or I might have woken your dad up over a parrot!”

  “Oh, Cameron can’t stand Tom talking in the night. He’s a chronic insomniac. Cameron, that is, not Tom! It’s because he broods over things so much, that’s what I think. If he’d lighten up a bit and have some fun he’d probably sleep like a baby. Would you like some breakfast? Afterwards, perhaps we can go for a walk along the clifftop?”

  “Sounds good. How’s Lilias?” I asked, as we walked into the kitchen.

  “Oh, she’s all right. She’s always better after a good night’s rest. Sit down and I’ll make some toast.”

  I pulled up a chair, and Shellycoat jumped straight on to my lap.

  “She must like you,” Piper said, surprised. “She doesn’t normally take to strangers.”

  I ate my toast with one hand and stroked Shellycoat with the other. I could see she was quite an old cat. She only had a handful of teeth left and she was rather bony, but she purred the whole time I was stroking her.

  “What’s wrong with her eye?” I asked.

  Now that I could see her more closely, I realized that one of her eyelids was closed tight.

  “She’s blind in that eye,” Piper said.

  “Oh, was she born like that?”

  Piper hesitated a moment, then said, “No, she wasn’t born like that. She used to be Rebecca’s cat, you see.”

  I frowned and was about to ask what she meant, but Piper was already heading for the door.

  “Shall we go now, if you’re finished?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Let me just grab my camera.”

  I went upstairs to fetch it and, a few minutes later, Piper was unlocking the heavy chain around the gate.

  “Did Dad explain to you about the gate?” she asked.

  “You mean that it must always stay locked?”

  Piper nodded. “He’s absolutely paranoid about something happening to Lilias.”

  “Is that why my bedroom window is sealed shut?”

  “Oh, all the upstairs windows are, but it wasn’t Dad who did that. Apparently there was some kind of accident back when the house used to be a school. One of the girls fell from an upstairs window.”

  “How awful! Was she OK?”

  “No, she died. They sealed the windows after that.”

  We locked the gate carefully behind us and then set out along the path. It hugged the edge of the clifftop and I could see at once why it was dangerous. There were no barriers of any kind and it was a sheer drop to the rocks below. The wind hadn’t died down much since yesterday, and seemed to tug at my sleeve like invisible hands trying to pull me over the edge. When I asked Piper about it, she said, “They did talk about putting fences up once but there’s miles of open croft land and moorland around here and it would cost a fortune to put fences up everywhere. What do you think? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  It was certainly beautiful, but there was one part of the scene that made me feel cold all over – and that was the sand down on the beach. I had imagined it being a warm golden colour but, instead, it was completely black, like mud.

  Black sand…

  Suddenly I was back in the café, watching the Ouija-board app spell out those words.

  Frozen Charlotte, black sand…

  “Do you know anyone called Charlotte?” I asked Piper.

  She looked surprised. “Charlotte? Not that I can think of. Why?”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  We walked along the path while Piper chattered away, pointing out birds and plants and rocks. But after five minutes I couldn’t contain the question any longer.

  “What did you mean about Shellycoat earlier?”

  “Shellycoat?”

  “Yes, you said she was Rebecca’s cat, as if that explained why she’s blind in one eye.”

  Piper came to a stop in the middle of the path. “Oh,” she said. “I just assumed that you knew. I forgot you only met Rebecca once.” She looked at me, strands of hair blowing around her face, and said, “If you’d known her a little better it would make sense to you. Rebecca was … well, she had a bit of a cruel streak, I’m afraid, and Shellycoat probably just got in her way one day. Or maybe she had nothing else to do.”

  I stared at her. “Are you saying that Rebecca… That she did it to her own cat on purpose?”

  “She promised never to do it again,” Piper said softly. “I think she knew it was wrong, really.”

  “But that’s terrible!”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. But at least Shellycoat survived. Her sister wasn’t so lucky.”

  “Why, what happened to her?”

  “We had two cats for a while, Shellycoat and Selkie. Rebecca had one and I had the other. Did you notice the big fireplace in the kitchen? We were in there one evening when Rebecca stood up and walked over to it, holding Selkie. I’ll always remember how she just stood there, looking at the flames for the longest time and then, all of a sudden she … she just threw poor Selkie straight into the fire. She was so badly burnt that she didn’t survive. Rebecca cried every day for a month afterwards.” Piper shook her head. “God knows what possessed her to do it in the first place. That was when Dad bought me Dark Tom. Hey, why don’t we walk down to Neist Point and I’ll show you the lighthouse? Sometimes you can see dolphins and whales and basking sharks and all kinds of things down there.”

  I couldn’t get the image of Selkie being burned to death out of my head. Had Rebecca really been capable of doing something so awful? I wanted to carry on talking about her, but Piper seemed to want to change the subject because as soon as I started to ask another question she cut me off. “Have you ever been diving?” she asked. “There’s lots of good diving around these cliffs because of all the wrecks and anemones and dead men’s fingers and things.”

  “Dead men’s fingers? What’s that?”

  “Oh, it’s this stuff that looks a bit like coral, only softer and sort of swollen. It grows on the rocks. Look, there’s some down there!”

  We carried on walking down the path for a couple of minutes before Piper said, “I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend. Dad told us that he died just recently. It must have been such an awful shock for you. What was his name?”

  “Jay,” I said, and saying it aloud made a lump rise in my throat. I really didn’t want to talk about him, not to Piper or anyone, but I couldn’t expect Piper to talk to me about her sister if I refused to talk about my friend.

  “Were the two of you a couple?” Piper asked.

  “No. We’d been best friends for ages – we met at school when we were four. It was never a romantic thing. But…”

  “But what?”

  “Well … just a few days before he … he…” God, I just couldn’t say it. I just couldn’t say the word ‘died’. That would make it real. Being so far away in Skye I could almost pretend that Jay was still back home, waiting for me to return so that we could go to our café or hang out at the bowling alley or see a film at the cinema.

  Piper was looking at me, waiting for me to go on, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “A couple of weeks ago we were at my house when he … he asked me if I would go to the end-of-school dance with him. I thought he was joking so I laughed. And, a moment later, he laughed too, but aft
erwards I thought that … I don’t know … that maybe…”

  “Maybe he was asking you for real?” Piper asked in a sympathetic voice.

  “Yeah. And now I’m just… I worry that he was being serious and, if he was, then how could I have just laughed at him like that?”

  I hadn’t spoken about that awkward moment between us to anyone, had hardly even acknowledged it to myself. Tears prickled my eyes and I knew I needed to change the subject quickly or I’d end up sobbing like a little kid and wouldn’t be able to stop.

  In my mind, I could see him again, standing there in the dark car park, blowing me a kiss I’d thought was just meant to be a kind of joke.

  And I heard the last words he’d ever say to me: Anything for you…

  “What would you have said?” Piper asked quietly. “If he really was being serious?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied, digging my nails into my palms. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Piper didn’t ask any more questions and, a moment later, we suddenly came across a simple white cross at the edge of the cliff. As we got closer, I was startled to see the name printed neatly across it: Rebecca Craig.

  “This is where she died,” Piper said, when I asked her about it. “Didn’t you know?”

  “No. My parents never told me how it happened.”

  “I suppose they didn’t want to upset you. It was so awful. She came out here all by herself in the middle of the night. No one knows why. It was January, there was snow everywhere, and it gets terribly windy on the island in the winter. As much as ninety miles an hour, so they say, and you’d believe it if you heard it – it howls like anything. My grandmother used to say it was the Sluagh, the spirits of the restless dead, travelling around the island in packs. I guess living on an island makes people very superstitious. The Sluagh are supposed to approach from the west, and people always say you should keep the west-facing windows of a house closed so they can’t get in. God only knows what possessed Rebecca to come out here like that, all by herself in the middle of the night. She knew we were absolutely forbidden from doing it. But that was typical of Rebecca, always doing something she wasn’t supposed to.”