Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  “Did she fall over the cliff?”

  “Yes, but that’s not what killed her. She fell three metres and landed on a little rocky outcrop sticking out of the side. She broke her leg when she fell so she wasn’t able to climb back up again. There was so much snow that year. None of us had any idea she was out here. It wasn’t until the morning that we realized she was gone. By then she’d frozen to death.”

  “How horrible!”

  Piper’s lovely face was troubled as she gazed out across the water. “It must have been so scary for her, all alone like that. She must have called and called for help, but we were too far away to hear her. You know, sometimes, when we’re at home at night, the wind out on the clifftop can play tricks on you, can almost sound like a voice. A couple of times I really thought I heard her calling my name, as if she was still lost out here, trying to find her way home.” She glanced at me then and said, “Sophie, can I ask you a favour?”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “Don’t mention Rebecca’s name back at the house. You saw how everyone reacted last night. It’s just that she’s such a painful subject for my family. Lilias never met her, of course, but sometimes I think she’s haunted by Rebecca as much as any of us. She’s terrified of her old bedroom, you know, and won’t walk past it if she can help it. Mum had her nervous breakdown and Dad’s had this complete with gates and fences and locks ever since. I think he’s worried sick that the same thing will happen to Lilias. And I’m afraid Cameron blames Rebecca for what happened to his hand. I suppose it was her fault – she was the one who started the fire, after all. Obviously, it would have been terrible for anyone, but because Cameron’s a musician it’s even worse for him. He’s learned how to play the piano with just one hand, but it’s not the same, and there are some pieces that he can’t play at all any more because you’ve just got to have two hands. It’s the one thing he can’t forgive her for. I don’t think he ever will. You won’t upset everyone by talking about Rebecca, will you?”

  “I… I’ll try not to,” I said. The moment the words were out of my mouth, I regretted it. I didn’t mean them, after all I had to talk about Rebecca if I was going to find out more about her. But how was I supposed to tell Piper that I thought her dead sister might have killed my friend?

  She beamed at me. “I knew I could count on you.”

  Chapter Five

  How brightly beamed her laughing eye,

  As a well known voice was heard,

  And driving up to the cottage door,

  Her lover’s sleigh appeared.

  We continued down to Neist Point where I took some photos of the causeway jutting out into the sea, as well as the lighthouse and the sheltered bays more than thirty metres below us. We didn’t see any dolphins or basking sharks but there were plenty of razorbills and black guillemots around for me to photograph.

  We turned back towards the house soon after that and I took a few pictures of it from the outside before we went in.

  As soon as we stepped through the front door I heard the most beautiful music I’d ever heard in my whole life. It was sweet and lilting, soft and sad, full of unspoken words and half-remembered dreams.

  “Cameron obviously thought he’d get a bit of sneaky practice in whilst we were out,” Piper said.

  “Is that Cameron playing?” I asked, hardly able to believe it.

  Piper smiled at me. “I told you he was good. We can go and listen if you like – he won’t notice us walk in. He never notices anything once he starts to play. I think the whole house could be burning down around him and he’d still play to the end of the piece.”

  So we went into the old school hall, with its raised stage at one end. Cameron was sitting at the piano, his dark head bent over the keys as his left hand flew up and down them. I couldn’t help wishing I’d been able to hear him play when he could still use both hands, but even with only one, the music was breathtaking. I felt like I could stay there and listen to him play forever.

  The room was completely different during the day. Sunlight slanted in through the full-height windows, catching dust motes that danced in the beams and shining off the smooth wooden boards of the stage.

  Finally, the beautiful piece came to an end and there was just the last lingering echo as Cameron held his fingers down on the final notes. Piper immediately burst into applause and I couldn’t help feeling a bit irritated with her for giving our presence away. Cameron instantly snatched his hand from the piano and his blue eyes were cold when he turned to look at us.

  “Back so soon?” he said. “I thought you’d be out for longer.”

  “Oh, please carry on,” I said. “That was wonderful.”

  I thought his expression softened just a little, but his voice was still cool when he said, “I’m glad you approve.”

  “Would you play something else?”

  Cameron’s hand twitched towards the keys and I thought, for a moment, he was going to agree when Piper ruined it by saying, “Yes, please play something else, Cameron. I know, how about ‘Sweet Seraphina’? That’s a beautiful one and you play it so well.”

  “Hardly. In fact, I can’t play it at all any more,” Cameron said. He stood up and closed the lid with a bang that made the keys shiver, sending out faint echoes of themselves, as if the piano itself was sighing. “That piece of music requires two hands and can’t be adapted to only one.”

  “Oh!” Piper winced. “I’m sorry, Cameron, I didn’t realize.”

  “Why should you?” Cameron asked, and there was ice in his voice. “You know nothing about music.”

  “I’m sorry, I was only trying to help.”

  “Trying to help!” Cameron repeated, and there was a savage bitterness in his voice I didn’t understand. “I never asked for your help, Piper, and I certainly don’t want it! Why aren’t you two off picking berries or something? Isn’t that the kind of mindless thing girls like to do? I thought I’d get an hour’s peace at least, but clearly that was too much to hope for.”

  And with that he jumped off the stage and stalked past us.

  “Oh dear,” Piper said once he was gone. “I’ve upset him again. I told you he was sensitive about his hand.” She sighed and then said brightly, “Oh, well, that’s boys for you! That’s why I’m so pleased you’ve come to stay with us. It’s nice to have some girl company for a change.”

  We walked back out to the entrance hall, and as we went past Dark Tom’s cage he started to hum. It was a weird sound and, like his speech, it made me think of a child who wasn’t quite right in the head. A child shut up by themselves in the dark for too long, who didn’t really understand the sounds they were making and were just trying to copy something they’d heard from someone else. He bobbed his head up and down to the rhythm as he hummed, and shuffled his clawed feet up and down his perch. The song wasn’t quite in tune but I would have recognized it anywhere, it was the one that still haunted my dreams. The simple, sing-song melody that had played from Jay’s phone the night he died.

  I stopped so abruptly beside his cage that Piper almost walked into me. “What’s that tune he’s humming?” I asked, and my voice came out harsher than I’d meant it to.

  “How odd,” Piper said, staring at Tom. “You know, he hasn’t hummed that one in years and years. It was Rebecca’s favourite song. It’s an old folk ballad called ‘Fair Charlotte’.”

  “Charlotte?”

  “Yes, it’s about a girl called Charlotte who goes to a ball but refuses to wear a cloak because she wants everyone to see how pretty she looks in her gown. She travels with her boyfriend, Charlie, in an open carriage but by the time they reach the ball she’s frozen to death.”

  Charlotte is cold…

  The words from the Ouija-board app floated back to me and I shuddered.

  “Dark Tom often hums and sings to himself when Cameron’s been playing the piano, but he normally just tries to copy whatever song he last heard. I wonder if Lilias has been singing it to him?”

  �
��Why was it Rebecca’s favourite song?” I asked.

  “Oh, because of the dolls, I suppose.”

  “What dolls?”

  “The Frozen Charlotte dolls. Rebecca had a collection of them. They’re based on the dead girl from the song. She just adored them.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “If you like. They’re in her room.”

  We went up the stairs, leaving the humming parrot behind us. Piper opened the door and we stepped into a room that had the dense, airless feel of a place that’d been kept shut up for too long. I instantly felt sticky and hot.

  I was vaguely aware of a bed and a wardrobe and a dressing table and all the normal things a seven-year-old’s bedroom would have, but the thing that instantly caught my attention was the doll display cabinet. Two metres tall, it had a glass door that allowed you to see the rows of shelves within, all lined with dolls.

  After what Piper had said about the folk ballad, I’d expected the Frozen Charlotte dolls to be dressed in beautiful ballgowns, with pretty blonde ringlets on their heads, long eyelashes and maybe elaborate hats and dainty slippers. But these dolls weren’t like that. In fact, they weren’t like any doll I’d ever seen before.

  Made from delicate white porcelain, the Frozen Charlottes were stretched out on their backs, completely naked, with short, painted curls and a pinkish blush to their death-white cheeks. The rosebud lips were little more than a painted red dot, making the dolls look prim and disapproving somehow. Their painted eyes were all different – some were open, some were closed and some of the dolls were so faded with age that they didn’t look like they had eyes at all.

  The dolls were all very small, some were no bigger than a penny and most were just a few centimetres long. A lot of them were chipped or broken in some way, missing arms or legs or even heads. Unlike normal dolls, they had no joints, so their limbs couldn’t be moved. They were frozen in place, lying on their backs with their arms bent at the elbow and their hands stuck up in the air, like claws reaching for their last dying breath. Like little bodies laid out in the morgue. This wasn’t Charlotte on her way to the ball – this was Charlotte after she’d died.

  “But they’re dead!” I blurted out.

  The sight of those outstretched white hands reminded me of the cold fingers I’d felt all over my skin in my nightmare, scratching and pinching and clawing at me.

  “Yes, I think they were supposed to teach kids a lesson, you know? Always wear a coat, do as your mother says, that kind of thing. Rebecca found them just after we moved in. They were downstairs in the basement. We think they must have belonged to the children when this was a school back in Edwardian times. Some of the Charlottes were in a locked box, but there wasn’t room for all of them so the rest were painted into the plaster on the walls. Isn’t that strange? Some kind of art project or something, I suppose. You can tell which ones were in the wall because they still have bits of plaster stuck to them. Dad chipped them out for Rebecca after she found them.”

  I stared again through the glass at the dolls. Most were entirely naked but a few of them had painted shoes or a painted bonnet or stockings with blue bows at the top.

  Piper said, “Rebecca took one of the dolls with her. That night she sneaked out. It must have shattered when she fell over the edge of the cliff. The only thing that survived was the head. They found her holding it the next morning. I’ve kept it with me ever since – look.”

  She reached beneath her T-shirt and pulled out a necklace on a silver chain. It was strung with a single Frozen Charlotte head, and what I thought were white beads at first. Then I looked closer and realized they were hands, dozens of dolls’ hands, and even a couple of white arms.

  “The head looked a bit odd by itself so I added some of the spare hands,” Piper said. “Most of the dolls are missing limbs. I mean, they’re more than a hundred years old, so it’s no wonder they’re a bit battered.”

  Personally, I thought the hands only made the necklace even stranger but I didn’t want to say so when Piper was presenting it to me so proudly.

  “It’s lovely,” I managed.

  “It makes me feel close to Rebecca,” Piper said, tucking it back beneath her T-shirt. She gestured to the cabinet. “The dolls that aren’t broken are worth more money. So are the ones with bonnets and stockings. And the Black Charlottes too, of course. There’s one in there somewhere. Oh yes, there it is.”

  Piper pointed at a tiny doll lying on one of the shelves. It looked just like all the other Frozen Charlottes, except that it was completely black.

  “Why are they all naked?”

  “Children were supposed to make little outfits for them out of bits of velvet and ribbon and things. They’re small so they’d only need scraps to make a dress. The Victorians used to put them into Christmas puddings as charms, and in the summer they froze the little ones and used them as ice cubes in drinks. Isn’t that sweet?”

  Sure, I thought, dead dolls as ice cubes are just adorable. I didn’t think it was sweet at all, more like creepy and weird, but I just nodded.

  “They float on their backs in the bath too,” Piper went on. “So they’re called Bathing Babies. Rebecca even had a Frozen Charlotte music box.” She walked over to the dressing table. “Dad found it for her in some antique shop and gave it to her one Christmas.”

  The box on the dressing table was completely white, with pale silver icicles stencilled on the lid. When Piper opened it, a tinkling version of the ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad began to play, and two small figures started to dance. I stepped forward to get a closer look at them and saw that it was Charlie and Charlotte dancing together. They both wore Victorian dress, but while Charlie’s skin was pink and warm, Charlotte’s was white, her lips were painted blue and tiny snowflakes clung to her dress and hair. Charlie was dancing with a corpse.

  “The dance they never had,” Piper said, closing the lid with a snap. “Weren’t the Victorians peculiar?”

  “What are you doing?”

  We turned around to see Lilias standing in the doorway, staring at us with a look of utter horror.

  “I was just showing Sophie the dolls,” Piper said.

  “You’re not going to let them out, are you?” Lilias asked, her eyes huge.

  “They’re staying right where they are in the cabinet, Lilias,” Piper replied. “There’s nothing to worry about. Look, the key is still right here in the music box.”

  “Dad wants you to help put lunch out,” Lilias said. She kept glancing nervously at the doll cabinet.

  “All right, I’ll come down,” Piper replied.

  After she’d gone, I followed Lilias down the hall to her room.

  “Can I come in?” I asked. Lilias nodded so I slipped in and said, “I’m sorry if I upset you yesterday. I really want us to be friends – we are cousins, after all.”

  “Cameron says we’re not really cousins,” Lilias said. “He says you’re not even related to us and that you shouldn’t have come here.”

  I felt my cheeks burn in a flush. “Oh. But your dad is my mum’s stepbrother. So we’re almost cousins, aren’t we?” I sat down cross-legged on the floor so I was closer to her level and said, “You know, I agree with you – I think Rebecca’s Frozen Charlotte dolls are creepy too.”

  Lilias looked at me but said nothing.

  “Those painted dead faces are enough to scare anyone,” I went on. “And I don’t like how white they are. What is it that you don’t like about them?”

  Lilias was silent for a moment, then she looked me right in the eye and said in a challenging voice, “I don’t like it when they move around at night.”

  Without meaning to, I raised my eyebrows.

  “I knew you wouldn’t believe me,” Lilias said at once. “No one ever does. But they do move around at night. I hear them in there, scratching at the glass, trying to get out.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What do they want?”

  Lilias folded her arms in front of her chest and glared at me
. “They want to kill me. They want to kill you too. And Rebecca says she’s going to let them out.”

  Chapter Six

  “Oh daughter dear,” her mother cried,

  “This blanket round you fold!

  It is a dreadful night tonight,

  You’ll catch your death of cold.”

  Piper had to go to the beach with her dad after lunch – apparently he was doing a painting of her and needed to carry on while the light was right – so I took the opportunity to poke around the rest of the house a bit more while they were gone. I went into the old classroom again, and looked at the black and white class photo. The girl with the blindfold really bothered me. I got a cold, prickly feeling all over my skin whenever I looked at her.

  Finally, I pulled my attention away from the photo and wandered over to the roll-top desks. When I lifted one of the lids I found a collection of exercise books inside. I rummaged through them, hoping to find something of Rebecca’s. I wasn’t disappointed. Right at the bottom of a pile of Piper’s old spelling books I found an exercise book with Rebecca’s name on it.

  I thought it was a handwriting book at first but then when I flicked through the pages I realized it was actually a book of lines. The first four pages were covered in the same sentence written out over and over again: I must not tell lies. I must not tell lies. I must not tell lies.

  The entire book was full of lines, all with different dates at the top of the page, copied out over and over again in Rebecca’s spiky handwriting.

  I must not bite my sister.

  I must not be devious.

  I must not say vile things.

  I must not be cruel to cats.

  I must not break things in temper.

  I must not tear off butterflies’ wings.

  I must not spread unkind rumours.

  I must not play with dead mice.