Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  The terrible list went on and on. I put the disturbing book away and went back up to my room, trying to make sense of it all. It was stuffy and hot in there again and I wished I could open the window. Instead, I went and sat by it to look out at the view. The burnt tree ruined what would have otherwise been a very pretty scene. It was such a horrible sight and I wondered why Uncle James didn’t have it chopped down. Lilias was out there in the garden, skipping round and round the tree in an endless circle. Watching her was making my head ache.

  Finally, I decided to go outside and speak to her again, but when I got up and walked out of my bedroom she was standing at the top of the stairs.

  “How… how did you get there so fast?” I asked, staring at her.

  She gave me one of her suspicious looks. “What do you mean?”

  “Weren’t you just outside? By the burnt tree?”

  But even as I said it I knew it couldn’t have been Lilias. There was no way she could have got back into the house and all the way up the stairs so quickly.

  “I haven’t gone outside today,” Lilias said. Then she added, “It was probably her.”

  My mouth suddenly felt very dry. “Who?”

  Lilias scowled at me. “You know who,” she said, and then stamped past me to her room.

  I stared after her for a second before going downstairs and letting myself out into the garden. There was no girl there now. I realized that, from the window, I hadn’t actually seen her face. Lilias was the same age Rebecca had been when she died and they both had long black hair. I thought of the girl I’d seen standing on the table in the café when it all went dark – the one who seemed to disappear as soon as the lights went on. Could that have been Rebecca? And if I’d seen her once, then might I have just seen her again in the garden?

  Slowly, I walked over to the burnt tree. It was a foreboding thing, rising black and twisted into the air, sending a long shadow across the lawn. When I got closer I could see the ruins of the tree house. A mess of rotting black planks and scorched rope still nestled between two thick branches.

  I thought of Cameron playing the piano with only his left hand and wondered whether perhaps he’d been in the tree house when the fire started.

  I had a last look around the garden, half hoping to see some neighbouring girl with long dark hair that would explain the girl I’d seen skipping around the tree. But I didn’t really expect to see anyone, not when the nearest house was miles away. Lilias had been inside but I had seen someone out here, and I was afraid I knew exactly who that person had been.

  The five of us sat down to dinner that evening, just as we had the night before. Uncle James came out of his studio smelling of paint and seemed pleased with his work. I was relieved to see that Piper had made pizza for dinner so there could be no chance of Lilias finding some hidden bone and freaking out again. The meal seemed to be going well until Uncle James said, “And what have you been up to today, Lilias? I’ve hardly seen you.”

  “Playing.”

  “Playing? Normally you complain about having to play by yourself.”

  “I wasn’t playing by myself.”

  “Who were you playing with then?”

  “With Rebecca.”

  There was a sudden dead silence around the table. Everyone was staring at Lilias.

  Uncle James took a deep breath. “Lilias,” he said. “We’ve talked about this. I will not be lied to. One minute it’s dolls running around the place with knives and now it’s Rebecca. It’s got to stop.”

  “But I’m not lying!”

  “You know perfectly well that your sister is dead. She died before you were born. So you could not possibly have been playing with her today.”

  “Sophie saw her too!” Lilias said, to my dismay. “She told me she saw her out by the dead tree. Didn’t you?”

  Now everyone was looking at me. “I… I did think I saw a girl in the garden,” I said. “I thought it was Lilias at first but—”

  Cameron slammed his fork down on the table so suddenly that the sound made me jump. “Are we really going to have this conversation?” he asked. “Even if there was a girl in the garden, it clearly could not have been Rebecca.”

  “But I did play with her today!” Lilias said. “She likes me because we’re the same age. She says I’m her favourite sister.”

  “Lilias, I don’t want to have to start taking you to Dr Phillips twice a week again, but if you carry on with these astonishing lies then you’ll be straight down there for a session first thing in the morning.”

  Lilias stood up and stamped her foot hard on the floor. “I am not a liar!” she said, and her voice came out a shriek. “All I ever do is tell the truth and get punished for it! I’m never telling you the truth again, ever!”

  And then she ran from the room without another word. Cameron half rose from his seat, as if to go after her, but Uncle James said, “Just leave her. The last thing she needs right now is extra attention.” Cameron slowly sat back down, but he didn’t look very happy about it.

  Uncle James pinched the bridge of his nose. He suddenly looked very tired. “I’m sorry about this, Sophie,” he said. “I don’t know what you must think of us all. It’s been very hard on Lilias, growing up without her mother around.”

  I nodded, feeling embarrassed. “There … was a girl in the garden, though,” I began uncertainly, feeling like I ought to say something in Lilias’s defence.

  “I don’t see how,” Cameron said shortly. “None of the local children ever come up here. And, even if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to get into the garden. The gate is always kept locked, remember?”

  He looked so irritated that I dropped the subject. After dinner I offered to help clear up, but Piper wouldn’t let me so I decided to go to bed. I was halfway up the stairs when Cameron caught up with me.

  “Sophie, can I talk to you for a moment?”

  Since he’d mostly avoided me since I arrived I was surprised to find him seeking me out now, but I said, “Of course.”

  As usual, his right hand stayed buried in his pocket, and his blue eyes had that piercing look as if they could see right inside my head.

  “Are you really going to stay here for the whole two weeks?” he asked.

  The question took me aback. “Er … that’s the plan,” I said.

  “Isn’t there anyone else you can stay with while your parents are away?”

  “Why?”

  “This house is … well, you can see that we have our issues. It’s not good for you to be here. You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I’m sorry you feel like that,” I said stiffly. “I’ll try to stay out of your way.”

  I turned and would have continued up the stairs but he grabbed hold of my arm. “Sophie, please. I’m not… I’m only trying to warn you—” He broke off abruptly.

  “Warn me of what?” I asked. “You don’t think the dolls are haunted too, do you?”

  “Dolls? What dolls?” He looked genuinely baffled.

  “The Frozen Charlotte dolls,” I said. “Lilias thinks they’re haunted or something.”

  “Of course I don’t think the dolls are haunted!” Cameron said impatiently. “Lilias is half out of her mind with fear. You must have realized that by now? The last thing she needs is you feeding all her phobias and paranoia.”

  “Well, what are you trying to warn me about then?”

  He let go of my arm. “Never mind,” he said. “Just forget I said anything.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” I said. “Why do you have to be so mysterious about it, whatever it is?”

  But I knew it was useless, he wasn’t going to say anything, nothing sensible anyway. He just stood and looked at me with his jaw clamped firmly shut. The paleness of his skin emphasized his cheekbones and made his dark hair seem coal-black – he was very handsome, in a cold sort of way. I could imagine what Jay would have had to say about him if he’d met him, his voice was clear inside my head: He looks like he should be wea
ring a cravat and storming around the moors in the rain, shouting about something.

  Before I could stop myself, I laughed. Then I realized what I’d done and clapped my hand over my mouth, but it was too late. Oh God, I really was losing it. Even though Jay was dead, I was still laughing at his jokes.

  Cameron stared at me. “I’m sorry, have I said something funny?”

  I shook my head, lowered my hand and tried to pull myself together. “No,” I said. “No, I can’t imagine you ever saying something funny.”

  Cameron raised an eyebrow. “You think I’ve got no sense of humour.”

  It was a statement rather than a question.

  Great, I thought. Now I’ve offended him too.

  “I don’t know,” I said, desperately trying to think of the right words. “I mean, we don’t really know each other.”

  “No,” he replied. “No, we don’t.”

  Then he just walked past me and up the stairs without another word.

  “Never do that again!” Dark Tom said suddenly downstairs. “Never do that again!”

  “Quiet, Tom!” I said, as firmly as I could. “I want to try to get some sleep tonight.”

  The parrot tilted his head and stared at me through the bars, but didn’t say anything more. I went up to my room, got changed and went to bed. The wind had started up again outside, blowing its way around the house and rattling the windows in their frames. I tried not to think about what Piper had said about the Sluagh, but that howling sound made it easy to believe the spirits of the restless dead were out there, circling the house, looking for a way in…

  That night, I dreamed about Jay. He was sitting next to me in our maths class. We were in the middle of an exam and I was letting him copy my answers when suddenly he leaned over and whispered in my ear “I have a present for you.”

  Then he put a white box on the table and opened the lid. A tinkling melody began to play and I recognized the tune at once – it was the ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad. Two figures danced together in the music box and, when I looked closely, I could see they were Jay and me. The tiny figure of Jay had water dripping off it and the little figure of me looked normal to begin with, but when I peered at it more closely I saw that my skin was white, there were icicles clinging to my dress and tiny drops of blood dripped from my fingers on to Jay’s hands.

  I gasped and drew back from the music box.

  “What’s the matter?” Jay asked, sounding hurt. “Don’t you like it?”

  I turned to look at him and saw that he was soaking wet. Water ran down his face from his hair and his school uniform was sodden.

  “You’re… You’re soaking wet!” I said.

  “Well, I drowned, Sophie,” he said, sounding irritated. “What did you expect?”

  He sounded almost more like Cameron than Jay and, even as I had the thought, it was suddenly Cameron sitting there at the desk, dripping wet just like he’d been the night I arrived at the house. “It’s not safe for you here,” he said, scowling at me. “It’s not safe for any of us.”

  He reached out towards the music box with a hand that was horribly burnt and shoved it across the table towards me. It fell into my lap and blood poured out of it, staining my hands and skirt, running down my legs and filling up my shoes. And the whole time that tinkling tune continued to play, over and over again, scraping away at the inside of my head, peeling little broken pieces off my heart…

  I gave a muffled shriek and jerked awake in my bed, my heart hammering in my chest. The ‘Fair Charlotte’ song was still playing and, at first, I thought it was just inside my head, a horrid shard of the nightmare still lodged in my brain. But then I realized that I really was hearing the song, that it was the tinkling tune of the music box and it was coming from Rebecca’s room, which meant that someone had opened the lid and was in there, right now, in the middle of the night.

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh no, oh no!”Fair Charlotte cried,

  And she laughed like a gypsy queen.

  “To ride in blankets muffled up,

  I never would be seen!”

  It was such a soft sound that if I hadn’t been in the room right next door I never would have heard it. But it came to me clearly through the wall and I knew it meant that someone had opened the music-box lid. I glanced at my phone and saw that it was after midnight.

  Feeling cold all over, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Snatching up the torch I’d found in the bedside drawer, I tiptoed out to the corridor but didn’t turn the torch on. If someone was out there, I didn’t want to warn them I was coming.

  As soon as I stepped out on to the landing, the tune became clearer, and I saw at once that Rebecca’s door was slightly ajar. It had definitely been closed when I’d come to bed. There was no light shining through the crack, just pitch-black and that hateful little tune spilling out of the darkness. Part of me wanted to run back to my room, jump under the covers and hide there until daylight. But I had to find out what was going on, for Jay’s sake.

  I crept softly over to the door, the torch shaking in my hand. Silently, I counted to three and then quickly shoved the door open and slapped my hand against the wall, but although I ran my fingers frantically all around I couldn’t find a light switch so I snapped on the torch and jerked it this way and that around the room.

  First the bed swung into view in the beam from my torch, then the doll cabinet up against the wall and then, finally, the dressing table with the music box sitting open on it, the little figures of Charlotte and Charlie twirling round and round in their endless dance. It was awful not being able to see the entire room at once. Shadows moved around the beam of light shining from the torch as I swept it around the room once, twice, three times. There was no trace of anyone there. The room seemed to be empty.

  I walked over to the dressing table, reached out and closed the music-box lid with a snap. The tune cut off at once.

  And that was when I heard the scratching.

  It was coming from the doll cabinet behind me. A frantic scratch, scratch, scratch, as if hundreds of tiny fingers were scrabbling and scraping over glass.

  I whirled on the spot and jerked my torch towards the doll cabinet.

  When the light hit them, I almost dropped the torch in shock.

  The dolls were all still and silent on their shelves but they weren’t lying down, like they’d been before, now every single one of them was standing up and facing out, their tiny hands resting against the glass, their painted eyes all staring directly at me. Even the ones missing a leg or an arm or a head were pressed up against the door, facing out of the cabinet.

  At that moment a small hand crept into mine, cold fingers wrapping around my own, just like that night at the café. I gasped, my heart racing in my chest, and snatched my hand away, while instinctively striking out with the hand holding the torch. It made contact with the small shape beside me in the dark, and there was a grunt and a thump.

  I shone the torch in front of me and saw a little girl with long dark hair, sprawled on the floor. For a second I thought it was Rebecca, but then I saw that the huge, frightened eyes belonged to Lilias. One hand was pressed to her cheek where I’d hit her but, before I could say anything, she scrambled back to her feet, gripped my hand and practically dragged me from the room and down the corridor to her own bedroom. Her bedside lamp was on, creating a soft, warm glow.

  “I’m so sorry, Lilias,” I said, squeezing her shaking hand. “I didn’t mean to hit you. Are you OK?”

  Lilias snatched her hand from mine and glared at me. I could see that her cheek was red where I’d hit her, but I hadn’t broken the skin. She was trembling from head to foot. And at the top of her nightdress I could clearly see the terrible, ugly scar running across her collarbone where she had tried to cut it out.

  “How can you be so stupid?” she said, still glaring. “You shouldn’t ever go in Rebecca’s room. If you let the dolls out, they’ll do bad things.”

  “I wasn’t
going to let them out,” I said. “I heard the music box and wanted to see if someone was in the room.”

  “Rebecca was there,” Lilias said. “In the corner – didn’t you see her? She wants to show you the dolls. You saw them move, didn’t you? You heard them scratching at the glass?”

  “I… I thought I heard something,” I said. “But why would Rebecca want to show me the dolls?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” Lilias said fiercely. “You’re the one who brought her here.”

  “But I can’t see her. Not properly. Lilias, are you really saying you can see Rebecca? That you’ve actually spoken to her?”

  I remembered what Lilias had said that night at the dinner table: She likes me because we’re the same age…

  It was true – Rebecca had been seven years old when she died, the same age Lilias was now. They even looked kind of similar.

  “She’s here,” Lilias whispered. “And she’s really, really angry.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s she angry about?”

  But Lilias just shook her head and refused to say anything more about Rebecca. “Next time you hear the dolls moving around in the night,” she said, “just close your eyes and pretend you can’t hear them. That’s what I do. It’s no use telling anyone because no one will believe you. No one ever believes you, especially not Dad. He’ll just get angry and call you a liar.”

  I tried asking her about Rebecca a couple more times, but Lilias just pursed her lips and shook her head so, in the end, I decided to give up and go to bed.

  I said goodnight and was almost at the door when Lilias said, “You didn’t bring any needles with you, did you?”

  “Needles? No. Why?”

  “I was just going to tell you to hide them,” Lilias said. “To hide anything that’s sharp. That’s what the Frozen Charlottes will look for if they get out of the cabinet.”

  “Needles? But why?”

  “To poke out your eyes while you’re asleep. That’s what they do. That’s what they did to that blindfolded girl in the school photo. That’s why the grown-ups had the dolls plastered into the walls. But then Rebecca found them and let them all out.”