by Alex Bell
I instantly wished that I hadn’t.
The school’s last teacher had not, as I had hoped, moved away when the school shut down, or gone to teach at another school. She was the reason the school closed in the first place. The local newspaper had covered it all in an article, printed alongside the same class photo I’d seen downstairs.
Although a thriving school for many years, the Dunvegan School for Girls was dogged by misfortune towards the end of its tenure, culminating in the death of schoolmistress, Miss Grayson, when she fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Although advertisements went out for a replacement teacher, it seems the school’s troubled reputation put off potential applicants and, as a result, the decision was eventually made to close the school.
In the final years before the school shut for good, one of the students died in a bizarre accident involving an overlooked allergy, while another came into difficulty swimming in the nearby Loch Pooltiel and drowned. A further accident left a student permanently blind in both eyes, and another girl fell to her death from one of the upstairs windows.
Today, the house is occupied as a private residence by the Craig family but it seems its curse is alive and well. Cameron Craig, a child prodigy whose rising star looked set to shine bright in the music world, had his promising career cut short when a fire on the grounds caused irreparable damage to one of his hands. A short while later, his younger sister, seven-year-old Rebecca Craig, froze to death one night on the clifftop under mysterious circumstances…
Burnt, frozen, drowned, poisoned, maimed and killed … there seemed to be no end to the horrors that had occurred in the house or the area around it. The building had been a school since the 1850s but the first sign of anything strange going on seemed to be around 1910. What had changed? Could it be something to do with the Frozen Charlotte dolls? Perhaps they’d come into the house at around that time?
I was just trying to think how I could find out more about the Frozen Charlottes when the discordant peal of piano keys rang out from downstairs. It was almost 3am and I jumped at the sudden sound in the silent house.
I relaxed a moment later when I realized it must just be Shellycoat walking across the keys again like she had the night I arrived. I went back to looking at the article on my laptop, but then the clash of keys came again and, this time, the shock surged through me as I remembered.
There was no piano downstairs any more.
Chapter Fourteen
So on they rode through frosty air,
And glittering cold starlight.
Until at last the village lamps
And the ballroom came in sight.
The crash and groan of tuneless notes continued, growing ever more frantic, as if a demented halfwit sat down there, pounding mindlessly at the keys in some kind of lunatic frenzy.
I snatched my camera from the bed and ran down the stairs before I could lose my nerve. I was sure the rest of the family would be close behind me because the music was quite loud by now – a terrible din that was sure to wake the entire house.
I hesitated for a moment outside the old school hall before throwing open the door and stepping inside.
The huge room was dark but the moonlight shining in through the windows behind the stage clearly illuminated the piano as a dark silhouette. I’d seen the piano man take the ruined instrument away with my own eyes and yet here it was, perfectly whole once again.
And that wasn’t all. Someone was hammering away at the piano keys, their silhouette clear in the moonlight.
It was a little girl wearing a dress, with long hair trailing down her back. She was pounding at the keys like she hated the instrument with all her soul, and hated the music even more.
She slammed her fingers down a few more times with jerky, unnatural movements, as if she was a puppet on strings, yanked around by a puppet master with no skill. Even from across the room I could sense her mounting frustration and anger, as if she was trying to play a tune she couldn’t remember the music to.
And then, all of a sudden, it shifted slightly, and even though the notes were still all wrong and grossly out of tune, I could hear a wobbling melody faintly beneath it. It was a song I knew well and hated – the ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad.
The girl’s hair fell down on either side of her face as she bent her head over the piano and proceeded to murder the folk song so that it was almost unrecognizable.
With fumbling hands, I turned on my camera, lifted it up and snapped a photo.
The brightness of the flash lit up the room for a brief second and in that awful moment I clearly saw a girl in a plain white nightdress, long dark hair trailing over her shoulders and hiding her face from view, seated at a piano that didn’t exist any more, her hands slipping and sliding over the keys because they were so smeared and sticky with blood.
In the last fraction of a second before the flash went dark, Rebecca jerked her face towards me. I saw bloody tears, angry dark circles beneath her eyes and blue, frozen lips…
And then the flash went off, plunging the room into darkness.
I felt a sudden rush of air from the other side of the room, as if a window had just been opened and a current was racing towards me, but I knew this was no mere air current.
I heard things being knocked over and falling to the ground as whatever it was flew closer and closer and, although I stumbled back in the dark, I knew it was almost upon me.
The next moment I felt cold hands, one on each shoulder, and an awful, unbearable heat, the crackle of flames and the smell of burning. I staggered back and tripped over something on the floor. Long hair brushed against my arm as I fell and then the hem of a damp nightgown swept against my cheek.
By the time I scrambled to my feet and found the light switch in the dark, she’d gone. There was no piano up on the stage and aside from a knocked-over table and a couple of fallen books, there was no sign that anything had ever been there in the room with me at all.
I snatched up my camera from where it had fallen, praying that I’d managed to capture Rebecca on film. I pressed the button to view my photos, dreading that I would have just captured an empty hall.
But the second the image came up to fill the screen, I felt my heart speed up in my chest, thumping so hard against my ribs that it hurt.
The photo clearly showed a piano up on the stage, and a little girl sitting at it, her head bent over the keys, her long dark hair veiling her face.
But that wasn’t the only thing. Even though the stage was now empty, in the photo it was full of Frozen Charlotte dolls, row upon row of them, covering the entire stage in a sea of white porcelain and curly dark heads. They swarmed up and around the piano, only leaving enough room for the legs. Every doll, big and small, had its face turned towards me so I could clearly see that their eyes were open and their lips were pinched in cold disapproval. Their raised arms, bent at the elbow, meant that they all had their tiny hands stretched out towards me, and every single one of them had blood on their fingertips, running in delicate streaks down their white palms.
The dolls and Rebecca and the piano made me feel queasy but, in spite of that, I was fiercely pleased that I had managed to photograph her. I went back upstairs and uploaded my new photos on to my computer.
Blown up on the larger screen, the picture showed Rebecca and her dolls even more clearly. After saving the image, I suddenly remembered that I’d never got round to looking at the photos I’d taken of Neist Point and the house the morning after I arrived. I clicked to the start and quickly went through the photos of birds I’d taken down at the lighthouse. But then I got to the one I’d taken of the house from the outside, and I froze.
Every single window was white and at first I thought that all the curtains were drawn but I was sure the windows hadn’t been covered when Piper and I returned from our walk. In fact, I didn’t think there were any curtains downstairs – that was what made the dark windows so unnerving at night.
But when I zoomed into one of the windows a bit
closer, my breath caught in my throat as I realized that the white in the windows wasn’t curtains at all – it was hundreds of tiny hands. Small white fingers splayed across the glass, pressing up against the outside world, and I knew at once who they belonged to. Only the Frozen Charlottes had such miniscule white fingers.
By the time I turned off my computer, it was gone 4am and the dawn light was shining through the windows. My eyes burned and itched with tiredness so I leaned my head back against the wall, thinking I’d close my eyes for just a few minutes. But I fell straight asleep and woke up a few hours later, feeling stiff, cold and almost more tired than I had been before I went to sleep.
The rest of the house was still in bed, but I decided to get up anyway. An idea had occurred to me as I drifted off last night and I wanted to act on it as soon as possible. So I quickly changed my clothes, pulled a brush through my hair, winced at the sight of my bloodshot eyes staring back at me in the mirror, then went downstairs to the old classroom. I went straight to the black and white photo on the wall of Miss Grayson and her pupils standing outside the school. The article I’d read hadn’t mentioned the names of the girls who’d been hurt at the school but I remembered seeing names neatly printed along the bottom of the photo. It didn’t take me long to find the one I was looking for. The name of the girl who’d been blinded was Martha Jones.
Of all the girls, she was the only one whose accident hadn’t been fatal and I was clinging to the hope that she might have gone on to have children, children who might still be alive and living here in Skye and could tell me more about her. I tiptoed back up the stairs to my room, turned on my computer and did a search for her. I found out she had lived in the area all her life, in the flat above her family’s gift shop, Salty’s Gifts. She’d died fifteen years ago, but perhaps someone from the family was still running the business and might know something about what had happened at the school all those years ago. I knew it was a long shot but it was the only thing I could think of. I grabbed my rucksack and went back downstairs, where I left a note on the dining-room table saying that I was going into town to take some photos of Dunvegan in the morning light and that I’d be back soon.
I was keen to sneak out without any of the family hearing me because I had to be alone for this, the last thing I wanted was Piper deciding she was going to tag along. So I could have throttled Dark Tom when he started squawking the moment I stepped into the front hall.
“Thief!” he shrieked, bobbing up and down on his perch. “Thief! Thief! Thief!”
“For God’s sake, shut up!” I hissed, wondering if it would be really awful of me to reach through the bars and poke him with something sharp. But then I remembered the sugar mice I’d stuffed in my bag to eat on the way and quickly reached in for one of them, snapped off its head and pushed it through the bars, hoping that parrots liked sugar.
Thankfully, Dark Tom snatched the treat from me at once and began pecking at it, leaving me free to slip through the front door and head straight for the bus stop.
There weren’t many people around when I arrived in town. It was such a small, sleepy little place that I’d hoped to be able to find the gift shop quite easily, but although I walked around the handful of shops twice, I could see no sign of one called Salty’s Gifts.
Finally, I stopped a woman who was passing by and asked her. She looked baffled at first but then she said, “Oh, Salty’s closed down years ago. It’s The Searock Café now. That one over there.”
She pointed across the road. It was small but cheerful looking with neat little round tables covered with checked tablecloths. I thanked her but my heart sank at the news. She went off, leaving me standing and looking at the café. Something about the small friendliness of the place reminded me of all the happy hours Jay and me had spent at our favourite café, eating curly fries and drinking Cokes and hanging out just the two of us before he’d downloaded that stupid app and everything had turned so awful.
I walked over to the café just as a group of men who looked like they’d come in from the fishing boats walked out. When they opened the door, the delicious smells of bacon and coffee rushed out, and they seemed so warm and comforting and familiar that I decided I might as well go in and buy myself a hot drink or something. It was already a wasted trip but I didn’t feel ready to go back to the house just yet.
So I opened the door and walked in. The little bell above the door announced my presence and the grey-haired woman who was clearing the table gave me a smile and told me to take a seat. I must have looked a bit deflated because she came bustling over a moment later and said, “You look like you need something to cheer you up. How about a nice hot breakfast?”
I’d only meant to have a drink but the breakfast did smell good. I was just wondering whether it would be rude of me to have breakfast here rather than with the Craigs when the woman said, “What would you like, love?”
She was smiling down at me in such a kindly way and it felt so good to be somewhere normal without ghosts or dolls or other horrors. So I ordered some tea and a bacon bap, and when she brought them to me a few minutes later the bap tasted every bit as good as it smelled. I could feel myself cheering up a little with each hot, delicious mouthful.
“Well, you certainly seemed to enjoy that,” the woman said when she came back to collect my empty plate. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a teenager up and about this early in the summer holidays before.”
“I was hoping to go to Salty’s Gift Shop,” I said. “But then someone told me it had turned into this café.”
“Oh, yes. Salty’s closed years ago,” the woman said. “Not enough trade in the winter months, unfortunately. Whereas a café gets business even after the tourists have gone. The fishermen alone would keep us going. They build up such a hunger when they’re out on the loch. But if it’s gifts you’re after then there’s a little shop a couple of doors down that sells sticks of rock and postcards and things.”
I shook my head. “No, I was really hoping to speak with a member of the Jones family.”
“Really? Well, I’m Pat Jones. The business still belongs to my family even though it’s a café now.”
“Oh.” Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that the same family would still be running the place. “Are you related to Martha Jones?”
At the mention of the name, Pat’s smile faltered and when she spoke her voice had lost some of its cheerfulness. “She was my aunt.”
“Then perhaps you can help me.”
“Is this about what happened at the schoolhouse?” Her voice had definitely grown colder now.
“Yes, I just—”
“I’m sorry but I’m afraid I can’t help. It all happened so long ago and I really don’t have time to satisfy any morbid curiosity about it.”
“It’s not morbid curiosity,” I said. “Honestly, it isn’t like that. I’m staying at the schoolhouse at the moment. The Craigs are family of mine. They live there.”
“Oh. Oh dear.” She shot me an anxious look.
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” I said. “Please. I only want to find out how Martha went blind and what happened at the school.”
Pat hesitated a moment, and if a customer had walked in just then I’m sure she would have used them as an excuse not to talk to me. But the door stayed closed and the bell stayed silent. Finally, she seemed to make up her mind and she pulled out the chair across from me.
“My dear, I really don’t know much about it,” she said. “It was before my time. I’ve never even been to the school.”
“But did your aunt ever talk about what happened?”
Pat sighed and said, “The truth is that us kids were all rather afraid of her. And she wasn’t exactly the type to make friends with children. She used to just sit in the corner, rigid as a board, and stare straight ahead of her, as if she was trying to see with those blind eyes of hers.”
“How did she go blind?”
“It was an accident,” Pat said, looking down and rubb
ing at a non-existent stain on the tablecloth.
“Yes, but what kind of accident?” I asked.
“We don’t really know. She was asleep when it happened.”
“Asleep?”
“Yes, she woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Apparently some sewing needles had got tangled up in her pillow and they said she must have rolled on to them in her sleep. But Aunt Martha always said that … well, that someone did it to her. There was a terrible scandal about it at the time and the school was on the brink of being closed anyway when the schoolteacher fell down the stairs. Everyone blamed the teacher, you see, for what was happening to the girls. All those accidents, and she was the one who was supposed to be looking after them.”
“I suppose if she was the last person who died then people might have thought that the deaths ended with her because she was the one responsible.”
Pat gave me a startled look. “She wasn’t the last one to die.”
“She wasn’t?”
“No. The little girl who jumped from the window died just an hour or so later.”
“Jumped?” I stared at her. “But I thought she fell?”
Pat flushed and her hands reached out to fiddle with the salt shaker. “Look, this is why I didn’t want to get into it,” she said. “The families of all those girls still live on the island. The old schoolhouse is a painful subject for those of us who had relatives there at the time. I don’t want all of this to get dragged up again. I only know what my aunt told me and you have to understand that she’d been through a dreadful ordeal, going blind like that. Sometimes I think it turned her a little mad.”
“I just want to hear her side of it,” I said. “You probably know that my uncle and cousins have had a lot of accidents at that house, and Rebecca died on the clifftop.”
“It’s just bad luck,” Pat said, her tone almost pleading. “It doesn’t mean anything. There’s no such thing as haunted houses.”
“Well, what harm would it do to tell me about it then?”
