Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  Lilias slammed her hand down on the table.

  “Cameron is not going to prison!” she said, glaring at Piper across the table.

  “Oh, Lilias, don’t be naïve – of course he is,” Piper said. “For a very long time. You’ll be all grown up by the time he gets out, I expect. If he ever gets out, that is. Accidents happen in prison, so I hear.”

  “You’re such a liar,” Lilias muttered, scowling back down at her plate.

  “Aren’t you hungry, Sophie?” Piper asked, ignoring her sister’s remark. “You haven’t touched your sandwiches.”

  “I think I’ve lost my appetite,” I said, pushing the plate away slightly.

  “You ought to eat something, you know,” Piper said. “You’ve had nothing since last night at the beach.”

  “I really couldn’t,” I said. “Not after what you just said about Brett.”

  “Wow, that kiss must have really affected you!”

  “I’d feel the same way about anyone who lost their eyes!” I snapped. “Even someone I don’t like.”

  “Whatever you say,” Piper said with a smirk. “But if you don’t want your sandwiches then I’m sure you won’t mind if I give them to Shellycoat?”

  The elderly cat had just come into the room and was purring and rubbing herself around my legs. When Piper grabbed one of my sandwiches and held it out to her, the old cat hobbled over eagerly.

  “No, don’t!” I said, slapping the sandwich from Piper’s hand and snatching it up off the floor before Shellycoat could get to it. “There… There might be bones in it,” I said, forgetting about Lilias’s phobia for a moment.

  “Bones?” Lilias looked suddenly ashen and pushed her plate away.

  “You’re right,” Piper said slowly, an odd look in her eyes. “It could be dangerous.”

  For a moment we just stared at each other across the table.

  “Well,” Piper said, finally. “Since we all seem to have suddenly lost our appetites, I might as well clear this lot away.”

  “I think I’ll go and finish reading my book,” I said.

  “OK,” Piper replied. “See you later then.”

  Lilias and I went back upstairs and the moment we were alone I said, “Lilias, can you do something for me? I’m going to get rid of the Frozen Charlotte dolls and I need you to go to your bedroom, lock the door and stay there until I get back, OK? Don’t open the door for anyone. Not even Piper.”

  Lilias nodded slowly. “When you get back, how will I know that it’s really you?” she asked. “Piper steals people’s voices.”

  “Good point,” I said. “We need a password. You pick one.”

  “Liquorice,” she said at once. “That’s my favourite sweet.”

  “All right, when I get back I’ll say liquorice and then you’ll know it’s me and you can let me in.”

  I watched Lilias go into her room and heard the click as she locked herself in. Then I grabbed the suitcase from my room and hurried back down the stairs, praying that Piper wouldn’t appear at just that moment.

  Dark Tom eyed me from his perch and it was almost like he knew what I was about to do because he cocked his head and said, “Frozen Charlotte? Dreadfully cold. Dreadfully cold.”

  I didn’t even pause to shush him, I just threw open the door and hurried down the garden path towards the gates.

  Chapter Nineteen

  And there he sat down by her side,

  While bitter tears did flow.

  And cried, “My own, my charming bride,

  You never more will know.”

  The second I was outside the gates I started running down the clifftop path, the suitcase full of broken dolls thumping against my leg with each pounding step. I could hear their delicate porcelain bodies clinking together and I hoped they were breaking up into a million pieces.

  When I left the path and walked to the edge of the clifftop, the dolls started to speak.

  “Please don’t hurt us…”

  “Please, Sophie…”

  “Let us out…”

  “We’ll be good, we promise…”

  “Don’t put us in the water…”

  “Sophie, we just want to be your friends…”

  “Your friends…”

  “Your best friends…”

  “Please, Sophie, let us out…”

  “Take us back to the house…”

  “We’ll never tell…”

  “Never…”

  It was the weirdest thing but, even though I knew the dolls were evil and that I had to get rid of them, when they asked me to take them back, I felt the strongest desire to do it. I even took a step away from the cliff and towards the house, but then I shook my head, ridding myself of those horrid little whispering voices that were trying to make me do something I didn’t want to.

  I stepped back to the cliff edge and looked down at the dark waves pounding against the black rocks. Before they could find some way of stopping me, I lifted the suitcase above my head and threw it over the edge.

  It sailed out away from the cliff in a perfect arc before finally hitting the water with a splash that created a small explosion of white foam. The waves picked the suitcase up and hurled it against the rocks a couple of times before it filled with water and slipped down beneath the surface. I watched it go with a sense of satisfaction. The currents could carry it out to rest with the shipwrecks and the skeletons and the dead men’s fingers – the Frozen Charlottes couldn’t do any damage there.

  I watched the water crashing against the rocks for another couple of minutes but the suitcase didn’t resurface so I turned back towards the path, intending to head back to the house.

  But, as I turned around, I saw the small white cross that had been put on the clifftop in memory of Rebecca. There was a little girl standing next to it. A girl wearing a white nightdress. She had her back to me and was looking out to sea, her long dark hair trailing out behind her. I was sure it must be Rebecca but, when I called out to her, the wind snatched my voice away, and the little girl didn’t turn round. She just stared out over the cliff with her arms hanging loose by her sides.

  I started down the path towards her but had only gone a few steps when I walked into the most shocking cold spot. It seemed to wrap around me like a blanket, a biting, scratching, spiteful cold that went right through to my bones, scraping at them like scalpels. My eyes watered and my breath frosted before me.

  “Rebecca!” I called again.

  She still didn’t react so I carried on down the path. Finally I was right there behind her and, this time, when I said her name, she slowly turned round to face me. Her skin had a bluish tinge to it, all frozen and cracked, and her black hair was stiff with frost. Ice sparkled on her lips and her eyes had deep dark circles under them.

  For a moment we just stared at each other in silence, but then she slowly reached out her hand towards me. I hesitated, but Rebecca didn’t seem dangerous standing there on the cliff. She just seemed sad and small and very alone. Now that I knew she’d been trying to tell me about the message Jay had left for me on my phone, I couldn’t feel afraid of her as I’d done before. So, instead of shutting her out, I let her in and reached out my hand to hers.

  Her cold fingers curled around mine just like they had that night at the café.

  The instant our hands met, it was like my body disappeared. Suddenly it was night-time and I found myself in Rebecca’s head as she fell over the edge of the cliff. This wasn’t a phantom Rebecca but the living, breathing girl as she had been eight years ago. I felt the thump all the way through her bones when she landed on the rocky outcrop several feet below, heard the pained gasp that frosted the air before her in the dark, and felt the warmth of tears on her cheeks as she started to cry.

  And then I heard Piper’s voice from the clifftop above, calling Rebecca’s name. The next moment her strawberry-blonde head poked over the edge of the cliff and peered down, surrounded by a vast backdrop of stars that sparkled like little chips of broken glass
in the night sky above her. She didn’t look the same as she did now – she looked exactly as she had when we’d first met as children.

  “Rebecca, are you OK?” Piper called down.

  To my surprise, Rebecca scrambled carefully to her feet in the snow. “I… I think so,” she said, pulling her coat tighter around her.

  “Really?” Piper sounded more surprised than concerned.

  But this wasn’t right. Rebecca had broken her leg when she’d fallen – that was why she’d been unable to climb back up the cliff. And she hadn’t been wearing a coat, only a nightdress. And she’d been alone – no one had ever said anything about Piper being with her.

  “I told you we should have waited till tomorrow to come and fetch Charlotte!” Rebecca called.

  I realized that she had a Frozen Charlotte clasped in her hand.

  “But she was afraid and cold out here by herself!” Piper called back. “Is she still crying?”

  Rebecca lifted the doll to her ear and, for the first time, I could hear a soft weeping over the sound of the ocean waves below.

  “It’s OK, Charlotte,” Rebecca whispered. “Don’t be scared. Soon we’ll be back home in the warm. I promise.”

  “Can you climb back up?”

  “I don’t know. It’s really high!” Rebecca looked down over the edge of the ledge. It was a sheer drop to the scattered rocks hundreds of feet on the beach below. The wind blowing in from the sea tugged at her hair as if it was trying to pull her over the side. Rebecca pressed herself against the cliff face. “Maybe you should go and fetch Mummy!”

  “But we’ll get into trouble!” Piper called back. “It’s not that high – you can climb it.”

  Rebecca looked again at the black beach yawning beneath her like the mouth of some awful monster, and I felt her wishing she had never let Piper talk her into coming out here like this in the first place.

  “Rebecca, come on!” Piper called. “It’s safe – don’t be such a baby!”

  Rebecca slipped the Frozen Charlotte into her coat pocket and then put both hands against the cliff face, searching for a hold. Fear of the drop below was making her legs feel shaky but she counted to ten under her breath and then began to climb.

  The freezing stone cut into her fingers but she dragged herself up anyway, using the ledges and footholds carved into the rock. Despite the freezing night air, I could feel the sweat running down her back by the time she finally reached the top, panting for breath, both arms trembling with the effort.

  Letting Rebecca into my head and seeing that night through her eyes, I could feel her emotions as well and I sensed her shock of surprise and uncertainty when she reached the top and didn’t find Piper crouched at the edge ready to help her, as she’d expected, but sat a little way back from the clifftop, humming to herself and building a small snowman in the moonlight on the ground in front of her, as if she didn’t realize her younger sister was clinging to the edge of a cliff for dear life.

  “Piper!” Rebecca gasped. “Help me!”

  Piper got up and wandered over to the cliff edge, still humming under her breath. It was a song I knew well by now – the ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad.

  When she reached Rebecca she stopped humming abruptly and gave a sudden smile. “You know, if I wanted to, I could just kick you in the face right now and you’d fall all the way back down again.”

  “That’s not funny!” Rebecca said, scowling at her. “Help me up!”

  Still smiling, Piper shrugged and reached out to grab the hood of Rebecca’s coat, but when she pulled, one of Rebecca’s arms started to slip from her sleeve.

  “Don’t!” she yelled. “Don’t pull on the coat – you’ll pull it off!”

  But Piper just seemed to pull even harder until Rebecca’s right arm had slipped out of the sleeve altogether.

  I felt her heart speed up inside her chest as her fingers scrabbled to regain a hold on the clifftop.

  “I said stop!” she shouted at her sister. “You’re going to make me fall again!”

  “Well, just pass me your coat,” Piper replied. “I can’t hold on to your arm if your sleeve is in the way, can I?”

  Rebecca shrugged off the other sleeve and held the coat up to Piper, who snatched it and threw it on the ground.

  “Now help me up,” Rebecca said.

  When Piper didn’t reply straight away, Rebecca looked up and saw her sister staring down at her in the moonlight, a strange smile on her face.

  “Piper—” Rebecca began, but that was as far as she got before Piper drew back her snow-crusted boot … and kicked Rebecca hard in the face.

  I felt Rebecca’s lip split as blood poured into her mouth and smeared against her teeth. One of her fingernails ripped off as she lost her grip on the rock and fell back down the cliff face to the ledge below. She landed with a great thump that jarred every bone in her body and, at the same moment, a memory flashed clearly into her mind, a recent one from just that summer of standing in a burning tree house, screaming for help and wondering why Piper was just standing there in the garden watching the tree burn, and didn’t run to fetch their mum and dad.

  Without her coat, the frozen rock felt like knives beneath her nightdress. Knives that would peel her skin right off. A sob of pain and fear bubbled up out of Rebecca’s chest as she slowly sat up on the ledge. “W-what did you do that for?” she cried, each breath frosting before her. With only her nightdress to protect her, the cold was almost unbearable. The frozen air made her lungs ache with the effort of breathing, and she couldn’t prevent herself from shivering so violently that her bones seemed to rattle inside her body.

  “Don’t be such a cry baby, Rebecca!” Piper called down.

  “Go and fetch Mummy!” Rebecca shouted back, no longer caring whether they were discovered out there.

  “No, I’ll get into trouble!” Piper said.

  “But I’m s-s-so cold!”

  “Tough!”

  Rebecca started crying properly now. She’d never been so cold in her life. Her skin felt like it was bleeding and splitting in the raw air that was blasting in from the sea, crashing into her over and over again like relentless waves.

  “Piper, please,” she called. “Please help me!”

  “Don’t want to,” Piper called back. Her voice was cheerful, as if this was just a game. That was what scared Rebecca most of all.

  “But what if I freeze to death like Frozen Charlotte did?”

  “I hope you do. I don’t want a sister any more.”

  “No!” Rebecca sobbed. “No, but, Piper, I don’t want to be dead!”

  “It’s not so bad to be dead.” The Frozen Charlotte doll whispered the words from the clifftop but, somehow, Rebecca still heard them over the pounding of the ocean. Perhaps the doll whispered them inside her head. “It’s not so bad to die.”

  But Rebecca didn’t believe her. She remembered what it had been like in the tree house before Cameron came to get her out. Trying to breathe, she’d sucked smoke into her lungs that squeezed around her throat and made her heart beat so fast she thought it was going to explode out of her chest. Rebecca didn’t want to die.

  So she wiped her tears away and reached her trembling hands back towards the cliff face. Blood ran down her finger where she’d torn away her nail, but she couldn’t feel it through the cold. She was shivering so badly she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold on but she pulled herself up to the first foothold anyway.

  “Don’t you come up here!” Piper shrieked, seeing what she was doing. “No! No! I don’t want you to! Go back down!”

  Rebecca ignored her. She gritted her teeth against the icy wind that sheared her skin and tugged at her nightdress as if it was trying to drag her off the cliff. She reached up feeling for something else to grab on to.

  The next moment she cried out as a snowball hit the top of her head. It cracked like ice as it burst apart, and lumps of snow slid down her hair and the back of her neck, turning into icy fingers of water that trickled a
ll the way down her spine.

  “Piper, stop it!” she screamed.

  She tried to carry on climbing but Piper threw snowballs at her as fast as she could make them, and then she must have found some stones beneath the snow because she started throwing those too. They cut Rebecca’s skin where they hit her, slicing it open to the raw sea air. One of the stones caught her just above her eye, and as blood dripped into her eyelashes, Rebecca lost her grip on the rock and fell all the way back down to the ledge.

  This time, her weight landed on her right leg, and I heard the bone snap as it broke. Rebecca crumpled to the ground, all her air sucked away for a moment of pure breathless agony before she screamed. The sound seemed to crack the frozen night air around them into shattered glass.

  “Piper, my leg!” she shouted through streaming tears. “I’ve hurt my leg!”

  “I’ve never been to a funeral before,” Piper replied. “I wonder what it will be like? I wonder if everyone will cry? Do you think Mummy will buy me a new dress?”

  Rebecca dragged herself into the corner between the cliff edge and the ground, as far away from the steep drop as she could get. She begged and pleaded with Piper until her throat was raw but it did no good. Piper just giggled, as if they were playing a game.

  “W-was it the … the Frozen Charlottes?” Rebecca asked between cracked lips and chattering teeth as she remembered all the bad and naughty things the dolls had ever told her to do. “Did they t-tell you to t-trick me out here like this?”

  “No, the Frozen Charlottes didn’t tell me!” Piper said. She sounded offended as if the dolls were being given credit that should have rightly gone to her. “I told them! It was my idea to leave one of the dolls out here, just like it was my idea to set the tree house on fire.”

  I felt Rebecca’s heart turn to stone when she heard this. There was silence for the first time since Rebecca had fallen over the edge of the cliff. Then Piper suddenly said, “I’m bored with this game, and I’m cold. I’m going back to bed. You can keep Charlotte.”