Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  “Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” Piper said. “I just want us to be friends.”

  “We are,” I said, but it occurred to me that Piper and I didn’t know each other, not really.

  “Well, aren’t you going to try the cake?” Piper asked.

  I quickly bit into it and had to force myself not to grimace. It was way too tart and practically made my eyes water.

  “It’s delicious,” I said, forcing myself to swallow it.

  “So how was town?” Piper asked, as she poured herself some lemonade. And then, before I could answer, “What did you and Cameron talk about?”

  Her tone remained casual but I suddenly felt sure she knew exactly what Cameron and I had talked about. Whatever weird sibling rivalry was going on here, I didn’t know how I’d managed to plant myself right in the middle of it.

  “Nothing much,” I shrugged. “I don’t know why he asked me along, really.”

  “Well, that’s a relief anyway,” Piper said. “I was worried he might have taken the opportunity to pour poison into your ear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cameron doesn’t like me to have friends,” Piper said slowly. “It’s part of his possessive nature, I think. I used to be quite popular but he’s chased away most of my schoolfriends now.”

  “You mean, he lies about you?”

  “Yes. At least … well, he normally just sticks to lying.”

  “Normally? You mean he sometimes does more than that?”

  I hadn’t meant the disbelieving tone to creep into my voice but I think it did nonetheless and Piper noticed. She looked at me and said, “You could say that. A couple of months ago, Cameron flogged my boyfriend and said that if he ever came near me again he’d get much worse. I haven’t seen him since.”

  I stared at Piper in silence for a moment. “Flogged?” I finally managed. “You mean with a … with a—”

  “With a riding crop,” Piper said. “Ask him about it, if you don’t believe me. I knew Cameron didn’t like me seeing Brett but I never dreamed he’d turn violent like that. He arrived in the middle of this party we’d gone to and said he was taking me home. I didn’t want to go but he grabbed my arm and dragged me out and when Brett tried to follow us Cameron hit him with the crop. It was Lilias’s – she has riding lessons once a week. Cameron brought it with him. That was the thing that disturbed me the most afterwards, I think. He’d brought it with him from home, so he must have planned to attack Brett all along.” She rubbed her temples with her fingers and said, “It was so terrible. Poor Brett. He could hardly walk afterwards and the back of his shirt was all ripped and covered in blood.”

  “But why?” I said, suddenly feeling very cold despite the sun shining down on us. “Why did he do it?”

  “I told you, he’s possessive,” Piper said. “He’s always been like that. Even when I was a kid. And it got a lot worse after Rebecca died. He thinks he can control everyone and everything. He wants to keep me here in this house for the rest of my days. He won’t go away to music college, you know, even though any college in the country would be delighted to have him, in spite of his injury. He was furious with me for dating Brett and I suppose he wanted to punish me for it.”

  I remembered what Cameron had said earlier about violence sometimes being necessary and felt the cold prickle of revulsion creep over my skin.

  “But if he did that to your boyfriend, then how can you stand to be around him?” I said. “How can you even look at him?”

  “Perhaps Rebecca dying unhinged him a little.” Piper sighed. “Perhaps it unhinged all of us. But you mustn’t think badly of Cameron because of what I’ve told you. That’s the last thing I want. You won’t act any differently around him, will you?”

  “I’ll try not to,” I said, and took a gulp of my lemonade.

  And then something bit the inside of my mouth. Hard. I felt sharp little teeth that were not my own tearing at the inside of my cheek. The soft flesh ripped and blood poured into my mouth.

  I shrieked, spitting out fat globs of blood that spotted the white tablecloth. Frantically, I reached my fingers into my mouth, grabbed hold of the thing and flung it down on the table.

  It was one of the Frozen Charlotte dolls, her white porcelain skin stained and smeared with blood. It was still dribbling from between my lips and down my chin – it felt like a great chunk of my mouth had been torn away. I even thought I felt a lump of flesh disappearing down my throat as I instinctively swallowed.

  “Oh God, Sophie, are you OK?” Piper said, jumping to her feet.

  “It… It bit me!” I exclaimed. My voice came out thick and each word caused the loose flap of skin inside my mouth to sting horribly. Blood sprayed out of my mouth when I spoke so I clapped my hand over it.

  “What did?” Piper asked, staring.

  “It… It felt like something bit me,” I said, wiping the blood from my face with trembling fingers. How could I possibly say that I thought a doll had bitten me? It sounded mental, even to me.

  “You must have bitten your cheek,” Piper said.

  Of course that was the most rational explanation – I’d bitten myself – and already I found myself starting to wonder… It seemed so crazy to think that that tiny white doll on the table between us had actually bitten me. She didn’t even have teeth, just a painted red dot where her mouth ought to be.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Tentatively, I prodded the spot with my tongue. It stung like anything. I glanced down and saw that I’d managed to get a few spots of blood on my white T-shirt too. “I’d better go and change,” I said. I got up and started to walk back to the house.

  “Sophie,” Piper said behind me. When I turned back she was holding a striped paper bag, a strange expression on her face. “You forgot your sugar mice.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” I went back for them and then walked across the garden to the house, aware of Piper’s eyes on me the whole time. It was only a bag of sugar mice. I hadn’t asked Cameron to get them for me. So why did I feel a weird twist of guilt in my stomach, as if I’d somehow done something wrong?

  I went upstairs to my room, took off the white T-shirt and grabbed a clean one. I was just pulling it over my head when I heard someone giggle. It was muffled and high-pitched, girlish and strange, and my first thought was that it was Dark Tom, giggling in his cage downstairs. But then someone said my name, in fact they whispered it, and it wasn’t one person, it was several, all whispering my name over and over again:

  “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie…”

  “Sophie, Sophie…”

  “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie…”

  Tiny, tiny, inhuman little voices that made creeping fear travel all the way through me, right to the very end of my cold, clammy fingertips.

  They were coming from Rebecca’s room.

  Chapter Nine

  Her bonnet and her gloves were on,

  She stepped into the sleigh,

  Rode swiftly done the mountainside,

  And over the hills away.

  I pressed my ear against the wall and heard them whispering.

  “Sophie…”

  “Sophie…”

  “Open the door, Sophie…”

  “Let us out…”

  “Sophie, please. Unlock the door…”

  “Please open the door…”

  “We want to play with you…”

  I thought I heard crying too but then I realized it wasn’t crying – it was giggling.

  “Let’s play the Knife Murder Game!”

  “No, no, the Stick-a-Needle-in-Your-Eye Game!”

  “Let’s play the Push-Teacher-Down-the-Stairs Game!”

  I rushed out into the corridor and threw open the door to Rebecca’s room.

  The voices all stopped at the exact same moment.

  I stepped into the room and my eyes went straight to the doll cabinet. When I’d first seen them they’d all been lying down and last night they were all standing up. This time, they w
ere all lying down on the shelves again, except the ones without any heads. Those were standing up against the glass, as if they were trying to see out, even though they were headless and no longer had eyes to see with.

  I walked up to the cabinet, glad of the sunlight filling the room – at least I could see them properly this time. I peered at the glass and, now that I was looking closely, I could make out the scratches. They were small and faint but they were there, crisscrossing angrily over and over each other. When I put my fingers against the glass it was smooth, which had to mean that the scratches had been made from the inside …

  “I hear them in there,” Lilias had said, “scratching at the glass, trying to get out…”

  I leaned closer to the cabinet, my eyelashes almost brushing the glass as I tried to get a closer look. The Frozen Charlotte dolls who still had their arms were all bent at the elbow, their hands outstretched, tiny white fingers splayed out. And some of them had red stains around their fingernails, stains that almost looked like blood…

  “Sophie?” Piper’s voice behind me made me jump. “What are you doing?”

  I jumped back guiltily. Piper didn’t look angry but I still felt like a snoop being caught alone in Rebecca’s room like this. “Oh, I was just … looking at the dolls. I hope you don’t mind?”

  “Of course not. They are quite fascinating, aren’t they? So old. Think of all the little girls who have played with them over the years.”

  I saw that she had the tiny Frozen Charlotte dolls with her that she’d used as ice cubes and, as I watched, she unlocked the cabinet and put them back with the others.

  “Piper, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “The Frozen Charlottes… I’m not really sure how to put this but—”

  “Uh-oh, has Lilias been telling you that they talk to her?” Piper locked the cabinet and put the key back in the music box. “She got the idea from Rebecca, you know. Somehow she must have found out that Rebecca said the dolls talked to her. I don’t know if she really believed it or not, but I doubt it. I think Rebecca just used them as an excuse. Whenever she did something wrong, she would blame the dolls. If a vase got broken, or a toy went missing, or … that day we found Shellycoat covered in blood and … and the night she threw Selkie into the fire… She blamed the Frozen Charlotte dolls for everything. She said they were always telling her to do bad things.”

  “And you never thought it could be true?”

  “Of course not.” Piper laughed. “Dolls don’t talk, do they?”

  “I heard someone calling my name a moment ago,” I said.

  “That was probably me. I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

  “But it sounded like it was coming from this room. And it wasn’t one voice, it was a whole load of them, all whispering my name at the same time.”

  Piper laid her hand on my arm and said gently, “I wouldn’t worry about it. That sort of thing is only to be expected in your … well, your delicate mental state.”

  “I don’t have a delicate mental state,” I snapped, shaking her hand off irritably.

  Piper sighed. “Look, Sophie, you’ve been through a terrible time recently. Losing your best friend like that, I mean. It’s only just happened and grief can do strange things to you.” She gave a small, sad laugh and said, “I should know. Remember how I told you that I used to think I could hear Rebecca crying and calling out my name on the clifftop? One time in the living room I even thought I heard hands beating at the window panes.” She paused, then added, “And there were white fingers once, pressing against the glass, bloodless and covered in ice…” She shook her head and said, “It’s probably just your brain trying to deal with what you’ve been through, to make sense of losing Jay like that. Lilias probably planted the idea in your mind when she told you about the Frozen Charlottes.”

  “I guess so,” I said, but only to keep her happy. I knew I’d heard voices coming from Rebecca’s room. They’d been real. I wasn’t going crazy. Was I?

  “I’d better go and get started on dinner,” Piper said, giving my arm a squeeze.

  “Do you want some help?”

  “No, it’s fine. You just relax.”

  When I went downstairs a few minutes later, I heard the soft strains of piano music, so pure and lovely, and when I walked into the old school hall I saw Cameron sitting at the piano on the stage.

  As I listened, I felt all the things Piper had told me about him melting away. I felt the scene from this morning, where he had lunged at her so horribly, being wiped out as if it had never happened, as if he was just that same kind boy from my childhood memory. While the music filled the room, again I felt like I wanted to stay there listening to him play forever. But then he stopped, and the feeling faded away along with the final notes.

  Without turning around Cameron said, “What do you think?”

  “It was beautiful.”

  He turned to look at me and, for just a moment, I thought I saw some warmth creep into those cold blue eyes of his.

  “Can’t they do something for your hand?” I asked, blurting out the question before I could stop myself.

  I was worried he might take offence but he just said, quite calmly, “Not a thing. The nerve damage was too extensive.”

  “Have you ever thought about going to music college?”

  “Yes,” Cameron said. “I’ve thought about it. But it wouldn’t work. I can’t leave this house.”

  “Why not?”

  For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “Last time I left, I came back to find our mother had had a nervous breakdown and been committed to a mental hospital. I haven’t seen her since. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  He turned back to the piano and played a few random chords. With his dark head bent over the instrument, his burnt hand buried in his pocket and his long musician’s fingers flying over the keys, I just couldn’t imagine Cameron hitting another person with a riding crop, or anything else.

  “Did you flog Piper’s boyfriend with a riding crop?”

  Cameron’s hand froze suddenly on the keys. “A riding crop?” His eyes narrowed and, for a long moment, I thought he wasn’t going to answer the question. But then he looked at me and said, “Yes, I did. It was an ugly business.”

  “Why did you do it then?”

  Cameron fixed me with his cold blue stare and I had to force myself not to look away. “Someone had to,” he said quietly.

  So he wasn’t even going to deny it. I realized that I’d been hoping he would. I’d hoped that Piper was making it up or, at the very least, that he had some kind of explanation that would make such a violent act less horrifying.

  Cameron had clearly had enough of the conversation because he turned back to the piano without another word and started to play another piece – cold music that darkened all the shadows in the room and made ice crackle inside my head. I turned away and left, feeling strangely unhappy.

  That night, I decided not to go to sleep but to sit up instead. Lilias had said that the Frozen Charlotte dolls moved around at night. The previous nights I’d been woken up by strange things. This time I hoped I’d get a head start by staying awake. I kept the lights off so no one would know I wasn’t asleep. Then, when everyone else had long gone to bed, I took my torch and camera and crept into Rebecca’s room.

  After hearing those whispers through the walls, I didn’t want to be anywhere near those horrible, creepy things. I wanted to go home and never look back. But I couldn’t do that, not until I had the answers I came for. If the dolls moved, I would catch it on my camera and then I could show Uncle James, or Piper, or Cameron, or email my mum. Then at least there’d be other people who would know something strange was going on here and could help me find out what it was. I wouldn’t have to do it all by myself.

  Sitting there in the room, alone in the dark, the sound of my own breathing seemed so loud in my ears. The curtains at the windows weren’t drawn and I could see the outline of the Froz
en Charlotte dolls in the moonlight. My hands were actually shaking with dread as I watched those still, white shapes in the locked cabinet.

  But as the hours dragged by and there was no sign of movement and no whisper of sound, I began to feel less nervous and more idiotic. Staying awake became a torture and all I wanted was to crawl into my bed. Maybe I really had lost it, sitting here in a dark room, staring at dolls in a cabinet and waiting for them to move. If Jay could see me now, crouched on the floor with my camera and torch, he’d probably laugh his head off. I could imagine him doubled over the way he used to be when he found something really funny, taking off his glasses so he could wipe away the tears that would be streaming down his face. It was one of the things I’d loved most about him. He was always so ready to laugh, and he made you laugh with him.

  I ran both hands through my hair, wishing this could all just be some stupid practical joke. Wishing that Jay would turn on the lights and yell, “Surprise! You should have seen your face! I can’t believe you fell for it!”

  I thought about giving up and going to bed, but I really wanted to feel like I was doing something. And then, in the dark, someone started to hum. It was the same tune I had first heard the night Jay died, that innocuous little ‘Fair Charlotte’ ballad.

  I froze, almost paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t tell exactly where the humming was coming from but I knew it was close, really close, so close that whoever it was must practically be upon me. If I were to reach out my hand I would probably brush against them in the dark.

  My fingers fumbled with my torch as I hurried to switch it on, convinced that Rebecca would be there, sitting right in front of me, eyeball to eyeball. But when the beam of light sliced through the room, there was no one there, no one at my side or behind me. In fact, despite shining the torch this way and that, I could see no one else in the room at all. But the humming continued, so softly, and yet almost deafening in my ears because it was so close.

  Then I became aware of the smell. This awful, putrid, rotting stench, all wrapped up in a sick sweetness that made me think of death and decaying flowers.