Frozen Charlotte

by Alex Bell

  “Where’s Lilias?”

  “Has anyone seen Lilias?”

  “Perhaps she’s in the coffin?”

  “Perhaps she’s in the grave?”

  “Perhaps she’s all chopped to pieces?”

  “Ha! Chopped to pieces!”

  Cameron and I raced around the upstairs bedrooms, no longer caring how much noise we made, but there was no sign of Lilias or Piper. Rebecca’s room was a terrible mess. It looked like Piper had gone into a rage when she’d seen that the doll cabinet was empty. There was hardly a thing left in the room that hadn’t been destroyed. She appeared to have slashed the knife around blindly, demolishing almost everything in sight, including the doll cabinet and the window.

  “Mad,” Cameron muttered under his breath. “She’s finally gone completely mad.”

  There were even deep gouges in the wallpaper from where she’d dragged the blade along the walls.

  We went back to the top of the staircase and, now that the lights were on, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before – there was a drop of blood on the first step. I nudged Cameron and pointed at it. We hurried back down the stairs, noticing more blood every few steps. It led right to the old school hall.

  We went straight there and found one light in the huge room already on. It was the spotlight above the stage where Cameron’s piano used to be. Lilias stood there by herself with a knife pressed against her neck and tears running down her cheeks.

  Cameron stopped dead when he saw her. Slowly, he held both hands out in front of him, palms up, and said in a calm, steady voice, “Lilias, please. Put the knife down.”

  “The evil skeleton,” she whispered. “I can feel the skull grinning inside my head. I don’t want it there. I want to cut it out.”

  “There is no evil skeleton,” Cameron said. “Lilias, nothing about you is evil.”

  “There is. There must be. Otherwise I never could have broken your piano, no matter how many times the dolls told me to.”

  “I don’t care about the piano!” Cameron said. “Do you hear me? I couldn’t care less about the damn piano! The only thing I care about is you. So put the knife down and let’s get out of here.”

  Lilias gave a dry sob and the hand holding the knife trembled. It looked like it could go either way. I didn’t even dare to breathe. Would she listen to her brother or was she about to cut her own throat right there in front of us?

  “Lilias,” Cameron said, and his voice was suddenly very quiet, “if you ever loved me at all, even a little bit, you will put down that knife. Right now.”

  She took a great gasp of air, and the knife fell from her fingers.

  In a flash she was off the stage and running to Cameron. Her arms wrapped tightly around his waist and she buried her face in his side.

  “Good girl,” he said, hugging her back. “Good girl, Lilias!”

  The Frozen Charlottes, though, weren’t so happy about it. They were practically hissing through the walls.

  “Nasty boy!”

  “Horrid boy!”

  “Always ruins every game!”

  “Hateful…”

  “So hateful…”

  “Kill him, Piper…”

  “Pretty, pretty please…”

  “Do it for us, Piper…”

  “Put your knife in his heart…”

  “No, no! Put your knife in his face!”

  “Cut out his eyes!”

  “And feed them to the cat!”

  “Lilias,” I said in alarm. “Where is Piper?”

  “She’s gone,” Lilias said. “She said she was going down to the beach to look for the Frozen Charlottes you threw into the sea.”

  “We’d better check the house,” Cameron said, looking at me. “If she really isn’t here then we can lock all the doors and keep her out.”

  I almost didn’t hear what he said. One of the big long windows was uncovered – perhaps Piper had run out of sheets – and for just a brief moment, I thought I saw Rebecca outside the window, her long dark hair blowing around her, both hands pressed against the glass as she stared in at us.

  Cameron was already heading for the door with Lilias hanging on to his left hand. I looked back at the window but Rebecca was gone – if she’d ever been there to begin with. Frowning, I hurried after them.

  The moment we stepped out of the school hall into the front entrance, the room went completely dark.

  Someone had turned off the lights, plunging us into blackness.

  I heard Piper shriek as she rushed past me. A blade glinted for just a moment in a chink of light shining in through a gap in the sheets, and then there was a thump and someone grunted in the dark. For a few moments of confusion I didn’t know what was going on and, although my hand fumbled for the light switch, I couldn’t find it.

  Then Cameron’s hand closed suddenly around mine, and I knew it was him because I could feel the burnt skin of his scarred right palm.

  “Come on,” he muttered, already pulling me along, stumbling, behind him.

  My free hand found the bannister and I realized we were heading up the stairs. I could hear Lilias’s footsteps clattering on Cameron’s other side and, behind us, Piper was shrieking, “What the hell are you doing here, Cameron? You’re the only person who could have stopped that brat from slicing herself up once and for all and you’re not even supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be rotting in prison!”

  We ignored her and carried on up the stairs. The darkness hid us from view and the whispering Frozen Charlottes helped mask our footsteps but there was nowhere to escape to and it could only be a matter of time before Piper caught up with us. When we reached the landing I thought Cameron would go to one of the bedrooms and try to lock us in but, to my surprise, he headed straight for the end of the corridor instead.

  “Where are we going?” I whispered, wishing I could see my way better in the dark.

  “The roof,” Cameron replied, and the words came out as a gasp. His voice sounded strange and I knew that something was wrong.

  When we reached the end of the corridor, he stopped so suddenly that I bumped into him. My hand came away from his T-shirt slippery and wet.

  “Cameron, are you bleeding?” I hissed.

  He didn’t reply but opened the door and pulled us through it. A small, steep staircase, almost more of a ladder, led up to a trapdoor in the floor. I heard the rusty groan of bolts being drawn back, then Cameron struggling with it and I put my hands against the door to help. It was incredibly heavy but we managed to push it open between us and it finally landed back against the floor with a bang. I winced, certain Piper must have heard it.

  “The roof, the roof!”

  “They’re heading for the roof!”

  The Frozen Charlottes whispered in the corridor behind us, and I wished I could smash all their horrid little china heads in.

  “Go on, Lilias,” Cameron said, pushing her up through the trapdoor. It was so narrow that we had to go one at a time.

  As soon as Lilias was gone, Cameron’s hand was pushing me through. I scrambled out on to the roof beside Lilias. We’d come out on to the flat bit with the slate tiles, beside the empty bell tower. The distant roar of the ocean below the cliff seemed to keep in time with the anxious thumping of my heart.

  Cameron pulled himself up on to the roof beside us and I saw him stagger as he straightened up. In the evening light I could see what I had felt downstairs – one side of his shirt was soaked in blood which was running in a dark stream down his jeans.

  “Oh my God, you’re hurt!” I said. Lilias whimpered beside me and grabbed hold of my leg.

  “I’m all right,” Cameron said. “Just help me with this door, quickly, before Piper realizes we’re up here!”

  I rushed to his side and together we gripped the edge of the trapdoor and tried to lift it closed but it was even harder the other way and, a moment later, I heard Piper screech on the stairs below.

  “I’m going to end you, Sophie! You should never
have touched those dolls! You can’t hide behind my brother forever!”

  Over the side of the trapdoor I saw her come on to the staircase and jerk her head up to look at us – a weird, snake-like movement that made her appear somehow inhuman. She was still holding the knife and I could see that the blade had blood on it.

  Cameron and I strained as hard as we could against the trapdoor. I heard him groan with the effort, but we couldn’t quite close it in time and, the next moment, Piper’s head appeared at the opening.

  I let go of the trapdoor, leaving Cameron to take the full weight, and hurried to the side to kick Piper full in the face before she could pull herself through. I felt savagely pleased by her cry of pain and the series of thumps as she slipped back down the stairs. Served her right for being such a vicious, two-faced bitch.

  The next second, Cameron managed to slam the door closed. His breath came out in a ragged gasp as he straightened back up. His left hand was clamped to the ripped gash in his shirt, but blood ran down through his fingers and dark spots stained the ground around his feet.

  “There’s no way to lock the door from this side,” he said. “We… We have to—” He tried to take a step forwards but his legs buckled beneath him and he fell forward on to his knees.

  Lilias and I both rushed to his side and helped him sit back against the wall. The sight of the wound in his side made me feel light-headed for a moment – it was no mere scrape but a great slash that cut deep. Cameron was shivering, and his hairline was damp with sweat. I knew he was really hurt, and he knew it too, but the look he gave me warned me not to say anything in front of Lilias.

  “Here,” I said, pulling off my jacket. “Stop the bleeding with this. You’ll be fine. It’s not… It’s not bad.”

  I couldn’t help faltering over the blatant lie but Lilias didn’t seem to notice as she crouched down by his side, holding on to his hand. And when Cameron’s blue eyes met mine I thought he was grateful to me for trying.

  “We need to block the door,” he said. “To stop her from coming through.”

  “You stay there. I’ll do it.”

  But although I searched around the roof I couldn’t find anything we could use to weigh it down.

  “She won’t be able to lift it by herself very easily,” I said. We all glanced towards the silent door. There’d been no sign of Piper trying to force her way through. Perhaps she didn’t fancy getting another kick in the face. “And even if she does manage it she’ll need to climb out head first and I can just kick her back down like I did before. She shouldn’t be able to reach us up here. We can call the police and just wait her out.”

  “Have you got your phone?” Cameron asked.

  With a sinking feeling I remembered seeing it skitter over the edge of the cliff and fall to the rocks below.

  “No, I lost it earlier. On the clifftop. Haven’t you got yours?”

  Cameron closed his eyes briefly and leaned his head back against the wall. I felt a chill of alarm at how pale he was. “It ran out of battery at the police station,” he said.

  “Daddy will be back in the morning,” Lilias said. “We could just stay up here tonight and wait for him to come home?”

  Cameron opened his eyes and looked at me. We both knew he couldn’t stay up here on the roof all night. He needed to get to a hospital, and quickly. In fact, he needed to be there right now.

  “We have to go back,” I said. “We have to get out of the house.”

  “No,” Cameron said. “It’s too dangerous. We’re not going anywhere. She’s got a knife, for God’s sake.”

  I shook my head. Lilias and I could wait it out until the morning, but Cameron definitely couldn’t.

  “You two stay here,” I said. “I’ll go down and call for help from the landline.”

  I turned to go back downstairs before Cameron could argue with me but, somehow, he managed to get back to his feet and put his tall body between me and the trapdoor.

  “I won’t let you go back there,” he said, grabbing my wrist.

  “You can’t stop me,” I replied. Lowering my voice so that Lilias wouldn’t hear, I said, “Cameron, you’ll die if you stay here.”

  His grip around my wrist tightened. “Don’t you understand?” he said. “This is my fault. I knew that there was something wrong with Piper. I knew she probably had something to do with what happened to Rebecca. I knew and I didn’t do anything about it!”

  “But what could you have done?”

  “I don’t know… Something… Anything… If you go down there you’ll just get yourself killed. At least this way, you and Lilias will survive.”

  “I’m not going to stand around and watch you sacrifice yourself, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said, shaking him off. “No way. You can forget it. I don’t want to hurt you, Cameron, but I am going to call for help and you can’t stop me.”

  “What’s that smell?” Lilias said suddenly.

  “What smell?” Cameron asked.

  But I smelled it too and Lilias and I both replied at the same time, “Smoke.”

  I saw it then, billowing up from the side of the house in a great cloud, swirling with little flecks of ash.

  “Oh God,” Cameron whispered. “She’s set the house on fire.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Her parents mourned for many a year,

  And Charles wept in the gloom.

  Till at last her lover died of grief,

  And they both lie in one tomb.

  For a moment we just stared at each other in horror, trying to work out what to do. Our options seemed pretty limited – either jump from the roof and hope by some miracle not to die, or wait right where we were to slowly burn to death in fiery agony.

  “It’ll get you this time.” Piper’s voice floated up to us from the garden. She sounded happy, and I hated her for that. “The fire’s come back for you, Cameron, and you won’t get away from it again.”

  I crossed over to the low wall running around the roof and saw Piper standing in the garden, Dark Tom’s cage at her feet. She was smiling and, in the light of the flames that were starting to flicker through the windows, she looked like a beautiful, insane devil.

  I glanced back at Cameron, alone near the trapdoor, one hand still clamped to his bleeding side, his shoulders hunched, his eyes closed. He looked like someone who had been beaten. Someone who’d been fighting hard for a long time and had finally lost. And I felt a sudden rage come over me, unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

  “We are not going to die here on this roof!” I said. “We’ve got to go back through the house. It’s our only chance.”

  I went over to the trapdoor and gripped the handle, putting all my strength into pulling it up. The muscles in my back screamed in protest but I managed to lift the door, causing smoke to billow out on to the roof. I saw Cameron flinch away from it and wondered if the smell reminded him of that day when he’d saved Rebecca from the tree house and burnt his hand in the process.

  I thought of that night when I arrived at the house and had smelled something burning and again later when Rebecca had come at me downstairs and I had seen flames that weren’t there. Perhaps she had known all along that this was going to happen, perhaps she had seen it somehow and had been trying to warn us.

  Some people think spirits can see the future… Wasn’t that what Jay had said that night at the café?

  “How has the fire caught hold so quickly?” Cameron asked.

  “The curtains,” Lilias said. “The sheets hanging in the windows. Piper got the petrol can from the shed…”

  I remembered the smell of petrol when we’d first walked through the front door.

  “It’s only going to get worse,” I said. “We need to go … right now.”

  Cameron held his hand out for Lilias. “Come on. Let’s get down from here.”

  We started to choke on the smoke as soon as we went back inside. Every single room was on fire because of the petrol-soaked curtains that Piper had h
ung there. This had clearly been her back-up plan all along. The Frozen Charlottes didn’t seem so pleased though.

  “Hot,” they whimpered inside the walls. “So hot.”

  “It burns…”

  “Make it stop…”

  “Piper, please…”

  “How can you hate them more than you love us?”

  “Please, Piper…”

  We started to make our way back towards the staircase but the smoke snaked down our throats, making it almost impossible to breathe. Already it was unbearably hot and the thick clouds of ash made it hard to see where we were going.

  I felt Cameron stagger beside me so I grabbed his arm and draped it around my shoulders. With his body pressed against mine I could feel the warmth of his blood soaking through my T-shirt and jeans, and I felt sick with worry. When he muttered Rebecca’s name I thought he was hallucinating at first, but then I saw her there through the flames. She was standing at the top of the stairs, her lips blue, her hair sparkling with frost, and she was beckoning us towards her.

  The three of us hurried forward, trying to ignore the roar of the fire, the crying of the Frozen Charlottes and the unbearable heat pressing in on us from every angle. The dolls were no longer pleading, but angry instead. I could almost feel their rage burning through the walls as they spat out every swear word I knew, and some I’d never heard of. But there was one word they kept hissing over and over again: Traitor.

  “Traitorous, traitorous…”

  “Not going to help us…”

  “Never really loved us…”

  “Never…”

  By the time we reached the top of the stairs, the smoke was so bad that I could barely see a metre in front of my face. I was practically carrying Cameron. My back burned and my shoulders screamed with the effort, and his head kept lolling against my shoulder so I wasn’t sure if he was awake or, I dreaded to think it, even still alive.

  I’d lost Rebecca from sight and the smoke was like a great monster blocking our path. I wasn’t sure where the stairs were, and I was terrified of falling all the way down that steep flight and breaking our necks on the bottom like that teacher had done all those years ago.