Frozen Charlotte (18 page)

“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.”

She threw the Frozen Charlotte doll back down the cliff and it shattered beside Rebecca in a pile of broken porcelain.

And that was it. Piper left and Rebecca was alone on the cliff. Her limbs felt like lead and each breath she took was like trying to breathe knives but she reached over and picked up the doll’s head – the largest surviving piece. The Frozen Charlottes told her to do bad things sometimes but I could feel how much love Rebecca had for the magical dolls that spoke to her and said they wanted to be her best,
most special friends in all the world.

“
Shh
,
” the Frozen Charlotte head whispered. “
It’s not so bad to die. You’ll get to play with us forever and ever.
”

Rebecca tried to flex her fingers but the muscles had locked in place and it hurt to move them. She was afraid that if she tried to stand up she would fall over the edge of the ledge, hundreds of feet to the beach below. So she stayed where she was, a strange fog filling up her head so that she couldn’t be sure whether she sat there for hours or only minutes. It seemed like an eternity of staring down at the black sand shining in the moonlight and hearing Frozen Charlotte softly humming her ballad in the still, silent night.

At some point, Rebecca’s heart began to feel strange. It was beating sluggishly at irregular intervals, all wrong and out of time in a way that made her chest ache. And then the strangest thing happened. The cold seeped away and she actually started to feel warm! A delicious warmth that spread all the way through her, a lovely bright glow that made her drowsy and ready, at last, to lay her head back in the snow and sleep until someone came to rescue her.

And then she heard Piper’s voice up on the clifftop, calling out to her and saying she was sorry, that she loved her and had brought help. She heard Cameron calling her name, and her mum and dad too. They’d come to get her. Rebecca felt a small explosion of joy deep inside her chest as she looked up and saw her parents, and her brother and sister, standing at the edge of the clifftop, smiling down at her. She tried to speak but only a hoarse croak came out.

And then she blinked and, suddenly, they were gone. There was no one on the clifftop. No one coming to rescue her. No one even knew she was there, except Piper. And Rebecca realized that Piper wasn’t sorry, she was at home in bed, tucked up in the warm, asleep. And she wasn’t coming back.

A tear slowly ran down Rebecca’s cheek as she closed her eyes and let her head fall back on to the snow. She breathed out slowly as her heart did a few more of those strange sluggish beats… And then stopped.

I gasped for air on the clifftop, my own heart racing in my chest as everything around me returned to normal. I felt chilled to my bones by what I’d just witnessed. I couldn’t see Rebecca on the clifftop anywhere but I realized that this was what she’d wanted all along – for someone to know the truth about what happened to her. She hadn’t died by accident. She’d been murdered by her own sister.

I thought suddenly of Lilias and knew I had to get back to the house. But when I turned round, Piper was standing on the path, just a few metres away, holding something behind her back. She smiled when she saw me looking at her.

“Hello, Sophie,” she said. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

“No, I just … I just went for a walk.”

“Only I saw your suitcase was gone so I thought perhaps you’d decided to go home without saying goodbye. And I can’t let you do that. Oh, Sophie, I’m afraid we have a problem now that you’ve seen something you weren’t supposed to.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, desperately trying to sound normal.

“Come on, now. We both know that’s not true.” Piper’s voice softened suddenly. “You know, it would have been a lot easier for you, for everyone, really, if you’d never found that letter. It’s made everything very messy. Not neat and tidy at all.”

“What’s that you’re holding behind your back?” I asked.

“What … this? I unlocked the kitchen drawer.” Slowly Piper drew out the object she was holding behind her back. It was a huge meat knife, gleaming and sharp. She smiled. “The Frozen Charlottes want to play the Knife Murder Game.”

“Piper—”

“Ready, set,
go
!”

She sprang at me like a cat, and I just turned and ran. My first thought was to try to outrun her,
either by going along the clifftop or taking off into the croft land, but there was hardly any distance between us. She could catch up with me at any moment and bury the knife in my back. I could hear her footsteps crunching on the path behind me and could already feel the blade biting into my skin. So instead I ran to the only safe place in the area that I knew of – Rebecca’s clifftop ledge. Thanks to the white cross marking the spot, I knew exactly where it was.

For an awful moment as I lowered myself over the cliff, I thought I was going to miss the ledge, but I just made it. I managed to land on both feet, then the momentum drove me forwards on to my hands and knees, so close to the edge that my fingers curled over it. My phone flew out of my pocket and I watched it skitter over the side to smash upon the rocks below. I felt warm blood beneath my palms and realized I’d cut them when I fell, and both my knees throbbed. For a breathless second I gazed down at the black sand that Rebecca had sat staring at while she froze to death. Then I quickly scrambled away from the edge and pressed my back firmly up against the cliff face.

“Oh, not this again!” Piper’s voice came from up above me. “I’m not going to have to throw rocks at you too, am I?”

“You’re mad!” I gasped.

“
I’m
mad?” She laughed. “You’re the one clinging to the edge of a cliff face. This seems a strange time to go rock climbing, I must say. Haven’t you noticed that it’s howling a gale?”

“What’s wrong with you?” I stared up at her, wondering how I could have ever missed that insane glint in her eye. There was something different about her face, as if a mask had been taken away, revealing something rotten underneath. “How could you kill your own sister?”

Piper tilted her head a little. “Did Cameron tell you that?”

“No. Rebecca did. She showed me what happened.”

Piper stared down at me. “Do you actually believe that? You really think you’ve seen Rebecca? You’re as crazy as Lilias.”

“I have seen her,” I said. “I spoke to her through a Ouija board back home. She escaped from the board and came here with me.”

Piper just smiled and shook her head. “So what’s your plan? I mean, are you just going to stay down there forever?”

“I only need to stay here until your dad gets back.”

“He’s not coming back tonight. Didn’t you hear? Because we took so long giving our statements at the police station he arrived on the mainland too late to see the lawyer, so he’s staying over and seeing him first thing in the morning. He phoned an hour ago to tell me. And, even if he wanted to come back, he couldn’t. It’s the wind, you see. They’ve had to close the bridge and cancel the ferries. There’s no way on or off the island tonight.”

“Well, it’s not winter now,” I said. “I can stay out here all night if I have to.”

“
You
can,” Piper replied sweetly. “But Lilias is back at the house.”

“And how will you explain it if anything happens to Lilias?” I said. “I know you think you’ve got it all worked out for me with that fake suicide note and those answerphone messages you left for my parents, but don’t you think people will be suspicious if your other sister dies under mysterious circumstances as well?”

“But they won’t be mysterious circumstances,” Piper said, smiling down at me. “Lilias has a phobia of bones, remember? You must have noticed her scar? You saw what she tried to do to herself once before. All I have to do is give Lilias a knife and she’ll kill herself with almost no persuading at all. She’s terrified of that skeleton inside her and would love nothing more than to cut it out. It would have worked the first time if Cameron hadn’t poked his nose in. He’s always ruining things. That’s why I had to get him out of the way. He’s chased away all my friends, but he can’t chase away the Frozen Charlottes. They were the only ones who ever preferred me to Rebecca. Rebecca used to cry when they asked her to do things. And when she did what they told her to she was normally stupid enough to get caught doing it and would then whine about how it was the Frozen Charlottes’ fault. I never did that. I’ve always been loyal to the dolls. And they’ve been better friends to me than any person ever has.”

“Well, they’re gone now,” I said. “You’ll never see them again.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I packed them all in my suitcase,” I said.
“And threw them over the edge of the cliff.”

Piper stared at me for a moment. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying. They’re all gone. Every last one of them. I even took the broken arms and legs and heads. They’ll be at the bottom of the sea by now.”

She shook her head. “You’re making it up. You’re just trying to scare me.” I saw her glance towards the house and then look back down at me. “You’re just trying to get me to leave so that you can climb up from there and run off.”

“The dolls are gone,” I said. “They were evil little things that poisoned your house. I bet that’s why someone tried to lock them away in the basement all those years ago. But now they’re gone you don’t need to do the terrible things they told you to do any more.”

But even as I spoke I knew it wasn’t going to work. Piper had one hand clasped to her throat and I realized I hadn’t got all the dolls after all – she still had her necklace. And even though it was only a head and some broken hands, it could still whisper vile words in her ear and put evil thoughts in her head.

Piper gripped the handle of the knife so hard that her knuckles turned white, and the look in her eyes as
she glared down at me was simply demented. “I
liked
playing those games with the Frozen Charlottes!” she hissed. “I’m not like Rebecca, or Lilias, I don’t play the game and then cry about it afterwards. I play the game and then ask the dolls when we can play it
again
. If you really have done something to them then I—” She seemed to choke on the words – she was so angry that she almost couldn’t get them out. “If you’re telling the truth,” she tried again, “then you’ve just made the biggest mistake of your miserable life.”

And, with that, she turned and stepped away from the clifftop, disappearing from sight. I had no way of knowing whether she’d just taken a few steps back and was still waiting for me, or whether she really had returned to the house to check on the dolls.

I tried calling her name a couple of times, but obviously if she was just waiting there to trick me into climbing back up then she wasn’t going to answer. I remembered what I had told Lilias about locking the door to her room and staying there until I got back. With Cameron gone, she was all by herself, waiting for me. I’d promised I would stay with her and I knew what Piper had said was true – it wouldn’t be difficult to hurt Lilias, and if Piper
gave her a knife then she’d probably do it all by herself without too much persuading.

I reached out for the rock and found ledges and footholds, just as Rebecca had done. It was easier for me than it had been for her because I was older and it wasn’t a freezing night, but the wind made it terrifying. It howled around me, tugging at my clothes and pulling at my hair, doing its very best to drag me right over the side of the cliff.

As I got nearer the top, I hesitated a moment. If Piper was still up there then she’d be upon me the moment my hands grabbed the side of the cliff. She could bring her knife down and cut my fingers off with one swipe, or stab the blade down full force into the top of my skull.

I swallowed hard, already imagining the blood soaking my hair, and reached my hand up for the edge of the cliff.

The second I did so, another hand clapped down on top of mine. I screamed and almost lost my grip. But it wasn’t Piper staring down at me.

It was Cameron.

For a moment we just looked at each other in shocked silence. Then Cameron tightened his grip
around my wrist and said, “Well, are you just going to hang there all day?”

With his help, I scrambled up on to the clifftop and moved away from the edge on shaky legs.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought—”

“The police can’t hold me for more than six hours without charging me,” he replied. He looked exhausted – the circles beneath his eyes were so dark they resembled bruises. “They haven’t decided whether they’re going to or not. I have to go back to the police station in the morning for more questions. I got the bus home but as I was about to go inside I … thought I heard Rebecca again, calling for help. When I saw your hand come up over the edge like that, I… Just for a second, I thought… What the hell are you doing out here like this anyway?”

“There’s no time to explain,” I said. “We’ve got to get back to the house. Piper came after me with a knife.”

“A
knife
?” Cameron’s face went suddenly ashen.

“She was with Rebecca that night. Somehow Rebecca showed me what happened. Piper was there and she left her to die. I threw the Frozen Charlottes into the sea – I thought that might release their hold
over Piper and that she’d be, you know, normal again, but I don’t think she ever
was
normal. I think she
likes
doing these awful things. And, Cameron, she was so angry when I said I’d got rid of them. And Lilias is in the house with her.”

“Come on,” Cameron said, already turning away. “We need to hurry.”

We ran all the way. I had a stitch in my side by the time we reached the gates, which Piper had locked behind her. The sun wouldn’t set for some hours yet but the overcast sky cast long shadows over everything and the house looked like an empty shell huddled there, with thin ribbons of sea mist curling around the bell tower.

There was total silence as we walked down the path and, when we got closer, I realized that every single window was covered. The curtains were all drawn in the windows upstairs and it looked like sheets had been hung up over the downstairs ones.

Cameron turned to me and said, “Maybe you ought to stay outside. If Piper really has lost it—”

“I’m coming with you.” I cut him off at once. No way was I staying outside twiddling my thumbs, wondering about what might be happening within.

To my surprise, Cameron reached for my hand and his fingers wrapped warm and strong around mine. “Stay close beside me then,” he said.

He gave my hand a squeeze and I squeezed it back. Then we turned back to the house and walked up the steps to the front door together, both dreading what we might find inside.