Shiver

Samuel and Fiona looked back at the house. It rose above the trees, its many windows gleaming in the fading light. Dunadd was a great draughty building, with winding corridors and dark passageways. Samuel had never lived anywhere quite like it before. He and his mother rented a small whitewashed cottage from the owners of the estate, which sat just across the courtyard from Dunadd House, with only a few plum trees and a white stone archway between the two.

Fiona lived in the main house, along with her mother and two brothers, Charles and Sebastian. She had lived here all her life. Things had improved since Samuel had come to stay in the cottage. For a start, she had a friend now, someone her own age, who could defend her against her brothers.

Chris Morton, Fiona’s mother, lived nervously in the house, with some reluctance. Ever since her husband had died here when the children were small, she’d felt a shadow hanging over the house, but she had never felt able to leave Dunadd. It was their home, after all. Mortons had lived here for generations. The fact that Isabel Cunningham lived in the cottage across the way helped matters to some extent; it eased the loneliness, for the two families often spent companionable evenings together, in the huge upstairs drawing room.

Samuel’s mother, Isabel, was an artist – or a sculptor to be more precise – and used one of the barns as a studio. She had cleared it out, fitted new worktops, whitewashed the walls and transformed it into her own personal space. She was often buried away in here, creating weird and wonderful objects which she then attempted to sell. They didn’t fetch an awful lot of money; she and Samuel were always struggling, leading a hand-to-mouth existence, but he was used to that. It didn’t bother him, particularly.

In fact, he felt rather special, living up here on Sheriffmuir. It was so wild and remote. None of his mates at school could boast anything quite as extreme as this. His mother had been delighted to move here, because the rent was so ridiculously cheap after their flat in Edinburgh, and it was just what she wanted; somewhere to paint and sculpt and a place where Samuel could stretch his wings. Isabel constantly reassured herself that they were not completely isolated; there were three other children for Samuel to hang about with. The fact that he had not exactly hit it off with Charles and Sebastian was neither here nor there. They would … eventually. Boys always did. Didn’t they?

Christmas was looming, and they were anticipating more blizzards, like last year.

“Will it be as bad, d’you think?” Samuel asked.

“Nah,” Fiona reassured him. “Last year was different. It was out of this world. It’ll snow, but not
that
badly.”

Samuel remembered the ten-foot snowdrifts and how they’d been unable to leave the moor for days. Even Granny Hughes and her husband, who worked on the estate during the daytime, had been unable to return to their centrally-heated
flat in the town. They’d had to stay up here with the rest of them.

“D’you think your mum still misses your dad?” Samuel asked, out of the blue. He was walking along beside Fiona. They could see the clustered rooftops of Dunadd, poking out from between the skeletal trees.

“What made you ask that?” Fiona said.

He shrugged. “It just occurred to me, that’s all …”

“It’s so long ago now … since he died, I mean. I don’t really know if she misses him or not,” she replied, thinking about it properly for the first time in ages. “She must do, I suppose. It’s funny, but I hardly remember him.”

Samuel nodded, but said nothing. He knew what that felt like. He couldn’t remember his father either. The only information he had gathered about him was that he had acquired another family somehow and preferred to keep his distance. He knew, of course, that there must be more to it than that, but all he had ever known was his mother. And when you didn’t know any different, well …

He sometimes longed to be part of a big family: security in numbers, that kind of thing. People who could say to each other “C’mon you guys” or “come along team.” He had heard other mothers using expressions like that in a rather smug way when they rounded up their offspring after school. He didn’t really want his mother to be like that.

“It must be hard for you, too,” Fiona said.

Samuel shrugged. “It’s no problem. I’m used to it.”

“Still, at least we’ve got friends.” Then she added, “I just hope Mum never decides to move …”

Samuel glanced at her quickly, noticing the worried
frown.

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just … well, sometimes she floats these ideas. But I don’t think she means it.”

“I hope not,” Samuel said.

“She couldn’t do. Anyway, race you back to the house?” she cried, then set off at a run before Samuel had a chance to realize what was going on. She leapt over fallen branches and spreading tree roots, but her race came to an abrupt end when she finally stumbled in a rabbit hole, which sent her crashing onto her back.

“You alright?” he asked, bending over her, but she shrieked with laughter, flinging her arms up either side of her head. Last year’s leaves were stuck in her short spiky fair hair.

“What am I like?” she cried, laughing at herself.

“An idiot,” he said, helping her up. “That’s what you’re like.”

“Mum says I’m getting too old to go charging about the place like this.”

At twelve years old, you were supposed to
act
mature even if you didn’t feel it. But Fiona was a free spirit. She’d always lived out in the countryside, far away from other houses and people and she was used to doing her own thing; she didn’t really care what others thought about her. Samuel liked that about her. It was refreshing, especially when girls at school were so preoccupied with the way they looked and dressed, standing in tight semi-circles with their arms folded, passing judgement on everyone else. Fiona wasn’t like that. She was, in many ways, a tomboy.

From the studio, they could hear the whirr of a power tool.

Samuel looked sceptical. “I wonder what Mum’s up to now?” he mumbled.

He decided he’d better go and light the stove in the cottage before his mum realized it had gone out again, otherwise they’d freeze tonight.

“What does she need a power tool for?” Fiona said, half laughing.

“Goodness knows.”

“We could go and see?” Fiona suggested, but he shook his head. He knew to his cost what it meant if he disturbed his mother at work. No, it would be better if he just got on with making his own tea. Beans on toast, again.

“Have tea at ours tonight,” she suggested.

Samuel shook his head. He secretly enjoyed the peace and quiet, when the cottage was empty, dark and cold. He liked the moment before he switched the lights on, staring out at the mist in the trees with the brown hills of Sheriffmuir beyond. It reminded him of how lucky he was to live here.

“Suit yourself,” Fiona said lightly. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Yep!” He nodded and smiled, then watched her stroll happily away across the courtyard. Once she’d gone he pushed the door open and stepped inside the gloomy cottage.

The cottage was quite cheerless. No lights on. No fire lit. Samuel went out to the barn and heaped a load of dirty coal into a bucket, then cracked some kindling. He’d have the stove roaring in no time. It could be a bit sluggish, and both he and his mother had been known to lose their tempers with it on occasion, but they had more or less got the hang of it now.

Soon a warm welcoming glow emanated from its heart, although not quite enough to remove the raw edge from the air. He switched on a lamp or two, then started to make something to eat, wondering if he should take some through to his mum in the studio. If she was feeling inspired she could be at it for hours. He didn’t mind, because he knew what she was like. But occasionally she lost herself in her work.

He inspected the empty fridge gloomily. They needed to go shopping again. He switched the TV on and ate beans on toast.

The winter evening closed in until a fat yellow moon appeared through the branches of the trees, illuminating the world outside. Samuel stood with his elbows on the high window ledge and looked outside at the courtyard and the woods beyond. He loved that view. It was so peaceful; he
could even hear the sound of water nearby, the murmuring of the Wharry Burn, an ever-constant presence in his life now.

Going outside, he followed the path to his mother’s studio. The power tool was silent. Pushing open the big barn door, he called out, “Mum? You in there?”

“Oh, Samuel. What time is it?” his mother asked.

“’Bout sixish, I think.”

“Sorry. I had no idea. I’ve been busy … as you can see.”

He glanced at the mess around the place. There were wood shavings all over the floor and the work surfaces were cluttered with objects. Where, in all of this, was her work of art? Then he saw that she had been fashioning something out of wood … a strange shape.

“D’you like it?”

“Um … yes,” he offered, although he didn’t really know what to make of it. It certainly looked like the kind of thing that people in art galleries would buy and position in a spacious window or hallway as a centrepiece for other people to look at.

“I love working with wood,” she enthused in a slightly tired voice. “And the great thing is, there’s so much of it here.”

“Did you make it out of fallen stuff from the woods?” he asked.

“Yep,” she said proudly.

He looked at it contemplatively. Samuel liked drawing and sketching, and for a moment he wondered if his mother would show him how to use tools and make things out of wood. She seemed to know what he was thinking and patted
his shoulder.

“Maybe I’ll give you a lesson,” she said quietly. “You
and
Fiona. Have you had anything to eat?” she added guiltily.

“Beans on toast.”

“Sorry about that. I’ll do a nice roast tomorrow. How about that?”

He nodded. “Sounds good … but we need to go shopping first.”

“So we do.”

As they crossed the courtyard to the cottage, she looked up at the sky thoughtfully and said, “I suppose I’d better get plenty of food in tomorrow, in case it snows.”

Darkness fell across the two separate households. Lights were extinguished, fires burned low and heads lay sleeping on pillows. But they were not alone. Other things lurked in the shadows, biding their time, waiting. Dunadd was full of
other
presences. Silent presences … that had not yet made themselves felt.

The moon still shone brightly in the night sky, but the wind had picked up. In her bed that night, Fiona heard it whistling in her bedroom chimney, as it blasted the sides of the huge old house and bent the trees as it swept across Sheriffmuir. It was the voice of her childhood. She was used to it. Without it she would be lost. But it tended to drown out other, more suspicious sounds: strange creaks and murmurings in the corridor outside her bedroom door. So no one suspected or noticed that there was movement in the air. Was that a light pattering of footsteps? No one saw the eyes burning in the
dark. Fiona turned over and went back to sleep, lulled by the roar of the wind.

Across the courtyard Samuel also lay and listened. The wind banged at the windows, rattled the doors, threatening to tear the odd roof slate off. Earlier the moor had seemed so still when he went to the barn to fetch his mum, but now everything had changed. The trees were full of it, creaking with the strain.

Samuel was just drifting off to sleep when a scream pierced the night. He sat bolt upright, instantly awake, senses alert.

What was that?
, he thought, his heart racing.

In the woods just beyond the cottage, a rabbit had been caught by a stoat. It was the scream of a dying animal, that was all. Nature simply having its way. But Samuel didn’t know this.

The night was playing tricks on him again.