Shiver Page 14

  “It’s like Mum said,” Sebastian added. “When we’re adults we can make up our own minds about where we’re going to live. But until then …”

  “Why are you two so ready to give up? Why can’t you make a fuss?”

  “What’s the point?” Sebastian sighed.

  “There’s every point in the world,” Fiona burst out. “Because of this,” she slammed her fist down on their father’s old desk, “and because of this …” She swept her hand round at the books and pictures lining the walls.

  “They’re just things,” Charles said. “We can take them with us.”

  “I’m not talking about things. I’m talking about history. Family history. A sense of place. A sense of belonging. We can’t take that with us.”

  Eliza Morton was watching all of this from the shadows, vaguely impressed. There was more to her descendant, Fiona, than met the eye.

  She fingered the pretty shiny dress that Fiona had left out for her. She had looked upon it with scorn, at first, refusing to wear it. John played with his pirate ship and all the little figures, murmuring to himself in peaceful contentment, but she had promised herself she would not be bought as easily as that.

  But gradually she had gazed at the dress, touching the material occasionally, stroking its satin smoothness. And in the end, she had put it on.

  “A dress for me. A pirate ship for you,” she had whispered softly.

  Fiona could not hear her.

  Eliza Morton giggled to herself, as if thinking of a private joke.

  She drifted off, in search of her brother. He was often hiding these days, making himself so thin and flat that not even she could always make out the increasingly faint outline of him. He had a knack of merging into the background.

  Eliza wanted to keep an eye on Chris Morton before the family left for good, and she wanted her brother to help her. The two of them would watch Mrs Morton, dog her every move.

  John Morton tries to talk

  “What is it Samuel?” Isabel asked, watching her son pack up his few remaining belongings into the box marked SAMUEL’S ROOM. He had filled that crate in Edinburgh just over a year ago, in order to come and live here, on Sheriffmuir. One year on and they were nomads once again.

  Samuel didn’t look at her. He had his back turned. She wondered if he blamed her.

  “I was happy here,” Samuel admitted. “I don’t want to leave.”

  “I know you don’t. And surprisingly enough … neither do I.”

  “She’s made up her mind though.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Why can’t things ever stay the same?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Samuel.”

  “Life always gets messed up in the end.”

  “Not always,” she added, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s easy for you to say. You’re an adult. You can go wherever you like,” he complained.

  “Is that what you think?”

  She looked at his few things scattered about. She could see why he would miss it. She would too. The cottage had become theirs. She would miss relaxing on the sofa at night, listening to the murmur of the Wharry Burn through the window, or the breeze sighing in the trees. She loved it here as much as he did.

  “It’s not quite like that,” Isabel said.

  “What’s not?”

  “Adults can’t always go where they want.”

  “It feels like it.”

  “I can’t always control things. I wish I could. The cottage isn’t mine. I have to leave it, if the Mortons are leaving.”

  He said nothing, but threw another book onto the pile in the crate.

  Fiona caught up with him later. He was looking gloomy. He already felt as if the others were distancing themselves from him, making ready for their departure. They were going to stay with an aunt in Argyll, while preparing the house and estate for selling.

  “It’s just a small cottage she’s got on the estate, so we won’t be living in a big house or anything. But I think that might be quite nice in a way.” She was trying to put a brave face on it.

  “Granny and Mr Hughes are still going to come up to Dunadd sometimes, to keep an eye on the place while it’s empty,” Fiona continued.

  “Oh good.” He wondered if this was supposed to be a comfort to him.

  “I’ll email you every day,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You can come and stay sometimes, if you like. Mum said that would be fine.”

  He nodded again.

  “Don’t be so glum.” She nudged him affectionately. “Nothing will stop us from being friends. Not you and me.”

  He smiled, taking courage. “You’re right,” he said. “I just wish …” He couldn’t trust himself to continue. His life at Dunadd during the past year was beyond anything he could ever have imagined happening in his life. He would never forget it. Never. He wanted every detail about Dunadd to be imprinted and scorched on his mind forever.

  “We’re only taking a few things at first,” Fiona said. “Essentials and stuff. Until we find somewhere else to live. Permanently I mean.”

  “Who would have believed it … the Mortons leaving after all this time,” Samuel murmured.

  “I know,” Fiona said. “Hard to believe, isn’t it. I wonder how the house will feel without us.”

  Outside the moon gave off a light so bright that the shadows of things stood out clearly: the greenhouse; an abandoned wheelbarrow filled with ice and dead leaves; places where no one would go again; objects no one would pick up, except to tidy away or discard … not to use.

  Later that night, the four sat watching television in the downstairs room next to the kitchen. It was the scruffiest room in the house … and the coldest. They’d pulled blankets over themselves to keep out the chill and huddled close together for comfort.

  Suddenly the television reception went fuzzy, black and white snow fizzing across the screen.

  “Hey, I was watching that,” Sebastian cried. “Who’s got the remote?”

  “Not me,” Fiona said.

  Then she turned her head slowly. A strange and solemn little figure had come to stand quietly behind Samuel’s chair.

  “Samuel,” she whispered, her face ashen.

  “What? What is it?”

  She nodded her head and he glanced over his shoulder.

  John Morton stood there in silence, his small pale face distressed. His cheek bones were thin and hollow, his eyes dark and sad and Fiona felt instantly sorry for him; this sad little boy, who slept upstairs among the cobwebs and relied on his sister for company.

  They all looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

  “It wasn’t our mother,” he whispered.

  No one said anything.

  “She did not do anything wrong.”

  There was an awful silence as Fiona considered what to say. The boys were all speechless, hopeless in a crisis.

  “No one is saying that she did,” she murmured, looking at him carefully.

  Suddenly another dark figure loomed in the shadows behind him.

  “What are you telling them?” Eliza whispered fiercely.

  “I wasn’t. I was just …” He sounded pitiful and sad.

  “Be quiet,” she said crossly.

  Fiona glanced at the scared little boy, feeling sorrier than ever.

  Eliza Morton had John by the hand now and was leading him away. He was beginning to fade, to grow thinner and fainter.

  “Wait!” Fiona cried, willing them to stop. “What happened to you? Who put you in that room?” But Eliza dragged him out of the light into the shadows of the passageway outside.

  “It was not her fault. They made her do it.”

  It was a faint whisper only, but they all heard his voice clearly just before he disappeared.

  Memories

  The large house creaked and moaned all about them, as if conscious that huge changes were imminent. The family were asleep in their beds. Boxes and suitcases were half-p
acked in hallways and corridors. The mahogany grandfather clock that had marked time for two hundred years, ticked away the remaining hours relentlessly. Tomorrow was the day they had all been dreading. The Mortons would pack up and abandon the house for good, leaving Granny Hughes and her husband to supervise the place in their absence. After this, Samuel and his mother would slowly prepare to leave. They had another few days left. Isabel had contacted a friend in Edinburgh and they were going to stay in her flat for a while.

  Samuel was broken-hearted. He’d become used to the open landscape, the trees, the murmuring Wharry Burn, the hills. He couldn’t imagine being cooped up in the city again.

  The only voices to echo here would be the voices of ghost children, looking for an absent mother.

  Now the house waited for them to leave.

  “I am frightened,” John whispered again.

  “You are always frightened.”

  The barely visible figures slowly circled the dark spiralling staircase until they came to rest outside one door in particular.

  Eliza Morton’s eyes gleamed.

  “I like this not at all,” John murmured.

  “Hush!” She silenced him with a glance.

  They crept through the narrow gap in the doorway and stood looking across at the four-poster bed. Chris Morton was sleeping soundly. Despite her fears and anxieties she had had no trouble in falling asleep tonight. Exhaustion had claimed her entirely. She was completely unaware of the room around her and of the two figures who crept ever closer to her bed …

  They stood looking down at her sleeping peacefully. Eliza held her candle aloft, the light from it flickering dimly over the bed.

  “I wish we had a mother,” John wailed softly.

  “We did have a mother,” Eliza replied. “She abandoned us.”

  “She did not,” John protested, rounding on her. “I remember what happened … and she never meant to leave us. She was broken-hearted.”

  Buried memories resurfaced from the long distant past as they remembered how they had first got sick.

  No one in the house at Dunadd was suffering from the plague. There had been isolated incidents reported as far afield as Stirling and Alloa, but no one up here on the estate had succumbed, where the air was clean. Their parents had felt secure in this knowledge … until John took ill, very suddenly.

  At first, they thought it was nothing worse than a common cold, but then the bruises and swellings started to appear. Their mother watched in horror, refusing to believe the truth. Although their parents were wealthy, the children, John and Eliza, had always lived in fear of the household staff. They knew that no one would help them or be kind to them, so when Eliza fell sick as well, it was their mother who nursed them.

  The servants told her she should not do so; that she would catch the disease herself and die. But she refused to listen. She would not abandon her children in their hour of distress. She wiped and bathed their little bodies, sat with them as they suffered. Their mother cared not about contracting the disease as well. But she remained untouched. Throughout the course of their illness – which lasted a matter of days – she stayed fit and healthy, nursing them until they were dead. Then she sat in the little room where they died, refusing to move. The fetid air bothered her not one bit, despite the protestations of her husband and the servants. She would not budge.

  “It is not safe to touch the bodies,” she was told.

  “They will be buried in a decent burial ground,” their mother insisted, as finally she was taken to her own room to rest, sitting in silence for hours until at last she began to weep and mourn.

  Unbeknown to her, her instructions were ignored. Lime was spread around the room, on the beds and the floors, and the children were put into sacks and thrown into a communal grave: a plague pit on the other side of the hill, near Alloa.

  Two headstones were erected in the graveyard on the edge of the moor, down by the little chapel where their mother sometimes had worshipped with her children. No one but their father and the priest knew that the graves were empty; that their bodies lay elsewhere. Their mother was never told the truth. Her husband constructed a convenient web of lies. He wanted to offer her comfort, that was all, and he knew that two little memorial stones were the only comfort she would have.

  The empty room was sealed up on the advice of all. The servants and staff were glad when every trace of the room was removed, knowing they had treated the children badly at times, especially in the last days of their illness. They had refused to help them, or give them so much as a sip of water. They were too terrified of the plague.

  But their mother had not been afraid. Disobeying her husband, she had gone to her children’s aid.

  Houses keep hold of their memories. It was a long time before the bricked-up room ceased to be remembered, and became a secret truly kept. Finally, there was no one left living who remembered. The secret room remained a secret, until four children began to probe and pry …

  “Don’t you remember?” John persisted bravely, working on his sister. “She had no choice. She nursed us until we were dead. Everyone told her that she must seal up the room afterwards.”

  There was a slight softening of Eliza’s face as she listened to her brother’s words. “They said the bodies were not safe to touch.”

  “That is right, Eliza. You remember now?”

  In their minds, the two children could hear their mother’s distraught cries as if it was only yesterday. Four hundred years had intervened, but her love for them had never faded or gone away.

  “They forced her to,” John muttered. “They said it was the right thing to do. They sprinkled grey powder everywhere, all over our bodies and the beds and furniture, before they took us away to the pit. Then they bricked it up. But she wailed and wailed.”

  Eliza looked at her little brother with dawning realisation. “You are right. Now I remember. Now I understand.”

  “None of this is their mother’s fault,” he added, looking down at the woman sleeping in the bed before them. And taking his older sister by the hand, he led her quietly from the room.

  Chris Morton slept on, suspecting not a thing.

  Escape

  Charles sat up, sweating. He’d had his nightmare again, the one about the house becoming a burnt-out ruin, himself gliding above it, able to see clearly inside. A roofless ruin with snow drifting in. In the distance, he could hear dogs barking; yelping and howling as if their lives depended on it. The dogs invaded his sleep. He woke up.

  Remembering his dream, he looked up and saw with relief that the ceiling was still in place.

  He flopped back onto the mattress and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again. Why were the dogs making all that noise?

  Something was roaring on the floor below.

  And he could smell something … something acrid, catching at the back of his throat. Smoke!

  He leapt from his room in an instant, calling out the names of his brother and sister as he ran.

  Sebastian appeared immediately from his room, having also been roused by the barking. Together, they stumbled down the narrow tower staircase, clutching at each other in the darkness. On the floor below, smoke billowed and filled the air, making them choke and splutter, so that it was almost impossible to see ahead. The dogs’ barking was more incessant now. They must have woken him in the first place, Charles realized, although he was too preoccupied to think of this. All he could think about was escaping from the terrible inferno that their house had become.

  On reaching Fiona’s bedroom, they found the door wide open and no one inside. A terrible crackling sound surrounded them. Still clutching at each other, they tried to make their way to the staircase, but were stopped in their tracks by a beam falling across their path, a burning timber which smashed sideways, trapping them where they were. For a moment, Sebastian hesitated, cowering in the darkness, too afraid to move. Charles, understanding that his brother was in shock, shook him, forcing him down onto his knees. It took some
time before Sebastian realized what was being asked of him.

  “Crawl,” Charles ordered. “Crawl on your knees.”

  With no other option, they slithered below the fallen beam, managing to avoid the worst of the smoke. The air at floor level was cleaner, easier to breathe. As they passed their mother’s room, they saw orange flames licking the curtains, running up and down them like quicksilver, eating them alive. Like Fiona’s bedroom, it, too, was empty.

  The fire was like a living, breathing monster, swallowing all in its path: a voracious animal that would stop at nothing. It was a force beyond them. They couldn’t hope to win this battle … only struggle to escape. They crawled their way down the stairs, in time to see another beam come crashing down on the floor above, ruining their home, their house … everything they held dear. Sebastian was crying, his breath coming in gasps now. They had no idea where the others were; if they were still alive, or if they were trapped somewhere inside the flames.

  “Where are they?” Sebastian sobbed.

  “Keep going,” Charles begged. “Just keep going,” and he dragged his brother behind him, mindful of the blinding smoke that was thickening all about them with every passing second. The roar of the fire was deafening as they crawled on all fours away from the foot of the spiral staircase, shouting for their mother and Fiona as they went. Their hearts felt as if they were bursting from their chests. The grandfather clock stood where it had always stood, flat against the wall in the shadows, the last thing to burn … but it too would perish.

  Everything in the world that they owned was now a huge conflagration, a bonfire that lit up the sky for miles around.

  At the Sheriffmuir Inn they saw it. Even Mr MacFarlane down at Lynns Farm saw the orange glow above the treetops.

  Once on the ground floor, the boys found their way to the kitchen and the outer door blocked by falling debris and swirling, choking flames. They had to find another way out. In the hallway, not far from the grandfather clock, was a grander, more formal-looking front door which was never used. Hidden behind a thick velvet curtain, it was so rarely breached that they mostly forgot it existed. They tried to open this now. However, through disuse, the bolts had rusted and it took several tense moments of jiggling and panicky brute force until they finally slid across and the key turned in the lock.