Shiver Page 15

  They threw the door open just as a whole interior panel came crashing down behind them.

  Stepping into the night, the cold air hit them in stark contrast to the blazing inferno from which they’d just escaped. Coughing and spluttering, they staggered clear of the flames, and lay prone on the frosty ground, sucking clean air into their lungs.

  Sebastian was sobbing with the effort. Charles put an arm round his brother’s shoulder.

  “Where are they?” Sebastian cried. “Where are the others?”

  Charles said nothing. He did not know the answer to that question. Instead they sat in silence, catching their breath, watching their home burn.

  Suddenly, in the darkness, Charles became aware of movement to the left of them and with immense relief saw figures huddled in a group and their sister running towards them, sobbing.

  “We thought you were trapped,” she cried, grabbing at them both hysterically. “We thought you were trapped in the tower.”

  The children gathered with Granny Hughes and her husband at the front of the building, watching the flames leap. Fiona was being comforted by Granny, who in turn was inconsolable. No one knew where Chris Morton was. No one had seen her.

  Samuel and his mother appeared and ran across to join them, and they all stared helplessly as the fire tore through Dunadd, eating up carpets and curtains, swallowing tables and chairs, devouring everything in its path.

  Everyone had the same thought. Charles was trembling. Where was their mother?

  The fire service had been called by the watchers at Sheriffmuir Inn and was on its way but Sheriffmuir was an isolated place to get to. In the meantime, they had to watch their home burn.

  “There she is. There,” cried Fiona, running towards a darkened figure, which had emerged from the side of the building, bent double and coughing, clutching something in her hand and preceded by barking dogs.

  “Oh, thank God. You’re all safe,” Chris Morton whispered hoarsely, clutching her children to her.

  She and Isabel stood side by side, the children huddled close. Soot and debris peppered the snow, which had gradually thawed over the past few days. At least the fire service would be able to access the moor; something which would not have been possible just a few days before.

  Fiona grabbed her mother’s arm, and the boys gazed at their mother with wide-eyed relief. She was safe. For a few moments they had imagined the worst, but she was there before them, unharmed. Their mother. At times she annoyed them and they her, but life without each other was unthinkable … untenable.

  As the great house before them crackled and roared, Chris Morton glanced around.

  This is what is important, she thought, looking at the people gathered about her. Not a stupid old house … but this.

  The two families leaned close together for comfort, and watched Dunadd burn.

  Flames leaped and roared, devouring the rafters, the turrets and the tower, leaving a blackened corpse, almost unrecognizable in its devastation. Dunadd House had stood upon the moor for nearly five centuries. Now, a roofless ruin would take its place – just as in Charles’s dream. A shiver ran down his spine as he stood there in the cold, surrounded by his family and friends whom he loved, in spite of their differences, and in spite of the history that had hounded them all their lives.

  Skull and Crossbones

  It was a miracle that no one had even suffered from smoke inhalation. The exact cause of the fire remained unknown. Fire inspectors suspected that the wiring had been faulty for years and in need of repair, and was probably the cause of the blaze.

  Others could confirm this, particularly Charles and Mr Hughes who had examined the power box in the basement. The electricity had been temperamental in recent days, to say the least.

  They spent the night – their final night – all sleeping on sofas and chairs in Samuel’s cramped little cottage, Granny Hughes and her husband included. It was a terrible squash, but no one minded. None of them could quite believe what had happened. They were suffering from shock.

  “It’s a mercy none of us were hurt, so it is,” Granny kept muttering.

  The smell of smoke and charred remains drifted across the courtyard. The shell of the house remained. It could be rebuilt … but at a cost.

  Fiona thought sadly about the grandfather clock, the grand piano, the paintings and family heirlooms, the antiques, the books … not to mention the rabbit that had perished in the flames. The dogs had escaped with Mrs Morton. In fact it was the dogs that had saved them. As soon as they had smelled the flames, they had barked and barked to raise the alarm.

  Chris Morton was thinking about the insurance. Nothing could replace what they had lost, but she reminded herself that they could have lost an awful lot more.

  As they sat drinking tea by the roaring stove, the adults comforted each other with stories and memories about the past. A warm feeling emanated from them all, despite the terrible circumstances of their plight.

  “I wonder how the fire did start?” Fiona whispered to Samuel, as she hugged her knees quietly in the shadows next to the stove.

  He shrugged his shoulders, but both wondered if Eliza and John Morton may have had something to do with it. They could not have been more wrong.

  “We’ve lost so much,” Granny was wailing.

  Chris Morton shook her head sadly. “I always found it a burden, to be honest,” she admitted, although she did feel desperately sad at the thought of all their belongings; valuables, which had been in the family for generations, had all been wiped out in a single night. “There’s something liberating about starting again, from scratch. After all, we come into this world with nothing …”

  Granny Hughes rolled her eyes. “That’ll be the shock talking,” she barked.

  “Well, whatever it is, I managed to rescue one thing. This.”

  She held up the framed tapestry that had hung in the library: the sampler of the two children standing beside the tower.

  “Why?” Granny Hughes said, staring at it in astonishment. It was a poultry little treasure to have rescued, in Granny’s eyes.

  Chris Morton shook her head. “I don’t really know why. It was signed by Catherine Morton herself. Maybe that’s it …”

  Fiona reached for the tapestry and stared at the distorted stitches, delicately and neatly executed by Catherine Morton, when she was incarcerated in her own house at the end of her life.

  “I noticed something else too,” Chris Morton surprised them all by saying.

  “What?”

  “You’ll need good eyesight.”

  “I’ve got a magnifying glass if that’ll help,” Samuel cried. “It’s packed already, but I might be able to reach it at the top of the box.”

  He disappeared and returned a few minutes later.

  Chris Morton held the magnifying glass over the picture and they took turns at peering at the minute stitches. There was an emblem embroidered into the body of the tower.

  “A skull and crossbones,” Fiona breathed. “It’s tiny.”

  Samuel’s jaw dropped open. “It’s a symbol of the plague! That confirms what we thought all along.”

  Fiona and Samuel both grew pale. Both were thinking of the hollowed-out eyes of the two ghost children, John and Eliza Morton.

  “They died of the plague,” Fiona said in a small voice. “And they blamed their mother for abandoning them to it. There would have been nothing she could do.”

  Then the ultimate horror occurred to them. That’s why the room had been sealed off. It was believed to have been contaminated by the plague. In those days, there was nothing anyone could do for the victims. Anyone approaching them, or trying to help, would probably have contracted the plague and died too. So the room had been sealed off and bricked-up eventually. No one wanted to remember. Everyone wanted to forget.

  But not their mother. She never forgot.

  Isabel shuddered. “I think it’s about time we all had a milky drink. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t
sleep yet.”

  “This cottage to rent on my sister’s farm …” Chris said speculatively, glancing towards Isabel, “… there are two of them actually.” Samuel’s ears pricked up. “I don’t suppose you’d consider renting the other one?”

  Isabel glanced briefly at Samuel then smiled. “We’d love to.”

  Fiona sat up and flung her arms round her mother.

  “We can start again,” she said. “I know we can.”

  “Five hundred years is a lot of time to make up for,” Chris Morton warned, thinking of the house and everything they had lost.

  But Fiona felt as if she could face anything, as long as she had her family and Samuel by her side.

  Epilogue

  That summer a new sign was hammered up next to the wooden gate at the bottom of the drive.

  FOR SALE

  Whoever bought this property would have to start completely from scratch.

  And would they have heard the rumours of a couple of ghost children found in a sealed-off room? Stories had been told. Some of them true.

  The spiralling staircase lay open to the sky – just as in Charles’s dream – and if you looked very carefully, it was said that you could see two pale children standing in the ruins. They vanished and re-appeared. Vanished and re-appeared. No one was really sure if they were there …

  Dunadd House, as a ruin, had acquired a far worse reputation than it ever had when it was occupied. But maybe one day someone would claim it and take care of it. Otherwise, it would remain a wreck, slowly deteriorating with time.

  Mr MacFarlane walked up there sometimes, and occasionally thought that he glimpsed children among the charred remains. He wondered if the place would ever be sold.

  “I wouldn’t buy it,” he muttered to himself, walking on. “Ghosts are best left to themselves.”

  In the distance, something shimmered. Dressed unaccustomedly in a beautiful satin dress, Eliza smiled at her brother John.

  “Come,” she said. “None shall harm us now.”

  Then, taking each other’s hands, they drifted across the broken ruins, fading back into the walls of their home, to live with their memories.

  Delve deeper into Dunadd’s secrets –

  read on for an eerie extract from Chill,

  the spine-tingling prequel to Shiver.

  The Weeping Woman

  Samuel was alone in the house. Outside the moor lay silent, stretching away into endless emptiness. Dunadd was completely deserted. He liked it this way, having the place entirely to himself. He could almost pretend the house was his. There was an atmosphere of secrecy and silence, which grew more intense when there was no one else about. The others had all gone skiing – it was all they could think to do on the snowbound moor. The drifts were so high that the narrow winding road, which led up to the isolated Dunadd House, had become impassable.

  It was so quiet. There was nothing but the sound of the wind in the trees, and the distant murmur of the Wharry Burn, water travelling and rumbling beneath ice. The whole moor was covered with snow, an ocean of unending white, waves of it packed up against the walls of the barn and cottage – the cottage where Samuel now lived.

  The rooms, corridors and staircases of Dunadd House creaked all about him in the silence. Numerous empty rooms lay behind heavy oak doors.

  Samuel had felt nervous as he crossed the snowy courtyard, the white tower looming above him, but he was not going to be put off. He made his way up the silent staircase to the drawing room on the first floor.

  The grandfather clock ticked noisily in the hall below, a deep sombre note befitting its age, like the heartbeat of the house itself; constant, regular, marking time.

  On the wide landing dark wooden doors concealed their secrets from him, but ahead of him one door stood open. He made his way towards it over the polished boards and Turkish carpets. He trod softly, afraid to disturb the peace. The colours of the rugs were beautiful, tawny-red, crimson and tan-coloured, like the flanks and hide of a red deer. The walls were panelled in dark oak, and he was conscious that above and behind him lay another narrower stone staircase, leading into the tower, a place he had never before explored.

  He passed shelves of books, old thumbed paperbacks, family favourites, and pushed open the door at the end. Before him lay the drawing room on the first floor, a vast expanse filled with light from the large bay windows on either side. Old pieces of antique furniture stood about in the shadows, gathering dust.

  After a week of raging blizzards the moor had at last fallen silent, and sunlight sparkled and reflected from the snow outside, and reached into the dark corners of the house. Dust motes circulated slowly.

  Samuel was familiar with this room. He had been here before, most memorably on Christmas Day, just over a week ago, although he preferred not to think about that right now. It only made him nervous, and he didn’t want that. He wanted to be able to explore the house, unafraid, without feeling the need to keep glancing back over his shoulder.

  He advanced slowly into the centre of the room.

  Near the door stood the grand piano, as expected, its lid open and ready to play. Family photographs of the widowed Mrs Morton and her three children stood on its polished surface. At the other end of the room was a massive stone fireplace, its hearth stacked with firewood, unlit at the moment. Mr Hughes would light it later when the family returned. Above the fireplace hung the mirror, framed in elaborate scrolling gilt. Samuel made a deliberate effort not to look into it. He repeatedly drew his eyes away on purpose, especially after what he had last seen there. He didn’t want that vision to disturb his dreams again.

  He wanted normality, nothing unusual to happen. Or did he? Perhaps he was seeking her out again.

  He walked across the drawing room to the window seat on the far side, and sat down with his back to the room. He made himself comfortable and studied the view of the mountains. It was a breathtaking panorama. The whole moor lay beneath him.

  He turned his attention to the map underneath the window, a long map of the Highland line, browned with age at the edges, fixed and preserved behind glass. This is what he was here for, ostensibly, to copy the drawing of this map, so that he could have one for his own room. His bedroom in the cottage across the courtyard shared the same view. Mrs Morton had been reluctant to leave him alone in the house at first, but at last she had agreed, and now here he was.

  He placed his pens and pencils on a small occasional table and dragged this into position next to him. Then he rolled out his long piece of paper, selected specially for the purpose, and pinned it down onto the table with a weight at either end to stop it from curling inwards.

  The oak panelling creaked now and then in the silence, and from a long way away, if he strained his ears, Samuel could still hear the regular, soothing beat of the clock downstairs. He began to draw, his fingers moving rapidly over the paper, his back to the mirror and whatever visions it might contain.

  This is an ordinary house, he told himself. It’s old and beautiful and very large, but it holds no sinister secrets. He almost believed it for a moment.

  There was nothing Samuel loved more than copying maps. He liked drawings with lots of fine lines and detail. It was a gift he’d always had. Even as a small child, sitting in front of the television, he had arranged his pens and pencils in neat rows and would draw away with utter contentment for hours.

  As he worked he glanced over his shoulder from time to time at the empty room behind him. The mirror over the mantelpiece remained blank, nothing moved or stirred in its silvery depths.

  He stopped drawing and listened. He thought he’d heard a sound on the staircase. The empty house waited, no sound apart from the distant tick of the grandfather clock and Samuel’s own breathing. There it was again – a light tread on the stair. He decided it was probably Granny Hughes doing her dusting again, despite the fact she had been ordered to rest by Mrs Morton. She often crept about like that, duster in hand, trying to be invisible in spite of her mutterings
and groanings.

  He turned back to his drawing, his hand poised over the paper, and began to draw a long curving line, more slowly this time, his ear cocked for any sound outside.

  Behind him the door swung slowly inwards – he could feel the draught of it at his back travelling across the room. Slowly he turned his head, but there was no one there.

  Then he heard it.

  It was the sound of a woman crying. It filled the room around him, permeating the walls and furniture. A bottled-up sound, trapped, as if echoing along a long dark corridor.

  Samuel looked about him, spinning this way and that, but the drawing room was empty. Then he heard her footsteps. She passed through the room to the door of the library at the far end. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear her footsteps clearly, and the sound of her weeping. Then the library door closed with a bang, and he was left with a terrible silence.

  He dashed across the drawing room, stumbling against the furniture in his haste. When he got to the door of the library he rattled the handle furiously, but it was locked … from the inside. He bent down and peered through the keyhole. The key was still in place. He could see nothing.

  He stood up and his eye was caught by the mirror over the fireplace. It reflected back no one but himself.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he whispered to himself. “I don’t believe in them.” There had to be a logical explanation. Think with the mind, not the heart. But his mind was telling him to run.

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