Shiver Page 9

  As the four children lay sleeping, one candle remained lit. Without warning it suddenly flickered and went out. A dim shape appeared in the far corner of the room.

  Fiona, Samuel, Charles and Sebastian lay still. No one moved, as the child spirit crept closer. She stared down at them, individually, observing them. Samuel twitched slightly in his sleep, as he felt a chill shadow pass across his face. But he didn’t wake.

  Eliza looked thin and cold, shivering in her inadequate shift. She drifted over the children, then moved towards the library. She was having fun, exploring the house in the dark. She was relearning all the old places she used to visit as a child, when she was a living, breathing human individual, with a mother and a father and a future before her.

  The firelight threw moving shapes against the far walls and into the distant corners of the room. Suddenly Eliza paused. One of the children by the fireplace had sat up and was rubbing his eyes.

  She stared at him.

  He stared back.

  It was Samuel.

  She stood frozen for a moment, then lifted a hand and beckoned him with one finger.

  He hesitated and considered waking the others. But Eliza didn’t seem to want that.

  She urged him to follow her.

  So he did.

  He got up out of his sleeping bag, paused for a moment to glance at Fiona and the boys, then followed Eliza out of the drawing room onto the landing outside.

  Samuel stared at the apparition before him. He had never seen her before, knowing of her only through Fiona and Charles’s descriptions. Now she was here before him, in all her spectral beauty. For there was something ineffably beautiful about her, something tragically sad and appealing, despite her terrible condition – the smell that clung to her clothes and hair, along with the traces of grey dust and powder. Beneath it all, she was still a child.

  Samuel followed her, not knowing where she was taking him, nor why.

  Eliza lead him to the window and with a mournful expression pointed towards the family graveyard. Samuel followed the line of her gaze. The sleeve fell back from her white arm, barely-clad, revealing how mottled and pale the skin was. She must be so cold, and he had to suppress an urge to offer her his dressing-gown. Instead he looked at her and murmured, “Is that where you and your brother were buried? With the rest of your family?”

  Eliza knitted her brow in confusion. Her voice, when it came, sounded pure and clear, like a distant bell. “I cannot recall exactly, but I do not think so.”

  “Where is it then … the place where you are buried?”

  Eliza looked at him sadly, but instead of replying she pointed vaguely towards the hills.

  Samuel nodded encouragement. “Over there?”

  She sighed heavily, as if the thought were unbearably painful to her, and drifted away. Samuel watched her go, feeling a strong urge to follow.

  Missing

  The fire had gone out sometime during the night and only ashes and burnt cinders remained.

  Fiona groaned and stretched herself. “That was an uncomfortable night,” she complained. “I think I prefer my own bed.”

  She slid out of her sleeping bag, muttering, “It’s so cold.”

  “The power’s still down by the looks of things,” Sebastian said, trying one of the light switches.

  “Oh great,” she sighed. “The romance is beginning to wear off. I thought it would have been back on by now.”

  She knelt down in front of the hearth and began making an effort to get another fire going. Kindling, firelighters, scrunched-up newspapers and logs.

  Granny Hughes looked in on them on her way downstairs. She grunted and shook her head. She was feeling miserable because of the cold and the extra work this would entail.

  “Hello, Granny,” Fiona called. “Did you sleep alright?”

  “Aye. Right enough.”

  “The fire was cosy.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “But the power’s still off.”

  “I noticed!” she responded. “Don’t know how I’m supposed to cook and clean under these conditions,” she muttered to herself, plodding down the stairs to begin work. The Aga ran on solid fuel, so she could keep the heat in, but ironing and vacuuming were out of the question.

  The others began rolling up their sleeping bags and tidying up.

  “Hey, where’s Samuel?” Fiona asked suddenly. She’d only just noticed he was missing.

  “Probably went downstairs to get some breakfast,” Sebastian suggested. “Can’t say I blame him. I’m starving.”

  But when they went downstairs to look, he wasn’t there either.

  “Have you seen Samuel, Granny?” Fiona asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”

  There was absolutely no sign of him. Fiona began to worry. She turned to her brothers and whispered “Where do you think he is?”

  “I’m sure there’s no need to panic,” Sebastian said, sounding more confident than he felt. “He probably just went outside, or else he’s already back home with his mum.”

  But Charles looked doubtful. Somehow he and Fiona just knew that wasn’t the case. Both of them had met Eliza before and wondered what mischief she was capable of.

  Fiona looked anxiously at her brother. “I’m scared, Charles,” she admitted.

  “Sebastian, go next door to the cottage and see if he’s there,” Charles instructed, looking straight at his brother. “But don’t raise the alarm if he’s not. We don’t want Isabel getting worried.”

  “Come on with me, Fiona. We’ll go and look in my room. After all, that’s near their secret room, isn’t it? She might decide to pay us another visit.”

  “You mean Eliza, don’t you?” Fiona asked.

  Her brother nodded. “Of course. Who else?”

  “You don’t think she’s done something to him, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Charles assured his sister. “She’s just a kid. She likes making mischief, that’s all.”

  “So why the urgency?”

  “I just want to find Samuel. Maybe she knows where he is.”

  At the cottage, Isabel was going through her morning ritual of re-lighting the stove.

  “Oh Sebastian,” she greeted him, when he turned up at the door. “How did the sleepover go?”

  “Fine. We were really warm next to that fire.”

  “I bet you were. Lucky things. Did you sleep okay?”

  Sebastian nodded vigorously, but said nothing.

  There was an awkward silence. “Have you all had breakfast yet?”

  “Er … just about to,” Sebastian muttered. It was obvious Samuel’s mother had not set eyes on her son that morning.

  “Well,” she continued, “Samuel seems to have been and gone already, as his jacket and boots are gone from the porch and he didn’t have them with him last night … “Is everything okay?” she asked, noticing that Sebastian looked decidedly uncomfortable.

  Rather than alarm her, Sebastian mumbled something incoherent, made his excuses and started to leave.

  Just then, there was the sound of tramping footsteps and Samuel appeared in the doorway, laden with wood for the stove.

  “Thought we might want this,” he said, looking at the two of them. “Everything alright?”

  “Yeah … just wondered where you’d got to,” Sebastian said hurriedly. “Breakfast’s on the go in the kitchen if you want some,” he added, glaring meaningfully at Samuel.

  “Oh … I woke early and thought I’d get this done before breakfast. I’ll be over in a moment. Where d’you want this, Mum?”

  Isabel watched Sebastian vanish under the archway to the house next door. Something’s up, she thought. Probably just kids’ stuff. Then, dismissing it from her mind, she headed off to her studio to start chiselling.

  Charles and Fiona climbed the narrow stone stairs of the tower, trying to subdue any thoughts of panic.

  “It’ll be fine, Fiona. Honestly,” Charles said.

 
; But Fiona knew he couldn’t be sure of that.

  “He could be in danger,” Fiona murmured. “And we don’t even know where he is.”

  “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” Charles asked. “We don’t know he’s been kidnapped by ghosts!”

  Charles opened the door to his room, and stared at his computer desk. Clothes and books were strewn on the bed, the way he’d left them. This was where it had all started, when he began to write that terrible ghost story. The pages of his efforts were in evidence all over the desk.

  “I wish I hadn’t bothered with that ghost story now. It was rubbish, anyway.”

  “I doubt it was that which caused all this,” Fiona pointed out, reading his thoughts.

  She touched the keyboard gently. “It was Samuel and I who found the secret staircase, remember? But Eliza also said something about us seeing them in the tapestry.”

  “I first heard them behind this wall,” Charles said, probing the wooden panelling with his hands. If there’s a secret room behind there, we have to find it. We have to gain access somehow.”

  “But how?” Fiona cried. “We ought to tell Mum that Samuel’s missing.”

  Charles hesitated. “We don’t know that for sure yet.”

  “Yes … we do, Charles. You know that we do.”

  Pounding footsteps sounded on the spiral staircase outside. Sebastian burst through the door.

  “Samuel’s fine. He went home. He’ll be over for breakfast in a few minutes.”

  Charles looked at Fiona in relief.

  “Told you,” he said.

  “You were right,” she conceded. “My imagination’s on overtime. It’s being snowed in. It’s driving me slightly mad.”

  “I’m starving,” Sebastian interrupted. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  From the shadows, Eliza watched them descend the staircase. What did they think she had done? she wondered sadly. What mischief did they think she was capable of? She had wished Samuel no harm. They thought the worst of her, evidently

  Blizzard

  Over a delicious breakfast of hot pancakes, syrup and crispy bacon – courtesy of the solid fuel Aga – Samuel told the others of his adventures the night before.

  “I couldn’t sleep afterwards,” he said. “I tried to, for ages. But it didn’t work. So I just got up in the end and went for a walk instead, gathered wood for the stove. Thought I’d make myself useful.”

  “So she’s appeared to you as well, now!” Fiona said. “So, we know we’re not imagining things.”

  “We knew we weren’t anyway!” Charles scoffed. “How much more proof do you need, if seeing with your own eyes isn’t enough?”

  “So what did she tell you?” Fiona asked Samuel eagerly.

  “Not a lot, really,” he replied. “She was very quiet. She just stood by the window, looking out, and pointing.”

  “At what?”

  “The hills,” he murmured, perplexed.

  “Why?”

  “I asked her where she was buried,” Samuel said.

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said she wasn’t sure. I don’t think she really knew, for certain. At first, I thought she was pointing at the family graveyard.”

  “We could go there and find out,” Fiona cried. “We could search the graves, read the inscriptions … find out for sure.”

  “Well,” Charles said, looking at the others. “I suppose we might get some answers that way.”

  “Fair enough,” Sebastian said. “I can’t think of any other plan.”

  “By the way,” Charles added, “don’t mention any of this to Granny. She’ll only start chuntering on about frostbite and hypothermia.”

  With a hot breakfast inside their stomachs, they gathered noisily in the boot room to don plenty of layers, coats, scarves, boots, hats and mittens, until they looked like a group of Inuits.

  “All we need now is a team of huskies,” Samuel joked.

  “Will Lucy do?” Fiona asked, as they ventured out into the freezing cold, trying to be cheerful, despite the gloomy nature of their expedition.

  The snow had drifted and hardened overnight. Much to Granny Hughes’s disappointment, it was impossible to get off the moor now. She disliked having to stay overnight at Dunadd, preferring to escape to her centrally-heated flat in town. Sometimes, if fate was on her side, she was snowed out rather than in, and couldn’t make it up to the house to work for the Mortons. But not this time.

  The weather outside was absolutely bitter, worse than the children had realised, and they were glad of the warm outer garments they’d put on. Lucy trotted beside them in the snow, wagging her tail enthusiastically. Fiona laid her hand on her back to feel the firm strength underneath. She was always such a good companion and it felt reassuring to touch something soft and warm.

  “D’you think this is a good idea?” Charles asked suddenly, glancing up at the sky.

  “We’ll be fine. We’re not going far,” Samuel said. “We just have to find out where their graves are.”

  “He’s right,” Fiona said, her breath forming a white pearly mist in front of her face. “We have to find out.”

  The land around seemed unbelievably inhospitable and hostile under these conditions – no longer the safe playground they were used to. They could just make out the family graveyard in the distance, over the brow of the next hill, the graves all leaning like rotting teeth against the hillside, as bleak as could be. They were half-covered by snowdrifts, and the headstones were rather insignificant-looking, as if they had been buried here on a whim and half-forgotten. There was no sense of wanting to remember, no vaults or huge mausoleums commemorating the dead. If anything, the Morton family seemed to want to forget, burying their dead hastily and planting small headstones, to be stumbled upon almost by accident.

  After trudging for what seemed like ages through the deep snow, the children reached their destination.

  Fiona bent down and scooped snow from each tiny headstone, but there was no sign of the names they were looking for.

  Samuel stood up straight and gazed into the middle distance.

  “You know, I don’t think they’re buried here at all. Like she said … maybe they were buried elsewhere.”

  “We need to go back to the house,” Charles suggested.

  “Why?” Sebastian said. “It’s stopped snowing now, and I – for one – want to keep on searching.”

  “Me too,” Samuel said, remembering the forlorn expression on Eliza’s face the night before and how his heart had gone out to her, even as her appearance filled him with dread.

  They looked up towards the hills above Dunadd. When he had asked her about her grave, Eliza had pointed Samuel in the direction of the edge of the moor, but he didn’t know exactly where she had meant.

  “We could search?” Sebastian said desperately. “Use known landmarks.”

  “Landmarks?” Fiona said, looking out at the unending white before them.

  “Like what, exactly?”

  “Fiona’s right. It’s too dangerous,” Charles said.

  “No, wait,” Sebastian exclaimed triumphantly. “Do you remember that little ruin on the moor … we used to go to it … in the summer usually? A small chapel that was crumbling.”

  “That’s right,” Charles said, an earlier memory taking him back to a distant time, when their father was still alive. “It had no roof on it. It was a ruin … a tiny little place.”

  “It’s an obvious choice,” Sebastian said. “We could try there. If this isn’t where she’s buried,” he pointed at the leaning gravestones, “then it’s bound to be the place. Has to be. Where else would she have meant, when she pointed at the hills?”

  “It’s definitely worth a try,” Samuel said.

  “As long as you know what you’re doing,” Charles cautioned. “Maybe I should come with you.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Fiona chided. “Sebastian knows this moor like the back of his own hand.”

  “But it’s ages
since we went to that chapel and everything looks different like this,” Charles pointed out.

  He surveyed the almost unrecognizable dips and hollows of the moor. Dunadd Woods stretched up darkly on the rise of the hill before them.

  “We’ll find it, no problem,” Sebastian assured his brother, a steely determination showing in his face. It was good to see Sebastian so fired up by the project at last, after his earlier cynicism, so it was with reluctance that Charles agreed to a division of resources.

  “Why don’t you two carry on,” Fiona suggested, “while Charles and I go back to the house? We can carry on with the hunt there?” She was conscious that there was still business to be attended to in Charles’s room.

  It seemed like a reasonable enough idea, in the end, despite Charles’s reservations.

  “Promise me you’ll come straight back if it starts to snow again,” he insisted before heading back to the house.

  “We won’t be gone long,” Sebastian assured him. “If we don’t find what we’re looking for within the hour, we’ll come home.”

  So Charles and Fiona retraced their steps back to the house, leaving the others to continue their search alone.

  Samuel and Sebastian watched the tiny figures of Fiona and Charles disappear towards the comfort of Dunadd House, before beginning their long steady climb to Dunadd Wood. They walked in silence for a while, their faces impassive as they stared ahead at endless white.

  “You are sure about this, aren’t you?” Samuel asked his companion.

  “About there being a ruined chapel?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “D’you think we’re heading in the right direction?”

  “Positive. I recognize the lie of the land … and that copse just there.” Sebastian pointed to a stand of trees, planted in the previous ten years or so: spruce, pine and Douglas fir, all dusted now with a fine sugar-coating of white powdery snow and ice. They trudged on, shoulders set firmly against the pitiless cold.

  “It’s like the Arctic,” Samuel remarked, through his woollen scarf. “I always fancied going to Norway … you know, to see the Northern Lights, but this is almost as good.”