Shiver (11 page)

Charles woke up in a sweat. He had dreamt that Dunadd was a burnt-out ruin. He could see right inside the house as if he was hovering above it. All of the rooms had been destroyed and smoke coiled from the charred remains. The spiralling staircase was open to the sky and snow drifted in, sweeping up against the large stone fireplaces, which had survived the fire. Flames had swept through the edifice, gobbling it up like a hungry monster, until there was almost nothing left: just an empty, smoking shell.

He sat up and looked around him, half expecting to see flames licking the walls and the oak panelling … and breathed a sigh of relief. Only a dream, he told himself.

The next day dawned bright and clear. No more snow was forecast and Granny Hughes even began to entertain thoughts of making another attempt to return to her centrally-heated flat in the village. The adults were dying to ask Samuel and Sebastian some questions. No one knew what to make of their foolhardy expedition, but for now they were simply glad that the boys were safe and well.

Patrick MacFarlane stood looking up at the gleaming windows of Dunadd, broken blinds hanging askew in the
library. The place was getting more and more neglected by the day. He could see at a glance that Chris Morton was struggling to maintain the place since her husband died.

He shook his head and approached the house.

The dogs barked at his arrival, but wagged their tails sheepishly when they saw him.

Granny Hughes came into the passageway and ushered him in.

“I was beginning to wonder if you were still alive,” Granny remarked, as he followed her into the kitchen.

“Aye, just about,” he muttered. “I heard the reports on my wee transistor.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I was concerned an’ all. Are they back?”

Fiona leapt up from the table, and put her arms round the old man. Chris Morton encouraged him to take a seat.

“No, no. I’ll not stop. You’ll have enough trouble to be dealing with.”

“For goodness sake, man. Stay an’ have a cuppa with us. You’ll be needing it after your walk from the house,” Granny scolded.

“Aye, well … I’ll not say no.” He ruffled Samuel’s hair.

“Glad to see you’re safely back, lads. You’ve had us all fairly worried, so you have.”

Samuel blushed.

“They still have a few questions to answer, mind,” Granny added.

“Now, Granny,” Chris Morton cut in. “Leave them be. They’ve been through enough. We’re just glad to have them home, aren’t we, Isabel?”

Isabel nodded her relief, dropping a kiss on the top of her son’s head.

“Mum!” he protested. “Not in public.”

Mr MacFarlane laughed, as he sat down to drink his tea.

“Men don’t like a fuss, do we boys?” he said. “When will women learn, eh?”

Ignoring this comment, Fiona leapt up and grabbed the old man by the arm. “I nearly forgot. We’ve got something to show you.”

“Let the man drink his tea,” Granny scolded.

“It’s alright … the tea can wait,” Mr MacFarlane responded, allowing himself to be led out of the kitchen and up the spiralling staircase to the rooms above. Isabel, Granny Hughes and Chris Morton stayed behind in the kitchen.

After they’d left the room, Granny shot a furtive glance across at Mrs Morton. “He’s a lovely man, so he is.”

Chris nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

“The kids love him, anyway.” Granny banged a saucepan of cabbage down on the draining board with a thud. “Wonder if he wants to stay for lunch?”

“We’ll ask him when he comes down,” Mrs Morton said.

Granny, pleased with herself, allowed a rare smile to play around her lips but kept her back to the rest of the room so the others couldn’t tell. She didn’t hold with open displays of emotion and there had been far too many of those recently.

Up in the library, Fiona, Samuel and the two older boys led Mr MacFarlane towards the great stone fireplace set into the wall of the narrow room. They pressed the servant’s bell so that he could watch the huge stone slide sideways, revealing the hidden staircase behind it. He was suitably
impressed.

“So, what else has been happening?” he asked them quietly. “Other than your recent capers on the moor, of course. What were you doing out there, by the way?” he asked.

No one could avoid giving Mr MacFarlane a straight answer.

“We were looking for their graves,” Samuel admitted. “We had this sleepover and Eliza appeared to me while the others were asleep. She pointed me in that direction, but didn’t seem sure if they were really buried there.”

“I remembered a little ruined chapel from a long time ago,” Sebastian added, “and we thought it might be the place Eliza meant … so …”

“So you ended up forgetting the time, wandering off and being caught out in a blizzard?”

The boys nodded.

“Well, at least you’re safe,” the old man murmured. “You had me worried sick when I heard the news.”

“We haven’t told Mum about it yet … not all of it.” Fiona looked at Mr MacFarlane. “What do you think?” she asked him then. “About Eliza and her little brother?”

The old man sighed. “What do I think?” He paused and was silent for a moment. “I think … the dead are best left in peace.”

The children looked at him in disappointment. It was not what they wanted to hear, but it was true.

“If their graves are empty, then so be it. There is nothing we can do about that.”

Fiona shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she cried. “We
could find the secret room. We could find out whether or not they were flung into a plague pit, and what happened to them.”

Mr MacFarlane looked at her. “And once you have found out all the information you can …? What then?”

She hesitated. “Then we’ll know,” she said, defensively, her voice wavering a little as the others looked at her.

“Know what?”

“We’ll know what happened to Eliza and her brother.”

“And will knowing make any difference to the children? Or to yourselves?”

Samuel spoke up for the first time, defending the desperate attempts of his friend to hold her ground against the old man’s reasoning. “Knowledge always makes a difference,” he said.

Mr MacFarlane nodded. “Good answer. But is it the right one?”

They concluded their discussion, with nothing more to say on the subject. Mr MacFarlane knew nothing about any plague pits nearby. Hunger at last drove them downstairs, but it was an uneasy Fiona who sat before her meal that lunchtime, mulling over all that had been said, still desperate for answers. She was not prepared to let sleeping dogs lie. Nor were Samuel and her brothers.

After lunch, the children congregated upstairs in Charles’s tower bedroom, far from the adults. Mr MacFarlane had stayed for a meal, before heading back to his farmhouse, and Granny Hughes was tidying and clearing the kitchen. They lounged on Charles’s bed, with Sebastian flopped in the chair.

“I still think their bodies are buried in a plague pit somewhere,” Samuel said. “That’s why Eliza can’t really be sure about where their graves are. She just knows they’re buried elsewhere.”

“But why go to all the fuss of a headstone with their names on it?” Fiona wanted to know.

“They were a well-to-do family. Of course they’d want proper graves and memorial headstones … to show they loved their children,” Charles put in.

“What a morbid subject this is!” Sebastian said, clicking his fingers idly.

“Isn’t it?” Fiona said.

“I think it’s time we tried to find this secret room … if there really is one,” Charles said, leaping off the bed suddenly. The others followed. He hurried down the stairs and strode off in the direction of the utility room, emerging a few minutes later with a hammer, a chisel and one or two other heavy and lethal-looking tools. Samuel glanced nervously over his
shoulder, waiting for Granny or someone to discover them. But no one appeared.

“What are you planning on doing with those?” Fiona asked her brother uneasily, as he stood in the open doorway, weighing them in his hands.

“You’ll see,” he said.

“Mum is going to kill us,” Fiona murmured, not for the first time, as they followed Charles back upstairs to the tower. The spiralling stone staircase resounded to their footfalls, but they tried to be as quiet as possible, so as not to alert the adults.

“This secret room …” Charles said.

“If there is one,” Sebastian interrupted.

“… has to be next door to my room,” Charles finished, ignoring his brother.

“Excellent deduction, Sherlock!”

Fiona nudged Sebastian sharply in the ribs.

They stopped outside Charles’s bedroom door. He moved along slightly, feeling the wall with his hands.

“A doorway ought to be … possibly … round about … here,” he muttered to himself. Then, to everyone’s horror and amazement, he picked up his hammer and swung it hard against the wall. The whole staircase seemed to reverberate with the impact.

“Don’t you think someone might hear?” Samuel said.

“What if someone comes?” Fiona added.

“We’ve got time,” Charles breathed heavily, as he took another swing. “It has to be done.”

As he made another aim for the wall, Charles found himself thinking about his nightmare. If they succeeded in
breaking through this wall and finding a secret room on the other side of it, would this make things better or worse? He had no idea, but he knew they had to take the risk. They couldn’t give up now.
Down in the kitchen, the adults were busy about their separate tasks and didn’t hear the noise at first. But after a while, it was impossible to miss. The whole house shuddered and shook with each impact.

Granny and Chris Morton looked at each other in alarm.

“What now?” Chris said. Without saying another word, she began to make her way upstairs.

At the top of the tower, Charles, Sebastian, Samuel and Fiona were banging and crashing with avid determination, swinging tools and attacking the plaster with a vengeance. They were on a mission now and nothing would stand in their way.

Eventually they broke through, just as Chris Morton began to climb the spiralling tower staircase.

With a cry of triumph, they peered through the jagged opening and saw what they had been hoping to find. The hole revealed a secret chamber that had been hidden and bricked-up for four centuries. Debris littered the ground and dust flew through the air, making them cough and splutter. They stepped through into the secret room. They had reached “the other side,” no matter how crude and unorthodox their method.

Charles and Samuel tried to wrench open the window shutters. They broke apart in their hands, riddled with damp and rot, and a dim light streamed through the ivy and into the room for the first time in four hundred years, alighting on shelves and ruined books, and a scatter of broken toys on
the floor. Spiders and mice scuttled away into corners, and a powder-grey dust lay thick as snow everywhere.

Fiona dipped a finger into it and smelled it.

“It’s lime, I think,” she said. “Chalk and lime.”

“Didn’t they used to cover the bodies of the dead with lime?” Samuel asked. “To stop disease from spreading. I read it in that book in the library, when it mentioned the plague …” His voice trailed away.

There was no one inside the room. No helpless boy crying for his mother, no pale girl … but there was evidence of their habitation everywhere. There were discarded objects, broken furniture, all draped with cobwebs. Then their eyes alighted upon the most telling detail of all. A group of crudely-carved wooden soldiers lay on the floor. They had been arranged into battle formation, and although one or two of them had toppled over, the rest still held their ground. It seemed that only recently a child had been playing with them.

The four children were instantly silenced, the realization of what they could see flooding through every corner of their minds. They had found their two little ghost children.

Chris Morton now stood in the broken-down opening behind them, rubble and lath and plaster littered all about her feet.

“What on
earth
do you think you are doing?” she asked slowly, staring at them.

By way of an answer, they moved aside, pointing to the scene within the secret chamber.

Chris Morton stared in amazement at what the children had uncovered: the toys, the beds … evidence of habitation everywhere.

“My goodness,” she breathed quietly, on a sigh. “My goodness me!”

Finally, she found her voice. “All this time, the house has hidden a secret room, and we never knew it was here.”

The four children gazed at her in silence. Seeing the little soldiers brought it home to them.

“This is …” she hesitated, trying to find the right words. “This is quite something. We ought to think about contacting someone … telling them about it. Historic Scotland, maybe.”

“Do we really want other people tramping about the place, poking their noses in?” Charles said.

“But it’s history … it’s evidence …” she murmured.

“Evidence of what? Of cruelty against children in 1604!” Fiona exploded.

Everyone glanced at her in surprise. “Well … it’s true! They were left here to die.” Fiona was unapologetic.

“No one could help it. Their mother probably had no choice,” Samuel said.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Chris Morton said. “What’s 1604 got to do with anything? Are you saying you know
something about the children who slept in this room? In all this decay and filth?”

The children looked sheepish. “We’ve been meaning to tell you” Fiona began “… but we were afraid to.”

Their mother gazed sternly at them all. “Well now’s your chance. Fill me in,” she commanded. And so they began to tell their story, of what they knew so far.

“And it’s all led to this,” Mrs Morton sighed, unable to believe the evidence of her own eyes. “This terrible room, with its …” she turned her back on it.

“I need time to think,” she added. “There’s an awful lot to take in.”

Chris Morton ordered the children downstairs. She would deal with the mess later. Once they had gone, she strode into the library, a room she never usually liked to frequent. But now she needed to be on her own. She sat down at her husband’s leather-topped desk and gazed at the bookshelves. What nightmare had been enacted within these walls that she called home? What was she to do? Was it time to move on, at last?

She gazed up at the gloomy portraits of her husband’s ancestors on the walls around her. They offered no help. Then her eye alighted on the framed tapestry, the sampler which Catherine Morton had stitched. She looked at it for a long time. Then she tucked it beneath her arm and made as if to leave.

She passed through the drawing room, but when she got to the landing outside her own room, she froze.

Two children had appeared at the end of the corridor,
a boy and a girl, standing side by side. She had time to observe that they were holding hands and that their feet were bare. They stared at Chris Morton as if in entreaty … as if demanding something of her, but she did not know what it was. She had never seen them before. This was the first time. And, unbeknown to her, would be the last. It was a while before anyone moved. Then, almost imperceptibly, the children faded away and were gone.

Clutching the framed tapestry to her, she hurried down the staircase. The others were gathered in the kitchen, telling Granny Hughes about their discovery of the secret room upstairs.

Chris Morton hesitated outside the door before deciding to join them. She remembered the curse of Catherine Morton and the trouble they had been through last winter.

She had made her decision. It was time to leave Dunadd behind. She would let everyone know as soon as possible.

Down in the basement, it was dark and eerie. Mr Hughes, with the help of Charles, was attempting to see if anything could be done about the dodgy state of the electricity. They located the power box, and Mr Hughes shook his head sagely.

“Just as I thought,” he murmured. “A loose connection.” After more minutes of tinkering, with Charles holding a torch for him, the problem seemed to be resolved. “You know this wiring’s faulty,” Mr Hughes added. “She should get it seen to.” He pulled down a lever. Instantly, the house was flooded with light. They heard a cheer coming from above.

“That’s pleased everyone,” Mr Hughes grinned.

The huge building buzzed into life and blazed with unaccustomed light. The boiler fired up, the radiators started ticking, TVs and radios began to mutter all over the house.

Chris Morton heard a happy, triumphant yell coming from the kitchen.

“Hurray,” someone bellowed.

By the time she joined them they were already celebrating, unaware that things were about to change forever.