Frozen

I think I just spaced out in utter confusion for a few minutes, trying to draw some kind of conclusion, find reason. I couldn’t make sense of it. This house was old. Hundreds of years old. The rose must have been in this spot, on this staircase, for at least three centuries. It wasn’t possible that it could be here, because no-one but my father could have carved it. It was identical to mine.

There was no explanation.

It didn’t make sense, and it was making me angry. My dad was gone. He was gone from my life - he’d left me - and the rose in my hand was a symbol of what he’d left behind. Something carved and unique, like how he’d helped to shape me as a person, throughout my whole life. But now it didn’t feel so special. There was another rose, too, and with each question I asked myself, another half a dozen raced through my mind.

I suddenly jumped up, eager to escape the chaos of my thoughts. I didn’t want to spend my next hours here, sinking deeper and deeper into this mystery. I didn’t want to think about my dad.

I decided to move on, and waked purposefully round to my right. A corridor split off from the entrance hall, from the huge staircase, think carpets and wood. Wood everywhere. It’s just a coincidence, I thought.

The corridor, however, was different. It was long, so long that I had to squint to see the turning at the end, but the ceiling was low, and everything looked more obviously ancient. It was as if, as I travelled deeper into the house, I was travelling back in time.

Beautiful old oil paintings lined the walls, spaced every few metres. I surveyed them as I walked further down the corridor. A landscape with a field of poppies; a portrait of a young woman, holding a lace parasol with a vacant expression. Little mahogany tables and cabinets stood proudly, showing off long-forgotten trophies in discoloured metal. But still, an eerie disquiet seemed to overcast everything. It both frightened and intrigued me, that no-one had cared for this place in such a long time. Where were the owners? The family? The Lords and Ladies who should’ve been dancing through the halls…

I could almost hear them singing…

“Da, da-da dum...la la la, la la la…da, da-da dum…”

A young man, bowing gracefully from the waist, offering his hand to a young woman to dance. Acceptance, and they move to the ballroom floor, swaying to the quiet, simple music. A violin solo. Their feet lift, and then return to the floor, in time with the fluid movements of the melody. Strangely, it’s only their profiles that I ever seem to be able to see. Never their faces.

“Da, da-da dum…” the woman sings, in the tone of a lullaby for a drowsing child, “Da, da-da dum…” Her voice folds into the aching notes of the music and she circles her arm more firmly around the man’s shoulder. He brushes an escaping curl from her cheek and she smiles.

She sings.

“La la la…la la la…”

They twirl without effort, content with each other’s company. But at that moment, the image blurs before I can see their face, though I can still hear her voice…

I blinked rapidly, coming back to the present with a jolt. I knew my imagination well for running off on its own sometimes. I needed to get out more. I continued to step curiously down the corridor instead, but out of the corner of my eye, in my peripheral vision, I saw something which made me stop in my tracks.

I shifted my bag further up my shoulder and turned to face a window on my right. There were several at this part of the hall, and through them I’d briefly and dimly seen an unkempt courtyard. I’d seen a small fountain, depicting a proud-looking bird, perhaps an eagle, or a falcon.

I looked back to count that there were five windows in total. That was strange. An oddly large number for how compact that courtyard seemed. Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. Perhaps it was an old illusion that the architect of the house had designed. Or the light, making the windows seem further apart.

The light…the light had been bright in the ballroom. White and pale gold from the regal columns and ceiling settings, from the huge sconces set into the walls. And there it was again. A singing voice. A woman’s voice, lilting and sweet.

“Da, da-da dum…la la la…” Meaningless words, so how could they contain so much beauty? But of course, as my imagination often liked to have it, just as something wonderful came along, it morphed into something else.

I stood in the middle of that hall, and strained to listen. I held my breath, the sound of my heartbeat sounding softly in my ears. For a moment, as the melody ended, and then started up again in transition, it was almost as though the song was coming out of the walls…

Great. Now I was really losing it. Still, curiosity killed the cat, as it were, and I moved closer to the corridor wall, and peered through the window.

It was in fact a small courtyard, with a stone fountain in its centre. A majestic falcon, wings spreads wide, towered over its invisible prey, trapped in art forever. Its head was raised to the skies, and water trickled steadily from its beak.

There wasn’t anything else there of particular importance, only dull grey paving stones and a few, unsuccessful attempts at flowerbeds dotted around, against the walls. Even weeds were failing to flourish, and that said something. However, something continued to scream wrong to me. And the only thing I could think to do was to listen.

I turned on the spot and slid down the wall, sitting on the musty carpet, and closed my eyes. Right on cue, the singing began again, its notes wavering in the silence.

I listened carefully to the rise and fall of the melody. It reminded me of the ocean, its waves washing forwards over the rocks, and then retreating. In and out…in and out…

Somewhere in the middle of following the dreams that the song created, I realised that its voice didn’t sound so much like the voice of the woman from the ballroom, as I’d first thought. Assumed, really. I’d been so caught up in the image of the lights and the dancing and the couple that my imagination seemed to have continued it into the here and now.

Somewhat startled, I concentrated on the singer’s voice, and was soon shocked at the differences I’d failed to notice. This voice wasn’t lilting and sweet; it was…well, it was beautiful. Even more beautiful than that of the pleasant-feeling, peaceful woman who had danced so happily in the ballroom. Her voice had echoed smiles, glory and contentment, but the voice I was hearing now was melancholy. It spoke of misery and loneliness, and span a web of sadness around me. My heart ached for the singer. An age of entrapment was contained within the notes…how could anyone possibly portray that kind of heartbreak? It was a thousand years of mankind’s pain and despair, all in one voice.

And the next realisation hit me like a speeding train. The voice wasn’t just different in tone and power and in the world it created…

Because it was a boy, or a man, singing.
I had never heard anything more beautiful.
I had to help him.

The instant that thought crossed my mind, the sounds became words, and their intent was no longer meaningless, excepting the extraordinary beauty which they had had before, and continued to carry on.

They became clearer and clearer, and the song wrapped me in its wistful embrace.

“A world of memory, a song of sound,
Hear my voice through silence’s ground.
Embrace the wound of beauty passed,
The mirror will break beyond the glass.

Rich and deep, his voice made the song flow like a poem, and I knew, somehow, that its words had real meaning. Did this unseen boy, or man, know that I was here? Could he know that I wanted to help him?

But…then I thought, what was I doing? What could I, just a sixteen-year-old girl, do here? And I obviously wasn’t thinking straight. The more I considered it, the more bizarre and utterly insane my train of thoughts appeared to be. What was I doing here? I’d been on my own in this ancient place for over an hour. My mind had to be playing tricks on me, surely, my imagination going off the rails. I seemed to be living something out of a daydream.

This craziness was all inside my head. I shouldn’t be here. The only reason I’d even come to this place was because of that terrible storm…no-one could stay outside in that kind of weather. It was dangerous, and this was the only escape, the only refuge that had been available. This abbey had been my only option, and it had got me so riled up…

I needed to get away.

My resolve solidified and I got to my feet, turning away and beginning to walk back down the corridor. What had I been thinking?

I’d just reached the first of the windows, when I took in the painting of a small girl, a picture with a gold, gilded frame. Her back was to the viewer and she faced a dark moor, with the moon shining in a cloudy sky and her white-blonde hair streaking down her back, over a white dress.

For some reason, the painting unnerved me. What had inspired the artist to paint such an image? A lonely child, in the middle of the country, in the middle of the night? I sighed and moved on. I needed to stop thinking in these endless daydreams…

“No!”

A strangled cry shattered my thoughts, and I felt like ice-cold water had been poured down my back. I stood, frozen to the spot for several, terrified moments; until a full-blown scream followed it, full of despair and rage. It echoed around the corridor, over and over; the grief echoed around me, over and over. A boy’s voice. A man’s voice. There was no way I could have imagined it.

I tore down the hall once more, tumbling in my desperation. In seconds, I faced the last window, and tried to ignore the ominous rattles of metal trophies, quaking glass cabinets and clinking china that sounded in my wake.

The first ray of sunlight hit my face and I hurried to the window, searching for any sign…a sign of anything…and the view through each window was the same. I ran to each of the five, wild and out of breath. The same courtyard. The same fountain. What was happening? I knew that I hadn’t imagined his scream!

Back to the last window again, I squinted through the sunlight that caught me square in the eyes. I shifted my weight to my other foot, moving a few inches, and the blinding ray continued to reflect straight into my face. Aggravated in the heat of the moment, I stepped to the left, a good foot or so, and yet I was still blinded. Up on my tiptoes, still blinded.

I didn’t dare to consider the impossible idea that the sun’s rays were following me, and moving.

And it was strange; there was no heat to it, no warm, pleasant accompaniment to the sunlight I was used to. Even through windows, it should be warm, shouldn’t it? The number of times I’d defied the childish instinct to play under the sun; instead of firing water pistols and water bombs, playing with sprinklers and hoses, I’d so often simply sat at the window in my bedroom, reading a good book. The sun had been warm through the glass, the heat of a summer’s day.

Then it came to me, so obvious it was incredible. So stupid that I hadn’t noticed it before!

There shouldn’t be any sun. There was a storm outside.
An hour couldn’t have washed away the raging, black clouds and lashing rain.
Somehow, what I was seeing through these windows wasn’t real.

And suddenly, the view through the windows bizarrely disappeared, and quite literally in the next blink of my eyes, it turned fully black, as if shadows had clustered to the glass.

The glass. My mind reeling, I followed my instincts. What had the song said? That line about the glass? As if the boy was singing once more, I heard a whisper in my head.

“The mirror will break beyond the glass.”

The mirror? The window - that was it! The window was both the glass and the mirror. It reflected the sunlight as well as a false image. To break it, well, that was obvious.
I was so full of a crazed, intense excitement from solving the mystery, that I swung back my arm and then hurled my fist towards the window, without a second thought. The impact was shocking.

I’d never punched anything or anyone in my life, and it was quite ironic, or so I thought, that my first was to a window. At least it wasn’t a wall. Books had never warned me of the resulting, jarring shattering up my hand and arm. The sharp pain made me gasp, and the sight of the splintering glass which crashed in sheets and further showers everywhere, made me pull my other arm up in front of my face. I shut my eyes tight until my eyelids flared red, and for a moment the shattering sounded like the thunder of the storm outside. But it was quickly over, and as the last tinkle of falling glass faded into the silence, I opened my eyes.

Standing in the room beyond was the boy, his eyes wide with shock and his mouth slightly agape, in what was unmistakably awe.

*****

The first thing I noticed was the silver hand mirror, clutched in his left palm. The knuckles had gone white. That was the mystery of the moving light solved, as I saw the small torch at his feet. Then I took in the person who had got into my head so much.

The boy appeared to be seventeen or eighteen, from his slightly lanky stature, but the tightness of his mouth and the glint of grief in his eyes struck me as something that should be part of someone much older. He reached behind himself without either moving his feet or taking his eyes from my face, and I didn’t know if it was just my imagination, but his hands were shaking as he put the mirror down onto a desk a foot or so away.

Looking from the hands, lightly dusted with freckles, I gazed back up to his face, which was still frozen in shock. His skin was very pale, but there was a good chance that it was just from whatever striking jumble of emotions that matched his wide eyes. Those were an unusually bright green, which reminded me of the luminescent shade that leaves turned in summer, when the sun shone through the trees in the wood. They contrasted vividly with his hair, which was a little long and slightly wavy, but more importantly, a beautiful, dark red. His curved cheekbones supported a strong chin, and a handful of freckles splashed across his cheeks and straight nose.

The silence encouraged me to study this extraordinary person for longer, but nothing else was revealed to me through his appearance. It had been at least thirty seconds since the window had smashed (or rather, I’d smashed the window), and the boy hadn’t moved at all, apart from that single movement with the mirror.

Worry flashed through my mind and I turned to the windowsill, which was of course coated in glass. I began to carefully sweep it to the corridor floor with my hands, which was when I realised that they didn’t hurt. They weren’t marred. No cuts, or even scratches. No glass. I turned them over again and again, staring in wonder. Hundreds of pieces of glass had rained down on me, and not even my right fist (which I’d punched the window with) was blemished in the slightest.

It was as if it hadn’t happened.

More than a little confused, I brushed the rest of the windowsill clean, dusted off my palms, and placed them on the wooden surface. I hooked one leg up the good metre above the ground and jumped over, thankfully landing lightly on the carpet below. A quick glance around told me the musty feeling of the old room - centred on dark, unobtrusive colours like grey and brown - which was set similarly to the library. But this room wasn't full of books; it had several bookshelves, but the majority of its space was filled with desks and tables, loaded with what seemed to be atlases, globes, maps of the world, statuettes, marble vases and a huge variety of other artefacts from around the planet and through history, it looked like, too numerous to study in my frame of mind.

I still felt an urge to help the boy. My worry and instincts were much more powerful than my curiosity.

I decided to approach slowly – a safeguard. I knew that alien concern was plastered all over my face, and I tried to look merely friendly, approachable instead. That gave up quickly. I’d end up grinning like a lunatic. He was still frozen to the spot as I edged closer. Remarkably still, in fact. He’d definitely beat me at musical statues. But something about the frozen line of his mouth made me feel strange. Surely no-one could stay so still…

At last I was a step away, and I moved into his line of sight, staring up at him. Several inches differed between our heights, half a foot even. His green eyes, wide with shock, locked with mine.

“Are you okay?” I asked timidly, “Are you hurt?”

The boy remained like a marble statue – if it wasn’t for the glint of emotion in his eyes and the colour now starting to flood his cheeks, that was so alive, I would’ve thought he was one.

Beginning to feel scared, I reached out a hand to touch his shoulder, and then it was as if the whole world exploded.

The moment my fingers touched the shoulder of his plain black shirt, several things happened in rapid succession. The first of these was a surge of heat that felt like it came from his body; it travelled down my fingers, my hand, my arm, and spread under every inch of my skin, pleasantly warm. But instantly it began to heat up, flaring up in temperature, with each millisecond.

The second thing, the most important, was that the boy burst to life. Feeling seemed to return visibly to his skin, like he’d been still for a very long time. I saw his fingers flex and the muscles of his bare arms and neck stretch. His eyes became alight with wonder, and he pressed his palms to his face. That almost instantly dissolved into something darker, an emotion that sent a shiver of terror down my spine.

“No,” he whispered, the single word ablaze with feeling, yet most obviously, with fear.

The third thing was the most simple by far. Moments after I touched the boy’s shoulder, as my skin began to heat up and as he began to come to life, my body was flung backwards across the room. It appeared an explosion had happened with neither my sight or hearing of it, and the blast had thrown me from my feet and back through the air. The heat, however, certainly made sense for that explanation, and the air whistled in my ears, out of control, like I’d stuck my head out of a travelling aeroplane’s window.

It was near-incomprehensible that all these things could happen so quickly, and I struggled to keep up. Of course, it didn’t help that less than three seconds later, I landed somewhat painfully on a large, wooden table, which luckily, as I’d noted earlier, was the only empty surface in the room.

The force of the impact shocked up my spine, and I took a while to recover from the white stars blinking wildly across my vision, my body numb from the blows. I groaned and unbent my leg from a very awkward position from underneath me, and immediately fell to the floor in a heap.

The sound of muffled footsteps came to my ears, and I felt, more than heard, the boy crouch down beside me. Now the shock was dissipating, I ached everywhere. And my body didn’t seem to want to respond to my thoughts. All I could concentrate on was a horrible pain in my leg.

Get up. Get up, get up, get up…

“I’m so sorry,” an unfamiliar voice said, and it was my curiosity which made me shakily move to sit up, leaning back against the table. It still appeared to be intact. Unlike me. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my bones had given an audible creak.

I brushed my hair out of my eyes and gazed into the face of the boy. Immediately, I was startled at the mix of grief and genuine apology there, and an uneasy silence settled between us. I cleared my throat groggily to say something, but then realised I had no idea what to say.

What had just happened?

The silence encased us in an awkward bubble, and embarrassment began to creep into my system. My face felt warm and I knew my cheeks would be flushing unattractively crimson, which didn’t help my state of mind, because a pretty attractive boy was crouched not two feet away from me.

I leant my head back, tried to breathe deeply, and ignored the fact that I thought my leg was on fire. I would not cry.

“Thank you,” he whispered, and I flicked my eyes down to look at him again. Frowning, and still shaking slightly, I wasn’t happy to notice, I reached out a hand to touch his shoulder again. I braced myself for the small explosion that had come with the contact before…

And nothing happened.

Grateful, but still cautious, I moved to his elbow, then his chest, and lastly touched a single finger to his cheek. The only thing I felt each time was the warmth of his skin, and after a moment I moved away, casting my head and gaze downward. His eyes had been filled with something like guilt.

Finally choosing the most simple question from the cascade of confusion that was my mind, I asked in what I hoped was not a shaky voice,

“What’s your name?”

The boy smiled slightly, like he hadn’t been expecting those words. “Dylan Cole,” he replied, and I noticed a hint of an accent in his voice. Irish.

“And yours?”

“Adena Brady.” I smiled hesitantly back, and felt my tumble of curiosity beginning to escape the hold I had on it in my head.

“What exactly did I just do?” I continued, my emotions in disarray. I wanted to add, ‘And what did you do?’, but I felt it would be too personal. There was clearly not a lot here that I could yet understand, but it was obvious it was complicated and entwined with emotion, tying to this boy.

Dylan’s expression told me that he was contemplating my question, but then he said, “Let me see your injuries first.” I knew a ‘what?!’ had exploded across my face, and it was lucky that he continued, “My father was training me to be a doctor before…this. Where are you hurt?”

I was so tired, and unsure of this stranger. However, his eyes were clear and honest, and he added in an apparently sincere tone, “I’ll answer you, I promise. But this first.”

Sighing, I gave in, wondering if it was the right choice to trust a promise from someone I had met only a few minutes ago. He seemed earnest though, and I decided that perhaps this would allow him to concoct and organise an easy, truthful answer in his mind, because this clearly was going to take a lot of explanation. Perhaps this was stalling. The earlier, deep pain and sadness in his eyes, made me think that he would have good reason for it.

I stared at Dylan, pursing my lips, and was surprised at the gentle patience in his eyes as he offered me one of his hands. We both smiled, yet that evaporated as I started to stand up, and realised the extent of my injuries.

My right leg buckled under my weight, but Dylan’s arm suddenly around my waist, and hand under my elbow, stopped me from falling, and he guided me to sit on the unbroken table when the world began to spin around me. Once I was mostly recovered from dizziness, and had given him conformation with my eyes, to settle his anxious ones, he began to roll up the right leg of my jeans.

Then I was grateful of two things: first, that I’d worn loose ones, so they would roll up past my knee relatively easily. (Would he have backed down if they’d been skinnies? – Take my trousers off? No thanks.”) And second…well, that I’d shaved the night before. Dylan may have been ‘professional’, but still.

As he approached my knee, pain lashed through my leg, and I gritted my teeth past it, determined not to make a sound. He paused, but at no further interruption, continued to roll up the denim, and I heard his partly-disguised gasp a second or two later.

“I think it’s dislocated,” Dylan murmured softly, and looked up apologetically into my face. The blood appeared to be rushing from every vein in my body to this single part of my leg, and I could feel my pulse, wildly, shooting fiery pain up and down it. It was all I could do not to cry out, so I answered quickly through clenched teeth,

“If you can, please just do something to fix it,”

He nodded slowly.

“This will hurt,” I wanted to scream that it did already, and was thankful that he didn’t waste time, “Brace yourself and hold on to my shoulder. Squeeze as hard as you like.”

I tried to smile in thanks. It ended as more of a grimace. I did what he said though, and tried to prepare myself mentally. I knew it could’ve been a lot worse, but it was difficult to be grateful when it felt like someone had plunged most of my leg into naked flame.

I winced as he pressed his hands to my knee, and probed for something that was alien to me. Then it seemed to be the right time, so I clamped my right hand to the table, and my left to his shoulder. Dylan and I locked gazes, and I tried to gain some strength from his sober expression. I trembled as he counted.

“One. Two. Three.”

On three, he twisted my knee with a jerk that made me let loose an involuntary scream, as my joint was lodged back into its proper place in my socket. The pain was worse at first, so much worse, a sharp blast that seemed to penetrate everything. But after a few seconds it began to lessen, and after many more filled with his scared apologies and my terrified pants, I came back to myself. I felt tears running in cold streaks down my hot cheeks, and brushed them away angrily.

There was so much worse pain in the world. Why did I have to cry now?

“I’m sorry I screamed.” I suddenly blurted, and instantly regretted it when I saw his composed features turning curious. My face began to flush again, and hoped he cast it off as a reaction to the pain. Apparently not. Laughter was blossoming in his eyes, and the first full smile I’d seen him give made me feel funny. Warm.

“No need.” he said, and it suddenly occurred to me that I’d never realised freckles could actually look attractive on a guy, before…

What?!

Could my thoughts be any more inappropriate? After the insane string of events that had preceded this one, why on earth was I considering how attractive he was? This was a boy who had just un-dislocated my leg, for Pete’s sake.

“I’m a professional, after all.”

After that, I couldn’t help but laugh and put aside my troubled feelings, and his replying grin finally relaxed the bubble of awkward tension there had been between us. Dylan questioned me about how I felt and I answered unflinchingly, in quite some wonder at the relief his simple act had given me.

The pain was very much bearable now, no longer lancing through my whole leg, but was more of an uncomfortable ache around my knee joint. He examined it for a while and asked me to perform several exercises, the results of which he seemed pleased with. And when he probed at my ankle and lower leg and I wiggled my toes, he let out a beautiful laugh so genuine, it was hard to believe that he was the same person that had shown such sadness, mere minutes before.

I was soon to find out that there was so much more to everything than this small, newly comfortable scene, and that this newborn happiness would be short-lived.