Frozen

“So…” I began, the smile fading slowly from my face, as I remembered the more important matter that was at hand, “You were going to explain all this to me.”

I cast my eyes away to scan the ‘path of wreckage’, as I thought of it; from the empty space in the wall where the window should have been, to the carpet below it that was covered in glass shards, to the unbroken table that I still sat on.

Dylan’s face turned sombre, an unsettling contrast again, to the emotions he’d shown so clearly, moments ago. He stood up stiffly from where he’d been kneeling next to me, and searched briefly before finding an old-fashioned, high-backed chair from behind one of the many tables and study areas in the room, and brought it back to a still in front of me. As he sat down with an unreadable expression, I adjusted myself so I was in a reasonably comfortable position, with my legs tucked underneath me (which was pretty difficult, what with my throbbing knee). He was stalling, but I swallowed my impatience. Dylan had shown me nothing but compassion; how could I violate that by returning it otherwise?

“First, Adena,” he announced, in a voice I could only describe as wary, “You have to remember that this isn’t a book with a start and a plot and an ending. It may have all those things. It may seem fantastical and unreal. But it’s not that simple.”

I held his gaze, a captive of his words. Something huge was going to be uncovered; I knew it in my bones. Something I clearly might not believe. Yet why would this boy tell me anything apart from the truth?

“It’s my story, and it’s my life.”

Dylan closed his eyes and seemed to take in a breath. It was only afterwards that I could appreciate how much it really meant to him, to tell me what he did.

“It began in 1979. I was seventeen, going on eighteen. My birthday was a few weeks away and I was ecstatic. My friends were already old enough to be classed as men, and I was beyond ready to join them.” Dylan was staring into my face, but it was as if he was staring right through me, looking into his past and falling into his memories.

“I remember the day it happened – a rainy day in November. Me and my two brothers – well, we were so close friends that we might as well have been brothers; we’d grown up together, from children to teenagers, to men. We were looking at our last option of university, on its open day. The place was beautiful, with wide grounds full of nature - the building itself was like a small castle – and with all the halls, and the staircases and arches.
“We spent the morning just getting the feel of the place, talking to some of the students, but in the afternoon we split up to go to the separate areas we were hoping to go into studying, though we were all going to meet at the Science Department later. It was the one subject all three of us shared an interest in. I don’t remember too many details of the day before that last room, but I know the History, and the English too, both disappointed me there.”

Dylan’s eyes flickered to some of the nearby tables – one stacked with grubby novels, another with what looked like pieces of an old, quite large gold coin. I saw the sadness grow in his eyes.

“I was the first to the building, which was one of the few that was separate from the main campus. I’d thought it was strange, because I was usually the late one, but I went in to find only one person there – a Mr Kayne. He didn’t seem to notice that I’d walked in until I was right behind him, and he was hiding something in his hands…

“New hopeful, are we?” Mr Kayne said, turning round from the lab table he’d been working at. There was a massive, roughly circular machine resting on it, comprising of all sorts of wires and strange metals I didn’t recognise.

“Mr Kayne,” I replied, my focus captivated by the contraption behind him, “What does your machine do?”

The man’s face - though forty-something and lined with wrinkles - lit up in a kind of childish innocence and wonder, “It’s a new instrument I’ve devised…a kind of measurement of time, you could say.” The last word was gleeful, and obvious that Kayne had put a lot of dedication into building his machine. He hadn’t meant measuring seconds or minutes, like with a stopwatch or clock, I guessed. It was more than that.

He began to fiddle with some of the connected devices, amidst brushing his black, grey-streaked hair out of his eyes – four sensors which were halfway between probes and electrodes; short and slender, but a dark, unblemished, orange-red metal the colour of rust, with flat, plastic-filmed, sucker-like edges that I could easily imagine fitting to the skin.

“Would you like to be a spectator to my first experiment?” Kayne asked quietly, with an odd undertone to his voice. Suddenly, I didn’t want to say no. I didn’t even consider how dangerous it could be. The word ‘first’ simply hadn’t registered in my mind; I didn’t think of the consequences of the first test run, the first trial, of any experiment. I simply gave into my boyish instincts of seeing something wild and exciting. The glee in the man’s pale blue eyes only intensified my feelings of eagerness and discovery, and made me want to take part, instead, in this small adventure of its own.

Mr Kayne smiled, thin-lipped but widely, and at my eager nod began to grin further. He picked up what I decided to name electrodes for now, and as he was about to press the first one to his temple he saw me staring, and offered me it.

I was excited. A real experiment. Kayne seemed to barely be able to control himself, and continued to grin so widely, so continuously whilst he fixed the electrodes to my skin, that goose bumps began to rise on my arms. Doubt seeded in my mind. Where they were fixed at my temples, my forehead and at the nape of my neck felt heavy, and I started to feel oddly drowsy. Pressure points, I supposed.

I remember thinking in strange patterns:
What was that strange smell? Thick and metallic.
Kayne’s eyes were lopsided.
Why was I seeing flashing blue lights?
It was so small in the room. There wasn’t any space. I was being choked in claustrophobia…

“Dylan.” Kayne said sharply, returning me to my senses. There was no happiness in his face now, only something serious and stern. He would be a strict teacher, I thought, despite his childish disposition beforehand. I was a student and I had to listen, after all.

“Dylan, I’m going to ask you to do something quite strange, but I promise that no harm will come to you when doing it. I want you to focus, concentrate. You must imagine and picture memories from your past, Dylan. Do what I say, when I tell you.” Kayne’s words were stringing together, so I focused myself. I automatically drifted to my memories, the childhood of a boy very different from the man I was becoming. In my sleepy state, I didn’t register how odd this was.

“Now, Dylan. Go through your memories, walk into your past, and close the door to the reality of the present.” A black door slammed shut in my mind, and the resounding click of its locking echoed inside me.

“Go to your childhood, to some of your youngest remembered days. When you were four or five, as you started school, perhaps…”

It was my first day. My mum held my hand. Warm. Safe. Secure. The school gates were huge. The children raced around the playground. Screaming. Laughing. Too many people. I started to cry. Fear. Sadness. I don’t want to go…

“Now at seven, eight…”

My memory flashed like a cinema screen in an old film, the picture flickering and crumbling until it found the next slide. I was seven; a boy with dark hair was telling me to jump, whilst another boy, blonde, beside him, was silent and pale. They were far away; I was sat in a towering oak tree twenty feet above them, stretching for another branch to swing from. Like a trapeze artist, the boy said. I loved the circus. So I leaped out of the tree. As I missed the branch and plummeted to the hard ground below, the blonde boy’s cries were loud and piercing in my ears.

“Yes, good - keep going, Dylan. How about you at nine or ten?”

A flash followed by less flickering this time. A glow that was warm and golden encased the images to follow.

A towering man with broad shoulders and thick muscles banding round his arms, was leaning over my desk. His grey eyes were filled with a rage that made my hands shake.

“Are you deaf, Cole?” he bellowed, and the class became as quiet as a tomb. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the guilty face of Billy Jones sitting two rows over, trying to mouth an apology to me. Mr Mason saw my gaze waver, and the class’ awaiting, held breath was evident as his fury mounted.

“You are not listening, Cole!” His voice filled the room and pained my ears with its destructive force, but I was determined to keep a straight face.

“Are you laughing, Cole?” Mason accused me incredulously, suddenly, and it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t going to escape his wrath.

“No. No, I’m not, sir.”

“Are you laughing at me, Cole?”

His face was flushing an angry purple. I sat on my hands to stop them from shaking, but my head moved from side to side, telling him the truth because their words had frozen in my mouth.

“Do you think you’re funny, Cole? You will never laugh at me!”

His body convulsed into a crazed fury, and in a flash his hand struck my cheek. Wildfire pain exploded across my skin, and I let a shout of pain. Then Mr Mason began to reach for the scruff of my shirt collar…

“Yes, Dylan! It’s working!” I heard Kayne say, but his voice sounded gruff and familiar, unlike his previous childlike excitement. My mind was making my memories become real.

“You are a teenager, Dylan. Thirteen years old.”

The glow was molten gold now, splashing vibrantly across the vision on my closed eyelids. My memories took place in flickers.

My thirteenth birthday: the day my parents divorced. A baby screaming. Burst balloons a rainbow, carpeting the floor. I could’ve been a clown at a funeral; my party hat was so out of place…

Fourteen. A blonde girl blushing. Hair like corn silk, eyes like forget-me-nots. She smiled, with her teeth bright. I tried to stammer something to make her laugh, but my awkwardness did that instead, and my stomach twisted…

Fifteen. The same girl. Cold lips, wet from rain, meet warm ones. My head is spinning. I feel like a man, instead of just a boy. Powerful and happy. Top of the world.

Sixteen. She is standing away from me, too far, trying to move around the dark-haired boy in front of her. His stance is protective, almost animalistic. Anger rages in his dark eyes.

“How could you, Dylan?!” he shouts, taking a step towards me, whilst the girl still struggles to get past the barrier of his body, “Anyone, you could have anyone, and you choose my sister?!”

My spine tingles in instinctive preparation for the fight to come, and my body tenses. My mind is just a wash of sad helplessness in contrast.

“I’m sorry…but you know I would never hurt her.”

“You wouldn’t be able to help it! She can’t control the way she is!”

His mouth is a snarl, colour flushing up his neck and face. He is angry, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. And suddenly, even though this has barely begun, I want to give up. I want to give in.

“Take me then. Take me down if it will make it better.” I say, head bowed, arms limp at my sides.

“You can’t have my sister, Dylan! You didn’t think, did you, about her feelings? How dare you feel sorry for yourself? You should be in agony for her!”

As he dives at me I hear her shrieks, which mingle with the young screams of a different person, a boy. In a different time. My memories overlap…

Misery floods my system.

I remember.
I remember.

“Yes! It’s working! Dylan, you’ve done it!”

And then memories merged and folded into a blur of time, sound and colour. I could only see glimpses of places and people; the shade of the girl’s eyes, the rain lashing down around me, the empty table at which there had been so much happiness. It made sense, and didn’t, all at the same time.

A shiver moved across my skin, an uncomfortable pressure encompassing my whole body. It slowly grew to the point of pain, at my neck and across my forehead and temples. It built like a flame, licking my skin greedily, burning…

My eyes opened.

My vision was hazy, and I couldn’t see much more than the glowing, golden mist, everywhere around me, fog-like. But how could a fog be bright, or even strangely beautiful? Only a few things of interest weren’t entirely encased by it: a dark doorway behind me, and a small, flashing blue light in front. I could make out the cables of the machine snaking around it.

Mr Kayne stepped out of the mist. He spoke few words, but each was dangerous, and sounded very final, unchangeable as he spoke them.

“Thank you, Dylan. I hope you will not be disappointed. Your memories have been of much use to me.”

He smiled, his voice changing. The childish excitement was still there, but a menace still clung to it that a child could never understand, let alone bear. The mist wrapped around the dark shadow of his body, until the only thing visibly left, was his head. His teeth were a dazzling white, and I found my muscles trembling at the pressure being forced upon my skin. Kayne’s smile unnerved me; it was wrong, somehow.

“Time is a complex thing, Dylan. It isn’t a science equation that you can work out in just a few minutes. Time is a living essence. And so living essence is needed to unlock it.”

He took a step closer to me, and instinct urged me to step back, to get away from this madman in any way I could, but my feet appeared to be stuck to the floor. Try as I might, I couldn’t move.

Laughter flooded Kayne’s eyes and as a want to provoke violence seeded in my brain, the rest of my nerves froze too, unable to function. My arms were stiff boards at my sides, and my legs were so numbed, I wouldn’t have been surprised if my body had ended at my torso. All I could do was breathe, blink, and shoot daggers at him with my eyes.

“Goodbye, Dylan,” Mr Kayne said, still smiling, teeth bright, “I’d tell you that I was sorry, but I would be lying.”

Then the pressure over me became so great that I might’ve been blasted into atoms, for all I knew. I passed out, but I remember seeing the gold mist thickening, sparks flying in its curling tendrils, like it was charged with electricity.

And the world exploded.



“And when I woke up, I was here in this room,” Dylan said, his face solemn as he looked around himself in remembrance, “My memories were scattered, and it took me a few days to piece everything together, but I soon understand as much as possible about what had happened to me. I’ve been here ever since.”

The day’s dreams, images of his story, still clung to us for a few moments. I could see the mist and Kayne’s shadow so clearly in my head…like a nightmare. And the sorrow in Dylan’s eyes when he’d talked about his friend, and the boy’s sister. I was surprised a seventeen-year-old boy could hold that much emotion inside himself, even though he was nearly a man. Even though it had happened over thirty years ago.

He’d been trapped in this single room for more than three decades. Alone. The incredulously of everything he’d said in the past few minutes dawned on me finally, from where I’d simply been a captivated listener before. Now I evaluated his story, and it seemed more ridiculous by the second. No-one’s life could be like what he’d just told me. No-one’s life could be like something out of a fiction novel. Questions buzzed, bright fireflies through my thoughts, and I voiced the most troubling of them.

“Dylan,” I began, and the sound of his name being spoken seemed to wake him up, “You were on your own here for over thirty years? How are you not any older? You still look seventeen!”

He stared at me with intensity in his eyes, and I saw inside them the sunny leaves of the woods I loved. Dylan frowned, his jaw tightening to match his mood.

“I am seventeen.”

Somehow I knew that I didn’t need to say anything then; my expression hung my unasked question in the silence.

“Kayne’s machine,” Dylan said, leaning forwards towards me on his chair, his hands clasped tightly on his knees, “It was somehow powered by my memories, and my emotions.” He shifted his weight onward further, with his face tight lines of concentration. I knew how he wanted to choose the right words. Loneliness was so obvious in his eyes, the need of belief, of fellow understanding. I knew it, because I knew loneliness too.

I was the first person he’d seen in an age, and yet he was still seventeen? How? It was impossible. And to be sane after all this time…if he was telling the truth, that was. But Dylan, with his clear eyes and unwavering determination, seemed like he could be trusted. That put me in a fierce mood to listen and judge fairly as he went on.

“I don’t know the theory behind this, since Kayne hasn’t graced me with his presence since that day, but I know enough.” He settled, and his eyes willed me to believe his every word. He gestured with his hands, his need drifted into his movement.

“The machine is powered by connecting to the electrical charge building up in the emotive and memory sectors of the brain. It somehow uses that charge to tamper with the time of a fixed place. It amplifies the power of the mind into the physical world, messing with how it continues as a never-ending flow of seconds, hours, days. It used my mind to fix the time of this whole building, the entire abbey.”

He moved his hands to form a circular cage, and I could almost see the time whispering around us, a frozen, golden mist.

“Anything or anyone trapped here will remain the exact age inside, as they did when they first stepped in. Their age cycle will only continue when they walk back out. I’ve had thirty years to study the artefacts in this place, and they haven’t changed at all. It might not be a long time in their life spans, but something should have been different…

“I haven’t really existed in here, Adena, for over thirty years. I’ll stay seventeen forever unless I escape, or if Kayne ‘unfreezes’ the time in the abbey. That will never happen, and so now I’ve doomed you too.”

Dylan leant back unexpectedly, the abrupt space echoing between us. He closed his eyes, his mouth tight, and ran a hand over his jaw. When he opened his eyes once more, he couldn’t hold my gaze.

“I’m trapped here too?” I asked quietly, trying not to do anything, above all trying not to think. What about my mum? School? My friends? Could one walk on a cloudy day running arbitrarily riot, have ruined my life outside of these walls? Dylan nodded slowly.

“I don’t know for sure, but I think that’s what has happened. Because of me.” His last three words were a mortified whisper, and I was surprised that I couldn’t feel the heat of shame radiating from him, or see steam coming out of his ears. I, myself, felt as if a gallon of cold water had been poured down my back.

Out of the blue Dylan was on his feet and I followed him across the room that had become his unwilling, unwanted home. Coming to a halt in front of the empty window frame, I watched his hair turn lighter red, vivid, in the nearby lamplight?

Lamplight?

I frowned at the tall, wooden lamp with the inconspicuous, grey lampshade which stood in the corner of the room. It had a bulb; it was powered by electricity. How could electricity still function in a place where time was frozen, when years meant nothing? Was power still possible then, even when change wasn’t an option? Maybe we still did have hope.

I cast the thoughts from the forefront of my mind and paid more attention to the boy standing next to me. He was staring out into the corridor with mourning in his eyes. I’d forgotten that he hadn’t seen outside this room since his entrapment, except through mirrored glass. I was so stupid. As he rolled forwards into his toes and back onto his heels, his body a waving motion of constriction, I stumbled for words. It looked like he would explode with all of this bottled up inside of him. How on earth had he survived here, alone? How could anyone survive what he had? I could never compare my loneliness to what he had suffered.

The only thing I could do at that moment came to me, clear as day.

“Let’s go find out.”

Dylan remained silent for a few moments, evidently lost in thought, and then turned to me questioningly.

“What?”

“Let’s go find out,” I repeated, my gaze flickering from his face to the world in front of us, “if I’m trapped here too, if my life won’t even start again unless I escape.”