Frozen

The journey back to the library was steady and tense. Dylan insisted on helping me out of the empty window frame, taking a navy tablecloth from one of the many display tables and laying it across the windowsill. My fingers tingled as I placed my hands on his shoulders and he supported me at the waist, when I jumped to the floor. Somehow I didn’t think it was completely from fear of repeating the violent consequence of earlier.

We walked up the corridor in companionable silence and I watched Dylan’s expression flicker through a range of emotions. Sadness. Worry. Relief. He ran his hands along the edges of the tiny tables, touched the gilded frames of the paintings with his fingertips. He even paused at the picture of the lonely girl on the moors, and we shared a glance that sent shivers up my spine. How much had Dylan watched me do before I’d broken through the glass to him?

We were soon in the entrance hall with that huge staircase again, and I determinedly fixed my gaze on the door at the other end of the massive room. Our footsteps echoed in the expanse around us and I walked faster, approaching the tall door to the library, so intricately carved.

Like the rose on the staircase.

There were urgent matters at hand. I wouldn’t think about it. My life, essentially, could be at stake here as Dylan’s had been, ensnared for over three decades. But wouldn’t imprisonment mean endless time? Endless youth? Some people might have found that appealing. I didn’t.

I wanted to grow up and live my life, to give other people happiness and love, and hopefully receive it in return. I wouldn’t ever want to be forced to stay inside these walls, no matter the forever of youth that they entailed. I wanted my life! However, I knew that even if I didn’t share Dylan’s fate, I would use this priceless, non-existent, frozen time to try and help him escape. There were positives to it, after all.

I turned the doorknob to the library quietly, and heaved the heavy door open. All caution aside, thought and images of imprisonment - of never seeing my family and friends again - filled my head. Adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream, I slipped through the half-open door and started running desperately towards the exit, the escape, amidst the recessed windows. They taunted me, laughing in torrents of rain and rolling black clouds.

I dodged the armchairs, the coffee tables, sprinting through the room that even so large, seemed quaint and delicate. It was like the very walls were screaming at me not to knock anything. But I didn’t even stop running when I reached for the handle, and Dylan’s shout of warning was so far away…

Crack.

That explosive force caused me to ricochet wildly before I even touched a finger to the door. Like I’d run into a brick wall, except it was springy, responsive…a wall-length trampoline, more like. I imagined a huge, colossal bubble of frozen time, encasing the abbey in its gold mist. It sealed all the exits. All escape. It threw me backwards through the air one again, but luckily, this time I had Dylan to catch me. Plus, the force wasn’t nearly as powerful as before, and I wished I hadn’t characterised this incident as so taunting. The first time, it had unleashed itself and caused me injury. The second time…I could nearly see Mr Kayne on the other side of the door, smirking maliciously.

I flew back into Dylan and I heard his surprised outburst of breath; my elbow caught him in his chest. We landed in an uncomfortable heap, squashed between two armchairs, and I felt my cheeks turn warm. We spent a few awkward moments trying (and failing) to wriggle out of the gap, but it was soon obvious of the solution. Dylan and I pushed the chairs apart with our backs against them, sitting opposite each other, and moved away, relishing the space. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him - that was untrue and completely irrelevant – I just liked my space and there was also a lot we needed to talk about.

I finally caught my breath after the furious, rampaging chaos of the last moments. Those moments then caught up with me, and flooded me with emotion.

“I’m trapped here too.” I said.

It wasn’t even a question. Really, I’d known it was true since the second I’d panicked at the library door. If I looked back, I saw that I should’ve connected what had happened when I first touched Dylan, to his entrapment and later mine after he’d told me his story.

My chest grew heavy, and I felt anguished. Defeated. I let my knees curl up to my chest and pressed my forehead against them lightly. I hugged my legs, and a memory flashed through my mind’s eye:

My mother, picking me up in this position with a book open in my lap. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa downstairs, waiting for her and Dad to come home from a movie. The babysitter had been snoring in the room above, having read Jonas the same bedtime story seven or eight times to calm his tantrum.

I'd loyally waited for my parents, and had received the rewarding lift upstairs, the goodnight kisses, my dad stroking my hair back from my cheek. It had all seemed so important when I’d only been seven years old. I missed them both. And now I might never see them again. Time had frozen around me, and I had ceased to exist. Not that I ever had had a chance of seeing Dad again, before the abbey. I still had no idea why he’d disappeared. A kidnapping, an abduction, a murder? All seemed out of the question; most of his possessions had been cleared out when we’d found him gone, vanished. Unless someone had wanted it to look that way. Unless it had been planned…

I had been and asking myself these countless questions for four years. I still wasn’t any closer to answers.

I felt the armchair that I’d been leaning on move as Dylan sat down beside me. I didn’t look up; I didn’t want to see the pity and understanding in his eyes.

“Adena,” he said softly, and I stayed childishly silent, “Adena.” But I would rather be a child, than be trapped somewhere I had seen only once, fleetingly and years ago – or even to be trapped at all! And with a lonely seventeen-year-old who, attractive or not, had been seventeen for over thirty years. What kind of repercussions must that have had? It was all a bit too much just then.

Typically, Dylan appeared to understand that as well, and went on like I was looking him straight in the eye. My immature reluctance to speak wasn’t apparent to him, apparently. Years had made him wise, or maybe he had been wise already, before the time of Kayne and his machine…

“I’m glad that you’re here, Adena.”

That stopped me. My head snapped up, childishness forgotten. Dylan’s expression was conflicted. And I thought that I was confused?

“I haven’t seen another person in so long; I think I might have still felt glad if a psychopath had broken the window, instead of you.” He grinned, still frowning, and I smiled, staring at my knees again. This time I kept my head up though.

“I’m just thinking about my own happiness, and I’m so sorry that yours has been ruined because of me.”

“What are you talking about?!” I demanded, my emotions fuelling my already-short-fused temper and bursting it into flame, “How on earth could it be your fault? It was Kayne’s! It is Kayne’s! He’s the madman who’s trapped us in here, who created the machine!”

“But it was my voice that-“

“Can’t you see?!” I asked, my voice diminishing, an idea blossoming into life within me, “That wasn’t all you. It might have been your voice, but that…image I had of the dancing couple, I think that was a memory. It was so much clearer than a daydream.

“I think it was Kayne’s memory.”

Something I’d said made sparks fly in Dylan’s eyes.

“Wait a minute. You imagined people dancing before you smashed the window?” he questioned me, and I knew we were getting somewhere.

“It was what linked me to the singing. It was a huge ballroom, all gold and white. I couldn’t’ see the couples’ faces, but the man was shorter than the woman, with black hair, streaked with grey, so he was probably middle-aged. There was a violin playing, I remember it, a-“

“A violin solo.” he interrupted.

“Yes! How did you know?”

Dylan’s expression began to morph slowly, to change, triumph widening his green eyes and tilting up the corners of his mouth.

“Because I’ve heard it too. We’ve both seen the same thing: one of Kayne’s memories.”

Resolve solidified inside me, and I stood up, slightly dizzy but pulling Dylan with me anyway.

“That’s solved it then. We’ve got something we can work with, something we can work to our advantage.” My voice was low – goose bumps had moments before begun to prickle up my arms like someone was watching us.

He seemed dazed as he murmured back hopefully, holding my gaze, “You’re going to help me?”

“Yes, Dylan, I’m going to help you. I really have no choice…but that’s not the point. Despite the fact that I don’t know much about Kayne, I’m pretty sure that if we share even the slightest insight into his mind, then we have a chance of getting out of here.”

Unconcealed joy bloomed in Dylan’s eyes – twin, blazing suns through summer-green leaves. I was certain that I was doing the right thing and that we were on the right track. Nevertheless, a few, uncertain questions hovered around me. Nothing could begin until I knew exactly where we stood.

“How much have you seen of the abbey, Dylan?” I asked him curiously, changing the subject and getting my worries out of the way. I thought I already knew the answer, but I had to be sure.

“Only what we’ve gone past, and the Historical Room- my room.” he replied, his face composed. I hoped to not linger on his grief as I followed up my next question.

“You haven’t had any form of contact, from anyone, since you woke up here?”

“Not a word.”

“And do you know any more about anything – Kayne, the machine, the abbey – any more than you’ve told me?” Dylan was about to shake his head, but I saw him hesitate, which prompted an idea.

“Has anything you’ve seen since I...arrived, made you realise or remember anything more?”

Dylan paused, appearing thoughtful. He clenched his hands into tight fists on his knees, in a gesture I recognised as anxious.

“When you were thrown across the room before, the first time also, I think that might have been a reaction in the abbey. I’ve seen some strange things happen over the years, and I think it has traps, of sorts. They could have been reactions to unsealing two of them...” he mused, frowning pensively. I didn’t fully understand, but he went on without noticing.

“I thought of another memory when you were talking about the ballroom. It didn’t make sense earlier because I had nothing to relate it to, but now I do.

“When I saw Kayne’s memory, the only other sound apart from the violin was a few of his words, on a loop. It was, “The rooms, inside the rooms.” It felt off limit; I shouldn’t have been allowed to hear it. I think those words are the key.”

“The key to escaping?”

He nodded, a dark red wave falling into his eyes. He brushed it back and continued, “The more I think about it, the more it seems that what Kayne let slip was searching every room in the abbey is the only way we can get back.”

Dylan looked like a huge weight had been lifted from his chest, and he leant back against the chair with relaxed shoulders, obviously satisfied, and closed his eyes. I, on the other hand, felt unabashedly eager to move, to explore. The adventurous part of my soul that I’d kept with me since childhood blossomed, warmed and sent butterflies amok in my stomach. I jumped to my feet once again, expecting to be followed, but halfway across the room I looked back to see Dylan still in exactly the same position.

“Are you coming?” I asked mockingly, an audacious note in my voice that I knew he wouldn’t ignore. Dylan opened one eye to glare at me, not moving any other part of his body except his lips, of which one corner twitched up to form a half-smile.

I crossed my arms over my chest and tapped my foot sarcastically. I announced in an impatient manner, “We haven’t got all day, you know.”

With a perfectly straight face, I waited until he was right beside me before beginning to walk again.

“Actually,” he added, “We have.”

I laughed to myself, shaking my head. It was funny how one fixed dislocation, one heart-to-heart and several unravelling mysteries could make you feel so comfortable around someone you hardly knew at all.

“I knew you were going to say that.”



I ran through in my mind the doorways, archways and few corridors I’d glimpsed between the library and Dylan’s room. There had to be some way of making this easier. There would be many, many rooms to explore, and we needed a system to get though them all, now that we were on the right track.

I really hoped that we were on the right track.

As we made our way back into the huge entrance hall, we shared and debated approaches, but I had a niggling feeling that we were really over thinking the situation. Why didn’t we just do something simple?

I stopped at the foot of the staircase, lost in thought until I realised that I was staring straight at the rose. I would keep an eye out for anything that might point me towards its meaning here, its impossible meaning. I would gladly take risks to find out whatever I could about my dad. Four years had been too long. Four years had made me desperate.

“Let’s keep it straightforward,” I decided firmly, interrupting Dylan’s vocal tirade that had been born of his knowledgeable guesswork, of rooms the abbey might be hiding, “We can start here at the hall, move outwards, and work our way up the floors.”

A frown of either stress or irritation (and I hoped it was the first) still knotted his brow, but he nodded agreeably, eyes scanning the possible paths around us.

“Clockwise?” he questioned me, and I could see the possibilities coming to life behind his distant gaze.

“Clockwise.”

He was off in a moment, determination flowing through his long stride and the set of his squared shoulders. Dylan led me to the furthest corner of our right, past a small, upright piano that I noticed as distinctly too modern for this ancient house. The list of strange happenings here was growing, and it had made the abbey so much more than I had expected.

We entered a small alcove which was gloomier than the rest of the wide, light, airy hall. The size of the door we then faced and how it was tucked away in a place it was seemingly unseen – unless you stood facing its exact direction by the left wall – struck me as odd. Was our first adventure going to be in a cupboard?

I almost laughed out loud.

Dylan stood back to let me go before him, and I was thankful; I did want to go first…but I hesitated. With the impossible things that had already happened in just a few, frozen hours, who knew what we might have to face on the other side of this door? Could worse injuries be possible? Had Kayne designed this place as a death trap? Would the answers that I thought I needed to know, be not what I wanted to hear?

I breathed deeply; steadily in through my nose and out of my pursed lips. Trying to calm my apprehension and pure fear, I ignored precaution and whispered, “On three.”

Dylan gave me an encouraging smile in response. I guessed he was more used to the unexpected by now. Solely his existence was the most anomalous thing that I’d ever come across. On the other hand, reasoning was beyond me when it came to figuring out how thirty years of isolation had preserved – or given him, more disturbingly – his optimistic nature.

Dylan said the subsequent words with me, the words that were supposed to release my anxiety and tension, and lend me courage and strength.

“One. Two. Three…”

He reached and turned the worn doorknob, faded brown, and I pushed the door open with both of my palms flat against the panels. I barely had time to take in what was inside after we’d stepped in, before the door clicked shut behind us.

A dawning dread settled upon me, and with wide eyes I turned the boy next to me. His hand was still even on the door, and soberly, he turned it back…for nothing to happen.

Dylan’s face was set. It was as if he’d been expecting this. As if he’d been expecting us to become trapped even further.

I sighed, and twisted back round to survey my surroundings. We’d hopefully find a way out later, even if it meant knocking the door through. For now, at least, it was time for the ‘adventure’ I’d hoped for in this first room.