Frozen

A wave of exhaustion threatened to overthrow me. I held it back, forcing it to cease its wave of motion, forming a dam in my mind. I blinked several times to clear the haze in my vision and swallowed a yawn, taking the small, inconspicuous volume into my own hands.

“It’s a few pages in.” Dylan murmured, an undertone scaling his voice. I couldn’t quite pin down what it was – anger, sorrow, a mixture of both? But it was enough in those five words to warn me of another mystery rocketing our way. No matter what emotions it had drawn to the surface, this new happening had caused a stir deep in Dylan’s heart; that much was obvious. Such few words sang of his lack of spirit. This wasn’t him.

I was going to have to tread carefully if I didn’t want his sanguinity to be trampled further.

The front cover and title page of the book were blank, in that well-read, faded white-beige colour that old books always seemed to adopt. However, one more page turn and the truth instantly struck me. It wasn’t a book (in the sense of a novel or poetry, or even of a diary); it was a sketchbook.

The haphazard lines caught me off guard and I quite literally fell into bewilderment for several, tired seconds, before I realised that what seemed to be pointless scribbles, was actually a sketch.

And I had it the wrong way up.

I span the book the ninety degrees clockwise to the landscape view that it needed, and began to take in the picture. Though the pages were compact because of the book’s size, the sketch was spread over two, so it was nearly as large as a normal, A4- size one. Drawn in black pencil, the abstract lines and curving strokes began to form a scene before my eyes.

In many shades of black and grey, flames drew in from all sides of the picture, encompassing the majority of the space. They snatched hungrily at the floors and walls of the room I saw, and smoke in firm grey swirled from their tendrils and hung about the picture’s ceiling. The way the character of the flames had been encapsulated – their hunger, their raw menace – was something I found astonishing. How could a drawing show all that?

And the main focus, although obscured and a little unclear, like it was being viewed through misted glass, was clearly highlighted.

Déjà vu struck me like a burning brand. Though I’d experienced it such a short time ago, this was so violent that it felt like I’d never experienced such a sensation before in my life. A large, rectangular shape loomed out of the flames, the form of a body in its masses. A girl, almost a woman, with streaks of ash on her cheeks and hair that waved with the fire. The planes of her face were impossibly familiar.

How could this be me? How could this scene have been captured so perfectly by the mind and hand of a stranger? The way I’d felt, seeing my reflection in that mirror, the initial despair and horror as I recognised myself…it was all depicted by the artist. Unless electricity worked well enough in the abbey for Kayne to have rigged a hidden camera right outside the door, and even then…it terrified me. It was as if the picture had been drawn from straight out of my mind.

I switched my attention back to Dylan once more, only to find him pacing at a short way down the corridor. He was definitely allowed a moment to himself. There was so much I imagined that both of us needed to think about.

I was about to close the book and put it aside to take my own moment, when one of my fingers caught the edge of the page, revealing a section of the next. The next sketch. Curious, after throwing a hasty glance towards Dylan, I drew up my knees to my chest and balanced the book on my thighs as I turned the page.

The second sketch was even more abstract than the first. Very nearly the entirety of the page was covered in inky black and soft grey darkness, clearly setting a scene with no light.

I immediately realised where this was going.

Two small details stood out of the mass of dark sketch lines. The first was a face, the hair around it blending into the black, and a body visible down to the waist. The arms were stretched out, palms splayed, as if the person was trying to catch the darkness with their bare hands. Her expression was intensely fearful, shown through the tense, furrowing lines of her forehead, her tight shoulders, and the absence of any spark of happiness in her eyes.

That person was me. She had been me.

The second detail was a small, dimly lit patch in the upper-left of the sketch, whereas the figure was centre-right, towards the bottom. This was perhaps a square or two inches of faded grey, with a darker silhouette in front of it. At first I recognised it as what I’d expected of Dylan to be visible then, before the door had closed and left me at the mercy of that emptiness. It soon dawned on me that that wasn’t the case; the silhouette had its right hand raised, clutching a rectangular object like it was waving it for attention, or about to throw it through the doorway.

I would’ve bet anything that the object had been a green book.

I continued to stare at the sketch for a while longer, the mass of shadows imprinting itself onto my eyelids. Then I turned the page to a blank result, and a short flick through the rest of the book told me of its further emptiness. I sighed. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that the silhouette, the person, might have been there with me in the dark, or had at least thrown the book. There had been nowhere for it be hidden in the room, and Dylan and I would’ve seen it. Books didn’t follow people through doorways by themselves.

Remembrance of the silhouette’s raised hand made me stir uneasily. If my suspicions were correct, what was this person trying to tell me? Just that they had thrown the book, or that they were the artist? Was it Kayne playing his mind games again, or was it a warning of, or from, someone else trapped here in the abbey? I thought of the cry that I’d heard in the dark. That surely hadn’t been just my imagination…

Dylan had been taken. Could someone else, even someone who’d been visiting the same university at him on that same day, have been taken too? Nor for the first time, I wished that the answers to my numerous questions could’ve been written down. If this person wanted to give me a message, then why not in words?

Questions span in my head like someone had not just popped off the cap of one, but dozens of bottles. They fell in pools and made small circles of passage on the floor of my mind. Ever since I’d come into the abbey, though with Dylan’s help I’d found some answers, the others had been too many and had trickled away from me, too quickly to catch. I would have to act soon then, to grasp even a single one.

What about this one?

I rose to my feet and meandered down the hall to where Dylan’s pacing had ceased – meandered because I scanned each painting on the walls I passed. Maybe that girl on the moors, Lea, hadn’t stood out to me just on a whim…

Reaching within touching distance of Dylan, he swivelled on the spot with eyes relatively calmer than the last time I’d seen them. My memory briefly flashed back to when he’d given me the book. Their green had been level then, proclaiming the impossibility of such a sketch. Had that been tainted with something else? Had his expression been a little too level, a little too controlled? Was there something that he wasn’t telling me?

“I was thinking,” Dylan said, before I could ask anything aloud about my wonderings, “I told you how I got here, but you haven’t told me how you did.” Something smouldered in the back of his eyes, interest laced with another feeling, one that I didn’t recognise. That solidified my resolve. There was something that he was keeping from me. Well, if he wanted distractions, then I’d play along.

I moved a little way away from him and leant against the wall, both crossing my legs in front of me and my arms across my stomach. Memories flickered before me, each time I blinked. Where did I start?

“It really wasn’t much,” I began honestly, thinking about how quietly the day had begun, “It was just a walk that went wrong. I was out in the forest and the weather turned. It’d been warm, cloudy, but I was suddenly caught out in a full-blown storm. It was horrible.”

I shivered, remembering the way, without warning, that the clouds had coalesced in the sky. That black-and-grey swarm now evoked images of the darkness.

I went on to explain how I’d run across the clearing, and had wandered through the abbey to the entrance hall. It was just at that point that I felt an unfamiliar sensation, almost as if someone was nudging my right temple gently, though of course there was no-one else in the hall. I figured that it was my instincts’ way of telling me to keep the section about my father’s rose to myself.

So I skipped over my crazed confusion with the staircase and my necklace – though a part of me yearned to reach up and stroke the soft wood tucked under my t-shirt, resting in the hollow of my throat – and proceeded to tell Dylan what I thought that he mostly already knew. The vision, the fake courtyard, the song…it had all been a ruse of Kayne’s.

Dylan was nodding to himself by the time I had finished.

“I think,” he said in something like a forced whisper, stretching out his limbs as he did so, cat-like, “that if you hadn’t smashed the window, then you wouldn’t be trapped here with me.”

I blinked.

I moved away from the wall, his words repeating themselves in my mind. You wouldn’t be trapped here.

“But I thought you said that anyone was trapped, from the moment they stepped into the abbey?”

“For you, it might not have been. After you smashed the window into my room, when you were thrown back onto that table, it was explosive. It was too big a reaction for it to mean nothing. It feels like something Kayne would do, to let anyone inside, and test them to see if they were worthy enough to stay.”

His words were tinged with bitterness, the usual brightness in his eyes less exuberant, slightly dimmed.

I frowned, not wanting to dwell on theories.

“Come on; let’s just move on to the next room.”

The dimness began to fade, the green lightening again. He smiled at me – not just a sad upturn of the mouth as it had been, but genuinely, with optimism.

How much worse can it get?

I remembered passing the second of the three doors in the corridor on my left, so, going down it in the other direction, it was on our right. Over halfway down, when I came to a stop on the vivid carpet in front of it, I instantly began to compare it to its predecessors, as I had before.

This door was as proud as the first had been meek, as bold as the second had been plain. Instead of hiding in an alcove, it couldn’t be more broadly seen, and instead of faded panels, its entirety was polished to a glisten. Made of a strong, medium wood that looked like oak to my borrowed knowledge – my father’s – the left-side panels were decorated with arcs and curves like the strokes of an artist’s pencil or paintbrush. They stood out, clearly raised on the wood. The right side, however, was less intricate, comprising of what seemed to be mere highlighting of the grain in the wood. They were swirling ovals, accompanied by small, clearly unnatural notches in the surface. They seemed forced somehow, as if they didn’t belong there. While I could link the left panels to something, the right evaded me. It most likely symbolised something, I thought…but what?

Whilst I debated this internally, Dylan appeared to be bracing himself, his expression focused, his breathing deep. I caught it in the corner of my eye but when I turned to face him, he seemed just as he had before, if not a little more tense around the eyes.

“Can I?” he asked suddenly, and blasted into my train of analysing thought so harshly, that the only thing I could think to do was nod. His manners were intact, yet as he reached for the polished doorknob, I knew that his emotions weren’t. And it wasn’t because of the mirror room either; he’d clearly pushed that behind himself. Dylan didn’t seem to be the sort of person who dwelled on things too much. No matter his past, what I’d learnt of him the past few hours told me that he was an optimist, and something was disturbing that outlook from shining through him at the moment. What had changed?

I didn’t have time to ponder the answer, because he had pushed the door open and I stayed close behind him as he slipped inside. Our exit sealed itself with a click of finality, and before I’d even glanced around to study where we were, instinct drew me to Dylan’s face again.

The contrast within seconds was huge. He was slightly agape, his cheeks tinged with colour. Whether with a red anger or a flushed embarrassment, I had no idea. Bound to the unspoken horror and an odd, small flash of resolve in his eyes – like he’d half-expected what he was seeing – my own eyes were irresistibly lured to the cause of his…starburst of expression.

We stood in a room of mahogany-panelled walls, dark and foreboding. The floor and ceiling mirrored them in shade, and with no decoration or difference in colour or texture, they flowed seamlessly into one another, creating the image of a dark cage.

On a slightly raised platform at the back of the room stood two, similarly wooden chairs, facing each other horizontally in my vision, perhaps ten feet apart. Beyond them on the back wall hung a single painting; an ominous, night-strewn background fronted by violent bursts of orange light, like the night sky with all its quiet stars was spouting incandescent fire.

But Dylan’s shock, horror, anger, resolve…whatever mixture of emotions his expression was, was because of the two people sitting in the chairs.

Both were boys looking to be about Dylan’s age – I guessed that neither could be younger than me, and they looked too young to have grown out of their teens yet. Though they seemed similar in age, however, they were anything but similar in appearance.

The boy on the right had medium, golden-blonde hair, not like the platinum, white-blonde many girls at my school had recently taken to dying their hair to, or the dirty blonde that several boys had. It was a simple, short-cut, natural gold. It reminded me of sunshine; it was the exact shade that would blend in with the rays, on a clear summer day.

From what I could see of his face, across the reasonable distance Dylan and I stood from him, he had features to match. His oval face was soft, with a little fragility about the jaw in its rounded sweep, and his eyes were a light, bright blue.

All this - the delicateness just edging out of childhood curves - was marred by his expression, which somehow was even more complex than Dylan’s.

I took a few steps forward, and as I moved I took in the wide, devastated stare of his eyes, their topaz-blue like crystal. They were so wide, so unflinchingly unblinking, that it was as if he had been in this state of horror for months, years, and his face had accepted the facet. I fought the urge to shiver as an old taunt of my dad’s ran through my mind.

When the wind changes, your face might stay that way, Dee…

Additionally, his limbs seemed oddly stiff, in generic positions – his arms on the chair’s armrests, his legs together with feet flat on the floor – and the composure of it was unnatural. The boy’s gaze had snapped to us, probably before I’d noticed it at less than a dozen seconds inside the room, and now it was a cascade of emotion staring at Dylan.

Dylan himself seemed rooted to the spot. Realisation began to settle over me. A twinge of intuition snagged at my mind, and I turned to the second of the boys.

He was very different from the blonde; where the first was soft-featured – his light-coloured hair standing up a little on his head and making him look ever so slightly like a small, startled animal – the second boy was sharp. That was my immediate, reacting thought in effort to find the right word to describe how he looked. His hair was a dark, rich brown, a little long like Dylan’s, but without a wave in sight. His jaw line and chin were so sharply angled that to touch them might’ve caused bloodshed. His high brow and strong cheekbones set the lines of his face off in a way that gave him an air of seriousness. His lips might never have seen a smile.

So, in Dylan’s way of no hesitation, all action, he was striding towards the blonde boy while I was still taking in the sight of the other. His eyes were closed, being somehow the last thing that I noticed. The shadows of his eyelashes made me wonder if his face would seem less sombre if they were open. The stillness of his expression was unnerving…the entire room was unnerving. There was something wrong in the air, the walls and the two boy’s faces, so I brought it up upon myself to do what I could for the dark-haired stranger, who Dylan had chosen to put aside first.

Within a few paces, I noticed there was a sketchbook on his lap.

Alarm bells began ringing in my head.

It wasn’t the green book – of course not; that was tucked securely in a side pocket of my jacket. It was a proper sketchbook, large and filled with pages of touch, thick artist’s paper, something that was alien to me.

Could this stranger be my messenger?

Up close, I took a moment of patience, hoping that the boy might open his eyes at his personal space being invaded. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get my wish.

With a blossoming of skittish butterflies in my stomach, I placed my free hand on his arm, which was bare, muscled, and slightly tanned, and asked tentatively,

“Hello?”

There were a few seconds of no response, followed by the smallest of movements in his right hand. It held a black pencil. I had a sudden, very vivid image of that hand and that pencil sketching across that white page, forming the black, swirling darkness of a room with no light, and the shadowed face of a girl in fear.

I moved cautiously away, and with movement that was impossibly fluid for someone with their eyes closed, the boy’s hand and arm moved upwards, curving to his lap. The pencil wavered, poised inches above the blank canvas for a moment. Then he began to draw.

I knelt down next to the boy, the top of my head level with his shoulder. I followed the pencil’s path with fierce concentration, taking in with my eyes what it left behind.

It was soon obvious that the point of focus was a person, or at least their head, the shape of the face portrayed in acute, slanting lines. The pencil moved back and forth with astonishing speed, leaving almost angry strokes. I watched the sketch coming to life, despite a building want to look up into the boy’s face to see if his expression was just as absent as before.

After the face was roughly constructed, along with the shape of a pair of outlined hands at the temples, the pencil began moving too fast for me to keep track of it. The lines blurred where I stared, the boy’s hand and the dark stripe of the pencil merging into a quivering, black-and-white mass. I gave into my compulsion and drew my attention to his face instead. There was little change; he seemed as sombre as ever, his eyes still eerily closed, but a frown was now knitting his brow.

Wondering whether it was from concentration or from something else, I turned back to the sketchbook. That small jumble of seconds had been nearly all that he’d needed. The finishes touches were now scattering across the page – a flicker of shadowing, an embellishment of a curve at the eyes. The boy’s hand drew away slowly to rest lightly on his lap, and I leant closer to his sketch in curious, muted amazement.

The picture showed a boy, or a young man’s, head and upper torso. His dark hair mussed around his head, thick and a little long, and the lines of his face were sharp and angular. The boy had drawn himself. However, the hands that I’d seen before at his temples were not his own. They were someone else’s hands, with rounded palms and long fingers. They curved around the top of the boy’s head, across his temples, the thumbs over his closed eyelids. They were angled in such a way – the palms against his face with the thumbs on the inside - that would be impossible for him to do himself.

After a small amount of deliberation, I came to the question of who the hands belonged to. They were too feminine to be Dylan’s…was the boy relaying a memory to me? Were they his sister’s hands? Was he showing me something of his loss, instead of the message that I’d been expecting?

Then I grasped the answer, and it was so obvious that it made me cringe.

A small, star-shaped scar struck the base of the left thumb – from a bike accident when I was seven – and the half-crescent moons were large, in stark contrast to their tapering, tamed nails. They were my hands.

A thought caught me then, out of the blue. Studying the sharp, striking lines of the boy’s face, drawn himself in rough but stunning, slanting sketch, gave me an unexpected craving. If I had ever been able to draw well – I’d always loved the idea of expression though art; it was just so infinitely personal – then I thought I would’ve likely wanted to draw this boy more than anyone I’d ever seen. The strokes in front of me, beautiful, hard and sombre, they made me think of the night sky, black at midnight. The few, gentler curves of his face – the softness at his eyes and at his full-lipped mouth – shone out of the sketch past the dark hair and the shadowy planes of his face, like the brightness of stars dotting the blackness.

I suddenly realised that I thinking in actual description. It was scary.

Pull yourself together! How can a boy’s face look like the night sky?

I stared at him, confused in a blaze of dumb, shocked amazement at myself.

Well…like that.

Tearing myself away from my bizarre train of thought and instead to others, I soon decided firmly that it was my message that was facing me. What else could it really be, after all? Hadn’t the other sketches simply been drawn to lead me here, and Dylan too, to save these two prisoners as it seemed that they were?

For a moment I considered, awkwardly, the best way to position myself. Kneeling was too much of a stretch, sitting was out of the question, and standing from his side didn’t feel quite right. Eventually, internally sighing, I settled on somewhat precariously leaning over the boy in a part-crouch, but an almost full-standing stance. I shook my hands at my sides, as if to banish all the trepidation and anxiety from them, and then reached out to gently place them on either side of the boy’s head. My thumbs curved over his eyelids in identical motion to the sketch that still lay on his lap. Though it was upside-down to me, I knew that what I was doing was right. It felt sure and…natural, somehow.

My fingers had threaded a little into his hair, and my mind silently wandered to the feel of it. It was warm, and fell in a tumble of thick, rich brown over my skin, which was pale in contrast. It was soft, smooth…

Following an impulse, I let my own eyes drift shut, and I thought about why the boys could have been taken. What had Kayne’ purpose been, in capturing three teenagers in an age-forgotten abbey? Had it been an experiment? Had it been an investigation gone wrong? What power was Kayne tampering with here, and could he control it? What force on Earth could ever cause a man to take, in essence, the lives of three innocents…?

Questions washed over me in countless waves, and my attention cast itself briefly to reality, where I offhandedly thought that I felt fiercer warmth against my palms and a searing heat across my thumbs, but the notions soon captured me once again…

How was any of this possible? What had Kayne done to himself, to others, in order to achieve it? How much had he sacrificed in order to gain this power? Was insanity ruling him, his actions? Or could it be something more than that…?

Before, the change in reality had failed to seize my attentions. But flickering movement against my gently-laid thumbs was oddly harder to ignore.

Jolting back to the present, I slid my hands away from the eyelashes that were tickling my skin, though they left tingling sensations in my thumbs as they met bare air. I watched with wide and curious eyes, because the boy was really moving, stiffly as Dylan had first been when we’d met, dreamlike. His head was bent and I simply stared at his dark, disarrayed hair until he finally rose to bring his gaze to mine.

I nearly gasped out loud. At first, I thought his eyes were black, a startling colour that I’d never seen before in anyone’s eyes, and they were huge – serious and gleaming. My night sky comparison appeared to be running off on a limb of its own, until more seconds caught me up and I realised that it wasn’t black at all that I was staring at. His eyes were grey; a deep, mysterious grey that regarded me with an almost midnight-shaded, dark mixture of sadness, relief and what I imagined to be recognition. I was vaguely mesmerised, to say the least.

My descriptive, frighteningly distracted feelings began to waver, and I dragged myself sluggishly out of them, like I was trying to run through waist-deep water. I knew myself for daydreaming or thinking in odd patterns when I was stressed or confused, and especially when I was tired. I was now happily in a tangled mixture of all three.

At that moment, I had a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy staring at me what appeared to be dawning incredulity. I snapped back to myself with another jolt, shock trembling in my veins as I thought about how I’d just been thinking, about a complete stranger! Something sounded in the back of my mind like an urgent alarm bell, echoing my earlier twinge of intuition. It made a particularly worrying question swirl in front of me, as I remembered what Dylan’s face had looked like when we’d first come into the room. He would’ve seen this boy too…

Is he really such a total stranger?

The boy and I continued to stare at each other for several more, stunned seconds, until he broke the moment by turning to the sketchbook in his lap. He flicked backwards through a few pages, to settle on an image drawn in much more detail than the others that I’d seen. He picked it up and held it out to me wordlessly. The expression on his face made me wonder if he still couldn’t speak, or if he didn’t need to.

I bent my head to look at the sketch, the astonished silence continuing. It was a close-up, and the familiarity of the captured scene struck me as the others had. In exquisite detail - so much that I could see each curve of the pendant on the necklace and the faded rings in the wood of the banister - was a drawing of me. I sat on the bottom step of that glorious staircase, the rose pendant resting in my right hand, my left stretching out to touch its twin on the spindle of the staircase. My features were caught in an acute picture of bewilderment, turning from one carving to the other, my hair falling in waves around my face.

I could hear my heart beating in my ears, and felt goose bumps shiver down the lengths of my arms and thighs. How long had this stranger been watching my journey through the abbey? Of everything that had happened, of all the impossibilities, the moment captured in this sketch had been the most privately personal of them all to me. Staring down at solid, visual evidence of its happening, all the feelings of fear, hope and astonishment flooded through me again, so vividly that they could’ve been fresh. I felt so emotionally exposed, that if it had been outside of my head, I would’ve been standing in front of the boy, naked.

“Adena Brady.”

The voice startled me out of my reverie. I glanced up involuntarily to see the words, my name, just fading from the boy’s lips. I’d been wrong to assume that just because he’d been rendered blind, he’d been mute as well.

My previous, emerging realisation finally crystallized in my mind, and I replied to the deep voice, beset with mysteries, with two equally simple - and complex at the same time, with all the indications they also carried – words of my own,

“Carson Blake.”

The dark-haired boy smiled.