Frozen

I watched Dylan and Carson together, gazes fixated as if they were sizing each other up. What had I done?

Carson was much more collected than he’d been before, and for that I was grateful. But he stood just inside the usual space boundaries that battled between strangers, which made them wary of each other. Supposedly a lot more communication was put across to others through body language over actual words, and it felt to me that even this simple action was screaming at Dylan that a different line had been crossed between Carson and me. That we’d found a rare link of understanding, one that you didn’t often find when meeting new people, and that it connected us now.

I forced back a frown. If my notions were more than just notions, then I was not going to be used as bait for Dylan’s rage.

I broke the silence. A change of subject was always a good way to make people let things go. But why was Dylan looking at me as if I’d done something wrong? I’d hugged Carson, because he’d needed the comfort of another person - so what?

“Did you find out anything that we might need to know?” I asked tentatively, and I saw Carson’s mouth curve up in a small smile. Dylan looked enraged, and I realised how my words must have sounded to them both.

“That any of the three of us might need to know,” I corrected hastily. It wasn’t like I’d swapped ‘sides’ or anything. Yet that was what it felt like.

I was in the middle of two, warring people.

They were acting so childishly, though that childishness was laced with grief and the experience of their years. And old anger, betrayal. If we were ever going to escape this abbey, then all of us had to work together. We would never be able to outsmart Kayne, an insane genius who had forced this entire building to be frozen in time, if we were separated by our prejudices. We were going to get nowhere like this.

“It seems that Kayne has a fondness for turning people’s passions against them,” Dylan began, his voice low, rough, but clear enough to understand, “With me, it was entrapment in a room of artefacts and old books. He wanted their company to be the only company I had, and for me to hate them because of it.”

The line of his mouth made me wonder if Kayne had been successful. Of course, however, he continued, unaware of my worries, and his words were snapped short.

“With Gale, it was freezing his ability to move – his body – and to speak, completely. He could still see and hear, but only what was nearby.”

He shot a shadowed glance at Carson, who shifted his weight to his heels slightly, but nonetheless appeared unperturbed.

Dylan realised then that this entrapment designed by Kayne and the connection it had to Gale wasn’t obvious to me, and explained further.

“Gale’s a runner. Taking his ability to move, to run…it would be like taking a pianist’s fingers, or a swimmer’s limbs. That was his torture. And he was able to see and hear him perfectly, but not do anything to change the situation.”

Carson’s frown at Dylan’s acknowledgment of him, made me want to inch closer to him and squeeze his hand. The bizarre idea made me fight to keep my breathing even.

“He couldn’t say a word to let him know he was here. They’ve both been alone, in different ways.”

Dylan’s eyes glinted, a green promise of knowledge.

“I didn’t know he was here,” Carson interrupted, out of the blue, “Sight is key to how I think, especially being an artist, and I made myself learn to draw without it. It was convenient that the equipment was provided for me.”

His lip curled up in a fierce kind of grimace. It made him look feral, wild.

“I thought it was Kayne who put the images in my head of you,” he admitted, turning to face me, head and torso, “He was laughing at me being blind, so he gave me some new inspiration.”

It was funny; his words weren’t bitter, like Dylan’s had been. They sounded…straightforward. Simple. Honest. With all three boys’ gazes burning into my head, as I dropped it slightly to stare at an appropriately interesting floorboard, the conversation abruptly no longer seemed a good idea.

“Maybe he showed you them for a reason,” I mused, other than torture. The sheer idea that I could have been the subject of someone’s persecution made me feel slightly nauseous.

“Were there any others apart from the ones I’ve seen drawn?” I held eye contact with Carson, willing him not to mention the three. I still had an odd, gut-wrenching, temple-nudging feeling that I couldn’t tell Dylan about the rose, and Carson had both seen and drawn me with it. It had to be our secret, just between us.

“Yes,” he answered vaguely, though as he moved a hand up to rub his chin, three of his fingers flexed and curled back into his hand, almost too quickly to catch sight of. If I’d blinked then, I would’ve missed it. A snap of a look at the others told me of their faces, unchanged. Dylan still appeared to be strapping reins on his obvious anger, and Gale seemed to be slipping back into the vacant expression that I’d seen him wearing before. It sent a chill up my spine.

But I felt something twinge at my intuition, and it pushed me to ask Carson an unprecedented question,

“How long ago was it that you first saw me?”

He frowned for a moment in thought and calculation, strangely, instead of surprise. His reply was laced with bitterness once more.

“Kayne told me when each year passed. I think it was only in my mind,” He glanced at Gale for confirmation, but he was clearly no longer present with us, “and he had his fun with it. The first time I saw you was about four and a half years ago.”

My intuition whispered further.

“Present or future?”

“Both.”

I pressed my lips together tight. I had been expecting one or the other…something just before I’d come here, or something from that time. Four and a half years ago had been shortly before my twelfth birthday. My dad had disappeared only a few months later…

“In the present, there was a man sitting outside an old shed at the outskirts of a forest. He was whittling and carving something into a piece of wood, with another at his feet. A nameplate or a plaque, I think, but I couldn’t tell because I wasn’t myself in the vision; I didn’t have a body, only sight. It said Adena.”

I smiled. I knew that Dad hadn’t forgotten it.

“And then I saw you walking in the forest; you looked over at the man and he did this strange, crooked smile. It made you laugh. You couldn’t have been more than twelve.”

Carson raised his eyebrows at me expectantly, expecting an explanation. He didn’t really need it though – he was just curious. No, the true meaning behind the newly-revealed side of this memory would be mine alone.

“And the future one?” I encouraged him with my eyes, and was pleased when he let it go.

“You were older and running through the forest. You were frantic, and I had a feeling that you’d just had a revelation of some kind, because you looked desperate to find out something. It was night but you knew where you were going, and there was no moon. At the edge of the trees there was a clearing, and you stopped. It didn’t look like there was anything there. It could’ve been because it was so dark, which is why I thought the moon not shining, was strange. It was cloudy, but I didn’t see sight of it, anywhere. You looked disappointed and turned away. You didn’t go back.”

I frowned. I couldn’t remember anything like that happening to me. And running through the forest at night was something that I definitely wouldn’t have forgotten.

“How old did I look then?” I wondered aloud, and Carson considered.

“I’m not sure,” he said, and he seemed to be revisiting the stolen memory or vision, from the distance in his face, “but you were a few years younger than you are now.”

“Your hair was different.”

“How?” I hadn’t changed it in the past year…

“It was short. You had more of a fringe…” The words were uncertain, but in a way of unruly description instead of faulty remembrance. I would’ve been worried if he’d gotten technical, so I was grateful.

More importantly, however, that short style phase had happened only a year and half or two years ago. No more than that. I’d been fourteen with that hairstyle, and I had never run through the woods in the dark, on my own.

I would have been able to remember it if I had.

I eventually disregarded the worry, an untied end to come back to later. A part of me was still reeling from the knowledge that Carson had thought that he was alone for so long, and had retreated into sombreness and rage so much. And even more so that Gale had been forced to watch his friend’s spiralling descent into painful solidarity, and hadn’t been able to give him any sign of the truth.

I felt a wave of pity for him.

I soon noticed that his vacant expression still hadn’t subsided, so I tried to avoid both Carson’s curious eyes and Dylan’s slowly simmering ones, and made my way over to where Gale stood. His eyes were huge and a summer-sky blue, seeming even bigger with all the emptiness that they contained. It was a look that made me shiver.

“Do you want to get out of this room?” I murmured to him softly, and watched his gaze gradually returning to the present. He made a movement that was barely a nod, and a quiet, mad fear was unsettled through his whole body. I knew that I could never understand what he was feeling, but I had to help him. The look in his eyes said as much.

“Me and Dylan…we have a plan. Come with us, and we might be able to escape. I don’t think that Kayne’s going to feel remorseful anytime soon.” I waited.

“OK.”

The word was so hushed that it was almost imperceptible, but I smiled gently and led Gale away from the platform. It was no wonder that he could barely keep himself together after what he’d been through. So maybe being away from this scene, this room, would make it easier for him to find normality again.

“Adena, what are you doing?” Dylan asked tensely as I passed him with Gale.

I stopped in my tracks.

“Getting out of here – what did you think we were going to do? This room isn’t doing wonders for Gale’s sanity, Dylan. We get him away from here and he might come back to himself. He might be able to tell us something too.”

“But we don’t know what…what if-” Dylan’s eyes flickered over to Carson as he stammered, something I’d never heard him do before, “We can’t just-”

“What, did you think we were just going to leave them here?” I demanded of him, understanding suddenly, “That we were just going to let them get out of their imprisonments and then leave them to fend for themselves?”

Anger flooded me. How could Dylan have thought for a second that this had only been a quick check-in, to search for an escape? How could he have considered abandoning his own friends, no matter what one of them had done to him in the past?
No-one could be surrendered to torture, no matter who they were. Especially not Kayne’s kind of torture. The kind that got inside your head, twisted your perception so that your greatest passions became your darkest enemies.

“We don’t know what Kayne wants!” Dylan cried, his face a mask of desperation, turning to Carson and then back to me again, “This could be a challenge – what if freeing them stops us from escaping?”

I shook my head in disbelief. This didn’t feel like the Dylan that I had been coming to know. Ever since Carson had come into the equation – since Dylan had found his first sketch in the green book – he had been different, changed. It wasn’t right.

“I don’t care about Kayne’s rules,” I retorted, “What I care about is the fact that someone needs our help. Someone more lost and confused than I think that we can even contemplate. But I’m going to try and help Gale, and you’re not going to stop me.”

Our gazes burned into each other.

I quickly looked away to Gale’s bewilderment and began to usher him towards the door, whispering soothing words. About how in a few moments, he’d never have to step foot in this room again. How soon he’d never have to see this torture chamber, in just a few more steps…

“No, Adena.”

Dylan was standing right in my path, obstinacy etched into every inch of him. I couldn’t believe his nerve.

“Look,” I said in a barely controlled tone, “I don’t know what’s happened to you and where the Dylan I know has disappeared to, but this isn’t you.” I gestured towards his rigid stance dejectedly.

“This is more important than playing along with Kayne’s fun, Dylan. Gale is your friend and he needs our help – can’t you see that?”

He remained motionless.

“Please let us past, Dylan.”

His eyes were green and unforgiving.

“Please don’t do this to him…don’t do this to me.”

After a short silence, in which I truly thought that he wasn’t going to change, something appeared to give in and fall slack inside of him, and he swung himself sideways to give us an uninterrupted exit. My heart was drumming a little faster than usual, a light throbbing in my ears.

He’ll understand why you had to do it, I thought hopefully, You had to hurt him to save his friend. He’ll thank you later.

I didn’t want his thanks though; I wanted his safety. His safety, Dylan’s safety too.

Taking the last step out of the room and holding onto Gale’s arm carefully, I looked back over my shoulder with words on my lips.

At that moment, the second we passed through the doorway, Gale collapsed to the ground, his arm slipping out of my grasp.



Panic rose in my throat.

I tumbled to the floor beside him, where he was curled on his side with his face turned away. I reached to twist his chin to me; so that I could see what had happened, what was wrong, but I didn’t need to. He was already moving to look at me.

“Gale?” I asked worriedly, a dozen questions clinging to the single word, the lonely name. His eyes were reeling in wide circles, spinning cartwheels around the hallway. His jaw had gone slack and the muscles in his arms, legs and seemingly the rest of his body lay disturbingly limp. The only part of him that was paying any attention was his eyes.

I heard running footsteps behind me and looked back over my shoulder again, to see Dylan shoot through the door. He was beside me and peering anxiously into Gale’s face in an instant.

Carson had followed him just as hurriedly, but I watched him take in the sight of the perimeter of the doorway, and slow. He seemed unsure that he could physically step through, and I didn’t blame him. He might not have been able to see the room with his eyes, but being trapped for that long would get inside anyone’s head.

It might even make freedom seem too much.

Carson was as motionless as Gale, though in an entirely different way. His face was ridden with uncertainty and trepidation, fighting the urge to snap, it looked like. I wondered whether it would be to scream with rage, or cry with misery…or maybe even to laugh with joy.

Dylan was completely ignorant of me, and with a great deal of reason; he had his hands roughly around Gale’s face, trying to fix him in place as tremors began to run through his body. His blue eyes were still wild. If he started thrashing, Dylan and I would need all the help we could get, and Carson and Gale undoubtedly shared something from that…room of torture. Carson needed to get out of there for himself, too. He just needed some help to push past his fears.

Not feeling quite myself somehow, moving slowly as if I was wading through deep water or was trying to run in a dream, I rose and moved over to Carson. His gaze shifted from the doorway and found mine. His voice was tinged with an unexpected vulnerability as he said,

“Don’t you think that Kayne will stop us?”

His eyes were so dark. I reached out my hand across the barrier of the doorway, and replied,

“I think that he has less control of his powers than he thinks he does.”

Carson said nothing. Gradually, the anxiety and fear left his face and he reached out his hand too. He stepped through the doorway to stand beside me, and I was lost in his eyes and the warmth of his hand in mine. A sudden heat broke free of invisible incarceration in my chest and I felt slightly dizzy. What was wrong with me?

A shocked gasp broke my spell and I twisted away from Carson, fell to the floor and onto Gale. Like I’d unwittingly predicted, the blonde boy’s body was beginning to go into some kind of seizure, his limbs thrashing violently, his head and chest and hips jumping off of the floor, out of sync with the rest of him. It was as if he was being pulled on puppet strings.

I threw myself over his legs and pinned them to the floor, struggling against a flash of pain as he kicked out and struck my stomach. A dark head was soon nearby and across from a panicking Dylan on Gale’s chest, whose red hair was haphazard and whose body was straining with the effort of forcing his friend to stay on the ground. Carson leant past him, and took Gale’s face in his own hands.

My muscles burned as they fought to maintain their positions, and I heard the muffled, sickening thumps that Gale’s body made when its various parts struck the wooden floor.

But the boy himself was soundless. Unsettlingly so. He was in no control of himself at all. And that was why I, and Dylan too, could hear every one of the next words spoken.

“Gale Asher,” Carson’s deep voice was calm and controlled, despite the boy’s lack of the word.

“He was a boy I used to know. We went to school together, and met over a train set. He always leant me his favourite pen in our first years, and took a punch for me when we were fourteen. He lived with his mother and his sister, Nina, in a semi on the outskirts of town. His father left when he was young, before he’d learnt to ride a bike. He shared a room with his sister but didn’t mind, though she was four years younger. He once told me that her dolls and toys were what kept him sober, because they reminded him that he would always be the man of the house.

“Nina was beautiful even as a child; she had this thick blonde hair that she was always twisting through her fingers. We knew she would grow up and be even more beautiful when she was older, but she was fragile and delicate, so we saw to be her personal bodyguards when she came to secondary. Her eyes were what their mother called gemstone blue, and she was totally innocent, more innocent than a child should be. When she looked at you, sometimes she could have been staring into your soul.

“On a night that Gale always kept cherished and secret, he’d been attacked, mugged, on the way home from school and his mother was too ill to notice. He told me that he’d dragged himself up to his room to find Nina sitting on his bed. She saw his bruises and they argued. She was nine, and she was clever. She told him how he was the bravest person she knew, that he was brilliant – a brother and father all at once to her. Nina told him that he was special, and she was always going to be a little girl to him; that’s what ‘Nina’ meant, her name. She was glad, because that meant that he would always-”

“-always be her big brother.”

Over the course of Carson’s words, Gale’s fit had slowly ceased, and he cut into the story in a gasp. I watched the two boys share a look of utter belief and friendship, complete loyalty, and I finally understood what Dylan had said to me, shortly after we’d first met.

Me and my two brothers – well, we were so close that we might as well have been brothers…

This was the loyalty that Dylan had broken. This was why he and Carson had never been able to forgive each other, even in memory.

Because of how much they’d lost. To both of them, it had been like losing a bother.

Carson got to his feet and offered Gale his hand. The boy rose with weakness, but the smile and pat on the arm that he received for his triumphed struggle seemed to strengthen him. The irony of the situation was absent. This was real comfort, strung from mere friendship and the family that it wrought.

Carson must have sensed my eyes on him, because his gaze swung to mine as irresistibly as Gale’s puppet string control. Or like we were the opposite poles of two magnets, unable to turn away from each other. I quickly averted the theory and that gaze; I knew that my thoughts of respect and admiration filled my face, and I could feel Dylan looking at me again.

I glanced at the boy in question and he was frowning, searching for something in the air between Carson and me. So it wasn’t just me. Dylan could see that there was something between us too.

“Are you okay?” I asked Gale tentatively, forcing the approaching focus to fall away. He turned to me, and I was relieved to see that though his face was paler than it had been before, which was a little alarming with his already intense pallor – his eyes were straight and settled, excepting some confusion.

“I think I’m fine,” he answered with a note of tiredness, “I don’t know what happened – did I black out?”

“You were having a seizure,” Dylan said tightly, and I was disturbed by how much that was reflected in his body language – his taut, folded arms and clenched jaw, “It didn’t last long. We should go, Gale.”

Gale nodded silently, and I wondered if he had been the weaker link in the group when they’d been at school together, the more cautious and withdrawn third, alongside the two leading, headstrong boys. But I refused to pass judgement based on one event. I expected that something like what had just happened would take the fight out of most people.

I concentrated instead on how Gale was walking, head slightly bent, arms loose by his sides. Should we really be letting him move anywhere? Were we depleting his already exhausted strength?

“Stop worrying.”

Carson was close to me, with a quirky tilt to his smile. He glanced at his friend with a satisfied approval, and then focused on me again. I smiled lightly, uncomfortably, rubbing my left thumb in circles around my forefinger on the same hand, a motion that I often found myself doing unconsciously when I felt awkward or out of place.

“He’s fine. I know him as well as I know myself; if it was too much, he’d stop. He’s not reckless, and he wouldn’t take on more than he could handle.”

I felt a light touch on my chin, and Carson tilted my face to his. His grey eyes were light and easy now.

“Trust me, Adena. He’s fine.”

Trust me. There was so much hidden in the depths of those words.

I stayed with his touch perhaps a little longer than I should have in the circumstances, and mentally kicked myself when I found Dylan’s frozen expression. Carson and I shared a look, my side brimming with warning, and he wisely moved to walk ahead with Gale, whilst I sidled up to Dylan.

I remembered that the last door in the corridor, or the first as it had been when we’d originally passed it, would be on our left. It wouldn’t be far away, so I didn’t have much time.

I braced myself for what I was about to say.

“Dylan, I-”

He stopped, and I cringed from the half-disguised betrayal in his eyes.

“If you like him, that’s fine. I don’t see the attraction myself, but it’s not up to me. Just don’t let him wrap you around his little finger, Adena. I did, and you know how it turned out for me.”

And then he was gone.

I was speechless.

How could he say something like that? How could he assume that I liked Carson in that way, when first, I didn’t really know him, and second, I wasn’t even sure myself? I’d barely considered it amidst everything that had happened, and even if I had, who could say that I’d find the answer that Dylan had already proclaimed for me?

I tried to be grateful for his attempt to back down from the obviously tense situation, but I couldn’t.

Because somehow, it didn’t really feel like an attempt at all.