Twisted Winter Read online

At the end of the room was a pair of scales, the size of a house. They were almost too huge to see, although I did wonder whether I myself had simply become very small. I still don’t know. In one of the pans of the scales, the left-hand one, there was a feather, as long as I was tall, curling and white.

  In front of the scales sat a shadow. It was the size of a normal man, and it sat quite still, with its hands on its knees.

  “Do you know who this is?” a voice said.

  I couldn’t tell who was speaking.

  “No.”

  “His name is Zachary Upson. Do you know that name?”

  I felt as though I’d suddenly stepped onto a ledge that was too high. I said, “Yes. He’s my dad. Was my dad. His name was Zachary but my mum says everyone called him Bardy because he liked writing songs and his mum was Irish. Where bards came from,” I added, in case, being Egyptian, they didn’t know. My fingers closed around the ankh at my throat.

  At that, the shadow lifted its head. I didn’t remember my dad but I’d seen photos and a video that my mum had taken, when I was still a baby. So I knew it was really him, but he looked very young. He was young, I suppose. He’d only been thirty-one when he’d died. I don’t know why it had taken all this time for him to come here, but perhaps there was no time in this place.

  “We’re ready for the weighing,” the voice said. I didn’t know what that meant but I’d been told to keep quiet unless I was spoken to, and whereas I might have disobeyed my mum or a teacher, this was different. Then the voice started speaking again and it was a list of everything my father had done: how he’d nicked things as a kid, and gone on to stealing cars, then drugs. Using, but dealing as well, bringing misery into other people’s lives. I listened and I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t good. I hadn’t known about any of it; my mother had kept all that from me and I was grateful, but also angry. I didn’t know what to think.

  As each of his crimes was spoken, a weight dropped, leaden and black, into the right-hand pan of the scales and it sank lower and lower. At last the voice finished – names, dates, convictions – and the sad-eyed dog-headed man turned to me and said:

  “Now it is your turn, Hannah Rose. What do you know that is good, about this man, your father?”

  The trouble was, he’d gone off when I was still a baby. Hadn’t been able to cope, my mum said. Left her completely in the lurch and she hadn’t been able to go back to her own mum, because my nan was dead by then. She must have been so alone. And yet, Bardy was my dad, and here was his shade, looking at me with a hope in his face that hurt.

  I said, “He gave me my name. Hannah, because it was his mum’s name. And he left me with this.” I held up the ankh and they all leaned forwards, as if to look at it more closely. “And a song. For me. He wrote it for me.”

  There in the hall, with the great torches flickering fire over the walls, I sang my song in a little quivery voice, and the shadow before me grew more solid and at the end of the room, the scales shuddered. Slowly, very slowly, the pan that held the feather began to sink, against the weights, until the feather came to rest against the floor and the black weights were no longer visible.

  My dad’s figure wasn’t shadowy any more. It was filled with light and it became brighter and brighter until it was gone, but I could see that he was smiling. There was an opening in the air behind him, a doorway shaped like a cross with a loop at the top, like my ankh. He stepped through it and when he disappeared, the torches began to go out, one by one, and as the last one guttered I was in total darkness. I think I yelled, but the dark swallowed the sound. Then I saw that an eye was staring at me, a huge white eye, and a moment later I realised that it was the moon. There was no sign of the hall, or the great figures, or the dog-headed man. I was standing in front of the gates, but the sluice looked different. It was much smaller, and made of grey metal like the little sluice further down the canal. I could not see the wheel. I wondered whether the gates opened into other worlds, other lands of the dead, and my dad had gone to the one he loved best. But I knew that whatever the gates looked like, they were not just to hold back the sea.

  If this had been a dream, I suppose this was the point at which I woke up. But it was not a dream. I was stiff and frozen, the reeds crackled with frost, the moon was on fire in the coldness of the sky, and the canal smelled of weed and water. I trudged home along the towpath, and sang my song as I went. The pony whickered to me when I came up the slope of the field. The orchard no longer seemed unfriendly, with things lurking behind the apple trees, and when I lifted the latch on the back door, the sky was already growing brighter in the east. There were flowers of frost on the windowpane. I did not go to bed, but sat in a chair by my bedroom window and watched the sun come up over the blaze of the world after the darkness of the night.

  Flawless

  Frances Hardinge

  When people stay in hotel rooms, they suddenly turn into toddlers. Weird, creative, screwed-up toddlers.

  Let’s smear jam on the wall! Let’s leave apple cores in the drawers! Let’s hide used nappies behind the radiator, so that they fill the whole room with the smell of cooked poo! Hello, whoever cleans this room! I’ve left you a surprise!

  Maybe they think there’s some hidden handle we pull to flush the room clean. But there isn’t. The only ‘handles’ are Mum, ‘Occasional Kev’ from the village, and me. Kev’s just Occasional and Mum has everything else to do, so cleaning is mostly my job, particularly during the school holidays.

  Cleaning a room is like being that legend-guy who pushed a rock up a hill again and again. While you’re scrubbing at the gribble, most of the time you can’t even tell if you’re making any difference. Nothing’s ever perfect. Your eye adjusts. The closer you get to perfection, the better your gaze learns to pick out the stains and marks.

  When I’ve finished a room, I always step into the corridor for a moment, taking in the spotted walls, the gingery time-stains on the mock-brass electric chandeliers. Then I enter the room again, and for one moment it is perfect. It gleams, like it’s just been taken out of its packaging.

  That never lasts. Next day there will be inexplicable bootmarks on the curtains, and somebody will have tried to cook soup in the kettle.

  I don’t know why they bother. After all, we already have a weird, creative, screwed-up toddler of our own.

  Dill is two years old, and tall for his age – tall enough to reach door handles. He has a rubbery little mouth and big, wet blue eyes. He wants to hit everything in the world against everything else. If you don’t let him, his eyes get wetter, and his scream goes right through your brain.

  He’s my brother and I love him. Of course I do. But sometimes loving him feels like just one more thing I do because it’s my job.

  He adores clean rooms. He rushes around them like some grimy, stumpy spirit of Undoing, throwing pot plants on the floor and stamping on biscuit packs. Once he left a toy truck in one of the teacups, with a live slug in the driver’s seat. I’m not making this up. And he’s two, so whatever he does is my fault.

  Once I dared to suggest to Mum that maybe Dill was too hyper. But no, apparently he’s just ‘being a boy’ and ‘letting off steam’. I didn’t ask what was supposed to happen to my steam. No, I just swallow it down, so that I can be the ‘nice smiley girl at reception’ and Mum’s little helper.

  Or at least I did until this winter, when the snows came and changed everything.

  * * *

  We’re not exactly a winter destination. Our hotel is on the cliff path, with views down to Windmouth (fading spa town) on one side, and Creve (failing fishing village) on the other. From October onwards, the wind from the North Sea does its best to blow us somewhere more sensible inland. It always fails, but I’m rooting for it.

  Low season means more free time for me, but this winter I spent every spare minute wrestling with my GCSE work. Mum didn’t stop me, but whenever she caught me studying her face went neutral, and I knew what she was thinking. Mum has always wanted
me to leave school after my GCSEs, and work in the hotel. Worse, I know it isn’t just because she needs the help. She thinks I’m wasting my time. She doesn’t think I’m smart enough to bother with university. She thinks I’d drop out, or waste three years of my life for nothing but a big, fat debt and an unclassified degree.

  I didn’t tell her how badly I was doing. I didn’t tell her that my brain froze up whenever I tried to prepare coursework. Blank paper, blank screen. Time and again I lost the staring competition. A barrier in my head stopped me filling them with words. I might as well have tried to write across the sky. By December I was going spare.

  The snow arrived one evening by stealth. First tiny ice-crumbs spiralled down, flecking my lashes and sleeves while I took out the rubbish bags. After dusk came small, soft tufts that melted on the sills and damp tarmac as soon as they landed. Then followed big fat flakes, blue with the late evening light.

  Doors, windows, just a whirl of snow. Sorry, we are not receiving transmission from the world at present. You are between channels.

  Next morning, when I peered out of the window of my attic room, the sheer beauty of the world outside knocked the breath out of me. There was thick snow everywhere, heaping up on the windward side of the cars and buildings. It hung over the edge of the cliff in a smooth, crazy, cartoon way. The sky seemed full of sun. The snow was so white you could feel it throughout your head, like toothache but without the pain.

  For half an hour I sat there looking at it, completely happy. It was the white I’d been scrubbing to find under the chipped china and worn-out tiles. Perfect. Flawless.

  Of course it didn’t stay that way. Dog-walkers, hikers, postmen, delivery men, they all started to rut and spoil my beautiful snow. The buggies from the surrounding golf course took their usual short cut through our land to get back to their club hut, leaving deep tracks.

  Dill had never seen snow properly before. He wanted to zigzag all over it, and fall in it, and throw it. Most of all, he wanted to spoil it. He seemed to find every pure, beautiful patch, and then take pleasure in stamping it into slush.

  “Keep an eye on him,” said Mum.

  I took my history book outside, and leant against the footpath stile near where he was playing. I couldn’t study, though. I had to watch Dill as he scuffed my gorgeous snow and warbled in a tooth-edgey falsetto. Suddenly the whole scene felt like The Symbol of My Life.

  She must have come up along the coastal path behind me, but I didn’t hear her approach. There was no soft, powdery huff, huff, huff of feet stirring snow. All I knew was that suddenly there was another figure leaning over the fence, watching Dill.

  It was a woman in a pale blue coat, with silvery fake fur around the neck and hood. I thought she looked Swedish, with her pale lashes and pure gold hair. Her face was tanned, but I wondered whether it was a skiing holiday tan, not a beach tan. I realised that I was blocking the stile and moved hastily, but she carried on staring over the fence.

  I waited for the usual inane comments that Dill draws out of adults. He’s having fun there, isn’t he? Wish I was his age. But the silence stretched.

  “He’s my brother,” I said. It was weird to start a conversation that way, but all I could think of to do was to answer the routine remarks that hadn’t been made.

  “Then can’t you stop him doing that?” answered the woman, without looking at me.

  Her tone held the suppressed frustration that I often felt when I watched Dill. When she glanced at me at last, her small frown melted away, as if my face had mirrored her own feelings.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. Mum lets him do whatever he wants.”

  Her irises were dark at the rim but silvery grey nearer the pupil. In contrast, her lashes were shockingly white. As we locked gazes, I felt the woman enter my head as a guest. She walked through the rooms of my mind, but disturbed nothing, trod no dirt into the carpets. She ran her fingertips along surfaces and examined them, then nodded approvingly.

  “No,” she said softly, “but you would if you could. He spoils everything, doesn’t he?”

  I flushed, and nodded. The ‘steam’ that had never been ‘let off’ filled me right then. For the first time somebody understood. The relief was painful.

  “Some people do,” the woman murmured. “They do not care how long others labour to create, to restore, to clean, to preserve – they must always mar. Destroy. Stain.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it.” My voice sounded mangled and tearful.

  “And if you could do something?” she asked softly. “Something to stop your brother spoiling anything pristine, ever again?”

  “You mean, apart from throwing him off the cliff?” I gave a hasty-sounding laugh to show it had been a joke. Somehow it hadn’t sounded like one.

  She smiled. “Oh, nothing that drastic would be necessary.”

  I was starting to get a tingle-kneed feeling as if the precipice was much closer than it actually was, as if it had been inching towards us during the conversation.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d like it if all the spoiling and breaking just stopped.”

  “Then bring him here,” she said.

  And I did. I walked over to Dill, my face burning, and a terrible warmth in my chest. I called him over. I picked him up. I walked back to the woman at the fence.

  I didn’t know what would happen. I would love to tell you that I thought it would be nothing terrible. But deep down I think I knew.

  “What’s his name?” she asked, giving him a smile bright as dewdrops.

  “Dill.”

  “Hello, Dill.” She leant over the fence, and kissed him on the forehead.

  Dill’s blue eyes widened, and he screamed. When the woman straightened, I almost expected to see her kiss seared into his forehead, but there was no mark. I set him down, and watched him stumble away with a feeling of shock and growing guilt.

  I turned back to the woman, just in time to see her gloved fingers delicately plucking a small black bead from her mouth, as if she were discreetly spitting out a cherry stone.

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  She did not answer. Instead, she touched the bead to a bracelet of similar beads on her wrist, where it joined their ranks, smoothly and impossibly. Then she turned and strode away, down the path towards Creve.

  Watching Dill blunder towards the front door, I felt my heart lurch. His stubby feet were not sinking into the snow. He left no prints behind him.

  * * *

  I have guilt dreams sometimes. Dreams where I’ve killed somebody. I can’t remember who or why, but I know that I’ve done this terrible thing I can’t undo, and I just can’t believe it. When I wake up, the relief is indescribable.

  Walking into the house after Dill, I was filled with the guilt dream feeling. But this time I knew I really had done something terrible, and I wasn’t going to wake.

  Mum was on a ladder mending lights, her brown-and-grey curls scrunchied back. She grimaced when Dill ran wailing to the base of the ladder.

  “Chloe, can you take him? Give him his colouring books.”

  Dill thumped my shoulders while I carried him to his play room, but he settled when I laid out his crayons and Disney colouring book. He loves colouring. It’s the only time he’s quiet. It’s like a drug. He loves vivid shades, particularly reds and blues. He can’t keep his scribbles inside the lines, but he tries. Mum says he’s artistic.

  And sometimes when I watch him colour, my mind is quiet too. I start to think that maybe he’s just a fat little bottle bursting with… stuff. Energy and craziness that comes out in screaming and breaking, except when it can come out in red and blue.

  Today was different, however. Dillon curled his fist around a red crayon, and drew it hard across Goofy’s muzzle. Nothing happened. No colour, no mark, not even a dent from the pressure. He scratched it desperately to and fro, so hard that the page should have torn. It didn’t. Goofy smiled back unblemished.

  For a few seconds Dill could o
nly croak, his mouth making rubbery, trembling shapes. Then his scream was like an earful of molten lead. I hushed him in vain, bounced him on my knee, and sang him songs. Big sister of the year. I felt like such a hypocrite.

  As lunchtime approached, a new dread seized me. What if he can’t touch anything, including food? What if he can’t eat? Mum was too busy to fix Dill’s lunch, so I took care of it, my heart hammering.

  As it turned out, he could eat. Or at least, he could eat things I’d chopped, mashed or broken up for him. But he couldn’t cut or chew things that were intact. His teeth couldn’t dent biscuits. Grapes went into his mouth, then came out whole and glossy with spit.

  I started to understand. The woman in the snow had promised that Dill could never spoil anything pristine again. So he couldn’t affect anything pure, clean or whole.

  He isn’t going to die, I told myself. It could be worse.

  But as I struggled through my lasagne, his future existence unrolled before me. What kind of life could he have if he could only eat food broken up by someone else? What would happen when he went to school? He would never be able to write, draw, sign his name – maybe not even type into a keyboard. He would never be able to open envelopes, jars, tins, packets. He would be a freak forever, sliding off the surface of the world like raindrops off waxed cloth.

  * * *

  By mid-afternoon the sky was dim as twilight, and more flakes were flurrying down.

  I could still hear Dill’s desolate wailing while I scrubbed floors, bleached toilets and scraped the lime off shower screens. Nothing I did was undone. No thrown orange juice beakers left sticky patches on the carpets. No jam murals appeared in the corridors.

  I was tense all the while, knowing that any moment Mum would hurry to Dill to see what was wrong. She would take one look at him and know, using her extra-terrestrial mother-powers. And then I would hear her accusing voice calling for me…

  But the hours passed, and she didn’t go to him. After a while it started to creep me out.

  She just went on working. His loudest screams made her frown, but in a distant, distracted kind of way.