Free Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell

Their painted eyes were all different – some were open, some were closed and some of the dolls were so faded with age that they didn’t look like they had eyes at all.
    The dolls were all very small, some were no bigger than a penny and most were just a few centimetres long. A lot of them were chipped or broken in someway, missing arms or legs or even heads. Unlike normal dolls, they had no joints, so their limbs couldn’t be moved. They were frozen in place, lying on their backs with their arms bent at the elbow and their hands stuck up in the air, like claws reaching for their last dying breath. Like little bodies laid out in the morgue. This wasn’t Charlotte on her way to the ball – this was Charlotte after she’d died.
    “But they’re dead!” I blurted out.
    The sight of those outstretched white hands reminded me of the cold fingers I’d felt all over my skin in my nightmare, scratching and pinching and clawing at me.
    “Yes, I think they were supposed to teach kids a lesson, you know? Always wear a coat, do as your mother says, that kind of thing. Rebecca found them just after we moved in. They were downstairs in the basement. We think they must have belonged to the children when this was a school back in Edwardian times. Some of the Charlottes were in a locked box, but there wasn’t room for all of them so the rest were painted into the plaster on the walls. Isn’t that strange? Some kind of art project or something, I suppose. You can tell which ones were in the wall because they stillhave bits of plaster stuck to them. Dad chipped them out for Rebecca after she found them.”
    I stared again through the glass at the dolls. Most were entirely naked but a few of them had painted shoes or a painted bonnet or stockings with blue bows at the top.
    Piper said, “Rebecca took one of the dolls with her. That night she sneaked out. It must have shattered when she fell over the edge of the cliff. The only thing that survived was the head. They found her holding it the next morning. I’ve kept it with me ever since – look.”
    She reached beneath her T-shirt and pulled out a necklace on a silver chain. It was strung with a single Frozen Charlotte head, and what I thought were white beads at first. Then I looked closer and realized they were hands, dozens of dolls’ hands, and even a couple of white arms.
    “The head looked a bit odd by itself so I added some of the spare hands,” Piper said. “Most of the dolls are missing limbs. I mean, they’re more than a hundred years old, so it’s no wonder they’re a bit battered.”
    Personally, I thought the hands only made the necklace even stranger but I didn’t want to say so when Piper was presenting it to me so proudly.
    “It’s lovely,” I managed.
    “It makes me feel close to Rebecca,” Piper said, tucking it back beneath her T-shirt. She gestured to the cabinet. “The dolls that aren’t broken are worth more money. So are the ones with bonnets and stockings. And the Black Charlottes too, of course. There’s one in there somewhere. Oh yes, there it is.”
    Piper pointed at a tiny doll lying on one of the shelves. It looked just like all the other Frozen Charlottes, except that it was completely black.
    “Why are they all naked?”
    “Children were supposed to make little outfits for them out of bits of velvet and ribbon and things. They’re small so they’d only need scraps to make a dress. The Victorians used to put them into Christmas puddings as charms, and in the summer they froze the little ones and used them as ice cubes in drinks. Isn’t that sweet?”
    Sure
, I thought,
dead dolls as ice cubes are just adorable
. I didn’t think it was sweet at all, more like creepy and weird, but I just nodded.
    “They float on their backs in the bath too,” Piper went on. “So they’re called Bathing Babies. Rebecca even had a Frozen Charlotte music box.”She walked over to the dressing table. “Dad found it for her in some antique shop and