Riverside: Other books in the "Riverside" series: "Dollhouse" (vol. 2) and "Rewind" (vol. 3)

By Bianca Rita Cataldi

Riverside, in England. Four thirty on an unremarkable afternoon. An abandoned, dilapidated school at the end of Silverbell Street. As twenty-five-year-old Amabel will soon discover, this is no ordinary building - inside, the desks are all still in their place and chalk dust hangs in the air. All the clocks, from the one above the entrance to the grandfather clock in the hall, have stopped at nine nineteen, on an unknown day in an unknown year. What happened in that old school? What event was so earth-shattering to make time stop within its walls? And more importantly, who is that boy in school uniform that appears to Amabel, claiming to be a student at a school that hasn't been open in years? 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Nov 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393614401

Book preview

Alice laughed: There's no use trying, she said; one can't believe impossible things. I daresay you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

1

BEFORE...

2

From a distance it looked like a cathedral, its spires standing out against the rainy silver of the sky, tickling the clouds’ belly. Full of curiousity about the imposing building, she took a few more steps. She felt the biting February cold pierce her skin and sting her veins, and for a moment, just a moment, she felt an unexpected sensation run through her – fear. Fear?

She had always lived in Riverside, she knew every alleyway, every nook and cranny, every square. She could recite the names of the streets by heart, like short poems, but...

But she had never walked down that street. Silverbell Street- she had never even heard of it.

Amabel had never set foot on its cracked asphalt, had never caught sight of the lead-coloured spires of that unsettling, unknown building in the distance. Once she got closer, it no longer resembled a cathedral, now she could see its wide courtyard and the entrance to a small chapel whose windowpanes were smeared with dirt and streaked with rain.

A school.

A school? In an unfamiliar building, on a street with a ridiculous name (what on earth did a silver bell have to do with anything?), with spires worthy of a gothic cathedral and a small, falling down chapel. It was impossible.

For the second time, an unexplained feeling of fear pricked her chest like a pin. Still, curiosity was pumping the blood in her veins and urging her forward.

And so she went on. She wondered why she had decided to walk down Silverbell Street, at half past four, without a car and with only a light jacket that gave her no protection at all from the February cold.

As roadworks had made it impossible to take Schoolhouse Road, she had had to change her route to try to get home. Fine, but then why Silverbell Street? There were plenty of other roads... she could have taken High Church Street or passed by her niece’s primary school and kept going along the river. Instead, she had taken that unknown street, and she couldn’t explain why. Perhaps Amabel had simply been drawn to its mystery, who can say.

She carried on walking undeterred, not realising that she was no longer heading home, she was walking towards the nameless school that stood out against its surroundings. A school, how strange.

A few minutes later, she was greeted by an old, rust-worn gate and a sign with illegible lettering. Amabel lifted her eyes to the grand building looming over her. A solid door, crisscrossed by wooden bars, double-arched windows with stained glass panes, and a large clock, its hands stopped at nine nineteen, on an unknown day of an unknown year. The clock above the entrance was unsettling, its hands spelling an upside-down L and the round quadrant in a stone frame. Immediately below the clock was the school motto.

Amabel could not read it from that distance, she needed to get closer. She looked around her, as if to check that no one was there. A pointless precaution, given that the school gate was wide open and seemed to be inviting her in. There was no one there except for the wind, which fluttered animatedly around Amabel, ruffling her hair.

She went in.

3

The courtyard welcomed her into its stony embrace. It smelled of horse chestnuts and faded youth; to the right, half hidden behind a bush, was a bench, its paint peeling and the backrest almost entirely broken. Amabel smiled – she could see kids sitting on the bench as clearly as if she were looking at a photograph. She could even make out the details, the cotton blazer with the school’s crest on its pocket, the leather satchels, the books with yellowed pages bound by a piece of string. Then the image vanished, as quickly as it had appeared. Amabel rubbed her eyes and walked on.

When she was close enough to the entrance, she looked up at the letters carved in the stone just under the clock. Mergens sidera caelum, it read. She couldn’t understand a word of it, and yet it seemed very different to a usual school motto. She tipped her head to one side, just as she always did when she didn’t understand something. She promised herself that she would look the expression up in her old Latin dictionary, which was probably the only thing that she had kept from her small-town school days. And despite the dirty grey stones, the stopped clock, the broken bench and the grimy chapel windows, in spite of the atmosphere of neglect and disuse that rose from it like a roar and swirled around the school, Amabel thought that she would have liked to have gone to a school like that. It must have been fantastic once upon a time, and it had undoubtedly seen better days.

Emboldened by curiosity, and by the fact that no one apart from the horse chestnut trees in the courtyard could see her, Amabel decided that entering an abandoned school through a half-open window was not a serious crime. She went over to the window closest to the chapel, the only one that was slightly ajar, and once she was standing in front of it, she had the clear, chilling sensation that someone was watching her. She did not want to turn around, because she knew that that someone was not behind her. Amabel could not say why, but she felt that the person watching her was inside the school. She thought about it for a few seconds more, then laughed at her own stupidity. What was happening to her? She was getting silly ideas from the strange and slightly suspicious atmosphere of the school, and the fact that it was abandoned. Or at least that was what Amabel told herself, to quieten the thoughts swirling in her head. With her hands resting on the sill of the half open window, Amabel was unsure what to do. She pressed her fingers against the icy stone and tried to summon the courage to jump. She told herself that she was doing nothing wrong, that no one would ever find out. And even if someone saw her, what would happen? Nothing. Every kid has crossed the threshold of an abandoned building at least once in their lives, drawn in by the sense of mystery and an irrepressible urge to break the rules. Amabel was no longer a kid, though. She was twenty-five, with a degree in Business Economics and no sense of adventure. If anyone found her prowling around an abandoned school like an intrepid boy scout, they would think she was mad. But what’s so bad about being a little bit crazy? Amabel smiled, and with a leap she crossed the windowsill and was inside.

Inside.

Inside were endless corridors, fraying rugs and chalk dust.

4

Amabel sneezed and inhaled more dust than she had in her whole life up to that moment (which was not to say that her house had ever been particularly clean). It took her a few minutes to get her bearings.

She found herself in a long, gloomy corridor with dusty walls, and everywhere she turned she saw stern faces trapped in ugly gold frames. At the end of the corridor, right at the end, was an arch leading into a room or hall. Holding in an endless succession of sneezes, Amabel hurried towards the arch, passed under it and found herself in a wide hall, probably the entrance hall. As soon as her feet touched the dusty marble floor, Amabel felt the force of the past sweep over her and envelop her in a strange new feeling, one that she had never felt before. A taste for the forbidden and an improbable sense of adventure now mixed with mystery and fear. It was a feeling that simultaneously belonged to Amabel and was outside of her; it was like a memory, but how is it possible to remember something we have never experienced? This feeling smelled of dust and plaster, it was a heap of old photographs, the kind that feel reassuring because their sepia tone kept them safely in the distant past, almost out of reach, unreal. Yes, the past. Everything in that abandoned school on Silverbell Street was the past. For a moment, Amabel thought she was in a dream, one of those confusing, annoying dreams that you have when you go to sleep drunk, or after eating a meatball that won’t digest. But it was not a dream. The hall she was in, with its dusty patterned marble floors, large framed pictures and armchair was very real. An unbelievable, extraordinary reality made of stone and brick and clocks  stopped at nine nineteen on an unknown day of an unknown year. Yes, because even the grandfather clock in the hall, clearly visible on the west wall, had stopped at nine nineteen, like the clock over the entrance to the school. Again, those hands positioned in an unsettling upside-down L shape. Amabel shivered. It wasn’t a coincidence, it couldn’t be. With trembling fingers she lightly touched the worn velvet of the armchair, walked around the hall, leaving footprints in the dust behind her and looking in disbelief at the grandfather clock’s quadrant, those cursed hands... she rubbed her eyes. The hands were still there, stopped in an upside-down smile that seemed to be smirking and mocking her.

Amabel picked up her pace, still looking around her. She would have left the hall, if something next to the entrance had not caught her attention. She squinted to try to make out what it was – damn her short-sightedness – and hesitantly walked towards it. She saw a shapeless object, covered with a cloth. It might have been old pieces of furniture, piled up and hidden under a sheet, like a shroud on a corpse. As she got closer, however, Amabel realised that it was not furniture. She glimpsed four wooden legs planted firmly on brass casters, and that was all she needed to see to understand. With a tug she pulled off the cloth, and her guess was confirmed. A piano. And for some reason, that instrument being there only increased the growing feeling of fear and trepidation in Amabel’s chest. She dropped the cloth to the floor and took a few steps backwards. The instrument, standing solidly on its wheels in a corner of the hall, reminded her of a recurrent dream she used to have as a child. It was a simple nightmare, the kind that when told to someone else is not scary at all, but it had haunted Amabel’s dreams for years, scarring her nights with terror. She would always dream that she was lying in a comfortable, warm bed, in an unfamiliar room, hugging a doll with pink hair. At one point in every dream, the disquieting sound of a piano would float up to her in bed. She would open her eyes wide in the darkness of the room, and suddenly realise that the doll was no longer with her. So she would get out of bed, while the sound of the piano continued to creep under her skin and gather at the centre of her chest, as icy and creaky as snow. Then, the nightmare was almost over, almost as soon as it had begun. Amabel would part the curtains that separated her from the room with the piano, and then she would see it. Her doll with pink hair. It was sitting at the piano, playing. At that exact