Dark Winter: Last Rites

by Hennessy, John

  I’m sure Toril will try and stop me. I don’t know witchcraft. I have no magic spells. These days, I just have my wits about me, and they will have to be enough.

  Right now, Toril is being warm and friendly because for her, life is good. Two miscarriages? I’m sure that no matter what Troy says, if Toril wants a baby, they’ll keep trying until they get one.

  I, for one, am not happy that I am standing over a friend’s grave. A girl who died too soon.

  I am sure Toril won’t be alone in trying to stop me changing this version of the future. But I have to do it. I just have to.

  Toril will do everything in her considerable power to stop me, and I must do everything in my power to stop her.

  Black Pennies

  72 years ago.

  Maria, my Nan, had run fast and hard. The woods hissed at her as she made her exit, grabbing the sliver of torn dress material she saw on a branch, and took it with her. It was all she had left of her friend.

  She would later explain the whole experience as the worst of her entire life. Nan had been pressured by her parents to tell them absolutely everything. She tried. How she tried. But she was just eleven years old when it happened. How can you tell anyone with a straight face that you’ve just seen the Devil?

  At the school run by nuns, Maria and Dana had been described as inseparable. United in death, as in life, it seemed their paths were destined to cross again, even though Dana’s body lay broken on the rocks below.

  Gorswood Forest has a way of burying its secrets. Anyone looking to free one of those secrets would not live long enough to tell the tale.

  Understandably, Maria became very introverted after Dana’s death. Gone was the fun loving girl who lived for her after-school time, playing in the fields, covering herself with daisies and chasing butterflies. Now, all she did was stay in her bedroom.

  When she would talk about them, it was clear to me that Nan loved her parents dearly, but the first real argument she recalled having with them, was due to one thing, and one thing only.

  Dana’s Mirror.

  Well, it didn’t belong to Dana exactly, but it was responsible for her death. Nan did explain how a man chased them through the woods. They would have gotten by him, only he had been brandishing a hatchet axe in every direction they attempted to run. Although they had been too young to understand such a word, paedophiles did exist and after they had their wicked way with the children they caught, those same children would be found dead.

  The bodies were in the kind of state that made the most hardened of forensic staff call it a day on their careers.

  In Dana’s case, someone had covered her eyes with black pennies, one for each eye, the tails side facing up towards the sky. But here’s the thing – one of the people who found her removed the pennies, because apparently they wanted to close the eyes properly; offer some dignity to the recently deceased, that sort of thing. Nan could have told them that the colour of sweet, blonde and pretty Dana Cullen’s eyes were a sparkling sea blue.

  That was not on the official report, which listed amongst other strange occurrences around her corpse that the eyes were black.

  Not just the irises. The entire eyeball was coloured black.

  Nan stayed in her room. Her parents had been reduced to peering through the keyhole.

  One night, her mother was awoken by Nan, who stood over her bed saying ‘There’s someone next door who wants to speak to you.’

  Her parents would try not to appear alarmed, and told her to go back to bed, but Nan would not be deterred. Believing it was the way a child dealt with death, they invited her to stay in their bed. She refused.

  “I’m not frightened. But you should be,” she said. “If I don’t do what she asks – what He demands, it could get bad for a lot of people. Starting with you. Two might die, you know?”

  Her parents looked at each other like Maria had gone mad. Her mother even let out a blood-curdling scream. Her father tried to calm things down and make sense of the situation.

  If I had been alive around that time, I would have told them that my Nan was probably the smartest person I had ever known. Then again, if I awoke to find a girl standing barefoot in her nightdress in my bedroom saying disturbing things, I’d probably scream too.

  ***

  It’s the things you hear but can’t see; those are the worst kind of terrors. My Nan prayed, how she prayed, but it was to no avail. The voices kept on talking to her. At first, she thought it was just sounds in the room. Her father had explained that the house was very old, the floorboards did creak, and the pipes did rattle. It did not mean that ghosts were haunting the place.

  Just one particular ghost.

  It was only one word, but it was enough to turn my Nan from the generous, good-natured girl that she was, into someone who looked like she only managed one hour of sleep per night.

  ‘Mari-a.’

  That was her name, and at any reasonable time of day, to hear it would be just fine. Only, it was six minutes past three in the morning, the moon was shining through my Nan’s bedroom window, and it was only uttered once. That was the ghost’s power. If she kept on saying it, maybe it would lose its effectiveness.

  She had said it only once, but it replayed without pause in my Nan’s head, who covered her face with the bedsheet, prayed to God, Jesus, all the saints and any family members who had died to make the malevolent presence disappear. To make the voices stop.

  One morning, she decided to look at the mirror in her drawer. The mirror that had driven her friend crazy. The mirror that had driven her friend to her death.

  Nan had looked down on the stricken body of Dana. She shouldn’t have been able to see it so clearly, but when the ghost of her departed friend visited her in her dreams – or nightmares, to use a more appropriate term, she showed her what it was like fall to her death.

  Sometimes my Nan would wake up, finding that perspiration had soaked through her nightgown. She did not want to say the girl’s name, even though it was clear that every night, Dana was going to visit her. It seemed she blamed Nan for her death, but my Nan had done everything in her power to tell Dana to leave the mirror well alone.

  Dana believed her friend had failed to protect her. Now she would never leave my Nan alone. Perhaps she wanted to drive her insane too, so that she would throw herself down on top of Dana’s broken body. Then they would be friends forever, wouldn’t they?

  When Mari-a started to lose its effect, Dana tried something else. My Nan thought she had stopped wrecking her sleep, but she had gotten used to waking at 3:06am, that’s if she could get to sleep at all.

  One night, the sound stopped. My Nan watched the clock tick over to 3:07, then 3:08am.

  3:10am, and still there was nothing.

  She started to laugh hysterically in the bed, as if she had imagined the whole thing. This manifestation of Dana was no more than my Nan’s wish to hold onto her dear friend. Of course Dana would not want to harm her, how silly. That was her belief, but once under scrutiny, deep held beliefs had a way of changing.

  Except the black eyes of Dana Cullen suggested she had survived the fall. Oh, her body had broken in several places, and the death of her human existence was almost instantaneous. But the demon that greeted her in the bowels of Gorswood Forest cursed her for entering his abode, and taking something that did not belong to her. Now she bore the black eyes of a servant of Diabhal, and he was not only not going to let her go, she was going to do his bidding.

  First things first, however. The mirror would have to be returned to East Gorswood Forest. It had never been in human hands before.

  My Nan should have known, should have asked, should have told someone, anyone, but she never did. When some lace white gloves mysteriously appeared on her dresser, she instinctively put them on. An older mind might have been more inquisitive, but at eleven years old, Nan just thought they were a gift from her mother. She held them up in front of her face, marvelling at the intricate design of the lace. Whils
t she watched, the gloves tightened, almost making her squeal as the lace material merged with her skin, then disappeared from view entirely.

  A blue hue emanated from her drawer. The Mirror had awoken.

  Funny how our emotions tease us. My Nan had gone from inquisitive and happy to terrified and hypersensitive. The gloves had disappeared from view.

  She pressed her hands together, linked her fingers, and although she expected to feel her own skin, it was with immense relief that the material from the gloves could be felt. Although she could not see them with her own eyes, she could loop a finger underneath the edge of the glove.

  Nan decided to remove just one glove. Her bare hand was free. Breathing a huge sigh of relief, she removed the second glove.

  The blue light from the drawer shone bright for a moment, then dulled. Outside, the light darkened; a shower of hailstones hammered the road, some of them as large as golf balls. Maria let out a shriek as one of those golf ball sized hailstones collided with her bedroom window.

  She did not want to be alone at this time, so she grabbed the door handle with great force and went to yank the door open, but it would not comply. She yanked at it again, but to no avail. The hailstones were smaller now, but no less consistent. Maria thought the sheer weight of them would break the panes on her window.

  “Mom! Dad! The door! The door won’t open!”

  Maria banged at the door with her fists, and kicked with her feet. It would not budge. Maria soon realised that the only sound that was being made was her own. The hail had stopped, but the darkness outside had intensified.

  “Mom…?” she said, but it was more like a whisper. She stepped back, and just for one crazy moment truly believed she could sense the smell of the Forest in her bedroom. When she turned around to look back at her bedroom window, it was open, but the curtain had draped over it on both sides.

  Behind the curtain, she could see two small feet on the floor. Maria could only make out the person’s shape up to the knees. It would have been incorrect to say that someone or something was hiding behind the curtain. Whoever it was, whatever it was, the entity wanted Maria to come forward and check.

  Maria tried to make sense of what was happening in the room. She wanted to go forward, but felt paralysed with fear. She wanted to escape via the bedroom door, but it did not want to be opened.

  The clink of two small objects fell from the shape behind the curtains, and rolled towards Maria. She stood, open mouthed as two small coins made their way to her. Covered in soot, perhaps blood too.

  Two small black pennies.

  As black as black could be.

  “Mari-a.”

  ***

  My Nan was subject to the same name protocol as I was, so I knew it would work like this:-

  “Ria! Ria! Come and get your dinner, Ria!”

  Ria was cute. It was safe. It was fun. There was no problem when being called Ria.

  “Marie! You did a great job there, wow that looks wonderful!”

  Marie. Or sometimes, Mari. Also safe.

  Maria was totally different, especially when the surname was added for greater effect.

  “Maria Hurley! Get down here now!”

  Doors sealed shut by demons or not, if my Nan needed to open that door, a simple utterance of Maria Hurley, albeit at the sound of 110 decibels would be sure to do it.

  But ghosts don’t shout, or scream. There’s no immediacy to their actions, no requirement to make a big entrance. They will whisper. Sometimes they growl. But they can always be counted upon to strike the fear of the Devil into their chosen target.

  Maria Hurley could run 100 metres in six seconds flat.

  Maria Hurley could jump over the moon if she had to.

  Not this time.

  This Mari-a was dark, disturbing, claustrophobic. Most of all, it was known to her. She knew who was saying it.

  The curtain drew back, and the figure locked its hands around Maria’s throat. As she gasped for air, the smell of burning filled the room. In fact, she thought that she was the one who was on fire. The vacant look and cruel expression – black, deep penetrating eyes looked deep into Maria, deep into her soul.

  “You should fear me. But most of all you should fear yourself. You should have never left me to die, Mari-a.”

  The mouth opened. Maggots, fleas, earwigs poured out of it. Black blood poured from an open wound on her neck, and when it had ceased pussing liquid, thin, reedy daddy long legs crawled out and onto Maria’s face. She could even taste the wings of the hateful insect in her mouth.

  Maria was unable to move, the force of the demon held her down on the bed. Now she could not see the figure, but it was definitely in the room with her. Her chest felt like a piano had been placed on top of it. Her legs wanted to move, but refused to co-operate with her mind.

  The scent of burning had intensified. Her only thought was survival, but she did not know how to turn that thought into a viable action.

  She thought that maybe if she could get to the drawer, she could get that mirror. The fact that Dana had lost her life, indeed her soul for meddling with it, was not registering with Maria at that particular moment.

  Allowing itself to be seen once more, the demon on her chest remained shrouded in darkness, and whilst she tried with all her might to shut out the glare from its eyes, it forced her to look.

  As she did so, a dark liquid pooled where its eyes should have been, and dripped onto her body, giving her flesh a burning sensation. The pain was more than Maria could take, perhaps more than anyone could take. Perhaps not all blackouts are unwelcome guests. They save us from viewing the most ugliest of things. As Maria lost consciousness, something heavy fell on her eyes.

  The next thing that woke her was the sound of her mother screaming.

  The First Banshee

  The adult members of the Hurley family were in no doubt of what they had just witnessed. It wasn’t the demon on Maria’s chest that had drawn their attention; it was the entity that pressed itself up against the window outside.

  Maria was unable to move. She had been paralysed by the demon. Her body appeared to be in a state of rigour mortis, though she was far from dead. The demon had left a calling card for her, a reminder of his power.

  “Jesus, for God’s sake, what is that? What is that?”

  Maria’s mum, my great-grandmother, was viewed as a tough and strong woman, having come through the war, things like that. My great-grandfather, for that matter, had received a number of commendations from the Army. But they had never seen anything of the kind that looked at them with a pure and undiluted hatred.

  The lady answered her own question. “It’s a Banshee, or something like it. Saints preserve us. Bless yourself and make it go away.”

  It screamed and wailed, the harbinger of death. It wanted to kill my Nan before she ever managed to use the mirror. But it could not cross the threshold. Its blue orb-like eyes dimmed as it came to this realisation, but its stumpy legs dangled in the air like strands of spaghetti; bloody entrails that had no feet on their ends.

  “GO AWAY!” came the scream. That particular scream, the entity actually heard above its own. Turning to Maria, the scream became a low-pitched wail, the kind no-one likes to hear.

  Two black pennies rested on my Nan’s eyes.

  “Maria, what in heaven’s name did they do to you?”

  They tried to lift her into an upright position, but she was as stiff as a board. The pennies remained attached to her eyes. Whilst they were figuring out what to do, Maria let out a huge breath, and more Gaelic curses filled the air.

  “I’m alright,” she said. “Which is more than I would say for you.”

  Finally, some laughter filled the room. Maria had survived an attack by a demon – two demons in fact.

  Later, when she had changed into her day dress and ate food prepared by her mother, Maria had consumed her dinner so fast; it was as if she hadn’t eaten for a month.

  “Maria, dear child, will you slow
down? The lamb isn’t going to run away!”

  “I know,” chirped Maria, who liked kicking the chair underneath the table whilst she ate, “but fighting demons is hard work. I’m famished.”

  “We’ll still be going to the evening Mass.”

  Maria did her best to hide a sigh. “Somehow I don’t think that’s going to help. I saw Dana in my room.”

  “Maria….”

  Maria set her knife and fork down. She was nearly finished anyway.

  “You two can go to church if you want to. I’m going to try and talk with her, that’s if I see her again. I have to find out what she wants.”

  Maria could sense another Maria coming her way. Her parents could not discount what they had seen and yet, if there was anything happening that they could not explain, off to the church they would go. On this occasion, they absolutely insisted Maria should go with them, because they were not leaving her on her own. At the same time, they were not prepared to stay in the house that evening, not until they had received a blessing from the priest.