Dark Winter: Last Rites

by Hennessy, John

“Something could happen to us,” offered Beth. “A demon could come through and take possession of us.”

  Beth wasn’t being dense. We both harboured something evil in our bodies. Mine was just noisier, that’s all. I am sure he would leave me if I ever laid eyes on the Mirror again. Because if I do see my Nan’s gift to me once more, Belial knew what I would do. I would force him into the Mirror. Of course I would. I did it before, and I would do it again and again until I finally succeeded.

  For her part, Beth was dealing with something that was slowly killing her. I didn’t want to say it, but I felt we were dead already, that each day took us closer to our eventual deaths.

  If I could help make it better for others in this world by ridding the evil ones to theirs, wasn’t that worth it? Wasn’t it worth my life?

  I recalled something from the Bible where Jesus cast out a number of demons from some poor soul, but I was hazy on the details. Beth brightened up when I asked her to recount the story.

  “He’d been cast out of his own village,” said Beth. “He was cutting his own skin with jagged stones. The local children were so frightened of him. He would stare at them, eyes bulging out of his head, a vein in his temple throbbing angrily. Only one man dared to approach him.”

  Of course, if you’ve read the Bible, you would know that Jesus never feared anyone or anything. Did that make him a fool, or truly the Son of God? The atheist in me said the Bible was just full of fairytales for adults, but Beth would strongly disagree. Did it matter who was right?

  No, it did not matter. Beth reminded me of the salient points.

  “Jesus commanded the demon to give him his name. That’s what he did back then, and that’s what priests who run the Roman Rite of Exorcism do today.”

  Except when it comes to you and I, dear Bethany. They don’t want to go near us. Point of fact, they didn’t want to go anywhere near Nan, back in the day.

  “He told Jesus that his name was Legion, for so many were inside of him.”

  It seemed strange to me that the demon could be weakened by the mere mention of his name. I wondered why Belial’s grip on me had not weakened. He was waiting. He was a patient old bleeder. I hated him, as I hated myself for putting Beth through this. But she would have to face up to her demon, or demons, too. Our very own judgement day was coming. Maybe it would be this day. Beth was right. Using the Ouija board might just open a door for the devils to come through.

  Choosing an alternative option never came to me, nor was anything forthcoming from the spirit of my Nan.

  Beth ushered me into her bedroom.

  I was clutching the black bin bag. Beth did everything to avert her eyes from looking at it. I considered the possibility of having to do this myself, but everything I knew about Ouija suggested there had to be at least two or more people using the board.

  I opened the bag, pulled out the box containing the board, and placed the contents on the bed.

  “Can I just say one thing?” asked Beth. Before waiting for an answer; she said, “Toril was a witch. She would be the first to say she wasn’t the best witch, but we both saw her powers increase rapidly over the years. She would have known how to handle a Ouija board, Milly, and yet when it came to it, she was out of her depth. The fact is; we need a witch here. Neither of us know what we’re doing. Please, please….”

  Her voice trailed off. I knew she was scared, and if I admitted to her my truth, I would tell her that I was scared too. Of course I was. We would be contacting the dead, and worse than that, a force that was unknown and unlikely to be a kind spirit. Knowing our luck, it would be a malevolent entity, but whatever it turned out to be, we could and we would deal with it.

  I try to remain upbeat.

  “What’s the worst that can happen, Beth?”

  She shook her head. I thought a grin was breaking out on her face.

  “Is that a smile I’m seeing on you? Are you smiling?” I asked.

  “My Gran says it’s better to laugh than cry.”

  We certainly hadn’t laughed much of late. I tried to reassure her a little. Maybe by doing so I could reassure myself.

  “Your Gran sounds a lot like my Nan,” I said. But reminiscing about our loved ones was just delaying the inevitable, and we both knew it. Looking around the main living room, I spied a minibar near the corner where Grandpa Finn probably sat. I cocked my head to one side, and winked at Beth, wanting her to look where I was looking.

  “Do you want a drink? You look like you need one.”

  “A drink? You mean, an actual drink? Grandma Finn would kill me, and if she didn’t, my Grandpa would instead.”

  “Is that a no?”

  Beth laced her fingers together, looked at the minibar with a furtive glance, then looked away. Next, she rolled her wrists back and forth. I noticed Beth did this a lot when she was nervous. If she spent anymore time with me, I doubted her left hand would be parted from her right hand ever again.

  “Well, no. Not exactly. Just…I can’t stop at one, Romilly. It’s a curse.”

  I believe that we go through life always being tested, never truly cursed, but always having the most blessed of days. We just use up too many of those days before truly understanding how wonderful life really is. We would overpower that which threatened to destroy us. Our friendship, our bond was too strong now. Beth was beating herself up for a little weakness. We all have them. So what? It’s not like she killed anybody.

  I turned around and walked over to the bar. It was packed with bottles, so many in fact that Grandpa Finn must have been thinking to come out of retirement and start up his own pub.

  He wouldn’t miss a bottle or two. If Beth raised any objections, I could always say the demon made me do it.

  As I reached for a bottle of Glenfiddich for Beth and a White Witch ale for myself, I felt a stabbing pain in my right side. Either I had stooped awkwardly, or the demon did not like me making fun of it.

  It was a harsh, unpleasant pain, enough to make me cry out a little. In kung fu class we are told that pain is irrelevant, our emotional state does not matter, that self-preservation and the destruction of our enemy is all that matters. We had to be the very definition of cool and calm around others, so that they would feel like that too, and be inspired to live their life in the same manner.

  But I wasn’t fooling Beth. She knew me too well.

  “Romilly!”

  “I’m alright,” I lied. “It stings a little when I bend my knees, that’s all.”

  That was actually true. I had recovered for the most part from my recent stays in hospital, and I was determined that I would be old and gone crazy before allowing any doctor to tube me up again.

  “You need your strength to use a Ouija board, Milly. Maybe we can do this another day.”

  Oh, that sounded so appealing. But that’s what the demon wanted. One of the most useful things my mother told me was to not to put off until tomorrow, what you can do today and it was one of the few areas we agreed on.

  “Grab yourself a glass, Beth. We’re doing this.”

  ***

  Whatever the opinion people held of Beth, from school, the courthouse, St Margaret’s Hospital, or anyone at the Dying Swan (who were often drunk so their opinion didn’t count) my opinion of her was that she was a good girl who had been constrained, unfairly so, by her religious upbringing. She had a faith, and that was a good thing; I would never question that.

  However, where Beth’s religion appeared to hinder her, seemingly trading belief in an entity rather than believing in herself, Toril’s Wiccan beliefs seemed to strengthen her resolve.

  Where did that leave me? Would I always sit on the fence, living my life by picking and choosing bits of belief systems that I liked, whilst discarding the rest?

  What gave me my strength?

  I wasn’t sure. But I knew what was taking it. Negative energy. My body was full of this awful, stomach splitting feeling.

  I wore a crescent moon pendant around my neck. I suppose that m
ade me more of a witch than a Christian, even though I had been baptised as one.

  Toril had even told me she had charmed it when we had a full moon one night. Maybe it had worked. I was still here, still alive, with breath in my body.

  Even though the demon was trying to stab it out of me.

  He knew we were up to something. I could not acknowledge him, nor let Beth know I was extremely concerned it was about to spoil our little Ouija game.

  The big question about what I actually believed in could wait for the moment.

  Beth had returned with glasses for both of us. I quickly poured the brew out before any further objections were raised.

  I wasn’t an old man of sixty, yet this is what I was drinking. Whatever happened to the Snowballs, Babychams and Cinzanos that I grew up on? And yet Beth thinks she has a drink problem?

  I took a gulp of the White Witch. Either my body didn’t like it, or the demon was pissed off at me for further destabilising a body and a mind it felt it should control. I keep referring to the demon as an it because that’s how I retain control.

  Beth rolled the liquid around in her glass. She stared at it for a while, took a look at me, then gulped it down in one.

  I take it back. She does have a drink problem.

  ***

  With renewed courage, Beth raced upstairs ahead of me in the direction of the spare room. I still struggle to grasp the bannister with just two fingers and a thumb on my right hand. I wanted to keep up with Beth so that she didn’t try to trick me by locking herself in her room.

  Scratch that thought. She wouldn’t lock herself in her room, not with the Ouija board. Not on her own.

  Beth was way ahead of me. She pulled the board out of the box. It was unusual looking to say the least. I thought they were all light-wood coloured, with the lettering and numbers carved into the wood, and painted black.

  In complete contrast, this Ouija board was black; a kind of charcoal-coloured black, the lettering and other digits were a stark bright white.

  Something was missing.

  “Where’s the planchette?” I asked. Without it, I doubted the board would work.

  “I’ve got it,” said Beth simply. “I’m in,” she affirmed, “because if I can’t talk you out of this, you are not doing this on your own.”

  Beth placed the board and planchette on a small round table, We sat down. Beth gave me a look that said Only one of us can hold the planchette. I nominate you.

  I wasn’t having any of that.

  “We’re both going to do it, Beth.” I grabbed her right hand with my left. My right hand, with its reduced number of digits, could fit on the planchette easily. Beth tentatively touched the planchette. I could tell she wanted to take her hands away, but I gave her a look that said I would be annoyed if she did.

  I locked my eyes on her. Truthfully, I was never good with eye contact. In another life, if I had been a cat, I know I would have been the first one to look away. The submissive cats tend to do that. She had beautiful eyes, and there’s a saying about how Irish eyes are the most beautiful ones of all. Beyond her understated beauty, Bethany was a girl with thoughts as deep as the ocean.

  Maybe the drink was having an affect on me. I should have been taking note of the seriousness of the situation.

  “Aren’t you going to miss this Beth?”

  “Miss what?”

  “All this,” I said. “All this excitement. When this is over, we’ll go back to our lives. Living the rest of our lives out in peace.”

  “I can do without this kind of excitement,” she said. “I’d give anything for things to be normal again. Don’t you want a peaceful life?”

  Our fingers remained on the planchette; our hands clasped together on the edge of the table. This was one circle we could not break.

  “Of course I do,” I replied. “It just might get a whole lot more noisier and unpleasant before the lasting peace comes. Will you ride it out with me?”

  “You know I will,” she said. “My flaky days are over.”

  “You don’t have to label yourself like that,” I said. Of late, Beth had been solid, loyal and true. Toril and even Jacinta would have agreed with me on that point. “We become what we lumber ourselves with Beth. You let people point fingers at you, saying things behind your back and to your face. You let people tell you that you are no good, and you started to believe it. That’s not you – that’s not who I believe you are. So stop saying bad things about yourself. There’s a whole world out there just waiting to do that. Let’s do our job now, and rise above all of that nonsense.”

  “Woo,” she said. “That ale must be good. The White Witch has spoken. Dare I say that Toril, wherever she is, may have competition in you, Milly?”

  I thought I had competed with Toril enough for one lifetime. Maybe for ten lifetimes. In Toril’s head, I turned out to be no competition at all.

  “I just don’t like you putting yourself down, Beth.”

  “Okay, I won’t. Now why don’t you call out, whoever it is you want to call out, because I…oh, sorry, Milly. Jesus.”

  Some blood had just erupted from her mouth, more than the usual trickle. Her chest raised and lowered as her breathing quickened.

  “L-look. Look, Milly. Behind y-you.”

  I turned my head, and whilst I couldn’t say with any certainty that I could see something, I could feel it. The temperature in the room had dropped significantly, and we hadn’t even called out any demons yet.

  The corner of the room darkened as if it was hiding something. I thought my eyes were tricking me, but there appeared to be a shape standing there.

  “We don’t have to call out the demons, Milly. They are already here.”

  I didn’t want to deny Beth what she perceived to be her absolute truth. It confirmed its presence by a clinking sound that menaced the floor in front of the figure.

  “Black pennies,” said Beth simply. “She is a harbinger of death.”

  “No. She’s not,” I spat. I did not direct this at Beth, but at the figure.

  “Go back to Hell,” I screamed.

  “I am already there, Romilly. And I have set a place at my side there for you.”

  I wanted to attack the shape in the corner, but as soon as she had said those chilling words, she disappeared, with that corner of the room brightening again, and the temperature returning to normal.

  “Dana,” whispered Beth. “She’s not going to leave me alone; leave us alone.”

  “So let’s get our answers, Beth.”

  I checked that our own little circle wasn’t broken, then I said the words I really thought I would never have to say.

  “Is there anybody there?”

  Almost immediately the planchette began to move, and rested on YES.

  “I want to speak with someone from the Circle. A Wiccan coven close to this place.”

  The planchette didn’t move. Beth’s eyes wanted to divert to the corner in the room, but I told her to concentrate.

  “I want to know where the Mirror of Souls is.”

  The planchette moved, spelling out Toril has it.

  “I know she has it! I don’t know where she is, or where the Circle is. Show us!”

  Blood gushed from the centre of the Ouija board, but Beth and I held our nerves together. We never broke our own circle, not once. When the blood had settled, Beth noticed it before I did.

  “It’s a map,” she said.

  I looked at her as if I thought she had truly lost her mind.

  “No, it is, look.”

  She pointed at the board, where lines of blood had seeped into it. Blood normally doesn’t splatter like this. What we were looking at, was straight lines. Beth could somehow see deeper that me.

  “I’m telling you, this is a map, Romilly. Follow this, and it will lead you to Toril. To the Mirror. Find Toril, and you will find the Circle. You’ll get all the information you’re after.”

  I looked at the dried blood on the board.

  “Rea
lly? Are you sure, Beth?”

  “Yes! What else could it be?”

  The day had been weird enough. It may not have provided me with a definitive answer, but at least an answer of sorts.

  “How do you know it was Dana in the corner, Beth?”

  “Because she didn’t dare speak her name. That’s how they lose their power. She’s a coward, a slevine bitch, Romilly.”

  Oh Beth, you know Dana is anything but a coward.

  One thing I could bet on was Dana setting a place at Hell’s dining table. I didn’t plan to be there.