Nan gave me the most curious look. She wasn’t a bit offended that I had said she was too old. Of course, I didn’t mean any offence to her. I loved her. I was going to miss her.
"Use it? Whatever do you mean, use it?"
"Does the Mirror have powers we can use?"
Nan smiled. "Do you think it does?"
I punched her ever so gently on the arm. "Come on, Nan. I’m supposed to be asking the questions here."
"So ask me the right questions then."
I repeated my last question. "Nan, does the Mirror have powers that we can use?"
"Yes it does."
"What are they, and how do we use them?"
"It’s different for everyone, and it will be so for you. Right now, you have the opposite problem. You’re too young."
"So why didn’t you give the Mirror to Mum?"
"Aha!" said Nan brightly. "Now you are asking the right questions. Milly, your mother is a good egg. She’s smart, bright, beautiful, intelligent. But she was not chosen by the Mirror. The Mirror chose you."
"I don’t understand."
"It’s not for us to understand. Who knows, your mother may have used the Mirror by now, and caused the end of us all."
I really didn’t believe that.
"I told you before, young lady, it doesn’t matter what you believe."
I gasped out loud, barely covering my scream with a hand over my mouth.
"You know what I’m thinking?"
"Sometimes, Milly. Sometimes I can read people’s thoughts."
"So that’s your gift, then. Wow!" I said. I sat there, on my bed, simply astonished.
"A gift? A curse? What’s the difference, really? When I die, that will be one gift I know will pass to you. It’s how you use the gift, Milly, that’s all that matters. Now, have you convinced your parents to let you stay at Rosewinter next summer?"
"I have. Now come on Nan, tell me everything you know about the Mirror."
"It doesn’t work like that. You have to ask the right questions."
"Will you stop being so cryptic? If anything happened to you, I have no one to guide me on this."
"I didn’t have anyone to guide me either. But to tell you all I know about the Mirror, well, that could take some time."
"I’m not going anywhere, Nan. Now I convinced Mum and Dad to let me stay at Rosewinter at the tail end of their break. You’ve got to hold up your end of the bargain."
"That seems only fair," said Nan.
Nan recounted the story in full.
"I was just twelve years old when the Mirror came into my possession. I was playing in the Forest, well, you could in those days, and I had my friend Dana with me. We’d roam for quite a way, much further than perhaps you’ve ever been, and each day, Dana and I would dare each other to go just that little bit further away from home."
Nan had a tendency to ramble, but the key points were always kept in her story. Who knew how many more conversations we could have like this? As much as I wanted to say Get to the point, Nan, I fought saying it and thinking it, just in case she could recount the story and read my mind too.
"One day, we ventured out a bit too far. To the East, I know that now. The Forest sprawled for as far as your eyes could see. Anyway, we must have travelled a fair few miles, and we thought there would be no end to the trees in front of us until suddenly, a clearing was before us.
"Right in front of us was a wood-cabin, similar in size to Rosewinter, except it was painted dark red, and strange symbols were painted on the walls outside. Though we didn’t know it yet, the same strange markings were on the floor inside."
Toril Withers would know all about this, thought Romilly. She’s into that kind of thing.
Nan continued.
"Well. It was quite a find as you might imagine. We were scared, for sure I’ll admit that, but having travelled so far to find this place, even though we weren’t looking for it, was exciting, you know?"
"There was no-one inside, so we thought we’d take a look for ourselves. What could be the harm? I was game, but Dana – she really didn’t want to go inside, so I called her a scaredy-cat. Dana seemed upset by the place, but I thought she was upset by the name calling. I grabbed her hand to reassure her, and we went inside."
"Dana saw the danger before I did. I was marvelling at all the strange markings on the floor.
Dana shouted at me not to step within the circle that had been drawn. I laughed at her, but soon listened to her as well. Then I saw what was upsetting her. There was a huge axe, bigger than both of us put together, standing in the corner of the main room. It had blood on it, which looked like it had barely dried. On another side of the room, there was an animal’s head, of a moose if I remember rightly, stacked onto the wall. It seemed to be looking at us as we stepped, ever so slowly and quietly around the place."
"In the next room, there was nothing save for a small dressing table. The room didn’t even have a window. Dana walked towards it, like she was in a trance. I wish I had been able to stop her."
"She opened the drawer in the middle of the dressing table. The wood was in decay, and splintered all too easily. Inside the drawer, was a simple looking mirror. It was placed face down, and Dana picked it up, and smiled."
"I’ve found something! It’s beautiful!" Dana exclaimed with delight.
"I ran to the room where she was, having been distracted by the pentagrams on the floor. I told Dana not to touch anything, because I didn’t believe there was anything beautiful in this place, and also, that it really was time to be going."
"Dana told me that I was wrong, and that she had found this beautiful mirror. I found her, holding the mirror in her hand, and looking rather curiously at it. You could say, it was the same look you had when I first gave you the Mirror."
Now I was really scared. I really wished this was one of my Nan’s stories, but this one was the most truthful one of all.
"Dana said to me, "It’s really strange, this….there’s no reflection of me at all."
She turned the Mirror one way, then the other. "Nothing!" she said. "Not a thing!"
Oh no, I thought. Here it comes.
"I told Dana to put the mirror down, but she didn’t want to. Now I knew that taking anything that didn’t belong to you meant that you did pay a price. Perhaps not today, but soon. It always catches up with you. Remember that too, Milly."
"Dana kept staring at the Mirror. Her wide, weird smile changed into fear as her eyes bulged in her head so hard that I could see veins protruding from her forehead. On her arms, deep markings were forming, and her hand seemed fused to the Mirror for a moment."
"She started to scream, and turned the Mirror at an angle so I could see what she could finally see. It was showing a reflection of herself, not her true self, but some crazed, demonic version. The white dress she wore was stained with blood stained in the reflection, and I saw something leave her body and enter the Mirror. The colour drained from her face, and she shook violently."
"I tried to take the Mirror from her grasp but it was impossible."
"She shouted at me in the most unearthly voice I had ever heard, and then, in the next moment, was back to her normal self."
Trying to calm my nerves, I said’ "Dana, what’s the matter with you?"
"Dana told me she didn’t like this place at all, and not only should we walk now, but we should run, and not stop until we were home. Run like the Devil was behind us, she said. Trying to sound calm when I was anything but, I agreed we would go, but she should put the Mirror down."
"At this, Dana became very agitated. She wanted to go, and I could tell in her eyes that she wanted to leave the Mirror down from where she had gotten it, But she was unable to."
At that moment, Nan held her head in her hands, her elbows buried into her lap. I wanted to say she could stop, that all this must be very tiring for her, but I really needed to know the deal with the Mirror.
"Dana didn’t stay in the house a second longer, and in her
confusion, ran deeper into the forest, instead of heading for home. I could run fast, in normal circumstances, Dana could easily outpace me, but now, given the frightened state she was in, she ended up running even faster. Fear has a way of doing that to you, my girl."
Nan stopped talking, and stared out into space. Her blank look scared me so much, that I had to dig her in the ribs to shake her out of it.
"Oh…right…" said Nan. "Well, anyway, I chased as far as I could, and shouted Dana’s name at the top of my voice. Then, in the distance, I don’t know how far away it was, but I could hear her screaming. I ran and ran and ran, into parts of the forest that I didn’t know, and bet few others did either. Weeds grabbed at my legs as I ran. The foliage hadn't been trimmed in years, if ever. I stopped abruptly. Above my head, darkness folded in. My heart sank as I saw part of her dress had been caught on a tree, ripped away by a protruding branch. I was scared, so scared, but still I kept on running in the direction of her screams. I just had to get her back safely.
"Then, every hair on my head stood up as I heard one long, unbroken scream. I ran still further, tears streaming down my face, with the thought of anything happening to Dana, simply too much for me to bear."
Nan turned to me. I can’t, even to this day, describe the look on her face. Imagine how you would feel if you believed that your friend had been killed.
"I managed to stop just in time, don’t ask me how. There was a huge drop right in front of me, Milly. It just came out of nowhere, like that cursed wood-cabin. Anyway, I stepped back to safety, thinking Dana had fallen to her death."
"I was scared of heights, you see. Still, I strained my neck to look down. If Dana had fallen, there was simply no way she could have survived. I had lost my best friend, and worse than that, I had been the cause of it."
“But it turned out to be far worse than that."
How could it be worse than that? danced the thoughts in my head.
"I’ll tell you, if you’ll be patient, Milly. I have a lot to get through."
"I could make out a bloodied, blonde heap far down below. I knew it could only be Dana. But there was something else. A hooded figure was crouching over her and well, the next thing I knew, she was gone."
"I screamed at the hooded figure, and it rose up, from the ground to face me. I could see no face beyond the cowl of its hood. I fell over as it towered above me. I felt something underneath me, and the figure’s body position seemed to change."
"I grasped whatever it was, and realised it was that hateful Mirror that Dana had picked up."
"I brandished it viciously in the figure’s direction, and to my surprise, it backed off, and made no attempt to take the Mirror from me."
"I took my chance to get out of there, and ran all the way home without stopping, clasping the Mirror in my hand. It may have taken Dana, but it saved me from that…whatever it was."
I tried, in vain, to process this in my head. I just couldn’t do it.
"Nan-", I ventured.
"You weren’t there Milly, so you don’t know. I can’t explain it, except to say that eleven year old Dana Cullen just disappeared. But she’s not dead. She’s destined to live out an existence for which no-one born in this life deserves."
"Have you ever tried to release her?"
"I’m not able to do that Milly. I can catch souls with the Mirror. But release them, I’m not sure how to do that. If the Mirror was ever broken, it would release all the souls, good, bad, and indifferent. So you can see the problem. It might be possible to get Dana out of there, but everything else would be released too. She’s probably changed out of all recognition. So you see Milly, the Mirror must be protected at all costs. At all costs."
I wondered why the Mirror couldn’t just be buried deep in the ground somewhere. It was like some doorway to Hell itself. Nan seemed to read my thoughts again, or maybe just the puzzled look on my face.
"Milly, it just can’t." She seemed very sad for a moment. I realised how long she had carried the burden of Dana, who was destined to be a young, tormented demon-girl forever. She would never grow up. Nan had lived with this pretty much all of her life.
"However, the Mirror might reveal itself to you, Milly. You might gain – or already have, a power to release Dana, and only the good souls that are trapped in there. Though, it is hard to know what state the good ones would be in, after so long in there. I know that even if I had learned how to release Dana, it wouldn’t have been a good idea, because of how much she had changed. How he changed her. I wish I had more advice for you."
"If you know my future," I said, "you could give me a lot of pointers."
"That’s true. But I won’t do that. It might have the opposite effect of what I want to achieve for you."
Which begged the questions - What does she want me to achieve? To free Dana and get her back to normal? Why have I got these wretched markings on my hands? Why isn’t Nan any fun anymore…the conversations just got too serious since I was given the damned thing.
"Nan, would it be so bad if….if you just had the Mirror back? I mean, I’ll be alright."
"Remember that night, when I told you I had seen the future?"
Oh yes. Vividly.
"Well, your future depends on you looking after the Mirror, Milly. You will achieve something great, but at great cost too. To put your mind at rest, this isn’t about me, Dana, or your parents. It’s about you, about all of you in this town. So please, do as I say."
It seemed there was no more to say.
"Okay Nan."
"You’re a good girl, Milly. I’ve always thought that. You’ve been fun to be around."
Nan went to her room. In the night, I was awoken by a shadowy figure, sitting at the end of my bed. He sat forward, with his fist propping his chin up, and his hooves – yes, he had hooves for feet, clunking on the floor. He didn’t say anything, but I could hear his voice in my head.
Your Nan told you not to sleep with your knees bent, otherwise I would pay you a visit. She told you that. You didn’t listen, you just don’t ever listen, do you? In your heart, you know you’re going to fail, don’t you?Does it depress you to know that you and all around you will die?
I closed my eyes, prayed to God, even though my faith is a bit non-existent, but in that moment, I believed in a higher authority that could protect me. When I opened my eyes again, the figure had gone. I just had to check on Nan.
I got up, perspiring heavily, and tiptoed into her room. She was snoring lightly. Satisfied, I went back to my bedroom. But on my return, there was no mistaking what was in front of me.
A girl, maybe ten or twelve, wearing a white dress, splattered with blood. She had a red apple in one hand, and as she bit into it, blood poured from her mouth. I dived towards my dresser and pulled out the Mirror. A ‘D’ pendant hung from a chain around her slender neck. The ghost of that girl disappeared before I managed to point it in her direction, but I could hear her laughing.
Hahahahah…. Hahahahah…. Hahahahah.
It was ringing in my ears. I don’t even recall falling to sleep.
I awoke to much commotion in the house. I could hear my mother crying, and my father pacing up and down.
My Nan, who had given me this Mirror of Souls for reasons only she knew, had passed away. I felt numb, but not in a way you’d expect. This is just typical of you, Nan, leaving me like this.
I should have felt mournful and sad in that moment. Instead, the one I most wanted to talk to about the night in question was Nan herself. What would she have made of the demonic figure on the bed, or the girl ghost? From the description Nan gave me, it had to be Dana, and if it was her, I didn’t want her released. Ever.
Nan wouldn’t have had that from me though. She’d have laughed, of course, and ticked me off for not believing in ghosts.
I damn sure believed in them now.
Learning Curve
I was on my own. I kept the Mirror locked up in my dresser, the middle drawer of three on the left hand side. I d
eliberately put it there because I’m naturally right handed. I didn’t want there even to be a small chance I could pick it up by accident. I was deliberately making it hard for myself to get to the Mirror. I would check that it was still there from time to time, and that was all I was prepared to do.
Looking back, if I had been just a bit faster, I might have been able to get that demon on the bed into it, or maybe even Dana, the girl ghost with the blood splattered dress.
It didn’t matter though. Nan was gone, and I would have to deal with things on my own from now on. My mother had gone into an introspective phase, and clearly wasn’t dealing with Nan’s passing all too well.
My father…well, was my father. He’s very much your archetypal strong, silent type, and brooded quietly on his own. He sometimes said to me that he really missed Nan, and yet, knew she had been failing in good health for a while.
Dark Winter: Trilogy Page 11
