Dark Winter: Trilogy

by Hennessy, John

  "Well, I’ll tell you anyway, because I’m not going to even try this, much as I want to."

  A morbid side of me I never knew existed, wanted Toril to go on.

  "So long as you don’t try anything, that’s okay. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you."

  "You’ve got a deal there, Milly."

  Jesus! Toril was using my Nan’s words right there. Toril had always called me Romilly. What was going on?

  Toril continued, unfazed.

  "You go to the bathroom, or somewhere in the house at night, the dead of night, and look intensely into a mirror. Any mirror at all will do. Holding the doll – this doll - in front of the mirror, you’re supposed to sing this song."

  Pretty, pretty, pretty Dana, come and play with me.

  I shuddered at the words, and the child-like way that Toril sang the song was creepy, to say the least.

  "But that’s not all," added Toril with a smirk. "You have to sing it three times in succession, and then, the doll disappears; with the ghost of Dana appearing behind you whilst you look in the mirror. Then, she draws her finger across her neck like this-"

  Toril drew her finger across her neck, as if her throat was being cut.

  "-and that’s when you die, forced to play with Dana forever."

  "Oh, Toril, you really are something else." Dry humour was the only way to respond to this.

  "Is that a true story?"

  "No," said Toril, "I’m just messing with you."

  Please don’t mess with me Toril, I’m unnerved enough as it is. I could feel another panic attack coming on.

  I didn’t like this at all. Dana…that was the name of her friend who originally found the Mirror. It couldn’t be linked, could it?

  Toril’s enthusiasm broke my concentration.

  "You know what would be really cool?"

  Yeah, you take that damn doll away and we never speak of it again. Take the Mirror too while you’re at it.

  It seemed to me that Toril was the perfect person to look after the Mirror of Souls, the White Roses for Dana doll, and well, anything else connected with this sort of thing. I expected she was the kind of girl who didn’t dream of how she’d look on her wedding day, but fantasise about the kind of funeral she would have instead.

  "Toril," I sounded like I was pleading with her more than I wanted to, but that’s just how it came out. "You won’t try anything Wiccy with this…with this doll, will you? You’ll be safe, right?"

  "It’s Wicca, not Wiccy!" laughed Toril. Her correction reminded me how I corrected my mother when she used to offer me a biccy. "The word is biscuit, Mum," I used to say. Wow. I must have been an incredibly annoying child, and sometimes it surprised me how I hadn’t been put up for adoption.

  "Of course I won’t, Romilly. But there are friends of mine in the Circle that would love to see a real Dana doll."

  "As I was saying," continued Toril, "what would be cool is if you have the original box for this. There’s only thirteen of these in circulation. I’d make a lot of money if I auctioned this."

  "Don’t sell it on, Toril. I have no idea how it got here, I have never seen it before, I swear, and I don’t happen to have the box for it either. “Whatever you say. Though I always thought there was a dark side to you, Milly. But don’t you want to hear about the legend, though? "

  I really didn’t want to know, but just like the stories from my Nan, I felt compelled to listen. A bit like when you are passing the scene of a car crash – you know you shouldn’t look, but you just have to. I had to admit that since my Nan’s passing, I had lost interest in such stories.

  "I might faint again," I said honestly.

  "That’s okay. I’m here," said Toril.

  I knew Toril wanted to tell me the story. Just like my Nan, she had loads of never-ending ghost stories.

  "Our story begins with two young girls. I can’t remember the name of the one girl, but the other is well known. Her name – Dana."

  "Now Dana’s story didn’t pass into legend because she was a bad girl; no, that wasn’t the case. But she was representative of all the badness in kids out there. Parents would say ‘if you don’t behave, Dana will get you’. We would laugh and scoff, and then, if we were really bad, they would tell us the story. This story."

  Toril paused, as she always did, to take a bottle of water out of her bag and take a swig.

  "Shall I continue?"

  "Sure." I didn’t mean a word of it. I estimated that when I got around to telling her about the Mirror, she might be even more upset than I was about this horror of a doll appearing from nowhere in my bedroom.

  "Two girls go into the woods…"

  Here we go, another Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood routine…

  "…and find the corpse of a man. He’s lying on his back, his dead eyes staring into the sun, the autumn leaves perched on his stomach like some soggy pyramid. His neck had been ripped open with wounds so deep that his collarbone was exposed. His skin was ripped in such a way that only an animal’s teeth, or something not of this world, could have done it. Blood surrounded his body, and it had not yet dried on the ground. One thing was for certain, his killer was close by."

  Gross. So it’s not all like Babes in the Wood.

  "The girls had never seen a dead body before. One of them covered her mouth to stifle a scream, but not Dana. Out of some kind of misplaced respect, she wanted to say a prayer for the man, and gather some flowers, late though it was in the Autumn."

  "The other girl, let’s call her Maria, wanted to run. She tried to tell Dana that they could be being watched, right now, and that they should keep running until they were safe."

  "Dana would have none of it, and said she was going to get some flowers. Maria, stood frozen to the spot, whilst Dana gathered the flowers."

  "When she returned, her dress was no longer white. Parts of her dress had been soiled by leaves and branches she had hurried by, and as a consequence, some of the material had been torn off."

  "Oh, Maria!" Dana said. "Look at my dress!"

  "I told you this was a bad idea," said Maria. "Can we just go now, please?"

  Dana mumbled a yes, and stepped backwards in the direction of the corpse, but was still looking at Maria. The hands that had been strategically placed over his abdomen, over the pyramid of leaves, grabbed at Dana’s legs. She screamed and fell over. Maria screamed even louder.

  Dana’s shoes slid in the blood; try as she might, she could not get a footing. It had been very hot the last few days, and parts of the woods remained sodden and treacherous.

  Finally, she managed to get to her feet, but the back of her dress was clotted with mud and blood.

  "Ugh, disgusting!" she said.

  Even so, she placed the flowers on his chest, but didn’t touch his hands, which, having been very active a moment ago, were thankfully still once more.

  Some of the flowers, which had been a brilliant white, were now peppered with red blotches.

  "Oh, drat. They’re ruined," said Dana.

  "Dana, for God’s sake!! We need to go now, please…!" pleaded Maria.

  "It’s not his fault. I heard my dad say one time about how the body can still move after death."

  "We won’t be moving in a minute, Dana. Whoever killed him is still out here!" said Maria, panic filling her voice.

  "Alright, alright, we’re going."

  Dana grabbed Maria with a bloodied hand, the two girls spun around on their heels, only to turn head first into a man’s stomach.

  "Going somewhere, girls?"

  Dana shrieked and backed off. The voice belonged to a man, one who she could only assume was the killer.

  "Don’t…do that," the man said. "I don’t like it when they do that." He pawed at the girls with his hands.

  "We’re going home," said Dana sternly, pushing back at him with her hands.

  The man unfastened his coat, popping out one button after another. He reached into his pocket and revealed a hat
chet axe. Holding it in his right hand, he shook it viciously at the girls.

  "Today’s not your lucky day then, is it?" he said.

  I must have had a weird look on my face because Toril stopped talking, only to look straight at me.

  "Shall I go on?" said Toril.

  No. Stop now.

  "Yeah, sure, I love these kind of stories," I lied.

  "Well, the girls did what you’d expect. Run, and run fast."

  Stories like this ended one way. The killer would catch them and jam that axe into them, ripping their necks open too. Toril sure had a way of including the gory details. Nan, at least, could scare you without the gore. That’s not to say Toril didn’t have me on edge, because she did.

  "But they couldn’t outrun a man, surely?"

  "No, but they had numbers on their side," said Toril. "You see, he would have to kill both of them. He couldn’t risk one of them getting away, but that’s exactly what happened."

  I felt incredibly sad. I mean, I didn’t even know the girls, so why was I feeling upset?

  "Go on, Toril."

  "Okay. So they find this cabin, deep in the woods. The man could hear the girls arguing about what to do, whether they should stay put, or go. You know, things like that."

  "The house itself is supposed to be blessed by the Devil himself. In fact, in terms of its layout, it’s supposed to look a lot like your wood-cabin, Romilly, how about that?"

  "But of course it’s not anything like yours…it belongs to someone else, perhaps something else."

  Please just get to it, Toril.

  "There’s a sheer drop at the end of Gorswood Forest. It’s supposed to be inaccessible now, but back then, the girls made it. Or at least, one girl did. The other fell to her death, or so it seemed.”

  Dana.

  "Her body was found twenty feet from the edge of the drop. She’d hit her head, and broken many bones in her body, but she didn’t fall to her death, because something saved her from that. She was to face a fate far worse than death."

  I sucked my bottom lip over my teeth. My Mum had remarked on it many times, saying it was a way I had of comforting myself. At the moment, it was to save my teeth from banging together. How could Toril stay so calm like this?

  "Like the corpse they found earlier in the story, when Dana’s body was found, her hands had been placed on her abdomen, and the pyramid of leaves was on top.

  When forensics came and analysed the scene, they found that something was being covered up by the leaves.

  They carefully took the leaves out, trying not to disturb anything. When they uncovered half of the leaves, they could see what they were dealing with. Many of those present needed counselling for years after seeing what was done to Dana. Some never went back to their profession again."

  Toril paused and took another swig of water. "Want some?" she asked.

  I wondered if I could keep it down, so I politely refused.

  Toril leaned forward and placed her hands on my knees. I didn’t realise how cold they were and it gave me quite a start.

  "When the leaves were uncovered, they exposed a posey of white roses, the bunch kept in place by Dana’s hands, which, by this time, were in a state of rigour mortis. However, there was so much blood, that the roses had turned red in parts. You know that saying about not mixing white and red on a wedding dress, and how it is bad luck for the happy couple? This story, that’s where that legend comes from! That’s not even the worst part."

  Oh my God, there’s more to this? I was feeling sick. For God’s sake, Toril was recounting the story of my Nan and her friend Dana! This is no legend. It’s real.

  Squeezing my knees together with her hands, Toril looked into my eyes, and said, “Dana’s stomach had been removed, completely hollowed out clean, by someone wielding a hatchet axe. So began another legend. The legend of Diabhal."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Dana’s killer was never found. The other girl, Maria, gave a pretty good description of the killer to the cops, but not a shred of evidence was found. A terrible way to die, wouldn’t you agree?"

  "Poor girl." Jesus. Nan had told me that the figure had crouched over Dana’s body. I had hoped for Dana’s sake that she was already dead when he hollowed her out. My God.

  "Yeah, I thought you might see it like that. Poor girl nothing."

  That wasn’t exactly what I meant, but Toril continued anyway.

  "Dana was saved from death, but legend has it that Diabhal saved her soul because he needed something to control people, and someone to do his bidding. Dana became the embodiment of that, only-"

  Toril paused for a long time, and took two swigs from her bottle of water.

  "Only what?" I persisted.

  "-Only that the details of how he managed to do that are sketchy, to say the least. I mean, killing, that’s the easy part, but he’s…in effect, taken her soul. Now that means he is much more powerful that anything we’ve ever faced. Imagine it Romilly, even in death, you can’t escape, and that, my friend, is scary. You are doomed to repeat the same things, same mistakes, over and over again."

  "Who is this Diabhal?" I asked. I really did need to read more books if I was ever to be as informed as Toril.

  "In Celtic folklore – Irish folklore specifically, Diabhal is the Devil. He always carries an axe, and he always makes a kill. Whenever anyone in the county dies, the accused always say that

  ‘Diabhal made me do it.’ "

  As scary as Toril’s story was, I had prepared myself that it was just that, a story. But the details she couldn’t fill in, that she felt sketchy about – I was about to fill them in. Then maybe she’d be the one who was scared.

  After all, the damned doll wasn’t why I brought her to my home, but the doll, the story of Dana, the reason why my Mum put white roses in my bedroom, the Mirror, my Nan and her friend called Dana…all these things were coming together.

  I reached for the second drawer on my dresser.

  "You’d better prepare yourself for this, Toril," and she did as she was told.

  The secret was about to be revealed.

  Mirror, Mirror

  One day, Mum had taken me to one of those beauty salons to get my legs waxed. I protested, because I didn’t think I had hair on my legs. Mum insisted that they were there, and had to be removed. I didn’t have a say in the matter.

  At the salon, the attendants hosed down my legs with water, and applied something I would later learn was a wax strip. What I didn’t know at the time, was how painful all this was going to be.

  The strip was yanked back, with incredible force, and the attendant kept a blank look on her face.

  Back in my bedroom, I realised that opening the drawer was pretty much like the wax strip. It would be painful to do this, to open the drawer, and reveal the Mirror with all its powers, to Toril. But I had to do it, and do it quick.

  For all her knowledge about Dana, the legend wasn’t filled in. Sketchy details, as Toril had put it.

  I yanked open the drawer with a similar force, and it near came out of its runner, spilling everything on the floor. Except the Mirror, of course, which stayed dutifully in its box.

  Toril sat obediently on my bed, but must have wondered what was going through my mind. She wasn’t alone there. I really didn’t know if I was doing the right thing by involving her.

  "You want to know how Dana really died? She tried to take this from that cabin in the woods."

  Toril regarded the item in my hands, which were covered by the lace gloves.

  "Well," said Toril. "I thought you were bringing out the twin sister of Dana or something."

  She shrugged her shoulders, wore a confused look on her face, and not for the first time today.

  "It’s a mirror."

  I blurted it all out. How my Nan had given me this Mirror, and when I held it the first time, how my hands went all dark and hard with protruding veins, just like her old hands.

  How the Mirror captures souls. How I have no idea
how it works or might reveal itself.

  "You can understand why I’m asking you, Toril. I don’t know anything about this stuff."

  Toril seemed to know plenty about the Dana doll, and that was just lying around in my room, and I had been totally oblivious to that fact. Just how long had it been there?

  "I don’t know what to say, Romilly. I mean, it just looks like a normal mirror to me. In all the reading I have done, I’ve never heard of a Mirror of Souls, or whatever your Nan called it. How cool though. Your Nan was best friends with Dana. So cool."