Dark Winter: Trilogy

by Hennessy, John

  “We’re okay,” offered Beth, intending to calm fears that things were about to kick off. They weren’t. Whatever the answers were, I would not find them with Beth, and especially not with Toril.

  All the same, I wanted to help her. Someone had come to my aid in the woods. Didn’t Toril deserve help too? One look at her told its own story. She had come into this seeking redemption for her embarrassing defeat by Dana. It looked like she had achieved a partial victory, but the cost looked far too great to have been worth it. I pitied her more than ever.

  We needed to go to a place of safety. Beth suggested her home, as her grandparents were away as usual.

  We walked in silence until we arrived there.

  ***

  Toril had given me quite the runaround. I had every reason to be beyond furious with her, but as the three of us walked, I felt that maybe the infighting had to stop. Toril’s logic had failed her, so in turn, she had failed us.

  Now we just had to go back to old-fashioned trust.

  Toril was sitting at the dining room table with her head in her hands. Beth motioned to me with her hand, and whispered Can I speak with you?

  So we stood in the kitchen and said nothing, whilst at the same time conveying what we felt.

  “I wanted to kill her,” said Beth. “If you hadn’t come in when you did, I might just have. How did you find us?”

  I told her it all. How I had got split from her in the woods, Curie attacking me, then someone benevolent appearing and helping me.

  It was then that Beth spoke up.

  “Do you think it was a God of some kind?”

  I had to think about that before answering. The truth was that someone was able to help me. I had no idea why. I could only say who it wasn’t, not who it was. Not Nan, not Jacinta, and not anyone I could think of.

  “It was someone or something with great power. I was bleeding, and this entity patched me up, urging me to make amends. When I was standing in front of the Dying Swan, I knew it was to do with you and Toril.”

  “It’s not looking good, Milly. Toril looks terrible. I don’t know how much use she can be to us. When I was pointing a knife at her throat, she looked at me like she didn’t care. There is something that happened to her, but she’s not telling us.”

  Before that experience in the woods, I was just consumed with getting the Mirror back from Toril. But I saw her bag, and there was no Mirror-like shape contained within it. She had lost it, destroyed it, or had it taken from her. Maybe there were other possibilities, but they weren’t revealing themselves to me at this time.

  “There’s plenty she is not willing to tell us, Beth. The question is what should we do with her?”

  Beth drummed her fingers onto the kitchen worktop. “The way I see it, she would be a liability. But I know you’re good with people. I think you’ve grown so much since school. If anyone can get her to open up, you can.”

  I thought about that for a second, but whatever Toril said to me; about her actions, and specifically, about the Mirror, I knew I would have trouble accepting. Yet as I glanced towards the forlorn looking girl in Beth’s main living room, my heart went out to her.

  “Toril is not the enemy, Beth. But her misguided views are a problem for us. I need her positive powers, not her flaws. We are near the endgame now, and even if you are partially correct, we can’t take her along with us. I need clear heads on this.”

  I had said what needed to be said.

  Beth prepared a tray of drinks, non-alcoholic this time. I shoved a glass towards Toril, and when she didn’t look up, I tapped her arm.

  “Hey,” I said. “This is no time be feeling sorry for yourself.”

  Toril didn’t say anything for a few moments. I felt no sense of victory by saying that to her, but it was better than saying Where’s my Mirror? And why did you desert me when I needed your help? When are you going to realise this whole thing is bigger than you? Bloody witches!

  She raised her head to look at me. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

  I slapped a hand down onto the table. The one with two fingers and a thumb left on it.

  “Toril, you may have been top girl in school, but not here, not now.”

  “You’re casting me out, is that it?”

  “Your ways, the ways of the witch, are not helping us Toril. If you got your head out of your book once in a while, you might just see what is happening out there, and what needs to be done.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Milly,” said Toril, answering my charge with words that surprised me. “I gave your Mirror to someone I thought I could trust. I was sent on a suicide run to save my mother. This isn’t my wand,” she said, pulling it out of her bag, and placing it on the table. “It belongs to my mum, or at least, it did belong to her. I barely got out of there alive.”

  I said nothing; in fact I was saving every bit of energy I had, just trying to process what she was telling me. In one statement, Toril had all but admitted her failure on every level. I didn’t want to be the one to kick her while she was down.

  I knew she wanted me to ask her questions, specifically about the Mirror. But I had the strongest feeling that the answer to that particular conundrum lay elsewhere. I wanted to tell her it would be okay. I wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter, that all that did matter was that we were alive, and able to fight another day. It’s when the fight goes out of us that we really need to worry.

  I didn’t need to know how she lost her wand, or how she ended up with the one she coveted the most. If she had her mother’s wand, what had happened to Tori-Suzanne? A witch of her reputation would not have given up her wand, not in any circumstances I could think of. But I knew Toril would have given anything to have a wand made from the cursed silver birch tree. But what was the cost to her? Why is it the things we covet the most, cost the most? We should really re-think that.

  Looking at her now, I realised the price was one I would never be prepared to pay. All the time, Beth had kept quiet, observing me and Toril. I turned to Beth, and asked her something I wasn’t sure she would be able to do.

  “Do you think you have enough strength to help her?”

  “What do you mean?” Beth asked.

  “You developed some healing powers after your first contact with the Mirror. Do you still have them? Can you help her?”

  Beth looked at me as if to say that she really didn’t know. I knew I was asking a lot of her, but an unhinged, depressed Toril was not something I could cope with.

  “We’ve got to put aside the past. We have to help each other. There things in the world far worse than our mistrust of each other. When all this is over, maybe we can to trust, to love, and to live again – you know? Breathe the good air that’s been missing so long.”

  Beth understood, but also knew what I meant.

  “You’re going after the Mirror, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer, but the looks that gave me away to someone who knew me as well as Beth gave her an answer. The demons inside Beth and myself would not be given any confirmation of what I was planning.

  I felt that Beth and Toril would be safer together. Beth may not understand Wicca, but if she made contact with Toril, and healed her with her good heart, then maybe they would come to some kind of understanding.

  I understood completely. If Beth had still been with Tori-Suzanne in the woods, there was little doubt in my mind that Curie, or some other devil would have killed her. Maybe her benefactor was the same as mine. I could fill in the blanks later.

  “I’ll see what I can do for her,” said Beth, gesturing to Toril. “But you shouldn’t do this alone….whatever it is you’re planning to do.”

  “It’s best we don’t share those thoughts out loud, Bethany.”

  “You would tell me, if you were going to do something…extreme, wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “Our enemies would destroy us if they knew what we were doing; what we
were planning. So let’s not plan in the open. Look what happened when we used the Ouija board! So let’s just stay with the overall goal in mind. If we keep to that ideal, we will get there.”

  Again, I felt that Beth understood. I could leave her to tend to Toril, and I had no doubt that Beth would do a good job. As for myself, I had done what my benefactor had asked. I had made amends with these two girls, and for now, that would have to suffice. We were not about to head out shopping together just yet.

  Toril finally spoke, after patiently enduring the fact that Beth and I had been talking like she wasn’t there. We had meant no disrespect, but not every secret could be kept in the dark.

  “You used a Ouija board? After what happened before, I am surprised at you both.”

  “We were trying to find you,” said Beth, a mild irritation in her voice.

  “I know what you were really trying to do,” replied Toril.

  “Alright, calm it down,” I ordered. “There are two wars going on, the one outside and the one in here. I can’t cope with it anymore. Now listen, you two are to stay together until all this blows over. I’m going to do what is necessary.”

  “After all we have been through, you just want us to sit tight? Are you mad?” asked Toril. “The three of us together would be more powerful than apart.”

  “You chose to be apart from us when you slavishly followed the teachings of that book, Toril.”

  “I’m-” Toril began, but then shut up.

  “We are no good together, not right now,” I stated. I wasn’t entirely sure if I believed that myself, but my unconscious mind was made up. We were to go our separate ways.

  “We really are orphans of the forest, aren’t we?” said Toril. “Each of us has lost a mother. You too have lost more than I have. I now understand how rotten it all feels.”

  Beth went to say something, her mouth shaped like an ‘Oh My God’ was going to rocket out of there. I didn’t know if Tori-Suzanne was dead, but something had happened to make Toril think so.

  “I’ll heal her face, if I can,” said Beth. “Then I will try and heal her heart.”

  I buttoned up my coat, left the two girls to it, and headed out in the direction of the woods. I waved a goodbye as I passed the window outside. Beth would have her work cut out for her.

  Old Forest, New Tricks:

  Chapter 16

  Before the Mirror came into my life, my focus was a bit limited to say the least. Looking back, I can’t believe just how much I fawned over a boy. That’s all Troy was. It wasn’t his fault that he was good looking, but boy did he know how to play it. Every girl at our school wanted to be with him.

  As an eighteen-year-old, I look back on that time with mixed feelings. I was hormonal, that was for sure, but my need for Troy to be in my life was bordering on obsession.

  I did not love him. It was an attraction, that was all. A misplaced attraction. But he had something in common with all other boys – he was simply one of them.

  I could not believe that he dragged me, kicking and screaming, in the direction of Redwood. Curie had intended to kill me, of that I have no doubt. Troy’s part in that was undeniable, yet later, when I needed a familiar face to comfort me, there was Troy, being everything I wanted, everything I needed. A friend, a companion, a lover.

  Could he have dismissed Toril so easily? In Troy’s position, I could imagine getting annoyed with her. She was headstrong, combative, and dictatorial to a point. She countered this by being incredibly brave, unfailingly kind, and always had the ability to surprise those around her.

  I expect that only Jacinta really knew what she was like. Troy couldn’t compare with that. I do know one thing – Toril had moved on, as had I. Troy had told me he’d moved on too. I just don’t think anyone told him what we’d done.

  All this time, he had been waiting patiently at Hob’s Hole. Believing Toril to be dead, further believing that Alix had been lost to the void, and as for me, he believed that I was messed up, that I didn’t know how to behave when a boy was on top of me. I might have been inexperienced, but I wasn’t stupid. It no longer mattered to me that things had not worked out with Troy. Part of me looked back on our brief liaison with fondness, but the cruel reality was, the demon had wrecked it for us. The demon believed that by destroying my chance for love that I would lose my way, and so, hand victory to Diabhal and his minions.

  I was still fighting for my Nan’s memory. There were other boys. Troy was just one of many.

  In the cold light of day, the truth was, he was hurting me. It wasn’t a pleasant experience at all. I try to rationalise it, and think that maybe the demon inside was robbing me of the oldest of pleasures. I could no longer tell truth from fiction, and unless I could, everything around me would unravel.

  Curie preyed on the innocent and the weak. He wouldn’t attack people when they were at their strongest. As I made my way to the entrance to the forest, physically, I felt okay. A little tired, a little fatigued maybe, but other than that, I was okay.

  My mental state was a whole other ball game. The council had spent money on the forest too, a sign that warned people not to cross the tape where they had sectioned off one part of the forest from another.

  It was just typical of the council to think that the rules they set are ones that we should follow. If anyone wanted to commit a murder in there, or take their own life, they could and they would. All the same, my inner compass suggested I head to the area that used to house Rosewinter and wait.

  That would keep me at least five miles away from the eastern side of the forest, but given all that had been happening over the last few years, the lines were clearly being redrawn. Boundaries mean nothing to those that mean you harm, and that’s because they know our weakness – we play by the rules. To come out on top in the end, I might just have to break some of them.

  The demons would no longer wait for us. They would now bring the battle to our side of town.

  I shuddered with the recall that Michael Dean had been shot dead close to Rosewinter. Once I had passed by the stone table tennis table and the other exercise equipment that nobody used, I could see mounds of yellow and black tape wrapped around the trees by the authorities that said simply DO NOT ENTER.

  I really wished I could abide by that, but I could not. I stepped over the tape, and yet as I took those first few tentative steps, I could see that others had been there before me. The question was, were they on the same mission as me? Or as some of the locals viewed it, were people now using this side of the forest much as they did in the east? To take their own lives?

  A sign put up by the council seemed to bear this out. It said

  THINK OF YOUR LOVED ONES WHO LOVE YOU

  THINK ABOUT THOSE WHO WOULD MISS YOU

  DON’T DO, WHAT YOU’RE THINKING OF DOING

  PLEASE – PUT IT OFF FOR AT LEAST ONE MORE DAY

  What they didn’t understand was that the people who had entered the forest with such thoughts were dead anyway. It was just a case of unsheathing themselves from the shackles of their body, which for them had become a prison. It was only their skin holding themselves together.

  For my own part, I had never felt such dark thoughts. I may not understand those who harboured such dark thoughts either, but I respected it.

  As I tread on the small branches, my weight pushes them into the ground. I could see yellow tape that people had wrapped around the tree as a starting point. These people did not intend to kill themselves, they were just worried that they would get lost in the forest.

  I knew that was with good reason too. Maybe they would learn far too late that the forest could simply make their tape disappear, or perhaps taunt them by letting it fall to the ground. The forest was wicked like that.

  Three steps, four steps, five. There were seventy-three trees between the entrance to the forest, and the clearing that used to house Rosewinter. God knows how many more were behind my old sanctuary. Hundreds? Certainly. Thousands? Probably. Tens of thousands? Normal
logic would say that wasn’t possible, because our town was small and the area surrounding it wasn’t exactly huge. If you looked at a map containing a bird’s eye view of the place, it looked small. But when someone was amongst the trees East of Gorswood Forest, I knew that anything was possible.

  It wasn’t exactly night-time. I checked my watch, and it said 5:30pm. Behind me, the lights at the Dying Swan had come on. I could envisage Patrick giving me a wave. He was a decent guy, and wouldn’t approve of me going into the woods on my own. But I was strong enough. On my weakest day, I would be stronger than most. Martial arts mindset? Maybe. But it kept me focussed on the subject at hand, which was….

  Which was what, exactly?

  I didn’t know. But I felt I was doing the right thing at this time. I knew the forest would taunt me, but I had to change it around and view the challenge presented as something I could overcome. When my eyes took in the first challenge, my blood ran cold; but I quickly asserted myself.