Dark Winter

by John Hennessy

  Perhaps I needed to know why this doll was here. My feelings rarely let me down. I really didn’t want the horrid thing in the house, let alone in my bedroom. I was still reeling from the effect it had on me. I thought about the things that really scared me, and human-like dolls, along with wasps, were near the top of the list. Clowns came in a close third. I bet that Toril, who claims to have watched every horror movie and read every scary book committed to print, wasn’t scared of clowns at all. Or bloodied devil dolls that made anyone faint. Perhaps she wouldn’t be scared to look into the Mirror either.

  “Nothing scares you, does it Toril?”

  “Scares me? No. Seen some things that disturbed me though.”

  I was intrigued. Toril seemed pretty unflappable about anything. She was like that Jacinta, only with a pulse. “Such as?”

  “You remember Don Curie, the school caretaker, right? One time, when I was eight, Mum organised a birthday party. She had a clown come over to…entertain us. But I knew the face under all the paint, and the crazy mad wig. And a suit that didn’t fit him at all.”

  “It was him. Curie. He did the clown thing as a bit of extra income, my father claimed, can you believe that? But what would a loner like Curie need extra money for? He absolutely freaked me out. The way his mouth was framed into a permanent smile was just so…oh, I just hated it, Romilly. After that, I always wore my Wiccan pentacle to school. I hadn’t before that day.”

  “I see, I didn’t know that.” I tried to get things back to where we had been, before that hateful man had came into the conversation.

  “You still want the doll?”

  “Oh yes, yes!” said Toril, happily. “You don’t know what this is, do you?”

  “I’d rather not know.” I didn’t want Toril to confirm my fears of what I thought it it was, but I did want to know where it came from. Then it hit me. Nan – could it have belonged to her? It seemed reasonable enough to me.

  How? The damn thing looked like the bloodied ghost girl I saw the other night. It seemed that Dana, Nan’s friend, the one whose soul was trapped in the Mirror, embodied that doll. She must have been the ghost who visited me the other night. It could not be mere coincidence.

  “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, look intensely into the mirror. 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.

  “But that’s not all,” said Toril. “You have to sing it three times in succession, and then…the doll disappears, and ghost of Dana appears 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 upset 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. She liked this kind 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. “It’s 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,” said 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, honest, and I don’t have the box for it either.”

  “Whatever you say. Though I always thought there was a dark side to you. Okay, okay, you don’t want to tell me. Keep your secrets! But don’t you want to know the legend, though?”

  I really didn’t want to know, but felt I just had 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.

  So I would take the hit head on. I don’t like scary stories anymore, not since Nan passed away, anyway.

  “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 guess when I tell her about the Mirror, she might be even more freaked out than I was about this horror of a doll.

  “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 wounds so deep, that his collarbone was exposed. The skin was ripped in such a way that only an animal’s teeth, or something not of this world, could have done it. Blood surrounds his body, and it was not yet dried on the ground. One thing was for certain, his killer was not far from here.”

  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. 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 flowe
rs.”

  “When she returned, her white dress was dirty. She had caught it by leaves and branches, as a consequence, some of the material had torn off.”

  “Oh, shoot!” 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 towards the man, but still looking at me. 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, and she couldn’t get a footing. It had been very hot the last few days, and parts of the woods were very sodden.

  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 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.”

  “Whoever killed him is still out here!” said Maria.

  “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.

  “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 undid his coat, popping out one button after another. He reached into his pocket and revealed a hatchet axe, and holding it in his right hand, 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 the 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, it’s supposed to be a bit like your wood-cabin, Romilly, how about that?”

  “But of course it’s not 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, saying it was a way 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 put 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. There was so much blood, however, that the roses had turned red, in parts. You know that saying about not mixing white and red on a wedding dress? 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 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 nothing was found, no evidence, nada, zero, zilch. A pretty messed up way to die, huh?”

  “Poor girl.” Jesus. Nan had told me that figure had crouched over Dana’s body. Maybe 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 Toril, 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?”

  “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…it was all 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<
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  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.