Winter

by Raven Taylor

  The inner sanctum was beautiful. Filled with ornate antique furniture. I knew this place. I had sketched that bed in detail right down to the tapestry that hung above it. I ran my hands across the red velvet cover. I had slept in this bed before and someone had sat in that leather chair by the fire, watching me.

  Dylan shut the door and glanced nervously at chair, I frowned, there was something strange about the way he looked at it as if he was seeing something I could not.

  “The walls of this place are soaked in ancient magic,” he leant forward, his voice a low whisper, “This is their sanctuary, and mine also, because usually my kind are destroyed at birth. We aren’t supposed to know they exist, we aren’t supposed to see them, but I do and this is why I have to stay here for my own protection so I‘m not seen by the greater powers. This is their place too where they go when they don’t want to be seen. For centuries it has been cloaked by their magic, a safe haven for those in need.”

  “What do you mean? Who’s magic? Who are they?” it seemed the temperature in the room had suddenly dropped despite the gas flames that danced in the hearth.

  Dylan leaned forward further still and fixed me with his wide, almost terrified eyes. His next words came out as an almost inaudible breath as if he were merely exhaling rather than actually speaking.

  “I told you, Angels.”

  “Yes, but what do they do? Who are they? All this rubbish about centuries of magic. It's a cult isn't it? Some kind of bizarre religious order.”

  “I told you you have it wrong,” he said, “They aren’t a cult, they aren’t even of this world, that’s why you can’t see them. They are Angels. Spirits. Beings with wings that exist on a different level to ourselves.”

  "Do you think because I have no memory I will believe anything you say? It's sick that they can do this. They've brainwashed you, maybe me too at one point, perhaps when you knew me I believed all of this too but now I don't. Listen to me Dylan, you have to tell the police what has been going on here, about Cane, I'll go with you, it'll be alright."

  He glanced at the empty chair again in a way that made me extremely comfortable, then he nodded as though acknowledging some silent request. My skin was crawling. The atmosphere in the room had grown thick an heavy.

  For a few moments nothing happened. Dylan's head dropped and he stood motionless, like a puppet with an idle master. I waited as the carriage clock on the mantle counted each second. It seemed an eternity passed. The flames flickered in the hearth and I stared at their hypnotic dance. Then suddenly Dylan leapt at me with strength beyond his size and pinned me down on the bed. His eyes had rolled back in his head so only the whites showed and he wrestled with me like a thing possessed.

  "Don't fight me!" he hissed in a voice that was not his own and then he clamped my face between his hands. His touch sent the room spinning away from me. I was completely paralysed. Then I wasn't there at all. I was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere in my tangled past.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  As I sit here in the snow against her grave I can still see his face, eyes rolling in his head, as he rendered me powerless and threw me into a stupor. Now I can feel the cold creeping into my very bones. My hand is numb as I try to write and I fear that soon I will start to loose the light. The grey sky has turned an oppressive shade of purple and the clouds hang like red gashes as the sun dips lower and lower. All around me the silent world holds it's breathe as though waiting, waiting only for me to be done with my tale. I do wonder about what waits for me on the other side. I have a fanciful notion that we will be together again, that she will be standing waiting, her red hair burning in the sunset as she steps into the clearing. Yet I know that she is gone and not even in death can she be reclaimed. What waits for me on the other side will offer no relief from the pain I carry in my heart. That is something I will have to live with always.

  Caroline. You have always been so patient, so unquestioningly accepting of all that life has thrown your way. I wonder then if you can accept what I am about to tell you next. Much of what I have told you so far you know already and I have spent much time deliberating over when to tell you the truth, what I know now but did not know then, about who I am and I where I came from. I did not tell you any of this at the time, about Dylan in the Witchery and the places he took me when he unlocked my memory that afternoon but I think now you deserve you an explanation at least. Yes, I believe now is the time to tell you how it all began, what happened to set me out on the path that would eventually bring me into your world. So we will leave the scene in the lavish inner sanctum where I lie motionless and crippled on the velvet blankets. We will leave all my theories about cults and we will leave the police to carry out there investigations into The Witchery. We can always pick that up later if the light allows. But before I take you back, back to the world where Cane ruled and a time when my love for Lilly first began to bloom, I would like to talk to you about something.

  Do you believe in Angels, Caroline? Those celestial beings that have become so common place in the world’s religions, a recurring theme that bridges almost all belief systems. To Christians they are the messengers of God. New Age practitioners claim to converse with them and that they are our guardians. To Hindus each Angel is created with a specific task to carry out only to expire once the task is complete. In the end they are all based on the same truth. Ask a child from any country and from any religion to draw a picture of an Angel and I can guarantee all will turn out a similar image; feathery wings, robes, halos. Well, at least they got the wings part right. Almost.

  Of course you have already guessed it haven't you? You with your sharp perceptions, what I really am, why I could see death printed on people, why I have no past. I am an Angel. Come with me Caroline, for now it is your turn to learn. Let me take you back, back to the world I left behind to be with her, back to the Underworld, where I sat drinking with my dark mentor one shadowy evening. Look, see us there in your minds eye, see him, the one from my dreams, sitting in the wing backed chair, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other.

  On most evenings we were perfectly sane. He was the great wise teacher, my mentor, and I the reluctant pupil who dutifully listened as he explained the way of things while I imagined that all around us I could hear the timeless swish and rattle of the great loom on which, he told me, Isaac, Elias and Myron weaved the endless pattern of life in rich and diverse threads. Talk of ancient secrets and death passed soberly through the cigarette smoke that drifted above the half empty coffee mugs and the more I listened the more I hated what I was.

  Yet sometimes, when he tried to corrupt me with worldly delights a little stiffer than coffee, as it grew late and time stretched on towards those hours in which nobody can think straight, he would roar with hyena laughter about nothing at all until his eyes bled tears. Such was the unstableness of his character.

  It was on one such evening, when he had forsaken sanity, that Cane turned his red eye up from the shade cast by the brim of his top hat, and fixed me with his keen stare. Pinned to the leather arm chair by that glare, all of the laughter sucked from me, I found myself wondering; if he could muster this much power now just by looking at me with that one eye what must it have been like when he still had the two? I looked away and stared uncomfortably into the full ashtray on the table that stood between us and the spent stubs that still smouldered there. Smoking was Cane’s vice, not mine, one of many human traits he had picked up from the mortal plain. He released me from his stare after only a few seconds and when I looked up again his features were once more in shadow and one half of his face was obscured by the purple fall of jaw length hair that grew on only the left side of his head to hide the empty socket where his missing eye should have been. In one black gloved hand he clutched a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels Bourbon (another of his human vices) and I knew he was about to say something serious now he had commanded the silence he needed. He flicked his cigarette into the ashtray and rose the bottle to his lips. I
watched and waited. At last he spoke and as he did so I avoided looking him in the eye and focused instead on the fangs that flashed behind his black lips.

  “My Dear Winter, my apprentice,” he began, “I must speak to you about a matter of grave importance.”

  Cane lit another cigarette and I watched the tip glow from across the table. He flicked ash onto the stone floor and then continued.

  “You know how I like to bend the rules,” he gestured around at the cigarettes, the bottles of bourbon, the playing cards, “Who doesn’t? It’s not like it was in the old days, nobody minds if we indulge in a few things that are so strictly human, but you, dearest friend, you have taken things a little too far.”

  I shifted nervously in my chair. I had an idea what he was driving at and I was afraid of him. Cane was the oldest, the wisest and most feared of my kind and although he had always favoured me above the others and mine was the only company he ever sought I knew I was still not above his wrath.

  “You know what I’m talking about don’t you? The mortal girl, the human child, in your constant obsession with her you have broken the only rule that is worth anything these days.”

  Cane rose from his chair slowly and gracefully, a creature of stealth and dignity and as he towered over me I tried to sink back in my chair. The candles that rested in the sconces on the walls flickered and cast dancing demons on the ceiling above our heads and caused the shadows to reach forward across the floor from the dark places in the corners of the chamber. This was Cane’s room. I was the only one he ever permitted to enter it and now I had angered him. He loomed over me in his black Victorian suite, still clutching the bottle in his hand, and his intense red eye burned into me like a searing ember.

  “Beautiful one, perfect one,” he hissed as he crouched and brought his face close to mine, “You know how I love you my child but you belong down here in the Underworld. If you were meant to save people then you would be up there in the sky with them.” he spat out the last word like a snake spitting venom.

  I could not speak, could not find the words with which to defend myself so I let him continue.

  “But even they know that certain ones weren’t meant to be saved. Only acts of chance may be interfered with, fate must be left untouched, you cannot tamper with the grand design.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and shook me. He was angry but he was disappointed too and that was worse. I had let him down. I thought of that giant loom, threaded with the fabric of life. I thought of Isaac as he chose new threads to weave into the pattern, I thought of Elias as he weaved the path through life and of all the accidental stitches he dropped along the way, some of which left holes, some of which were picked up. Finally I thought of Myron with his scythe, selecting which threads to cut, choosing who must die. Down here in the Underworld we dealt only with Myron. He was our master.

  “Does…he…know..?” I ventured uncertainly.

  “Who? Myron?” Cane took another sip from the bottle, “No, he doesn’t know, not yet.”

  “Will you tell him?” I was desperately afraid. The wrath of Cane was one thing but to be on the receiving end of Myron’s fury was unthinkable.

  “No Winter, I won’t tell him, but this infatuation must end because it will only be a matter of time before he finds out. You’ve been neglecting your duties my apprentice. You know she must die and you must be one the one to take her and you must do it soon, I’ve assigned her to you, I’m sorry but it’s the only way you will ever learn.”

  He began to laugh hysterically and he threw the now empty bottle on the ground where it shattered on the hard stone. I watched in horror as he rose to his full height and threw back his head, laughing so violently that his hat fell off and his purple hair flew back to reveal the hollow socket where his left eye should have been. What choice did I have? He was my mentor and this was his will and if I didn’t comply then who knew what would happen when Myron found out.

  “Then I will do it,” I blinked back the tears that where forming in my eyes, “I will do it for you but know this Cane; I hate what we are.”

  He seemed to sober suddenly and he took my hand and pulled me to my feet, his hair once again hiding his disfigurement.

  “Ah my poor Winter,” he said softly, “I sometimes think that you are too beautiful for this place, you are not as hard as the rest of us. I watch you even when you don’t know it. Myself and the others, we treat our work as art, we weave up elaborate events, different ways of doing it. We pride ourselves in drawing it out, in making it last and making them dance a while with fate. Our work is almost as beautiful as you are yet you still cannot see it despite all my best efforts. You take them as swiftly as you can then you run.”

  “I don’t like to see them suffer.”

  “Ha! You must look hard then and you’ll see. Make it not only your name but your nature too, become Winter!” He clutched my hands in his and glared at me but I was lost.

  “Winter is cold, harsh, merciless,” he began to explain, “A powerful force come to selfishly claim the land for its own after the golden purge of Autumn. It touches every living thing and holds the earth captive in suspended animation until the liberating thaw of spring when everything is born again and life comes full circle. This iron fist is undeniably cruel but also capable of works of great beauty so intense that it could surpass the glory of any summers day.

  “Winter is seldom the favoured season because its appeal is so hard to fine. It is easy to step outside on a late spring morning to be greeted by the sight of new flowers, the smell of fresh mown grass, the sound of bird song. It is impossible to avoid these little miracles; they leap out you with such force, screaming with radiance, so that it becomes an assault on the senses. Yes it may be attractive and charming but rarely does it leave a lasting impression.

  “However, take the time to seek out the perfect spears of ice that hang glistening from the frosted rocks by the side of a tumbling waterfall in a remote glen and there you will find beauty enough to pierce your heart, steal your breath and last you for eternity.

  “That is you, do not try to fight it. Everything in nature is meant to be. Even the cold and cruel. Even death. Without the winter then there would be no spring.”

  “Yes Cane,” I murmured, but I still didn’t see his reasoning, not really, nothing could make me think it was right for her to die. For anyone to die.

  “That’s a good fellow,” he pulled me close like a Father would his son and folded my lovely black feathered wings behind my back.

  “You will take care of the girl tomorrow then?” he pushed.

  “Yes Cane,” I said again. How could I be the one take her? Yet how could I not?

  He held me at arms length and looked me up and down admiringly. He gave a crooked grin. It seemed he never could stay angry at me for long.

  “Oh Winter one day you will learn that death is as much a part of life as living and only then will you loose that melancholy look you always have in those dark eyes.”

  But that wasn’t what I wanted.

  “Cane,” I was about to voice a bold question, “Have you ever seen the great loom? Have you ever actually met Isaac or Elias?”

  “Yes, I did once,” his voice was soft and his expression was distant, caught in some long ago memory that made the hint of a smile pull at the corners of his lips, “I think I am the only one of our kind who has ever dared travel there.”

  I nodded. I understood that our kind were permitted to climb out of the Underworld and onto the mortal plain whenever we chose but we were never permitted to travel higher.

  “Don’t get any ideas though,” he sank back into his chair and lit another cigarette, “You’re already walking a knife edge, one slip and you will fall.”

  It was always dark down here, hidden away in this twilight world of shadows. I looked around at Cane’s chamber sadly. It was not much more than a square cavern cut roughly from red sandstone and filled with human artefacts. Not all of us where capable of bringing things
back from the mortal plain into our own realm. It was not something I had ever achieved. Most thought Cane had this strange power because, being the first of our kind, he had a lot more of Myron’s power in him then any of the rest of us. I found myself wondering desperately if it would be possible to bring a human back. Of course human spirits did wander our realms, projections of those annoying individuals who had mastered astral travel, but they did not see us unless we wanted them to and the Underworld itself appeared different to each person who visited, it was a very personal experience for them. These where not humans in the physical sense though. Just flitting ghosts.

  “Go back to your room Winter,” Cane disturbed me from my thoughts and I was surprised because on nights like these he usually let me fall asleep in the chair.

  I nodded and made for the door. He called to me as I was about to leave and I glanced over my shoulder at him. He sat in his chair, relaxed and charming, like some twisted slant on a human gentleman with his shabby tailed dinner jacket and slanted top hat. His giant, leathery, bat like wings arched above his head and curled around his shoulders. I wished I had wings like his, strong and powerful. Mine where fragile and weak and could break so easily.

  “Make sure you take care of her, “ he said, “Or I might not be able to protect you.”