Children of Cernunnos

by Matthew Fish

  “It will all be explained soon, very soon,” Ryan says as he reaches down to the floor and retrieves The White Stag. He hands it to Elise.

  “Am I being punished?” Elise asks sleepily, exhaustion having overcome her.

  “One last memory is coming,” Ryan says as he squeezes Elise’s hand. He places an arm around her as he sits beside her, holding her hand tenderly. “You are a very strong, brave girl. You have the energy to make it through this last memory. Then we will talk about wishes.”

  “I cannot,” Elise objects as she shakes her head and the tears come.

  “Do not cry, Elise,” Ryan says as he wipes away the tears with the edge of his black suit jacket. “No more tears on my account. It is almost over.”

  Footsteps are just outside the open door. The presence that has visited her so many times is approaching one last time. As it rounds the corner, Elise sees it for the first time. It is a reflection of herself, her younger self. Not the older self that she now perceives herself as, or feels as—yet her true self.

  The light is dim and Elise reaches out. As her fingertips touch the apparition the sensation overtaking her is no longer unpleasantly cold, yet more comforting like a cool wash cloth on a feverish head. She inhales sharply as she is taken away from this reality in a brief flash of white.

  A week had passed since Ryan disappeared from Elise’s life in his human form. The following Monday, grandmother fell from the spiral stair and severely injured her back, forcing her to be bedridden most days after. Doing any kind of activity caused her great pain and still she held on to her will to live. Most of the time she would just sit in a chair and stare out the window each and every day, and Elise worried that she might be going mad. On that Friday of the same week, Mrs. Alice passed away in her sleep. Elise saw Mrs. Alice in her bed. She looked calm, simply asleep—only there was no life left within her. She, too, like Elise’s mother was free from this world. Mrs. Alice was the closest thing to family that Elise had left and, although it was very unlike her to do so, she wept as she had been wont to do lately.

  It was during a hot summer day that John Watts and a group of men helped dig Mrs. Alice’s grave. Elise watched each spade jab into the earth, carving out Mrs. Alice’s resting place. She wondered if Red Manor was punishing her for not making a proper wish, yet she did not believe this to be true, for she knew that it was simply waiting for her to do so. After all, now that she was bound she had nowhere to else to go.

  As the men finished up and left, Elise approached the freshly turned earth. “Goodbye, Mrs. Alice. I thank you for the times that you made me happy. If there was anyone here that was not selfish, or had an ulterior motive to their actions, it was you. You said that I brought life to Red Manor—but you were wrong. It was you. It was always you. I hope that you are in a happy place with your family. You deserve that.”

  Elise looked to the sky as a seagull flew overhead. The sun was bright and full and the sky a perfect cerulean. She began to walk away from the grave, looking back once as she wiped away a stray tear from her deep green eyes. She then remembered the golden ring with the emerald upon it. She slid it off of her finger and returned to the grave. She dug a small hole into the earth and buried it into the soil.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Alice,” Elise repeated as she wiped the dirt from her hands and returned to Red Manor. The house felt empty, silent. She ascended the spiral staircase, she kept her boots on and tracked dirt in, leaving specks on the wooden floorboards. She reached the fourth floor. She was just about to pass the guestroom as she paused for a moment at the door. She placed a hand upon the doorknob and flung the door open, halfway expecting to see Ryan seated at the leather chair next to the writing desk. However, he was not there.

  Elise entered the room. She pulled open the drawer that contained the red book and pulled out a single page. She paced over to the writing desk her mind numb and without care. She sat upon the leather chair and pulled on the switch for the desk lamp to turn on. With a flicker of white it flashed on, revealing the rough, grooved surface of the old desk. The silver pen was still in the holder at the bottom of the tilted desk. She took the pen in hand and began to write.

  Elise gasps desperately or air as though she is drowning. Ryan rubs a hand against her back and attempts to keep her from falling over from exhaustion.

  “See, that was quick,” Ryan says as he squeezes Elise’s arm, attempting to keep her awake.

  “I already wished,” Elise whispers.

  “You did, that day—three times at once to be exact,” Ryan adds as he pulls Elise up to her feet and drags her over to the writing desk. He allows her to collapse into the leather chair and places the old silver pen back into Elise’s weak hand. He wraps her fingers around it.

  “What am I doing now, then?” Elise asks as her head bobs and nods as she attempts to remain lucid.

  “I am giving you the chance to take it all back,” Ryan whispers as he tears a page from the old book and places it in front of her. “I have never done such, but we have little time.”

  “I already wished…,” Elise says as she shakes her head and rubs at her eyes with the cold palms of her hands. “What did I wish for?”

  Ryan let out a heavy sigh as he produces a folded piece of paper from his suit jacket pocket. He unfolds the paper and places it upon the writing desk beneath the lamp so that Elise may read it.

  Elise strains to focus on her own writing she places a hand upon the desk to steady herself. In quickly scrawled writing it says three things in order from one to three.

  1: I wish to take my mother’s place that night she drowned.

  2: I wish that Red Manor was burned to the ground instead of Mrs. Alice’s family home.

  3: I wish that grandmother’s suffering was put to an end and that she may pass on when she is finally ready to do so.

  “I did write this,” Elise says as the memory flashes painfully in her mind’s eye.

  “You did,” Ryan says as he takes away the paper. “Of course, you did not do it correctly, or heed any of my warnings. Thus, you drowned, and your body remained in that grey mud for centuries, until I summoned you back to fulfill the last two wishes.

  “Centuries?” Elise asks, deeply confused.

  “Your grandmother has clung to madness for so long that we have reached an ending of sorts. We now sit at the end of existence itself—it is not simply a storm that has made the sky black and the earth cold. It is always dark and cold at the end of things. However, time to us is irrelevant. We can still return back to our time, or any other time—you have proved your point.”

  “Proved my point?” Elise says, still struggling to make sense of any of it. The last thing she remembers is coming into consciousness near the window. Mud on her boots, and the song, the first memory. The coldness of the window—but what came before that? Were there memories before the one in the bedroom? She can almost recall one, and then it hits her.

  Elise takes a heavy gasp for air as the memory of drowning flashes to mind. The feeling of helplessness as she sank to the bottom, her body kicking and twitching about as life left her body and water filled it.

  “You’re not there anymore; you are here now—be in this moment,” Ryan replies as he rubs Elise’s back. “You made a series of unselfish wishes; you sacrificed your own life for the sake of others and their happiness.”

  “I remember now,” Elise says softly as she rubs her head painfully. She has a memory of tossing the lantern into the kitchen, smashing it against the wooden floor and watching the fire dance to life in its destructive blaze.

  “I am offering you a chance to return to our time, to take this wish back and return to a life that you never got to live,” Ryan says as he firmly shakes the pen in Elise’s hand. He places the blank sheet of paper before her once more. “I will release you from Red Manor. We do not have much time—soon the fire will be upon us and nothing can be changed.”

  “I am content with the decisions that I have made,” Elise says as sh
e drops the pen.

  Ryan snatches up the pen and pushes it back into Elise’s hand, pressing it against her skin. “How can you be? Your mother abandoned you, and your grandmother trapped you. Mrs. Alice was someone you knew for less than a month. Why do they deserve happiness when you do not?”

  “When the fire comes, will my grandmother pass away?” Elise asks, ignoring Ryan’s question.

  “She will, and once Red Manor is gone so will you—you are already nothing more than a ghost in this time,” Ryan says as he gently places a hand to Elise’s shoulder. “Take back your wish—you deserve life. The others have already had life and have made their choices. You made a decision out of grief over Mrs. Alice. You made a wish because you felt you had to, and that I pressured you into it. You deserve to be happy. ’Lisey, take us home. You have shown me that there is so much possibility. You have succeeded.”

  “I did not do it for you,” Elise says as she musters up the sparse remains of her strength and drops the pen again. She takes the red book and hands it back to Ryan. “People make mistakes in life. Some of them get second chances, most do not. Thank you for giving me one but I shall pass. I would wish my mother to be happy, even though she is not perfect. I would still wish for Mrs. Alice to be with her family, even if it is for only a brief time. I can imagine her face, surrounded by her brothers and sisters, and that is enough to sustain me. Although my grandmother also made mistakes, she made them out of fear and love. I will not fault her for that. If I take it all back then I am being selfish. If I can give my mother a chance at being happy for even a few years then I am glad that I could have taken her place. The same goes for Mrs. Alice—if I can imagine her being happy with her family that she missed so dearly then I stand by my second wish as well.”

  “I should have granted your first wish,” Ryan says as he closes his eyes. His lip begins to quiver as though he is on the verge of breaking down. “I will ask you one last time, Elise—please?”

  Elise embraces Ryan, whose eyes are still firmly shut as though he is desperately praying for her to follow his advice.

  She presses her lips against his cheek and whispers into his ear, “I thank you for everything you’ve done for my family, but I release you now. I now go to comfort my grandmother…. Thank you, Ryan.”

  Elise releases her embrace upon Ryan as she glimpses the gleam of a tear streaming from his eye. She nods in silence as he watches her leave.

  “Funny how I always hated the sound of my own heartbeat,” Elise says as she reaches for the door. “Now that it is gone I kind of miss it—goodbye, Ryan.”

  Elise closes the door behind her as she makes out the faint whisper of “Goodbye” from beyond. The hall is filled with thick black smoke and flames are arcing and lashing at the spiral stair. Elise uses her hands to navigate to grandmother’s bedroom. She opens the door, finding the black twisted form of her grandmother lying in bed.

  She reaches over for the electric lamp and turns on the light.

  “Elise?” grandmother moans as she gropes with a blackened hand, blindly grasping empty air.

  “I am here, grandmother,” Elise says as she brings grandmother’s hand into hers.

  Elise crawls into bed next to the old shadowy form of grandmother and begins to stroke her head comfortingly.

  “Why are you here?” grandmother’s says, her voice creaking.

  “I am here because our time is over,” Elise says as she eyes the flames overtaking the hallway. “I do not wish for you to die alone. That is what you were afraid of, wasn’t it?”

  “Live,” grandmother says as she attempts to push Elise away. “You should have nothing but hatred for me.”

  Elise holds on to grandmother in a tight embrace. “There is no place for hatred within me. I understand why you did what you did.”

  Elise closes her eyes as the flames explode into the room. There is pain, but it is so swift and fleeting that it is over in an instant. Everything disappears in the same light as before. Only this time there is warmth, a transitory heat that fills Elise before finally releasing her. She is exhausted, elated to be free. Her last moments are spent embracing the woman that cared for her, and in turn she would care for in those last microseconds of what semblance of life they had left. Then that, too, passed.

  Back at the city, Elise’s mother watched a small fire across the bay. For a moment she felt an overwhelming sense of sadness.

  “Looks like that old spook house has finally met its end,” the man at her side said as they continued on. “Are you all right?’

  “Yeah,” Elise’s mother replied as she hugged on to the man tightly. “I just felt something strange all of a sudden. It was like I had been there before…in another life or something.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” the man adds as they continue their night walk alongside the bay.

  Elise’s mother was happy, although it was brief as happiness often is in life. Her relationship with the man she gave up her daughter for lasted about two years and a few weeks—a personal best in terms of length and happiness. However, once that relationship was over she did the only logical thing she could think to do: she drowned herself in the bay shortly after midnight. Her body was found three days later by a fisherman on Black Tern Island who buried her in an unmarked grave. He said a few kind words for the mysterious woman, and pondered her situation for about a month before he forgot about her completely. There were just more important things going on. Another aspect of life, I suppose. We dwell on things until they are replaced by more important matters, and the loop continues.

  Mrs. Alice’s life was drastically different with the support of her family. Although her life was not without pain; she moved away with her brothers and sisters after her parents were murdered by white supremacists, burnt upon a cross that bore likeness to the one that she would pray to. She and what remained of her family started up a restaurant in Maine that had its fair share of success. She was the head cook, of course. She never lost her laugh, and despite finding love and marriage, she never lost any of her weight. She wore it proudly, as she should. She lived a long life and died at eighty-three, leaving behind three daughters—one of which she named Elise for reasons she could not fathom. It just sounded right at the time, so she went with it.

  As for the real Elise—Ryan broke from all tradition that was held by his kind. Out of love, he turned a mortal girl into a beautiful white doe. The pair walked back through time. They had a son, and then a few years after, they had a daughter which they named Lily.

  Chapter 2

  Mark surveyed a lavish gathering hall filled with approximately two-hundred or so dismembered corpses. He nearly wretched as the smell of the rotting bodies filled his nostrils, every wall or space on the floor was covered in dried deep blackish blood. It appeared to be one hell of a fight—however, a very one sided fight. There were men, women, all young looking, and their bodies were twisted and contorted in odd ways that looked nightmarish. Each body was cut in half in some form or manner. Entrails, organs and guts were piled about onto the floor and were strewn around the large room like some kind of macabre holiday decoration display.

  “What the shit happened in here?” Emily asked as she peeked past the glass entryway into the rather disgusting sight that lay beyond it. It looked like a nice enough place on the outside—a stone building that used to be a former church. Nice oak trees, large steps. They had passed through a narrow hallway with lots of framed art, paintings of people. Emily figured it must have been some kind of club or group. As they entered into a grand meeting room with stained glass windows, dark wooden walls and long elaborate tables…that was when all the prettiness of the place turned into grotesque disgust. “Someone turned all these poor Mortals into nasty bits.”

  “They’re not Mortals,” William said as he gestured towards the large mess and took a step forward. A pile of innards were hung above the entryway and the floor cracked softly beneath his foot as he stepped into a pile of dried blood. “I can feel
…birth dates for every single one of these people. These are all Perpetuals.”

  “Guess the poor fuckers will all sleep it off then,” Emily added as she ducked beneath the odd decoration above the door and followed William.

  “I got the call from Cain that he believes this happened quite some time ago,” Mark said as he attempted to compose himself and follow the others into the room of immense violent mess. “These Perpetuals should all be awake by now…”

  A swift breeze filled the room as a man dressed in a black and silver hooded robe projected beside Mark. He bowed to the group and then turned his attention to the mess at hand.

  William, unable to control himself, ran up to the man and punched him squarely in the jaw, sending him to the ground.

  “Captain Dickson,” Cain spoke as he rubbed his jaw with his hand and wiped a bit of fresh blood away from his split lower lip. “I do believe that was justified, however we do have a fair bit of a mystery to solve at hand.”

  “Sorry,” William said quietly as he rubbed his knuckles. He felt a little bad about it—but not too much. The man had gotten him his job back, quickly—and had given him a seat on the council. However, he still did not like Cain very much. After all, he was very much responsible for the death of a girl he once cared deeply for.

  “Sorry for what?” Emily said as she laughed. “That was awesome…nice new dress by the way, fancy.”

  “Ah,” Cain said as he nodded to Emily and placed a finger against the intricate silver and black woven fabric. “I worried that not another existed, but I managed to track down one at a museum. I do feel slightly bad that they will notice a priceless artifact missing—but I do need it to do my duty. Please do not burn this one.”

  “Don’t worry…” Emily muttered as she remembered back to the last time she burnt away Cain’s black and silver cloak. “The sight of naked burnt old man isn’t something I want to see again, you’re safe, fancy. Why don’t you reset yourself—why stay old and bald and…all of that?”