Dark Winter (13 page)

Alix poked his arm through a hole to the side of the door. Sporting a wide grin, he opened the door.

In the night sky, the shadow of Alix looked huge. I imagined that the bears that sometimes roamed the woods, miles away from here, would look similar to him.

I was tall, for a girl, but still much shorter than Alix. If it came to blows, I doubted I stop Alix doing whatever he wanted to do to.

“Alix! You get back here now! I’m not even kidding!” shouted Troy.

He started to run Rosewinter but Toril held him back. She shook her head.

“What the- Toril! Let go, will you?”

“No. No, damn you, wait!” Toril kept a vice-like grip on Troy’s arm. “It’s not safe. I’m not sure why, but it just isn’t safe. You’ll just have to trust me on this.”

“But Rom –”

“-will be fine. I can’t say the same for Alix.”

Alix stood just inches from my bedroom door. I had no control over his thoughts. He seemed cold, calculating and – if I stopped to think for just a moment, he was not himself. Alix was a joker, but to do something like this, no, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The prankster we all knew had been replaced by something much more sinister.

Jacinta looked troubled. Toril and Beth asked her to calm down, that Alix was a big boy and would probably be alright.
Probably.

“He’ll come out in a minute,” said Toril, through chattering teeth. “At least, he’d better. I’m going home otherwise.”

Jacinta had a very strange look on her face. With her white hair and blue yes, perhaps this was not unusual. Toril just had to know.

“You look spooked, Jay. What’s bothering you?”

Jacinta looked around with her eyes. “I’m not sure this is the place.”

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Toril. “Of course it is. There is only one wood-cabin in the area, and this is it. Look!”

Toril handed Jacinta a piece of paper. It was an internet print-out, and talked about the wood house that had been built on haunted grounds.

“Then there must be some mistake,” said Jacinta, “ because in the picture there are no trees. Look at these huge oaks, either side of the house. They’ve been here maybe a hundred years, if not more. This is not the same place. Maybe there’s another one, though there’s no way to get to it from here.”

“Give me that,” said Toril. Looking at it, she could not understand.

“
Another
wood-cabin? There;s rumours about such a place in the eastern parts of the Forest. But I was
certain
this was the one. Is this other place for real? And who lives there?”

Troy and the girls looked around, perplexed. Save for the route which they came by the wood house, all other routes looked pretty much impassable. The forest was very dense from this point onwards.

On the other side of the forest, there was indeed another wood-cabin. There were no lights on, but there was someone inside. The moon shone an accusatory light through the window onto the blade of an axe, which was propped up against the southern wall of the building. This was a wood-cabin which had inexplicably escaped Toril’s research, who was a stickler for detail. Inside, a lone figure gestured wildly, and in my house, Alix copied the gestures precisely, move-for-move.

He was moving towards me, then turned abruptly towards my dresser. “Well then, Rah-me-leeee, what have you got hidden here?”

My powers weren’t anything like Nan’s had been. I could not make the drawer open, and have the Mirror fly into my safekeeping. I could not keep it closed either, because if Alix, with his strong, windmill-like arms decided to open it, how could I stop him?

Then, the answer came to me. Because I had been living on my own for the past two days, there had been no need to wear my lace gloves. I could not hurt anyone because there was no-one to interact with. Old zombie-girl hardly qualified as an interaction for me.

But I couldn’t let Alix take the Mirror, even if he was being forced to do something against his will. I doubted that whatever evil that had drove him to break into my abode could use it, after all, Nan said once it had been bequeathed to another person – me, in this case, that the Mirror would leave a sort of imprint. I have the Mark on my hands, after all.

I
could hold the Mirror – but no-one else could, at least, not whilst I was alive, I was reasonably sure of that. Nan must have known her time was coming to an end, because soon after the bequeathal, she passed away.

Keeping my hands ungloved, I rose up from the bed, as Alix unlocked the draw that contained the Mirror. His eyes were only on that, he ignored me completely.

The answer came to me so simply. I knew exactly what I would have to do.

I would have to kill him.

The Mirror of Souls

Almost three years had passed since Nan gave me the Mirror, and now, she was no longer with us. I never forgot her, and I often think about her, and wonder what she would be thinking about me.

I remember how freaked out I was when Nan first gave me the innocent looking mirror. Something about it just didn’t feel right for me, and yet, in all the years I knew her, Nan had never hurt me. In fact, I can’t recall me ever having a single crossed word with her. Perhaps, when someone has passed over, you forget all the negative things about them.

Once the Mirror had been passed to me, I put it in my drawer, locked it away and except for checking it on occasion, I chose to pretty much forget about it. I never really believed that it contained souls, though to not believe anything my Nan said felt like a betrayal.

“You still don’t believe me, do you?” said Nan, one time.

“I…I really don’t know, Nan.”

“Well then,” said Nan stiffly,  “what you believe or don’t believe is of no consequence to me. But it may well turn out to be a major consequence for you. For everyone. Think about others for once, will you?”

That hurt.
I was no heroine, and I wished she had never given me the Mirror, no matter what her reasons were for doing so. In the last year of her life, the closeness that Nan and I experienced, had wavered somewhat.

We had one more frank conversation before she died.

“You want to ask me, don’t you? So why don’t you?” said Nan, matter-of-factly.

Oh yes. I wanted to ask many things. I wanted to ask why she had given me the Mirror. Why her hair had gone snow white, and how her face went from quite smooth to full of wrinkles. I wanted to ask her why as, the markings on my hands and wrists got deeper and longer in colour, hers had faded.

Most of all I wanted to know what was in my future. So I started with that.

“Nan, you said that I had to have the Mirror because you had seen the future. Does something bad happen to me, to you, to all of us?”

“If I told you, in full detail, what was to happen in the future, would you believe me? The truth now, Milly.”

No, I wouldn’t. Mum says you can’t remember how many pills you took today. How could I rely on anything you say? And yet…I have to ask, I have to know.

“Perhaps you can’t tell me, Nan. But ever since you gave me that Mirror, you’ve…you’ve changed a lot. You don’t look well.”

“That’s not important, Milly. The point is, how are you feeling? Good? Strong? Kicking harder than Bruce Lee ever did, I hope.”

I thought about that for a moment. The usual colds, flu, head pains, palpitations were a distant memory to me. I felt fantastic, if I was being honest. But my confused state, that was at its peak.

“Kung Fu is fine, and I do feel good Nan. But I would trade it all to see you well again.”

“Everyone dies, Milly. Nothing you can do to change that.”

I started to cry.

“I wish,” I said, brushing away tears with my sleeve, “I wish I had spent more time with you.”

“No need. A young bee needs a nice flower, not an old prune.”

“You’re not old, Nan.”

“But I am older than you thought I was.”

Yes. I really hated that. Time was catching up on Nan. Then, it kind of made sense.

“Did you give me the Mirror because I’m young? Are you…well, to put it bluntly…too old to use it?”

Nan gave me the most curious look. She wasn’t a bit offended that I had said she was too old. Of course, I didn’t mean any offence to her. I loved her. I was going to miss her.

“Use it? Whatever do you mean, use it?”

“Does the Mirror have powers we can use?”

Nan smiled. “Do you think it does?”

I punched her ever so gently on the arm. “Come on, Nan. I’m supposed to be asking the questions here.”

“So ask me the right questions then.”

I repeated my last question. “Nan, does the Mirror have powers that we can use?”

“Yes it does.”

“What are they, and how do we use them?”

“It’s different for everyone, and it will be so for you. Right now, you have the opposite problem. You’re too young.”

“So why didn’t you give the Mirror to Mum?”

“Aha!” said Nan brightly. “Now you are asking the right questions. Milly, your mother is a good egg. She’s smart, bright, beautiful, intelligent. But she was not chosen by the Mirror. The Mirror chose you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not for us to understand. Who knows, your mother may have used the Mirror by now, and caused the end of us all.”

I really didn’t believe that.

“I told you before, young lady, it doesn’t matter what you believe.”

I gasped out loud, barely covering my scream with a hand over my mouth.

“You know what I’m thinking?”

“Sometimes, Milly. Sometimes I can read people’s thoughts.”

“So that’s your gift, then. Wow!” I said. I sat there, on my bed, simply astonished.

“A gift? A curse? What’s the difference, really? When I die, that will be one gift I know will pass to you. It’s how you use the gift, Milly, that’s all that matters. Now, have you convinced your parents to let you stay at Rosewinter next summer?”

“I have. Now come on Nan, tell me everything you know about the Mirror.”

“It doesn’t work like that. You have to ask the right questions.”

“Will you stop being so cryptic? If anything happened to you, I have no one to guide me on this.”

“I didn’t have anyone to guide me either. But to tell you all I know about the Mirror, well, that could take some time.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Nan. Now I convinced Mum and Dad to let me stay at Rosewinter at the tail end of their break. You’ve got to hold up your end of the bargain.”

“That seems only fair,” said Nan.

Nan recounted the story in full.

“I was just twelve years old when the Mirror came into my possession. I was playing in the Forest, well, you could in those days, and I had my friend Dana with me. We’d roam for quite a way, much further than perhaps you’ve ever been, and each day, Dana and I would dare each other to go just that little bit further away from home.”

Nan had a tendency to ramble, but the key points were always kept in her story. Who knew how many more conversations we could have like this? As much as I wanted to say
Get to the point, Nan
I fought saying it and thinking it, just in case she could recount the story and read my mind too.

“One day, we ventured out a bit too far. To the East, I know that now. The Forest sprawled for as far as your eyes could see. Anyway, we must have travelled a fair few miles, and we thought there would be no end to the trees in front of us until suddenly, a clearing was before us.

“Right in front of us was a wood-cabin, similar in size to Rosewinter, except it was painted dark red, and strange symbols were painted on the walls outside.  Though we didn’t know it yet, the same strange markings were on the floor inside.”

Toril Withers would know all about this,
thought Romilly.
She’s into that kind of thing.

Nan continued.

“Well. It was quite a find as you might imagine. We were scared, for sure I’ll admit that, but having travelled so far to find this place, even though we weren’t looking for it, was exciting, you know? “

“There was no-one inside, so we thought we’d take a look for ourselves. What could be the harm? I was game, but Dana – she really didn’t want to go inside, so I called her a scaredy-cat. Dana seemed upset by the place, but I thought she was upset by the name calling. I grabbed her hand to reassure her, and we went inside.”

“Dana saw the danger before I did. I was marvelling at all the strange markings on the floor. Dana shouted at me not to step within the circle that had been drawn. I laughed at her, but soon listened to her as well. Then I saw what was upsetting her. There was a huge axe, bigger than both of us put together, standing in the corner of the main room. It had blood on it, which looked like it had barely dried. On another side of the room, there was an animal’s head, of a moose if I remember rightly, stacked onto the wall. It seemed to be looking at us as we stepped, ever so slowly and quietly around the place.”

“In the next room, there was nothing save for a small dressing table. The room didn’t even have a window. Dana walked towards it, like she was in a trance. I wish I had been able to stop her.”

“She opened the drawer in the middle of the dressing table. The wood was in decay, and splintered all too easily. Inside the drawer, was a simple looking mirror. It was placed face down, and Dana picked it up, and smiled.”

“I’ve found something! It’s beautiful!” Dana exclaimed with delight.

“I ran to the room where she was, having been distracted by the pentagrams on the floor. I told Dana not to touch anything, because I didn’t believe there was anything beautiful in this place, and also, that it really was time to be going.”

“Dana told me that I was wrong, and that she had found this beautiful mirror. I found her, holding the mirror in her hand, and looking rather curiously at it. You could say, it was the same look you had when I first gave you the Mirror.”

Now I was really scared. I really wished this was one of my Nan’s stories, but this one was the most truthful one of all.

“Dana said to me, “It’s really strange, this….there’s no reflection of me at all.”

She turned the Mirror one way, then the other. “Nothing!” she said. “Not a thing!”

Oh no,
I thought.
Here it comes.

“I told Dana to put the mirror down, but she didn’t want to. Now I knew that taking anything that didn’t belong to you meant that you did pay a price. Perhaps not today, but soon. It always catches up with you. Remember that too, Milly.”

Dana kept staring at the Mirror. Her wide, weird smile changed into fear as her eyes bulged in her head so hard that I could see veins protruding from her forehead. On her arms, deep markings were forming, and her hand seemed fused to the Mirror for a moment.

She started to scream, and turned the Mirror at an angle so I could see what she could finally see. It was showing a reflection of herself, not her true self, but some crazed, demonic version. The white dress she wore was stained with blood stained in the reflection, and I saw something leave her body and enter the Mirror. The colour drained from her face, and she shook violently.

I tried to take the Mirror from her grasp but it was impossible.

She shouted at me in the most unearthly voice I had ever heard, and then, in the next moment, was back to her normal self.

“Dana, what’s the matter with you?”

“Dana told me she didn’t like this place at all, and not only should we walk now, but we should run, and not stop until we were home.
Run like the Devil was behind us,
she said
.
Trying to sound calm when I was anything but, I agreed we would go, but she should put the Mirror down.

“At this, Dana became very agitated. She wanted to go, and I could tell in her eyes that she wanted to leave the Mirror down from where she had gotten it, But she was unable to.”