Dark Winter (19 page)

“It’s okay, Romilly. He’s not going to tell me, I accept that now. But I will get justice for my parents.”

“There’s no point using that Mirror of yours,” laughed Curie. His words had slowed somewhat, whilst the blood continued to pour from the gash above his eye. “Surprised I know about that? Well, it won’t work on me. That demon you released from the Mirror protects me.”

So far, Beth hadn’t asked me for the Mirror. I then found I could read some of her thoughts.

It’s okay, Milly. I know you won’t give me the Mirror. Even if Curie was to kill me, you won’t give me the Mirror. I have another plan.

Beth reached into her bag once more.

“I doubt that demon can protect you from this,” said Beth, holding in front of Curie a
White Roses for Dana
doll. Where the hell did she get that?

She ignored my thoughts.

“
Pretty pretty Dana, come kill Don Curie for us.”

“Beth! No! You’ve gone too far!” I said, but it was too late.

Curie looked non-plussed. “Well, this is all very fascinating. Some old wives tale, designed to shake me up, right? Please, unbind my hands, so I can at least fight her on my own. Be merciful.
Please
.”

We waited what seemed like an age. Me, staring at Curie. Beth, holding up the Dana doll in front of him. I hated how that doll’s left eye rolled around in its socket. I didn’t much care for the crack running down her left cheek either. Back at his desk, Curie glared at us through his good eye, half-smiling.

Still nothing.

And then…something. I could hear Beth’s thoughts! She was wondering where the real Dana was. She thought that Toril had played a cruel trick on her. Perhaps there was no way to summon the ghost girl after all. All the same, Toril had seemed very sure about it, to the point that even she would not play that game at all. Maybe the whole ouijia board experience had put her off messing around with the occult for good.

Whilst I was trying to make sense of these thoughts in my head, Curie lunged forward in his chair. He was still tied, and the chair lurched awkwardly to the side, and he laughed.

He banged his head on the desk, and the force opened up a bigger hole wound than the one already over his eye.

The chair collapsed to the floor, but still, Curie couldn’t move.

He was badly hurt, and he knew it. He couldn’t resist mocking us though.

“Leave me to die here, girls. The police will find your fingerprints. I’ll see you in hell, Beth O’Neill and Romilly Winter. I’ll see-”

The girls screamed.

The ghostly image of Dana appeared behind Curie, and in her hand was a long knife with a serrated edge.

She had stuck it into the back of Curie, near the nape of his neck, and dragged it downwards. She was laughing as she did it.

Beth and I ran out of Curie’s office, resisting the urge to look back, and see if Dana was behind us.

I hoped to God and all that is good that Dana wouldn’t follow us. We ran so hard out of there, that our feet did not touch the ground.

Losing
H
e
r
Religion

Beth couldn’t go back to her home straight away. Her grandparents would have a heart attack if they saw her now. Her hands were covered in blood, and she was shrieking and talking incoherently, trying to come to terms with what had happened.

I was trying to understand what had just happened too. I was annoyed at Beth for not telling me she had the Dana doll. I was annoyed at Toril, who must have given it to her. I was annoyed with Nan, for not telling me that Dana’s spirit had survived and had somehow been embodied in this doll. Finally, I was annoyed with myself, for giving it to Toril in the first place.

I never actually expected the ghost of Dana to appear, much less bring Curie to a bloody end. I’m pretty sure that Beth, for all her big talk, didn’t bet on her appearance either. But here we are.

I cleaned Beth up, and got ourselves a cup of tea. It was all I could do to normalise the situation.

We waited for the police to come and take us away. There would be no more running from this.

             
                          
 
              *                            *                            *

An hour passed. Two. Three. Beth and I sat in silence. Curie had been right about me, because now, I was fully mute. I really had nothing to say.

Finally, Beth spoke.

“Well, whatever else, he can’t hurt any more people. I’m glad he’s dead, Milly. I’m glad you were there too. We know he is dead. I didn’t imagine it with my own eyes.”

I slowly nodded in agreement. Curie was a bad seed, and I was pretty certain he was in Hell now. I was becoming less of an atheist all the time.

“Why do you think the police haven’t come? They would have found the body by now, and taken prints. It wouldn’t take long to link it back to us.”

“Beth, why didn’t you tell me you were going to summon the spirit of that doll? I wouldn’t have given it to Toril if that was the case. I’m so pissed at her for giving it to you.”

“She didn’t give it to me, I took it from her. I also know what I did wasn’t cool. But I honestly didn’t think it would work. But I’m glad it did. We didn’t pull the trigger even though he wanted us to. This whole Dana situation….it was probably meant to work out like this.”

I must have looked at Beth a very strange way. She spoke faster in case I interrupted her.

“Think about it, Milly. He knew the game was up. He wanted us to stop him, but he wanted us to pay as well. You often hear this about serial killers and their abusive ways. In the end, they want to be stopped, because if someone doesn’t stop them, it will just go on and on. We are not to blame here, we’re really not.”

That was part of it, for sure. We didn’t check the drawer, so we have no way of knowing if he had a real gun in there or not. If he did, he would have known that Beth was not prodding a real firearm into his back. If he didn’t, I still don’t think he would have fallen for it.

Beth was looking to justify her actions. But why do this when it wouldn’t bring her parents back?

I think the part about Curie wanting us to pay
was
true. That’s why he allowed himself to be bound, because then, the onus would have been on us to do something to him. Until Beth pulled her Dana stunt, I really thought we were just going to walk away.

Someone like Curie, even if he was responsible for the death of the O’Neills, would never give that information up. It still nagged at me that he had an alibi for that. It ate away at Beth, that she still truly didn’t know who killed her parents. Curie’s offensive taunts didn’t mean he was guilty.

“You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you Milly? He had to be stopped.”

I knew what Beth was talking about, but proving the years of abuse Curie had inflicted on the children at Gorswood High would be impossible now.

“Well, he sure has been put a stop to now,” I said lamely.

A shrill tone broke the silence of the house. Beth stood up to answer her phone.

“Hello? Oh, hi!”

Beth mouthed the words
It’s Toril,
to me.

“I told her that it’s all done, Curie won’t be hurting anyone else anymore, and that I’ll be bringing the doll over tomorrow. She’s not as upset about the doll as you were.”

Given what had happened today, how could Beth be so relaxed?

“Toril was really surprised that the doll thing worked. But I bet Curie was the most surprised of all! Ha!”

We waited another hour for the police to arrive, but they never did.

Beth stood up, munched down a doughnut, and wiped the sugar from her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Milly, something’s not right about this. We have to go back.”

             
                            *                            *                            *

I didn’t agree with Beth, but she was adamant. She insisted that she needed to know for sure, that he was dead. I reminded her that as we left, Dana was yanking the intestines out of Curie’s stomach and exiting them via his back.
He was dead
. Of course he was.

She had yanked them out with such force that Curie’s blood had almost covered her entire dress.

No one –
no-one,
could have survived that. After all, we had left him to his fate, hadn’t we? Did he really deserve to die like that? I knew nothing of the crimes Curie was said by Beth to have committed. But she was sure, and that was enough. Surely what Dana did was enough to kill him too?

Beth wouldn’t hear of it.

She stomped around the room, chastising me for not wanting to go back. I tried to explain that we would have been seen going into seeing Curie. Our fingerprints would be everywhere. The phone conversation with Toril could be accessed if needed.

“There’s a trail, Beth, and it does lead back to us.”

“So, why aren’t they here? The police. If Curie’s dead, they should be here. And if he is still alive, he would be here. Those are the only two possibilities, Romilly.”

“So why not wait for the police come to us, Beth? If we leave it long enough, they’ll come.”

Of course, I already knew the answer to that. Beth simply didn’t believe Curie was really dead. I doubt she would be convinced if he was taken out to the centre of town, and hung, drawn and quartered, like how they executed people in medieval times.

“You’re scared, Romilly. You’re scared. But what we have done today, will save so many others, you’ll see. The sad thing is no-one will know. Even sadder? You don’t believe me now, but one day, you will. I for one will go to the police if they don’t arrive. I won’t involve you if you don’t want me to say anything.”

What planet was Beth on? I was
already
involved. Because of my actions, a man has died today. Nothing could ever change that, and I would have to live with it. Beth wasn’t interested in what the Mirror could or could not do, she just wanted revenge.

Beth had changed from saying the Lord’s Prayer every few hours to believing in something else entirely. Something satanic – and the thought of that did scare me. Beth was right about that.

I couldn’t stop her going to the police, but wondered how long we could both evade the law.

Then there was Toril. That was a very brief phone call. Toril had given Beth the doll. I didn’t believe Beth just took it without asking. I wanted to wring Toril’s neck, and I promised myself that the next time I saw her, that’s exactly what I would do.

“I’m scared, Beth, too right I am. I’m scared because of how you are behaving. This….isn’t you.”

“I’m happy to go to prison, if it stops that old devil from harming anyone else. You should be happy too.”

Beth was absolutely convinced she had done the right thing.

Just then, there was a knock on the door. My heart beat so hard I thought it was going to burst. Beth smiled the weirdest of smiles, and said to me, “I’m so glad he’s dead, Milly. I can’t explain just how happy I am!”

Skipping down the stairs, she pulled the door open, fully expecting to see police officers waiting to take us away.

Instead, it was Toril Withers. I would get to wring her neck sooner than I thought.

                                          *                            *                            *

I wanted to follow Beth down the stairs, go and see Toril, and ask her what the hell she was thinking. But the room started to spin around me. Perhaps my racing heart had kicked off a severe palpitation. I couldn’t control how I was feeling, and tried to shout to the girls, but no words would come out.

I fell forward, out of the room, and found myself in Beth’s bathroom. My knees weakened, and I grabbed out at the wash basin attached to the wall. I pulled myself up slowly, looked into the mirror on the wall, and saw me looking back. This would not normally be an issue, after all, a reflection of yourself is what you would expect when looking into a mirror.

Yes, it
was
me, but I had the veins that were on my hands, all over my face. My eyeballs sat bulging from their sockets, and my hair, that was once a rich brown, clung limply and lifelessly to my face, darkened black with sweat…or something more gruesome.

The hands started to reach out towards me, grabbed my throat, and squeezed hard. I choked violently, and put my hands on the reflection’s cold, clammy arms.

Her arms –
my arms -
snapped off, and the entrails and bone stayed in my grip. The bits of veins and tissue and skin flapped wildly towards my throat, and I threw them into the bath. They made a nauseating, if satisfying, slop-slop sound as they slid down the wall of the bath, leaving bloody red marks above them.

The vision was gone, but soon replaced by another.

It was a flashback to earlier in the day. I could see Beth holding the doll in front of Curie, then summoning Dana, Curie smiling at us, and then Dana appearing behind him, slashing him with that pink wand of hers in one hand, and goring him with the knife with her other.

All of that, I remember. It happened.

But then, something else. As Dana hollowed out Curie’s guts, we stopped looking. But it was like I was watching a movie. I could now see what happened after Beth and I had turned and ran for our lives.

Dana was still hunched over Curie, and she let his head, which had been resting on her knees, fall to the floor. His pupils were still, his body, devoid of life.

Dana licked the blood off her wand and turned as if to disappear back to where-ever a demon like that returns to. She looked at Curie’s body one more time.

She sat down next to him once more, and yanked his head back, exposing his neck.

Dana leaned back, and opened her mouth wide.  Silver fangs protruded from her teeth, and she sank them into his neck, and with her signature mocking laugh, disappeared.

Curies eyes flashed open, and I was shocked so much by this new information, that I found myself back in the room, shaking uncontrollably.

Downstairs, I could hear Toril and Beth laughing heartily. I bet the laughing would stop once I told them what I saw.

Somehow, and for reasons I could not yet fathom, I knew that Curie was still alive, and he would kill us the next time we saw him.

             
                            *                            *                            *