Dark Winter: Trilogy

by Hennessy, John

  Lunabelle grabbed Toril’s hand, forced it flat onto the table, and before she could do anything, drove a knife through the back of her hand.

  Toril screamed out in pain, and the blood gushed from the wound.

  “Be still, dear,” said Lunabelle, who was still smiling, and burned a look deep into Toril’s eyes. She withdrew the knife, and whilst Toril cradled her hand, Lunabelle gave the knife to the man, who had suddenly reappeared, then disappeared from view once more.

  “W-what? W-why? Why did you do that?” said Toril.

  “Impostors. We get a lot of them here. D’s folk, I am sure you know who I mean.We have to know that you are, who you say you are.”

  “It’s you who say you know who I am! What the f-”

  “No, child,” said Lunabelle. “We’ll have no profanity here. Denzel? Are we good?”

  “Yeah,” said Denzel. “We good. Lucky for her. We. Good.”

  “What’s good?” said Toril.

  “It seems you are who you’re supposed to be. I’m sorry about that Toril. Forgive me?”

  The intense, scary smile had been replaced by a far more kindly one.

  “Do many…impostors come to the Circle?”

  “More often than we would like. Please understand Toril, that your mother took you away from us soon after you were born.”

  “So…the blood test…how do you really know it’s me?”

  “Let me do this first,” said Lunabelle. Taking her hand again, Lunabelle waved a hand over the wound, and the skin closed up, right before Toril’s eyes.

  “Better?”

  “Much,” said Toril. “But I’ve never seen my own blood, apart from the time of month and all that.”

  “We have instruments that can puncture one who has been covered in the oil of the dillfern, as you were. I am sorry, but I just had to do that. Come along, dear,” said Lunabelle. “The Book will show you what you need to know.”

  If the answers to the questions in Toril’s mind lay anywhere, she was convinced it was here, at the headquarters of the Circle, that she would find them.

  The Ghostly Visitor

  “Beth, this is a stupid idea,” I said. “He’s been convicted. Just let it go, will you?”

  “I’m eighteen. I know more than I did when I was younger. That question has never been resolved, and I need it to be. You can’t stop me going to see him.”

  “Maybe I can’t stop you, but I’m still raising my objections.”

  “Noted. Now. Are you coming?”

  Of all the things I wanted to do with my Saturdays, visiting Gorswood Jail would be close to, if not at, the bottom of the list. Michael Dean, in Beth’s view, had been wrongly imprisoned for the murder of her parents. He had been in jail long enough now that he was allowed visitors.

  Beth had a dual agenda as well. She wanted to keep me busy, and keep me close. She was worried about me. She was always worried about me, or worried about something. She would sometimes wipe my face when I had forgotten to wash it. Maybe I hadn’t forgotten, but I was so affected by the demon, even if it lay dormant within me, that things like washing my face didn’t seem to matter, in the general scheme of things.

  She produced a face wipe from her handbag, and rubbed it gently over my skin. I felt better, but the Demon quietly mocked me.

  No matter, Romilly. I’ll turn your skin inside out. The world will know your ugliness. They’ll see it, and find you revolting. Your victory was a hollow one. You belong to me now.

  “Let me do your eyes,” said Beth. “Be still, will you, Milly? For God’s sake. Haven’t you looked in a mirror lately?”

  That shook me out of it.

  “Jesus, Beth. How can you say that?”

  I hadn’t looked in any mirror, ones that kept evil at bay, or otherwise, for a long time. By any yardstick. I looked like hell.

  “Oh. I’m…..sorry, Milly. I am real ditz sometimes.”

  Beth knew she said things in the spur of the moment. She didn’t mean it, of course, but it was in bad taste, really. I didn’t bite back, and just accepted the apology.

  “I just want us to look presentable, that’s all,” said Beth.

  Despite wearing a concerned look on her face, Beth looked presentable. Very much so. Her red hair had grown longer, way past her shoulders, but it bounced gently around her when she walked. She looked gorgeous. She shouldn’t be going to the jail looking that good, with me bringing her down.

  I resolved to let her do my make-up, and about twenty minutes later, she said, “We’re done.”

  She did not show me the results in her mirror. That was for the best.

  Beth explained to me why we were going. A man called James Gordon had been imprisoned for a burglary. Apparently, he knew the killer or killers of Beth’s parents. Word had it that he was going to tell all this to Michael Dean. It might do some good, as Michael Dean was due for a parole hearing within a year.

  I still had reservations about what good it would do, but Beth could not be deterred.

  “There’s two wrongs we need to put right, Milly,” and with that, we set out for the jail.

  ***

  Michael Dean knew the O’Neill family well. He also knew Beth well, and she was stunned when he was arrested in connection with her parents’ death. She was in no doubt he was innocent, but what was also in no doubt was the gravity of the situation Michael Dean found himself in. He was given a life sentence, with little chance of parole.

  Unbeknown to Beth, the sentence on Michael Dean had hardened somewhat since his incarceration. He had accepted his fate, and had kept himself to himself pretty much for the first year or so. Later, he would start fights for no apparent reason, and was heard muttering to himself by prisoners and the guards.

  Sometimes, the guards would pass his cell and find himself in deep conversation with someone who wasn’t there, and yet, when they would speak to him, he would just continue, ignoring them completely.

  “Just leave him,” the other guards would say. “Anyone would go mad, considering what he did.”

  One day, whilst the guards were mocking him, he stopped the conversation abruptly, and stood up, turning to look at the guards through the bars of his cell.

  “Get back, 2209,” said the guard, whilst withdrawing his baton at the same time. “I won’t tell you a second time.”

  Michael Dean started to shake violently and point and the guard. “Can’t you see? You’re dead! You’re all fucking dead!! She’ll rip your heart from your chest and laugh at you while you die. You’ll see. You will see.”

  Of course, they could not see what Michael Dean believed he was seeing. Growing up in Gorswood, he had heard of the legend of Dana. But he’d never seen her. Not until he heard the voices in his head. Not so much a voice, but the laugh of a child. Not a playful laugh. A mocking laugh. A crazed, demonic laugh. It was this sound that filled his head before he started a number of fights in the prison canteen.

  This seemed an odd turn of events, given that, from the guards’ point of view, he had been a model prisoner.

  “Just calm down, your invisible friend isn’t here, and can’t harm us,” ordered the guard.

  Sometimes, he would see her. Not fully, not at first. But he would see pools of blood form on the cell room floor, and droplets of blood fall from the ceiling onto his bed clothes.

  In the most unholy of hours, 3:03am, he would wake from a deep sleep, only to see her wand make a clinking sound as it hit each bar of his cell door. Other times, he would start coughing violently, and blonde hair would be expelled from his mouth, clotted with blood. Michael Dean had dark brown hair. There was no way this hair belonged to him.

  It just wouldn’t be her style to appear so that he could see her in full. After all, he knew of the legend. If you see her, you die. Maybe not that day, maybe not even a week or a year later. But you are going to be a victim of Dana Cullen. There was no escape from that.

  It would be incorrect to say that Michael Dean slept at night. The images
of Dana in the haze of 3am was enough. Of course, she could appear at any time, and often did.

  There was a period of three nights when Dana did not appear. Michael Dean had been visiting the prison chaplain, Fr Brannigan, and confessed his sins. It wasn’t related to the murders of Beth O’Neill’s parents.

  Still, he was thankful for small mercies. “Maybe the little bitch is too busy burning in hell to visit me these days.”

  He lay on his side, looking outwards at the bars of his cell. While he looked, a chill came over the room. The light outside, such as it was, dimmed. He shivered in the pseudo-darkness.

  “Not her, not her again, Jesus, no…” said Michael, in a broken voice.

  He could make out a shape, the shape of a man. A man, maybe no more than 5’6” in height. From the outline of his face, he looked older than his years, which, from his build, suggested he was in his mid-fifties.

  This was not like Dana. When Dana Cullen appeared, it was subliminal, playful even, for a demon ghost. This man’s image filled the entire cell, and Michael Dean’s teeth chattered under his single bed-sheet.

  Then, he could hear something. It was so loud, he was sure that everyone could hear it. It was like…..like some weapon, that was making a scraping sound.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s him. Diab-”

  No. He would not finish that word. It best remained in myth, in legend, in the darkness from which it was spawned. It was one which teenagers spouted in conversation all too easily, but adults knew better, didn’t they?

  Michael Dean had been just twenty-four years old when he found himself incarcerated at Gorswood Prison. Now he was thirty, he felt his youth slipping away. Beth O’Neill knew he was innocent. She was the only one who thought so. The only one who could perhaps prove his innocence.

  ‘Hello. That’s all I said’, thought Michael. ‘Hell-fucking-O.’

  It was enough to convict him, as he was the last person alive seen talking to the O’Neills.

  “Hello, Michael,” said the figure. “Hello.”

  Michael shut his eyes.

  “Oh no, Michael, it’s better that you see this. Forgive my insensitivity. I shouldn’t have used the word ‘hello’.”

  Michael half-opened his left eye. The cell was still covered in that hazy kind of half-light, but the chill was worsening.

  “It will stop when I move away from your cell. I died in Gorswood Forest, you see. You carry the chill over from the body when it lies in the snow. You don’t have the guts to take your own life, Michael, but see over there? It’s happening right now.”

  Michael looked directly across from his cell. James Gordon, the newest inmate of the jail was sleeping. The next image would live with Michael Dean for the rest of his life.

  The figure got up from his bed. With his eyes still shut, he walked up to the bars of his cell. Keeping his eyes closed, he kept saying a word over and over again.

  Michael. Michael. Michael.

  Keeping his eyes closed, his mouth turned into a huge grin. In the darkness, Michael could see a huge grin from the young man, who was no more than eighteen years old. The prison officers only brought him in yesterday. The canteen gossip said he was in on a charge of burglary, and likely to be released in three months. No biggie then.

  Michael had the same feeling in the pit of his stomach when the guilty verdict had been given in the court, even though this time, the experience was much more surreal.

  The eyes closed shut, along with the wide grin unsettled him, for no-one smiled in these kind of places.

  He could not take his eyes off him though, even when the sound of his name resonated in Michael’s head.

  There was only one other person smiling in the jail. The figure that shared Michael’s cell.

  The grin became wider as the young eighteen year old slashed his own throat with a razor blade.

  “Jesus! Jesus….oh my God! What the fuck.” shrilled Michael. “I never knew who he was.”

  “Then I’ll tell you,” said the figure. “He was my latest victim. I wasn’t sure of the benefits of being dead until now. Every cloud has a silver lining. Or sometimes, silver fangs. ”

  “Who are you?”

  “Ah yes. I never introduced myself, did I?” he said. The figure took steps towards Michael. He could make out that part of the man’s head was missing….no…it was more that part of his skull was exposed. He could see part of the man’s brain, and a damaged eye socket. A crazed, deranged look from the other eyeball. Fingernails that were long enough to belong to a woman. But the fingers were blackened and the skin looked like leather that had been exposed to the sun for far too long. It seemed to Michael that with each step, the sound was more like the scraping of an axe.

  “My name is Don Curie.”

  ***

  Beth had been far too young to visit Michael Dean in prison. That was six years ago, but she was older now, and although she wanted to do other things with her time, part of her recovery was seeing the man who was not guilty for her parents death.

  I didn’t want to go. I hate prisons. Doesn’t everyone? Yet I wanted to support Beth. We needed each other. I disagreed with her on this, but I had to be a friend. So we found ourselves on the way to the jail.

  On entering the two hundred-year-old prison, the prison officer looked at us both.

  “You two girls don’t look like you belong here.”

  “We don’t,” I said crisply. “We’ve come to see someone.”

  “Michael Dean,” said Beth.

  “Well, you should have come yesterday then,” said the prison officer. “They’re turning over his cell right about now.”

  “Why?” we both asked at the same time.

  “He is the prime suspect in a murder. He made some poor kid slit his own throat. Don’t ask me how, but when the kid was breathing his last, he said ‘Michael Dean made me do it.’ ”

  “Dean has his own cell, doesn’t he?” said Beth. “How could he have killed anyone?”

  The prison officer nodded, before adding, “Look Miss, I don’t know, okay? But I do know you can’t see him today.”

  While Beth argued with the prison officer, I felt the air was thick with death. Maybe that is not uncommon for a prison as old as this. Many lifers must have spent out their days here.

  Why would a young offender who would have been released in a few months killed himself?

  Just a few words filled my head. But it was enough to know the truth.

  ‘I’m a rat, Romilly.’

  Beth was getting nowhere.

  I grabbed her by the wrist. “Beth, we have to go. We can do no good here today.”

  I didn’t want to tell her, but somehow – impossible – but somehow – Don Curie was back. Being dead, he was going to be more difficult to deal with than ever.

  ***

  “The truth, Dean, or you’re never getting out of here. Add to that you’ll be in solitary for a month. Even scum like you wouldn’t want to end up in the hole.”

  Michael Dean sat holding his head in his hands. “I didn’t do anything, I swear.”

  “You also swore, on oath, in court, that you didn’t kill Rosemary and Conan O’Neill,” said the prison offer. “Yet three people now lie dead. How many more are going to die because of you, Dean?”

  Michael Dean knew how it would sound. ‘A ghost visited me, and killed a man in my name’. Why? Curie, even in death, had his reasons.

  ‘You’re going to do something for me, Michael,’ said Curie. ‘Let’s just say, there’s no point in refusing.’

  There was no point in telling, either. They could send him to Gorswood Mental Hospital if it was ruled that he was mentally insane.

  Michael decided to stay mute.

  That also meant he was sent to solitary confinement.

  Beth and I would have to wait at least one month before attempting to see him again.

  ***

  Michael Dean had never been taken down to solitary confinement before, but he had heard things
about it. Some of the prisoners said they were not fed. Others said that the prison officers released gas into the cell that caused hallucinations, or made hallucinations prisoners were already having, much worse.

  In other cases, prisoners self-harmed to get released from the cell. One prisoner banged his skull repeatedly against the wall, causing major head trauma. Another ate his own fingers down to the stumps because the voices in his head told him to.