Dark Winter: Trilogy

by Hennessy, John

  Troy spoke with total honesty.

  “She wears some kind of gloves to cover them up. When she puts them on, the markings disappear, making her appearance look normal. Now shouldn’t you be going back in there and seeing to her?”

  Good one, Troy.

  “My team will see to her, and she will be fine, once she’s had a lot of rest. The ribs will take a week to heal, but even then, her movement will be slow. After that, we think she can be discharged.”

  “Good,” said Troy, in the commanding tone I was used to hearing.

  “There is just one more thing,” said the doctor, in a tone not unlike Columbo.

  “Oh?” said Troy, who had gone to sit down, only to straighten back up again. The uneasiness in the doctor’s inquisitive statement made Troy stand like he had an ironing board inserted up his back.

  “There are deep cuts on her body, several lacerations on her stomach. We don’t wish to do invasive surgery on her abdomen, and we should not have to because her ribs will heal in time. But like the markings on her hands and arms, these cuts on her stomach seem to have been made on the inside.”

  Troy felt a bit nauseous at that statement. But he could not tell the doctor what he knew. Not the whole truth. Not this time.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone, or some thing, is trying to hurt her. I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

  The doctor’s tone had become much more sinister.

  “I took an oath to do no harm, Mr Jackson. As her friend, if you know something that can help her, shouldn’t you tell us?”

  Troy lost his commanding composure in an instant. He shrugged his shoulders, and his head bobbed forward, and he looked to the floor.

  “Then there is the loss of her two fingers. For all the world, they look like they were bitten off. Savaged off. There’s no skin left, save for around the knuckles, and there’s bits of bone protruding-”

  “Alright,” said Troy irritably. “That’s enough!”

  “I thought you would want to know the details, that’s all, Mr Jackson. We will tend to her, so all you have to do is relax.”

  Troy wanted to go into the room and stay with me, but the doctor wore an expression that said You are not going anywhere near her until you tell us the truth.

  The doctor gestured to Troy to sit down, and would you like a drink, to which Troy wanted to say yeah, a triple shot of Jack Daniel’s, but thought better of it.

  Troy knew one thing. I possessed a Demon inside of me. Or more accurately, the Demon possessed me. Not all the time, no. This Demon was clever. I mean, if he abused my body much more than he was doing, then he would attract the kind of attention the priests would be interested in. Exorcism? No. I didn’t need someone to save me. I needed to find the strength within to save myself.

  The biggest problem I had was that the Demon would hurt me if I refused to acknowledge it. When it first entered me, I thought I could ignore it. No. It won’t ever let me do that.

  There are nights where it squeezes my throat so tightly that I think I will breath my last. In Beth’s body, the demon was strong. Inside my own, it was even more dangerous. It enjoyed the power it had over me.

  I distract myself from thoughts of the demon to thoughts about Troy. I suppose Beth, Toril and I did not know what would happen to Troy when he went through the Mirror of Souls. We could make guesses, but that’s all they would be. Pure guesswork.

  I could not have known that the demon Dana would have been able to go there and back, without any apparent interference. Diabhal didn’t seem to be able to stop her, or much less care if he could. The Zeryth army was of even less consequence to Dana when she was in the void. She could feed on them, and as she grew stronger, Diabhal, apparently, grew weaker.

  Then there was Troy, at first, tricked into thinking she was Toril, and that Toril was alive.

  Then, the truth. At least, Dana’s version of the truth. The truth that Toril had perished when the Mirror of Souls was activated, the forest of Gorswood burning for miles around. The fires had encircled Toril and Beth, killing them both. Somehow, I had survived.

  “Because Romilly Winter never conquered her demons, Troy,” mocked Dana, when they were both in the void. “She succumbed to them.”

  Dana did not keep the pretence up for long. She revealed that she was a seventy-year old corpse in an eighteen-year old girl’s body.

  “And you will succumb to me,” ordered Dana.

  As he tried to gather his thoughts, Troy realised that he had made some terrible mistakes. But there was no way of knowing that this girl was not who she appeared to be. She looked exactly like Toril who, before the events in Gorswood, had been his girlfriend for three years. She even wore her pentacle. The blue one was the real one, the one that gave Toril some powers, and heightened her sense of ingenuity and cleverness. The red one was fake. Oh, it had been charmed by her mother, but for all intents and purposes, it was a fake.

  It was the blue one Toril had been wearing when she fought Dana. Dana had ripped it from her neck, and stolen her wand.

  It was so easy to convince Troy, because he really wanted to believe that the girl standing in front of him was Toril.

  That first night, if it was night in the void, they had made love passionately, violently. Troy was just overcome to see her again.

  “I thought….I didn’t know what to think,” said Troy. “I thought I’d lost you, lost everything.”

  Dana found she had something in common with Toril. She was utterly incapable of being sentimental.

  “Troy, do knock that off, will you? You talk like a girl sometimes.”

  Troy bit his lip. He wanted to say Only when it comes to you, Toril, but he thought better against it.

  Several nights of passion followed. On one occasion, Troy pushed Toril, or to be more exact, Dana, to the ground and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders.

  “Ow!” she screamed, whilst cradling her shoulder.

  “I thought you liked it rough,” said Troy.

  Before Troy could apologise, she drew her wand and pointed it at him. A wand he had seen before. A pink wand, stained with blood.

  “I do,” said Dana, her true appearance revealed, with blood pouring from her mouth, and the wound inflicted by the axe, visible in her shoulder. Apart from that, she maintained the body of an eighteen-year-old. “The question is how rough you will like it, when I’m through with you.”

  Dana, with strands of white-blonde hair amongst the full-bodied raven colour that was customary to Toril, marched purposely towards Troy. She looked beautiful, in a kind of way that would be appealing to most boys and especially to Troy.

  Dana had obviously merged the look and personality of Toril, but had retained the wholesomeness of me. That’s why it was so easy to convince Troy into believing that Toril was alive, at least, that’s what Dana wanted to convince him of, just before taking that small bit of solace from him.

  To complete the look, the strands of white blonde hair were a kind of mocking tribute to Jacinta, and Troy had fallen for it completely.

  Dana still didn’t like to be messed with. She liked to play games, so long as they were on her terms. Troy had been too rough, and she no longer wanted to play this game.

  Keeping the wand pointed at him, and speaking through bloodied teeth, Troy heard the words that Curie had heard before him.

  “You will service me.”

  “I will not,” said Troy, “but you will tell me what you are.”

  “I’m whatever you want me to be,” said Dana girlishly, but her stare was anything but girlish.

  “You are a demon,” snarled Troy.

  “Oh, does this mean you don’t want me anymore?” said Dana.

  “I want Toril!”

  “She’s dead, and what’s more, you caused it.”

  “Then I have no reason to live,” said Troy, remorsefully.

  “Ugh! Spoken like the little boy that you are. Sure you want to live,” said Dana pointedly. “F
rom now on, you service me.”

  “Repeating yourself doesn’t make it so.”

  “Actually, it does,” said Dana confidently. “You wanted to know what I am. I wasn’t going to tell you, in case, you know, you find another wand wielding whore to spend your time with. Present company excluded, of course.”

  Dana curtseyed.

  “Of course,” said Troy. Anger was welling up inside of him to almost uncontrollable proportions. He would kill Dana if he could, but even if it were possible he knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “To some, I am a Demon,” said Dana, who laughed off the mere possibility that being a Demon was something to be ashamed of. “To others, I am a Succubus. Well, you believe that part I suppose. To the police, and the good people of Gorswood, I was an eleven-year-old girl killed in the most violent of ways. To those in Gorswood who believe in light craft, or false Gods, I am the stuff of nightmares.”

  “What do you want?” said Troy, frustrated with Dana’s torrent of words. He just wanted to shut her up.

  “The same as you, Troy,” smiled Dana. “Freedom.”

  “I thought you could come as go as you please.”

  “Not like that,” said Dana. “I’m bored with that existence.”

  “How then?”

  “Well, when I touched that cursed Mirror all those years ago, it captured my soul. I didn’t really understand at the time, but over the years, I’ve come to understand how the Mirror works, and how I can bend it to my will.”

  Troy didn’t like where this was going. He tried to deflect the conversation. “I don’t care about any of that. How do I get out of here?”

  “Dear me, aren’t we impatient?” purred Dana. “I’m a witch, Troy. One of the best, and who knows, maybe the best one. My spirit, the essence of me was captured by the Mirror so that I would help that cursed Diabhal regain his strength. But I resisted him, and through some craft of my own, my spirit lives on. In your world, there are dolls that contain my spirit. I can’t be destroyed whilst they exist.”

  “That is a load of twaddle,” said Troy. “Why would you tell me that when you know that I’ll use that information against you?”

  “You’re assuming I will just let you out of here,” said Dana. “There’s a price.”

  “I haven’t got money, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “I have no use for such things,” said Dana. “Now stand up.”

  Troy seemed to have no control over his body, and he complied, even though he did not wish to. He covered his face as Dana pointed her wand at him and he screamed as she penetrated his deepest thoughts.

  Images flashed through Dana’s mind. Through them, she could deduce that Troy was tired of Toril, and was happy to charge at the army of Zeryths rather than stay any longer with her.

  “Stop! Stop it!” screamed Troy.

  “You were thinking of leaving her? Who for?”

  “No-one else.”

  “LIAR!” shrieked Dana, and a dark colour emanated from her wand. “Beth? Jacinta? Not Romilly, surely? Oh!”

  Something must have given Troy away, because Dana laughed uncontrollably.

  “Oh my! This is too easy. So you want to be with a girl who is weighted down with the most terrible of troubles, and she’s got a Demon inside of her? This is who you want to be with? Oh really?”

  “It’s not Romilly.”

  “You’re still lying, Troy. But if that’s your final answer, I will go and kill her now, as she’s no consequence to you. That does mean you’ll be stuck with Toril though, and if you both think of coming after me, get her to at least practise her wand play! She is pathetic.”

  Troy stood up. “Don’t you dare talk about Toril that way.”

  “Oh? So you do care about her after all.”

  Dana put her wand back. “As I was saying, the dolls contain my spirit. There are thirteen essences in all. Put them together and….well, let me worry about that.”

  “I need to worry about that,” said Troy. “If you want help, that is.”

  “You just get those bloody elements together.”

  “Or what?”

  “One. You’ll never get out of here. Two, I’ll make sure that anyone you care about dies. Not through a bus hitting them, or getting cancer. Nothing so simple as that. I’ll make sure they are scared to death. Anyone you care about. Now do you want to play mind games with me, or do what the hell I tell you? It’s not like you have a choice. You. Service. Me.”

  Dana swished her wand, and Troy found himself outside of the void, in Gorswood Forest.

  He could not believe his eyes. He took a deep breath of air inside his lungs, and it felt real, felt good, like the scent of rain in the air after an April shower. He hoped it was not an illusion, and that he really was out of the void.

  Why the sight of me would be the confirmation he needed, I don’t know. But when he saw me, sitting under the biggest oak tree in the forest, he felt a sense of peace he had not known in a long time. Dana, performing a selfless act? That’s not her style. But for now, that was not important.

  A shadow crossed Troy’s position. Troy was aware of it, but was still thinking about the good feeling he had when he saw me, and the uneasy feeling about what Dana had tasked him to do. She could follow through on her threat, he had no doubt about that.

  “Mr Jackson? Mr Jackson?”

  Troy looked up at the figure. It was Columbo again, only he’d lost his sinister tone.

  “You can go and see her now. For a few minutes anyway.”

  Troy nodded and made his way to the room. He wasn’t prepared for what he was about to see.

  I didn’t look good. I had lost a third of my body weight, the combination of lacking food and water, plus the mental and physical stress of trying to get out of the pit had taken its toll on my body. I looked peaceful, but the doctors could only cover up so many of the cuts. My arms looked worse than ever. Perhaps the gloves acted like some kind of synthetic moisturiser. I really should have worn them more over the last four years than I have done.

  My skin was blotchy, but they had removed the dirt, and even cleansed under my nails, the eight that remained anyway. As for the two lost fingers, they had bandaged over the stump, presumably after they cleansed the wound and stemmed the blood loss. It amazed me how much blood I had lost from my wounded hand.

  Every now and again, the Demon would lash out at my back, forcing my body to stick upright like a tent. Troy would try and tend to me, then the Demon would slam my face side to side so hard that I bled excessively from my nose and mouth.

  A hospital would have been the last place I would have expected to find any peace. But here I was. Bloodied, broken, and still with the Demon inside. But I was alive, and Troy, inexplicably, was with me. We took our chances with the moments of calm.

  “Rom,” he said simply. Since holding hands, it didn’t feel so brotherly. His huge frame filled the doorway. I couldn’t quite open my eyes through the amount of sedatives that they had given me, but I felt no fear. His presence was a good one, and it was not the Demon playing tricks on me. Not this time. It was too real.

  “Romilly.” Troy kept his gaze on me whilst he pulled up a chair. This time, I actually could feel him grabbing my hand. “I should have come back sooner. It’s not easy for the emergency services to get to that end of the forest. The doctors didn’t say if by hauling you out of there, whether I caused you more damage or not. I’m really sorry if I did, Rom. Can you say something? Anything?”

  Something, somehow escaped my lips. “Ease up on my hand, Troy, or I’ll lose more fingers.”

  I tried to smile, but started coughing. Troy adjusted my pillow and asked me if I wanted some water. I declined, but told him what I did want.

  “I’ve decided I’m leaving Gorswood.”

  Reading Between the Lines

  Lunabelle ushered Toril through a vast number of corridors. The interior of the Circle was like a mansion, or one of those stately homes her father liked to vis
it whenever he returned from business in the Far East.

  Toril had spent just a single night there, but already felt at home. She knew she got her bossiness from her father’s genes, something that actually made her happy that her father spent a good time away from home on business. Apart from her occasional impression of a bomb going nuclear, using swear words even Toril hadn’t heard of, her mother was a gentler sort, so the personality clash that could erupt all too frequently was happily avoided. “A good job too,” Tori-Suzanne would say. “The two of you versus me is not something I want to contend with on a daily basis.”