“Yes?” I answered hopefully.
“Last night when we spoke, you mentioned that you were falling for Canada... well, I wanted to ask you if... if it is just Canada that you're falling for? Or whether there might be something, or someone, that you're falling for too,” he asked. But before I could answer, he blushed and added, “Sorry, you don't have to answer that if you don't want to.”
I wanted to answer his question; after all, I knew the answer. I was falling for him, without a doubt. Regardless of the fact that I was a few years younger than him, I felt like we had a connection.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked hesitantly.
“Shoot.”
“Why did you really come to see me tonight?” I asked bravely.
This time, his face turned pink before he replied.
“Honestly... I was hooked the second I laid eyes on you, Lilly. It's weird really, because I've always hung out with girls my age, but I almost feel like you've put a spell on me. Not that I'm calling you a witch or anything,” he laughed, “but I've never been bewitched before.”
During the silence that followed, it was as if I could hear his, and my own, heart beating.
I was so glad that I'd wrapped my scarf around my face... it helped hide the fact that I was blushing so much and the fact that I was grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
“And even though I barely even know you, I feel like I've always known you,” he laughed breaking the silence, “and I can't believe I'm actually saying all this. Out loud. To you.”
“Well, I'm kind of glad that you are saying it out loud. To me. I know how you feel, Oliver. I've never... er, hung out with a boy before. Let alone a boy who is older than me! It just feels... right. But I guess we'll just have to get to know each other better won't we?” I replied happily, “but now... it's so freezing. Why don't you walk me back home?”
As we turned to walk back towards the house, I looked up at him and smiled. He caught me watching and he laughed.
“In answer to your question... Canada isn't the only thing I'm falling for” and I laughed cheekily as he took my gloved hand in his.
As we approached the front door, Oliver asked me out on a date, “a proper date,” he said, the following Friday night. I happily accepted and he leaned in and gently kissed me on the cheek. My first kiss!
“I'll pick you up at seven,” he said and then he was gone.
That night I drifted off to sleep happier than I had done for a long time. But my dreams were strange and vivid once again.
I found myself flying freely with the ravens while I was looking down at the cats below. Only this time they weren't small cats, one was a white mountain lion and the other a black panther.
They were stalking something. I couldn't quite see what it was but as I flew closer, I saw that they were stalking Oliver. I tried to get his attention but he couldn't see me, he could only see and hear ravens squawking at him from above. “Oliver, Oliver watch out!” I yelled, but as hard as I tried to get him to understand me, I knew that all he could hear were the incomprehensible squawkings of a bird.
I tried to reach him in time but it was no good, the cats had already pounced and as I landed nearby, I saw that he was covered in blood. As I approached the bloody scene, the cats seemed to bow down to me and skulked away as I picked him up with ease and carried him to the waterside to try and clean his wounds, but as I looked down into the water, my reflection wasn't that of a raven or a girl... it was that of a mountain lion. I screamed.
I awoke with a start and noticed that my face was soaked from tears that streamed down my cheeks.
“Lilly, goodness me,” said Meredith as she rushed into my room and switched on the light just as Gabriel had done before. She sat down on the bed and cradled me in her arms. “It's alright. It was just a bad dream. Just a dream. Shhhh. It's over. It's over.”
The tears wouldn't stop as I tried to tell her that Oliver was in danger. “The cats, the cats,” I sobbed.
“No, it was just a dream, sweetie. Oliver is fine. Calm down.” Eventually, I realised that it had been nothing but a scary nightmare – triggered by the memory of the words I had learnt just days before... that Oliver and Ben's parents had been killed by wild mountain lions many years before. It was nothing more than my subconscious mind playing horrible tricks on me.
Meredith had been kind, assuring me that all was well. She even made me a cup of sweet cocoa to help soothe me back to sleep. The rest of the night went by quietly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The following day I was awoken by the sound of Gabriel's voice. Although he spoke quietly, I could still hear him.
“I came back as soon as you sent your message, Meredith. I guess I have no choice now but to tell her the truth. I had hoped the dreams wouldn't have started until she was at least 18. I understand now that it is a sign. She must be told. It's such a shame that this is all happening now. She is so young. I've never known for it to happen this young before,” he'd said.
Meredith murmured something in response but I couldn't hear what it was.
I could hear the sadness in the way Gabriel spoke and that made me feel sad too, even though I had no idea what he had to tell me. I finally felt relief. Relief that, at last, I would know the truth. But along with the relief came the dread. After all, it must be bad for there to have been so much secrecy in the first place.
Now that I knew that he planned to tell me, I waited for him to broach the subject, so that day I just acted as normal, I went to school and completed my homework before dinner. It was after we'd eaten and washed the dishes that something finally happened.
He had summoned both Meredith and Wyatt – my father's brother and sister – who had arrived just as we had finished washing the dishes.
“Lilly. It is time,” said Gabriel, as Meredith took my hand and led me into the living room where we all sat in silence waiting for the news to be broken to me.
Gabriel produced an old battered shoe box and took off the lid. In it were photos and letters. He handed me the first. It was a picture of a very beautiful young woman with long black hair. There was something vaguely familiar about her. She was probably a few years older than me but in her arms was a tiny newborn baby. Clearly the photo had been taken immediately after the baby had been born, in the local hospital.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Her name was Serena,” answered Meredith with a sad smile, “Lilly. This is your mother.”
I gasped and shook my head.
“No, my mother is Vivian. This isn't Vivian.”
“No, Lilly. Vivian isn't your mother. Serena is. And this little child is your sister, Neleh,” said Gabriel as he passed a number of different photos to me. All were the same little girl at different ages. One was the photo Ben had taken to the airport to identify me with. I said as much but Gabriel told me it was the closest image he had of me. “You two looked so alike when you were babies.”
In another the little girl was about four and was being cuddled by my father on a beach on a lovely sunny day. My father looked like a completely different person, so happy. I had never seen him happy before. Another pictured her aged around 10, posing happily for the camera in this very living room with Gabriel laughing to her side. The most poignant image was that of her as a teenager pictured with Serena and my father. The image of a very happy family – it was then that I noticed Serena was pregnant.”
Wyatt spoke. “She was carrying you in this picture, Lilly.”
I shook my head but deep down I knew. It was obvious to see. I looked very much like Neleh and Serena. And as I looked at the photos, I realised that Serena was the woman from my dream, the dream I'd had of the woman in the forest. I didn't know what to think. For so many years I had grown up believing Vivian was my mother yet I had never felt any kind of bond with her. She had always made it blatantly obvious that she didn't care for me at all. Practically locking me up in a room and rarely saying a word to me aren't the true actions of a car
ing mother. In fact they aren't the actions of a mother at all. It made sense. I felt my eyes welling up so I blinked hard to try and get rid of the tears before they spilled down my cheeks.
“Lilly,” said Gabriel, “this is just the beginning. There are things we need to tell you that you are going to find hard to believe. We need you to be strong.”
I nodded, unable to say a word.
“Just after you were born, Neleh was killed,” said Wyatt.
I gasped and gulped back the tears as it really hit me that I once had a sister, but she was now dead.
“And shortly afterwards... Serena died too. I'm so sorry, Lilly,” he said sadly.
“What? But how? Why?” I cried, looking down at that picture of the exceedingly happy family, ripped apart by two deaths.
“Nobody knows exactly what happened, dear. All we know is that Neleh was murdered in the forest. By who or what we don't know for sure – although there were suspicions at the time,” said Meredith as she held my hand tightly in hers.
“Suspicions?” I asked.
Gabriel looked so angry that he frightened me just for a moment, but before he could speak, he was interrupted by Wyatt, “Lilly there is a man in that forest who is believed to have been responsible for Neleh's death. His name is Sammy Morton.”
Gabriel gave me another photo showing Neleh probably a couple of years older than me, pictured with a handsome young man with dark skin and black hair and even darker eyes. The way the photo was taken would suggest they had taken it themselves. They looked so happy together.
“Is that him?” I asked.
Meredith nodded.
“But they looked so happy. Why would he kill her? I don't understand.”
“Nobody understands. But he hasn't been seen since. There was a lot of talk. But we can't be sure,” added Meredith.
Clearly from the look on Gabriel's face, I figured he thought Sammy was guilty.
“But what about Serena? What about my mother?” I asked.
I was told that my mother had taken her own life because she was so full of grief for the loss of her beloved daughter.
“How could she do that? How could she just leave me, her baby. Her own daughter?” I cried.
“Again, Lilly dear, we do not understand that either. Grief is a funny thing. People react to it in such unusual ways. She must have been so heartbroken and she just couldn't believe that her eldest daughter was dead. That combined with postnatal hormones. We simply don't know. We wish we knew what had been happening. Perhaps we could have stopped her from doing what she did. Serena was my best friend, Lilly. It was very hard to understand for me too,” said Meredith as she choked back the tears.
“Tell me,” I asked slowly, “tell me how she did it. How did my mother kill herself?”
Gabriel stood up abruptly then and turned his back towards me, as if he was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened almost fourteen years ago. He spoke slowly and quietly, “She just walked out of the hospital in the middle of the night and continued walking until she reached the highest point in the forest and she threw herself into the river. She must have half frozen to death before she even got there. All she had on was a hospital gown. She didn't even have any shoes on. It was December. It was freezing.”
I could barely breathe. My mother. My true flesh and blood. The woman who had carried me for nine months and had given birth to me had killed herself just after I was born. I could picture her walking through the snow, barefoot – yet she was probably barely even aware of the cold. Clearly all she could think of was the death of her precious daughter. My sister. Both were dead. Tears rolled down from the corners of my eyes. I couldn't stop them. Soon my face was completely wet.
Gabriel approached me and crouched down in front of me. He placed his hand on my shoulder and patted me. Looking me deep in the eyes, he said, “I didn't just lose my grandchild and my daughter-in-law that night, Lilly. I lost your father and I lost you too.” He held me close to him then just for a moment.
There was a knock on the door. “That'll be Rose,” he said as he stood up.
“I'll get it,” said Wyatt as he stood and went to open the door. “Hi Rose. Thanks for coming,” I heard him say. She whispered something and I heard him respond, “yes, she knows everything up until Serena's death.”
“Oh, the poor dear,” I heard her say.
Rose walked in then, removing her warm fur coat and throwing it accurately on the coat hook on the wall. “Darling, Lilly,” she said as Gabriel and Meredith gave her room to embrace me tightly.
She said nothing for a few minutes. We just sat in silence while the tragic news sank in, making my heart feel so heavy. The sound of the kitchen clock could be heard ticking, almost in time to the beating of my heart. To the beating of all our hearts. In fact I could have sworn that I could hear their hearts beating too.
Rose looked at me then. She really looked at me as if she was looking deep into my soul.
“You are my sister's daughter,” she said, nodding. “Yes, Serena was my darling little sister. She was the most wonderful person, Lilly. Everybody loved her. When she was born, she was a little miracle. That's what my parents and I had called her. 'Our little miracle'. My parents were getting on, you see. They never thought they'd have another child so when she appeared, it was a huge shock... a wonderful shock, of course, but a shock nonetheless,” she said smiling.
Gabriel laughed then and I thought what a lovely face he had when he laughed. I hadn't seen much laughter in him since my arrival.
“It was a shock to the whole community,” he said. “Your mother was nearly 70,” he chuckled as he spoke to Rose and they shared a smile together.
I was suitably amazed too. A woman of nearly 70 had given birth, naturally, to a healthy baby girl. Not something you heard much of these days, I thought.
“She was embraced by everyone here,” said Rose, “and I raised her as my own after mother and father passed away nearly ten years later. I was happy to do it though, with the... absence of children of my own. Serena wasn't your average ten year old. She was so mature and bright. She and Jack were the best of friends from a very early age. We all knew that they were soul mates, so when they told us they wanted to get married, we were overjoyed. It was the most natural thing in the world for them both. She was nearly 16 and Jack was 19.”
“She became pregnant with Neleh almost immediately and they loved that child. They doted on her. Neleh was exactly like her mother... your mother...” she said, nodding at me, “she was headstrong, beautiful and intelligent. Everybody loved her. So when the cycle started to repeat itself again, nobody was worried. Neleh and Sammy seemed like soul mates too. They had wanted to get married themselves and start a family at a very early age. We didn't worry. We thought it was the most natural thing in the world – Neleh following in your mother's footsteps,” she stopped then and asked Meredith for a glass of water, who quickly poured her a drink and passed it to her, before she continued.
“Sammy Morton was a very well liked boy here. He was an orphan, raised by a foster family in town. We really thought he and Neleh were well suited. What went wrong between them, we don't know, but that day when he carried her lifeless body back into town, he just looked different. He didn't look like the same person. He looked crazed somehow. And everybody just started believing that he had murdered her. He disappeared that day and nobody has ever seen him since. Some people say he still lives in the forest, some people say he is dead and haunts the forest. Whatever happened, he disappeared within that forest, Lilly, which is one of the reasons Gabriel doesn't want you to ever go in there.”
“But what happened to his foster parents? Didn't they want to find him?” I asked.
“They couldn't accept what had happened and so they left Powell River a few weeks later.”
I found it hard to believe that his foster parents would just up and leave like that, unless they thought he was guilty too.
It was so much to take in th
at my head began pounding harder and harder and the sound of blood pulsing through my veins became louder and louder until I could barely hear myself think. I felt hot and uncomfortable and I just needed a moment to myself. I excused myself for a couple of minutes and went and splashed my face with cold water in the bathroom.
As I stood there, I looked at myself in the mirror, but I couldn't see myself. All I could see were the morphing faces of Neleh and my mother.
Again, I recalled the short dream I'd had in the forest before. The woman that had tried to speak to me in my dream had been Serena. Had my mother been trying to tell me something? I suddenly remembered Gabriel's words to Meredith that morning: 'I guess I have no choice now but to tell her the truth. I had hoped the dreams wouldn't have started until she was at least 18. I understand now that it is a sign. She must be told'.
Were my dreams real signs? I thought of Oliver and the feral cats and a cold shiver ran down my spine.
As I returned to my family, they were whispering among themselves. They quietened down as I approached them and sat down.
“I know there is more... so please go on,” I said bravely, although I didn't feel so brave.
This time, Meredith spoke. “Lilly, what we are going to tell you now might sound fantastical and surreal but we need you to really keep an open mind, okay?”
I agreed, unsure whether my mind would be open enough but I had to try.
“When your father left us and took you away to live in England, we believe that he did so against his own will. We believe that a witch cast a spell on him,” she said nervously.
It was like an epiphany to me and it was then that I knew they were talking about Vivian. Vivian was a witch. As I said so out loud I could feel a weight being lifted from not only my shoulders, but from those around me too. I could hear sighs of relief as if they were worried I wouldn't have believed them. But finally understanding that Vivian wasn't who she said she was made perfect sense. I thought once again about that strange black room and Gabriel's words: black was a magical colour.
When Darkness Falls - Six Paranormal Novels in One Boxed Set Page 117