Faded From The Winter

“Truth or dare?”

“Dare.”

“Dare,” she repeats and turns away, looking thoughtfully around the attic. It has taken years to coax her into the mansion, bribing and caution and creative coercion that involved more games than actual debate. Finally she relents to entering the house wit invitation if Hazel does not entice her anywhere open or regularly visited by her father and the staff. Thus the attic is the ideal place for their games, though Hazel misses the outdoors and opens all the curtains and windows to let the light and the air in. They sit on well worn blankets on the floor, enveloped in the scent of dust and ancient wood. Dust motes glow in shafts of sunlight as they speak.

“I dare you,” she begins, pausing as she glanced out the green tinted window. The wistful look in her eyes makes Hazel nervous before the dare is proclaimed. She turns back to Hazel with a predatory look that Hazel likes even less. “I dare you to come with me to the other place.”

The wind blows the windows in the attic open, the dim room suddenly full of grey sunlight and the first autumnal chill of the season.

Hazel’s brow furrows in confusion.

“The other plane, where I come from,” she clarifies.

Hazel hesitates only a moment. She has long wondered where she comes from and cannot bear the thought of passing up such an opportunity to find out. Hazel glances throught eh window at the horizon, when the creeping darkness is fading to the pale roles of sunset.

“Alright,” Hazel says. “When?”

“Tonight.”

Hazel waits until the house has fallen silent and she can be sure her father is asleep. Then she waits another hour for good measure. When she finally creeps down the hall in her nightgown and her coat she is surprised by how late it is.

She takes a route through the darkest hallways from one end of the house to the other, slipping between stray lights from lamps not yet extinguished. The house is silent, even the staff are mostly asleep, only a few traverse the ground floor, insomniatic and turning off lights that cross their path.

Hazel makes her way to the kitchen, slipping out the door into the gardens. In the darkness they are a tangle of silver green shadows, iridescent in the moonlight that shines between the clouds. Hazel must guess where the stone lined path is in the dark, feeling her way around hedges and alleys of statues, until she arrives at the forest.

The woods are foreboding, cold and silver in the moonlight. There is no sign of her beyond the garden, no glimpse of dark auburn in the dark.

Hazel’s conviction falters; she suddenly recalls every story Mr.McMahon has ever recounted of children disappearing in woods, though Hazel has known these woods since she was young and cannot think of any monster lurking among the flowers and moss. Still, Hazel rallies her courage before slipping from the garden to the copse of trees, feeling blindly for eye-level twigs and thorny branches and brambles.

She is standing some ways away, milk white under the moon.

In the darkness she is more solid than Hazel has ever seen her, the shadows in her face more prominent against the silver highlights of her cheeks and brow. Hazel realizes she is quite pretty; it takes shadows to make a face pretty. Where stray shafts of moonlight appear, though, an elbow or a shoulder disappears. Her hair blows across her face, shockingly red against her pale complexion.

“Good night,” she says when Hazel approaches. “Are you ready?”

Hazel follows her through the leafy aisles between the ancient trunks, trying to walk as silently as her companion, cringing with each snapping twig.

Pathways form between trees that bend over the aisles, their canopies hiding the stars except where they shine through like embers in the dark. They take numerous twists and turns in the labyrinthine forest before stopping at a mound of earth, rising above them, a hill of moss.

“Here,” she says and circles around the mound until she faces it, waiting patiently as Hazel follows.

The other side of the mound disappears into a tunnel, a cave dripping with roots that becomes blackness.

“I can’t go with you,” she says as Hazel peers into the darkness in search of light. “I will meet you on the other side. But the dragonflies know the way.”

“The dragonflies?” Hazel echoes, but as she turns she finds she is alone. She returns to the tunnel, wondering if whatever awaits her on the other side is a reasonable price for the satisfaction of curiousity. Hazel thinks of her mother and it does not seem to matter. A dragonfly disappears into the darkness, glittering silver and gold in the moonlight before fading into the shadows.

“Lead the way,” Hazel whispers, and steps into the tunnel.

Art by A.S. Byatt

Text by Lucie MacAulay