The House of Winter Read online

  She let her words sink in, her eyes moving around the circle as she scanned the faces looking back at her. Then she said, “And you will come back again. As I’m sure all of you know, witches believe that we all return again and again to live in this world and enjoy it in different ways. Personally, I love that idea. So we’re going to work with that, although I’m taking some liberties with the idea.”

  Ginny pointed to a row of tables set up at one end of the room. Annie had seen them when she came in, and had wondered what they were for. Now she waited to find out. Ginny indicated half a dozen large cardboard boxes that sat on the tables.

  “In those boxes are the materials for making masks,” she said. “We are each going to make a mask that symbolizes what it is we’d like to come back as after we die. We will then use those masks in our ritual, although I’m not going to tell you everything about it now. Today all you have to think about is what you would like to come back as. Then we’ll make masks to represent those things.”

  “Does the mask have to be something specific, like a person or an animal?” asked a man to Annie’s right.

  Ginny shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “It can, if that’s what you want, but it doesn’t have to. It could just symbolize some personality trait you want to have. It can be as specific or interpretive as you like, as long as it really reflects what it is you hope to return as after your visit to the land of the dead.”

  All around the circle people nodded in understanding. Ginny clapped her hands. “Let’s get started, then,” she said. “To the boxes!”

  They all stood up and went to the tables. People gathered around the different boxes and opened them. There were exclamations of surprise and excitement as they pulled out the contents. There were feathers and sequins and paints, scraps of material and sticks and seashells. All kinds of items came out of the boxes and found their way onto the tables. Annie stared at it all, her mind swirling with ideas as she tried to decide what she wanted her mask to look like.

  “Take one of these,” Ginny said, walking around with plain face masks and handing them out. “Use them as the basis for your masks. Glue things on them or paint them or do whatever you feel moved to do. You can’t do it wrong.”

  Annie took the mask that Ginny handed her. Then she sat down and put the mask in front of her. She stared at it, thinking of it as her face. What did she want it to look like? The only mask she’d ever made had been a hedgehog head she’d fashioned out of papier-mâché for the Midsummer ritual she’d attended with Kate and Cooper. But that had been pure fantasy. This was serious. If she could be anything she wanted to be—anything at all—what would it be?

  “I don’t suppose coming back as Julia Roberts is an option, do you?” Ivy asked Annie as she took the seat next to her.

  Annie laughed. “I think one Julia Roberts is enough,” she said.

  Ivy sighed, running her hands through her cropped brown hair. “Pity,” she said. “We look so much alike. What are you going to make?”

  Annie shook her head. “I really don’t know,” she said. “It’s not every day that someone lets you pick what you come back from the dead as. I feel like I need to make it something really spectacular.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about being spectacular,” Ivy told her. “I don’t think most of us really come back as Cleopatra or Madonna or anything quite so thrilling. After all, if we assume that who we are now is just the latest in a long line of people we’ve been, we have to assume the next time around will be kind of the same, don’t you think?”

  Annie shrugged. “I’m not sure what I think about it at all,” she said. “What if when we’re dead we’re just dead?”

  Ivy shuddered. “I don’t like to think that’s true,” she said. “But I know what you mean. There are days when I think it would be nice to just have a good long rest. Star says that when she comes back she wants to be one of our dogs because all they do is sleep and eat and chase the goats around. That sounds pretty good to me sometimes.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be a dog,” Annie said firmly. “Nothing that has to eat out of a bowl and have forced baths.”

  While she knew what she didn’t want to be, she still didn’t know what she did want to be. She looked around the table to see what other people were doing, and was perturbed to see that everyone else seemed to be going at their masks with great enthusiasm. Unlike her, they weren’t hesitating. They took things from the piles and worked with them, gluing and painting and decorating their masks. Even Ivy, after another moment of thinking, reached for some fake leaves in gorgeous fall colors and began to arrange them on her mask base.

  Annie stared at the blank white face of her mask. It looked like a ghost, she thought, something without any real personality or form. It was waiting for her to bring it to life. But how? She closed her eyes and tried to picture herself with a different face. What would it look like?

  Suddenly she had an image of sunflowers. Bright yellow sunflowers with dark brown centers. She knew where the image came from—a painting her mother had done of the flowers growing in their garden in San Francisco. But it was more than that. The flowers reminded her of light and the sun in all its glory. It was an image that made her recall the smells of summer and the way it felt to lay on the ground and feel the warmth of the grass and the earth beneath it. To her, sunflowers were strong and joyful, and that’s what she wanted to be, whatever else she was in her next life. She didn’t know what form she might take, but she wanted to be someone filled with the power of the earth and the sun.

  Now that she knew what she wanted, she worked quickly. She had once seen an image of a Green Man, a face made up of leaves and vines. She had been drawn to it because of the way it seemed to be nature in human form, and that’s what she wanted to do with her mask. She wanted it to look like a woman made of flowers, a face composed of petals and leaves. She looked around the table, seeing what there was she could work with.

  She spied some deep gold paper, which she took, and some soft brown yarn, which she also scooped up. Then she started making her flowers. The petals were easy. She cut them from the paper and made a pile of them. But the centers of the flowers were going to be harder. She knew what she wanted to do, she just wasn’t sure it would work right.

  She unraveled the yarn and looked at it for a moment, thinking. Then she had an idea. Holding the four fingers of her left hand together, she wrapped the yarn around them about a dozen times. Then she slipped the loops of yarn from her hand, folded them in half, and wrapped some more yarn around the place where the loops were folded. The loose loops stood up, bound together into a tight bunch. Then Annie used scissors to snip the closed ends open, so that the lengths of yarn puffed out. When she was done, she held in her hand a dark brown mop of yarn that looked like the soft, dark center of a sunflower.

  She took the center she had made and arranged some of the petals around it. It looked okay, but there was something missing. The flower appeared flat and lifeless, and she wanted to capture the beauty of a living flower.

  “The petals need to stand up,” Ivy suggested, looking at Annie’s handiwork. “The centers are great. Now the petals need to be just as exciting.”

  Annie nodded in agreement. Ivy was right. But how was she going to make flat paper look like real, moving petals? She looked around the table, and saw a package of pipe cleaners. They gave her an idea, and she leaned over to pick them up.

  Laying a pipe cleaner on the table, she took two of the golden petals and put glue on one of them. Then she laid the pipe cleaner down the center of it and placed the other petal over it, pressing them together. She let it dry for a moment and then tried bending the petal. It worked perfectly, the pipe cleaner acting as a framework to bring the petal to life.

  Annie cut out some more petals and then went to work sandwiching the pipe cleaners between them. Before long she had a good-sized pile of them. She then made some more of the brown centers. When she was done, she started assembling the fl
owers. Cutting a piece of heavy paper into the shape of a circle, she glued the ends of the petals to it so that the petals spoked out like the rays of a sun. Then a brown center was glued to the middle of it, covering up the ends of the petals. After a little bending of the pipe cleaners, Annie had a gorgeous sunflower.

  “Beautiful,” said a woman across from her, who had been gluing shells to her mask and who was now painting blue swirls on them.

  “I just have to make about fifteen more and I’ll be all set,” Annie said, wiping some glue from her fingers.

  She spent the rest of the morning doing just that, and by the time lunch rolled around she had all the sunflowers made. After eating one of the sandwiches brought in by the hotel staff for them to munch on, she started assembling her mask. She’d made some green leaves out of paper and pipe cleaners as well, and she arranged the sunflowers on the mask with some of the leaves between them.

  When she’d glued a few of them on, she held up the mask and looked at it. It really did look beautiful, and she was pleased with her work. Although she’d been doing a lot of painting since discovering that she shared some of her mother’s artistic talents, she still never thought of herself as being all that creative. But the mask made her think that maybe she was, and looking at it filled her with a sense of accomplishment and pride. She was even more pleased to notice that some of the other participants were pointing over at her and nodding their heads appreciatively.

  “I think you’re a hit,” Ivy told her.

  “I’m just glad it’s not a mess,” Annie said.

  After another hour or so she was finished. The sunflowers were glued all over the mask, with two small spaces left so that she could see out when she put the mask on. Looking at it, Annie could easily imagine that it was the face of a woman who had emerged from a field of sunflowers, stepping from between the rows and reaching her arms up to the welcoming sun.

  “I see that most of you are done,” said Ginny. She’d been walking around the table, looking at the different masks and talking to their creators. “Why don’t we form a circle again? Bring your masks with you.”

  The class participants picked up their masks and returned to their seats on the floor. Annie sat with the others, cradling her sunflower mask in her hands.

  “Look around at what your pathmates have done,” Ginny told them. “You’re each holding the face of your new self in your hands. See what you’ve each chosen to become.”

  Annie looked around the circle. Like her, the others were holding the masks in their hands facing out, so that the masks looked like faces peering back at her. Seeing them all, she was amazed at how creative people had been. They had come up with all kinds of ways to use ordinary objects in extraordinary ways, and the results were haunting and spectacular.

  “You’ve created magic in these masks,” Ginny said. “Now let’s go around the circle and tell everyone what the masks represent.”

  The woman to Ginny’s left went first. She held up her mask, which depicted a clown’s face painted in bright, childlike colors. “I often feel like I don’t play enough,” the woman said. “I’m so busy and so worried about making sure everything goes smoothly for everyone around me that I have a hard time enjoying myself. So when I come back I want to be more playful and more carefree. Clowns represent that to me.”

  The man beside her showed them a mask with feathers sticking out all over it. “It’s supposed to be an eagle,” he said. “I guess it kind of looks more like a chicken.”

  People laughed, and the man smiled. “I just like the idea of being able to fly,” he said. “Eagles are so free, and that’s how I want to feel.”

  They continued around the circle. Each person had something to say about her or his mask, and Annie liked hearing why they’d chosen what they had. One man had made a mask with antlers, while another woman, who told them that she was suffering from a disease that was terminal, had made a mask featuring long flowing hair and healthy pink cheeks. She said that all she wanted in her next life was to be healthy, and to her the mask represented how she used to look and feel about herself.

  Masks like that one made Annie sad. Others made her laugh and feel happy. When it was her own turn to show off her mask she held it up and sighed. “I don’t have any particular story to go with this,” she said. “To tell the truth, I don’t really know why I picked sunflowers. I guess because they’re pretty and they make me feel good. But I’ve been studying Wicca all year, and one of the things I’ve learned is that you should go with what you feel. My heart said sunflowers, so I made sunflowers. Maybe I’ll figure out why when we do the rest of our rituals, but for now I just like the way they symbolize light and the earth.”

  The remaining people in the circle spoke after Annie. When they were done, Ginny nodded approvingly. “These masks are beautiful,” she said. “They represent your strengths and your dreams—even if you don’t exactly know what those are,” she added, looking at Annie and smiling. “Annie’s right that many of you will find out that your masks mean more than you know they do right now. The rituals we’re going to do will bring out meanings that will probably help you understand why you chose the images you did.”

  Ginny paused, then continued. “We’re going to end for the day now,” she said quietly. “But tomorrow some of you will die. I can’t tell you which ones, because I don’t know myself. But some of you will die. So tonight you should all prepare yourselves for death, in case you’re chosen tomorrow.”

  Annie looked around the circle at the faces of her pathmates. She barely knew them, and already some of them were going to die. But what did that mean, exactly? She wished that Ginny would be more specific about what was going to happen. But she also knew that not knowing was part of the overall experience.

  Maybe you’ll be one of the ones who dies, she told herself. The thought troubled her. She looked down at the mask in her hands. Suddenly, the bright sunflowers didn’t make her feel good at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  “We had the best time,” said Sasha as she emerged from the bathroom, drying her hair with a towel. “Luna is the coolest. We spent all morning doing yoga, and then in the afternoon we did this weird interpretive dance stuff to some Goddess music she had.” She paused to take a breath. “So how did your paths go?”

  “Mine was kind of intense,” Annie said. She wanted to show her friends the mask she’d made, but Ginny had collected them all and taken them away. Annie wasn’t sure why, but Ginny had told them that they’d be getting them back later and not to worry.

  “Mine was fun,” Cooper said. She was sitting on her bed, playing the guitar that Maia had loaned her. She was still working out the details of the song they’d worked on all afternoon. “One of those twins is in the same path as me. Nora. She’s really cool.”

  “Well, her sister isn’t,” Kate remarked. She was getting dressed, and was checking her appearance in the big mirror that hung on the wall. “Lucy’s in my path, and she’s a real downer.”

  “Did you have to work with her?” Annie asked.

  Kate shook her head. “No,” she said. “But she kept shooting me these weird looks. I think there’s definitely something wrong with that girl.”

  “Nora said that Lucy is a little off,” Cooper commented. “She also told me that there’s a ghost around here,” she added.

  “We already knew that,” said Sasha, pulling a T-shirt over her head.

  Cooper shook her head. “This is a different ghost,” she said. “She didn’t get a chance to tell me much about it, but she said that Lucy doesn’t believe her about it.”

  “Feuding twins,” Sasha said. “How fun. I can’t imagine not liking someone who looked just like me. It must be weird.”

  “I’ll find out more later,” Cooper said. “Right now, let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

  The four girls finished getting ready and then went downstairs for dinner. When they arrived they went through the food line and then sat at a table with Sophia. They were joine
d by Thatcher, one of the men from the Coven of the Green Wood, and Thea.

  “Did everyone have fun in path today?” Thatcher asked when they were seated.

  “I don’t know if fun is the best word for it, but yeah,” Annie replied.

  “Right,” Thatcher said. “You’re in Earth. I hear some of you are dying tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” asked Annie.

  Thatcher exchanged looks with Sophia and Thea, then gave Annie a blank look. “I have no idea,” he said, trying desperately to sound sincere.

  “You are such a bad liar,” replied Annie. “But that’s okay. I’m sure I’ll be able to handle it.”

  Thatcher laughed. “I’m sure you will,” he said.

  “Where do you guys go all day?” Cooper asked him. “I don’t see any of you in our classes.”

  “We have our own path,” Sophia explained. “It’s for people who have been teachers in the past.”

  “And what do you guys do?” Kate inquired.

  “Very secret stuff,” answered Thea. “We can’t talk about it.”

  “She means they sit around telling bad stories,” said Tyler as he arrived at the table. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Not at all,” Thatcher told him. “Here you go.”

  Thatcher patted the empty seat beside him, which also happened to be next to Kate. Tyler pulled out the chair and sat down. Kate gave her friends a startled glance but didn’t say anything.

  “You guys have all taught here before?” Annie asked Sophia, Thea, and Thatcher.

  “Several times,” Thatcher answered. “If you come often enough, they rope you into it.”

  “Maybe you’ll teach here one day,” suggested Sophia thoughtfully. “Cooper, I hear you already did a little bit of teaching of your own in your path.”

  Cooper blushed. Had Maia been talking about her to the others? Part of her was horrified to think so, but another part of her was secretly pleased.

  “I just helped out with writing a song,” Cooper said. “It wasn’t a big deal, and I wouldn’t say it was teaching.”