The Beast’s Heart

by Leife Shallcross

  I limped cautiously down the stairs, sniffing at the air, trying to catch the scent of whoever had cared for me last night and left me food this morning. I had no coherent thoughts in my head as to what I would do when I met them, just an instinctive yearning for warmth and more food. All I could smell, however, were the myriad, musty odours of decay underpinned by the now-familiar tang of newly awakened magic. I breathed deeper. I could not even detect the smell of wood smoke. As I reached the bottom of the staircase, the reason for this strange absence became apparent: the hearth was empty. Not just cold, but utterly bare. No charred remains of last night’s fire; not even the tell-tale, ashy coating of a hearth swept clean. Indeed, the soot stains in the fireplace were so faded it looked as though it had not been used for years. There was nothing here but cold stone and mildew.

  Not far away was a pile of weathered sticks and disintegrating fabric. I crept forward and sniffed at it: woodworm and the faintest vestige of mouse. A few stray strands of horsehair quivered in a draught. My chair. Or, more correctly, the remains of it. The skin across my shoulders prickled with unease. Did I dream the fire and the chair? I was so sure I had not. I nosed around the floor and found one of my own bloodied paw prints. How could I have possibly dreamed up broken glass that cut me?

  A new scent reached me, the merest thread of warmth in the vast, grey chill of the abandoned chateau. I turned to follow it. I padded lamely up the stairs, along halls, until I came to a long, empty gallery. It was so desolate I did not immediately realise where I was. Shutters had fallen away from a series of large windows that showed countless gaps where the panes had cracked and shattered. Part of the roof had collapsed and, beneath the rubble that had descended from the breach, the floor was sagging dangerously. It was not until I saw the splintered frames, torn canvases and warped boards still adorning the decrepit walls that I recognised this was the gallery in which had hung portraits of my family, dating back many generations. I had little care for these ruined heirlooms now. I was exhausted and in pain and entirely focussed on tracking the tiny point of heat I had detected. The scent of it was not wood smoke, but something else that spoke of warmth and light and comfort; something I had known in another life. Memory tugged at my brain like a snarl in my fur, but I could not place it. I picked my way along the gallery beneath my obliterated ancestry, following the enigmatic trace. At last I saw a tiny winking light.

  Of course. Candle wax.

  Visions of tall tapers burning in silvered candelabra washed through my brain; of people and dinners and dancing and church, and all the things candles meant to me once upon a time. Instinctively I looked all around for the person who must have placed the single, jewel-like light, twinkling in a glass upon a shelf. There was no one about.

  Then I saw it.

  Amid all the destruction wrought by time and neglect, one portrait remained untouched. It hung above the candle, the rich gilt of its frame intact and reflecting ruddy glints. It was a portrait of a woman of middle years in a russet brocade gown with a starched ruff, smiling gently, if a little sadly, down upon me. One hand rested upon a ruby droplet depending from a strand of pearls about her neck, the other clasped a posy of wild flowers in her lap; white daisies, red carnations, forget-me-nots, celandine and purple fritillaries. The strength left my legs and I sank to the floor, staring up her. Every line of her kind face was intimately familiar. My heart broke open and memories spilled through me, sweet and piercing.

  Grand-mère.

  A miserable whine rose in my throat. Why must I see her now? I’d never felt my wretchedness more keenly. She was the only mother I had known, for mine had died when I was very small. She had understood all too well the failings of her son, my father; it was her life’s sorrow. She had doted upon me, perhaps hoping I might choose a better path. But look at me now, I thought, bitterness stopping my breath as though I had swallowed thorns.

  I dragged myself up, too ashamed to remain here under the benediction of her painted gaze. But as I took a faltering step I heard the ghost of her voice again. Chéri, you must be the best man you know how to be. I stumbled. She had said this to me so often in the last years of her life, always with a gentle touch and a smile, trusting me to choose the right path and not lose myself to the course of corruption chosen by my father. I hung my head, staring at my bandaged, bleeding paws.

  I am not a man.

  Yet someone had cared for me. Had left me food. And however pitiful that meal had been, it had been a human meal. I twisted to stare back at the candle. Someone else was here in this ruined chateau and whoever it was knew me for being more than just a beast. Perhaps they could help me … I limped off in search of my mysterious benefactor.

  I found no one.

  It’s true; I was ill and injured and could move but slowly. It would not have been a difficult task to avoid me. Even so, if there had been someone to find, eventually I must have discovered some sign of them. But there was no one. I searched for days. Weeks, even. Every night I returned to my dreary room and every morning a meal was waiting for me beside the bed. Sometimes there was even a meagre fire burning in the hearth, or in the hearth of the entrance hall. At long last I came to the uncomfortable realisation I was entirely alone and that whatever food or fire or light appeared in this desolate place was a result of the magic that seemed to have sunk indelibly into the very walls. There was no one to help me. If there was to be any change in my pitiable condition, I would need to work it myself.

  The morning after this epiphany, as I was finishing my paltry meal, a basin of steaming water appeared on a table nearby. I cannot describe how wholly disconcerting this was. It simply materialised out of nothing. I flung myself away from it, snarling. When it did nothing more remarkable than send up gentle curls of scented steam, I gathered my courage to investigate it. Circling the table upon which it stood, I recalled the way my fireside chair had picked itself up after I knocked it over the night I arrived. Indeed, the water smelled of chamomile and pine and the faintest whiff of magic. I knew what it was for. I remembered it from my previous life. It was as though, now I had accepted any change in my situation was mine to make, the magic inhabiting this place was offering me a challenge.

  I could only reach it by standing on my hind legs and my only means of cleaning my face was to submerge it in the water and shake it about. By this method I ended up with half of the basin’s contents up my nose and the other half down my front. Still, most beasts will wash themselves with their own tongue, and I had done it with a bowl of hot water. An unfamiliar feeling of warmth gathered in my chest. It caught me by surprise when at last I recognised the foreign sensation for what it was. Pride, I realised wonderingly. I honestly could not have said when I last did something I felt proud of. This was such a simple thing, it seemed ridiculous. But it certainly wasn’t the last simple thing to challenge me.

  Thus began the process by which I learned anew how to be a man. At the start, it was almost as miserable as the existence I had just escaped. Many, many times I tore outside and threw my body at the iron gates, trying to force them open so I could run back into the forest and be a beast once more. It seemed, however, that having accepted the house’s hospitality in my darkest hour, I would not be permitted to return to oblivion.

  The house was not the crumbling ruin I had first encountered on my return, but it was little better. It was rank with neglect and inhabited by every pestilential creature imaginable. The strange forces that had cared for me and brought me food on my return were erratic. One day I might find a feast awaiting me in the entrance hall, another I would be served nothing but rancid cheese and spoiled meat. There were occasions when I did not eat for several days together. Even so, with the relics of my old life constantly before me, I began to try to reclaim what dregs of it I could.

  And it seemed to me the magic now pervading my house rewarded my efforts towards this impossible goal.

  Over time, the rooms I used most improved and became comfortable. The invisible servants
inhabiting my house became more reliable. I found it easier to pretend I was a man. I would shake off the drowsiness that dogged me and walk around on two legs. I would dress in a fine linen shirt and velvet doublet and dine at the table.

  It was not easy. Eating with any appearance of civility was ever difficult; that never changed. Always I had to allow the magic to help me dress, or the velvet doublets I wore became torn and the fine linen ruffles at my wrists frayed and unravelled. I found it almost impossible to draw on my own boots, even after my hind feet grew more human in shape. Yet it was of immediate concern to me that, in every possible respect, I appear as noble as I had been born. I knew all the conventions of civility; they had been ingrained in me as I grew. I had practised them in empty pride, a mere exercise of righteousness. But now, in absolute solitude, I made them the mark of my humanity.

  Progress was achingly slow and each milestone I achieved was a thing to be treasured. It took years before I could walk unaided down the grand staircase on my hind legs, and many more hours of effort before I could do it easily. And, of course, some conquests cost me more than simple physical exertion. There was the day, before ever I thought to stagger about on two legs like a parody of a lady’s lap dog begging for treats, when I wandered into the room that had once been my study. It was a decrepit mess. Not wholly derelict, perhaps, but close. The curtains over the windows hung in rotten rags, mildew bloomed across the walls and the books piled upon the desk had swollen with damp and burst their spines. Several had come apart entirely and spilled their pages across the floor. I looked down at the water-spotted piece of paper at my feet … and discovered I could read.

  Why should I have been so surprised? It was something I would not have thought twice about in my previous life. But here I was creeping about on four paws, my body clothed in nothing but coarse fur, looking down at words scrawled across a page and reading. I think that was the first time I knew for certain I was no mere beast. I stood there, transfixed by those faded words, trembling with the import of this revelation. I could read! What beast can read?

  The onslaught of grief this presaged, as I realised anew what had been done to me, was difficult to weather. I finally understood what was lost to me and what must lie ahead. But, even so, after that, the study became a favourite haunt of mine. Even before I could sit in an armchair, I would sprawl on that threadbare hearth rug, a book open beneath my animal paws, my phantom servants turning the pages as I found refuge from my unbearable existence in the words and knowledge of other men and women that those precious volumes contained.

  Another incident stands out in my mind. On this occasion I was prowling through the upstairs portion of my house, shambling along on two legs as elegantly as any bear, when I passed a gallery that had once been used by the men of my family as a sort of salle d’armes. Every other time I passed it, it had been a shell of its former self, reduced to warped floorboards and damp-streaked walls. But on this day the door was open and through it I glimpsed an apparent mirage: the room, set up as it always had been, as neat and tidy and impeccably maintained as if my fencing-master had only just that moment stepped out to run some errand.

  What was this? Why this room? Why now? The hallway I stood in was as rank and neglected as ever. But inside the gallery … There were the leather dummies, set at one end of the room, presided over by a wooden manikin with one outthrust arm surmounted by a battered sabre. There were the hooks upon which hung thick leather jerkins and a heavy canvas jacket. There was the rack of shining weapons, some among them intimately familiar. I crept forward, hardly daring to breathe, feeling as though I were trespassing on forbidden ground. Why should this disconcert me so? I shook my head to clear the anxious buzzing in my ears. My heartbeat was racing itself, tripping against my ribs.

  The art of fencing. Surely the mark of a civilised man. I had known how to handle a blade. I had been very good at it. I had learned and practiced and honed my skill in this very room. Was this a sign? If I took up my sword and proved my skill, would I likewise prove my manhood? Would I be free of this stooping, hulking, hateful form? I edged closer to the rack of steel. There. That one! My own sabre rested there, gleaming.

  I reached out one beastly paw and wrapped it around the hilt, lifting it from its wooden rest. At once I was assailed by memories, rushing through me as though a river had suddenly burst through the walls and was carrying me away. My nostrils filled with the remembered stink of blood and smoke and burning steel. For a moment it seemed my paws and blade were drenched in scarlet. Screams of pain and cries of ‘Beast!’ echoed in my ears. Memories of a wall of spears and flaming torches rising up before me sent me stumbling to my knees. I lost my grip on my blade and it clattered to the floor.

  Slowly the darkness obscuring my vision began to clear and I could see the whitewashed walls of the salle d’armes again. I gasped in clean, untainted air.

  ‘I am not a beast,’ I croaked in protest, the sting of tears rising to blot out the room anew.

  ‘Not a beast,’ I said again.

  And then I heard it.

  Not the suffocating silence that usually filled these lonely halls, but the words I had spoken to break it. Words. No inarticulate whine or anguished howl, but human speech. My first words in a century, or perhaps more. If I had not already been on my knees, I probably would have fallen then.

  It was this, more than anything else, that taught me to keep striving to regain those things I had thought lost. To keep trying to walk upright, though I felt as though I were performing a foolish trick for an unresponsive audience. To do what I could to regain my skill in fencing, though at the start my ungainly paws could barely grasp the hilt. To take up what other pursuits I remembered from my life before, though my clumsiness made me grind my teeth and my solitude mocked me at every turn. And to read aloud a little, every day, so that my voice might strengthen and lose its beastly growl, and I might hear something to break that frozen silence.

  Still, there were times when I raged about the house, or ran to the rooftops to howl curses at the night-time skies with their cold stars. For, as I tried vainly to regain my humanity, I began to feel, more and more keenly with each passing year, each day and hour, the one basic need that makes every person truly human.

  My invisible servants were by no means physical beings. They did as I bid them, but aside from that, talking to them was like talking to the wind. There were no replies. I could still feel the forest around me, and no one ever came into it now. Even though I no longer haunted its shadowy ways and mysterious groves, the miasma of my anger remained. I had passed into myth, but the taboo persisted.

  My sorrow was loneliness. My craving was for human company. Often I pondered the bitter irony of my situation. Before, I had been a man locked in a constant struggle with the monster within. But the Fairy had torn me open; exposed my most shameful secret to the world and ensured I would only ever be recognised for what I had tried to hide.

  Despite this, when the chance came to see and speak to another human being, I grasped it without thinking twice.

  Chapter III

  Who knows how many years I spent there alone? A lifetime? Half a lifetime? I never counted. Indeed, time seemed an unreliable, mutable thing. It stretched and contracted with dreamlike unpredictability, while the rest of my world remained utterly static.

  It was early one evening, in the depths of midwinter, when I became aware someone had entered my forest. I always knew when some creature had broached my borders. For many years it had only been the occasional goat or cow that strayed too far. But this was no dumb animal; this was a man. Cold and hungry and possibly near death.

  I laid aside the book I was reading and sat for a few moments concentrating on the presence of this solitary traveller. He was indeed exhausted, and so was his poor horse. But he seemed driven onwards by some burning need. I had the strongest sense he refused to die, that he knew if he let himself or his horse rest for even a moment, they would never leave the forest. The poor fool. I
could tell that unless both he and his animal got food and rest in the very near future they would not see morning.

  My strange connection with the forest did not end with my capacity to sense intruders. I had long been able to shape it to my will, to somehow change the course of the pathways winding through its green heart so, if I chose, the lost might wander forever without once catching sight of a break in the trees. Now, though, I made sure he found an overgrown path that led straight to my gates.

  I did not know if they would even open for him. I merely hoped. My joy, when he finally rode through, was unutterable. I could only imagine his amazement when he saw what lay on the other side. For, within the tall hedge that kept me from the forest, my lands in their previous entirety could be found.

  This was not all. My ability to manipulate the forest outside was multiplied a thousandfold within the confines of my prison. Even before I learned again to eat with decorum, or read, or fence, or shoot with bow and arrow, or do any of those things that are the mark of a civilised man, I found solace in shaping my gardens. In them I could use the enchantment binding me to create something of refinement and beauty.

  I had not been able to resist a certain measure of exotic variety that could only ever exist by magic. It took time (of which I had eons to spare) and much careful experimentation, but at last I had gardens straight out of the pleasantest dreams. Winding paths twisted past flower beds permanently in their prime, flourishing with springtime blossoms and fragrant herbs growing together with delightful untidiness. I had orchards both in fruit and in flower and lawns ornamented with ancient yew trees trimmed into fantastic shapes and hedges. Sometimes the lawn and yews were cool and green and sometimes they were covered in a blanket of clean, white snow. Another lawn was set with bosquets of different varieties of trees, all in glorious autumnal colours. Tended by my unseen servants and pampered by magic, my gardens flourished, even as parts of the house persisted as a ruin.