by Liz Braswell
“No!” she shouted, throwing herself back and forth, trying to wrest herself out of his grasp.
“Now, now,” the woman said, clicking her tongue. “Don’t want all that acting up, do we? Might need to use the special medicine, and you don’t want that.”
“Listen to me!” Maurice shouted, trying to make his voice sound as authoritarian as possible. “There is nothing magical about her!”
But the two ignored him. The man pushed Belle in front of him out the door. She kicked and tried to throw herself sideways, blocking the way.
The man wrapped his arms around her in an obscene caricature of a hug and forced her through, upright.
“Papa!” she yelled.
“Belle! NO!”
The Beast loped back to his castle on all fours. A thousand different scents tried to distract him: speedy squirrels and friendly wolves and tasty coneys. He couldn’t let them. He managed the whole trip without stopping until he got to the gates.
The walls around the castle were shining white with snow and the cobwebs. He reached out to push them aside, ready to use his full strength, but they broke easily at first touch and fell. Getting in was easy. Getting out again…
He took a moment, thinking like Belle: he would need to get out again. To lead everyone to a rescue, including the giant suits of armor. He needed to prepare for that.
With a growl he unsheathed his claws and tore at the webbing. They sheared easily, drifting through the air and disappearing when they finally hit the ground, like sugar floss in water. All of his frustration and anger about Belle’s capture went into clearing the gate and several feet beyond on either side.
He then smashed the gates open, taking them off their hinges for good measure and hurling them as far as he could. It would be harder for the webs to cover such a huge, open gap.
He did the same for the doors into the castle itself, ripping apart as much of the webbing as he could and then smashing open the doors themselves. Icy wind and snow immediately blew into the castle, as if excited by the chance to invade and freeze the unnatural human dwelling.
“COGSWORTH!” he roared as soon as he was inside. “LUMIÈRE! Guards! To me, now!”
Nothing.
There was nothing.
No sound, no movement, not a hint anything in the castle was alive.
For one insane moment he wondered if they had already left the castle, if they had decided on their own that he and Belle weren’t up to the task, that they needed help. He had seen no sign of them on his trip back—hadn’t smelled anything of the castle, or the smoke from Lumière’s candles.
“Hello?” he roared again. “I am your master, the Prince! Answer me!”
Perhaps they were in the servants’ dining room, where they often gathered to avoid his wrath and console each other during the long years under the curse.
He headed that way…and then paused in the hall of the suits of armor.
They were all there, lined up, though not so perfect as they once were. The fight to get Belle and him out of the castle had left a few casualties: some had notched and damaged swords, others weren’t standing quite as straight as they should have been. Almost as if they were tired.
“Attention!” the Prince bellowed, trying to remember his father and Cogsworth and old captains of the guard. Trying to sound empowered, not entitled.
Not one of them moved.
A slow, creeping sense of horror crawled up the Prince’s spine…
…and he was not accustomed to being scared.
Unsure why it took his legs so long to move, he shuffled over to the closest suit. Reluctantly, delicately, he tapped at its helmet with a single ivory claw.
The helmet tipped and crashed to the floor, rolling and bouncing like the loudest thing in the world.
Otherwise, everything remained stationary and silent.
The suits of armor were just…suits. All life in them gone. All the people they originally were now transformed permanently into inanimate objects. Dead.
The Prince raced through darkened halls and silent rooms, downstairs to the kitchen.
There, sitting on the table like a slightly unusual place setting, were a cold teapot, a clock that needed to be wound, and a candelabrum whose candles had burned down to their stubs and then gone out.
The Beast howled, picking up the thing that was once Lumière and shaking it. Nothing happened. He looked around, desperate to grab another candle, to try and relight him…maybe he could rewind Cogsworth…
Then he realized he could only see at all because of his beast eyes. The kitchen was dark and cold; his little puffs of breath were making clouds that as a child he had called “dragon smoke.”
He was all alone, in his empty, dead castle.
They took Belle to a truly frightening room.
It smelled of antiseptic and alcohol and the slightly sweet overtone of nitrous oxide. And also other things, meant to cover up the stink of fear and body fluids. It’s a prep room, she dimly realized. A half-dozen wheeled tables were arranged to accept bulk quantities of new patients awaiting whatever horrible surgeries D’Arque had in store for them. A counter nearby had rows of shining, spotless scalpels and knives laid out neatly on a white linen towel…along with one unscientific-looking knife, seemingly carved from black glass, curvy and sinuous like an evil snake.
“No! What is this place? Let me go!” Belle began to struggle in a blind panic.
“Now, now, calm yourself,” the horrible female nurse said, grabbing her ankles with surprisingly strong and cold fingers as the man lifted Belle up by her torso. He arranged the struggling girl almost gently on the nearest table, holding her down with one meaty arm while drawing up and tightening straps around her with the other.
The table was cool under her body, but not cold. A soft fleece protected her from the metal surface. This was somehow more terrifying than everything else: that steps had been taken to provide comfort for the “patients,” as if this were actually a place of succor and healing.
Once Belle was secured, the woman draped a gag loosely over her mouth. It smelled of chemicals and she tried not to breathe, recognizing the foul tang of chloroform.
Then they wheeled her into the operating theatre.
Around the edges of the small and spotlessly clean room were machines that looked like Maurice’s own inventions…but shrunken and horribly malformed. Like they had been sucked through an evil mirror and come out the other side utterly twisted for foul purposes. The largest one had bellows and pumps and tiny versions of pistons above a neat row of bell jars.
Belle fought against the numbing influence of the drug on the gag, kicking and trying to scream. She wanted nothing to do with those machines. Anything was better than whatever they hinted at. Being knocked in the head, beaten on the feet, anything. Traditional torture…
“Ah, there you are,” a clipped and aristocratic voice called out.
Belle turned her head as far as she could to look.
It was D’Arque, the sallow-faced and skeletal head of the asylum. He was well known to the villagers despite his rare trips down into town. Frightening when he was trying to be pleasant in broad daylight, here in the depths of the asylum and its darkness, he was positively horrible.
“I’m so sorry about all this,” he said, coming forward to regard her. “I think we can be fairly certain you are pure and free of the vile, unnatural corruptions of the supernatural. But I have to be absolutely certain.”
“What is this?” Belle demanded, trying to force the gag out of the way with her lips and chin. “Is this for Gaston? So I am pure enough to be his wife?”
“Gaston?” D’Arque asked, surprised. His eyebrows crawled up his scalp like two beetles trying to flee his tongue. “That foolish bull of a boy? Please. He is no more than a pawn. He thinks I approve of his silly wedding plans.”
“Thinks…?” Belle’s mind raced. The way he phrased it, it seemed like D’Arque and Gaston had some sort of long-term relationship. A
side from the old man’s occasional visits to the hunter’s tavern, she had no idea they really knew each other.
“I needed someone to feed me information about you and your father from time to time. To make sure you weren’t up to your mother’s old tricks, or that your father hadn’t recovered his memory and gone back to seeing old…friends. Unsavory friends.”
“Les charmantes,” Belle said slowly. “You mean les charmantes.”
“I do,” D’Arque said, sucking in his cheeks with disappointment. “Have you learned of such abominations? That’s a pity. I had hoped you would remain completely free of any…taint…of them.”
“Why do you care about us?” Belle demanded. “Why not anyone else in town?”
“Let us just say that I do particularly care about you and Maurice, in my own way. Also, I do care about everyone in town,” D’Arque added with concern. “But everyone else is fairly safe. Normal. Set in their ways. Boring and uneducated, but harmless.”
“Except for Monsieur Lévi,” Belle spat. “So you burnt his shop down.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” D’Arque snapped. “I suspect that was the idiot, Gaston. When he went to find Maurice. I have nothing against books. I love books. Books are the remedy to superstition and…magic. I was so pleased with your education, your brilliance, Belle….It’s a pity we have to do this, but we must be sure….”
He took off his waistcoat, folded it neatly, and handed it to the nurse. Then he drew over the scariest-looking machine, and began to pump at a foot peddle on it.
“No…Monsieur D’Arque…Please…”
“Shhh, now,” D’Arque said, placing a metal cup with a tube attached over her mouth.
Belle began to scream. She thrashed and tore at the leather straps, throwing herself from side to side. Blackness began to drip over her senses.
The Beast continued to howl, always his first response when something terrible and confusing was bothering him that he couldn’t literally reach out and shred with his claws. Disbelief, anger, and terror had full control of his animal mind, and it took all his effort not to run, shrieking, into the darkness. Away from the scene.
Giving his animal side free rein for just a moment, he turned and bounded through the castle, past the dead suits of armor, up, up and up to the West Wing. He had to see for himself. He hadn’t looked at the rose at all since that night with Belle. In a strange way, he had sort of forgotten about it, what with the books and the making dinner and stories and finding out about Belle’s mother. All of that to figure out how to break the curse that had turned him into a beast, and yet he hadn’t given a second thought to the rose….
But what was happening to his servants…his friends…must have something to do with the curse.
Before he even got to the table with the rose, he saw something that stopped him dead in his tracks.
The Portrait of the Beast as a Young Man, as he had taken to calling the painting in the hall; it was an image of the man he should have been, with dark honey hair and fingers instead of claws and a broad, handsome figure. The picture that he had tried to destroy, and Belle had tried to fix…
It now showed a beast.
Not just the Beast as he was, at that very moment, but all beast. Snarling, slavering, the oil paints swirled so realistically it looked like he was about to tear his way off the canvas and through the heart of whoever was viewing it. In one paw was a bloody white dove, its head missing.
The Beast fell back against the wall, feeling weak.
This is what would happen to him eventually. Soon.
His insides would match his outsides. He would be nothing more than that monster in the picture, completely devoid of human reason, thought, and conscience.
He covered his face with his paws, overwhelmed with the urge to weep.
Hadn’t she said this might be happening? Hadn’t he felt it, recently? If he was honest with himself?
From that blackout he had experienced after Belle angered him, to waking up with no memory of how he got the blood on his muzzle. Thankfully it was just a sparrow or another small bird, but it could be anything next time, if he even “woke up.” He had been losing his temper more than usual, little things setting him off in a way they hadn’t used to. The urge to hunt was stronger than ever. And he had barely been able to control himself on the run home, nearly overcome with the desire to run free into the woods.
Slowly, desultorily, he moved into his bedroom proper, now no longer really caring what the rose looked like. He knew in his heart the changes were becoming complete.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, he thought, if the Beast he became was more like a real animal—a wolf or a horse, say. Then he could almost happily sink into oblivion, spending the rest of his days like a simple creature of nature, sleeping and hunting until old age or a bullet caught up with him.
But he wasn’t a real animal. A natural animal. He was a monster, whose heart would become ferocious and vile, bloodthirsty, and out of control. His prey wouldn’t be confined to rabbits and sheep.
Despair rose up like a huge, inescapable tide. He sank down onto the floor.
He’d never, ever be able to see Belle again. He couldn’t. For her own safety.
The thought of her made him pause.
Before he was overtaken by the curse, before he became a full-blooded monster, he had to do this one last thing. He had to save her.
He pulled the mirror out of his cloak.
“Magic mirror, show me Belle!” he commanded.
When the silver-gray fog cleared, he nearly crushed the mirror with fury.
Belle lay half-drugged and kicking feebly, strapped down on some sort of horrible table. An old man was shoving needles into her flesh while some sort of thug forced a bronze cone over her mouth. More men stood near the door, along with a frightful-looking hag who looked like she was enjoying the proceedings.
The Prince swore, thinking about the giant, impregnable stone building he had seen her taken to. There was no way, even in full-on berserker mode, he could break in and disable every guard.
He ran his paws through the fur on his head, frustrated. He couldn’t do it alone. He needed help. And the servants were all…unavailable.
The only people around to help were the people in the village.
The people the Beast had long avoided, knowing that the insane hunters like Gaston would shoot him on sight and the closed-minded peasant folk would run screaming.
But…they liked Belle, right? Despite what she had said about growing up lonely, she had a few friends, like the bookstore owner. And hadn’t that man in the street shown some concern about her and her father?
What it came down to was that he had no other choice.
With a determined roar, he headed back to the village.
Sounds and voices came and went like wolves drifting over dead prey and then disappearing again.
“No, the meters don’t lie. It is just as I said all those years ago. She has no magic in her whatsoever….”
“[undecipherable]”
“…Keep her…she is still valuable. I believe she can lure in a far better prey: the beast Gaston was blithering about….I believe he is the one cursed long ago by her own mother…how is that for irony?”
Even in Belle’s confused head, she wondered how he knew all about that.
She forced her eyes open.
D’Arque’s face was shockingly close to her, examining her wakeful movements. She looked directly into his eyes, small and black as coals, full of intelligence and malice above his narrow crooked nose.
A dagger of familiarity drove itself into Belle’s foggy brain. She had seen him in the visions in the mirror at the bookshop, in the panes between the webbing on the castle.
“In the kingdom…you were…Papa and Maman’s friend…” she croaked. “You were friends with them! And ALARIC POTTS!”
She had the satisfaction of seeing D’Arque’s face go pale…right before he pushed the cone over her mouth again, cau
sing her to lose consciousness.
The tavern was a perfect scene of Christmas: merry yellow light glowed from the windows and poured onto the snow below and cheerful singing broke through the snug stone walls. The smells of smoky fire and bubbling cheese and spicy mulled wine overwhelmed any of the rank, oily human scents the tiny village had.
The Beast watched for perhaps a little too long, hiding in the shadows of a fountain. Any childlike yearning he had for that glow, to be part of humanity again, was eclipsed by his nervousness about how to begin. This was a hunter’s tavern, for heaven’s sake. The Prince could smell the cold scent of long dead, mildewing fur and the fresh, lovely stink of all sorts of game in the back dressed and hung to bleed out. If anywhere there was a less safe place for a potentially dangerous, one-of-a-kind furry monster to show up, he would have a difficult time imagining it.
This was going to be hard.
Also, the Prince had never asked for help before. Anytime. Anywhere. As beast or prince. He ordered people, he demanded of people, he made sure people anticipated his wishes before he even had to vocalize them.
Somehow he had to go in there and make them see the human in him before it was gone forever. He had to make sure they didn’t shoot him, and then beg them to help him—a dangerous, total stranger—rescue Belle.
The Beast closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his courage.
Something he had also never had to do before.
Then he sprang up—
—and immediately forced himself to slow down. To walk on two legs up to the tavern door. To s-l-o-w-l-y push it open.
Upon his entering, the tavern fell to an immediate, and very understandable, hush.
And then a mad scramble as everyone grabbed for his musket or gun or hunting knife or anything else that could be used as a weapon. There were screams and cries and general chaos, yet all leaving a very clear area between the Beast and the rest of the room.