Beast Page 7

  He rises on his haunches and claws aside the thick tendrils of his mane that fall over his chest, revealing a heaving expanse of matted fur. He grasps the glass shard in both paws and aims its point at his exposed breast.

  Oh, if only I had a mouth to cry “No!” He must not take his life! He cannot rob me of my revenge!

  He draws a breath — and pauses. He angles the point a little higher, toward his throat, lifts his tufted chin, and closes his eyes.

  But his resolution fails him again. Try as he might, with all the best intentions he can muster, he can’t plunge the weapon home, cannot deprive himself of his life, however wretched it’s become. At last, with a howl, he casts the bloody shard back into the rubble in disgust. Relief wells up inside me, and no little glee, to witness his cowardice.

  Then his gaze falls back on me, my light still sparkling in the broken glass. His dark eyes narrow. “You shall mock me no more, Little Candle!”

  He scoops me up again and picks his way across the room, hooves crunching the splintered glass until he reaches a dark passageway and a small door in a far corner. It opens into another of the turret staircases. We climb the spiraling stone steps to the topmost floor of the château, its rooms long unused. We come out into a narrow passage and turn off into another longer one, the gloom too deep and our pace too quick for my light to illuminate much. He has no need to see by my light, I am sure; his beast’s eyes sharpen in the dark. He must have some other purpose in bringing me here.

  We arrive at last in a large room under steep, slanting roof beams, dark and dusty with neglect. I see chests and pieces of furniture stacked here and there, some of them nursery things, all items for which Jean-Loup, the bachelor chevalier, had no use. An old cupboard stands in one corner, turned sideways toward an arched window through which nothing can now be seen but black night. The beast who was Jean-Loup yanks open the cupboard door and thrusts me inside, setting me on a shelf tall enough to accommodate my tapers. There is no other object on this shelf; my flame illuminates nothing. For the first time since my transformation, I feel anxiety as he begins to shut the door on me. How will I enjoy my revenge if I can’t witness his misery? And perhaps he hears something of my thoughts somehow, or simply guesses them, because I see a wicked smile kindle in his cold eyes.

  “You are so eager to watch me suffer? I will give you better than that, Little Candle,” he growls. “You shall suffer with me. Shine as bright as you like, but see me no more.”

  And I am shut up in empty darkness.

  I should have known he would find a new way to be cruel to me, even in my present form. Time has no meaning for me. I can’t feel its passage as I once did; I no longer feel hunger or weariness. But I notice subtle changes in the nothingness within this cupboard. A strip of morning daylight alerts me that the cupboard doors are ajar; the impact when he slammed the one shut must have loosened the other. There is a space through which I can peer, and beyond it a mullioned glass windowpane.

  Daylight comes and goes many more times, and the unlatched cupboard door sags open a little wider, so I can resolve what it is I see. The window looks out over the courtyard, its flower beds beginning to run ragged, the blooms all gone, the stalks unpruned. This room I am in is near a corner of the château, and another wing juts out nearby, framing the courtyard below. From where I perch, I can look into a broad bay window, one floor down in the adjoining wing. It is always dark inside, and I can never see what lies within. But tonight, as the full moon rises, it casts its curious beam through the glass to illuminate what’s inside.

  Visible now within the bay window is a beautiful sunken bathing tub inlaid with Moorish tiles — deep blues, rich greens, purple, and turquoise, like a small private ocean. A half-drawn curtain separates it from the larger room within, and as I peer beyond the curtain, I glimpse an ebony bedpost. His bedchamber. His private bath.

  The curtain is pulled all the way back, and he is standing in his room. He surveys the bathtub for a long time, and finally turns and lumbers away to the fireplace at the opposite end of the room. I can just glimpse his feathered back as he crouches before his hearth, working intently at something. At last I see the flickering of firelight in the hearth; by some miracle, he has managed flint and tinderbox with his clumsy paws. When he’s satisfied that the fire has caught, he turns and gallops away; I hear his heavy footfalls echoing in one of the stairwells below.

  He hauls the buckets of water up himself, with no servants left to help him. My hands are fit only for holding candles in this dark place where light is banished. He wants the fire not for light, but to heat his bathwater, and I marvel at his determination to savor what must be the only pleasure left him — even as I gloat over all the pleasures he has lost. First he brings up the cauldron from the kitchen and sets it on his fireplace grate. Then he hauls up the water, two buckets at a time, slowly filling the cauldron. Whenever it gets too full, he bails hot water out of the cauldron and carries it over to the bathtub by the bucketful, then races downstairs for more water to feed the cauldron.

  At long last, the tub is full and steaming, and he stands above it. It’s a terrible sight, all of his animal parts joined together — huge horned head above massive shoulders and a broad chest matted with motley fur. His trunk is pelted with long, tangled hair. From this angle, only a few ruffled edges of the useless feathers that cover his back are visible, silhouetted in the firelight, but I can see the curly fur that covers his broad haunches, from which his thick hind legs emerge above heavy cleft hooves. His muscled shoulders and heavy paws provide power, his hindquarters speed, but surely his patchwork parts were never meant to be joined to the same creature. He is breathtaking in his hideousness.

  He clambers over the side of the tub and slides into the water on his back, like a man, deeper and deeper, until nothing is left above but his hairy paws covering his face, lest he glimpse his awful reflection rippling on the surface of the water. A straw-colored forelock looks soft, almost boyish, as it spills over his paws. But something odd happens when at last he dares to lift his head.

  From my high perch, I swear I can see his former body, his human body, shimmering beneath the surface of the water. Illuminated in the silver moonlight, it’s as well-formed as when he was human — broad chest and shoulders unobscured by fur, tapering waist, narrow hips, long human legs. Naked and poignant, the image floats like a dream, a memory, under the water. His great head jerks when he glances into the water and sees it. But when he hastily raises a dripping leg out of the water into the air, it’s still coated in animal fur with a hoof on the end. The vision is only an illusion of water and moonlight or a trick of Mère Sophie’s or some last, lingering memory of Jean-Loup, haunting his rooms. And I hear his voice begin to rise, not roaring like an animal this time, but sobbing like a man who has lost everything. His elegant tiled bath provides no refuge; moonlight, water, and all of nature mocks him, even here.

  I would smile, if I could, that my revenge has borne such fruit.

  There must no longer be any comfort for him in civilized pursuits. He goes no more into his private apartments; his fine clothing, his wineskin, and his crossbow and arrows all lie untouched. I sometimes hear him prowling about the rooms at night, his movements quiet and stealthy, no more banging and crashing about. By day, he seems to disappear, for I never hear nor see him. Curled up in some dark corner, I suppose, hiding from the light.

  Some movement catches my attention, far below my window, and I peek out into early winter twilight. A hare creeps about in the courtyard foraging among the gnarled, overgrown flower beds. The small creature pauses for a moment; his ears prick up as he scents the air, then he goes back to his nibbling. But I see another movement, a dark shape poised in the long shadows thrown by the buildings. He watches the hare with feral intensity, his powerful haunches tensed.

  He shifts his huge body into a better position and freezes, waiting. The hare, unconcerned, swivels about, presenting his backside as he takes the next shoot of withe
ring grass in his paws. The larger animal rises imperceptibly, then springs over the flower bed dividing him from his prey. Startled by some natural instinct, the hare bolts off to the left the instant before the heavy paws would land on him. He’s fast, skittering this way and that, but the predator has size and strength and cunning. The hare wheels about three times, but the fourth is anticipated by a lunge from the larger animal, who falls on the hare with his deadly claws. The hare is slammed to earth, and a mighty paw crushes his backbone. Quick. Clean.

  He crouches on his haunches and lifts the hare’s lifeless body in both paws. Holding it belly-up, he sniffs at it, touches his tongue to the still-warm flesh. He angles his head sideways, rips open the small body with one savage tooth, and begins to feed. Ravenously. Tiny bones break under his powerful jaws. Gore drips from his snout whiskers. Blood drenches the matted fur of his chest.

  He is man no more. He is Beast.

  My cupboard door is drawn open. Beast stands outside. Days or perhaps weeks have passed, and daylight streams in again through the window.

  “I felt that someone was in here,” he rumbles as his gaze searches these empty shelves. His eyes look different in the daylight, still strangely human, but a warmer shade of brown, flecked with gold. Then he frowns at me. “What fool left lighted candles in a cupboard? It’s a miracle they didn’t burn the place down.”

  What game is he playing at? Has Mère Sophie’s spell erased his memory along with his handsome face?

  My candles stand as tall as they did when he first shut me up in here, however long ago that was; my wicks burn constantly, but they never diminish. Tilted briefly upward, as he lifts me down from the shelf, I see my flames have not blackened the shelf above. He notices it, too.

  “Are these flames not real?” He draws me farther out, snuffles tentatively at my candles, but pauses when he glimpses his reflection in my silver surface. We have shattered all the mirrors, but I am still here to show him what he is.

  “I know there’s been enchantment here,” he murmurs at last. “I can sense it.” And his whiskers quiver slightly. That’s all he says; no raging at his image, no flinging me across the room. He looks around one last time, but all is silence and dust. He glances again at me.

  “Perhaps you are enchanted,” he suggests after further consideration. As if he didn’t know. Why does he pretend not to recognize me? “But whatever you are, your light is wasted here.” And he carries me out the door and downstairs. I could not agree more. I have nothing to illuminate up here, but now I can enjoy my revenge once more.

  The solitary clopping of his hooves echoes in the stillness. “I thought this house would be full of people,” he murmurs as we go. “But it’s so empty.”

  How can he not remember how all the servants fled in terror from witchcraft? From him? How can he have forgotten so soon? But I have vowed to never let him forget!

  Gloom and neglect hang like cobwebs on all the once-fine things in the château. Beast has not kept up his housekeeping, and now no one will come in to do it for him. I can imagine the tales put abroad in the town by his fleeing servants. Witchcraft. Ruin. The Château Beaumont is haunted. A terrible monster lives there.

  I wonder if this is the Beaumont Curse fulfilled at last, this monstrosity conferred upon the chevalier? But I know this monster has always lived here, for all that he once had a pretty face and comely form. Still, the rumormongers have done their work well. The château remains utterly deserted; no one is left on whom to spend his silver coins and his scorn. Only me.

  On the second floor, he hesitates for a moment, then carries me toward his private apartments and through the outer salon. But he goes no farther than the sitting room, frowning down as his hooves crunch over the shattered glass that still covers the hearth. From here, I can see through the tall, arched window overlooking the grounds. It’s late afternoon, and I’m astonished to see how ferociously the wood has overgrown the park. Wild-growing thicket and bramble smother the stately, manicured trees and riot across the green. At this rate, they must soon devour the entire château.

  Beast is also gazing out the window. “That is where I make my bed,” he says. “In the thicket, under a canopy of thorns.” Is he thinking aloud to pierce the silence or speaking to me? And why should he imagine I care? I am not here to listen to his prattling, at any rate, but to witness his suffering.

  His uneasy gaze sweeps all around the sitting room, where his own nightmare began. He frowns again. “I feel that something terrible happened here,” he whispers.

  I would stare at him if I could. He is the terrible thing that happened here — his beastliness! If he forgets his own hideous transformation, and all he has lost, how can he suffer? He must suffer, or I shall have no revenge! And without revenge, what use is my life?

  Rage at this injustice so boils up in me that I feel bubbles explode out of one of my upheld silver cups. Tiny globs of hot wax, eternally burning, splatter over his paw, scorching him. He yelps and sets me firmly on the mantelpiece. Rumbling to himself, he marches out, clawing the hardening wax out of his fur. Let him suffer his own company a while longer. Let him know what it is to be truly alone.

  The winter sun is cold and pale, shrouded in white gauze. It appears only briefly each day in the arch of the window near the fireplace before drifting off again, consumed by dark night as the park below is consumed by the wood. What little light the sun provides glistens off the ice and snow that covers everything outside now and glitters feebly in the bits of broken glass on the floor. It’s a silent, sleeping world, abandoned by time — abandoned by life.

  Only Beast disturbs the deathlike serenity. Sometimes I hear him stomping about belowstairs or out in the yard, barking in the cold moonlight. I don’t know what he finds to feed on in this season. I am more fortunate in my transformation; I feed on his misery.

  It’s cold afternoon again when Beast comes back to the sitting room. He crunches over the glass to the mantel where I stand. I see my steady flame reflected in the gold in his eyes as he peers at me.

  “I feel certain that something I said or did offended you last time,” he rumbles at length. He rubs absently at the spot on his paw where the wax landed. There can be no doubt that he is speaking to me, not merely airing out his lungs for his own benefit. “I regret it, whatever it was.”

  The words astonish me. It should never have occurred to Jean-Loup that he ever gave offense or to mind the consequences.

  “It may be that you prefer your own company. For which I would not blame you,” Beast goes on with a wry glance at his image in my polished surface. “But if you feel yourself trapped in this solitary room, there is a great deal more to see in this place, and I am eager to see it.” He raises a shaggy brow hopefully at me. “I will try not to offend you again if you would like to come with me.”

  I consider his offer with the suspicion it deserves. I am not here to make him feel his loneliness any less, and yet I am eager enough to be out of these rooms. My purpose here is to witness his further humiliation, and I can’t do so if I’m left on my own up here. So I make up my mind before he can abandon me again — which he certainly will if I do not find some way to agree to his plan.

  Rage alone has fueled me thus far; my flames feed on it. But I wonder if I have other thoughts, other feelings, that might be as powerful; thoughts and feelings are the only parts of myself that still live inside this silver form. So I take a moment to center my thoughts on serenity for a change. Nothing can hurt me anymore. I am invulnerable. And for that moment, I feel my flames flickering lower on their wicks, although I cannot see them.

  But Beast can. He visibly starts, sending a shiver through his unruly mane, to see all three of my flames dimming together. “By God’s life, you heard me,” he whispers, staring at me; were he not a beast, I could almost swear his mouth is forming into a kind of smile. He hesitates another moment, then makes a mock courtly bow, ridiculous in such an ungainly creature, and slowly extends a paw toward me. And, as I spew
no more hot wax at him, he dares to lift me again, very gingerly, and we leave this cursed place at last.

  What am I to make of this puzzling creature? Jean-Loup would never ask permission before doing whatever he pleased. Perhaps Beast’s mind can no longer grasp the horror of that transformation. I am here to remind him, of course, but I resolve to bide my time and keep him under observation while I try to understand this mysterious new turn of events.

  He carries me back to the staircase and down to the entry hall. My flame makes the shadows dance in the gloom, the only sign of life. Beast is less clumsy in his beastly shape than he was before, walking upright on his sturdy haunches. At the bottom of the stairs, he steadies himself on his hind hooves and glances about the hall.

  “This place has become my mausoleum,” he says, and begins to carry me slowly around the hall, tipping me toward doorways and into corners, as if to see for myself that gloom and loneliness fester in every shadow. “There is nothing to do, nothing to see,” he tells me. “No one ever comes here. There is nothing at all to interrupt the days.”

  He can’t expect me to respond, so he merely sighs and carries me into the front of the hall, across the black-and-white checkered tiles, to the grand glass panels overlooking the courtyard. The once-glorious flower beds are choked with desolation. Blooms have dropped, stalks withered, and unpruned limbs have become mazes of knotted grey bramble, all frosted with snow. It’s a dreary sight, without warmth or color, without hope.

  Beast frowns out the window at this ruin. “This was a garden once,” he murmurs. “It must have been so beautiful.” He shakes his great head. “Oh, if only I had the power to make it so again.”

  Out in the courtyard, the flower beds begin to tremble, as if in the grip of an ague. Snow seems to dance in the beds, and frost and ice are shaken off the bramble. Tiny pinpoints of spring green erupt along the grey limbs, forming into tiny leaves that grow as we gaze. The leaves unfurl, and we see clusters of red growing instantly into buds. In less than a blink, they mature into roses of voluptuous velvety red, and suddenly all the flower beds on either side of the central drive are a riot of red and green. We stand transfixed as new branches burst out of old bushes, and layer after layer of blooming branches rise up and up until the thicket of roses is as dense as the wood and higher than the stone wall that contains the courtyard.