As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (19 page)

Something was in the once-forbidden West Wing. Something was left there, something they missed.

It wasn’t forbidden now, but that did not mean she wanted to go up there alone, in the middle of the night. Even the Beast’s presence would have been acceptable. Maybe he would even
be
there, asleep.

The thought gave her courage.

Trying to steel her nerves, she walked forward more forcefully, as if this were
her
choice. As if she were just going to seek out a mystery she forgot. Not a scared, lonely girl in her nightgown with a candle, like some daft heroine from one of the lighter romance books she read. This thought, too, gave her courage; she was
Belle
, not an idiot.

She started to march up the stairs and then thought—

Wait, who else but an idiot would just be propelled forward by her overactive imagination?

The castle was getting to her. Something about the shadows made it look like she was ascending into a gigantic cage, reminding her of the ivory webs on the outside walls. The stairs resembled nothing more than a ramp up into a trap like the one for rats her father designed.

Maybe she should just go back to bed, or see if one of the little serving creatures was up….She turned around.

There, in the middle of the steps, as if it had always been there, was a statue—made entirely out of ivy.

Belle was too frightened to even scream. She put a hand over her mouth and bit her knuckles—a tiny, dim portion of her mind saying,
Aha, that’s why people in stories do that. It’s so they don’t break down into useless, screaming piles of insanity.

Little pools of water were forming from snowmelt. For some reason, watching the slow drips was the most frightening thing of all.
It must have come in from the garden,
Belle thought insanely. There didn’t appear to be anything under the leaves and vines; they wove around themselves to make the vague semblance of a person. Perhaps a woman. Its green and amorphous arms were lifted up, entreating.

Belle stumbled up the stairs backwards away from the thing, keeping her eye on it. It didn’t move.

Shaking and making little whimpering noises in the back of her throat, Belle kept moving, backing all the way up to the top of the stairs, almost tripping as she reached for the next step that wasn’t there. Her foot came down hard on the floor instead, sending a shivering jolt through her ankle and up her spine. She let out an involuntary cry and stumbled onto the landing, barely catching herself. But she managed to keep a firm grip on the candle, not daring to let it go.

Realizing she had taken her eye off the statue, she stood up quickly and spun around.

It was now farther up the stairs, just feet behind her.

Belle sobbed.

Its arms were by its sides, like it knew Belle would just finish going where she was being herded, of her own free will. It was there only as a reminder.

Belle took a deep breath—and then ran the last thirty feet to the Beast’s lair. She started to put her hands on the ugly, monstrous bronze handles that opened the door to his room…and then stopped, a different sharp pain suddenly in the sole of her foot.

She looked down: a giant shard of glass was stuck into her flesh. Blood slowly crept along its edge and dripped. With a wince, Belle reached down and pulled it out. The piece was from the giant mirror on the wall, the one that had been shattered by the Beast—no doubt after he caught his reflection in there.

Belle looked up at what was left of mirror now, raising her candle and moving it around. It was hard to tell exactly with so little light and all of the shards pointing every which way, but even so Belle could see that they weren’t reflecting her, or anything around her. She frowned and looked closer.

One piece of glass showed a blond lady carefully guiding a little girl’s fat hand over a hole in the ground, to drop seeds in…

…another had the woman throwing leaves on the girl like a snowfall…

…a third showed the woman and the girl in sort of matching outfits, spinning and laughing….

Belle suddenly realized with a shock that these were all scenes of
her and her mother
doing things together: her mother squeezing her tight; her mother running after her with Belle running away, crying; her mother and Maurice both cuddling her together on their tiny bed….

Some showed Belle as a baby, the little family in a smaller apartment that she didn’t recognize, with no rose garden at all and an eerily familiar castle in the background.

Belle gasped. She had lived
here
? In this
kingdom
?
This
was where she and her father had moved from when she was a baby?

She didn’t remember any of it. It was like watching something else—like seeing other people through the Beast’s magic mirror. This was a different family, something that happened another time to someone else.

“No,” Belle whispered. “Why can’t I remember this?
Maman
?
What is all of this?
”

As if in answer, suddenly all the shards went dark.

A single face appeared in the blackness: scarred and shadowed and monstrous—even more monstrous than the Beast, for this was at least part human. Mangled, scarred, bloody, and torn apart, whatever features remained were erased, deep in shadow.

belle…

It croaked—then suddenly lunged toward her…

betrayed was betrayed stay away stay safe away from dark

Belle fell back, screaming.

She couldn’t
stop
screaming. All of the terror and insanity of the night welled up and burst out of her. She felt like it would never end, the screams and terror and the blackness would just roll up out of her forever.

The large doors opened and suddenly the Beast was there. He gathered her up in his big, revoltingly furry arms and she began to kick and scream louder. He held her carefully at arm’s length so she couldn’t reach him and loped away, back to her own room.

“NO!”
she shrieked. “
I’M NOT GOING BACK IN!
The shadows! It’s too dark!”

The thought of being shut up there with the blackness outside the fire and the talking wardrobe and the shadows and no easy escape was too much.

The Beast paused for a moment, then carried her into the study where she had tied him up earlier. Sleepy-looking objects peeked around corners, fluffled up the fire, and generally watched, curious, as the Beast set her down on a divan.

“Here, have a drink of this,” Mrs. Potts said. She wore, Belle noticed distractedly, a knitted kettle cozy, the way one might wear a dressing gown. The cup she offered was not Chip, and the liquid in it was not tea.

“No,” Belle protested.

“Ma chérie,”
Lumière said gently, “really? Don’t you think if we wanted to poison you, we could have done it earlier?”

Through the thick muddle in her head, Belle could see the logic in this. She could also see how ridiculously she was behaving—a hysterical girl among the closest things she had to
friends
at the moment.

She took the cup and drained it in one draught.

“Easy,
mon petit chou
,” the little candelabrum laughed.

She didn’t even cough or choke. The fiery warmth hit her stomach in an explosion of comfort.

Calmness returned to her eventually…the ticktock of Cogsworth’s face helped slow her own heartbeats. Sleep came back, to claim what it had been denied.

“Don’t leave!”
she whispered before she finally succumbed, begging—
someone.

Maybe even the Beast.

The study had no windows to let in morning light—or to reveal the creepy, bony netting that was taking over the outer castle walls.

The fire was banked low, emitting a steady orange glow. All the shadows were calm.

Someone had thrown a—
silk?
—duvet over Belle and carefully put a down pillow under her head. She was, despite everything that had happened, ridiculously comfy, warm, and sleepy. Safe.

Somehow her soul knew that it was day—that all of the demons and nightmares had been banished back to where they came from for the next twelve hours and there was nothing to be afraid of.

She pulled her foot around to take a look at the injury.

It was still there.

Everything was real.

Belle sighed.

She had read too many romantic novels of a dark and dreary bent to really be surprised—
The Castle of Otranto
was one of her favorite English reads. For all intents and purposes, she was the overwrought, terrified heroine wandering around a cursed castle at night, seeing things in the shadows, jumping at noises.

Plus she could not, even in her most imaginative moments, have come up with the idea of an ivy statue that sneakily followed her when she wasn’t looking.

She rubbed her hands over her face. Was her mother dead? Was she haunting this castle? Was it somehow filled with her soul or her memories?

The scenes shown in the shards weren’t just happy, archetypal mother-daughter moments she could draw from any well-written book; the two fought in some instances and they did
nothing
in others. Although details were hazy in the tiny visions, Belle could see her mother frowning and her hair was askew. Imperfect.

And what about that other home? The tiny apartment, the one she didn’t remember, somewhere in the town below? There was no doubt that these were fragments of real memories she no longer had.

So what had happened to them?

Belle rose and went over to the fire and took the poker. She knelt before it like a supplicant and began prodding the coals lightly—not out of any real need for more heat as much as for something to do.

Moodily, she felt little wisps of thought try to sneak into her consciousness. Irritating ones. Ones she had dismissed long ago.

Why
didn’t
she have a mother, all those years? Where did she go?

And: maybe, just maybe, she would really have actually
liked
to have a mother. Just a little bit.

There should have been no perceived difference between a father brushing her hair and a mother.

And yet there was.

“Good morning, dearie.” Mrs. Potts came waltzing in, steamy and bubbly. Behind her Cogsworth himself was pushing a rolling cart of breakfast things: chocolate, pastries, the smell of rich, fatty bacon, a bowl of warm compote.

“Ooh, what are you doing there, in the ashes?” she clucked. “That’s James’s job! Get up, you’ll ruin your pretty slip!”

Belle wondered how they had known she was awake. Was something in the room secretly alive, transmitting the message along the house somehow, like telepathy? Or was it a purely natural instinct of good servants?

Either way, she would have liked a few more minutes to herself.

Although the bacon
did
smell delicious.

“Here are your clothes,” a dustmaid said, dancing in on her feathery skirts. She carried Belle’s pinafore and apron, all cleaned and pressed. “The…wardrobe thought you would like them.”

“Thank you,” Belle said politely. “Sorry about last night…”

“Oh pish,” Mrs. Potts said, turning her head. “First night in an enchanted castle! Who could blame you?”

Belle regarded the three little objects
looking
expectantly up at her and realized she wasn’t awake or chipper enough to deal with them.

“I…think I’d like to get dressed now,” she said delicately.

“Of course!” Cogsworth said, flustered. He practically tripped over himself bowing and leaving backwards.

“Let us know if you need anything, dearie.” Mrs. Potts used her spout to indicate for the maid to leave as well.

When the door closed behind them, Belle sighed.
An eternity of that? Is it worth bacon?
She had read about how servants and general entourage members fought amongst themselves for the privilege of handing the Queen of France her underwear in the morning—while the queen herself remained shivering, waiting, in her bed.

Belle slipped the rest of her clothes on quickly, unsure when the next interruption would be.

She had just poured her chocolate and begun to nibble a croissant when there was a faint—but animal;
fleshy
—knock at the door, and it opened an inch.

“Can I…come in?” the Beast asked softly.

“You may.”

She was surprised by the relief she felt that it was
him.
There was nothing normal about him, or this situation—or particularly pleasing about being thrown in a room and told she was a prisoner—but there was, ironically, something slightly more
human
about the Beast than his servants.

“You…all right?” he asked gruffly, looking around, as if asking the question embarrassed him.

“Yes. Thank you. I hope this doesn’t happen every night of my eternal incarceration here. Chocolate?” she offered primly.

“No.”

The Beast didn’t seem to be able to stay still for very long. He went over and sat in his chair, twisting this way and that in it, looking at the fire, and then got up again.

“I want to go out and hunt,” he finally admitted. “I can’t.”