As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (36 page)

“Mother?” Belle gasped. “My mother?”

“Oh, Belle, I saw her….” He began to weep. He leaned against the wall and sobbed and choked. “Belle…she was taken from us all those years ago. She didn’t leave. They took her and have been taking all the magic out of her. That’s what D’Arque does, Belle. He removes magic from everything.
Everyone.
That’s what those screams are! He’s…torturing the magic out of them. Out of your mother. She’s mangled, Belle…your beautiful, strong mother. She’s a husk of bone and skin….”

Belle remembered, with nausea, the monster she had seen in the mirror that the Beast had broken. It
was
her mother. The beautiful lady with the rose and mirror who cursed the Beast was now a scrawny, scarred victim of torture that left her looking like a monster.

I thought she didn’t love me. That she left me and Papa for her own reasons. But she was
stolen
from us. Kidnapped—and brought here.

And even in her weakened state she still summoned the strength to try and reach me.

“Dark,” she suddenly said aloud, remembering what the vision in the mirror had said. “
Stay safe away from dark…
D’Arque! She meant stay away from
D’Arque
! She was trying to protect me!”

She put a hand to her head, feeling both overwhelmed and exhausted. “We have to get out of here,” she said as calmly as she could. “Papa, we have to do something. I’ll do something. I’ll get all three of us out. The Beast can help….”

“The Beast who captured us?” Maurice asked, alert and skeptical.

“He’s the prince
Maman
cursed. When he was a child. I…touched the rose she cursed him with and somehow completed the spell. I’m trying to help him break it.”

Maurice looked at her, dumbfounded. Then he shook his head. “Magic always comes back on itself….”

A voice, old and female and guttural and chatty, came from up the hall. A nearly inaudible masculine grunt replied. For some reason the sound of both made Belle sick.

The newcomers approached the door and unlocked it. One was a large unmasked man wearing a plain tunic and breeches. His arms were the size of hams. The woman with him was also wearing a plain, clean outfit. They looked almost like nurses, but there was something terribly not right about the whole thing.

“Hello, girly! The doctor’s all ready to examine you, now!” the woman said with cheeriness that wasn’t so much false as terrifying.

“No!” Maurice yelled, standing up straight. “Stop. I am her father. There is nothing wrong—or magical—about her at all!”

“The doctor will get it all sorted. And don’t you worry about your precious girl. I’m along here to make her feel comfortable and safe, nothing naughty or untoward happening with her.”

The man unlocked the door. Belle’s first urge was to get away, even if just to the back of the room.

Both “nurses” must have guessed at what she was doing, because they sprang into the room faster than seemed possible; they were well used to people resisting. The man had Belle’s hands behind her back and held tightly before she could move.

“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. Aside 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.”