Monstrous Beauty (3 page)

He rides into the wood, his sword unsheathed.

The impassable forest of thorns disappoints him; it is dark and overgrown, to be sure, and thickly populated with briars, but the spines on these are not the sword-length blades he had been led to expect. He makes his way through with no more difficulty than an ordinary tangled forest might give him, and sees no horrors along the way. There is no sign, in all the wood, of any prince or knight slain here before him.

The villagers go blackberrying in the wood every year; they could have told him it was safe.

On the other side of the wood he finds the castle, walls cloaked in ivy, gate hanging open. Sword still in hand, the prince steps through. The courtyard stones are cracked by frost, and grass has grown between them, but there are no scattered bones, no fallen blades, left by despairing suitors. Above stands the tower, the tiny panes of its window glinting in the light—shut against the elements, not left open by one leaping to his death.

The villagers never venture as far as this, but they know the courtyard is clear.

The great door of the keep also stands open, and dead leaves have drifted into the hall. They crunch dryly under the prince's boots as he walks in, the only sound he can hear. The light is failing now, the day having passed while he navigated the wood, and so he pauses to work flint and steel, until a spark catches in the torch he brought with him—he knew there would be darkness. By the torch's flickering light, he searches the corners for threats, but finds nothing.

The villagers could have told him that.

He begins to question this all as he looks for the stairs. Where have all the others gone? Is it mere fiction, that men have come here before him? Could it be he is the first? All the stories agree that the questers have never returned, but perhaps they never reached this place at all. Perhaps they perished far from here; the road is, after all, dangerous. Or perhaps they came, failed to wake the sleeper, and refused to return home with their shame.

Perhaps there
is
no sleeper.

But he never asked the villagers for answers.

He finds the stairs and climbs, half-wondering if there is a guardian lurking here who will devour him, bones and boots and all, half-wondering if the tower room will be empty when he arrives.

Nothing meets him on the stairs.

As he opens the heavy door at the top of the stairs, he is of two minds. One envisions triumph and fame, the tale of how a youngest son, lacking any hope of inheritance at home, won a beautiful princess and restored her castle—their castle—to its former glory. The other fears mockery, the jeers of those around him when they learn he spent years on a foolish, pointless quest.

All thought vanishes when he opens the door.

The dusty, half-rotted curtains around the bed stir slightly as the air is disturbed. The prince scarcely sees them, eyes fixed instead on the figure lying atop the mouldering coverlet, hands neatly clasped across her breast. Amidst the decay, her hair shines like incorruptible gold. Her long lashes lie against her cheeks, hinting at the beauty they hide, and her perfect rosebud lips await his gentle kiss.

There
is
a sleeper, and there
is
a curse—and the villagers know well the nature of both.

The prince drops his torch to the floor, where it dies swiftly, unnaturally. In the sudden gloom, he walks toward her, boots automatically lifting over the debris that blocks his way. He spares no thought for the debris; all his attention is fixed on her. She is a beauty beyond compare, and his skin aches, as though too small to contain his adoration. Trembling in anticipation of the sight of her eyes, he bends over and gives her the kiss of life.

An instant later, he stumbles backward, no longer recognizable as the idealistic young prince who set out on a noble quest, nor even as the older, more travel-weary prince who climbed the tower stairs. He is scarcely recognizable as human. His skin has shrunk tight against his bones and his muscles have withered away; he collapses to the ground, a skeletal, desiccated thing, dying among the scattered bones and rusted blades of all the other brave young men the villagers could not persuade or prevent from coming to this tower.

The sleeper sighs once, but does not wake.

The curse still holds, for which the villagers give thanks every morning. Her prison of sleep still contains her. But one day it will fail; one day, she will absorb enough life from others to open her terrible eyes, to rise from her bed and walk again. On that day, the skies will darken, and she will come forth from the castle once more, sweeping the bones of her suitors before her, bestowing her ravenous kiss on all who cannot flee her path.

But that day is not today. For now, she sleeps, waiting for her next kiss.

Notes on “Kiss of Life”

He wakes before dawn to prepare her breakfast. The spoons and pot-handles are clumsy in his curving claws, but the servants all left long ago, and so he has learned to make do. The breakfast is not what he would wish it to be; getting supplies is difficult these days. He found two eggs in a lark's nest yesterday, though, that he cracks with painstaking care, scrambling them because anything else requires more dexterity than he possesses. There is meat, as always, and bread he stole for her.

The claws of his feet click against the stone as he hurries from the kitchens, tray balanced in his enormous hands. The sounds echo off the walls where the tapestries have long since fallen away. It took an army of servants to maintain this place, once; he cannot manage it on his own. Even the small areas he keeps are almost too much for him. The kitchens; one of the parlors; her bedroom, of course. The garden. Everywhere else has been given over to dust and neglect, surrendered to the dominion of spiders and mice. But he makes these few places as pleasant for her as he can.

He tiptoes into her bedroom, comical in his caution. She does not stir at the sound. Laying the breakfast tray on the bedside table, he averts his eyes from her motionless form. It would not be proper for him to look. She should have a lady's maid; she did, for a time. But the woman had been the first of the servants to leave. Now they are alone.

Drawing back the brocade curtains, he says in a gentle voice, “Beauty, it's time to rise.”

He helps her dress, eyes shut tight as he fumbles for buttons and sleeves, moving her like an overgrown, listless doll. The gown is one he purchased for her, when he had servants to go into town for him. The figured muslin is decorated with a delicate embroidery of roses. She was a village girl, before; he had to teach her the distinction between day dresses and evening ones. But he spared no expense on her behalf: she had lovely gowns, expensive furnishings, everything she might desire. Before the servants left, her food had been exquisite to match. But they could not live with her, they murmured, and one by one they fled.

She does not touch her breakfast, again, and it worries him. Guiding her from the room, he apologizes for the fare; he apologizes, though he cannot think what he might do to improve it. He would move heaven and earth to make her happy, but he cannot leave this castle or its grounds, the woods that lie to the south. The villagers would kill him on sight. He must make do with what he can hunt or gather, or occasionally steal from the nearest houses. And if she continues in this manner, she will simply fade away. When was the last time she ate?

He leads her to the parlor, where he sings for her entertainment. Harp strings snap under his claws, and piano keys are too slick, but he has a fine bass voice. When noon comes, he slips away to capture and devour a plump rabbit, then returns to her with an offering of ripe cherries. She does not touch these, either.

Tomorrow, he tells himself. Tomorrow she will be hungry.

In the afternoon, they go to the rose garden, where she sits quietly in the sun. He has a new book of poetry to read to her today, one he has been saving for some time. He judges—he hopes—that now is the time to share it.

Turning the pages with careful claws, he reads the romantic poems to her, one by one, in a rich growl that holds a wealth of emotion within.

In the hot summer sunlight, she sits without a word. A fly lands on her cheek, and she does not brush it away. A stench fills the air that the roses cannot mask. The servants did their best for her, trying to make her happy, praying their master could be delivered from his curse. Some of them stayed even after he drew her from the pond at the base of the garden—but not for long. Their hopes died with her.

But his live on. The truth cannot be borne. And so, day after day, the Beast cooks meals she does not eat, sings songs she does not hear, and reads poetry to her in the rose garden, waiting for Beauty to love him.

Notes on “Waiting for Beauty”

Some short story sets are planned; others happen by accident.

This is one of the latter sort. It began with what I thought was a one-off idea—a vaguely Lovecraftian retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood”—but within three months it had spawned three more stories in a similar vein. (The remainder sauntered in over the next two and a half years.) At first their connection was more stylistic than thematic; they were all fairy tales, and all written in a more poetic and ornate kind of prose than I usually employ. But over time—specifically, round about the point where I wrote a story I thought was for the set, and then realized it didn't actually fit—I noticed there was a common thread running through them all.

In academia (which is where I was when I wrote these), there's a concept referred to as the “monstrous feminine.” It doesn't simply mean “a female monster;” it has to do with the ways in which femininity itself is treated as a source of horror. The idea was given that name by (I think) Barbara Creed, but the concept goes all the way back to Aristotle, who described the woman as “a failed and botched male.” It's the idea of marked and unmarked categories, Self and Other. If male is the unmarked default, the Self—and that's been the pattern in Western society—then female is the marked category, the Other. And the Other is
scary
.

Remember, this set happened by accident. I didn't plan to write seven stories, though after I had written two or three it became clear I was on
some
kind of roll. And I didn't plan to write about the monstrous feminine. Some authors can say to themselves “I am going to explore this theme now” and have it turn out well, but I'm not one of them. I was five successful stories and one failed attempt in before I noticed what I'd been doing all along. Nor is there any kind of message I mean to send by writing about this concept—though of course there are all sorts of messages one could pull out of the result, whether I intended to put them there or not. The fact that the set has a theme does not mean I am attempting to preach anything. It is, however, the reason these form a
set
—the reason I didn't decide to bundle them in with other short stories to make a larger collection. They belong together, and nothing else I've written belongs with them.

That's it for my general remarks. For commentary on the individual stories, turn the page.

Short stories are small enough things that they can spring fully-formed from a single sentence, like Athena from the head of Zeus. This one—which was the fifth of the set to be written—arose from its opening line:
“Cut out her heart and bring it to me,” the queen said, and so the huntsman did.

The immediate question, of course, is how the story can continue when the central character is dead from the first line. I could have had it follow the queen from there, focusing on the consequences of her magical cannibalism, but the whole “flesh golem” thing caught my imagination and ran off with it on the spot. Like all the tales in this set, this one was written in a single go: the idea is either there or it isn't.

“The Snow-White Heart” was originally published in issue #39 of
Talebones
, in 2009, and recorded in audio format by
Pseudopod
, Episode 218, 2010.

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This was the last of the stories to be written, for a mix of aesthetic and pragmatic reasons. Aesthetically, my brain had stopped producing these kinds of ideas on a regular basis; I would have had to consciously work at it to come up with more. Pragmatically, it was not easy to sell them; editors see a
lot
of fairy-tale retellings in various modes, and so are rather jaded on the subject. Furthermore, their short length sharply limited the number of markets I could offer them to. Ergo, it didn't seem like a good idea to put a lot of work into thinking up more stories of a type that wouldn't easily find a home—certainly not when I had so many story ideas of other sorts knocking at my brain door, asking for some time and attention.

But I couldn't stop without trying my hand at “Cinderella,” the last of the classic fairy-tale trinity (as established by Disney, anyway). The need for her to leave by midnight suggested the witching hour, which naturally suggested horrible necromancy, and so it went from there.

“Footprints” was originally published in issue #9 of
Shroud Magazine
, in 2010.

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Readers who know their European fairy tales well may be familiar with Giambattista Basile's “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” which is an early variant of the tale more popularly called “Sleeping Beauty.” That version is about as far from the Disney movie as you can get: Talia is raped in her sleep by a passing king and gives birth to twins (Sun and Moon), not waking until one of the infants sucks on her finger and pulls out the splinter of flax that put her to sleep.

Basile's tale is horrific enough all on its own. That, however, did not stop me from taking it one step further. (A writer's brain is not a nice place.)