Monstrous Beauty (2 page)

Notes on “Footprints”

Their laughter is the silence of empty rooms, the hush of dust lying decades thick. Their smiles leer from metal reflections marred by tarnish and rust. Their jest has entertained them for many a year.

They wait for the light, and the man who will bring it. He will wake his bride, and take her, and her body will swell with the passing moons; he will believe the child his own.

But others have been in the tower before him.

He will think his bride a virgin, and see the blood as proof; he will not realize the truth. The shadows have had her a thousand times, in a thousand different ways, as she lies in her sleep that is so like death, and that is why they laugh.

Though unwed, she is the shadows' bride, and when the light comes, their child will awaken to be born.

Notes on “Shadows' Bride”

The hart leads them far into the woods, fleeing through the trees while the hounds nip at its heels and the horses thunder behind, until the path is lost, lost, and familiar lands are no more than a memory, and then it runs still more. One by one the huntsmen and hounds fall away, until only the young lord pursues, on his weary, lathered horse, and then even that noble beast founders, crashing to the forest floor with an inhuman scream of pain, sending the young lord to the ground.

He does not break anything in the fall, but the horse is not so lucky; it twists and moans, ridden past the point of exhaustion, and now crippled besides. The cries of equine pain disorient the young lord further, but finally he recovers his senses and turns to the dying beast. No doctor or bone-setter could save the creature now, and so the young lord draws his knife across his mount's throat, ending its agony.

In the sudden silence that follows, the blood soaks into the carpet of decaying leaves.

The young lord wipes his knife dry and puts it away, considering his own situation. His companions are lost, or rather
he
is lost; he does not know where his pursuit of the hart has taken him. Following his own tracks backward, he hopes to return to familiar lands; it should be easy, for a galloping horse leaves an unsubtle trail. But the forest's twilight murk deceives him, and soon he is further lost. He stumbles on blindly, fearing to stop, fearing what manner of creatures rustle and whisper in the shadows around him. He has no means for fire, and his bow broke when he fell. He would be an easy target for wild beasts—were it wild beasts producing the sounds he hears.

On and on he goes, brambles reaching out to clutch his cloak, roots of trees rising unseen in the darkness to tangle his feet. The shadows mock his weakness. Exhaustion drags at him, as if it were he, not his horse, who had run for such a distance in pursuit of the hart, and he knows he cannot go on much longer.

Into his fog of disorientation, a voice comes—singing high and pure, wordless, beautiful, perfect. The sound is a beacon, and he seeks it unknowing.

And then the woods open up, and the voice stops.

Before him is a grassy clearing, blessedly free of the brambles and roots and shadows that have plagued his progress thus far. Moonlight spills down into this open area, edging with silver the tower that stands there. The young lord thinks with trembling relief of fires and beds, a place for him to rest at last.

But from where he stands he sees only one high window, dark and cold and empty, and no sign of a door. He circles the tower on weary feet, praying that this place might be the haven he hoped, but finds nothing else: no windows, no doors, no hint of human presence. And the window he first saw is too far away to be reached.

So dismayed is he by this cruel jest, this taunting offer of safety and rest, that he cries out in pain. And to this, there is a response.

A maiden appears, moon-white and fragile, at the window's embrasure. After the trials the young lord has suffered, she seems to him a vision of perfection, and as far out of his reach as perfection itself. A tear slips down his face at the mere sight of her.

“Traveller,” she says, “why do you cry out?”

“Lady,” he replies, for surely a creature so lovely as this cannot be of lesser birth, “I am lost in this wood, lost beyond hope. My horse is dead, and I have strayed from my path; I followed the sound of singing, and found myself here. I hoped to find shelter in this tower, and so when I saw it had no door, my disappointment was such that I could not help but cry out.”

The maiden looks down at him, head tilted to one side as she considers him. “Disappointment?”

“Lady,” the young lord says, “your tower has no door. I would beg your hospitality, for I fear the creatures that haunt the shadows of the wood, but I do not see how I might enter.”

“You are right to fear the creatures of the wood,” the lady says. “But in the other matter, you are mistaken.”

“Then your tower has a door? It is most cunningly hidden.”

The maiden smiles faintly. “There is no door.”

The young lord ponders this, struggling against his weariness in order to think. “A ladder, then.”

“Nor ladder neither.”

“Then, lady, I do not see how I might enter.”

Her slender ivory hands rise to her neck; she reaches behind herself, into the impenetrable shadows of her tower room, and she brings forth her hair. The unbound tresses spill down the tower's side, a shining waterfall of purest silver that cascades from the high window all the way to the ground below.

“Here is your entrance,” she says. “Come to me, and you need not fear the creatures of the wood.”

To the young lord, this all seems like a trance, a dream, a thing which cannot possibly be real—the maiden in the tower, the silver hair, the horrors that wait unseen beyond the forest's edge. And so he steps forward, as a man in a trance, and takes hold of the tresses, and climbs.

When he is halfway up, not yet to the window but a great distance from the ground, the strands begin to move.

For one frozen instant, he believes it is the wind, stirring the maiden's hair. But no breath of air disturbs the moonlight clearing, and a heartbeat later he cannot deny the truth. The silver strands are moving of their own accord.

They wrap about his wrists and arms, twining around his throat while the shadows hiss in malicious approval. He cries out again, this time in fear, and draws his dagger from its sheath, slashing at his bonds, heedless of the risk of falling; from the tower window above comes a shriek of furious, alien pain, and the dagger is wrenched from his hand. He is trapped, entangled, a helpless puppet, and the tresses of hair slide about his body like sinuous fingers, caressing, possessing. The strands around his throat tighten ever more as he is dragged upward, choking off his screams, sending blackness and spots of light dancing across his vision, and his final sight is of the inhumanly perfect face above him, waiting, hungering, ready to welcome him in.

Notes on “Tower in Moonlight”

The shadows writhe and twist as she skips down the path, singing to herself. If she turns her head, there will be nothing there, and so she does not; she keeps her eyes fixed on the path ahead, on the dappled sunlight, not the shadows between. She does not listen to the voices that whisper from the dark.

She has come this way many times before.

But this time is different. This time, clouds begin to veil the sun, and the light's vibrance fades. The shadows creep in. Her steps quicken, the faster to leave the wood, but then in the growing murk something slips across the path, and she stumbles to a halt. Now, for the first time, she turns her head and looks in fear.

Shapes move through the shadows, indistinctly seen, and her hands grip her basket until the wicker-work cuts into her skin.

She moves on, but more slowly, ever looking over her shoulder. There are words in the whispers, now, words she tries not to hear, laughing at her, telling her she is slow, so slow,
too
slow, why don't you run, little girl? Won't help you to run, but oh, it would be fine.

She should run, but she cannot. Fear shackles her legs.

On an ordinary day she would have reached her destination well before nightfall, but the darkness is rising early, and for all that she is still on the path she feels she has lost her way. When the little bridge appears among the trees, she sobs with relief. Almost there. Almost there.

But first she must cross the bridge, and she fears what might lie beneath it, in the shadows between bridge and water. There are tales, after all, and while this bridge has long been a familiar friend, today nothing is familiar, and nothing is a friend.

Her feet will not move.

She must move. She
must
. Whatever may lie beneath the bridge, the wood holds worse; she is sure of it. And safety lies just beyond the bridge.

So she gathers up her courage, takes a deep breath, and with a scream she darts forward, flying over the little wooden bridge as fast as she can go. On the other side she does not stop running; she careens down the path, basket jolting against her hip, around the bend and into the open garden before her grandmother's house, which holds the last of the light.

Before it can die out and leave her in darkness, she pounds on the door, gasping “Grandma, Grandma, let me
in!
”

The door opens, and she stumbles into the firelit embrace of the house.

Her legs give out. She collapses onto the rag rug, panting for breath, her basket forgotten beside her. The fire crackles and dances; the shadows dance in reply.

“How wonderful to see you, my dear.”

The voice is a whisper, a rasp; Grandma has been ill. The sound reminds the girl of her purpose here, reminds her of her basket; she picks it up with shaking hands, disentangles herself from the red cloak that has wrapped itself about her legs, and stands. “Grandma, I have brought you bread and fruit from my m . . .”

Her words trail off as she sees her grandmother. The illness has taken its toll on her, and the firelight is not kind; her skin seems to sag on her face, like an ill-fitting dress, and her eyes are dark hollows.

“How very kind of you,” Grandma whispers, “to bring me such treats.”

The girl swallows; her throat feels very dry. “Grandma—what dark eyes you have.”

“I have been very ill, my dear.”

The firelight dances, and the patterns tied into the rug twist and snake.

Grandma reaches for the basket, but the girl grips it tighter, staring. “Grandma—what long nails you have.”

“I have been waiting a long time, my dear.”

Behind Grandma, in the shadows, the cold laughter echoes. Waiting. Watching.

Grandma smiles at the girl.

The basket drops from her nerveless fingers; the food spills out, lost, and one of Grandma's shoes crushes grapes to pulp as she steps forward, hands out, reaching.

“Grandma,” the girl whispers, almost soundlessly. “What sharp teeth you have.”

“I am very hungry, my dear.”

The shadows rise up around them, living and cold, as the firelight dies. It is a long way to grandmother's house, through a wood that is not empty at all; the only ones who hear the screams drink them in like wine, sighing in pleasure.

When dawn comes, the shadows retreat, leaving behind an empty house and an old, wrinkled skin on the floor, discarded like an ill-fitting dress.

Notes on “The Wood, the Bridge, the House”

In faraway lands, the tale is a romantic one. She sleeps in her tower, in the castle surrounded by thorns, awaiting a prince who is brave and true of heart, for only the kiss of such a man will end her slumber and bring her back to life. She has waited for many centuries, they say, and many princes have gone, fighting their way through the dark wood and climbing the thousand stairs to the tower room, but none have been pure and noble enough to wake her.

Some tellers say that, distraught by their failure and this judgment of their character, the princes fling themselves from the tower window and fall to their deaths below.

If that were true, the courtyard of the sleeping castle would be littered with bones.

Closer to home, the stories change. The princes, they say, do not die of broken hearts and wounded pride. They do not reach the tower room at all. Long before they have a chance to lay their mouths against the perfect rosebud lips, long before they catch sight of the graceful, slender hands, they fall prey to the creatures that wait beneath the thorny boughs of the wood. And if they survive their trials there, then they meet their ends at the hands (or claws, or jaws) of the beings that walk the halls of the darkened keep, more foul by far than their forest-dwelling kin. And if they win their way past these as well, they perish in battle against the guardian who stands on the stairs of the tower—but most never make it that far. The curse on the castle and its sleeping resident was placed by a powerful, jealous sorceress (or fairy, or stepmother-queen), and she vowed, as she was slain by knights, that her victim should never wake; and her blood flowed out and became the monsters of the wood and the hall, her malevolent spirit the guardian on the stairs.

In the village that once served the keep, they tell another tale, and that is the darkest of all.

They tell their tale to all who pass through, but most princes and knights and wandering adventurers dismiss their words as the superstitions of credulous peasants (forgetting that their own peasants' tales set them on their road to begin with), or else assume that the villagers do not want the curse lifted—for then they would lose the one thing that distinguishes their collection of squalid hovels from the thousand others like it.

The idealistic young prince who approaches the wood now never even had the opportunity to disregard the peasants' tales, for he took a vow, when he departed on his quest, to speak with no one until his task was done. A foolish vow, which lengthened his road by months and leagues; he searched in many wrong places, all unknowing, before finding his way here. He is not quite so young now, and his idealism has tarnished along the way. But at last he has found the wood, and beyond it lies the castle, and in the castle's topmost tower sleeps the lady whom he seeks.