Monstrous Beauty

  Monstrous Beauty

  Marie Brennan

  Published by Book View Café

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Marie Brennan

  All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Cover art © Andrey Kiselev | >Dreamstime.com

  Cover design by Leah Cutter

  Foreword

  There are five basic schools of thought regarding author commentary in a short story collection: put it 1) all together at the front, 2) all together at the back, 3) individually before each story, 4) individually after each story, and 5) don’t bother.

  The nice thing about ebooks is, they make it much easier to facilitate whichever approach an individual reader prefers. If you would like to read my commentary beforehand, you can go directly to the Afterword and/or the individual Story Notes. The latter are also linked at the end of each story. Otherwise, you can read straight through from here and arrive at them in due course. And if you are the sort of reader for whom author commentary is not something you care about at all, you are of course free to ignore those latter parts entirely.

  Because I am a notes-after kind of person myself, I will say only that this collection contains seven very brief fairy-tale retellings (the longest is only 1400 words), all dark, and all on a common theme. I hope you enjoy them!

  The Snow-White Heart

  “Cut out her heart and bring it to me,” the queen said, and so the huntsman did.

  He brought no deer’s heart in its place, for the huntsman was loyal to his queen. He brought her the heart, and she ate of it, and the blood stained her lips like dye. Her wrinkled skin grew pale and smooth, her greying hair blackened, and she laughed as she finished the last bite.

  Now, in the cold darkness of the wood, the princess’ mutilated body lies waiting for the wolves. The stench of putrefaction draws scavengers of all kinds. Ants devour the flesh of her lips; birds steal strands of her dark hair; her pale skin grows sickly and bloated. Ravens peck out her dull, dead eyes.

  But others find her body before the wolves. They mutter amongst themselves in the shadows of the wood, and argue, and agree, and carry the corpse to their home, trailing blood as they go.

  They are master craftsmen. They slaughter ravens for their feathers, and fashion the feathers into hair. From fresh, red meat they cut new lips. Sapphires from the depths of their mines form new eyes, glittering like frost in the lifeless face. They lay the body on a bier, and last of all they craft a heart and place it in the empty, gaping hole the huntsman cut. No heart of flesh, this; their magic is of a colder sort. The heart they place within her is formed of pure, freshly fallen snow.

  They chant as they work, incantations to the dark powers of the wood. And as they put the heart of snow in place, the flesh closes and knits together. It becomes white as the snow inside, cold as winter’s touch.

  Their servant rises to do her work.

  Through the long months of winter she works, doing whatever task her craftsmen-masters set for her. She rises at night and rests at dawn, returning to the bier where her body was restored, sleeping in the thin winter sunlight that pierces the leaves of the trees.

  They are careful not to feed her.

  But rumor spreads of the beauty in the woods, a woman of sculptured perfection. They say she sleeps without waking, for who would come to the dark wood at night? Who would venture close enough to see the empty bier? Some risks, even the most foolhardy of princes would not venture.

  Princes are bolder by daylight, though, even the thin, starved light of the winter sun. One comes at last in search of the beauty in the woods, and finds her.

  Drunk on the wine of tales, he does not heed the signs of warning. The twisted symbols carved into the sides of the bier escape his notice. The chill of her flesh, he attributes to nothing more than the bitter air. The tales say that the creatures of the forest keep her company, and they are right—but these are no innocent songbirds, making music for the sleeper. The eyes that watch from the trees are yellow and cruel, and their music is laughter, dark whispers, malice.

  The prince, seeing none of this, bends to kiss her.

  The fire of his touch burns her frozen flesh. She awakes with a scream, sees daylight for the first time. It drives her mad with its brilliance. Sapphire eyes blinded, she lashes out with an animal’s instinct, finds sustenance, feeds.

  Bones and bloody scraps of cloth are the only sign of the prince, when she is done.

  Hot blood seethes through her cold, dead flesh. It flows over the stone of the bier, coats the symbols carved into its sides. In their cavern home, her masters wake and realize what has happened. They hasten to their work, barricading the entrance, chanting spells to keep her from their door.

  She does not seek them, though—not yet. Another target draws her thoughts.

  Her entourage of creatures follows her through the wood, whispering and laughing to themselves. Ravens, wolves, scavengers of all kinds trail at her heels, while around them the winter vegetation withers into true death at her passing.

  At the castle, her approach is felt as a freezing wind, that knifes through even the most tightly-barred window, the warmest cloak.

  The fire in the queen’s chamber has been built to a roaring blaze, but even that is not enough. The queen huddles and shivers before it, calling desperately for more wood. Her stolen beauty is haggard in the struggling light, and the fire dies ever downward, flames shrinking to nothingness at the killing pressure of the cold.

  The door opens at last, but the visitor is not a servant bringing wood.

  The last flicker of flame shrivels into ash.

  In the near-darkness of the chamber, the princess shines with an icy light. The queen cannot look away as she approaches. Her beauty has become an unearthly thing, greater than ever it was in life. But cold, so cold . . .

  The princess’ lips curve in a smile, gleaming with the redness of the bloody flesh that forms them. A moment later, the color fades from the queen’s mouth, leaving her blue and shaking. Next the skin, growing wrinkled and spotted once more. Then the hair, withering into brittle greyness. Strands of it drift to the floor like dying leaves.

  Then the pain begins.

  Her screams echo through the frozen darkness of the castle, where the servants huddle in fear. The huntsman hears his queen, but does not move; his loyalty cannot make him face the horror that has come.

  Alone now in the upstairs chamber, with only the shadows and the remnants of what was once the queen for company, the princess raises the bloody heart to her lips. Her sharp teeth tear into it, blood staining her snow-white skin, and then it is gone. She licks her flesh clean, and smiles once more.

  No blood, however hot, can remove the coldness from her now. But she hungers for that heat, and goes in search of more.

  Notes on “The Snow-White Heart”

  Footprints

  Among the noble flowers that have gathered for the ball, the hopeful young ladies in lavender and spring green and pink, she stands out like a rose, red-black as venous blood. The prince sees her from across the grand hall, and wonders how he overlooked her until now. Did the footmen not announce her? Was he distracted when she entered, his time and attention imprisoned by some insipid girl in powder blue? What kept his eye from this beauty?

  Drawn to the upswept gleam of her dark hair, the shining silver of her mask, he tries to make his way toward her, but others intervene. Earls and counts, their faces concealed behind suns and stags and stars. Duchesses eager to climb yet higher, to marry their daughters to the royal line. Only one can attain the exalted height of the princely bed, and so they are merciless in their maneuvering, none willing to relinquish the prince’s atten
tion to another. He struggles through the press of bodies, only to find she has moved on. His progress is undone by a general he cannot snub. He meets the stranger’s gaze once, and her black eyes hold him pinned, like a moth transfixed to a card.

  Then she is gone, and he cannot find her again.

  The morning after the masquerade, his royal parents ask for his decision, whom he will take to wife. His answer displeases them, for it is no decision at all. Another ball, he demands; he must have another opportunity to consider his choices.

  And so a second ball is announced. Again the invitations go out; again the parents of potential brides turn to their tailors and jewelers and hairdressers and mask-makers, to render their daughters the loveliest of all.

  Again they come, and again he sees her.

  She alone wears the same mask and gown as before, silver as smooth as time, silk that flows like blood. He dances with her this night, and her hand rests in his, cool and dry. Her scent he cannot place. Her face is unreadable, hidden as it is; her eyes give nothing away. She does not answer when he asks her name. She does not speak at all.

  When he tries to bring her before his parents, just before midnight, she slips from his grasp and vanishes into the crowd.

  Guards go in search. They tell him she came in a carriage of pine and wrought iron, drawn by horses black as night. They find no sign of the lady or her escort: only footprints on the palace steps, the muddy tracks of bare feet, that carry an odd smell.

  The prince will not be deterred. The marks are measured for length and width, shoes made that will fit such feet. Tiny as the shoes are, few women could wear them. A dozen pairs go out, royal servants sent to find their match. And one by one, the kingdom’s ladies try them all, and one by one they fail.

  Next they turn to the merchants and housewives; they even try the servants and char-women. No woman living within the kingdom’s borders can fit into the shoes.

  The prince will not listen to reason. No other lady will he accept: only the dark-haired stranger in the crimson dress. So a third ball is convened, at ruinous expense. The nobles and their daughters come once more, filling the hall with their silks and gems, but everyone knows this time is not the same.

  As the night draws on, the woman appears again, and dances with the prince. Her silk whispers against his legs as they waltz, and around them the others observe.

  The dance concludes. And, as she has done before, she tries to slip away.

  But the doors are locked, and guards stand by them; the windows are too high to reach. The light of a thousand candles burns pitilessly as the guests draw back, watching events unfold.

  The prince speaks from the dais, making his offer to her. She has no reason to fear. He loves her, only her, and he will make her his bride.

  The palace bells begin tolling midnight.

  The horses vanish first, outside, where only a few guards and hostlers are present to see. They fade into nothingness, and behind them the carriage drops to the ground, nothing more than a plain pine box.

  Her shoes go next, leaving her barefoot on the polished floor, her feet trailing something that is not mud.

  Then the dress. Its liquid shine sheets down her body, flowing and puddling on the floor, red-black as venous blood.

  Last the mask. Silver fades, lifeless and dull, the sickly grey of a corpse’s skin, and then it slips loose and falls, releasing a stench that permeates the hall.

  The doors are locked, and the guards cannot find their keys quickly enough. Some climb for the windows, trying to escape the creature the prince should have let go, the thing that looked so beautiful in its gown of blood and mask of skin, this horror that was once a living woman. She leaves tiny footprints of rotted slime on the floor as she approaches the prince where he stands, transfixed, on the dais.

  He has made his offer, and cannot take it back. The mouth that would scream denial, repudiation, is robbed of its ability to speak.

  Tongueless, she cannot voice her acceptance, but as the last stroke of midnight tolls she kneels at his feet and presses her putrid lips to his hand. And so those present, prince and court and all, are drawn away into the realms of the dead, and when the palace servants come the next morning, tremulous with fear, all they find is a trail of footprints, that climb the dais and vanish.

  Notes on “Footprints”

  Shadows’ Bride

  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”

  Tower in Moonlight

  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.