Beauty and the Beast

BEAUTY and the BEAST

She walked through the woods near her family’s farmhouse everyday, though she had been told long ago that it was a dangerous journey.
There were wolves there, people said.
There were other things too, and that she knew from experience.
When she had been fifteen years old and still in the last waning stages of her ‘Goth’ period, she had dropped her tatty black schoolbag on the path and its contents had fallen out of the tear at the side.
Laurie had scrambled about on her hands and knees, picking up jotters and pens and hastily scribbled notes. Her flame red hair had cascaded over her shoulders, trailing in the mud at her knees. Her pale skin had been luminous in the thick darkness of the woods.
But even in that darkness she had seen it. A shadow, a shape, lingering in the trees a little way off the path, a huge, bulky mass of something or someone…
She still had nightmares about the eyes; white, catlike and glowing they haunted her sleep.
Now she was twenty-one and she sold flowers at the village market on the weekends and worked as a waitress on the weekdays. She was no longer an outcast but the most beautiful girl around for miles and also the shyest.
All the young men that asked her out, whether it was simply for her looks or for an honest interest, she turned down.
Some of the local blondes sniped that she was perhaps a lesbian. The brunettes asked her to her face but Laurie never answered them.
She could hardly tell them that the reason she had turned down all the eligible men in the world was because of a shadow she had once seen.
But that was the truth.
She had always searched for something out of the ordinary; a door to another world, a four leaf clover or a toadstool ring. In these woods she had found two out of the three.
She was still waiting to find that door.
In her dreams the eyes were always waiting for her, at the end of a corridor, in an empty theatre or where they had been when she had seen them, in a dark forest. She always felt afraid when she saw the eyes and yet entranced. Like she wanted to see what was behind them.
Night was falling fast and it brought with it the first snowflakes of winter. Laurie gathered her black jacket tighter around her body and continued on. A dark green crocheted hat covered her long ringlets and furry brown boots went all the way up to her knees.
But she had no gloves or a scarf and so she still felt the cold. And it was freezing. She shivered, trying to pick out the edges of the path in the starlight. The paths that were so familiar to her in the daylight always became more treacherous at night.
She had been at the cinema with her friend Elise, watching the latest James Bond and ogling the villain. The bus had dropped them both back in the village and she had left Elise there.
Elise lived just off the village square and she had never even walked through the woods. Even when they had both been children and still visited each other’s houses to play Elise had walked safely on the path by the dirt-track road. She didn’t long for danger like Laurie. She adored safety and routine and her boring boyfriend Brian.
Brian had mousy brown hair and brown eyes. He worked at the local newspaper and walked his dog at six o’clock every evening. Laurie could barely stand to talk to him for more than ten minutes. She swore to herself that a love like that, so ordinary and mundane, would never be for her.
As she walked dark clouds slowly moved across they sky and covered first the stars and then the scarred white moon. Now she could see nothing at all and she stuck her arms awkwardly out in front of her, trying not to hit any trees. She heard the crunch of fern leaves under her feet and then she tripped over what must have been a large tree root. As she tipped over and hit her shins on a rock Laurie realised that she had wandered off the path.
And she realised that with no starlight and no torch she had little hope of finding it again until morning.
I should stay where I am, she thought, I can’t be that far from the path anyway.
But she remembered the shadow she had seen six years ago and a little bit of fear and a little bit of excitement welled up inside her. She was already off the path, what would be the harm in wandering further?
She pushed her way through the sharp branches and one talon pulled the crotched hat from her head. Her curls spilled over her shoulders and the leaves from the trees snapped off and buried themselves in her hair.
She looked as fresh and innocent as she had that day six years ago; still pure and if possible, more beautiful for the years that had passed.
Behind her the great shadow followed, not bothering to hide behind the wizened trees as he so often did when she passed him.
This time he had the advantage of total darkness to shelter him and protect him from her forget-me-not blue eyes. They would not be as unforgiving as those that had seen him in the past, this he knew. But he could not bear to think of seeing his own hideousness reflected in her perfect beauty.
He had watched her for so long, from the first time she had ever walked through his forest to now. She had been only nine years old when he had first laid eyes on her, an exquisite little doll in a frilly white dress and white ribbons in her hair. She had carried a bunch of daisies and bluebells that she had plucked from the edges of the path.
He had admired her then and decided to allow her safe passage.
Then, every day since, he had watched her, always hidden, apart from that one day. When she had been fifteen and dressed in a black netted skirt and school shirt she had dropped her bag. As he watched her scramble to pick it up he had smelt her and his stomach had growled.
She had smelt of soap and perfume and talcum powder, but underneath that there had been a purity, a freshness, a cleanliness that he longed for in his loneliness.
But in his lust for her scent he had been careless and she had seen him then, or at least the shadow of him. Her eyes had grown wide and she had run home as fast as her legs could carry her. He had thought that would be the last he would ever see of her but he had been wrong.
The next day her scent had reached his leathery nostrils as he slept in his bed of ferns and vines and his heart had sung in his chest.
She had returned.
And now she was only a few centimetres in front of him and his forest was touching what he could not. His vines brushed her legs and his trees stroked her hair, all the things he longed to do.
She couldn’t know where she was going and yet she seemed to be searching for something anyway. He wondered what it was.
A short cry rang through the frosty air as she stumbled once more on another root and he almost reached out a paw to catch her, before he remembered that his claws would scratch her as soon as touch her.
But then she fell again, this time onto something soft, a bed of leaves and flowers. As she shuffled around on her hands and knees, trying to make out what she way lying in, as it seemed to her to be a giant nest, he realised they had reached his home, his bed.
Then she spoke.
“Hello?”
There was a slight tremble to her voice, but it struck a chord in his soul and he realised he had never heard her speak before.
Laurie knew there was something, someone, there. Whether it was the shadow she had seen before or a lonely tramp she wasn’t sure. But another thing she knew was that she had landed in the thing’s bed. It was a bed to worms and spiders as well, but it was warm and comfortable, and the leaves felt smooth against her fingers.
“Do you know me?” a voice growled in answer and Laurie resisted the urge to run.
Whatever was before her smelt of pine and earth and air, she reached out an arm and touched it.
She felt fur, and then a wide mouth and fangs. With a gasp she withdrew and scuttled back.
The clouds parted and a beam of silver light shot down on then, illuminating the darkness.
He saw an angel, a nymph. Her skin was white and milky and green leaves stuck out here and there from her red ringlets. Her perfect pink cupids bow lips were parted in a frozen gasp. He wanted her, God how he had waited for years in his prison for someone like her to turn up!
She saw a monster, a great hairy beast that loomed before her like something out of a horror story. His fur was dark, almost black and his hands and feet both had curled yellow claws. But as she looked closer she saw that his large eyes were soulful and a little sad. They looked at her in awe and, could that be…love?
“You?” she said. “You are the shadow aren’t you?”
He moved and knelt before here and the white droplets of snow settled in his fur and then melted. He reached out a large, leathery paw and hesitated, holding it near her face.
She saw the claws and she saw his hideousness and she was not afraid. Wasn’t this the adventure she had always dreamed of? Finally something out of the everyday ordinary was happening to her. Could she forgive herself if she turned it away through fear?
No, she decided, she could not.
She placed her small white hand around his paw, being careful not to scratch herself. He was warm, as if his very being was burning up from the inside. She pressed her face against the soft padded area and he moved his claws slightly, cupping her head in his hand.
He had never dreamt he would ever be this close to her.
“I am the beast,” he said, feeling a strange need to make his identity known.
He was no shadow; he was as real as she was.
“Are you not afraid of me?”
She looked at him with her big, innocent eyes and shook her head.
“How could I be?”
His stomach growled and she heard it and slowly fell backwards until she lay like a sacrifice among the leaves.
“What is your name, beauty?” he asked.
“Laurie Richards,” she whispered.
In his mind he discarded her name immediately. No human name deserved her. She was simply to be called Beauty or Love or Innocence, or any one thing that he could see in her.
Laurie closed her eyes against his ugliness and instead allowed herself to get lost in his heat, his wild scent. He was different alright, and she still wasn’t entirely sure that she wasn’t dreaming.
“Are you a man in disguise?” she asked, remembering a story she had once read.
He placed his enormous snout over her hair and sniffed. Then he breathed out a sigh. But of what she could not tell.
“I am the beast,” he said. “In whatever form I am the beast.”
And then he lay beside her and gathered her up in his arms. His claws cut her flesh but only lightly and his fur protected her from the snow. The stars winked down at them through the trees and Laurie thought to herself, if Elise could see me now!
Then she slept and the beast’s stomach growled through the night. But he ignored it, concentrating on enjoying simply the fact that she was there instead.
And in the morning when she awoke to the sound of birds chirping cheerily he was a man. His face was wide and his teeth sharp, like fangs. His skin was pale but rough and his black hair was long and matted. When she stroked his cheek and he opened his eyes they were dark and soulful and a little sad.
She kissed him then and gave him her coat to wear.
“Are you really a man now,” she asked. “Or just a beast in disguise?”
He said nothing. He simply looked at her with his sorrowful eyes and she felt sorry for him and now that he was a man she felt that she loved him. After all, she had always wanted the extraordinary, and what was more extraordinary than a shadow that had become a beast who had become a man?
Laurie kissed him again and, since the sun was now up and she could find the path, she led him back to her house and gave him some clothes and married him.
They built a house in the forest and sometimes she would find fur pelts in the garden, under the rose trees, as if a beast had just shed its skin. Sometimes she worried about exactly what she had married. But sometimes she just didn’t care.
She had found her door.