by Cameron Jace
She never ate in front of me. When I asked why, she wrote that she was afraid that if I saw her eating, I’d be disgusted with her and wouldn’t marry her. Later, I caught her eating a tarantula. Some marriage proposal, that was.
‘Do you think you could love me?’ She once wrote over dinner.
“Not in a million years,” I said. She had tortured me enough that I wasn’t afraid to speak the truth. Torture was so hard to tolerate in the beginning, but later it tasted like a bitter memory that stuck with me forever. It was always painful to remember, but no longer surprising or shocking.
‘That’s alright,’ She wrote. ‘It will take some time, although I don’t know what love is, so I can’t claim I’d be missing it if you didn’t. I just want to look at you every night, and wish you to keep me company.’
“How’d you expect me to marry you if I don’t know much about you?” I thought it was a good time to learn anything about her. If I had learned anything from the books I read, it was that people’s weaknesses could be spotted through their speeches. You just had to listen carefully and read between the lines. In all of the fairy tales my father told me, the villain always had to make a speech.
“There isn’t much to know about me,” She wrote. “I’m a beast. I do horrible things, and I enjoy it. No amount of things you know about me will make you sympathize with me. You have to like me for who I am.” She said, picking up a beetle from a small box and munching on it.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up, but I knew one thing; she was a smart beast. She talked with reason, but how was I supposed to like her for what she was?
“Were you born a beast?” I asked.
She stopped in the middle of a bite, and threw whatever was left of the insect away – the legs probably. Her eyes blackened again but she sat still, not picking up a skin to write on. Apparently, she wasn’t going to answer this.
“I am sorry,” I said. “It seems you don’t want to talk about it. How about if I ask you about my mother? You said you would show me evidence that she has received the rose and was cured, or what would be the point in marrying you?”
‘Really?’ She wrote. ‘Are you going to marry me?’
“Let’s talk about my mother first.”
‘That’s fine. I’ll keep my promise,’ She wrote. ‘But you have to promise me that you will do as I say. You have to promise me that you will not do something foolish.’
“Why would I do something foolish?”
‘You just promise me!’ Her handwriting wasn’t as beautiful as it was before. It was scribbled and looked nasty.
I agreed and followed her through the castle; to the rooms she had warned me of entering on the first floor. I walked slowly, two or three strides away from her. Everywhere she walked things dimmed or died. All, but me. I was still safe from her curse.
She stopped in front of one of the rooms and showed me in while standing at the threshold.
‘This is a forbidden room,’ She wrote. ‘No one’s supposed to enter it.’
“No one? Even you?” I asked.
‘Even me. I don’t enter it. It’s enchanted in ways I can’t explain.’
“So why are you showing me in?”
‘Because you want proof that your mother is healed, and only mirrors have the power of showing you what’s happening in far away lands without having to travel. You must have noticed that there are no mirrors in the castle. I hate them.’
“So?”
‘There’s a mirror in this room though,’ She wrote. ‘Ask it about your mother, and she will show you she’s safe. You don’t ask the mirror anything else. Understood? Not one other thing. You must promise me.’
I nodded and entered alone as she closed the door behind me.
The mirror inside the room was blackened and had no reflection. What kind of mirror was that?
There was nothing special about the room itself.
“Mirror?” I asked it, lowering my head, and thinking I was insane.
No answer.
“Mirror?” I repeated.
This time it shone slowly from dark into light with a rippling surface, showing my beautiful face in its reflection. With all the madness I had been through, I wasn’t surprised, and I remembered reading about such mirrors in books.
“Could you show me my mother? Could you show me if she was cured?”
The mirror’s surface rippled and showed me my family’s castle in our kingdom, and then it showed me my mother. She looked beautiful and healthy, walking in the green gardens outside while ruling the kingdom. Seeing her brought a long smile on my face. She was cured.
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?” I asked the mirror.
“No one in this castle knows what your mother looks like,” A girl in the mirror said. I could only hear her voice but not see her face. “If I wanted to trick you, how’d I be able to conjure the image of someone I’ve never seen?”
It wasn’t the most convincing explanation, but it proved the mirror could speak to me, so I knelt down and whispered to the mirror, keeping my eyes on the closed door separating me from the beast.
“Do you know how I could escape this place?”
“You can’t escape this place…” The girl in the mirror said, then stopped without saying more.
Was that it? Was I destined to stay trapped with the beast forever?
“…unless your heart changes,” The girl in the mirror continued.
“What does that even mean?”
“How could you expect to leave if you haven’t changed?” She continued. “How do you expect to advance in life if you don’t learn from your crises?”
“I don’t understand. Change how?” I decided to go on with the insanity and actually ask.
“Ask the girl in your dreams,” The mirror said. I felt my heart racing. How did the mirror know about the girl in my dreams? “She is trying to help you.”
The beast knocked on the door.
“Just a minute. I’m on my way out,” I said to the beast, and leaned closer to the mirror. “Why can’t the beast enter this room?” I whispered, but I was too late. It had gone black again, hearing the beast’s voice, I assumed.
The rest of the day, I did everything the beast asked of me. I just wanted the sun to set so I could go to sleep and dream about the beautiful girl that could help me out of here.
While I was chained, dreaming about the girl, she seemed too real to me. Too beautiful, wearing a white dress with pink flowers. Her blonde hair was braided on both sides, glittering in the sun. Tiny white birds flew around her, celebrating her youth and beauty.
I had to follow her wherever she went, walking into cornfields and then ending up before a simple house. Unlike what I had imagined, she wasn’t a princess. She was a merchant’s daughter living in a secluded house in a farm. The kind of people who lived the real happily ever afters. They didn’t need crowns, enchantments, fairy tales, or too much beauty. They had each other, a family of five; her father, her mother, herself, and her two sisters. I wondered if this was the true beauty I should have aspired for.
The girl signaled for me to follow her in the house. I discovered that no one could see me in the dream but her, and I watched her kiss her parents and play with her two sisters before dinner.
Everything happened fast in the dream, as if she only wanted to show me precise things, enough to know about her. I was patient and I didn’t interfere with what I saw. I was here to learn how to change, whatever that meant.
A messenger came knocking on their door in the dream, inviting the girl to the Queen of Sorrow’s castle. So this girl lived in the Kingdom of Sorrow?
The messenger said that the Queen offered young girls the opportunity to make money by working for her in the castle. The Queen also promised to teach the girls the etiquettes of princesses and shower them with gifts when their work ended.
The girl didn’t really have to go. Her family was neither rich nor poor. But all young girls seemed infat
uated with the Queen of Sorrow, the young queen of the land. Even her mother and her two little sisters were fond of the Queen. The father was reluctant but couldn’t deny his daughter’s aspiration to go work for the Queen, who she described as the beauty of all beauties.
I saw her welcome the messenger and debate with her mother about which dress to wear when visiting the palace. They couldn’t stop talking about the Queen’s beauty and elegance. They had heard about the Queen inviting young beautiful girls to visit her castle before, but they never thought she’d choose their daughter.
“What’s your name?” I whispered to the girl, still wondering how her mother didn’t see me.
She blinked at me then shushed me away behind her mother’s back. I understood that I was here only to watch, not to ask questions in this Dream, so I obeyed. All I wanted was to know how to change like the mirror said so I could free myself of the beast.
I followed the girl riding the coach to the Queen’s castle, which they called the Schloss, an old Germanic name for ‘castle’. The coach was black and it looked like it was made from bones, but the girl didn’t see that. She even claimed it was gold. I guess I saw in different colors in this world. Then she talked to the coachman who was actually a wolf, but she saw him as a man and called him Managarm. I was sure that I saw things differently from her now, but I concentrated on what I should learn from this dream. Who said we all would see the same dream the same way?
So back to the castle…
It would take me about two long diaries to describe the magical ride and the castle itself, and I’m sure others will do a better part at it than me in their diaries. What mattered was what happened in the castle…
Tens of girls lined up on both sides welcoming the Queen of Sorrow passing through to her throne. The Queen walked on a red carpet made of the finest fabric I had ever seen, and the throne that awaited her was made of glass that looked like a precious pearls from afar. The castle’s ceiling was so high it was absurd, filled with golden paintings on a sky-blue background as if the delicate threads were sewn to the real sky. I heard the girls talking about the Queen’s throne being placed at a certain point in the castle on purpose. It wasn’t haphazardly chosen. There were tiny holes in the ceiling that made the sun shine directly every day on the Queen’s face while sitting on her throne, right at noon. The Queen used that single ray of sunlight to enhance the skin on her arms and face. If the Queen desired the sun to settle on that spot on any other hour of the day, the servant closed certain openings and left others to match the angle of the sun’s changing positions.
The Queen herself didn’t need so much sun on her face in my opinion. She was as beautiful as Queens were supposed to be, and she might have surpassed those expectations too. Her beauty was indescribable. She was as beautiful as dreams that never came true because they were too fabulous to be real. Her attractiveness wasn’t all beauty, though. There was something dangerously enchanting about her. I couldn’t put my hands on it. She reminded me of the bright and beautiful light that burned the moths and butterflies.
I had to force my eyes away from the Queen’s attractive looks to concentrate on the nameless girl I was following. The girl knelt, among others, on one knee and bowed for the Queen who knelt for no one; she didn’t even lower herself one bit, but the girls worshipped her nonetheless. They wondered if they would ever be like her, talk like her, walk gracefully like her, and if one day they could ever have other girls bend on their knees for them like her.
Again, I’m sure the Queen is going to be mentioned in countless diaries, so I’ll skip to the important – and shocking – ending of this once-beautiful dream.
At some moment, the Queen consulted a large mirror held by two strong male servants next to her throne. The mirror seemed heavy, and the men holding it looked worried of what they held in their hands. I couldn’t see who was talking to the Queen from the mirror, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was when the Queen stood up.
The lovely Queen, the Godmother of most girls in Sorrow, turned into a beast on her own terms, still looking as beautiful as ever, though.
The Queen walked down the carpet, and the girls on both sides stared at her. Her chin was still up as she lifted her hands in a majestic way and chanted strange words as she walked. It was a song, a lullaby, so sweet, yet so deadly, like I had never heard before. I felt dizzy hearing it, but what happened to the girls was much worse.
The girls fainted and piled down one by one next to her like dying plants, bending down the floor. Some of them gave in silently, and others throbbed like a fish out of the water before they gave in eventually. The beautiful Queen was like a plague, killing everything she passed.
She reminded me of the beast that captured me outside of this dream, except that one of them was a beauty and the other was a beast.
Servants began collecting the girls in glass coffins and sending them to a secret chamber, which turned out to be a large bathhouse. What was a better place to have a bloodbath but a bathhouse?
But the dream prevented me from accessing the bathhouse. The dream had powers over me; I couldn’t wander wherever I wanted, and the girl who had ushered me here was in a glass coffin half-filled with water and floating roses, just like all the other girls, pushed to the bathhouse where I started hearing screams.
“You know all you need now,” the beautiful girl said from behind me, taking a ghost form. We weren’t in the castle anymore. We were in some neverwhere, those places in dreams when you know you were about to wake up soon.
“You’re dead?” I wondered.
“Not exactly,” she said. “I can’t explain, and you don’t need to know more. I want you to free me so you change, and then you can free yourself.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “What do you want me to do, and what does this have to do with me escaping the beast?”
“To escape the castle, you need to free me from the dream I’m trapped in,” She said. “This isn’t just any castle. It’s like a world of itself. It has been there since the beginning of time, and it’s everywhere. It has no address, and changes place from century to century. Did you see any signs on your way to it?”
It took me a moment to remember. “Yes. It said, ‘East of the Moon and West of the Sun’.”
“No. It should say, ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’.” The girl explains.
“Does it even matter?” I laughed. “It’s not like it is a real address.”
“You said it yourself. It’s not a real address. Don’t you understand? This castle is evil. I bet it is what caused you to get lost somewhere, whether land or sea. It has planned everything to bring you here. It does it all the time. It washes people’s minds and lets them think it has been here since the day they were born, until it takes away what it wants.”
“What does it want?”
“I can’t say, and even you know, you can’t say either.”
“What kind of puzzle is this?” I started losing my patience. “This is still so confusing, and I don’t care about all of this. All I want to know is how I could free you so I can leave it.” I said.
“To do so, you have to tame the Beast that holds you prisoner. You tame her, you free me and yourself.”
“Is that it? Is that the only way out of here? To tame the beast?”
“Yes.”
I wondered why she didn’t just say so from the beginning, but I was in no position to argue. “How can I tame her?” I asked. “She chains me to the bed every night, and she tortures me. How do you tame a beast?”
“Find beauty in her, and you tame her,” The girl said. “It might sound unreasonable but I’m giving you ‘the key to set yourself free’.”
“How am I supposed to find beauty in her when she is an ugly beast?” I asked.
“’Things have to be loved before they’re lovely’” the girl said that damned phrase, and gave me no chance for further discussion.
I woke up.
The next day, I sat at the
long dining table in front of the Beast, trying to enjoy my delicious food as she ate a beetle, a spider, and then started to have a frog as dessert, I presumed – she poured cinnamon and sugar on it as it wiggled its feet before being eaten alive. The beast croaked momentarily after swallowing it, instead of burping. I had never eaten a live frog before, so maybe this was what naturally happened after eating them.
How was I supposed to see beauty in her? How was I supposed to get close to the beast?
I knuckled my fingers and cleared my throat, reminding myself that I had little experience with girls, wasting my life reading alchemy books about magic that couldn’t save the day when I needed it.
“Hmm…” I coughed, wiping my mouth with the finest fabric, but it seemed to take her attention away from the frog’s dead legs for now. “I meant to ask you something,” I said.
She nodded at me, not bothering to write on the animal skin as sticky green stuff drooled from her lips.
“What’s you name?” I asked. It was the best I could come up with. It occurred to me that to know people, to bond with them, their names were a good start.
The beast threw whatever she was munching on away, raising her eyes to me. Although disfigured, something shone in them. I wasn’t sure what it meant when black eyes shone, though. Did I say something wrong?
“I’m sorry—“ I shrugged. “I didn’t mean to—“
She grabbed her animal skin instantly, wrote on it, and jumped off her chair and walked to me, showing me her name.
It was Villeneuve.
Villeneuve? How peculiar, I thought. It sounded like, ‘villain’ but the ‘neuve’ part made it sound fine and sweet.
When I spelled her name on my lips, her eyes shone brighter, evading the black and turning into a paler shade of blue. She tilted her head when hearing her name and kept gazing at me as if she wanted to kiss me –- something I didn’t want to do.
“It’s a lovely name,” I nodded, and I wasn’t lying.
She amazed me by holding one of my hands between hers. How could this be the torturous beast I knew? The girl in my dreams was right. This looked like my way out. But what now? Should I just ask her to let me go? I didn’t think she would yet. The best thing was to continue playing the game.
