As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A)

by Liz Braswell

  But by the third moment she was feeling all over Filthy Mary for the set of keys she knew she would have.

  Voila! Next to her kitchen knife, under her belt.

  Belle took the big, black, ugly lump of keys—and the knife—and hurried to the hall.

  “Everything all right out there?”

  Belle froze as the guard’s voice called through bars.

  She thought desperately.

  “Keys keep slipping through my fingers,” she called back in as close to an imitation of the woman’s terrible accent as she could manage. She put a nasty purr into it. “You want to come and…help me? With your strong hands?”

  “No, go ahead,” the voice said quickly.

  Belle closed her eyes and allowed herself a single deep sigh of relief.

  None of the rooms in this corridor were as “nice” as the one she and her father had been thrown into. These were barely four feet wide, unlit, and they stank. Belle went quickly through the smaller keys, trying to find a likely one. Moans increased up and down the row as the metal clinked, either from fear or expectation of gruel, it was hard to say.

  When Belle finally threw the first door open, it was hard to say who was more surprised: she or the person within.

  The…person…was small. Very small. And despite the foul conditions of the cell and the prison, Belle was pretty sure that it wasn’t his hair that was disheveled to the point of looking like a hedgehog’s prickers…The person really had a head covered with hedgehog prickers.

  “GO!” Belle said when she found her voice. She pointed to the door. “You’re free!”

  The poor thing blinked at her with big sticky black eyes. It started to open its mouth.

  “Shhh!” Belle said, finger to lips. “Go!”

  At that, the creature ran. Or…scurried. It was hard to tell.

  Belle’s plan was simple: unlock all the doors as fast as she could. Let all the prisoners out. Find her mother and father while chaos ruled the insane asylum and the guards dealt with all the other inmates.

  It wasn’t great, but it was all she had.

  She ran to the next cell. And the next.

  Most of the prisoners were seemingly human. All had terrible cuts and scars on their heads. And some of the people were shockingly familiar.

  “Monsieur Boulanger?” She gaped in shock. He was the present Monsieur Boulanger’s father, a great old man who was said to be able to spin sugar confections so delicate and airy it was as if the angels themselves created them. But Belle hadn’t heard anything about him in years.

  He looked sad and faintly embarrassed. And sick. Pale yellow and wheezing.

  Belle opened her mouth to say something. He was someone’s father, just like Maurice was hers. Stolen and abandoned here…

  And that’s when the guards finally figured out something was going on.

  “HEY! HEY! Adrien! Come here! Why isn’t Mary back yet? I think we have a problem….”

  Belle ran out. Hopefully the old—charmante?—baker would follow, but she didn’t have time to find out.

  She flung herself desperately from cell to cell, unlocking each as fast as her tired fingers could manage. The sounds of shouting grew louder and closer.

  Finally, when she flung open the last door there was no one waiting for her…just something almost like a corpse, tied down to a hard stone bench.

  It lifted its head to look at the newcomer.

  With a shock, Belle recognized the monster from the image in the mirror.

  “Maman!” she sobbed.

  “Belle,” her mother croaked.

  She looked twenty years older than Belle’s papa. Scars and lines crossed her face like an ancient field, once watered with canals and streams, now dry. Her prematurely white hair was filthy and tangled and matted with old dry blood. But her eyes were bright, bright green through the crust and dirt, an angelic green that Belle remembered so clearly from her vision.

  “Maman!” Belle cried again, throwing her arms around her as best she could, weeping into her. In all of her fantasies of what this moment would be like, Belle was always somehow smaller than her mother, and her mother was holding her in wide, comforting arms. Not the other way around.

  “Belle. This day is the only thing I have lived for,” her mother whispered.

  Only with great effort was Belle able to master herself. She clumsily undid the buckles that kept the older woman confined. With a sigh, her mother sort of fell to the side, maybe being allowed to do that for the first time in years.

  “We have to go,” Belle said, holding her hand and squeezing. It was frail, and bony, and cold.

  “Wait, just wait. Let me just look at you,” her mother said, putting another weak and spidery hand on top of Belle’s. She leaned back and blinked, as if trying to take in ten years’ worth of her daughter’s growth in one moment. “You are so beautiful! So strong! You’re everything I could ever have wished for in a daughter!”

  Belle tried to blink back the tears that were coming again. The shock of hearing her long-lost mother say exactly the words she had always wanted a mother to say was too much.

  “Why?” Belle asked, unable to stop herself. “Why did you make me forget you? Why couldn’t I have even the few memories of us together?”

  “Not just you,” the woman said with difficulty, taking wheezy breaths in between the words. “Not just me. All charmantes. Forgotten. Forever. To protect us. And protect you. No longer would any human be able to remember where we live and hunt us down. And with you and Maurice having…forgotten…me, and magic, you would be safe, too. Forever.

  “Not that it seems to have worked.”

  “I’d rather not have been safe,” Belle insisted. “I’d rather have been with you.”

  The woman chuckled bitterly. “Ah, I doubt that. What he’s done to me for the past ten years I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, much less my own daughter.”

  “But how…How was D’Arque able to do all this? How did he not forget about les charmantes?”

  The woman’s face fell into a distinctly frightening, smoldering frown. “He is a charmante as well. Or was. He hated himself and all like him…I never knew how much.”

  “I saw him,” Belle said. “In the images…in the castle…”

  “Ohh,” the woman groaned. “I am such a fool. And that was my last great piece of magic. That. The cursing of a useless eleven-year-old human. When I felt you bring the curse down, it was like my soul was ripped in two. Magic came back on itself, and I have been punished accordingly.”

  She shook her head.

  “With what little I have left, I tried to reach you, tried to tell you what happened. And then I freed you.”

  The gurney. Her straps. That’s how she had been set free. It was her mother.

  The sounds of metal against metal suddenly grew loud, and the shouting; the door to the cell was opened and one of the more human-looking prisoners stuck his head in.

  “Mademoiselle, the guards are on the way—you must flee, you and Rosalind!”

  “Rosalind,” Belle said, feeling the word on her lips. Rosalind, her mother.

  “Come, you will have to help me,” the older woman said, pushing herself up. “Now that I’ve seen your face once more I can die happy—but I’d rather not. I’d rather see Frédéric die first.”

  Belle put her arm out and carefully helped the woman whom anyone else would have thought was her grandmother get off the stone table and out of her cell. She almost had to carry her.

  Outside it was precisely the chaos Belle had hoped for: there was a lot of running and screaming and panicking and shouting.

  “We have to go get Papa,” Belle said.

  “I saw him…Maurice. He would be upstairs,” her mother croaked. “With the…the ‘real’ patients. Let’s go…”

  “Belle!”

  Belle was stopped in her tracks by a strangely familiar voice calling from a cell across the way, one that was still locked.

  Grasping the b
ars like a sad circus animal was Monsieur Lévi, the bookseller.

  Belle gasped, then unlocked the door.

  “That bastard,” Lévi swore as soon as he was free. “He promised. He promised me he wouldn’t touch you.”

  Rosalind’s eyes narrowed. “You made a deal with that monster?” she said in a surprisingly even tone for someone so otherwise weak. “We will discuss this later, Lévi. For now, perhaps you can help…”

  “Absolutely.” He grinned and held up his hand, producing a tiny sliver of glittering glass. “Now that I’m free, I can get everyone else out. You two go find Maurice!”

  Belle took her mother’s arm and dragged her along as fast as she could. Was it her imagination, or was her mother growing stronger? Was her vitality returning, now that she was away from her cell? Or was it just the excitement of the moment?

  “STOP!”

  A guard stepped out in front of them. He had the arms of a circus strongman and his hands could easily rip their shoulders from their sockets.

  Belle raised her kitchen knife. Its thin blade looked pitiful against his sheer size and bulk.

  He started to reach out…

  …and then was suddenly falling over like a giant log, screaming in pain.

  Belle looked down to see what knocked him over. The little hedgehog-person was curled up in a ball at his feet and grinning, spines all out. Pinpricks of blood appeared like rain all over the orderly’s clean white gown.

  “Thank you,” Belle whispered.

  The thing chattered something meaningless and mad in response before uncurling himself and running away again.

  “A herisser,” Rosalind murmured to herself. “Delightful people. I didn’t know there were any left….”

  Belle pulled her mother along. She seemed easily distracted and there was far too much going on around them to allow that to happen. Back at the main entrance to the cell blocks, inmates flooded out while guards tried to push their way in, wielding clubs and leather-covered batons. Belle closed her eyes, said a quiet prayer, and dove through.

  On a hunch they headed down a hall polluted by the hot and fetid air of an industrial kitchen. She was right; they were soon running through a low-ceilinged cavern of a room that smelled disastrous. Squat metal stoves warmed large, unclean black pots to boiling with soup that was no more than thin broth. Foul things occasionally bubbled to the surface with a pop of sulfurous steam.

  The head cook, a giant slob of a man, leaned back on a stool that bowed with his weight while he regarded Belle and her mother with lazy surprise.

  “We were never here,” Belle said, gesturing at him with her knife.

  The man said nothing, giving a wide, careless shrug.

  Belle pulled her mother on.

  On the other side of the kitchen were the pantry and receiving hall, where loads of groceries could be easily delivered, as well as a narrow set of servants’ stairs that led to the main floor.

  She dashed up them, pulling her mother behind…

  …and ran right into a pair of large orderlies, coming down with trays of empty bowls.

  All four landed in a tangled mess, Belle’s and her mother’s arms and legs floating more to the top because they were smaller.

  “They’re escaping!” one of the orderlies said. “They’re patients!”

  “No one is a ‘patient’ here!” Belle snapped, twisting and turning to extricate herself from them. Once she rose she turned to help her mother up.

  The female orderly stumbled to her feet and, putting her two hands together, backhanded Belle across the face.

  Not expecting such a quick—and violent—attack, Belle staggered back against the wall, stunned. Blood dripped down her face.

  Her mother, hunched-over and ineffectual looking, only widened her green eyes in reaction to what had just happened.

  The other orderly, a man, was now also up. He grabbed Belle by the shoulder, digging his fingers into the muscle between the bones there.

  “Racine,” Rosalind whispered, holding out her hand and blowing something from it.

  Both orderlies’ eyes popped in surprise.

  They looked down at their feet. Belle was just recovering from the blow and had tears in her eyes—she couldn’t see anything. But their two would-be captors didn’t seem to be able to lift their legs. They began to panic, screaming in little soundless Os.

  Her mother slumped and swayed, utterly exhausted.

  Belle grabbed her just as she fell, ignoring her own pain.

  “Dirt from the floor of my cell…” her mother murmured, stepping up the stairs with difficulty. “Filled with fungal threads…”

  Belle wasn’t sure if she was raving or not, but the guards couldn’t follow, and that was the important point.

  At the top of the stairs it was like entering another world: while not precisely light and sunny, the halls were broad and didn’t stink. The stone walls were free from mold and slime, and lanterns hung at regular intervals.

  “This feels familiar,” Belle said thoughtfully. She ran on tiptoe down the hall, dragging her mother behind her, coming to a sudden stop as she heard a familiar voice shouting.

  “No…only the monsters in the sub-basement. Everything is fine up here. Send everyone you can down!”

  D’Arque.

  Belle felt a hot hand of rage clamp down on her belly. The atrocities that had been committed on her family by that man…She wanted nothing more than to run at him, knife out.

  Reason, still a somewhat dominant force in Belle’s heart, finally prevailed.

  She waited until she heard the thumping sounds of guards hurrying away, followed by the cold click of the old man’s heeled boots on stone.

  She counted an additional fifty seconds after the sound died away before stepping forward.

  As she had guessed, they were in the hub of the “normal insane people” wing. There were halls leading off to hospital rooms, wide and almost inviting, with thin rugs. No doubt to impress visiting relatives—who probably had no idea what went on below. Even the sounds were different; there were a few whimpers and moans, but those sounded plaintive. Not tortured.

  Belle would still release everyone up here as well—after she got her father.

  “Papa?” she called as loudly as she dared.

  “Belle?” a voice called back, surprised.

  “Maurice,” Rosalind whispered.

  The two women hurried over to his cell. Belle fumbled over the keys until she found the right one.

  Her father practically knocked them over when he came rushing out, putting a meaty arm around each one’s neck and pulling them both close.

  “My girls!” he sobbed. “My two girls. I never…I never thought we’d be a family again.”

  Belle didn’t want him to ever let go. Mother and father together, hugging her, one happy family like they should have been, never separated. Who knew what would happen in the next few minutes, if they didn’t get out? There might not be another moment like this again….

  “We have to go. Now, Papa,” she finally said, regretfully disentangling herself.

  “Wait—what about everyone else?” Maurice asked.

  “Hey. You,” Belle called to a prisoner who had been watching the whole scene quietly, hands on his bars. “Catch!”

  The man seemed only vaguely surprised when she tossed the keys to him. After he looked at them for a moment, bewildered, his eyes finally widened with understanding.

  “Let’s go!” Belle said, grabbing her parents by the arms.

  And that’s when two guards, passing by the other end of the hallway, saw them.

  “STOP!” one of them ordered.

  The prisoner with the keys hid them behind his back and tried to look innocent.

  “RUN!” shouted Belle.

  She dove forward, fully expecting to pull the full weight of both her mother and father. But although he took a little to get going, Maurice soon began trotting under his own power. He let go of Belle and ran around to grab
Rosalind’s other arm and the two dragged her along.

  They ran into the closest open room, what looked like an indoor exercise and recreation area for the nonmagical patients. Leather balls and tatty decks of cards littered low, padded tables and backless chairs. Belle and her father scattered the furniture as best they could as they ran, tipping things over and hurling them behind. Belle didn’t dare turn around but was gratified to hear some frustrated grunts and the crashing of furniture behind her.

  Not knowing which way to go, Belle picked corridors and rooms at random. They wound up in the laundry: tubs of soapy, soupy hot water and lines of eerily stained linens blocked their way. Calmer patients worked here under the watchful eyes of house nannies, carrying piles of clothes and pushing paddles deep into steamy alkaline tubs.

  “You’re free!” Belle shouted at them, ducking around a scalding hot tub.

  “Run!” Maurice suggested, pushing a very skinny girl out of the way.

  “OUT OF MY LAUNDRY!” a large woman with an imposing hat shrieked.

  Rosalind did her best to keep up, holding Maurice’s hand as they threaded through the maze of dirty and wet clothes.

  “There should be a door ahead!” Maurice called up to Belle. “For hanging the clothes out back!”

  Belle didn’t have time to wonder how he could have guessed such a thing; she changed directions around a confused-looking medicated patient with a tall pile of white cloth in her arms. Neither managed to quite avoid each other; there was a crash and soon pillowcases and smocks were drifting to earth like angels. Belle managed to recover herself first.

  “Sorry,” she said, dashing away. She wasn’t sure the patient even noticed.

  The guards were right behind them, tearing clothing lines out of their way and swearing loudly as burning hot water splashed onto their skin.

  But the door, as her father had said, was right ahead.

  “On three, Belle.” Maurice bent over, aiming his shoulder at the probably locked exit. Belle did the same. “One, two, three!”

  Father and daughter ran forward and the doors gave under their combined weight and strength—though possibly a bit more of it was Maurice. Rosalind hurried behind as best she could.