As Old As Time: A Twisted Tale (Twisted Tale, A) (39 page)

Anonymous—female, short, speaker to animals. CURED. Deceased.

The list went on and on. Here were all of
les charmantes
who unfortunately fell into his power, and a clear list of the experiments he performed on them to remove their magic.

“‘Cured. Deceased!’” Belle spat, forgetting herself for a moment. She slammed the book back onto the shelf. She longed to destroy it, as all the good books in Monsieur Lévi’s shop had been. But when they brought D’Arque before a court of law, this would be prime evidence.

Belle hurried on, holding her hand around the flame so it wouldn’t go out, more determined than ever to escape, to rescue her parents, to survive and bring terrible retribution on the monster who ran this asylum.

The library door opened into a broad, well-lighted area shaped like a bottleneck. She shrank against the wall as noises traveled down multiple halls to her: clinking and clanking, voices raised, the occasional shriek.

The narrow end of the room had one giant set of double doors with wide bars, allowing whoever was outside to watch what lay beyond them.

“Who’s the keeper tonight?” came a voice from the other side. It was rough and male and deep. Belle thought of her masked captors.

“It’s Filthy Mary,” another voice said with a laugh.

“Faugh! May as well leave it alone, then.”

“Don’t have to tell
me
twice.”

Keeping her back against it, Belle crept along the wall farthest from those voices and peeped around the corner down the first hall. There was a large locked door built into a heavy stone frame just a few feet away. Through the grill in it she could hear the moans and cries of the now truly insane.

She passed quickly by and moved on to the next hall, praying no one was watching.

Same thing. A locked door, the cries of the deranged beyond.

Same for the next hall.

The one
after
revealed something different.

There was no locked door set into it; instead, it widened and opened into a sort of a storage area. There were piles of neatly folded, surprisingly clean laundry on shelves, unused chamber pots ready to go, shapeless robes with wide belts…and trays being laid out with bowls and bread for dinner.

Doing the laying-out was a woman whose very shape made Belle almost buckle with rage.

Without thinking, Belle ran on quiet tiptoe as fast as she could, picking up speed and slamming the older woman as hard as she could in the middle of her back.

The hateful woman fell, the one who had “accompanied” Belle for her “comfort” to the room of torture. Who hadn’t even felt the need to wear a mask, ever.

She moaned as her face hit the table in front of her and her legs collapsed.

“What…” the woman began.

Belle grabbed the closest thing she could, a tin chamber pot, and smashed the woman across the head with it.

The woman slumped, silent and bleeding.

Belle took one moment to breathe.

She took another moment to reflect on what recent events were turning her into.

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 bars 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.