I am beautiful!
Time passes, but it matters little to me. My tapers burn at all times, day or night, dark or light.
I am not a waxen candle, subject to every whim of heat or weather, draining away my life in service to others. I am proud, strong silver, holding up the candles. Their wicks burn, but they are enchanted; hot wax never drips down my silver arms, my tapers never shorten, and their flames never die.
But the candles in the crystal chandelier are ordinary wax and subject to the laws that govern ordinary things. They have all burned out, and the chandelier hangs dark and forlorn from its gilded chains. The fire in the hearth below me has gone out as well. It’s so quiet now. No servants to bustle about. No hounds to bay.
His dogs set up a fearful racket when he went down to the kennels the next day; they could be heard all over the property. They might have torn him to pieces, but in the end, they seemed as frightened by the witchcraft as the servants and ran away. From my perch, I can see out the window and over the balcony to a great deal of the grounds and the park behind the chateau. I saw the dogs’ dark shapes racing away into the park and the wood. He tried to follow, perhaps to join their company, for want of any other. But he was not yet in command of his strange new limbs and was left panting at the edge of the park, snarling and cursing.
Even his brutish hounds abandon him.
He is the only thing that moves in this place. I often hear the distant clop of his hooves on the marble floor or his heavy tread upon the stairs. Or sometimes a crash of pans in the kitchen as he searches for food. There are no servants to cook for him now. No one dares to come here anymore. His companions have forsaken him for other sports, other tables. He has only himself for company. And poor enough comfort he must find it, for I often hear him howling at night in his misery. A pitiful, beastly howl. Yet it warms me to hear it. Let him know what it is to feel despair!
I despair no more. I am elegant and strong, with no clumsy human body to be abused, no heart to be shamed. I feel no pain, no weariness, no anxiety of any kind. I do not thirst or hunger. I am sustained by his misery, and I feast upon it.
He never comes back here. I suppose he can’t bear to return to the place where his life was destroyed, can’t bear to go into his old apartments where everything is still laid out so luxuriously for the man he was. I am the only sentinel here, watching the nights lengthen outside the window as the winter comes on, that brooding time of year when all the country appears cold and dead.
But tonight I hear a sullen footfall out on the stairs, and he appears in the doorway, hunched forward but not quite on all fours. He hesitates there, then enters the room gingerly, still in a crouch, peering into the shadowy corners as if he expects Mère Sophie to come cackling out of the dark, flinging more curses at him. Finally his paws touch the floor, and he follows his snout around the room, sniffing at everything. Perhaps he hopes to pick up the scent of Jean-Loup in the last place he ever existed, to find some trace of his old self that will make him whole again. He creeps up to the chaise longue, sets his heavy paws upon the seat, and snuffles at the cushions. From up here, I gaze down at the mottled rusty brown-and-white stripes on the black-tipped feathers that cover most of his back; they tremble slightly as he roves about. He circles around to sniff at the cold fireplace below me, then turns his face up toward the mantelpiece to peer at the light reflected in the glass. My light.
He rises slowly, steadying his paws on the marble ornaments until he is up on his hind feet, balancing carefully on his heavy hooves. He cocks his giant head to one side. His eyes are still strangely human-shaped; stony dark under his new, thick, beastly brows and shot with a cold light, reflecting my flames.
“What, still alight?” His words are thick but intelligible; the wisewoman has not permanently denied him the power of speech, although he hasn’t had much cause to use it of late. He snuffles at me with his long snout, his animal breath hot, fogging my smooth surface. I am mute, of course, and serene.
“Little Candle,” he breathes. I see recognition dawning in his eyes and a fleeting shadow of that crafty look, that possessive smugness I remember from the night he called me by this name. Once it would have made me shudder inside, but he has no power to hurt me now. I wonder if he has sniffed out some trace of my former humanity, as he came looking for some trace of his.
“Of course,” he rumbles. “Who else could you be? Come to light my way again, have you?” His expression darkens with anger. “To mock me? To show me what . . .”
His words fade away as his eyes shift from me to the mirror behind me, where his reflection hovers in the glass. Horns, snout, ratty, strawlike mane — he sees it all. By my light.
His roar of rage would split my ears, if I still had ears; the tapers rattle in my silver grasp. His huge paw closes around me, and I’m lifted off the mantel; then my heavy base is dashed into the looking glass. A hailstorm of glass bursts over us both, but I am undamaged. I feel no pain. My candles and I are unbreakable.
This is what he thought of me once, an object to be used and discarded. But look at me now! I am strong, as I never was before. I am here to show him what he has become. I will illuminate his crimes.
Still howling in rage, he stumbles across the sitting room, wielding me like a club, throws open the wardrobe, and smashes me into the looking glass bolted inside the door. Then he carries me into his bedchamber and smashes me into the mirror overlooking his bed.
Glass crunches beneath his hooves as he lurches, half-upright, back out through his apartments. He smashes me into a mirror on the wall outside his chamber door in the entryway across from the staircase. Holding me in one paw, he crosses to the dining salon. We dispatch a huge mirror in a gilt frame above the sideboard, then proceed into the ballroom. It is an enormous cavern of a place in the dark. I have never been here before. Every wall is hung with panel after panel of full-length mirrors, veined with gold. Each one reflects my light, which of course has not gone out, will never go out. Each one shows him what he is.
Still gripped in his paw, I am hammered into one glass panel and the next and the next. With each crash, glass splinters, flies into the air, and rains to the floor, each explosion amplified in the vast, echoing room. It sounds like a battlefield, like the end of the world. It’s exhilarating, his rage. I am glad to be the instrument of his self-loathing.
At last nothing is left but four blank walls marked with gilded brackets and a carpet of shattered glass. Spent and panting, he props himself by one heavy paw against the wall and lets me slide from his grasp down into the broken glass. My candles still burn; the glass bits glitter with their light. They illuminate his face as he stares down at the destruction we’ve wrought.
He no longer has breath to bellow, but as he sinks down on his haunches, he makes a different noise, a wounded-animal sound, mournful and hopeless. His paws rise to cover his horrible face, and he crouches there, shuddering. I recognize his hopelessness. I revel in it.
At last, he lowers his paws. His eyes search the floor, then he springs at something. His paw rises out of the rubble, clutching a long shard of glass with a wicked point; its edges are so sharp, I can see blood on the thick pads of his paw where he grasps it.
He rises on his haunches and claws aside the thick tendrils of his mane that fall over his chest, revealing a heaving expanse of matted fur. He grasps the glass shard in both paws and aims its point at his exposed breast.
Oh, if only I had a mouth to cry “No!” He must not take his life! He cannot rob me of my revenge!