The Beauty of the Wolf. Wray Delaney

door all by itself opened into an abyss.

      ‘John?’ he called.

      There is no answer but from within comes that high-pitched yowl.

XXVII

      Thomas Finglas enters his house with shaking steps, fearful of stumbling over the remains of his apprentice and the serving girl whose name for the moment escapes him. He turns to where he supposes the sorceress is. Look at this learned man, this tormented Thomas Finglas. He does not possess one ounce of power. Now he searches for the sorceress as might a child, frightened of the dark and it occurs to her that the magic she feels in this house belongs to another. Thomas is shaking with cold or with fear, it is hard to tell the difference. In mortals both have a smell to them. In the passage he fumbles for a candle and then searches in vain for a tinderbox with which to light it. Not far from him is a scratching, talons on wood.

      The sorceress lights the candle for him and he nearly drops it. His hands are shaking so violently that he is forced to use both. As he goes towards his cellar the back door slams behind them and the candle is extinguished.

      ‘Did you do that?’ he asks.

      She did not.

      Try as she might she cannot relight the candle. Now she is equally alarmed for the very air is filled with menace. Does the creature have the strength to play with her?

      The laboratory door flaps, half off its hinges, and light spills from the hearth but there is no one to be seen. Thomas stares in at the chaos of this chamber, usually an ordered place that he keeps meticulously clean. It is in disarray; all his precious notebooks torn to shreds, the vials of chemicals smashed, his crucible overturned.

      ‘Where are you?’ he says wearily. ‘Show yourself, Randa.’

      In the silence the only answer is the breath of another – but where is she?

      His thoughts are whirling about his head, all wrapped in guilt that he hopes the sorceress does not understand but she does and she fears that whoever is hidden in the shadows can hear them as well as she.

      Anger at the meaningless destruction of all he holds dear causes him to spit out his curses.

      ‘You, the bringer of my ruination, are you my punishment for the sin of adultery? This, my life’s work, ripped asunder. Do you know what you have done? Where are you, you child of malice? Where is Master Butter?’ he shouts. ‘Where is Mary? Have you killed them as once you killed the mistress?’

      Instantly he regrets what he said. He tries and fails to suck the words back into himself. He picks up papers, bunches them in his hand. He is whimpering. ‘All my work, my books . . . they are irreplaceable. Monster! Yes, monster, a monster of my own making.’ His thoughts, now unstoppable, reveal in their brutal honesty the truth of his feelings and fuel his tongue. ‘I should have left you dead. I am disgusted that I had any part in the making of you. Half-human, half-animal – you have never shown any sign of intelligence, you cannot talk, nor do you comprehend what I say. My life has been ruined by you, ruined by the burden of a deformed imbecile who must be kept secret and restrained for as long as she lives – if only I can find chains strong enough to bind her. You have grown beyond my control.’ And now he is shouting, shouting, ‘What will become of me if you are discovered? What will become of you? Oh lord above . . .’

      And all the pity for himself, for Bess, collides into a single thought: what will become of Randa when she is fully grown? The idea that this beast, this thing he calls child, might have physical desires he can hardly bear to contemplate.

      ‘I should have left nature to take its course,’ he says into the darkness. ‘I should have let you die.’

      In the shadows the sorceress sees a human eye, green as an emerald. She is listening, just as the sorceress is, to every mean, mundane word and thought that this pathetic man has. Near weeping with exhaustion, defeated by all he sees, he recites his charm to calm her. To calm himself.

      ‘In the name of God be secret and in all your doings be still.’

      She will not reply. She has never before answered him.

      When she does speak her voice is deep and haunting and he is so stupefied by it that he loses his footing, stumbles backwards, feeling each word of hers as a blow.

      ‘I am not still,’ she says. ‘I never will be. And whatever your God of retribution might say, I will no longer be secret.’

      She screams a scream so piercing it shatters windows, sets dogs to howl. Now the sorceress sees the shape of the beast, she sees the glint of her talons. She hears the flapping of her immense wings. She hears Thomas Finglas cry out in agony. There is a rush of air and the beast is in the snowy garden and the sorceress is in time to see her silhouetted against the night sky, a magnificent winged creature who does not belong to the world of man. The sorceress watches enchanted as the creature tilts her head and inhales the thick, foul breath of the city. She opens her mouth and tastes the snow, stretches her wings to their full extent and swoops out over the river. And she is gone.

      ‘Randa, come back . . . Randa . . . in all your doings be still . . .’

      Thomas’s words collapse in on him. The sorceress lights the candle. He is on his knees in the passage. Blood runs down the torn ribbons of his face, he looks like a martyr and she has little sympathy.

      Revenge, she thinks, is the sweetest sweetmeat of all.

      ‘My hem,’ she says. ‘Give me my hem.’

THE BEAST

       ’Tis my sole plague to be alone,

       I am a beast, a monster grown . . .

      THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY ROBERT BURTON

XXVIII

      In my dreams I am not the beast. I am the child with childish thoughts. I run free on two stout legs, no spiked leather wings to weigh me down. I sing with unformed words that one day will turn into song, a language that will define me. I see my mother smiling, I see my father wake into a nightmare. Who am I, Mother, who am I?

      She called me Randa.

      She lied. I was no child. I was a malformed, half-wished-for babe. After only three summers I was a thing too strong for chains to bind.

      And he, my father, thought me an abomination. I heard his thoughts, caught on the wishbone of his sorrows, tied to his mean regret. I was his greatest triumph and his greatest failure. No word dare he speak of this to her, his love, his beloved, his Bess, my mother.

      Soft be she, kind be she, loving be she. She who knew what darkness filled my father’s dreams.

      I am old bones wrapped in young skin. I am the beginning and the end without end. I was plunged into mercury vapour and under those metallic waters, in that mirror, I caught a glimpse of time beyond understanding, of a past beyond regret. I knew things no infant should know, wisdom soaked into a deep, an ancient soul.