Grimm Tales: For Want of a Petal © 2016 Jennifer V. Cockerill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  There is a darkened manor, somewhere in the woodlands of France that has been torn by time. Trees grow through its floors and rooftops and allow in the rain and grass. No wildlife though, animals are too intelligent to enter.

  In the kitchens, dark and shattered, all is silent, the pantry long since plundered of anything it could supply. On a counter-top, strange amongst all this debris and destruction, stands a teapot and cup, deliberately unharmed and carefully dusted around.

  In the grand hallway there is a grandfather clock which no longer ticks or chimes, against all evidence it forever declares the time to be seventeen minutes past eight. The ignorant would assume that was the time at which the clock ran out, the wise know that it never showed any other. It too, stands oddly intact among the destroyed furniture and floorboards, there is evidence of someone or something cutting back the vines and vegetation that threatened to climb it.

  Then, faint, from upstairs, there is the sound of a piano playing. Not well, but playing. There are noises, soft, scurrying sounds of creatures on the prowl, making their way on unsteady feet to the west wing room.

  Here the destruction is greater, here is the epicentre. Portraits have been slashed and tables overturned, everything is ruined but for the Piano, upon which there is a vase. In the vase stands a dead stem of a rose.

  No, there is one other item which has escaped destruction. A simple gold candelabra, stood upon the piano stool as if it had been the player of that mysterious tune.

  The door of the room is opened. No, shoved, shouldered out of the way by something that has long ago forgotten how to use doorknobs. A shadowy shape slides into the room, prowling between debris and ripped curtains. It sniffs at the floor, then lets out a low snarl.

  In comes the second shape, smaller and softer in its contours, but unmistakeably a shape built to kill.

  ‘Master, Mistress.’ A voice comes from the piano stool. ‘You slept well?’

  The creatures do not reply, but their eyes are fixed on the candelabra. The larger of the two’s tail thumps the ground.

  There is a soft, bitter laugh. ‘Such a spell, eh? And I spared only for this long because I was the most alive in the first place. How ironic, oui? That I should pray to be weaker?’

  The creatures lower their heads.

  ‘If mademoiselle had only declared her love a moment sooner.’ The voice laments. ‘Before the last petal fell.’

  The smaller animal whines and nuzzles to her mate. Some vague remembrance of the human emotion known as guilt flashes in her dark eyes.

  ‘Ah I know; you were not to know. None of us were. So simple, it seemed oui? Find one to love you truly, not swayed by appearance, before a rose wilts.’ There is a disembodied sigh. ‘For want of a petal… a few seconds grace… remain forever a beast.’

  Its voice grows disjointed. The female creeps forwards and sniffs the waxen shape. She growls low in her throat and turns away, trotting to the door at the pace of a wolfhound. Her mate follows, snarling as his paw lands on broken mirror-glass.

  No more need of mirrors and magic to see the outside world. They see it every day, as much as they have need to.

  She trots ahead of him, always so confident, too bright and bold for the world of men and their rules, better that she is here. He may be master of the house, but the forest and mountains around it belong only to her.

  She pauses in the doorway of their lair, the moonlight catching the hard lines of her body. If animals could laugh, he would, because by all gods, she is a beauty.

  She throws her head back, letting out a long, baying howl that echoes through the house.

  It is answered by five other howls, voices indistinct and singular all at once. Five shapes come tumbling down the stairs and orbit their pack leader and mother. He approaches the group and they slink out of the door in a dark huddle, there is hunting to be done tonight.

  In the dark manor, a tune is played on a piano, not well, but the song is recognised by those who know where true beauty is found.

 

 

  J V Cockerill, For Want of a Petal

  Thanks for reading the books on GrayCity.Net