Twice Cursed, page 26
“Okaaaaaaay.” I start to back out when I notice the stool at the center of it all and the small box placed on the seat. Bright gold with rounded corners capped in copper hinges. Color and light dance in the metallic surface. A single, red rose is etched into the center of the lid. There’s one on all the lids, now that I look closer.
Suddenly the air is charged with music, bright and loud. I clap my hand over my ears, but then it starts to fade. Crest then fade, crest then fade, in and out, the notes drift through the air. One second they’re loud enough to hurt, the next they teeter on the edge of being heard at all. I search the corners of the room for hidden speakers or something, but I don’t see any. There’s just these shelves of boxes and the stool.
The music shifts, shrinking in on itself, leaving my ears ringing with the abrupt absence of its fullness. The tinkling tones are quiet, muffled. The gold box shivers with a beat I hadn’t noticed before.
Maybe…
I cross to the stool. The music swells just a little and I’m certain this is the source. I press the latch on the front and jump when the top pops.
A little ballerina in a red dress pirouettes on a spring, the notes of Swan Lake rising around her. Her skirts glitter. Her arms twist. Her painted face is smeared. A music box. It’s beautiful.
I trace the little black notes etched into the inside the of lid, watching as the ballerina spins, and spins. And spins. And… spins…
The music swells as she twirls. I’m not sure if it’s my mind playing tricks, but she begins to wave her arms and lift her legs to the melody. The twist in her limbs is slow and elegant, in and out, around and through.
Beauty is grace.
My eyelids grow heavy. My body refuses to listen when I try and move.
The music intensifies. Chords invade my senses, burrowing into my limbs and coaxing them into motion. I mirror the ballerina’s movements without trying. Our arms lift, arching through the air. We sway together and twirl. I’m so light on my feet, but every inch of me feels like lead. I push up onto my toes, and draw one leg up higher than I ever thought possible. A white-hot stab jolts through my hip and clear to the sole of my foot.
Ouch! I’m not supposed to bend this way, but when I try to lower my leg it won’t give. The rest of my mutinous body continues the dance, snaking around and around. Faster and faster.
Beauty is pain.
Stop! I leap into the air. Bone snaps when I land. I scream, or try to, but my mouth won’t open. Fire erupts from my ankle and boils over, spreading up my leg as I rotate on the same foot. My stomach lurches.
Something tickles my face. It takes me a moment to realize it’s my hair, stuck to my cheeks with tears. They blur my vision, run down my neck, but I can’t wipe them away.
Stop…
Darkness dances on the edges of my vision. The heavy feeling in my body deepens. I can’t fight it. Can’t keep my eyes open.
Everything fades.
Heavy is Beauty’s crown.
* * *
Every evening Mother Barbot opens the music box to peer down at me. I know it’s her, even though she doesn’t look like herself, anymore. The change was gradual, but not subtle. Her face filled out, her skin tightened, her hair brightened. All the while my body bent, contorted, and broke just a little more each day. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last.
“Are you ready to perform, my Flower?” Mother Barbot asks. She looks younger now, but she’s still creepy as hell. “I need you to give me one last dance.”
My name is Trisha, and I’m not hers, but I’ve stopped correcting her. She can’t hear me. Neither can the neighbors talking outside about another missing girl from the block. Not the police officers who came to question Mother Barbot about being the last one to see me two months ago, though they wound up speaking with her “granddaughter” who – surprise, surprise – turned up shortly after I went missing with some story about running away with a boy.
“A shame,” “Belle” had drawled, her words iced in that familiar French accent. “Gramma was so fond of that purty theeng.”
No one can hear me. I don’t even remember the sound of my own voice.
Mother Barbot twists the knob with her young, fleshy fingers, winding the clockwork as words spill over her lips. “Beauty is grace. Beauty is pain.”
My body moves outside of my control, like always. I’ve stopped fighting it. The burn of joints popping and muscle stretching has long thinned into a memory.
“Heavy is Beauty’s crown.”
There’s just the tinkling of music and the echo of words as my mind starts to darken and my thoughts harden on the edge of unconsciousness. Finally. I’m so tired.
Long may she reign…
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Joanne Harris (OBE) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche.
Since then, she has written over 20 more novels, plus novellas, short stories, game scripts, the libretti for two short operas, several screenplays, a stage musical (with Howard Goodall) and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Prima Donna Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science, as well as for the Fragrance Foundation awards for perfume and perfume journalism (for which she also received an award in 2017).
She is a passionate advocate for authors’ rights, and is currently the Chair of the Society of Authors (SOA), and member of the Board of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).
Her hobbies are listed in Who’s Who as: “mooching, lounging, strutting, strumming, priest-baiting and quiet subversion of the system”, although she also enjoys obfuscation, sleaze, rebellion, witchcraft, armed robbery, tea and biscuits. She is not above bribery and would not necessarily refuse an offer involving perfume, diamonds, or pink champagne. She works from a shed in her garden, plays in the band she first joined when she was 16, and lives with her husband in a little wood in Yorkshire. Joanne can be found on the internet at joanne-harris.co.uk, @Joannechocolat (Twitter) and joannechocolat (Instagram).
Neil Gaiman is the award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film and television for all ages, including Norse Mythology, Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats, and the Sandman comic series. His fiction has received Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Will Eisner Awards. American Gods, based on the 2001 novel, is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated TV series, and he was the writer and showrunner for the mini-series adaptation of Good Omens, based on the book he co-authored with Sir Terry Pratchett. Since 2017, he has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States, where he is a professor at Bard College. Neil’s website is neilgaiman.com, and he can also be found at @neilhimself (Twitter) and neilhimself (Instagram).
Angela Slatter is the author of five novels, including All the Murmuring Bones and The Path of Thorns, and eleven short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales. She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, two Australian Shadows Awards and seven Aurealis Awards. Her work has been translated into multiple languages. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, teaches for the Australian Writers’ Centre, and occasionally mentors new authors. Dark Horse Comics has recently announced her Hellboy Universe collaboration with Mike Mignola, Castle Full of Blackbirds. She can be located on the internet at angelaslatter.com, @AngelaSlatter (Twitter) and angelaslatter (Instagram).
M. R. Carey is a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter, novelist and comic book writer. Born in Liverpool, he worked as a teacher for fifteen years before resigning to write full-time.
He wrote the movie adaptation for his 2014 novel The Girl With All the Gifts. Distributed in the UK by Warner Bros Pictures, the movie opened the Locarno Festival in 2016 and subsequently went on international release. Mike received a British Screenwriters Award for his screenplay (as best newcomer, ironically – he was 59 at the time).
Mike has worked extensively in the field of comic books, completing long and critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. His comic book series The Unwritten has featured repeatedly in the New York Times’ graphic novel bestseller list. His latest comics work was The Dollhouse Family, for Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics imprint.
He is also the writer of the Felix Castor novels, and (along with his wife Linda and their daughter Louise) of two fantasy novels, The Steel Seraglio (published in the UK as The City Of Silk and Steel) and The House Of War and Witness. His most recent novels are The Book of Koli, The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli, collectively known as the Rampart trilogy and published by Orbit Books. Mike can be found at @michaelcarey191 on Twitter.
Sarah Pinborough is a New York Times bestselling and Sunday Times Number one and internationally bestselling author who is published in over 30 territories worldwide. Having published more than 25 novels across various genres, her recent books include Behind Her Eyes, now a smash hit Netflix limited series, Dead to Her, now in development with Amazon Studios, and 13 Minutes and The Death House in development with Compelling Pictures. Sarah lives in the historic town of Stony Stratford, the home of the Cock and Bull story, with her dog Ted. Her most recent novel, Insomnia, is out now and is in development with Left Bank Pictures. She can be found online at sarahpinborough.com, @SarahPinborough on Twitter, and sarahpinboroughbooks on Instagram.
Mark Chadbourn is a two-time British Fantasy Award winner and a Times bestseller for his collaboration with the adventure writer Wilbur Smith, and for his historical fiction under his pseudonym James Wilde. His urban fantasy series Age of Misrule has sold all over the world and been translated into many languages. A former UK national media journalist, Mark is also a screenwriter with many hours of produced work on BBC1. Mark’s website is markchadbourn.co.uk, and he can be found at @Chadbourn on Twitter, and chadbourn on Instagram.
Laura Purcell is the author of six novels, including The Silent Companions, which won the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. Her short story “The Chillingham Chair” featured in the Sunday Times Bestseller The Haunting Season. Recently, Laura wrote Roanoke Falls, an original podcast for Realm executive produced by John Carpenter and Sandy King Carpenter. She can be found online at laurapurcell.com, @spookypurcell on Twitter and spookypurcell on Instagram.
Christina Henry is a horror and dark fantasy author whose works include Horseman, Near the Bone, The Ghost Tree, Looking Glass, The Girl in Red, The Mermaid, Lost Boy, Alice, Red Queen, and the seven-book urban fantasy Black Wings series.
She enjoys running long distances, reading anything she can get her hands on, and watching movies with samurai, zombies and/or subtitles in her spare time. She lives in Chicago with her husband and son. Her website is christinahenry.net, and she can be found @C_Henry_Author on Twitter and authorchristinahenry on Instagram.
Katherine Arden is the New York Times bestselling author of the Winternight Trilogy and the Small Spaces Quartet. She lives in Vermont. Katherine can be found online at katherinearden.com, @arden_katherine on Twitter, and arden_katherine on Instagram.
Adam L. G. Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is an author of horror fiction. Of his novels, The Ritual, Last Days, No One Gets Out Alive and The Reddening were all winners of The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. He has also published three collections of short stories, with Some Will Not Sleep winning the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection, 2017.
Imaginarium adapted The Ritual and No One Gets Out Alive into feature films and more of his work is currently in development for the screen.
The author lives in Devon, England. More information about the author and his books is available at: adamlgnevill. com. He can also be found @AdamLGNevill on Twitter, and adamlgnevill on Instagram.
Helen Grant has a passion for the Gothic and for ghost stories. Joyce Carol Oates has described her as “a brilliant chronicler of the uncanny as only those who dwell in places of dripping, graylit beauty can be”. A lifelong fan of the ghost story writer M. R. James, Grant has spoken at two M. R. James conferences and appeared at the Dublin Ghost Story Festival. She lives in Perthshire with her family, and when not writing, she likes to explore abandoned country houses and swim in freezing lochs. Her novels include Ghost (2018) and Too Near the Dead (2021). Helen’s website is helengrantbooks.com, and she can also be found @helengrantsays on Twitter, and helengrantsays on Instagram.
Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Heart-Shaped Box, The Fireman, and others. Much of his work has been adapted for film, including the Blumhouse smash The Black Phone, adapted from his short story, and Locke & Key, a hit Netflix series based on the comic he co-created with artist Gabriel Rodriguez. He lives in New England. His website can be found at joehillfiction.com, and he’s @joe_hill on Twitter and joe_hill on Instagram.
A. C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling and Hooked, and the recent short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, Locus, Sunburst, Aurora, Ignyte, and Lambda Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a regular short fiction review column to Apex Magazine. Find her online at acwise.net and on Twitter as @ac_wise.
Kelley Armstrong believes experience is the best teacher, though she’s been told this shouldn’t apply to writing her murder scenes. To craft her books, she has studied aikido, archery, and fencing. She sucks at all of them. She has also crawled through very shallow cave systems and climbed half a mountain before chickening out. She is however an expert coffee drinker and a true connoisseur of chocolate-chip cookies. Kelley is also the author of the Rip Through Time and Rockton mystery series. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Cainsville gothic mystery series, the Nadia Stafford thriller trilogy, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal series, the Age of Legends teen fantasy series and the Royal Guide to Monster Slaying middle-grade fantasy series. Kelley’s website can be found at kelleyarmstrong.com, and she’s also @KelleyArmstrong on Twitter, and kelleyarmstrongauthor on Instagram.
Once an actor, a singer and a composer, A. K. Benedict is now a bestselling, award-winning writer of novels, short stories and scripts. Her stories have featured in many journals and anthologies including Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror, Great British Horror, Phantoms, New Fears, Exit Wounds and Invisible Blood. She won the Scribe Award for one of her many Doctor Who universe audio dramas and was shortlisted for the BBC Audio Drama Award for BBC Sounds’ Children of the Stones. Her novels, including The Beauty of Murder and The Evidence of Ghosts (both Orion), have received critical acclaim. Her most recent, under the name Alexandra Benedict, is the bestselling The Christmas Murder Game (Bonnier Zaffre) which was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award.
A. K. is currently writing scripts, another Christmas-based murder mystery and a high concept thriller for Simon & Schuster. She lives in Eastbourne, UK, with writer Guy Adams, their daughter, Verity, and their dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford. More information on A. K. can be found at akbenedict.com, as well as @ak_benedict on Twitter and a.k.benedict on Instagram.
Named one of The Root’s and BET’s 100 most influential African Americans, L. L. McKinney is an advocate for equality and inclusion in publishing, and the creator of the hashtags #PublishingPaidMe and #WhatWoCWritersHear. Her works include the Nightmare-Verse books, Nubia: Real One through DC, Marvel’s Black Widow: Bad Blood, and more. L. L. McKinney’s website can be found at llmckinney.com, and she can also be found online @ElleOnWords on Twitter.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Marie O’Regan is an Australian Shadow Award and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author and editor, based in Derbyshire. She won the British Fantasy Society’s Legends of FantasyCon Award in 2022, and has been nominated for several other BFS awards both as a writer and editor. Her first collection, Mirror Mere, was published in 2006 by Rainfall Books; her second, In Times of Want, came out in September 2016 from Hersham Horror Books. Her third, The Last Ghost and Other Stories, was published by Luna Press early in 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of genre magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Canada, Italy and Germany, including Best British Horror 2014, Great British Horror: Dark Satanic Mills (2017), and The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories. Her novella, Bury Them Deep, was published by Hersham Horror Books in September 2017. She was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Short Story in 2006, and Best Anthology in 2010 (Hellbound Hearts) and 2012 (The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women). She was also shortlisted for the Australian Shadow Award for “Edited By” in 2019 (Trickster’s Treats #3), and the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology in 2020 (Wonderland). Her genre journalism has appeared in magazines like The Dark Side, Rue Morgue and Fortean Times, and her interview book with prominent figures from the horror genre, Voices in the Dark, was released in 2011. An essay on “The Changeling” was published in PS Publishing’s Cinema Macabre, edited by Mark Morris. She is co-editor of the bestselling Hellbound Hearts, The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, A Carnivàle of Horror – Dark Tales from the Fairground, Exit Wounds, Wonderland, and Cursed, as well as the charity anthology Trickster’s Treats #3, plus editor of the bestselling anthologies The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women and Phantoms. Her first novel, the internationally bestselling Celeste, was published in February 2022. She is co-chair of the UK Chapter of the Horror Writers’ Association, and was co-chair of ChillerCon UK in 2022. Visit her website at marieoregan.net. She can also be found at @Marie_O_Regan on Twitter and marieoregan8191 on Instagram.
