Moonstruck with Music and Madness

Last night, under the waxing moon, I witnessed the Beast claim another soul.

Father did not listen to my recounting of the man’s rapture. He was far too preoccupied with preparations for this year’s harvest celebration. “It must have been a dream,” he dismissed it as he always did with the nightmares that had haunted me since Mother’s death. And he did it while tasting the finger foods that the cook set on her old silver trays. If she were looking down from the heavens, she must’ve surely been blinded by how perfectly Nanny had polished them. They could’ve rivaled tonight's full moon.

I watched it climb the treeline and take its rightful seat in the sky and in the corner of my mirror. The vanity faced the window while I was forced to face myself not as a girl watching for her late Mother to return from the woods, but as the woman of the house.

Nanny pulled at my hair with the brush and brought my wandering mind back to the present. Cormac would have been teasing me about it if he were in the doorway. And Nanny would have sent her son back to work before Father saw that his stable boy had been away from the farmhouse all day. Tonight, I had her all to myself, and I filled her ears with my dream.

“Boys down in the village dare one another to wander into the woods,” she spread the gossip she caught wind of. “No doubt they spook one another, too. ‘Tis the season.”

Whatever spooked that man was no boy. It dragged him into the dark under the unblinking moon and my sleepless eyes. I couldn’t sit at my window and keep watch for the beast tonight, however. My presence was requested downstairs.

The guests poured in, and Father and I were soon drowning in their compliments. “Mr. Van Lier,” they greeted. “Miss Van Lier,” they acknowledged me at his side, standing where Mother once did.

“Would you do me the honor?” Benedict Barley bowed before us, offering me his hand and my Father a pleading look. Like all ambitious young men, he did not know better than to try winning Abraham Van Lier’s favor by flattering his daughter.

“Forgive me, Mr. Barley. Tonight, I clipped the man’s wings in Father’s stead. “I’ve already promised my first dance to another.”

“Is that so?” At last, he stood at full height and searched his surroundings for his challenger. “And just where is this most fortunate man?”

“Who is it, Catherine?” Father drew me closer to him then, as if a predator were on the loose.

And I held my heart back so that it would not leap out of my chest. For I had both men’s eyes on me then.

I had not yet thought of an elegant excuse to turn down Mr Barley when the most fortunate man’s name turned out to be that of the only man I was allowed to be with unattended.

"Dr. Florian Fell, of course,” I heard myself speak.

“Dr. Fell?” Mr. Barley wore his smile before it burst at the seams of his shaven cheeks, before he discarded it altogether when he spotted the lack of one on my face.

“Dr. Fell,” Father said as if to summon him with the third utterance of his name.

And I must have, for he materialized before me in that very moment. Tall, willowy, and pale, Dr. Henry Fell shrank only a hat’s height when he removed it to greet a lady.

“Miss Van Lier.”

I wrapped my arm around the doctor’s and hurried him into the ballroom. And I was once more a girl free from care and unaware of the guests. Dr. Fell hadn’t been one of them until tonight.

There I was: running through the woods and climbing into the trees, scraping my knees on the bark, and picking leaves out of my braids. Father didn’t mind the dirt on my dresses when they weren’t ballgowns. And Mother would join, and we would be lost to the rest of the world until sundown.

When I stepped out of my dream, I was dancing with my physician while his white and barely blushing face was asking for my expertise on how to move with two left feet. He looked like a lost little boy, yet he was older than I was. His eyes crinkled at each end when I remarked on it. I saw them narrowing into crow’s feet like they once had during my first appointment, and his first day working in our village.

According to him, I was in dire need of more sleep and fewer daydreams. And he repeated this diagnosis when our dance came to an end and the dance floor became the stage for another pair. “Miss Catherine, you still seem tired to me.” He kissed my hand, but I saw the smirk he was trying to smother into my skin.

My laugh was loud, and it hurt as I ground it out. The autumn night air had dried my throat. And staring out the open window didn’t help. “You tired me out, Doctor.”

There was disbelief in his glassy green eyes, or was it my own lie being reflected? When the wailing of a woman stole his attention away, relief flowed through me for a single moment. And what followed was a night of chills washing over my spine.

“Cory! My Cory!” The wailing woman was my dear Nanny. “The Beast got my Cory!” Her feet gave under the weight of her grief, and the familiar garment she clung to her chest.

Threatened by a tide of panic, I clung to my anchor, Dr. Fell. And he held me closer than any man had ever dared. And I wrapped myself around his narrow waist like that little girl once had with the tree trunks. After the sea of people passed us and all sounds subsided, I whispered into his waistcoat and my empty home: “It’s a full moon.”

“Many predators hunt on a night such as this.” The doctor drew my attention to him, his hands on my face. They were coarse and cold, and a welcome splash of wakefulness. “Wolves used to roam this land before the settlers came and pushed them deeper into the woods. That must’ve been a hundred years ago. And it could’ve been one of your ancestors who did it.”

“We’ve been cursed then?” I felt my eyes widen to the point of dryness. Tears washed over to moisten them. “The woods have cursed us? Is that why the Beast took my Mother? And Cory?”

“I wish I had an answer,” he offered his chest for me to cry on. “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

The farmworkers found us in this tight, tearful, trembling embrace, and I hardly heard them over the beating of the doctor’s heart.

“A hunter’s bloodhound found the boy dead in the treeline, Miss.”

I demanded they give up all the gory details, and Dr. Fell stood by me. No talk of wolves or their fangs and claws deterred me when the doctor’s expertise was requested at the scene. I was going to ride with him to the edge of the woods under the full moon. Father was waiting for him there.

The men made a valiant attempt to cover the corpse from my eyes, but the great glowing orb in the sky showed me a crumpled Cory with his life drained through the darkened collar of his white shirt. The bite had dried black on his sun-kissed throat like it once did on my Mother’s. Dr. Fell held me as I dismounted and squeezed my sides while my legs buckled and my chin wobbled. My girlhood friend will never again tease my crinkling nose, and I will miss his impish smile for the rest of my days.

“Where is Father?”

“On the hunt, Miss. With Mr. Barley.”

“Am I to lose him as well?”

With a crack of my voice, the dam was broken, and tears began flowing. I didn’t allow myself to drown in them, following on foot the trail he blazed with hoofmarks.

“Miss Catherine, please!” Dr. Fell begged me to return, but came to join me because he had no choice. He saw it in my eyes, and I saw it in the mirror that was his pair. My Mother didn’t walk out of these woods alive, and I was not going to go back to the farmhouse and watch for my Father from my bedroom window.

“I saw Cory being taken,” I confessed. “Last night, I saw a man disappear into these woods.”

“I believe you,” he offered me his hand to hold as he mounted me on his horse while he hung one of the hunter’s rifles on his shoulder. “And nobody can deny it now.”

We braved through what had once been my playground and the stage for all my nightmares. The moon shone down on it all the same, its light pouring through the punctured canopy of trembling leaves. All the gold of autumn had been washed out with silver, all its budding life traded in for slithering shades. Our own shadows faded into the darkness, and the crinkling of dried grass under our feet joined the choir of whistling winds. Yet nothing was as loud as the heart in my chest.

“Father,” I called, and when nothing but crickets answered, I called for Mr. Barley as well. While the dirt showed us the way in the shape of hooves, the shadows didn’t betray their presence, and the leaves under our feet sounded loud enough to give away ours. Until, at last, Father’s steed charged out of the darkness and crossed our path. I dismounted Dr. Fell’s mare and hurried after him. It recognized my voice, and I reared it with my voice before I even reached its reins.

We had but a moment to catch our breath before the rider fell off the saddle and knocked all the air out of our chests. The moon revealed the red splattered body of Mr. Barley, throat torn, and brown eyes peeled open with fear of what they had last seen.

“Father,” I screamed until I had to catch my breath again. I screamed out the air and the fear. Fear for his life and my own. And something louder and faster than my own racing heart answered.

The doctor readied his gun, responding to every sound and threatening every shade. “Get behind me, Catherine.”

When the music of the forest was drowned out by the rushing blood in my ears, the darkness grew fangs. With four legs and the moonlight in its eyes, the Beast charged towards us. It took a blink to burn the picture to the back of my eyelids, and a gun firing off to blow my eardrums. It took a couple more deafening shots for the silence to return.

“You’re safe,” the doctor crouched down next to where I was curled up. “We’re safe. The Beast is dead. It’s dead.” And he soothed my shivering spine with his black powdered palms. He lost his mare, but we found our footing when the shades shifted around us again. It was the farmworkers, the hunters, and his bloodhounds. They sniffed out Benedict Barley and his killer.

“Is Father with you?”

“We’re looking for him, Miss.”

With hope filling my breast and Dr. Fell’s back against my chest, I returned home, where Father was sure to be waiting for me. So certain I was of this, I asked my savior to leave his mare in our stables because the man of the house would undoubtedly ask him to stay.

Grief was waiting for us at home. Nanny couldn’t see us through the red in her dried eyes, and she couldn’t hear us through the prayers she smothered into her son’s bloody waistcoat. On my knees, I joined her, smelling the dead leaves, the dried gore. With Cory’s memory in my heart and the Beast in the back of my mind, I promised her he had been avenged.

“You can’t blame an animal,” she sobbed. “Those boys in town chased my Cormac into its jaws. ‘Tis the season.”

“It was no animal I’ve ever seen,” Dr. Fell spoke, and startled Nanny. He excused himself and offered a glass of water to each of us.

“Thank you,” she started, but never finished.

The farmworkers barged into the ballroom unannounced and took their hats off solemnly.

“What?” I cut through the mournful silence. “What is it? Speak up!”

“I’m sorry, Miss Van Lier.”

“No,” I stumbled to my feet. “No, it cannot be.”

“I truly am sorry–”

“The Beast?”

“Hunting rifle,” he lifted his eyes from the carpet, but refused to face me. He looked over at the doctor instead. “He’d been shot.”

My heart was hollowed of all hope, and my legs were freed of all feeling. My body leaned against Dr. Fell’s as my feet crossed the floor and made it on the front lawn all on their own.

Lying in the gravel, under the full moon, I saw the Beast. And how I wished that what I witnessed tonight was a dream, for the fangs and claws that have been burned into my mind threatened could no longer hunt, but its eyes will forever haunt. They were deprived of all light save for the lanterns that the men had shone down on its face. They were my eyes. They were Father’s eyes.