Beast - Chapter 2
It started with a debt. His parents owed money or something to a powerful voodoo priest, a less-than-favorable one, and they didn’t pay up. As punishment, he cursed their only child, growing safe and oblivious inside his mother’s womb. He cursed him to be a beast, human only on the full moon so he could remember how it felt to have that small grasp of normalcy before it was ripped away from him again until the next night of the full moon.
The child was born human, and his parents rejoiced that the spell hadn’t worked. However, before they could relax and banish their fears, he began to change. Fingers and toes became humanoid paws, and flushed, pink baby skin became thick, dark fur. The creature began to cry-a whimpering mewl that spilled out of a muzzled mouth filled with fangs and two elongated canines. A long tail curled unhappily behind the monster, and his wolfish ears flattened back against his narrow, tiny skull.
He was a monster, but he was their son. Their burden to bear. It was their fault, and so they took responsibility for the most part. They moved to the woods outside of the city, far away from civilization, and there they raised the beast that was their son. They never called him a beast, or a monster, but they didn’t have to. It hung heavily in the air like the metaphorical elephant that never left the room. It tainted everything with its dark, hated presence. Every full moon became a reminder of their mistake. It became their curse just as much as it had become his.
His earliest memory was of being held by his mother after he’d cut his hind leg. Blood had wet down his fur, darkening it to black, and he’d whimpered as he’d clung to her with his ears pinned back and his fangs bared in distress.
“It hurts, mommy,” he’d whined, his words thick and garbled around the saber-like fangs that grew down past his bottom jaw.
“I know, baby,” she’d sighed as she knelt on the ground and gripped his injured leg with careful, gentle fingers. She’d cleaned the gash dutifully, but he’d noticed that she only touched him as much as she needed to and not a bit more. She didn’t hug him, or stroke down his spine. All her comfort had come from her words, and he remembered being okay with that.
He could stand upright on his hind legs, if he wanted to. That made him feel more human, but it also reminded him of what he wasn’t, and would never be, so he preferred to stay on all fours. It was the only time he ever disobeyed his parents. They tried everything they could think of to get him to stand upright, and wear clothes, but he never would. Not unless it was the full moon.
Once, on one of his mother’s bad days, she took a pair of clippers and shaved him down. He’d hid in the forest for hours, crying in a tree, and had only crept home after dark and curled up in the middle of his bed, his eyes glowing in the darkness and his stubbled cheeks still wet from his anguish. In the morning, his fur had grown back, and his mother had wept as well. His father had just looked at him, something in his eyes, and then left to go hunting.
On the full moon, they got to be a happy family. They laughed and pretended that everything was normal while he watched them and longed for it to always be that way. He wished that he had just been born a normal boy, like every other child who got to go to school and do other normal human things that he could never do. And for whatever reason, the thought of being like that unnerved him. It made his hackles rise and his tail lash.
Maybe he was just destined to always be a monster. Maybe it was the curse. Maybe it was just him. He never figured it out when he was young. He was more concerned with learning to hunt without his parents; tracking animals through the forest and mapping out his territory. As a child, this was his normality. It was his instincts, not his badly-manufactured humanity.
He remembered, toward the end, how tired and worn-out his parents always looked. By the time he was eight, they looked like they had aged twenty years. They never hugged him, and only touched him when they absolutely had to. It was then, looking at them while they avoided his eyes, that he began to truly hate what he was. He hated them for doing what they had, for bringing down the curse on him through their foolishness and neglect, and so he began to drive them away. It was when he was chasing them out of his territory, fangs gleaming and eyes wild, his snarls ripping the fragile peace to shreds, that he began to realize that he truly was a beast.
It was raining when he woke up. Ears flicking, he hauled himself out of his nest of moss and pelts to go and press his nose against the cracked, chilly window and look out into the forest beyond. His house had begun to fall apart in the last five years, but he did not care enough or have the resources needed to repair it. Moss grew up the sides and mingled with the ivy, and ferns were beginning to worm their way up through the cracked boards of the porch. The roof was sagging in some places, and paint was peeling both inside and out.
He didn’t care.
Oh, he used to. He took care of the house for a little while. It was the last scrap of sanity he had left to cling to-the last thing his parents had given him before he’d driven them out when he was twelve. That had been four years ago. Now he couldn’t be bothered to care, and it was showing.
Growling softly, he backed away from the leaking window and turned to the door, hunching his shoulders so he could squeeze through better. He’d grown too big to fit through most of them a few years ago, but he couldn’t bring himself to rip out bigger entryways. Maturity had bulked out his once-streamlined frame, and he’d grown to an impressive size, even when on all fours. Now he truly did look like a rabid creature with his wild dark brown, matted fur and his cold golden eyes. His features were a mix between feline and canine, and he’d stopped trying to puzzle out exactly what he was a long time ago. What did it matter?
He was a monster, plain and simple. A bitter, angry creature who knew he was going to be that way forever. His life wasn’t a fairytale. There was no true love’s kiss to break his curse. Once, a long time ago, his mother had said there was. She had told him every night, sitting by his bedside while he’d curled up in his nest of blankets, that all he needed to do was find someone who would love him for who he was, and not what he looked like, and that would break the curse.
It was bullshit. No one could ever love a monster.
That thought made him snarl, the walls trembling under the force of his fury, and he lashed out at the wall; cutting deep gouges into the weak plaster before he ripped his claws free and stalked towards the stairs on stiff legs. His tail lashed behind him and his ears were flat against his head. His golden eyes were like chips of ice.
His house was two stories tall, an old Victorian style with buttercup-yellow siding and white shutters. Inside, it had three spacious bedrooms and two full bathrooms. On the outside a porch wrapped around it, supported by beams that were beginning to crack and splinter. His forest was swallowing the architecture, reabsorbing the house, and him along with it. The stairs creaked ominously as he lumbered down them, the rough walnut sinking beneath his weight as he made his way to the ground floor.
The scent of rain and woods permeated the air, and he drew it deep into his lungs as he made his way out of his house-cum-prison. His paws sank into the wet grass and he dug his claws in, relishing the feel of the dirt giving way underneath him as he loped across the small clearing the house was built in and into the thickly-forested woods beyond. He didn’t mind the rain pattering down on his hide; darkening his fur further and making it stick to him in clumps that would probably tangle later. Not that he really cared, since his flanks were flecked and smeared with mud, and here and there he had little twigs caught up in snarls of fur. When you lived on your own and had no one to impress, why take the time to care about personal grooming?
He found his favorite stream and stopped to take a drink, savoring the crisp, cold water as he lapped it up. It cleansed his palate and left him feeling a bit more awake and refreshed, which he was going to need if he planned on eating breakfast. The forest was full of all manner of prey animals, but this morning he was craving some fresh, bloody venison. With that thought in mind, he set out on his hunt.
A plump doe became his breakfast. Her meat was hot and sweet, and gamey in just the way he liked. As breakfasts go, it was one of his better ones, but his size and bulk meant that he’d need to go hunting several more times during the day in order to properly feed himself. Thankfully the forest was very well-stocked for that, even with his existence amongst the fur and feather and fauna. Truthfully, he was the one keeping the populations under control, because until he learned to hunt the deer and other grazers were stripping the woods bare and not giving it enough time to regrow.
When nothing but bones and a few scraps of fur were left, he licked his lips to clean them and turned his face into the wind. Inhaling deeply, he pinpointed the few predators he would need to be wary of and made sure to remember to steer clear of them as he set out to renew the borders of his territory. His land was no small stretch of forest, either. He prowled over eighty-five percent of the wooded acres, and had even claimed some of the grasslands closer to the nearby town. He never ventured out into that area much, though, unless he was re-establishing his territory, because it wouldn’t do for some unknowing human to stumble across him and then run screaming right to the alphas. Did humans have alphas? He couldn’t really remember.
Shaking his massive, shaggy head to clear away the thoughts, he followed along the bank of the creek to the northwestern point of the forest where he planned to start. All around him, birds were singing and mice scurried through the underbrush. A crow cawed at him as he passed under her branch, warning the others of his arrival. Other than flicking an ear, he showed no signs of having heard her. The rain was letting up slowly, backing off from a steady drizzle to a fine mist. Here and there, tendrils of sunlight were touching the unfurling ferns, so he guessed that in another half an hour or so the rain would be gone completely and the day would become significantly warmer and drier.
Sure enough, by the time he reached the edge of the woods, the air had cleared and he was already starting to dry. Standing just inside the tree line, he looked out across the open land. His eyesight was far better than that of any human, or even any normal animal, so he could see the human dwelling in the distance rather well. Here and there, he saw wisps of smoke rising out of buildings, and even so far away he could hear the dull rumble and roar of automobiles. Every once and a while, sunlight flashed off of the shiny metal side of one, throwing out a bright glare, and he squinted so as not to be blinded.
“Tedious,” he huffed, curling back his black upper lip in a sneer. His voice was deep and rasped atrociously, as if he very rarely spoke, or was trying to speak using vocal chords that were not designed for the human language. Humans were so disastrous for the environment. They polluted everything, and clogged up the beautiful streams and rivers with their discarded garbage. Everything they touched they destroyed, and they didn’t care. Fury welled up in him and he snarled, spittle dripping from his mouth and his fur bristling in response to his unseen enemy.
With one last snort in the direction of the town, the beast turned and vanished back into the lovely shadows of his woods, shaking the ire from him like one would shake water from their fur as he returned to his previous engagement of warning off potential tresspassers.