Chapter One: Nightmare Before Christmas

A bad beginning maketh a good ending.

-John Heywood, Proverbs

Christmas Eve, as it is wont to be in France, consisted of a whirling, stormy blizzard raging against the turrets and towers of the Castle. It was bitter cold outside. But compared to the atmosphere indoors, the storm was a desert. The servants of the Castle hurried about anxiously.

One would think that the servants employed by King Raoul and his wife Queen Christine were the happiest in Europe, or at least as happy as one can be catering to someone else’s whims.

But then there was the Prince.

Prince Adam was Raoul and Christine’s eleven-year-old—and only—child. But although he was handsome and had everything a boy could wish for, Adam was spoiled, selfish, and unkind. His parents did what they could to make him behave; and he was careful to restrain himself in their presence, but really he remained the same. This Christmas, everyone knew, would be no different.

Outside the throne room the representatives of each faction of servants waited anxiously to present their gifts to the Prince. Among them were Lumiere, the maitre d’hotel; Cogsworth, the butler; and Mrs. Potts, head cook.

Meanwhile Prince Adam was slumped languidly in his father’s throne, fiddling with a bit of tinsel. He was meticulously pulling streamers one by one from the tinsel’s spine until there was a shimmering pile on the floor at his feet and a bit of wire between his fingers. At the sound of footsteps, he glanced up disinterestedly.

Mrs. Potts stepped forward first. Even now her hair was still black, with one or two streaks of dark grey; and there was a baby (known to the world as Christopher and to the adoring servants as “Chip”) squalling in a nursery a wing over in the castle. She stepped forward briskly. “Your Highness, sir, Prince Adam, I’ve made you meat pies for Christmas. Nice and hearty. Fill ya right up with—”

Prince Adam frowned and interrupted her. “Why do you always make me food for a gift, Mrs. Potts? Do you think I am underweight? Sick? Starving?” He spoke with all the elegance and diction of a man, but none of the maturity or tact.

“I—” Mrs. Potts began.

“Next!” bellowed Adam.

Cogsworth, a portly man with a curly brown wig and an over-inflated ego, strutted up to his Prince and bowed ingratiatingly. “Your High Highness, Prince Adam, I have the honor of bestowing upon you this most useful instrument of a man’s life; and I hope you will use it to your great—”

“Well?”

Startled, Cogsworth hastily surrendered the small box.

Prince Adam tore the lid off and peered inside. After a moment, he lifted out an intricately carved gold-and-ebony pocket watch. “A...watch,” he said in disgust.

“Yes...” answered Cogsworth nervously.

“Though I hate to be reminded of the time.”

“Well,” fidgeted Cogsworth, “yes...”

The pocket watch fell from the Prince’s hands and crashed to the floor, spitting cogs, glass, and wood everywhere. “Oh,” said the Prince after a moment, rather nonchalantly. “It must have...slipped.”

There was a tic going in Cogsworth’s eye; the timepiece had cost him ten thousand francs.

“Your Highness,” Lumiere, who was a Frenchman in all senses of the term, started abruptly, bearing a green box. “I would like to give you this—”

“Oh, give it here,” exclaimed the young Prince impatiently, snatching the box. He ripped the wrapping off, held the gift out at arm’s length to look, and turned disdainfully to its giver. “A storybook? You really expect me to read this?”

But before Lumiere could answer, there sounded a booming knock at the castle door. Prince Adam dropped the book and jumped to his feet. “Who dares disturb my Christmas?” Not waiting for an answer, he crossed the hall and flung the doors open himself.

Ankle-deep in the snow stood a wrinkled, bent, elderly woman. She held a flower in one hand and leaned heavily upon a gnarled staff with the other. She extended the rose, blood-red and blooming, to the Prince. “Please...accept this rose in exchange for shelter from the bitter cold,” she croaked.

Prince Adam wrinkled his nose as though the crone were something nasty on his shoe, instead of a needy human being. “Get out of here, you old hag,” he sneered as he slammed the door.

Outside, the woman’s robes began to billow about her, though the doorway was out of the wind, and the rose in her hand began to glow...

Suddenly the doors banged open. The garments the woman wore had wrapped tighter to her frail frame and they peeled away now, exposing an exquisite, powerful enchantress.

The prince fell to his knees before the beautiful lady. “I am sorry! I did not realize...please, forgive me!”

“Too late!” cried the enchantress; “for I have seen that there is no love in your heart.” Producing a shining scepter, she raised it to the skies, and purple-black smoke flowed from it. “Until you find someone to love who loves you in return,” she explained calmly as around them the castle grew dark and forbidding, “you, and your servants and your castle, will be cursed...”

And as the smoke infiltrated the castle, the walls turned from ivory to dark stone. Dark clouds and lightning covered the skies; never would the castle’s inhabitants see daylight again. The cherubs, nymphs, and animals that adorned the many roofs and gables and towers became gargoyles, demons, chimerae...

The three servants present disappeared...but if one were to have looked at the floor a moment later one would have seen a teapot, a tri-candelabrum, and a mantle clock. The three objects scrambled into a corner in horror at the sight now unfolding in front of them.

Prince Adam was growing in size, and sprouting fur, claws, tail, and fearsome fangs. His clothes split along the seams as he grew; and the Beast threw back his head and roared...

XXX

Ashamed of his monstrous form, the Beast concealed himself inside his castle, with only a magic mirror as his window to the outside world.

The rose the enchantress had given him was truly an enchanted rose, which would bloom until his twenty-first year. If he could learn to love another and earn her love in return before the last petal fell, the spell would be broken.

If not, he would be doomed to remain a Beast for all eternity.

As the years passed, he fell into despair.

For who could ever learn to love a Beast?...