A little farther away, I see the girl-woman in black dancing with Hud Hudson. He’s looking wildly around the room for me. Where did I go? He can’t lose me. He must still try and save me. But I’m already lost, I’d tell him if I had words, if the spinning weren’t making me dizzy. So I just watch him look for me. The girl-woman in black takes his hands and presses them to either side of her small, heart-shaped face. He looks down at her. And then his face suddenly changes. Entranced. So taken he is by her skull shape, its exquisite symmetry of bones. By her Smoothness. By her Glow, most of all. He’s shuddering. A hairy moth moving toward her light.
She’s whispering something to him now, what is she whispering?
Whatever it is, he’s taken with it. A man in a dream. Lost himself.
She reaches out and touches his face too. And that’s how they’re dancing now. Cupping each other’s faces like you might cup a flame to keep it lit. Turning the slowest of circles in the middle of the floor. Until they aren’t really dancing at all anymore. They’re standing still. And she’s removing his disguise. His beard, then those blond muttonchops. First one chop, then the other. Then finally, the monocle. She drops it to the ground and crushes it with her little patent leather heel. He lets her. Doesn’t move at all. Lets himself be revealed, this tawny-faced man with glossy black hair, shuddering before her now. I watch her fingers float up to his naked face, tracing the deep scar there. She’s whispering something to him again. I watch her red bow of a mouth making words I can’t hear. There are tears in his eyes. And now he’s allowing himself to be led by the hand like a lost child. Down the very dark hall where only a minute ago he wanted to go with me, to save me.
“Belle,” says a voice now in my ear. The drug voice that is like the movies, like music. The only music I hear. And then the man I’m dancing with, the one who’s been holding me so that I can’t see his face, holding me in a way that brings me right back, like a scent that brings you right back, now holds me apart so that we’re facing each other at last. Black suit. Black-horned mask over half his face. Familiar. I know the dark hair like a wave. I know the blue-green eyes shining out of the black mask. I remember the cold ocean of them. I remember drowning.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Belle. Except that you’ve grown. So much.” Long white teeth. That smile that used to light me up, like wrong stars in my child’s body.
“I know you,” I whisper, shivering. Very cold suddenly. But happy. So happy. I know him, though my mind’s a blank.
“We know each other well, Belle. Definitely. Allow me to escort you to your final treatment. Seems fitting, don’t you think, that I should be the one?”
I nod. Of course he should be. We’re dancing so slowly. Like time itself has slowed. There are no bodies in the hall anymore. Just us. No harpsichord or opera singer. This man brings his own music, just like he always did, and I hear it inside and outside of me. A synthy, dreamy pop song. It sounds like bodies in blue silhouette. It sounds like all my dreams. I’m jelly like the fish.
“I always knew,” he whispers, swaying me, “that you would take your Beauty back, Belle. I knew you would find me here. A long road. A long, lonely road for you, hasn’t it been?”
“Yes,” I hear my soul say. It’s my soul speaking to him through my mouth now. He has a direct line to it.
“But you’ve followed the footpath to the castle by the sea. To me.”
“To you.”
“Didn’t I always tell you this place was a magic place?”
I look around the dark, empty hall. The arched ceiling, I can finally see it, like a cage of white bone above us. The tank of red jellies has gone black now. All around me feels like a void. Like nothing at all. “You did.”
“Well now you see for yourself, don’t you?”
And then we’re walking down a winding stair to under the Depths. He holds my hand, his own gloved hand cold and slightly sticking. I remember the cold and the sticking of his touch, but I still can’t place him. If he would only take off his mask and I could see his face. But my body remembers. My soul remembers. From where, from where?
We stumble at first down the stair. My red shoes won’t walk me down. But he just smiles. Kneels at my feet like a prince. He’s going to take them off. “I always hated these fucking things,” he says. “I never told you, of course. Because you loved them so much.”
“I think I wore them for you,” I say. Somehow I know this is true.