ing Beauty: Danger Within”
Chris Van Dyk
Copyright 2013 Chris Van Dyk
Licensing Statement
Once upon a time, a young girl awakened from a nightmare…
Her first sensation was the shooting pain that radiated through her skull. It felt as though ravenous wolverines were desperately trying to claw their way out of her head, marauding for any orifice they could find or create. Sitting up in bed suddenly did little to help. In fact, it served little more purpose than giving her a severe case of nausea in conjunction with her face-splitting pain.
She seized and writhed. Eventually she tumbled to the floor, narrowly avoiding breaking her foot on the nearest post of the canopy bed. There was a chamber pot of sorts nearby, not that she noticed or cared. The pain and general confusion prevented her from the presence of mind to take heed of it, let alone aim for it, as she vomited for several minutes without end.
Once the bodily exorcism had been completed, she wiped her lips and hauled her slender body back into bed. As she tried to take stock of her situation, the girl suddenly came to a frightening realization: she remembered nothing.
We’re not just talking about a night of binging and hedonism followed by a fuzzy morning full of self-loathing, cerebral disorientation, and a universally accepted Walk of Shame.
She looked to her right: no. No gorgeous stranger from the evening before.
Evening?
There was a window on the far wall. Was it evening now? The sun was either just setting or just rising. Knowing which way that infernal window faced would certainly be helpful. But again this brings us back to her original problem of remembering nothing, including where the heck she was.
Bleary, bloodshot eyes finally began to come into focus as she looked around the room… oh dear. Things were clearly worse than she had thought.
Whatever had happened the night before must have been a terrible thing. The curtains had been reduced to ribbons, the antique chest of drawers had been smashed in, the mirror was basically nothing but shiny dust, and she was almost certain those were disenfranchised body parts laying around the floor in various stages of decay. Most of them were pretty well-advanced.
Gross.
Well, memory or not, staying here was absolutely out of the question. The young lady flung her feet over the edge of the bed, carefully avoided the puddle she’d created earlier during her reenactment of an exorcist movie, and tip-toed to the door.
She couldn’t be sure which was more disturbing – the general chaos of the room, or the fact that something about that shattered cell seemed vaguely familiar. When she came to the portal leading into the hallway, she found her answer.
There it was. A sign on the wall next to the door reading, “Within lays Aurora, our precious girl. She fell ill…” and so on and so forth. Apparently she had been placed under a curse or something that made her sleep for… 500 years?! Well, ok then. Surely that must have been a typo of sorts.
Below that sign was another that she was only now noticing.
“DANGER: DRAGON.”
Well, that was… less than encouraging.
But why not? She didn’t have any memory of her life or what the world might be like. For all she knew people kept dragons as pets like lapdogs. Maybe she even had a pet dragon! Was it pink? She hoped it would be pink.
Looking down at her dress with its marbled blue and pink effect, she decided that whatever her pets looked like, they had to be more fashionable than her at the moment.
The girl who now knew herself as Aurora descended a spiraling set of stairs down a stone corridor. The way was lit by little foot lamps near the floor that glowed a strange green. The blasted stairs went on forever. One would think that wherever she was before would have an elevator leading to it since it was apparently so high up.
Aurora wasn’t sure what she’d find at the bottom of the stairs, but a giant wooden door with an iron ring in the middle for a handle was probably not at the top of the list. The foreboding slab of redwood moved easily enough, though. And behind it was something else she hadn’t expected to find: a long room with computer terminals and monitors lining one wall. Each monitor showed the bed in her room from a different angle. One was blinking with a red light, as though it were warning of some terrible danger.
As Aurora was staring at the monitors and wondering if she’d just puked her guts out on a live reality TV show, she heard something tapping along the floor off to her right and a low voice say, “So… you’re awake.”
She turned and saw a stately woman dressed in black. For the purposes of simplicity, we shall simply say that she looked a little like Cher. Her black silk robe hugged tightly to her figure. In her right hand was a cane that stood nearly as tall as she with a teal glass ball, swimming with the colors of the ocean contained within it. It was this enormous cane that had been tapping along the ground.
“Hi,” Aurora said with a slightly stupefied expression on her face. “I guess I have… who are you?”
“My name is Maleficent… I have been watching over you.”
“That’s creepy,” Aurora commented. Looking at the monitors she asked, “Am I famous or something.”
“Well… infamous,” the Cher-looking lady answered.
“I read something that said I was cursed or something…” Aurora said absent-mindedly. “Do you know what happened to me?”
“Yes…” Maleficent said with terrible sorrow in her eyes. Aurora waited with bated breath. “I cursed you.”
“What? Why?”
“You had to be stopped. People were dying. We had no way to stop you except for my curse. I’m sorry… I’m not sure how the curse was broken. It must be getting stronger. And we’re still no closer to finding a cure!”
“What are you talking about?” Aurora was inching away now. The tall woman was between her and the door that might have an exit. Could she run back to her room, lock herself in, and then scale out a window?
“Sweetheart, I’m so sorry,” there were tears in the older woman’s pleading eyes. “But we must sedate you again, before it’s too late.”
“What? No way!”
“Child, please!” Maleficent took a step closer. “I promise, it’s for your own good… for everyone’s good!”
“Stay away from me!” Aurora screamed. Without thinking her left hand snatched up a large metal chair. She hurled it at Maleficent with ease, in spite of it weighing more than her. She had just enough time to be shocked at her own mighty strength when Maleficent blocked it by erecting a blue aura of energy around herself.
“Aurora, please… stop this. Your condition… we have to put you under before it gets any worse.”
“No! You’re not cursing me again! Do you have any idea what kind of hangover I woke up to?” Instinct took over now. Aurora plunged her dainty, perfectly manicured hands into the computer console, ripped it from the floor and lobbed the entire station in Maleficent’s general direction.
The sorceress may have been outmatched in strength, but she wasn’t out crafted. She teleported in a whirl of blue flame to a spot behind Aurora. Summoning her power, she cast a pillar of blue fire at the girl. “Forgive me!”
Aurora reacted quickly. In one fluid motion she performed a perfect aerial summersault, planted her hands on the back of another metal chair, and then dropped her body into it so she could use the high back as a shield from the fire.
The moment she felt the heat recede, Aurora suddenly launched herself into the air with unnatural strength. She hurtled toward Maleficent, who unleashed fireball after deadly fireball, but possessed the accuracy of a henchman in a James Bond movie.
The cane was raised and held across
her face in time to block the hand that would have ripped her eyes out. Maleficent needed to win this fight. Now. Before it was too—
Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
The hand that held onto her cane… it wasn’t human. Thick, green scales ran along the edges. The fingers ended in wicked claws that could tear through human flesh like a welding torch through an ice cube.
She looked into Aurora’s eyes… it was too late. The reptilian pupils dilated and peered back at her with a predator’s insatiable appetite. The forked tongue flickered out and tasted the air, searching for the molecules of her smell that spelled out “dinner” to the primal brain.
Maleficent jumped back, her cane held at the ready.
Aurora was growing at an alarming rate. In seconds her head touched the ceiling; in moments rubble and debris showered to the floor as she broke through. The snake-like neck thrust that streamlined head into the night sky as the batwings opened behind her. She reared back her horrid face and roared into the evening air.