Alas, said Beauty, I wish more than anything to see my brother.
Dorian was familiar with obsessions. Many of them flared brightly, and the warmth of their distraction blazed across his skin and mind, but guttered quickly.
There had been church and theology, but the fashions had been too dreary for any man of style; there had been women, more than he cared to count; there was the cabinet in his room that held only half of his collections: gems, bones, and gloves; fabrics and metalworks in the bottom drawers; an ombre array of colourful perfumes and colognes marching across its top. His room was hung with instruments, all of which he could play amiably if not masterfully; the zithers of those wild nomads he bade play for him in concert, slim lutes and creaking mandolins; the noble lyre, from which the fingers of both Apollo and Achilles coaxed ancient melody; even the pan pipes, in which he found the secret magic that echoed the untamed god’s bacchanal lullabies.
His library was edged with books, some in particular his favourites. He thought often of Henry’s gift of that yellow covered book; now flanked by an array of first editions, each meticulously covered to suit any of his various moods. Secreted away was the portrait. The grotesque countenance of his own face was a delicious monstrosity, an unmatched fascination. It delighted him.
The mirror was something else entirely.
And no sooner had she cast her eyes upon the looking glass…
It was something infernal.
He had bought it for Basil. The silver that curled leisurely around the thin glass, as delicate as the glittering surface it held entrapped; long ago he accused the artist in the midst of tantrum that he cared for him no more than a decoration, an ivory Hermes or a silver faun. It reminded Dorian of him.
It was installed in his London residence, sparkling above the detritus of his former amusements, flanked by a guard of Dorian’s favourite colognes. He never got around to passing it on.
Yes, there had been women; there had been men too. The only way to remove temptation is to yield to it.
I could, indeed, remain here forever entirely, said Beauty…
The fire crackled and spat in the grate across the room, the gas lamps half-lit; it was well past sunset and the windows were dark, the bedroom cavernous and nearly as murky. Dorian tied his cravat without looking, his aristocratic fingers weaving silk deftly between and around and tightening until it sat elegantly against his throat. He had engagements to attend, at least one coming out party, a masquerade, and then on to a salon. He was expected. His invitations of pale cut card, outlined in black, silver, and gold, lay in a dish brought up sometime by his man.
Still, he gazed deep into the silvery pane. The liquidity provided by muted light transformed the speculum as if the flawless surface had been dipped in the waters of the Lethe; he could forget existence itself in the face of this looking glass.
What a cruel invitation, to present a temptation he could not answer.
Dorian tilted his head and felt his lips twitch, fingers sliding down the silk of his tie, attending to his cuffs. The fingers in the mirror continued to wrap their own cravat. He’d dreamt of those fingers.
For when Dorian looked within the mirror, it was not himself that looked back.
To gaze upon him unguarded…
“Who are you?”
The glass was cold. He drew his fingers back quickly. He would not smudge the glass. He would not give his man a reason to even glance at it and so protect its contents.
“I wonder what current rumours would say, if they knew that Dorian Gray talked to magic mirrors?”
The youth reflected back at him started to smile as they attended to their own cravat, almost like they had heard him. Dorian longed to reach through the silver surface and find the youth on the other side, tangling his fingers in the reflection’s tossed curls; dark and rebellious and infinitely charming. The opposite of his own cultivated look.
The youth winked one mischievous eye and the mirror shimmered. It went clear and empty and Dorian was alone with his desire.
Tearing his eyes from the blank speculum, he checked his watch.
Late.
Dorian turned on his heel without a backward glance. One night that youth would answer for his narcissism as Dorian had.
Show me again, my brother, whom I so long to see.
Rose petals slipped out of his clothes and fell to the ground, trailing a path from his door to his room, pink and white and red. Some were still stuck in his hair, kissing the skin of his throat, caught under his cuffs or sticking to his skin beneath his shirt. The courtyard beyond the gathering had been covered with them, and the ambience had been too inviting to refuse and Dorian had been too inviting for his partner to.
Running his fingers through his hair, he dislodged the last of them to flutter into a small mound at his feet. He could still taste sweetness on his lips.
The fire was already blazing, the gas-lamps taking mere moments to kindle, and the mirror was waiting for him, more inviting than his little romp, sweeter than the taste of champagne. Dorian blinked languorously and the youth appeared.
Blood stained his collar, running a red line down his neck, his mouth swollen and wet and scarlet; eyes dark with anger. He titled his chin loftily in Dorian’s direction and Dorian was sure, for that single moment, he was being judged. What his sentence would be he could not guess.
The taste of copper was on the back of Dorian’s tongue, one pale petal dotted with colour where it was once white forgotten on the floor. His fingers reached for still silver waters, wiping at teeth-torn lips but only succeeding in smudging the mirror surface.
Dorian remembered doing that, but not to the youth in the mirror.
My name is not Lord, replied the monster, but Beast.
The tasteless smoke was thick in his lungs and he could feel the rushing of blood in his veins; a tiny, spun-glass hand was writing in the old language on the inside of his thigh, the wrist, stretching into the arm, pale as the bone visible beneath it, the fingers nails chipped and black; poisonous. A roar by his ear and he laughed, the smoke trailing out his mouth and nose with the burning fire of the dragon. The sugar-spun hand darted away and Dorian grabbed it back, bones and tendons colliding beneath his palm.
A bear clawed its way into the front of his dress jacket, and pulled him from his lounge, the pipe falling a very long way to the ground and landing there with a silent finality. Dorian stared at it in wonder, and idly brushed an ear in curiosity. The claws raked his chest. There was a table at his back and the bear was rearing.
No, how silly of him. There were no bears in London.
He laughed again, and punched the roaring brawler with his pretty fist into a thrice-broken nose. His knuckles rang with the sound of bells. They came back to him dripping with flecks of wine.
What ever I was before, said the creature, it is no longer in my countenance.
Morning dawned dark and grey; the heavy, velvet drapes pulled open to let in light that was wet with rain. Dorian selected a blue and silver bound first edition of his original yellow book and flickered through the pages, the words slipping away from his eyes and the young Parisian hero barely capturing the edges of his attention. His knuckles left a rusty smear across the cover, and he tossed it into the mountainous bedcovers, not caring if it was unearthed again.
A shadow passed through the mirror.
Dorian was on his feet abruptly before it, stretching his fingers, knuckles clicking and a deep ache reverberating through his hand.
Violet and black wrapped around an uncovered wrist; bones more substantial than sculpted confectionary; run with red. The printed wrist snaked up to cup the running rivers, trickling between dammed fingers. The floor seemed to be sliding beneath his feet, the world a blur but for his companion in the mirror and his half-covered face and the pouring blood. There was nothing in Dorian’s stomach, nothing but choking smoke lost deep in his lungs, yet his throat was closing, a knot forming within it that prohibited swallowing; breathing required far more thought than should be devoted to it.
“Who is hurting you?”
The eyes above that bruised, battered, incomparably lovely face, were scorching in their sockets; the darkness of his portrait could not move him to shiver in fear or revulsion, but here it was upon him in the flashing accusation of those glittering eyes; their impish twinkle ash on the floor of his soul.
The devil’s shadows crawled across the frame of the hidden portrait, echoing their pricking trails across Dorian’s body. His split knuckles dragged old blood across the line of his cheek; he would not look away.
Those fair hands came away wreathed in gore.
For the first time, Dorian thought he might have been the one who’d bought that blood. The youth smirked at him with red between his pearly teeth. He was not the one who had paid for it. Dorian never entertained guilt for long.
The mirror shattered.
Glass-cut liquid dripped and stained the carpet.
You are very ungrateful, said the Beast, but you shall die for it.
He was expected.
The blue eyes of the portrait were lively, its nose straight, its lips full and pink and naive. It looked over the body on the floor with the arrogance of its youth. Dorian’s arrogance. Dorian’s youth. The near-corpse, he loathed to call it his, was aged and greying. Sin lined its every wrinkle, woven into the lank hair. Blood seeped through its blue silk dressing gown, a dusky maroon.
Dorian flicked his cuffs over his wrist; blue silk. It swished at his bare feet, whispering through still air. The portrait meet his gaze smugly, its blue eyes beguiling. His face.
The body on the floor had his face also.
Dorian hated them both.
I know too well my own misfortune…
His steps made no sound as he walked slowly from the room and down the stairway. No creaks on the stairs; the heavy movement of his cloak silent against the floor. Fingers pressing in on his cheeks, he could feel the smoothness of his skin.
…I ought to be glad that I am not alone, said the Beast.
Crushed glass glinted menacingly at him, finding its home in among his perfumed soldiers, silver waterfalls tipping over the side of the dresser and sending tiny, luminous stars in constellations across the floor. The mirror waited, flickering in the light from the fire in the grate; the silver pool unshadowed. There was a melodic humming in his ears. Fingers uncurled from around the delicate curves of the glass and dropped away as the figure bearing them turned into the half-light.
“Mirror, mirror, fine and fair,” the figure intoned to the rhythm of the invisible music.
“Tell me who is standing there.”
Dorian froze.
A dark head of riotous curls; that wickedly smiling mouth; the flicker of the puckish eyes that he had seen so many times within his mirror. Appreciation coloured their gaze as the gas-lamps flickered to life and Dorian’s eyes flicked to the mirror, the silver pool still and blank and the youth inside it before him, leaning against his ornamented dresser, cravat untidy, bordering on entirely undone, fingers tapping across the tops of the vanguard of his perfumes.
“What would they say if they knew Dorian Gray was afraid of magic mirrors?”
Dorian watched the youth silently; wary that he might vanish at any time, sure that this could be all a fever dream, if it wasn’t for the stain of dark maroon on the front of his gown.
The youth’s eyes set him free from their captivity and moved about the room, alighting on instruments and rich drapes, scanning across the space between them, and suddenly he was near enough to touch. His face had the delightful curves and lines of both youth and beauty, full of shadows and skated by light.
Dorian might once have been jealous. Or inclined to ruinous yearning.
I am condemned. My heart is good, but still I am monster…
Fingers brushed the still wet stain marring the fine silk, a smile lingering in the corner of the youth’s lips. He was warm in a way Dorian was not.
“Your youth had its price.”
Bloody fingers brushed the line of Dorian’s cheekbone; his life force no warmer than his skin. The youth’s wrist was unmarred by too rough touches, his face unbruised, nose unbroken. Yet if Dorian looked closely, he could still see the indentation of teeth in the flesh of the youth’s smile.
“Your beauty demands its own.”
The watery surface of the speculum shimmered beyond the youth’s shoulder. Dorian had never considered that mirrors, even magic ones, could lie. His gaze shifted back to the terrible youth who had deceived him and revealed to him his soul in a way the beloved portrait had not.
The puckish eyes winked in unison with the firelight glittering across the silver snare.
“One deal, Dorian,” the youth’s eyes glanced meaningfully up to the high ceiling, as though seeing through to the top floor, to the restored portrait and dying body, “For another.”
Among mankind, there are those who deserve that name more than you, dear Beast. Those who, under human form, hide a treacherous, corrupt, and ungrateful heart.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a public domain work by Oscar Wilde. This story was inspired as an alternate fantastical mix with the french classic Beauty and the Beast.