Happy Thought

Prologue

1757

Once upon a time, the Guardian of Beauty blessed a girl with all the physical loveliness she could bestow. The girl's chestnut hair flowed down a petite straight back. Her dark eyes sparkled like smoky topazes set in flawless skin—balanced with just the right amount of olive, pink, and yellow tones. Beauty's creation moved gracefully in a figure both lithe and curvaceous. She spoke with a soft voice and a quick, bright laugh. Gold and silver rings envied her long fingers and flowers her upturned nose. Beauty's creation gave Beauty's heart a physical manifestation. But, creating alone in a hidden away place, Beauty forgot to seek the help of other Guardians. Her creation lived and moved, but lacked character, kindness, or morality. Beauty's delight became her disappointment. Not once did her creation, endowed with so much of her own being, show grace, charity, pity, humility, or sympathy towards her fellow man. Without a beautiful heart to match her beautiful figure, Beauty's creation was a waste.

Beauty cursed the girl and removed her physical attractiveness. She twisted her right shoulder up and out into a hump, and her fingers into hooked claws with little mobility. She deformed her left foot into a dragging club, while her beautiful lips mashed into a soft sneer that marred any smile or frown.

Beauty Quasimodo-ed her creation as passionately as she had Helen-of-Troy-ed her.

With her outward attractiveness stripped from her, the girl's friends faded. What she failed to provide to those around her, she now required of everyone: grace, pity, and love. Abandoned and alone, the girl haunted the dark, dank sewers under the city which once worshiped her.

The King Beyond the Door looked on the cursed creature with compassion and granted her a Guardianship. He graced the deformed monster with the powers of Happy Thoughts.

"She is still cursed," Beauty told the King, watching his pity in action.

"The curse can be broken," he said.

"Only if a man can love her."

"A man will if she grows a straight soul inside her twisted body."

2014

It watched Avery.

It watched Avery cannibalize the old man's brain and it smiled.

The game intrigued it, with so many players, who would not find it fascinating? They didn't yet see how all the pieces connected: a beautiful situation. If it plucked all the little threads of the different lives just right, they would never see the connections until they all got to the asylum it created. Many human lives had rushed by since it turned the home for human insanity into a house of horror. It found it offensive that all its work in the previous century was now regulated to urban myths and teen scary movies. Offended. Hurt. How many times had it carefully chosen just the right horror, just the right piece of the human nightmare, to build the insane-asylum-fear into a subconscious, cultural phenomenon? And now? A waste. The humans sat comfortably in the chair of science now. They thought they understood everything. They no longer feared asylums. They no longer feared insanity. In fact, some of them freely checked into asylums when life just got too hard.

It planned to change all of that.

It found it so easy to work when no one, but a handful of humans, believed it even existed. How silly humans were, how short-sighted, and dependent on that sight they were. As long as the damned Guardians and hunters stayed two steps behind, it would once again spread the fear of asylums throughout the country. It smiled. Toying with them, driving, haunting, destroying the Guardians and hunters proved even more fun than filling the humans with fear. Everyone knew the King—it spat at the name—did not protect his servants, and it planned to exploit that fact.

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The small, spotted deer lay curled up in the grass, so fragile, so innocent. Miles glanced around for its doe, but no parent charged to defend its offspring. He breathed in the warm air and relaxed in the hum of the bugs and the wind in the grass. Far away a mockingbird filled the air with a complicated song.

Sudden silence.

Red seeped from the mouth of the small fawn. Miles bent closer knowing, with that certain dream sort of knowing, that danger stalked the fawn. Was it dead? Miles touched it with his finger.

A cage flew up around him. Thick padded walls, a cold hard bed, no windows, no grass, bugs, or birds. A woman slept in the bed, clothed in the skin of the fawn, spotted and soft.

She woke, dark eyes wide. "Miles?"