francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-29 20:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | alice, cheshire cat, door: tales |
Who: Alice & the Cat
What: A greeting
Where: Wonderland
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Light violence, death, creepin'
Night had chosen to come to Wonderland, and it came spilling in, ink mixing with water. Tendrils of oily black pushed the blue out of the sky until none remained. The Cat was pleased. Where daytime in Wonderland was a lustrous lantern of burning colors, and a sheet of sky stretched taut overheard in sailor’s blue, nighttime was velvet hangings pulled closed by the silkworm silver wedge of a moon, a saturation of everything into one dark point. Its weight was heavy, but familiar. It was good. Blue-green eyes, pupils pinned, hooked open in the crosshatched shadow of a tall, curling tree. The Cat peered through the dimness with a smile. He didn’t have to glance to his side to know Alice was with him. She came with a certain inherent, physical warmth that was uncommon in Wonderland, the kind that emanated out from her small body as if from the rays of a thumb-sized sun. The Cat himself was the white satellite. He was cool as the air that settled low to the ground. Slowly, he eeked out from under the tree and into the small pool of light that ran before a curious treeline. A pair of hills rose to their left and ahead a path in a chalky purple twisted into the even darker black of the forest that loomed before them. Now the Cat turned to his companion. She was the Alice from before, in her tall boots. As pretty as sugar in a cup of tea. He smiled at her. “Curious.” In his low voice, it was both a question and a statement, and he stepped closer to her. Alice hadn’t known what to expect when the door turned again. The first time surely must have been an accident, a fevered dream of her fragile mind. Wonderland, in all its glory, couldn’t be waiting again. And this time it wasn’t, not like before with it’s rays of sunshine and blue skies. Wonderland at night was just as breathtaking as it was in the day, simply not as bright. “Quite,” Alice said, green eyes squinting as she turned her face first up to the moon, and then up at her crescent grin of her companion and then back down to the road winding before them. She paid his closeness no real mind. Finding him near was enough to ease any lingering worry from crossing the doorway, replacing it with a faint warmth at seeing his familiar face. “Where do you suppose it leads?” she asked before peering back down to the purple road, no eyes for the forest or what might be there. Not that a purely verbal answer would suffice, her feet proving they had a mind of their own and sending her down the path. Over her shoulder she turned to look at Cat, brow raised as she walked but still waited, and not quite so patiently, for him to accompany her. One hand smoothed the puff of pitch black ascot wound around the Cat’s neck. The slip of silk was trapped under the stiff, winged collar of the tailored dress shirt. His waistcoat was shawl collared, single breasted, satin in an emerald floral brocade. Again, he found himself in a frock coat, cinched at the waist, hitting him mid-thigh. This one was cutaway and lined with strange red buttons, made of glass, bright against the plum of the coat’s broadcloth. The trousers were long-legged, blushing in the same shade of aubergine as the coat. It was a slightly less formal look than before and it suited the comely Cat, as most things did. He lightly pushed the cylinder of a hat back on his head, following Alice’s pale silhouette with his eyes as it skated away from him and toward the forest in a ripple of liquid mercury. “Somewhere, to be sure,” he replied as lazily and lightly as a lightning bug flew, lowered lashes brushing the air slowly. The girl paused for him to follow—though she still moved forward, it was undeniable that there was a pause, an expectant breath—and the Cat’s smile waxed wider. Suddenly, his eyes were less of Wonderland by day and more of Wonderland by night. Of course, he took up his position at her side. They passed through and into the near-complete black of the woods, leaving the patch of weak light behind wondering what it had done to run them off. The little path ran head, offering nothing but the thinnest streak of illumination—enough to only know from the shifting darkness that their feet were hitting the ground. The Cat’s grin seemed to have its own source of radiance as white teeth flashed, then, without warning, vanished, abandoning the girl in the forest. Unseen, the Cat circled behind Alice and stalked her, the marks of his shoes in the dusty purple blotting out those left by hers. He too was curious as to where the road might lead them, but the journey was as fluid a thing as the destination, and ought be just as entertaining. The clothes were a nice touch, still surprising and disarming, and she was still getting used to a Cat, taller than she used to see him in this place with a grin wider than she had seen when she imagined him at Rutledge. As they walked she stayed close, the hem of her skirts brushing against his coat, the weight of her weapon bumping her pocket against his thigh. She had been taking comfort in the bright of his smile, a lone source of light in the darkness that surrounded her. And then just like that, it blinked out, no smile, no man, no Cat. “Leaving me to have this adventure alone?” She tut-tutted that ended with a huff that disparaged mangy felines but speaking to no one in particular, since no one particular was there. To look behind her at their changing footprints would never occur to her, too focused on the path before, not behind. The forest was terribly dark without her light, but she stepped boldly on the barest hint of violet road ahead of her until finally darkness obscured the last bits of the purple path. Nothing but inky black before her, Alice turned to her right and found the forest still there, black upon midnight blue, and that was just a bit better than absolute black before her. When faced with no path in Wonderland, Alice knew there was one way to forge her own. Blade in hand, the silver singing in the dark, she left the last patch of path and trekked into the dark forest. To say it was a hobby of the Cat’s to prowl unseen, to become privy to the actions and uttered thoughts of others when they fancied themselves alone would be... shall we say, understating. The Cat did not do anything so simple as have a hobby—he found the entire concept rather trifling—nor did he pass time. There was always some intent, however buried, in every twitch of his paw and every wink of his eye. Even the quietest moments provided a feast of knowledge, should one care to pay attention and know how much to pay the chef. Riddles and smiles and taunts were their own game, and the watching was another altogether—both designed to amuse and to reveal in equal measure. He’d played with Alice countless times, both in Wonderland and in her room in the asylum, teasing her delicate thoughts into a snarling knot, and leaving her to try to find and separate the ends, to try and make sense of the dazzling realness of someone she was told again and again was a figment, some ghost birthed by her disturbed mind. It was a fascinating thing to witness—this messy stitching together of two realities. And he liked to watch the girl struggle with the task. It wasn’t entirely her fault. Alice’s world, as a whole, was taken with the idea of a singular existence—that is, when one existed in one place, one could not be in another. It was all very black and white, very much a sense of being trapped under a bell jar, which, to be perfectly honest, the Cat found unbearably suffocating. He knew their attempts at philosophy, their shoddy mental structures built to contain everything neatly, were nothing but the constructs of men too small-minded to grasp the breadth of existences, and that it was Alice’s knowledge of a place beyond that caused her so much grief among the dull gray people of England. So too was it her knowledge of England and its washed out inhabitants that caused her such trouble in Wonderland. That was what made her unique. She was a single puzzle piece, caught in between. The Cat liked her there. Should she pick one side or another, she would become a closed door. That simply would not do. Slinking around the smooth trunk of a tree, the Cat followed the girl and her skirts. The tongue of purple path disappeared from under their feet. The night gathered around them in gauzy layers, trying to trip the two travelers in the forest. The man in the top hat made a small sound—a sigh or a laugh—under his breath as Alice fetched her blade from the square pocket of her apron. He resisted the urge to smile and instead, quickened his step to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with the curious girl. In a flowing movement, like a breath to blow out a candle’s flame, he swept the knuckles of one very human hand against the softness of Alice’s cheek. Her skin felt so very hot, though she was likely not fevered. The Cat was simply that cold. The forest had only thin slivers of moonlight breaking through the canopy of leaves every once in awhile. Nothing that would have eased the tension creeping up her spine or made her steps more sure as she crept through the inky black. She heard nothing but her own footfall, knew no one else in the air around her, and kept her eyes and ears open, what little good they were in the dark, for any sign of what was to come. The touch at her cheek stole her breath, a chill racing across skin, stopping her feet cold. But her hands weren’t so idle, the blade she held whipping instinctively to meet whatever was there. Whoever, it turned out, the edge finding a solid shape, a centimeter of fabric giving way to her before she pulled to a stop, holding it to their side with the threat of going further hanging in the small space between them. “Show yourself.” The girl might have once asked questions, peering curiously, a touch fearful, into the dark and wondering who was there. But the girl was grown, still curious but a touch fearless now, and answers came faster when coupled with a weapon. The Cat did not fear the little knife, however wicked its bite, just as he did not fear the girl, however wicked her bite. He knew Alice, whether or not she knew herself. So when the blade came out in a flash, and when it came close, its needle point slicing through wool and silk, silver and easy, a fish darting in the waves of a morning lake, the Cat didn't so much as blink. The girl’s hand stayed then and the knife cut no deeper. Her fear pricked at the green of her eyes, shot wide in the dark, and the Cat could feel unease coming off of her, in the same way she could feel a chill spilling over the bare skin of her arms. There was no terror here, nor panic, just tension, brittle, crackling in the air. A crescent smile lit up in the air beside Alice, several inches above her head, but close. It was a brilliant display of sharp, white teeth suspended in apparent nothingness—for all of five seconds. Then it was wiped clear from the darkness, leaving only a ghost of a grin behind, and the form the knife had scratched at was gone. The Cat skirted behind the girl and bent forward over her, enough to brush the pink petal of her ear with his lips. "Why, Alice, I'm right here." He smiled again. The voice, the smile, were enough to assuage her, the knife retreating back into her pocket now that there was no form to press against. To the smile she frowned, neck crane to so it could see her ire properly, face tilted up toward it before it blinked away into nothingness. But the touch at her ear made her lean into that familiar grin against her, as she had always done. Absolution granted, for now. “You say it as if you have been all along.” Not a moment later she realized the probable truth of it and returned a huff in his direction. So much for forgiveness. “Are you going to keep letting me wander aimlessly or will you be proving yourself helpful this time?” The toe of her shoe tapped upon the forest ground patiently as she regarded the black space where his voice had come from with a glare. “A light, Cat, would be most appreciated.” It all came down to light, or more specifically, to luminiferous ether, the medium through which light traveled as a wave through water. It came down to the lens through which the world was viewed and an aberration of light. Imagine the wheeling of stars through the indigo velvet of the night sky over time. The question to be asked being, of course, of origin of motion—were the blinking diamonds truly spinning around in the galactic ether, or could it be the observer wasn’t as stationary as their eyes told them they were? Which was truth and which fallacy? The Cat had an answer for that. For, at the instant of any observation of an object, the position of the object is displaced from its true position, the degree to which depends wholly on the angle and speed at which the light transmitted, traveling miles and miles, appears to the observer as an image. That is to say, one might seem to be in one place, but truly be in another, which, in terms of understanding reality, meant both were true—the sky did gyrate on a point, a top of unfathomable size, just as the body with feet on the earth did the same. That was how to become the unseen, pry those ideas apart and step between. Yes, the Cat appeared to be gone, but he was still there—just, perhaps, in a place one hadn’t thought to look. Or, possibly, there was no explanation for it and the man was but an entropic eddy of chaos left behind in whatever wonderful catastrophe created Wonderland. A grin in the wind. It hardly mattered. Alice’s weight shifted backward, a pressure against an expanse of space occupied by a sole smile that flickered out, tooth by tooth. The Cat was amused by the slow flowering of realization that opened on the girl’s face, by the sudden tick of black boot on blacker ground, and, especially, by the iron that ran behind her words as she angled to level what was actually his chin with a glare. He laughed, a smooth, dark sound, an obsidian shine on the edge of the little girl’s knife. “Then you ought fetch some,” came the cryptic Cat’s reply as he idly trailed a sharp, cold hand down Alice’s side, wondering at the tapering of her waist and the slight curve of her hip under the belled strata of petticoat and skirts. His other hand came up then and hard fingers gripped the girl’s chin as she tipped her head back to look up at him, and he held her there, unyielding. She was fire under his paws. He didn’t smile. The Cat twined forward like wire, curling against Alice’s flame. And softly, so softly, the initial pawing of a mouse, he kissed her. She stilled in his invisible embrace, wanting to lean back but unable to feel much more than the hand at her hip and fingers lifting her chin higher and higher. But there was no gaze to meet, no smile to focus on, and yet there was still the faint pressure of lips against her own. It was a familiar sensation, even without seeing him, and her eyes fluttered closed out of habit, kissing him as she had done times before, a bold press of lips, a shy flick of tongue. A bevy of contradictions, that was Alice as well as her kisses. But stolen kisses in the dark were things for other times, other places. They were borne out of strange dreams in the quiet emptiness of her Rutledge room. They only happened in her most wistful of her maturing imaginings, she reminded herself. Now that she had returned to Wonderland she wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. When she pulled away and down from the tiptoes that helped close their distance, she opened her eyes to gaze at the empty spaces where his face should be, into the dark shadows she knew him to be cloaked in. “Your grin, Cat,” she asked, fondness tempering her impatience and wanderlust but only barely. The razor sharp glint was back in her green eyes and echoed in her smile. “I need it.” When the cobbled bottoms of Alice’s patent leather boots hit the soft dirt, the Cat opened his eyes, lids heavy and unseen eyelashes lowered. His pupils were no more than afterthought, a fullstop drawn with the steel point of a fine-nibbed pen. His gaze scraped over the girl ruthlessly, taking in each and every detail and then some, as he still held her. She stared through him, two green eyes bright with the ground glass of curiosity. He felt the small heat of his own breath mingling with hers as two whispers in the quiet of the wood. In Wonderland, the Cat’s senses were sharp. It was a jarring experience, all claws. His days in the world of slate and cinder were most often spent in low-ceilinged basements, atop satin cushions the colors of bruises, in an endless whorling haze of white smoke that stretched the fabric of that sad place into something with a little more ...possibility. Here everything stood out, brutal in every way, and, frankly, the Cat had missed that. He had missed the disjointed, corkscrewing movement of time. The lurch. So too had he missed the cool green river of desire that had run through him before they had crossed over. His tail thrashed. He wanted the mouse, and she wriggled out from under his paws with a squeak. The Cat let the girl go. It wasn’t a rough gesture, but it was dismissive, an inaudible feline growl. He lifted the hand that had held the Alice’s burning face seconds before and scraped the nail of his thumb along his still-warm bottom lip in a lazy gesture. Her heat left him quickly, a solar flare glancing off the pale surface of a half-moon, and the Cat slipped his hands into the silk of his trouser pockets. He understood. She needed to see. The forest sighed, breath cutting through the trees that grew out of the ground like tall, black teeth. The Cat snaked forward and around the girl, so as to stand in front of her, though she was still twisted toward a recently emptied emptiness. “You do,” he agreed, a string of teeth appearing in the air to speak. They shimmered in a tinkling of glass. The smile retreated further down the path and vanished. It beckoned her to follow. “How shall you get it, hm?” His voice, no longer behind her, made her whip her attention toward him, tension springing up under her skin so differently than their moment before. His smile blinked into view, illuminating a small patch of forest ground, a few feet ahead of her, seemingly impenetrable blackness between them. It was scarcely a thought crossing her mind before she took one step back on, on ground she knew was solid beneath her, and then leapt forward, blue and white skirts opening up beneath her like a canopy to help soften her arrival on the light area the Cheshire smile had graced. Alice landed on light feet before falling to one knee to brace herself, letting her knuckles brush on the dirt. She looked up only in time to see the bright grin float away and then fade into nothing. “That remains to be seen,” she mused aloud, eyes squinting to see if he’d continue further down, no feline advantage there in the dark. But waiting to see was never her strong suit and chasing was far more invigorating. Her teeth didn’t glint nearly as bright as she smiled, but it was just as wide as his, and she pushed herself up and forward to run after her disappearing and reappearing Cat. “What shall it do when I catch it?” The play on words—intentional or not—was not lost on the Cat, and he smiled at its glimmer, as well as at the parachute of skirts that flurried open mid-air, frothing high and white as the girl cut through the air—a lovelier version of her knife’s blade. Alice landed an arm’s length away with her fingers in the forest’s dirt like roots. The Cat’s grin was a fluttering thing that went black the instant it lit up, leaving only a sinking imprint in the air that slowly dissipated into the night’s mist. He made a low sound of consideration, a sort of ‘hmm.’ He continued to duck through the trees, rather enjoying Alice’s beaming energy and her own smile that, contrary to what she thought or saw, was actually rather brilliant. It reminded him of a fragment of a chipped porcelain teacup on a lady's dark, gathered skirts. “If you catch it,” the Cat gently corrected with a purr. He had far more ways of escaping than she did of capturing something she couldn’t see. But he did so like playing these games. “I suppose, if you catch it, the choice is yours.” He paused mid-step and shifted to face Alice again. He was directly in her path. The languid Cat looked down at the girl, his eyes half-closed again. He considered the vacillating nature of curiosity and the desire to know. It was a rabbit hole, an avaricious mouth. It had an opening, but it had no close. It existed as one nefarious stretch of darkness that some thought they could see an end to and that they then sought after, infinite though it most assuredly was. Ultimately, the girl wished to discover what laid within and beyond the forest, but to do that she needed see, and to see she needed the Cat’s smile. Her curiosity led her deeper into the sweet blackness, further from the light, and the Cat watched with delight as she tried to figure out her next move. “When,” the girl countered, her tinkling laugh lingering as traces of his smile faded from her view. She bounded after him as best she could, skirts swishing with every long step and half jump, using the scant light as she chased the sound of his voice through the trees. There was no fear, not even with the threat of losing sight. There was only adrenaline, exhilaration, blood and energy coursing through her, the unexpected lurking around the corner and oh, the thrill of it. She enjoyed these games too. In the darkening wood, the last of the light blinking out she found herself bumping into something that she knew wasn’t there, at least not to her naked eye. The light hadn’t showed anything in her path and with the shadows closing around her there was simply no way to look. So up came her hands, palms pressing flat against it until she could recognize the fabric of clothes she had just seen on the man. “When,” the girl smiled, voice triumphant in the dark, chin lifted to where she imagined his eyes would be. One hand’s fingers walked up, up, up, nails skipping and pricking, little claws of her own, up the Cat’s chest without trouble despite seeing so little. “You’ve been caught, Cat.” “So you say.” The Cat grinned as bright as a ring of calcium light on a stage. Alice had her miniature claws wreathing his heart, so to speak, snagged in the fabric over the useless, pumping thing, but she had not won and she had not certainly not caught. The girl’s laugh was sparkling and the fresh, newborn light from the Cat’s smile washed out the details of her face, reducing her to a pair of wide, green eyes and a spate of gold hair in a glow of white as she smiled up at him. There was a moment where the pair of them stood like that—the girl against what appeared to be a column of air, the Cat unmoving. Then the sturdiness—the implication of a man, a man’s weight, his bone and tissue, bloody heart, all there, but imperceptible to the eye—was gone out from under Alice. The grin hovered there. The Cat crossed his arms. The suspended mouth opened. “If,” it repeated, amused. How did she suppose she would catch the intangible? The Cat wanted to find out. The winning of these little matches was never quite so easy; Alice knew this well. But even so she had stumbled slightly as the Cat’s form disappeared from under her fingers, leaving her to right herself lest she topple over into the space he once occupied. Above her the grin floated and she raised a hand to grasp at it, watching as her fingers passed through the air, not a ripple in the light of the smile. Another touch attempted, this time with a jump, and the smile remained, even higher this time, much to her chagrin. She stilled a moment, thoughtful turn of her lips, hands on hips, before turning to look at the forest around her. The light, intangible as it was, still shone enough to see the trees near her, and the branches that loomed toward the grinning source. Long enough, she mused, to get a good jump on that slippery grin. It didn’t take much more thinking than that – Wonderland being a place that didn’t foster patience and only favored the boldness, however foolish – before she was striding to it. The placement of large mushrooms at its base, slightly springy from first touch, helped her along and with fingers and feet, no care for the state of her attire, she slowly, awkwardly, but with no small amount of determination, began to scale its trunk. Touch anything long enough and one leaves their mark upon it—imagine shoes black on grass, imagine the opulent leg of a piano, gilded and baroque, on the fine, scarlet fibers of a Turkish carpet—move either after a length of time, and one will find the grass flat and the carpet worn. So too did people leave traces of their being there on each other, fingerprints pressed to skin, mind, and, if one was naive enough to allow it, heart. Even incorporeal, the Cat could be touched, though his body offered no resistance, and Alice's fingers, for all their appearance of sliding through nothingness, raked through his smile, nails to teeth, and down. Had he not been wholly accustomed to the searing burn her fingertips intaglioed upon his smile and his skin, he may well have winced. As it was, the Cat laughed. He tipped his head back to watch the girl then, his fingers catching the silk brim of his hat and his eyes alive with curiosity, as she pressed her heels to the spongy head of a freckled mushroom that stood perhaps a head taller than the Cat himself. She moved from there onto the low leaning tree that spanned above the forest floor with prickly purple-black branches and shaggy bark. Her dress hitched and snagged, and her hair was pulled by the tree like the sleek threads of a spider web. The Cat continued to smile. “Now what do you imagine that will accomplish?” With his feet still firmly on the ground, the brilliance of his smile was aimed up toward the canopy of the trees, and cast shadows better suited to phantasmagoria shivering on plaster than to the forest at night. The Cat blinked back into sight, colors swirling together to form a tall, thin man, and he squinted up into the branches. Alice’s dress was the cat’s tongue stroke of a filbert brush. She gained height slowly. He cocked his head to the side. "The advantage," the girl replied tartly, strong and soft fingers digging into the bark of tree as her boots found scant purchase. Her endeavor was a sound one, or at least seemed so when she had been on the ground. "Height," came a huff as she lifted herself, finally grasping the branch in question. Her foot nearly slipped but she righted herself, letting the sharp bark catch the hem of her skirts, uncaring for the way it ripped it the way her knees skinned as they brushed the trunk. The end was in sight and one push had her across the finish line of a branch, sliding along her stomach before turning to sit upon it properly. "Perspective," she sighed with just a hint of triumph, clapping her hands together to free them of dirt before she crawled herself up onto her feet. Dimly, she thought of her mother and sister and the sighing they would have done at her. It was behavior befitting a child, they would have said. There was little ladylike of the picture she made but then Alice never quite felt ladylike. "Height is everything when dealing with the tall-tailed." Her voice rang from the shadow veil the tree offered her and she strode out confidently toward his lost corner of their universe, a wave that faltered only as she caught sight of the rest of the world. Above on her perch she could see above and through the forest, the moonlight shining down on the black and white squares of countryside in the distance. A thousand memories seemed to come back to her, stilling her feet, far away looks in her eyes. The knife in her apron pocket weighed heavily as she recalled its part in that play and she wrung her hands absently as her palms itched to grab the handle of the blade once more, for old time’s sake. The thick arms of the tree supported Alice’s negligible weight with ease. They didn’t even creak. The Cat continued to crane his neck upward, waiting for the girl’s reappearance from the grasp of the twigs and jewel-bright leaves. Her voice slowly fell to him, soft as snow on snow, each word a cold puff of wind. Advantage. Height. Perspective. He smiled, spotting a ghost of fabric torn, waving like a mouse’s miniature flag, on the snarling bark of the tree. He thought of his brother. Then forgot him. Alice approached the thinner tip of the branch fearlessly, a vaudevillian diver above a glass of water. Her skirts were in tatters. These words dropped down from above like hail, splashing through overhanging leaves and landing on the Cat’s head with weight. He turned to gaze momentarily at the roots of the tree. He considered how they gripped the earth. He considered the construction of reality, of the necessity of stripping the world of its familiar, more obvious qualities to create curiosity and astonishment, of Alice’s London. The girl on the branch froze. “Is it?” The man on the path was again gone. And the Cat was busy himself, claws in the red bark, hauling him upward. If reality is constructed, then it is changeable. With a sudden displacement of weight and light, he materialized on the branch behind Alice’s heels. He rubbed his head against the leather of her boots. Pouring around her carefully placed feet, a rich orange fold of samite slipping cautiously, the Cat stalked to the end of the branch to follow Alice’s gaze to the spread of land, smeared past the blackness of the night that draped the forest, in an array of colors almost too numerable to name. “What do you see, Alice?” “Memories,” she breathed with a sigh, stooping oh so slightly to brush the back of her fingers across the top of his head, the change from grin to man to cat so quick and familiar she hardly batted an eyelash. “I see the chessboard countryside.” It was something from a daydream, that place, yes. Nothing more than something she imagined up, just like the the garden. Just like this forest. And yet. The blade in her pocket’s weight pulled her down like stones anchoring in water and her legs folded underneath her. Once seated, no need to pounce her companion now that he was there, she lifted her chin to peer over the treeline. “Do you remember when we were there? When we captured the queen? So much red that day.” Her eyes fluttered closed a moment, her mind flittering with memories of the time spent in that land, black and white squares splattered with red. A shiver raced down her spine even as a smile quirked at the corners of her mouth. “Why do I dream such terrible things,” she mused, flat and soft, not sounding as if she truly believed they were terrible, dreams or not. Memories. The Cat grinned, arching into the stroke. His blue-green eyes were settled too on the black and white check of the hills beyond, a replication of Wonderland made miniature—the night in the forest, hemmed in by the light of the sky under which the Queen had lived, black on white on black on white, over and over. The Cat purred as Alice sat, only then turning his slit pupils to her face. The girl’s expression was serene, but for the upward tug of one corner of her ruby lips. Her eyelids bat together, eyelashes sweeping closed, shutting the leaf-green of her eyes behind veils of white. Her question he found curious, but endearing. The Cat’s tail agitated playfully and he licked his front paw with an air of thoughtfulness and a bristled pink tongue. The Cat too saw memories. He saw them everywhere, the ephemeral outlines of the past offering an architecture for the present and future. It was good that Alice could see them too. His mind turned to the Queen, to her roses painted red, and the purring intensified. “Who is to say what is terrible and what is not?” He asked the girl. He was a slim orange tabby with a thief’s sly grin. The Cat could change and shift and become, but the eyes he saw through were always his own, two small seas caught in an eternal tempest. They moved back to the chessboard. “Shall we visit?” “Surely someone would have to,” she murmured thoughtfully, green eyes opening to frown at the small glimpses of the chess lands through the trees. “There must be someone, some way, drawing lines on what is done and what is not. Else we would all run wild, doing what we would, and what would become of the world?” The idea of such carefree ferocity existing in each creature in Wonderland sent a shiver through her, though not of fear. There was a certain something about being different. There was a power that she enjoyed in the ending games she and the Cat played with Wonderland queens. She could try and deny it all she wanted in the day, repeat the same affirmations in the Rutledge asylums that she hadn’t and wouldn’t be capable of such things. But in the dark and quiet with the Cat by her side, she knew she liked the rush that came with blade and blood. How it set her apart, them apart. Two of a kind in two worlds. The curve of her lips deepened as a thought – terrible, terrible – crossed her mind. “Is there anyone left to visit there?” The gleam of her grin in the moonlight was as sharp as his ever was. Alice was wrong. It simply wasn't that simple. There was no realism—no reality existed outside of its observers. Perhaps there were fundamental building blocks, some basic rules of order the universe(s) obeyed, perhaps not, but pesky little things like morality were so far from 'objective' as to be laughable. And subjectivity was not to be enforced. There was no absolute right and there certainly was no absolute wrong, and the idea that there ought be someone denoting such to keep order in a place built for chaos irked the Cat; it felt to him like the hand that strokes the fur backwards, and it culled much the same reaction, head laid low with ears flat. Displeasure. Wonderland had its fair share of those self-proclaimed arbiters of ‘morality,’ those who wished for ethics to fit into ordinary rules of logic and for the world to operate on conformity. Lines were drawn, as they were in the gray of England. What else should hold up the straight-lined trunks of the trees or color the depth of the shadows? They were placed by the queens and the kings, each one a trap, bear-jawed and expectant. The lines drawn were tripwires—the ruthless blade of the executioner’s axe and the sharp red curve of the Queen of Heart’s smile. There were meant to keep everything and everyone in their “proper place.” The issue, of course, being that there were no such proper places, as propriety was as relative as anything. Attempts to say otherwise—rules, laws, right and wrong—these were not for the Cat. He thrived on discord. He said nothing on the topic, choosing instead to smile at the madness he saw nesting in Alice’s eyes, edging her own smile. “Let us go and see. If so, we can say hello,” the Cat said, slinking to the edge of the branch. He peered down at the ground. His weight left the outstretched arm and seconds later, he was once again a man with his feet on the ground. The tall hat was held in the crook of his arm as he turned his eyes up to Alice. “Come, Alice.” She regarded him from her branch, a flicker of annoyed jealousy at the ease in which he shifted his shapes. With her legs swinging off to one side she peered down as he looked up, pondering only a moment the best way down. The answer, of course, of course, was the most straightforward path and one push had her off her perching and off the branch. The air immediately filled her petticoats, slowing her descent even if the rips on her skirt let her fall a touch faster than before. Both boots planted on the ground she spared her tall companion a quick nod. “Let’s.” With his smile back at her side they escaped the dark forest, making their way towards the land they spied over the treeline. It wasn’t long before her boots found the black and white boards that she once traversed so long ago. Little had changed, though she growing less and less surprised by this fact, and she had drifted from her spot at Cat’s side to bound about the black and white squares, skipping, tattered skirts twirling under the silver moonlight until her steps stopped cold, spying a white bishop in the distance, standing upright though nearly falling asleep on a black square that bracketed the edge of another forest. Had they always been so tall or had they changed as she had? She couldn’t recall and as she moved to him she realized it mattered so little in the end. “Do you think…” she started, blonde head tilted toward the Cat with her green eyes focused on the bishop who hadn’t quite noticed he was in her sights. She took a careful step toward him, and then another, fingers dancing across the top of her apron pocket for what lay there. “Do you think he’d remember…” Her words carried off in the wind towards her target and the bishop looked up at attention, glazed eyes squinting to focus on her approach, and going wide with recognition a moment later. The chessboard laid flat, as it was wont to do, especially at night. The Cat’s narrow-toed shoes shined fiercely in the dull light of the free moon as it swung now out of the grasp of lazarus trees, and they ticked as ink dripped from a pen on the hard white ground. The slumbering bishop sagged where he stood, drooping hat carved in the Staunton style. The Cat’s grin rounded into something sanguinary and raw, and, though he had none to be seen, it was as if his claws came out, menacing and bloodthirsty. There was no need to offer Alice’s queries any answers, cryptic or candid. The bishop remembered. The piece was clearly struck by a thunderbolt of memory, his eyes grew into two china coins and his mouth gaped, revealing ivory teeth, each one intricately detailed and so carefully crafted. The Cat’s hand was in his own pocket and his fingers found the saifani heart—that cool, clear yellow—handle of his knife. His own blade was curved in the manner of a kukri, a guillotine’s edge, and it came out of the dark silk pocket gleaming like mad (sheaths had no place in Wonderland). If blood still mottled his cuffs or painted his skin, the Cat didn’t notice, his focus was pointed and heavy on the quivering bishop. Feline eyes dipped to the side, meeting Alice’s, and the Cat nodded toward their new friend. The bishop was about to run, his legs bent and his hands fumbling with the weighted cloth of his dress. “Go and say hello.” The Cat palmed his weapon idly, with a dangerous familiarity, and smiled encouragingly at the girl. The chase was his favorite part. It was her favorite part too. There was no running at Rutledge. Its walls were tall and imposing, caretakers much the same, and they all blocked all ways out, keeping her trapped in their tiny little rooms. She had longed for more room to run, to skip, to be anything other than confined but as the years ticked by those longings withered as she was reminded to put away such childish notions. But the memories remained, of chasing butterflies outside, or after kittens running amok, or in imagined places with rabbits to run after. There was so much fun to be had in chasing and watching the piece scurry away from her brought all those old feelings crashing into her. She watched with no small amount of glee as the bishop took off across the squares, felt the rush of blood through her and heard her heartbeat thunder in her ears. When the Cat smiled at her she beamed back at him, the curve deeper and the glint brighter than the blade he wielded. And then she was off, bounding after closing the distance between them with steps. She was swift across the chessboard, that much hadn’t changed at all, but her hesitation had cost her and the bishop remained out of her grasp. “He’s getting away,” she said, the wind taking her words to the Cat she knew wasn’t far behind her. She didn’t need to look for him. He wouldn’t miss this chance to play with her, she was sure of it. Her prey nearly shrieked as he saw her gaining on him and she scowled fiercely at the sound. “He’ll alert the rest soon.” As predicted, the Cat was there as Alice greeted the bishop, though his pursuit was leisurely. He didn’t feel the need to rush. With his eyes wide and black, the Cat hunted, sharpened smile in hand, a curving blade seeking blood. It was easy to imagine him as a cat then, not a man, slinking low on its belly toward its skittering prey, tail flicking, though he hadn’t shifted his shape in the slightest. The feline grin waned merciless, the moon on a lone traveler on a winter’s night. No one would be getting away. The Cat wasn’t worried the bishop would attract attention. The air around, checked above the pattern on the ground, was still. No one was near. And if they were, then they were free to join in. In the time it took to blink, the Cat had moved, his stalking finished. He could smell the blood as it coursed through the alabaster veins of the chess piece and he wanted it. The copper tinge. Warm. Wet.—He was upon the bishop in a twinkle. The thing screamed, but the sound was savagely choked off as the Cat forced the blanched body to the shadow of his own, spine to his stomach, his arm clamped like a vice across the thing’s chest, his knife clutched in his hand. The bishop was afraid. He trembled. He reeked of fear. He recognized his pursuers. He knew what they had done. The Cat pressed his other hand over the wide, white mouth and leaned in to purr into the marble conch of the bishop’s ear. “She simply wished to say hello, dear. You needn’t yell so.” The words were coaxing and mellifluous, musical, dangerous, and sweet, a single claw, and the Cat smiled fondly at his struggling prey. His own heart was ticking, ticking, keeping time with a pendulum. The Cat was far from cold-blooded, but he was still a cat. And cats enjoyed hunting and playing, sometimes with unhappy results. Heavily pupiled eyes glittered and sought out Alice against the white and black. The Cat breathed heavily. “Alice, tell the gentleman hello.” Alice’s steps had slowed as she saw the Cat shoot out, twine himself around the bishop until they were one, a mass of twitching, wrenching, trembling limbs. Each word the Cat spoke, each drop of nervous sweat from the bishop’s brow, drew her closer and closer until she was peering up with rapt fascination, wide green eyes tracking every little movement. “Hello,” she breathed, wonder and horror warring to overtake her greeting. The fear was so palpable, Alice thought she would drown in it as she drew close. How funny, she thought, for hadn’t she just mused on these terrible things she saw and did here? And yet she couldn’t be so horrified as she watched the bishop desperately try to flee. Butterflies ended up pinned to boards. Dinah sometimes laid dead birds at her feet. This wasn’t so unnatural too. Their ragged breaths drew her attention and she reached out to ghost pale fingers over Cat’s arm until she could lay her palm over the bishop’s heart. Unsteady beats lurched beneath her hand and as she turned to look up at her companion, light glinting off his knife caught her attention. Her fingers curled, empty and annoyed, while the Cat had his hands and arms full. The Cat had all the fun. “He’s so afraid,” she murmured, a soft laugh falling from her lips as another fearful beat punctuated her words. She looked back at her partner, his smile mirrored on her mouth, a playful glint in her eyes, one delicate hand to relinquish his knife. “Am I so fearsome?” Fear was the result of a lack of control, though a lack of control was certainly not always accompanied by fear. The fright was secondary and connected quite intimately with the philosophy of causal determinism, as uncertainty arose when one was concerned things may not go as desired, which contributed to the feeling of loss or lack of control, which in turn, may have inspired fear. Fear then could be defined as uncertainty about the future (though it is not necessitated by this uncertainty). The bishop was uncertain about his future. He felt the situation he was currently in was out of his control. But he was wrong. The Cat did not hold with the notion of determinism—not predeterminism, not nomological determinism, not fatalism. There was no singular path, he knew. There was nothing linear about much of anything. This did not mean agents operated solely on free will, or that one thing couldn’t lead to another—they just didn’t have to (he believed, some days, in sensitive dependence, is perhaps a better way to put it). This meant that his definition of fear was a touch more anarchic. And should the bishop have followed the same line of thinking, then he would have known that things were not so hopeless nor as uncertain as they appeared. Perhaps the events would not transpire as he desired, but the possibility that they may existed. The Cat smiled down at Alice as she greeted the chess piece. He surrendered his blade to her without a thought. Her brook of a laugh, and the dovelike mingling of fascination and horror that crossed her girlish features both delighted him. Without warning and without answering the girl’s query, he released the bishop, offering him a small kick to the backside to inspire his running. The thing tumbled onto hands and knees, stunned, before picking itself up to dash away, as predictable as his moves on the board. The rounded white cap fluttered from his head. The Cat’s eyes trailed the man a moment, then he looked to Alice, the question in his eyes and on his teeth asking her if she was going to give chase or if he needed to do the catching again. She didn’t meet his eyes; there was simply no time for it. One moment she had been enjoying the weight of the Cat’s blade in her hand, so familiar to sight and unfamiliar to touch. The next had her spying her fleeing prey, her eyes tracking this cap fluttering to the ground. There wasn’t any time to look at the Cat, a quick glance at his gleaming smile at the corner of her eye. “No!” was her only warning, a shriek, a pout, an unhappy tantrum tone that was befitting a girl and a queen alike. And then she was off, her next move clear. Her prey was escaping. She needed to overtake. It was a simple move to get him off the board. His head-start was smaller than before and she gained on him quickly, the sound of her boots thundering in time with her quick breath, until they she couldn’t separate them from the piece before her. They were paired, she and him, moving together, moving against each other. Attack. Counter. Counterattack. He skittered. She followed. He feinted to one side. She didn’t falter. He screamed as she overtook him. She gasped as they tumbled. He coughed blood onto her dress. She stared at the knife she had slipped into his chest. Alice rocked back onto her knees, one hand still upon the knife’s handle, the other pushing off his chest, watching with morbid fascination as blood poured faster, across his mouth and across the squares. She pulled the blade back out with a slow but firm yank, blade singing its sweet song, and watched his body sag, and then squirm, then slow, and then stop. The Cat shifted from actor to spectator. Once the bishop left his arms, he let them fall, pulled to the side like velvet curtains before a stage or as cards before the Queen. His hands slipped into his pockets, and he stood, eyes hard on the silent ballet as it unfolded in black, blue, and white in front of him. He wondered at the blocking, the choreography of life and death, of Alice and bishop, and he pondered the permanence of things, and doubted it all fully. Alice was on the bishop’s heels and even from his orbital distance, the Cat could see the flare and seduction of pursuit that held her in thrall, so bright and big was it in her eyes, and he could see it as it spurred the chess piece across the board, his feet barely touching the ground. He watched passively, with only a plume of a white smile curling across his face like smile to prove he yet lived. His knife drew back, a greased piston in Alice’s dainty palm, and churned forward, plunging into the chambers of the bishop’s heart. There was no resistance. The Cat appeared next to the girl and her fallen prey in an instant of displaced light, his shoe toeing a dark line of blood as it poured, viscous and warm, from the valley-wide gash that split the piece down the middle. Red welled up in the bishop’s mouth, painted his lips like a whore’s, and bubbled over with the sounds of a man drowning. His body fought its apparent reality. The Cat lifted an eyebrow and relieved Alice of his blade, pulling each ribbon-white finger back from the yellow handle. He wiped the weapon off on his trousers. Blood smeared in a flower, life from death. He too stood to witness the choleric silence that overwhelmed the writhing bishop, stilling him and stealing away the starry glint from his eyes. Death was such a curious state. It was so peaceful, but so feared. The Cat grinned and put a hand on Alice’s shoulder, drawing her in to his side. “Who is to say, my dear, what is terrible and what is not?” Repeated the Cat with a purr. |