Rose followed Chess through the woods. An eerie feeling of being watched imposed its self upon her senses. As she looked around at the dead, leafless trees, she noticed that they seemed to be alive, raking their long, spindly fingers across her face, drawing blood. Her heart raced and she sped up, keeping close to the cat in front of her. "Mr. Chess?" she whispered.
"Yes, Rose?" Chess asked without looking back.
"Why do I feel like I'm being watched?" the words seemed to ghost out of her mouth, almost impossible to hear, but Chess' hearing picked it up easily.
With a dry laugh he replied, "That, my dear, is because you ARE in fact, being watched. Well, stalked, is more like it, but you get the gist of it." Rose gasped in surprise.
"We are being stalked?! But, by who? The cards?!" Rose's imagination was working overtime.
"No, child. The cards wouldn't dare come here anymore. Not since-" Chess was cut off mid-sentence as a large, muscled arm burst out of the foliage and grabbed Rose by her braid dragging her off kicking and screaming. Jumping into action, Chess leapt forward and clamped his jaws down on the receding hand. Snarling, biting, scratching, and tearing, he finally managed to get the hand away from her. Tensed and ready to pounce, Chess surprised even himself, as he did something that he had never done before. He hissed. The trees in front of them parted and out came Tweedle-dee and his twin brother, Tweedle-dum. The identical twins had on white shirts with red stripes, denim overalls, and sported a shock of white hair on top of their otherwise bald heads. They were both about eight and a half feet tall, the veins around their eyes bulged out, and their muscles were so massive that there was no doubt that they couldn't touch their heads. Tweedle-dee was holding his arm in pain, large tears racing down his face and lips quivering as his brother fussed over the bleeding appendage.
Rose, feeling sorry for them, tore the skirt of her dress so that it now came to her mid-thigh and approached the twins carefully. "Dee-Dee? Tum-Dum?" she murmured. Upon hearing Alice's nicknames for them, they looked up. And they smiled.
"Licey! (Pronounced Lissee, like the end of Alice's name with a ee sound added on the end.)" They intoned together. Their faces lighting up at the thought of the only person to be able to tell them apart. Rose smiled at them and started to wrap up Dee's arm.
"No, Dee-Dee, Licey is my mom." she explained softly.
"We should get going. We need to reach the cave before nightfall." Chess urged when she had finished wrapping the arm.
"Okay." was Rose's short reply.
After half an hour of walking, the four of them reached the cave and settled in. Turning to Dee and Dum, Rose asked the question on both her and Chess' mind. "Why did you kill the Mad Hatter?" There was a tense silence. After a while, Dee looked at Dum and nodded.
In a sad voice, Dum said the one sentence that started the mystery of a lifetime, "We no do, we framed by Red."