It is important to realize that any lock can be picked with a big enough hammer.
Sun System & Network Admin Manual
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Oscar Wilde
Alice remembered well the words by which she had parted with the Queen of Hearts, and was currently trying her best not to go into spasms from the effort exerted in keeping her face still and brave. It had been easy enough to call her a fatuous old thing when the end of a corridor was in sight, but here stood the old girl, Amazonian and corpulent as ever, and she was reluctant to remind the Queen of that heady day with thoughtlessness. It was an awkward situation, with the woman making circular strides about her, giving her the onceover, twice over.
This cheater, the towering inferno, stopped at Alice's face and made a familiar expression, one accompanied by a folding of the hands upon the curve of her back—I say curve, for there was no small of the back, and certainly nothing small about this woman. It was an odd look, one difficult to make out at first since she was tilting her head so far that her ear might have been on her shoulder. That slow, materteral smile, the way her eyelashes suddenly appeared, a sweet, dainty expression on a very ill-tempered tyrant.
"You don't happen to know why I was summoned all the way out to the Court of Clubs in the middle of the night, do you?" Alice waited a moment to see if this was a rhetorical question, and the thought occurred to her that she and her head might be in for a rather inconvenient parting of the ways, but Hearts's expression remained lovely, frozen in probably insincere sympathy.
"Perhaps she thought I was asking for you when I said I wanted to talk to someone expert in crime and punishment, who had jurisdiction to pass between the different states."
"I am that person," said Hearts, and gestured around her as though there were no one else to be had.
"Well, begging your infinite pardon, but I wasn't expecting Your Majesty when I said that-at least I wasn't directly asking for you—"
"Oh!" Hearts cried, letting her eyebrows and voice go high, twirling her sceptre easily between her fingers and tapping it against her palm, "You weren't asking directly for me. And yet," she gestured with her broad hands about them both again, "Here I am, woken up at an ungodly hour to see what my idiotic sister was on about, and I find you," her hand finishing the motion to land at Alice, sizing her up, "All corked up on Drink-Me, though I have to say, you almost got it right this time."
Alice was not sure how best to respond to that, and let it go.
"Tell me," she demanded in her curt voice, "What has that little NITWIT told you?"
"Only that I might pass between the states if I go with a royal enclave, and they do not move through in the winter."
"BLOCKHEAD!" cried the Hearts, rolling the word back over her shoulder as though to send it on up to Clubs. Her hair had momentarily spiked with anger, and her collar nearly flew off in disarray. "She is a stupid girl, and always has been. You, on the other hand, are quite clever, I daresay, and shall behold my wisdom."
"Yes, Your Majesty," said Alice with some slight hesitation. The woman turned a wild look upon her, much as a mustang does to the little girl who fancies she might tame him some summer, and Alice, spurred on by memory, opened her mouth very wide and said, "YES, YOUR MA-JES-TY," as pronounced as anything.
This contented the overbearer enough, who replied—
"She is WRONG, wrong indeed, and I say this because I am excellent enough to have knowledge which proves me to be CORRECT, and in this I may be praised." Alice thought it strange how the Queen was posing until she understood what the phrase encouraged, and replied,
"Oh—yes—indeed, you may, Your Majesty, a very great—wisdom, indeed—"
"Of course, of course, for you see, one needs only a passport or a caravan to pass between the TERRITORIES, which is not the same as the states, and what she is thinking is that SHE needs PAPERS to pass between states in order to have JURISDICTION. And she has not, for she does not manage her kingdom well, and in this, she suffers a FOOL." This last word rang even in the muffling snow.
"I see," said Alice after a pause.
"Greatly, and to wit: what do you wish to know?"
"What is an idle place?"
"A place of idles, what a stupid question," and she again twirled her heart-shaped scepter in her hand, very proud of how clever she sounded. Alice tried again, very patiently.
"Where might a learned monarch such as yourself send someone to be punished?"
"Oh! That is easy, for there are prisons to vessle them, and well I should fill them up with anybody who dares intercede with my rule, questioner or interloper."
"How many are there?"
"Five, to be sure! Not nearly as many as should keep the number of traitors and thieves, and that is a truth. Gold, Black, Red, Silver, and White, all bearing my standard colors."
"To which prison might the Duchess send a... traitor?" If she had thought the massive gargoyle before her had foamed with a blood-red eye before, the Queen of Hearts stretched up to her full stature now and set the record straight indeed.
"THE DUCHESS," she thundered, and Alice fancied the trees moved their branches out of the way to avoid being blown off in the ensuing hurricane, "I do not like her very much," she said between her teeth, very changeable indeed, for this was with an almost diplomatic, though still rather torrential, tone of voice. "She has drawn us all out on a technicality."
"Yes, I had wondered of that myself—" began the young woman before her in a nearly excited voice.
"AND I WONDERED OF IT FIRST." The crown popped off the woman's hair and came back down, she was growing quite agitated speaking of the Duchess, but Alice dared not change the subject. Hearts's next pronouncement was in a flat, bored voice. "What do you need to know of prisons, what need can you possibly have of them, you are a child."
"Perhaps not prisons, I am really thinking of someone being exiled."
"Who?" this demanded of her.
"The Mad Hatter, the Duchess sent him away for being a traitor."
"That sounds fair and just," said the Queen, nodding her juxtaposing approval.
"But she never said why, there wasn't even a trial—" Alice drew up short upon seeing the uplifted eyebrow, and tacked hard left. "I mean... the Duchess... she never—never, she—" and inspiration struck at this very point in the narrative, Alice drawing herself up and nodding indignantly, "She... pronounced... the verdict... before the sentence."
She had plucked blind an arrow deep into a cave, hoping it would rouse a sleeping monster to aid her, and in this, Alice soon considered herself a great success.
"Why, that fiend," shouted the Queen of Hearts in a hissing whisper, and clenched her fist to complete the tableau. "Well, we must get him back to try him the proper way and have an execution where I can manage it, I have no powers in these parts, hang it all—who did you say it was?"
"Er, the Mad Hatter, Your Majesty."
"Mad Hatter, Mad Hatter, I don't know any Hatters of Mad."
"Assuredly, you do, Your Majesty," said Alice, and made sure to curtsey very deep in great reverence, "You have punished him before for singing badly."
"Ah, yes," said the Queen of Hearts in fond reminiscence, "I have punished ever so many people, haven't I?" She was lost in the fond hazy memory of it all for a moment, and Alice began to shift about in the snow. "The Duchess is not the punishing type, certainly not as prolific or celebrated as I am," she continued low, and Alice looked up in some surprise, for her voice was quite altered, as though this is what she would sound like if she did not go about screaming at everything. "But driven to the proper ends..." The dark-haired woman inclined her head and frowned, actually managing to appear throughtful.
"The Antipodean Waste," she said suddenly. "The Tower there is quite remote; I do not think she would spend time and energy applying herself to the prisons, removed is her mind from the interests of the House of Cards."
"Antipodean Waste?" said Alice, hoping that it was not truly the antipode in a geographic sense.
"Yes, it would be perfect!" the Queen went on, purely thinking aloud, "There's none there, no one at all, what a miserable place, so cold and barren, even if you could bust out you couldn't get far." Alice leaned against a tree upon hearing this.
"What is the use of escaping, then?" she asked herself internally, and knew the answer, but would not think it.
"It is a three day's journey by chair, let us leave at once!" this sang out in exuberance, as though the Queen, in her newfound glee, would find the Hatter herself and declare sentence first, verdict later before brandishing an axe.
"Leave where?" said an airy voice, and the Queen of Clubs sunk down nearby upon a rope.
"We are going to the Antipodes," announced Hearts before seeing who it was—and at this, she scowled heartily, for she did not like her sister, though her sister remained placid.
"That is a long way away," she remarked blandly.
"Indeed, it is a three day's—" the fat one wheeled on Alice fiercely. "TURN OUT YOUR POCKETS," she bellowed, and in her confusion, the poor girl stood staring. "NO POCKETS?" came the reply, "SHOW ME WHAT IS IN THAT HAND WARMER." Thinking the woman desired payment for the conveyance, Alice delved for the jar, and pulled it out, fumbling with it, saying,
"I have no money at all, Your Majesty, only this—"
"I don't want your money, child! If I am to be stuck inside a palanquin with only you for three days, a queen must be ENTERTAINED, and the sound of your voice TIRES ME!" Alice did not like the idea of spending three days anywhere with the Queen of Hearts, and on top of all this, it worried her very much to remember that she had left the Hatter's hat in his house back in the capital and she had promised to look after it. She felt very anxious now in addition to her alarm at the woman's threatened companionship.
"I'm... sorry," said Alice, "Perhaps Your Majesty would find her own voice more... diverting, but I must ask whether..." She trailed off in a distraction, for the Page had joined them in her amusement at the ruckus her aunt had caused, and all three royal women were staring at Alice quietly. She actually turned her head to see if there were something behind her, but there was not. The noise had all died from the copse, and the three faces stilled, the Queen of Clubs having actually reverted herself upright to look and see.
"What a beautiful thing," said the breathy young Page. Alice held up the jar to eye level; the blue flame casting bright and shadows upon them, shifting and oscillating.
"What is that?" asked Clubs in very nearly the same voice.
"Well, I—I—that is to say, I-" said Alice.
"Open it," said Hearts, her face distant, almost melancholy. "Let it out." She tried, but the top would resist her now of all moments, and remained fast.
"I've never seen anything like that before," said Clubs as Hearts came near to Alice, but Alice held the jar close to herself, the changing light illuminating the woman's face. It did not alter colors, but moved in a swirl, like a gas—not thin or misty, rather like a fog or steam trail.
"I wish I had one," she heard the Page say to her mother. Hearts shifted her eyes down and slightly back, annoyed again now.
"You will come with me, but keep that thing out. I want to have a look at it." And off she marched, the girl trailing hesitantly, looking over her shoulder where family Clubs were waggling their fingers goodbye at her.
Alice was not allowed to return to Anglantine to retrieve the hat in its monumental importance after all; the Queen found it of the utmost expediency to surge forward—"For if we do not leave now, we will have missed three days from now, and any later is three days from then, and that is simply absurd"-hauling them both into a large sedan chair borne up by one of the green pig things she knew from the races, their party completed with the Ace of Hearts and two of the lower Clubs walking alongside, for, as the Queen of Hearts explained,
"She had misappropriated half her sister's court years ago, and anyway, she didn't think the silly twit had even noticed it, she was almost criminally bad at ruling over what little land she had got," and from there launched into a detailed, rambling morass of a dissertation on why the Queen of Clubs deserved to have her court subsumed into that of the Hearts.
The three days passed in this fashion, Alice allowing the Queen ample to gush her thoughts about the saloon freely as she gazed out the window, grappling with morality and attempting to find believable excuses to give the man regarding his hat ere she found him. She had not been able to draw more out of it than what she had seen him hold in his hands, and this comforted her, it seeming a kind of failsafe, but it worried Alice deeply that the hat might be lost, or stolen, or worse—destroyed, while she was out performing illegal acts of breaking-and-releasing. The Queen had long since forgotten her quest to seek out the Hatter and give him an unfair trial, focusing in her less talkative moments upon the jar of light, which Alice made sure to keep close on her lap. The way the woman eyed it did not instill her with confidence, though the Queen did not scream quite so much, and never once mentioned the possibility of a good old fashioned off with her heading—which was rather nice, of course, but she kept waiting for it, and it never came, so it was all very troubling and dissatisfying.
In the evenings the great beast would sink down, calling out in a long flat hooonk, and at last they two emerged, cracking their bones and stretching, Alice going for the nearest bit of land away from the Queen as quickly as her numb legs would allow. The earth became more as rocks and clay, webs of brown vegetation choking out an existence, the only thing being for miles the post tent bearing the Court of Hearts' heraldic standard whenever they stopped, and there was always one around. From this, she got the notion—but did not remark; it was enough to merely put this to memory and listen carefully to the soldiers' talk—that the Court of Hearts found it necessary to station men in remote locations, as though they were to build a fortress, or control these outlying lands.
Their final day in the litter brought the Winter Solstice, and the procession stopped just as the sun was loosing from its meridian. Alice peeled back the curtain, and the Queen suddenly came to her energies, herding her companion out of the box, saying how warm and drowsy she must be inside, how she must embrace the cold and buck up for the long walk, here, let me take your warmer, there's a good girl, now have a couple of circles around the chair now, and loosen your shoulders.
Alice trod out a few steps before turning to look at the Queen of Hearts where she stood before the entrance to the litter wearing a wide, affected smile. Her position blocked the way back inside where Alice's warmer lay on the red cushion, and Alice thought to herself,
"Well, it will be quite cold without it, but if she wants it, I shan't make her give it to me; I don't want to be yelled at," for it was quite obvious what the Queen was up to, but Alice did not mind it much given the circumstances.
"Ah," said the Queen brightly, "And here we must part—the Ace will walk with you a short ways yet to point out your direction—mind you take care on the rocks, dear girl," waggling a finger and betraying her secret joy, "Ta!"
Our clever heroine smiled and curtseyed before following the Ace; the Queen remained out of the slip, thinking herself very clever for not rushing back inside to search for the jar inside the warmer—but then she would be disappointed and exceedingly vexed to find it empty once the procession moved again, for Alice had taken great care and slipped it into her spare cloak pocket upon her ejection.
"There," said the Ace, and brought his arm level with his chin to gesture at a blackened form jutting out of the moors as the sun sought its last repose too early. Now she could see it; the bespoke-named Tower was precisely this and nothing more; no fortress with drawbridge and military guard, merely a dark stone column arising from the earth around it; not a soul about for ages and leagues, she thought.
Alice turned to the Ace, who looked honestly at her with this new journey now before her. He removed the black watchcoat from his person and shifted it about her shoulders.
"These are harsh lands, and I daresay you will need more than a mere cloak. It is not so thick with snow in these parts, but the cold is cruel indeed. Good luck," he said, for this was as far as he could stray, having to move quickly to catch up with the Queen by now, and left her alone to contemplate the visible end of her journey.
Alice watched until his head disappeared over the edge of the ridge, pulled up the hood of her cloak out of the tangle at her neck, and then turned full and began to walk.
Out, and out again through the forlorn thickets until she could see the moon, full and too-bright, the sky shaping dizzily above her in a concave dish, cold and distant, no welcome clouds to tamp down the notion that she was very much alone in so remote and frightening a place as this. Alice flexed her fingers and they burned painful, dumb to whatever reasons their mistress had for subjecting them to such harsh winds and a futile endeavor as this. Futile, no, never, she thought, and gathered folds of the huge coat into her hands to block out the sting. She stepped onto a boulder embedded deep within the earth, treading on the long-dead moss still clung there, careful lest she slip on its icy shell and strain and strand herself; then over the peak of land saw the Tower striking closer upward, making itself be known to the sky, and an imposing lonely structure it was. She kept moving forward, arms balanced out now, the worrying false heat at her fingertips forgotten, glancing up at the dark hulk so often that her chin began to ache.
And on, and on, and out, and out, she walked until the moon was so white it blanked out the stars as she stood before the Tower.
Its dark heather stone rounds found no greenery or sustaining accompaniment twined at its base to suggest that it belonged here; it was out of place and well in place at once. Alice approached the slick ice-glazed wall to view the turret, far up and away. If it had not been quite so cold, and quite so lonely, and quite so bare out here in the Antipodean Waste, the Tower might have suited the lonely inhabitant of a fairy tale, though she had no armor and certainly no—Alice dove her hands into the rumpled cloth of her skirt to find the hammer and its chain, nearly the length of her forearm now. She did have a kind of vorpal blade in form disguised, indeed, but what to strike? A rattling iron grate along the northern side, she perceived upon circling the evil thing, abutted not the stone, but barred a small alcove with a kind of illusion or trickery, the blocks being so dark as to cast the same image whether in light or in shadow. She lifted the hammer and smacked at the lock. It cracked as though made of old plaster, and the iron bent besides. Alice tucked the hammer back under her cloak, careful not to knock it against her by false moves.
Inside this alcove was a sickly oil flame rolling back and forth across the wick, licking out dying roars in the trapped windswirl. She found a small hunk of wax, and lit the stub. Now climbing the narrow stairs, the footholds barely sliced into the rock, too small for her, let alone a man's feet, Alice's imagination flickered and glowed to full in the dim light; it began to illuminate the way before her, distorting and twisting, calling up haunted speculations she had not put into order before the ascent, and they picked at her, pulling from the shadows. What if he were not here? What if hehad long set to ruin and perished, or if he languished even now in death's fog? She paused, foot raised, and stared down at the space where unknown figures might have dragged him unwilling, his heels catching in a final effort to resist—she closed her eyes and palmed the centerpost before exerting her efforts anew, moving faster until she found the heavy wooden panel at the top with iron braces at the hinge, not a door as you and I understand it, but like a small trap in the ceiling.
The light breathed with her, heaved shadows and began to splutter while she rested a hand against the wood, drew the latch, and pushed it; though it was small, it required her best effort, particularly as the candle roused in fits and made the thrills of anxiety and nerves near her middle rush up into her throat and die down before shooting anew into her ankles.
A circular tower would have a circular room heading its apex; Alice stood upright in the center of it, a thin rectangular window casting white light onto the floor. She lifted the candle and found the place to be empty, and then there was the jolting suck of someone taking an angry breath behind her, she fumbled to turn, the candle pinched out, and she was shoved back against the wall by the cutout window, the moonlight in her eyes, shaking frantically, for someone was indeed with her in this cell.
She was still, and heard them breathing.
"Who is there?" she cried, nearly at tears for fright, and hunched her shoulders against the stones in case they decided to rush her again. A bluish gray movement on the other side made her move out of the light to adjust her eyes, and then she was looking upon the Hatter again, he was there, standing shades in the shadow, a vague outline. Him, there, now, hair and eyes and nose and stature and all, once more, again. She stood against the wall for support, her heart beating so fast she thought perhaps she would pass to the floor before ever managing to set him free.
He was scrutinizing her, silent, and Alice came back into the light, only just a little.
"It's only me, I've come to get you out," she said soft, but he did not reply, instead turned; she heard his footsteps on the stairs, and followed.
If Alice had expected an exalted reunion with the Hatter, one of smiles, profuse thanks-be and perhaps even in a very little corner of her heart a grateful embrace, this was not that meeting. True, he was quite rich and welcome indeed to her eyes, and she was glad to be back within his presence, which cast not a shadow but a healthy, though eccentric and often frustrating, sunshine of companionship. He stood at the base of the Tower, and Alice made to offer the watchcoat, but then she looked up into his face.
The man cast his eye out over her head into the whitecast waste, still wearing his evening dress from the night of the ball, coatless, mouth open to breathe steam, winded from the stairs. He looked as though he had just come out of the villa, and Alice half-thought nothing had changed but this new reticence, until she saw that the shadows the moon palled over his face were no shadows at all-for his features were thrown into brilliant light-but in fact very dark circles beneath his eyes. Her heart fell to see the Hatter was in a poor state indeed, much altered from his sunny disposition, now thrust into a stuttering kind of bewildered despair.
He edged through her as though she were mere vapor, began to walk forward, and she watched him until she ran to catch up. The man paused, she with him, and he turned to sort of view her for the first time, though not really; he opened his mouth and gasped air, looking all around, searching for some sign.
"Where are we?" his voice came out flat and low, staccato, void of positive feeling.
"Antipodean Wastes," she offered, and watched him cringe deep and make a strange sound before finally-
"GOD," in a burst of rage; the Hatter was very fierce now, and miserable at this bad fortune, clenching his fists and turning heel in all four directions. "We have to get out of here," and wrenched her hand in dragging her forward before she jerked away her hand to draw the overcoat from her shoulders. He seized that from her too, and practically rent it in his efforts, at last getting it about him, but instead of bolting forward in anger as she expected, he snicked the collar high around his ears, and sunk back shaking into a bit of high ground. She meant her hand upon him to be soothing, but Alice nearly flung herself back over for surprise when he snatched at her wrist, trying to pull her down into him too abruptly. Alice listened to him breathing and calmed herself.
"You are not so cold," she told him by and by, rubbing briskly at his arms, "Your hands are very warm, I can feel them through your gloves."
"No, no." How stark his voice, how far from the operatic performances of summer.
"It is not so bad as that, I am sure," said Alice in a small voice, but uncertain. She had gotten him out of there, yes, but—but now this. And what? Eyes pinched shut, lines appearing in the purpling of his flesh, the Hatter shook his head. Alice extricated herself, rose, and coaxed him back over near his most recent prison, at the very least intending to block the stronger winds, but there was no going inside the moaning entrance, and certainly not upstairs.
"Sit over here," she urged him, plucking at his hands, "For just a little while."
"We have to keep going," she heard him say in the whip of air, "I shall lose myself, surely; you will have to drag me out, I will die—"
"Stop it," she snapped at him finally. "Sit down, you're going to pass out if you don't rest." They were silenced by the winds, and he glared at her, but it was weak, and she felt nothing from it.
She drifted to the sick earth, scraping along the brick wall and winding up half sitting in what had been a strand of grass but was now packed and spent dirt, with nothing but a few limping weeds choking through the crevasses in the clay. Care whisked from her into the breeze, exhaustion rushed in to greet her, smiling nastily, and it was with a horrible inflated feeling in the joints of her knees that she finally let the vague clouding at the back of her mind rush forward and pinch at the back of her retinas, pulsing in waves. She leaned back, to be floated up by a threadbare absence of panic, and swallowed.
The Hatter dropped down next to her heavily with an exhalation that was more from having the wind knocked gently out of him than a sigh, and he looked out across the land in a continuous search for something, anything or anyone. Finally, and with no small amount of caution, he leaned back against the stone next to her. They sat for a moment, still and tenuous. And then he sort of slumped over in finality, and lay his temple across her collarbone and looked so dazed, as though the worry weren't even something that he had to invoke or think about, it just was and it would be.
She could not help but gather him up, put her arms around him and gather up the pieces of him, and he put his arms around her middle and they held each other together like that, barely holding onto the pieces, waiting.