JMJ

Chapter Six

Slip, Rise, and Duck

Lise grew more receded as they reseated themselves and had more tea and sandwiches. Was it the condiments or was it that her mind really wasn't truly human, after all? It was the indecision which bothered Haddler most about her all around. Perhaps she was still filled with gears somehow, but Haddler felt more strongly it was something else. Was she an Alice or was she a lease? And what that even meant he had not sense to spend.

Nevertheless he remained as cordial and helpful as possible in such a way that one would hardly guess at any sort of conflict. No one could say that Matthias Haddler was a bad host.

At some point though, either while pouring tea or fetching cakes, he suddenly was offering something to an empty chair.

"Lise?"

He looked around even checking under the table again. If he had not heard the door shut, however quietly, he might have thought he had been visited by a ghost. He shuddered at the thought of that familiar tapping from Poe's poetry, but it was more disappointment than fear that got him as he stared at that empty chair for which a cake would do little good save to look pretty for some sort of aesthetic photograph if even that.

It did not last long. He quickly found a much better place for the cake between his teeth.

Then after setting the kitchen into motion picking up after him in a clockwork pushbutton manner, he prepared himself for the work ahead that evening. Gears, numbers, spinning wheels— all was better to crown his head than any hat, which was why he had never been able to get himself to buy one of his own. So off he went with pleasant gentlemanly posture up the elevator to the dome— the crown of his house.

Despite how he worked next morning and did some early errands in town with affable ease he was looking forward to Lise returning. He knew this for the simple fact that as soon as the heart of Heartland struck four, he found himself staring at his front door as though expecting a cuckoo to take its turn through it.

His ginger brows gingerly furrowed and his aquiline nose twitched. Within a tick he had his watch out. He did not consider himself an impatient man, but things had to be on time. Otherwise what was the point of ticking or tocking?

He already had a pack on his back, his green frock coat fresh for the occasion and walking shoes on ready for a hike with a walking stick in hand. It would be a long hike with long strides.

He put his pocket watch back into his waistcoat with an eye roll and a sigh. Although he was not bound to O'Hair's outdoor table, he had to admit as that his life had begun to feel shallow and redundant, and it had not started until Lise had showed up.

Or had it really?

It was a mystery that had to be unwound before it could stitch a place in time. He thought again how nice it would be to be able to simply take apart a mind with the ease taking apart a watch. He could examine it thoroughly and read it like a script then as easily as one pops on a hat. It was not the past he was interested in or the present. It was Time itself, but what is Time so much as what he was doing within his confines?

Matthias shook his head and closed his eyes to tut himself and to click the roof of his mouth.

Oh, Mattie. You'll find yourself in a worse predicament than living off oyster shells in prison.

Coming out of one's shell was one thing but a shell going into one was quite another.

If she wasn't coming, she wasn't coming. He had had a feeling from the beginning that she had not been exactly supposed to have been to his house. But did that mean he should go on the excursion without her?

Well, he could not exactly speak with Time. No matter what he said, Time sure would not come out of his shell once he saw Haddler coming. He was still the Hatter to him, and it was enough to make Haddler consider going back to hats and forget clockwork altogether in spite of such pettiness.

He set his walking stick into its holder and it recoiled into the wall, but it was just then that he heard an unexpected tapping. A tap, tap, tapping. He blinked at each one after the first in exact time.

Tap, tap, tapping.

"Oh, no! I'm not that into yore or quaintness!"

Tap, tap, tap! It was impatient now so that it almost sounded like chattering teeth.

"It's not even December!" Haddler exclaimed.

Picking up his stick again this time he brandished it like a weapon. As he swung around he shouted the battle-cry of, "Quaff! Quaff!"

The sound had led him to the bay window in the kitchen rather than a door whether front or chamber-laid, and he had no busts. He was not into wabi-sabi. He was into maximalism more the minimalism and neoclassicism more than neo-anderthalism, but what he was most of all at the moment was a momentarialist.

He lowered his stick. Taking a few paces into the kitchen he saw not a bird but quite an angelic visage out the steamed window so that she looked like a radiant vision. He took a wine bottle from the cupboard near at hand, uncorked it with a corkscrew at the end of a teaspoon, and quaffed himself quite well even if not with any thought of nepenthe. After all he quite liked being in control of his faculties, especially on a day like today with such a query about to be answered: What did this person want with Time and what would Time do about it?

Straightening himself as he put the bottle down, he winced a little at the final: tap, tap, tapping that was now more of a rap, rap, rapping, enough to wrap round his ears and pull it again to the visage in the window. The woman was wincing, trying to see if she could spot him in the limelight of her eyes. So he strolled into the sunlight and opened the bay window with brows raised a bit haughtily.

"So sneaking through back gardens is your idea of coming to a visitor's home properly, I take it."

Instead of greeting him, Lise looked over her shoulder distractedly out from where she had been climbing.

"If this is your idea of a back garden, I suppose it is," Lise said at last without looking him.

"Oh, I have a flower box, don't I?" chided Haddler patiently.

List turned to him. "If you call a box with a painted flower on it, a flower box."

"Open it," suggested Haddler.

Lise obeyed, opening the box on the window sill that looked like a jack-in-the-box. She looked inside and a spray of flowers bounded up so that some of the petals danced all over the room.

"When the sun comes out, the lid comes up. When the steam is thick, the lid closes."

"The sun's out now," said Lise.

Haddler shrugged. "Maybe the hinge needs oiling."

"And one box still isn't a garden."

"If you can have a rock garden you can have a pipe garden, and the way I've arranged it, I think it qualifies as an organ enough to be a living thing more than a pile of rocks."

Lise looked behind her again at some creaking lonely sound. She turned around to face him just as he was leaning down to follow her vision. Their noses almost touched, and turning bright rosy enough to be a flower, Lise moved the box gently to one side and closed its lid. Then she climbed onto the sill. Not so very cold and clockwork, but she had already said so herself that she was no desk.

Regardless, with this further proof Haddler smiled with triumph. "One would think you'd lost something rather than you being lost, the way you're always looking…. Or else o'er else."

Once Lise was safely inside, Haddler peaked briefly out the window himself through the spokes, pipes, and steam, but Lise was headed for the front door with or without him it seemed. He had a feeling he knew now what her hurry was, though. There was something not vegetable or metal out there, but something quite soft and fuzzy. He shut the window and locked it before following his day's companion.

"Or else what?" asked Lise as he pushed ahead of her just gently enough not to appear boorish.

"Well, that you think something else came over the wall with you, naturally," said Haddler opening the door gentlemanly as he took her arm into his.

She did not appear to appreciate this all too much, but she would have to forgive him. This was not a situation in which to appear furtive. This was a boisterous outing. A picnic, after all!

"And I can't imagine what else would want to get into a back garden except scavenging animals," Haddler went on merrily. "I don't have cabbage rows back there for that very reason. It would send for miles around the ambassador of passion for any rabbit or fawn."

"Or cabbages and kings."

"That too," said Haddler. "I knew you had wit in you and more sentient in sentiment than those not claiming to be made of clockwork."

They were strolling now at a brisk pace, and to anyone who was not on the lookout for anything unusual, the merry pair might have looked provincially rosy, which was what Haddler was hoping for the most. No one would suspect anything but a pair of that sort to be thinking of anything other than each other and even nervousness could be attributed to elopement. Why else would such a pair have such antelope leaps in pretending otherwise?

There was a scratching in the pipes behind, and Haddler dared a quick glance over his shoulder. For sure he saw a vermin-like movement half hidden in the mist coming out from behind his home.

It must be hard-hitting to be a flunky of the queen, he thought. Every test you flunk is a hit or miss and all of it harder the more surely vile.

#

A little pink twitching nose squeezed between two pipes, but though his nose had not eluded him, Hakuto knew now that he was too late. There was no one in sight and since, as the citizens of Heartland were apt to say, Nobody is a difficult person to catch sight of. Nothing to see but steam and clockwork. The only thing that sometimes got under Hakuto's skin was the fact that he did know for sure whether Nobody truly was a citizen or not. He never bothered to ask the gods on their ergonomic astral comfort thrones.

But she had been here. Lise could be anywhere now, but with the sound of the train whistle, he had a feeling it was not "where" but "how far", he needed to be concerned with.

As he finally squeezed out between the pipes and onto an unsteady platform, he shook his head and his bristling fur. He did not care what anyone said, he felt so oily and steamed that a bath was the only cure now for how he felt no matter how dreamlike the physical qualities of life here. He straightened his jacket, and as he stepped upon a crack in the pavement, he shuffled back quickly before the crack gave way to a chute that would break any mother's back and very likely his own, dream-world or not! The feeling of a pipe on the head or the spine was real enough to him.

He checked his watch.

"Next train will be every hour on the hour," muttered Hakuto miserably.

His platform was beginning to sink to a lower level of the city, and so he gave a quick leap onto a sidewalk, which began to walk towards the station with millipede legs sideway along a wall. Hakuto sat down upon a swinging bench just before gravity gave him guff. His side walk would end at the station itself at least for a moment or two when the next train arrived. Like clockwork.

Oh, clockwork!

"And I have so many things to do," he mumbled on swinging his legs over the side with nervous energy. "But of course the queen, what does she say? 'There is no eye more private than yours, Mr. White!' 'No one with more class for such classifying as the classified with what a stickler you are, Mr. White!' Or some such thing! 'We trust no one else with finding things in or out with how reliably you itch your ears. Facts, Mr. White!' 'Not like that fool, Nevin, who we only keep on for familiarity's sake with all his overt duplicity. Simplicity is one thing.' 'Nothing satisfies you more than honesty and integrity, which is why you work for us, Mr. White!' 'With all your lateness, Nevin is on the verge of being more late than anyone's great-great uncle.' Oh…!"

He slumped back into the bench so that his head was between the back and the seat. His hind feet twitched and his ear itched just then, just as the queen had so rightly observed. He scratched it, though a bit absently. He sighed miserably deflated like a stuffed rabbit that had flattened its stuffing enough for the lack of air to regress his form.

"Sometimes I think that the queen's artificial herself. Perhaps she's more LISE than Lise is. I'm beginning to wonder."

And speaking of wonder…, Hakuto's face at least regained firmness, and the rest of him was quick to follow. He straightened himself and glared out into the steam.

"…why should I bounce about all over this Wonderland to catch her? It's a wonder that—that— Oh! Whatever! Why can't they find her themselves? 'Keep an eye on her'? Well, maybe for some of the details, but they can certainly spot a person from above easier than I ever can from hardly over knee high to most other people as I am so that I might as well be a little boy in a cornfield when in a crowd of people— vegetables as most people are around here, they're increasingly growing outside too with those heads in the clouds more than the celestial sphere!"

And with that, he hopped off the bench and promptly cut through the steam like one cutting through a cold soup. He disappeared behind the veil like a conductor going behind a curtain.

#

Lise was very quiet as the train trundled to their destination, but she was very active at first. She looked around behind her seat only once, but her eyes darted everywhere.

Haddler crossed one leg casually over the other while he cocked his head to study Lise in his own catlike silence in the seat across from hers. Then reaching into a pocket when he could take no more he pulled out some cash. Without warning he put it into her hand.

She started and stared severely at him before examining the money in her fist that had clamped like a trap. Despite herself as she looked down, there was a hint of a smile, and such a golden smile it was that Haddler caught himself smiling as well; though unlike her he was not ashamed of it.

"Penny for my thoughts?" she asked quietly and in an attempt to sound rather mechanical.

"A machine would know that's quite a bit more than a penny, and for two cents it'd still be not enough to be called pretty, but it is fare enough for a ticket on your train of thought," said Haddler.

"You do do this on purpose, don't you," said Lise.

"It is common enough for one to take the same train of thought of one's own line when not much changes save where the hand is on the clock," shrugged Haddler.

Lise did not answer, but instead looked out the window, a pucker darkening her brow. Her smile faded under the shadow of the window frame.

"He won't catch us," Haddler said with a shrug, "and if you won't be giving me a ticket, I'll just take back my fare."

"It's against my programming to take fare for my thoughts," said Lise still looking out the window.

Haddler raised his brows and was just looking out the window himself in case Lise saw something that he had missed when she without warning put the money back into his hand. He glanced back sideways, but he was smiling again as she looked him straight in the eyes with her falsely dull expression but nearly dazzling vision.

"I'll tell you on the picnic," she said.

With a solemn nod Haddler pocketed his money and looked up out the window at a pristine blue sky. Though steam painted the horizon that could be seen through the buildings, this rollercoaster of a train ride was quite high along the buildings enough to feel its full dreamy effect on the scene as though if one were to shift one's vision far to either right or left, there would be nothing but steam to see at all. Haddler had to blink away a thought that he had dreamed this all before.

Well, not it all, of course, but something that rhymed with it. What part rhymed he could not tell. Whether it was Lise or the train or the vintage blue sky or the clockwork…

"Time does not repeat himself, but he sure does rhyme…" he commented.

"Mark Twain."

"Hmph?" Haddler stiffened and stared hard at Lise.

"Mark Twain," said the girl somewhat robotically, but only enough to convince a court card.

"Hmm… it's safe enough to travel. We have at least twelve feet to fathom."

"The author."

"Mmm, hmm."

"You're paraphrasing him," Lise offered.

"Probably," said Haddler rolling his eyes. "People say similar things to others all the time without knowing it."

"But I mean, you must like books the way to mention them," said Lise.

"Or I just like trolling people with trivials," Haddler shrugged leaning back in his seat leisurely.

Lise gave a grave nod, but he saw that look of amusement in her eyes if only for a fraction of a second, and he grinned vilely.

"Almost as much as you, I think," he added.

Lise did not altogether try to hide her annoyance, but it was more the annoyance of feeling amused than the annoyance of pure annoyance. For that Haddler felt he'd won again.

"At least under a bridge you would only try to stare down a billy goat rather than eat it," he said.

"You don't eat cabrito?"

"I've never had goat in my life, but if you mean to say you have a carburrito then I hope you exercise the little donkey enough to warrant it."

"And you can keep coming up with these things as awful as they are," said Lise. "It's clever enough of you to keep saying them off the top of your hat."

Now this especially Haddler had to smirk at, but just as he was about to speak again, a voice called from the back of the coach, "A runnel is coming."

No one reacted much to this, Haddler included, but it was Lise who suddenly looked at Haddler with a questioning look.

"Why are they announcing a runnel?"

"In case someone hits their heads," replied Haddler calmly.

"But a runnel, not tunnel, right?"

"No one inside a train hits their heads on a tunnel, dear Lise."

"Then what?"

"Hold onto your seat or you may just find out," Haddler warned just as he was holding onto his.

Before Lise could ask more the train suddenly did a lurch. Up went the front of the coach with a wave of motion going through the parts of it, so that they almost came undone. Though again all the pieces fit together into place once the ripple past as though nothing had happened. Lise gave out a gasp as its wave went under Haddler who had only but to remove the hat upon his head to keep it from smashing into the ceiling. Otherwise he remained straight in the spine and hardly moved. He was putting the hat back on when it was Lise's turn to rise, and she ducked as low as she could until the wave had passed by.

Then she turned violently to the window to see if she could catch sight of the runnel. Indeed it was the quite large Park Runnel before the park woods where they were going.

"They think of everything," said Lise.

"Nobody thinks of everything," retorted Haddler.

It was not long after this that the train began to slow down for the station coming alongside them in the always-moving clockwork.

"Here we are," said Haddler, and he did not give Lise a chance to speak before taking her by the hand to the platform outside in case it left without them.