JMJ

Chapter Eighteen

Closet Rummaging

There were only two doctors who were allowed down in the bay, but no one bothered about that as they hurried down the elevator in a commotion as crushing as at a mall on Black Friday. The elevator was blindingly bright, and the elevator music monotonous enough to force any amount of ants right out of one's pants, but when the crowd exploded out again, they were hushed by the atmospheric silence.

There was only one way to go from the elevator: a short corridor that would have left them in pitch darkness, except that the ruckus of movement woke the sensors to stretch electronic feet enough with a moan and quaver to light the way dimly but adequately. The ceiling lights still complained a little with a hazy buzz, but it was drowned out by the shuffling steps and heated breaths of the humans below.

It was Mars who tried the door, but of course, it was locked. He growled impatiently and began banging to no avail.

"Mars…" grumbled Pluto.

Mars did not answer.

Pluto cleared his throat loudly as the warrior began to pace.

"What?" Mars snapped.

"No one will answer us," he said.

"Can you get us in?" asked Neptune darkly watching the pacer.

"If the access code still works," shrugged Pluto apathetically; though by the way he moved forward he showed his confidence nonetheless.

He pushed a few buttons on the pad before them, and sure enough it opened with a ping. Now Mars wrenched open the door, and the party found themselves in what looked like a very dingy lobby or waiting room. A coffee maker was the liveliest fixture to be noted winking green and ready to go, though weakly. Aside from the few other electronics with glowing buttons on standby it would have been nearly pitch black in here too before Venus turned on the light. A computer was behind a desk. A table had some lab equipment that looked a bit out of date. An air freshener was near the floor and a security camera near a light fixture. There was nothing more save a couple doors. One had a window and above it read "Bay".

Immediately, Mars went for it, but again it was locked as he tried to barge in.

"Where are the doctors?" demanded Venus with a shudder.

She looked at Pluto, and she was not sure at all why she was looking to him for comfort. It was not any amount of liking for him, but he knew what was going on. He looked completely unconcerned as he watched Mars swing round to him and wave to the door with the sweep of his hand.

Haggardly but staunch, Neptune scowled but said nothing as he pursed his lips tightly. Uranus opened his mouth as though to attempt speaking, but nothing came out and he let it hang there on its hinge with lost vacant eyes as though hoping some speech might avail him in time. Pluto was also silent, but only because he had no need for words. The strange little man went to the door and pressed a few buttons to open it for another ping. Then he clasped the latch.

Before he turned it, Venus asked, "Where are the doctors?" once more in a hushed voice.

At least Pluto dignified her with a return look and it even held a little pity but not the sort she wanted. He did not want to tell her the truth, though she had already guessed it.

There were no doctors guarding this place, their eyes agreed together. There never were.

He turned the latch before Mars could become impatient again, but even Mars was a little sobered by the expression. Pluto pushed the door into its black beyond and flipped the switch. The others did not even have to go in, and to be honest they did not really want to.

The jaw-shaped cavity of a room was eerier than a morgue of dead bodies. The medical gurneys were vacant. There were the computers and the scanning equipment and even an empty observation tube the right size to observe a grown man and the likes which one would certainly expect in an unorthodox secret laboratory such as this, but there was nothing in the tank. Not even liquid.

"Where are the patients?" asked Pluto.

It did not surprise Venus that he asked the question that no one else asked and almost rhetorically. His frown held more triumph than any sneer could have, but he was in no way amused.

Mars grabbed him by the scruff.

"Mars!" cried Venus.

But Mars would not listen. "How long have you known!"

Pluto gulped and squirmed but said nothing.

"Throttling him won't give us the answer!" snapped Neptune gruffly and grisly as he put his hand on Mars' shoulder roughly, but Mars shoved him off.

He turned to Neptune. "Did you know too?" he demanded.

Neptune stared hard glowering tightly, but he returned his lips to their pinched state.

"Did you all know?" snapped Mars.

"Well, you must have suspected," said Venus; though, she could not withhold a shiver at the thought they all these stiff moon-pale men had known all along and had left she and Mars in the dark on purpose according to the theories of retroactive bigotry.

"I was not in on it with Jupiter if that's what you mean," said Pluto, "but I have known for a while. What was I supposed to do?"

"Well…" Uranus began squeakily and rusty enough to be likened to an unused hinge. "Well, that does explain your behavior lately."

"But then what's going on for real here?" Mars wanted to know. "They can't have done this just to fool us."

"Why not?" asked Venus. "We were peak graduates fresh from college minus Uranus and Neptune who used to even be college professors. But we were all wanted for expertise on computer science and neurological studies and technologies. They wanted us to cooperate without hesitation, didn't they?"

"We knew from the beginning that there was something shady behind all this, but we did want the prestige," said Pluto. "We all looked the other way about this. I'm not going to believe that any one of us fully believed that this was all for the benefit of mankind completely, did we?"

No one answered, but for Venus' part she knew that she had at one time believed it to be so. At the beginning. It would in the end help all of humanity evolve to the next stage of existence, merged with machine, not as a cyborg, but as a self-made angel, and yet, had she really only told herself that what they were doing to the voluntary "patients" was a necessary evil to accomplish their goals?

She bit her lip.

"But the volunteers?" demanded Mars. "The 'patients'."

"You actually thought they were patients?" asked Venus wearily despite herself.

An ugly leer darted back from him. "No, but whoever they were they were here. We were all here when they were primed. Where did they go? And more importantly, if the patients aren't here then who are the people we've been studying in the program?"

"The same people," said Pluto with care.

He knew full well he could not stretch this out with Mars there; though Neptune looked about ready to break out bear-style at any moment himself. He was a very large man, and Pluto, though far younger, was not exactly in prime physical condition to fight such a man who even now was a lap-swimmer in his spare time.

"It was Petra who told you, wasn't it, Aiden Crone?" Neptune said.

"Well, she was rumored to be your Persephone," remarked Venus.

Pluto smiled grimly. "Hmm. Persephone. Never heard it put like that before. I never abducted or seduced her. Jupiter was more the one who did that."

"But… where are the patients?" pressed Uranus.

"In Heartland," grumbled Pluto.

Mars sighed. "Let me kill him."

"No," said Neptune.

"How?" ventured Uranus with a shrewd glower despite his lost-sounding voice.

Venus looked away unsure that she really wanted to know how.

"The same way Hakuto sees them nearly every day," said Pluto not without eyeing Mars with moderation.

"That's what I was afraid of," Venus muttered back.

#

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.

Thrwock, throok. Thrwock, throok.

Lub. Dub.

The pain in his head was more than the pain in his chest. It was a pounding that throttled his skull. Lights overhead moving? Or was he moving? A gurney. A hospital? No. Besides it was more than physical pain. It was…

He knew what it was, but his mind cared for no word to describe it.

Other than that he was simply wrong.

Oh, so wrong.

He could be torn in two, but he knew it was more likely that although neither side of him would claim dominance, he would more likely just wither away, not from fright or sorrow, but a jaded sense of apathy. Or at least… if he survived.

A grin spread out before him.

"What are you supposed to be, the Cheshire Cat?" a voice cracked out into the gloom like a shot in the dark and was swallowed up just as quickly. It was his own voice.

He was drowning, but that grin persisted.

A mirror? Or was it an ironic copy. He cocked his head in that cocky way. In that mocking way. In that derisive way, but now he was not laughing. He was no spy. He was certainly no hero. The grin was not his own. The only reflection was that of guilt, and it was no reality. Not in the physical realm of that grin and those teeth sharper than any fangs however ivory and flat. It was the hovering of a person over him when all others had left. There was a dark light when all normal lights had vanished.

He could feel his heart beating.

Lub. Dub.

He writhed but could not move.

He growled but was silent. Helpless.

Lub. Dub.

A game of musical chairs

Is a favorite of yours

Round and round your fares

Until you don't know what-fors.

You missed a stitch in time;

You'll never get it back.

Turn the dozen on a dime?

Always off the track.

The lambs' wool from the threadbare,

The spool to the shears,

You're running round with care

To all with allergic ears.

Shut up, thought Matthias. Somehow to be ignored again would be worse than a return jibe, but to hear him keep on singing like that just to make him squirm? It did not make him squirm so much as growl again, but his face revealed bad enough his unvoiced call for silence.

The voice went on:

Your sobs are of the crocodile

Who gently smiles you down.

He need not track you up a mile

When you've come to pay his crown.

Your heart is in his teeth

He has but to clamp it through,

And to him did you bequeath

All that you did rue.

How just like a hare you've hopped

And like Peter Pan you've crowed

But now a jaded stead you're lopped

To see how much you owe.

What happened at the start?

Before you murdered the time yenned.

And spun round tables— weak rampart.

You're stalling at the end.

That hovering form grinned vile at him.

"Still bold to the bitter end, eh, Haddler? I know that look," the voice hissed amidst the steam encapsulating him in this confined cell. "That wit will now belong to someone else in a minute, though. Might as well use it while you still have it."

Matthias only glared the more, but the pain within his head tightened. He could no longer bear it. The fight was leaving him. His body was growing limp. It was over, and through it all, that grimy hand was pressed against his chest just to prove some sort of feral dominance. That grinning face knew full well that not a tooth would have remained had Haddler his full faculties.

With one last pathetic effort, he tried to get up, but he felt nauseous even from the little movement he actually managed.

"No more time." His voice? The other voice? A mocking of one over the other, but which?

Blackness dived down like a bomb, the violence was a silence more ruinous than a sonic boom.

A watch? It was held before his face? No, it was hanging on the wall. Which wall? What time was it? It all blurred into one; though he could clearly hear the ticking.

Every tick for every tock, but where had he heard the idiom.

#

"Rah!" growled Haddler leaping upright.

Panting, Matthias looked around. At first he could not even tell whether he was upside down and defying gravity somehow. He was looking up at a great ocean gleaming and reflecting the first hints of light at the dawn of time. Gentle waves were crashing distantly, but after a blink or two he almost laughed, as humorless as it would have been.

He shook his head. It was only a usual dawn, but at least it was dawning at all. The sky, though clear with a liquid sheen, was beginning its everyday miracle. The sound he heard was not waves of water but the gentle blowing of leaves already so early in the morning. But there was a trickling sound of some sort of water below him in a most ordinary fashion.

The crickets sounded like crickets. The breeze was gentle and cooling. If he did not know any better he might have thought himself anywhere but Wonderland until he recalled such things as bugs and morning chill. As for morning dew, well, that was when full wonder returned as he watched the early morning tadpoles coming down the creek, and what were they holding?

Library books with the label for a library downstream for last minute returns. No avid reader wants an overdue library book on record.

He smiled wryly despite himself and shook his head, but his face turned quickly grim. He turned away and sat down staring into the dark of the shadows still black in the deep of the wood. He was sheltered in a half a bowl of a very large tree throw, where thankfully no tree was throwing yet. It was still too early for that, though the baskets woven into the roots were not used by anything hard. It was perhaps "throw" as in "blanket" for the impossible blanket of moss. It was more comfortably soft than any bed that he had ever slept in; though he felt rather than saw that they had been sleeping on a bed of wildflowers. The scent of them were all around far fresher than any laundry freshener in clean bed sheets.

He was in one nest of this sort and Esther was still sleeping in another as snug all night long as chicks within their eggshells yet, but the softness was of the melancholy of age, the scent the aroma of bitter-sweetness. It was like the embrace of a mother over her children who only partly understood her sorrows but not enough to share them even if enough to love her more for bearing the mysterious burdens with saintly silence.

Slowly, his eyes fixed back into the wooded darkness as he looked back at his subconscious visions of the night. Yet the black shadows were turning purplish gray. As he had spent all night here, he could see the undergrowth of leaves, mushrooms, and ferns in what would have otherwise been a dim blur.

A squirrel was rummaging about as though for a winter-stored nut, but Matthias squinted as he noticed that it found nothing to eat. Instead he found a very small, doll-sized book. Then, as though caught doing something shameful, he turned sharply to Matthias. His eyes wide, his tail, taut, he then flicked that tail and twitched those whiskered as he fled with all haste, the book under his arm.

Okay, thought Matthias. So we made it to log-a-field forest, evidently.

Had the Cheshire Cat sent them to a library rather than a tea party or had the world just shifted overnight?

He stood up and brushed himself off a little as he shook the sleep from his well-rested limbs. He was not at all stiff, really, but his body was still so cozy that it was limp from all the softness. He looked back the way they had come last night, not much more visible than a sloping curve into a cloud of trees. His eyes rose as far as they could along it, and then rose up anyway right up into the sky between the foliage. There was no sign of the great ball from here anymore than the top of the hill.

He might have wondered whether it had fallen in the night or sunk like a bad moon, but his thoughts drifted once again to that claustrophobic, tight-aired space with no window to anywhere but more walls and manmade ways when they looked out at all. A different dimension, a place of nightmares, cold when it should be hot and hot when it should be cold, but the feel of it was not as important as what passed between his own lips and that of…

"Like Peter Pan you've crowed"… The Cheshire Cat had said something about crowing too and eating crow. Now as a cat, the idea of eating birds was probably not all that far-fetched as it would be for a dog fetching much else unless a bird dog. And yet, could the Cheshire Cat know something about Matthias' past that was only now coming back in full?

"You okay?"

Matthias jumped and turned around to Esther in a bit of a furrow. He only smiled back.

"Me? Why wouldn't I be?" he chirped like the early birds who had no books due.

Esther looked down thoughtfully a moment, still clearing cobwebs with a figurative grog swigging.

"Well," she then said with care. "You… have spent a long time in that… thing, and now you're released. I would think that might cause a little…"

"Free as bird," Matthias assured with a wide shrug.

"Right," said Esther.

Matthias rolled his eyes. "Alright, you don't have to sound like that. Of course, there are some things on my mind, but it's not quite what you might think."

"Did you not have amnesia?" asked Esther.

It was not an accusation, and Matthias pursed his lips before clicking the roof of his mouth.

"Not quite as cartoonishly simply as that," Matthias admitted.

"So you do know who you are," Esther said.

There was a long pause as Matthias turned away again and shuffled oddly with wide eyes searching the boughs as though bookshelves with any sort of information he could readily peruse for ideas. There was none, so at last he chirped more merrily than before, "Matthias Haddler."

Slowly Esther nodded then closed her eyes thoughtfully.

Matthias leaned against a tree with one arm, patiently waiting.

Standing up, she brushed the twinkling petals from her clothes and seemed quite willing to leave it all at that, but as she was about to hunt for something to eat in the stead of those edible mushrooms they had nibbled before bed with concern they might change size in the night (thankfully they had not), Matthias swung after her with a gentlemanly clearing of his throat.

"Esther."

Quite startled, Esther turned around. He had spoken with such serious earnest, not a like a creature of any sort of Wonderland, nor like a patient of a psyche ward for the emotionally disturbed. It was the tone of a rational man speaking with firmness to his female companion with deep gravity enough to pull anyone from cloud nine to the firmness of both feet on the ground.

She did not even answer with words for the solemnity of the moment, but her eyes spoke many things. Much of what was reflected in them he could not fully decipher, but she was listening and a touch suspicious.

"Hmph," Matthias smiled sheepishly and threw his fingers through his messy hair. "Look, you're brilliant."

"Brilliant?" Esther laughed and shook her head.

"What I mean is, you're everything I wished I was once," he said. "You're a spy, a hero, a… doctor even." He paused. "Well, I guess never saw myself as a doctor. Pleh!" he chuckled. "But you came here just like Cheshire said to save people. To be brave. To expose evil and bring it to light…"

She studied him and hardly dared to breathe, much like a cat in a way stiff and alert and with good reason when someone was untrustworthy. She was brilliant in more ways than one, and that meant she followed where this was going.

"You don't even have to act like a man to do it, if you don't take that the wrong way."

"I… don't take offense," said Esther.

"I…" Matthias sniffed and shook his head. "I'm not innocent of all this. You wouldn't've liked me."

"I don't know. You probably wouldn't've liked me back far enough before this," Esther admitted.

Matthias shook his head with a silent snicker. "No, I'm pretty sure I would, but I wouldn't've spoken to you more than a few words of a snark."

"But you're… repentant?" Esther muttered with some amount of frustration that Matthias did not understand.

Matthias shrugged. "How can I not be? It's not exactly in my hands anymore. I never made the choice not to be."

"So? You're sorry now, that counts for something," said Esther with a little more confidence, but he could tell quite well that she liked the distance between them. "You're not one of the scien—"

"No," answered Matthias quickly, though she had not been asking a question. "And in fact, I'm not even much of a real mechanic anymore than I'm a hatter; though I'm not a bad hand at steam punk merchandise that can light up and such if I want to. I'm not bad with my hands, but I'm no rocket scientist. Or bioengineer. And certainly not a computer wizard. I'm old hat, you might say, when I'm not bad hat."

When Esther didn't say anything for a moment, Matthias picked up a stick like a guilty little boy and began to pace with it as he stabbed into the earth with nervous energy more than his feet, but he was determined to go through with this. Esther deserved to know now what he knew. Besides, there was no need for the baggage of skeletons in closets at a time like this.

Sharply, he stopped and sighed puffing up his bangs as he blew out through his lips like a whale through its spout. "It's like this…"