JMJ
Chapter Eleven
Conspiracy Theories
Haddler opened his mouth, grinned, took his cup, and was disappointed that it was empty before putting it down again. He grinned once more and looked at Nevin, Lise, the King, and Pom all in turn. Last of all he dared one quick glance at the Queen, though she was only glaring at Nevin. Haddler sighed.
"My—my evidence," said Haddler.
"Please kindly tell the court what you know about the kidnapping of this piece of machinery," said the King.
"I beg pardon, Your Majesty, but we already agreed that a thing not sentient cannot be kidnapped so much as stolen," muttered the Ace who was apparently taking over for the White Rabbit.
Haddler bit his lip.
How very dull everything looked without the chugging of gears. It was more like they were all in some glorified sewer than in a court of royalty. Even the royal flags and banners looked like yesterday's antiques limp and miserable without a veil of steam. The smell of salt was enough to choke him into tears unless it was so salty that it was beginning to accumulate like phlegm in his throat. He cleared it.
"Well?" growled the Queen suddenly.
"Well!" Haddler squeaked. Oh, how he wished he had more tea! "I was going for a stroll with Lise…"
"What?" whined the King.
Even Nevin looked confused. The fact that he was looking at the court proceedings at all at this moment was enough to cause Haddler concern.
"Weren't you on the run?" the King demanded.
"You mean after Nevin?" asked Haddler fidgeting again. "Or away from Nevin? Well! She wished to go on a stroll and so we did."
"I knew she was broken!" declared Pom with disgust.
"But that's just it!" Haddler said unable to contain himself. "She isn't broken! She's all intact!"
"She does look intact to me and with the sharpness of a tack," agreed the bewildered King meanwhile. "But is she tactful enough to tackle speaking as a witness on her own behalf? We all know how useless the Hatter is in legal matters."
"So I may go, Your Majesty?" asked Haddler hopefully.
"It's not part of the proceedings, Your Majesty," remarked the Ace, "to call in a witness not rehearsed, and certainly it would be unorthodox to call to the stand the stolen object."
"Oh!" groaned the Queen as though more promises were being broken, and she was suffering it like a noble monarch butterfly might.
The King winced. "Are you alright, my Queen?"
"I have a splitting headache…" she grumbled.
"Oh, Amoris, I'd hate to see your precious head come into—" or maybe the King said "in two".
"—And if we don't stop wasting precious Time, there's going to splitting necks!" the Queen snapped throwing out her arms so that she smacked the King in the face in her violent outburst.
The King rubbed his face tenderly a moment and then said rather mildly, "Hatter, do you have evidence or not or else your will be the first Adam's split."
Haddler gulped hard on his Adam's apple and tried to remind himself that it was usually only the Queen's fancy. How many times had his sentence been ended by simply being forgotten?
"Well, a mid-life sentence can do things to a person," he muttered out loud.
"I thought you were only in your early thirties, Hatter. Explain yourself!"
"Mid-thirties, and what a middle it's been. I'm but a poor, simple man," admitted Haddler as though it was something quite novel to reveal.
Lise noticeably closed her eyes miserably.
"Stuck between a lease and a hard place— never been forgiven the sins of my youth!" Haddler went on.
"You don't have children, surely!" said the King aghast.
"None of which to speak of," shrugged Haddler.
"And none of which not to speak of if they really may be that wicked?" the King pressed uncomfortably.
"None of which exists at all," Haddler assured him. "And now the twinkling's gone, and I can't understand why nobody can see it."
"He is a baffling one to be sure, that Nobody," agreed the King.
"Well, nobody can hear him to ask him," Haddler said.
"Hear who?"
"Nobody can hear Nobody, I suppose," said the Ace.
Even Haddler had to scratch his head at that one.
"Off with Nobody's head, I say! For stating such an obvious thing as one hearing oneself!" snapped the Queen of Heartland.
Silence crashed like a meteor then. Not so much as Nat in the back row dared to so much as sneeze at Cheshire's drifting cat hairs more invisible than Anybody's business.
Haddler slumped in the witness box feeling sick, but it was still more because that in the silence of voices, the silence of the clockwork was more harrowing than a tomb. He had the strangest notion of Heartland itself sighing in misery like an old man no longer strong enough to keep himself sitting on a gate. His gait more miserable than his arrangement, he would very soon sink with the misery of his heart right down into the miserable acids of his stomach, and what would become of Heartland then?
"Well?" demanded the Queen suddenly standing up from her seat and tapping her foot impatiently. "Off with Nobody's head!"
The Executioner stared, gaping in disbelief.
"But, my dear!" whined the King. "Have reason with the man!"
The Queen flashed her teeth at her quivering husband.
"I—I mean it will take a great investigation for such a great court as ours to find anybody," the King blubbered.
"But I don't want anybody. I want Nobody."
"Oh!" cried the King his voice quite constringed. "I— I meant, 'Nobody'. We can find anybody easily enough, except Nobody, especially not right now in the middle of the proceedings with your nephew."
"Hmph! That's one thing I don't have," said the Queen. "I disowned the only nephew I've ever had, and that is Nevin, son of my worthless brother the Red King who made this broken thing before us to begin with!"
"I already said it," said Nevin with a roll of his eyes, "Auntie Hearty, I never went against Pom's Lise. As beautiful as she is to behold, clockwork is of little use to me, and I already proved that I was trying to elope with the Ace's daughter against your wishes."
The Ace suddenly turned rather blue, but no one paid him mind.
"Oh!" the Queen snarled not paying the least bit attention to anything as her eyes were on Lise herself. "Lise! Clockwork person thing! Come up here and give the evidence against you."
Lise started, but no one ever knew how she was going to finish.
"Do you have anything to add, Hatter?" the King then snapped.
Haddler clamped his mouth shut. "The clockwork's stopped. All of it! And Lise said—"
"What did she say?" snapped the King back.
"I can't remember what she said exactly!"
"If it's important, you must, or you're a traitor to the realm!" retorted the King.
Haddler gulped and fell to his knees. "The whole kingdom has stopped working. There's not a tick for any tock. It's gone! All of it!"
"Treason!" snapped the Ace. "Sedation! And sub-vision! To say that the kingdom isn't functioning as it should!"
"Treacle might slow down the sedation," Pr. Mouse suddenly however slowly muttered as he poked his head out from behind the door of the witness rooms. "At least to the three researcher sisters of—"
"No! It's that clockwork doll!" snapped the Queen. "Off with Dormouse's door!"
"Shall we legally change his name to 'Ian Mouse'?" asked the Ace. "Or 'Blank Mouse', Your Majesty?"
"You might give him a choice from a baby book of names to choose one of any name that doesn't have the letters D, O, O, or R," suggested the King gently.
"She's wound too tight," the Queen went on. "I don't know whether to execute Pom or execute the Lise. I'd execute my brother if he were standing here! She's rewound the Hatter and rewound the court! It's surely a conspiracy to end my reign! The Hatter's always in a state of sedation with all his sub-version tea. It's what he does best when he's not winding something's gears, and I want his hands more than his head to fix my son's wind-up soldier to its former Depend-on-Billy Tea! Nothing subverts treason like the reliability of clockwork. If something's broken in it, he'll fix it. If he doesn't, then we'll sever his hat holder from its collar."
Haddler pursed his lips.
Murmurs went through the courtroom then beneath the echoes of the shrill screams of the monarch.
"Speak, Lise, or forever hold your peace," sighed the King then; though under his breath he added, "You'll be resting in it in a moment for sure otherwise…"
"Shut up, Clarence," growled the Queen.
"Yes, Amoris," said the King calmly.
He knew his use was to only carry the word of his wife with loving care closed in and safe. He was not even the driver outside for all that, and if he didn't perform his duty to the court, he feared he'd become as hackneyed as his namesake.
Meanwhile Lise stood up.
"Come to the witness box," said the Ace severely.
Lise nodded and walked up quietly to the box. When they were but a few feet apart, Haddler looked at Lise and Lise looked back. Only her eyes held that life he saw originally. She was much like a little toy otherwise, and Haddler almost feared he had been wrong again. What reality was had never been something that bothered him in the past, but it certainly bothered him now.
Perhaps we're all machines, thought Haddler. Just machines of nature that have no real reason to think or for being.
When she noticed Haddler's sorrow. Her eyes softened. Haddler gulped.
"Go!" snapped the Queen to Haddler breaking the spell before it could take full hold on him.
But even as he jumped, he still hesitated and still could not go quickly down the steps. All the Queen apparently needed was for Haddler to be out of the box, however, and Haddler's pace slowed even if he dared not stop altogether until he reached the door still open just a crack where Ian Mouse was lying like a doorstop sound asleep.
"Sir Nevin Red committed no crime," said Lise. "At least not one that included me."
"Is that all you have to say upon the matter?" asked the King after a long while and Lise did not speak more.
He looked at the Queen gingerly, and the Queen only shrugged sourly.
"Well, you must at least coordinate a conjunction," the King pressed.
"Excuse me?" asked Lise.
"Has Nevin read or committed no crime… or has he read to commit no crime… Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Wouldn't the second be a preposition, Your Majesty?" asked the Ace.
"Which second?" demanded the King looking round as though expecting to find something. "They're passing by so quickly."
"Look, they are passing by quickly," said Lise. "The seconds are going by so fast, but something must be done before you all perish. That's why I went to the Heart of Heartland."
"You have no permission to do such a thing!" gasped the King.
"I wasn't aware of that," said Lise trying to be brave.
"You are not qualified to be aware much less are you qualified to go to the Heart of Heartland," snorted the Queen. "I'm growing weary of this. Off with her head." She waved her hand.
"But suppose taking off her head would not stop her as she is only clockwork, Your Majesty?" said the Executioner meekly.
"Then wash out her oiled gears!" snapped the Queen.
"Wash?" asked the Ace.
"The salt water should rust her to every gear and hinge."
"You mean…"
"I mean exactly everything!" snapped the Queen further. "Get Nevin off the dock in here and send Lise off it!"
Lise clenched her teeth.
"At once, You Majesty!" exclaimed the Ace.
"Guards!" ordered the King. "Restrain the— the— whatever she is. How many laws has she broken just by mocking the court? By speaking to us at all as a non-person? Calling an object to speak as a witness? Ordering a hatter turned-clockwork-fixer to go to a place that doesn't need fixing or hatting? Getting a member of the royal family in trouble for a crime he did not commit?"
"At least forty," sighed the Queen as though she was too benevolent to count the exact number.
"Amoris, my love," cooed the King wistfully back as though he really wished he had married someone else, and the Queen only smiled.
#
Before heading outside, Hakuto once more checked the main computer lab, and was quite satisfied that Mercury had gone. Then he rushed down the steps to get out of the lab himself. Even as he came to the skylight entrance, he knew that there was no escaping this madness easily. He wondered again if he was somehow dreaming all this in some horrible hallucination. Perhaps he could be lying in a hospital room with a concussion, but he did not stop to ponder about it.
He pushed open the revolving glass doors out to the crowd of people gathered just outside, and he felt as though he had not gone out of a building but into one.
He felt he was breathing in a tight space with a clogged filter recycling the same air, except that there was no smell in it. He had to stop and walk away from the crowd a few moments, despite it being against procedure. Nothing was procedure anyway and there was no fire. Besides, everyone else was as much preoccupied with the surroundings as he was.
"Is it a storm?" "A tornado." "Then we should head to a bunker." "Fire inside and tornado outside?!"
The lab was on the top of a hill, and like many dark and dangerous things it was hidden in plain sight as the government gave it all a blind eye. The locals may have had stories about genetic hybrids, but even most of them were mostly about genetically modified food, which was neither illegal nor uncommon.
The town was hidden round the curve of another hill, and a wind farm grew like a field of giant metal daisies with more than half their petals stripped, especially now as the blades did not move an inch. It almost seemed like only half were still standing too. Hakuto could not quite call it a fog or a mist, but the air was so thick that all objects seemed to disperse once too far out of a certain range into the air as though not only was the lab upon a hill, the hill upon a mountain, and the mountain was in an muddy bubble under the ocean— some magically dismal ruins of Atlantis.
As he moved his vision away from the curve that led to town, his mind almost filled-in the tiny hobby farm along the road, but when his eyes met where it should have been, there was no hobby farm that he could see. He turned a little more and the row of windbreaker spruces seemed to drift into a glazed horizon right off the ground like a string of immobile kites.
Hakuto tried to blink his eyes clear. Some allergy could have given him blurred vision, but he had taken his allergy meds that morning, and his sinuses were clearer than anything else on this strange day.
If indeed this dismal scene can be called a day or if there are no days or nights in this murky starless twilight.
He turned his head the other way and it was the same. Hills, silos and trees drifted off into nothing like one staring too close to the corners of an impressionist painting when the main focus was the lab. The lab itself, in the strange grayish green-lighting all around them, looked a little too surreal to even be the lighting before a horrible storm.
"Hakuto!" snapped a voice.
Although it was spoken in anger, the anger was not directed at him. Passively Hakuto spun around to Mars or rather Raul Marcial. Short and a little stocky though he may have been, he more than made up for this with a pair of muscular arms, a great square jaw, and a face not unhandsome when he was calm. Right now however he did not look handsome at all, but rather more like a mastiff the way his rage blared.
Hakuto hoped he would not become collateral damage. Outwardly the only sign of this was a small wince that looked more like disgust than fear, which made Marcial look all the fiercer.
"You might as well call me Mr. Adhikari," muttered Hakuto.
"Get over here!" was all Marcial snapped. "Jupiter wants you."
No later had Hakuto stepped into the crowd when Jupiter himself, or rather Dr. Fulgur Donner, came into view. He hardly had to push his way through the crowd. Like a god, his very movement caused the other people in the crowd to back up like minnows from the feet of a human child wading through the shoals. He was tall and perfectly carved— stone come to life through the magical art of a sorcerer sculptor. His lab coat was more like a robe the way it draped out from beneath a outerwear coat worn only to look more authoritative not from any bit of cold.
Hakuto felt a bit of a chill himself, though he could not say it was the weather which felt more lukewarm if it could be called anything at all. He looked up at Dr. Donner and kept as straight as he was.
Then Donner stopped and asked simply, "Did you see Mercury come down? Wasn't she the one who alerted you to come out of Heartland?"
"I was the one who pulled the alarm, Dr. Donner," said Adhikari.
"Not for a fire, I presume," said Donner darkly.
"And not for a drill," agreed Adhikari.
"No amount of drilling will bore you to anything but tears," said a little voice as tremulous as it commanded presence.
Silence.
Then came a shriek from Venus also known as Dr. Copper Fria. A few other non-pantheon workers also gasped and cried out.
"No!" sobbed a secretary falling to her knees.
"We're trapped inside the system!" cried Uranus who was also known as Herschel Georgi; his voice as shrill as ever.
Adhikari hardly had to look to know he was speaking about that White Rabbit that was not Hakuto.
"It's the only explanation!" Uranus went on. "There's no Mercury. She must have done this."
"I see the tears are already falling by the bucket," sighed the White Rabbit with sympathy, but he was too in a hurry to dwell on it.
"Are you Dr. Fulgur Donner, the leader of this expedition?" he asked of Jupiter himself.
"I am," said Donner less mystified than Adhikari liked. "And we shall talk right now about what is going on here or you will be the first animal test subject in the facility no matter what the laws are against such things."