JMJ

Chapter Nineteen

Words Choice

"I owned a shop," Matthias began then shrugged. "Well, own. If it's still there when I come back."

Esther furrowed her brow a bit, but Matthias would not let her interrupt.

"A sort of pop-culture thrift shop— as well as my own makeshift things," said Matthias now taking up a stick like a little boy meandering off the trail in a part whacking weeds; though they were admittedly few. "What I care to sell. A guy with little chocolates shaped like Death Stars and whatnot at the counter too. A girl from the college making hats and masks. There was coffee and— well, tea of course. A table outside to sit at for when it was nice. Quaint, right? I just got it going the way I liked it. I half inherited/half bought it from this old Comic Book Guy- type, you know. He wanted to retire, and since I'd been working with my crafts and dealing with the nerds and all, I picked up a lot about the trade. I never was a real nostalgia nerd, especially not that kind, but I knew my stuff. I knew how to pretend I was. 'People person' the old owner called me. Something he never pretended to be and spoke it to me with a disdain."

Matthias laughed. "Great guy! He needed to retire. That's all I know."

"I had a sort of steam punk revolution then when he was off to the Bahamas," Matthias went on after a respectful pause and he paced slowly, "and soon some twenties and thirties mocks to add to it. Worked nicely. I kept the geeky stuff on, of course. I was good at pretending for any kind of customer.

"For the furries I was a furry, for the aging hippy I was a hippy. For the vintage comic book geek I was the one to go to. For electro swing I knew every current as much as I knew who plays the end credits song in Titan A.E.

He paused, blinked strangely to himself, and shook his head. Then shrugged. "I think for a while that's all I did was pretend. Even if I do have a pallet for electro swing."

"I can picture you myself quite the speakeasy bar tender had you lived in a different time," Esther said almost wistfully but fairly affectionately.

Matthias only laughed again.

Esther bit her lip. "But what does that have to do with—?"

"Nothing at first. Except it was funny me encouraging all these… characters. Wanting to not live reality. Not all of them, of course. Even some regulars just wanted to finish reading their series or wanted a present figurine for someone they cared for or to treat themselves after a promotion at work… just like the tea or the novel-T of it for fun anywhere, but there were a lot of them that… I don't honestly believe they knew which dimension they were in. Dead serious. This is coming from a guy who just spent who-knows-how-long brain-toyed into being a Mad Hatter."

"Well," said Esther. "You were more alert about things than the others in the ball. Besides the Cheshire Cat."

"That's because the others… are patients."

"Hmm?"

"Reality Check."

Esther blinked and nodded as though she knew something about it already, which admittedly did not surprise Matthias in the least.

"Right across the street from me," Matthias went on anywhere. "It was a place where neo-whatevers tried to literally create their own realties in this club. They literally did believe that if people sit and think hard enough that they can escape the world they were born into." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "Some of them would buy things from me, and I'd tease them and play them up, depending on the personality. They liked that, but… yeah! I could tell many weren't satisfied with the results."

"Like, were they were trying to make a mental 'Second Life'," muttered Esther sadly as though it was a reference to something Matthias should recall, but at the moment Matthias was not sure he did or not even if the phrase sounded familiar.

"Sort of. It was supposed to be a kind of trance from what I understand where they would will themselves into a world of their own creation. They thought they were basing it off some ancient ritual, which is a common cover-up for such morologists. "

Esther made a face. "Isn't that what Wonderland is, though?"

"Only the Disney one."

"Ah, yes…"

"Bear with me here now," Matthias said holding up a warning finger, but despite himself he revealed just a hint of a smile. Admittedly, it was a very good one. "Simply put: no. Besides, they wanted a world that you and I would probably find a boring prison because it was more a living-ambience with no adventures or stress of any kind."

"Like their own vision of heaven," muttered Esther.

Matthias shrugged again but quickly held up his finger for the next emphatic phase of conversation. "But here's where it gets funny. The leader of the club didn't believe any of it."

"Trying to scam them."

"That's what I thought at first, but he didn't charge them very much. In fact, it only paid for the renting of the place during that one hour every evening. Not that their gatherings were limited to that. They spent lots of time over the internet doing this too. Had channels and accounts for it everywhere they could. There's the innocent ambience makers for white noise and Dungeons and Dragons. Then there's Reality Check. Yet here again, the members kept most earnings if any from these, not the grand master."

"What did he get out of it then? Sadistic pleasure?" Esther huffed impatiently.

"Oh, I'm sure," said Matthias. "He did have a way with people. He came to me when I was a little less experienced and still knew little about the details of their quest. Had me host events to help sell my merchandise and get more exposure for his thing too. I thought it all a great joke at the time. I saw no harm in it in the business sense of it all. I hosted things just as weird before this. Some Halloweens— well—!"

"I get it," said Esther sitting down on the riverbank.

"Oh, really?" asked Matthias suspiciously. "Enlighten me then."

With amusement he squatted down beside her.

"The people who were in his club are now the patients in the ball thing," Esther said simply without looking at her companion.

Matthias gave the most minimal of nods and then looked away again.

"You suspected…" Esther ventured.

With a laugh, Matthias sat down the rest of the way and threw a stray stone into the brook. "That they really were coming through to a different dimension?"

"Well, I know you suspected something," said Esther.

"Course, I did. That's why I calculated out his expenses behind his back," remarked Matthias. "We hardly had two events together before I figured that out. It was the Wonderland one where I knew this was more a psychological thing with him coming out as more a doctor or a false prophet rather than a game host for profit. It got weird pretty fast. I didn't go to the police, though. He hadn't done anything illegal. I thought it was a bigger scam still about money somehow. I was going to look into it all myself. So I intensified our partnership."

"That's a risk in itself," commented Esther.

"Of course! I got more and more chumly with him to his face and more and more secretive behind his back. Soon enough I found out about this whole network of people working on the project probably the same way you and your people found out about it. Horizon was the big name of the group. I think I'd spent too long among other people's fantasies, though, cuz I was starting to form my own. I thought myself quite the spy, you know, but my helping him in the forefront was getting more and more people into his core membership. I even wrote people on from my own desk for the little weasel."

"You started to think that the good you were doing was not outweighing the bad."

Matthias smiled. "Hmph! I started using my… er, way with people to actually indirectly talk them out of it. Most people didn't see through me well or didn't care. I was a person of confidence at the shop and they all respected me for that, but… he was too smart for that. He saw through me, and I knew our partnership was coming to an end.

"I started planning on picking up shop and planting myself somewhere else. My business was more and more online anyway, so my location could actually have benefited from less store front and more storage. But then, without going into detail, he set me up with a trap I couldn't resist. Of course, I was suspicious, but I took his cheese, and just like that the rattrap snapped. I'm sure in our world we simply vanished off the face of it."

"Sounds like a children's novel in of itself."

"Goosebumps maybe," Matthias said.

"But if you knew all this all along why did you…"

"I didn't have amnesia, but I wasn't myself there," Matthias explained more solemnly now than before. "It's a pull on your mind to keep dreaming. To keep playing. And you could wake up, but you don't want to. Even after I was out of it, it was still a thing that I had to slowly shake off like a hangover."

Esther pursed her lips thoughtfully as she stared with wide blinking eyes into the water. The sunlight sifting through the trees touching her hair and reflected shimmers from the water onto her face like St. Elmo's fire. She turned golden like a Midas touch as she bowed her head. Midway her eyes gleamed like a jewel as her face turned from aghast curiosity to somber gloom.

Matthias touched her shoulder gently, and she did not shake him off.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"Is this place real then?"

Matthias paused. "Yes. In its own right, I think, but not in the same way that reality is."

"So we're not just driven to madness and hallucinating all this?"

"No, I don't believe that. This is the place they want control of or at least humanity's access to it if they can't really do anything to Wonderland itself. They want to control what people believe in, what they imagine. Fantasy is dangerous. Fairy tales are power. 'Literature' may be a 'luxury but fiction is a necessity' and he knows this. If they can suck Wonder itself into only a feel-good black hole abyss of mindless ambience instead a place where people can go to understand better the perilous pearl, the beauty of the gleam that reveals the sharpness of a knife on which they live in the real world, then people will cease to think at all and only be instant-pleasure-seeking slime molds in mazes of Horizon's making."

"But how do you know for sure about what you're saying?"

"Well, a few things," Matthias explained, "but a gloating monologue does help."

"This— uh— nameless person monologued to you?"

Another pause. "That's the other thing." He stood up.

"What?" Esther demanded looking at him now straight in the face as she scurried up after him.

Matthias looked undauntedly back, so that she recoiled just a little. "I don't think he is a person."

Esther frowned, but before she could formulate her question, they were quite broken out of their own little world as Wonder took hold of them like a path sweeps one off one's feet to who-knows-where in the same way thoughts run away with people no matter what the level of seriousness may be weighing it down.

"Of course 'humanity' isn't a person," chipped a voice.

In unison the two humans turned down to the voice coming from the water. Two beady eyes looked up at them, cocked to one side on a small brown head of fur sleeked back like it had been oiled. His shaggy whiskers were still dripping as he cocked his head to the other side upon being scrutinized by the interrupted pair and their wide gaping eyes.

"We weren't talking about that," said Matthias a little annoyed.

Esther continued to blink.

"Well, there's no time to talk if you want to make it before the library opens, you know," said the Otter.

"We don't have any books to return," said Esther simply.

"Don't be silly," said the Otter. "You'll get a fine if you don't."

"We never checked any books out," Matthias insisted.

"Don't be silly. There's always a book to return," said the Otter. "And then once you have the books placed back on the shelves, you'll feel much better and more inclined for breakfast."

"What sort of breakfast?" Esther could not help but ask; she was obviously hungry.

Although his own appetite seemed to have abandoned him for the moment from all he had already unloaded, he knew that it would come back with a vengeance if he stalled too long. Unless, food was unnecessary for them while in Wonderland…?

"There's always sunnies and crayfish and frogs' legs, and I am quite getting into turtle soup," the Otter said.

Esther laughed.

"Is it rich and green?" asked Matthias allowed himself to a little smile as well.

"A little thin, last time," the Otter admitted personably, "though I like the cayenne (not too little or too spicy) but if you have a good banana bulb muffin with blueberry custard, it suffices so nicely for a full meal. Come along or you'll miss it, sillies."

He looked quite ready to zip off then, but just before diving under the water with a pair of goggles snapped over his eyes, Esther called, "Wait!"

"Yes?" asked the Otter looking about in alarm as though something was thinking of swooping down upon them, but he quickly shook his head. "We don't have time to chat."

"But why would you think we were saying that 'humanity isn't a person'?" Esther asked.

The Otter only smiled and said, "You're going to a library. You can find the answers to all questions there including all about humanity."

And down he dove with excellent skill off into the direction that all the other animals had been headed.

"Well, now what?" demanded Esther.

"We go to the library," Matthias offered.

Esther raised a brow.

"Come on," Matthias urged with a gentle tug at her elbow before she could cross her arms, and with a huff Esther followed.

They could not hope to catch up with the Otter, but it seemed that going down river would lead them to their desired destination. Other stragglers were still coming, including what looked like a very tiny gnome or fairy riding on the back of an armadillo companion as he read the end of the book in his hands aloud to his companion.

"'…and now that you've managed the words by themselves you may try the second volume to train them by twos. Once you've gone through all seven volumes you'll have mastered a full train of thought all of your own station to and from which you may carry what you will both passenger and good,'" the gnome fairy was reciting.

"What are you reading?" asked Esther.

The tiny thing closed the book with the sound and depth of a tome as big as the type of college dictionary that resides on its own pedestal in an old castle study. He took off his spectacles as though he was a professor himself and said with his eyes closed, "Word Training 101 in Seven Volumes."

"What's that like?" Esther asked.

"Well, there's 'recalling words' to start with and 'sitting on them' a while. Then there's 'healing' and 'leading'. 'Staying in place' is a particularly difficult phase even with one word if it is a verb. You can only imagine what it's like with a full train of thought, and then as if that wasn't enough there is the 'socializing' of the thing so that it can perform all these actions in front of others rather than in a private thought."

Matthias snorted with amusement.

"You scoff?" asked the Armadillo quite bemused.

"Not at all," said Matthias. "It sounds well thought out."

"Well, it was written by a master of words," said the Gnome Fairy. "I started out with his work on portmanteaus before getting into this sort of thing."

"Humpty Dumpty?" offered Esther.

"Or as he liked to call himself outside of a portman's toes," said the Gnome Fairy, "Humming Umpteenth Tummy of the Dumbing-Umming Tuttery."

"Nice," said Matthias. "A Tuttery must be a thing of beauty."

"Definitely," said Esther.

"Oh, it's an ugly business to be from one however, I'm afraid," said the Gnome Fairy. "Especially when hailing from such a place tutting dumbing-umming. You might believe how many people hate a Tuttery against remaining silent or ambiguous upon subjects that one should have as straight forward as possible."

"Especially when it's right in it's tutting," said Matthias nodding sagely.

"Exactly," agreed the Gnome Fairy. "You seem to be a pair of sense enough. My name is Nory, and this is my roommate Arlo."

"Please to meet you," said Esther.

"Oh, you shouldn't say that to an armadillo," said Nory.

"Why not?" asked Esther.

"Because he may think you believe it literally," said Nory, and just as he was speaking, the frightened creature was gasping and coiling up as though afraid he was being discussed for dinner.

There they stopped. All the other last-minuters passed them by. Nory sat there on the armed lump for a few seconds in silence.

"I'm sorry!" gasped Esther as she spoke to the thing that hardly looked like a living creature anymore. "I meant only that I was happy to be introduced to you."

"It's no good now," said Nory with a very sad sigh and a pitying shake of his head. "He'll be like that a while and he doesn't catch on to making words mean what you wish them to mean so well as all that. Perhaps we should just leave him for now."

"Won't he be offended?" asked Esther.

"Not at all," shrugged Nory hopping off the armadillo and onto the ground with his book tucked neatly under his arm. "He'll follow us in when he's ready. He can still hear us, you know, and the words we've been speaking, though many, will have sunk into his mind enough to be saturated there in time. And he knows I have a book to return."

"Do you want us to—" Esther was perhaps about to ask if Nory needed assistance, but she stopped when she saw how amazingly fast he could move.

It was enough to make one wonder why he was riding the armadillo in the first place if he could move so much quicker, but Matthias left that to Esther.

They came to a very colorfully decorated post not long after this. On top of it was what at first looked like a large bird house with glass doors that covered most of the front. On further approach, however, it was easy to see that no bird would likely find it very comfortable as there were books stuffed, often haphazardly, inside the box so that it looked near to bursting. If it was not for the fact that Nory's book was so small, he would not have been able to fit it in.

"Help me up, please, it's the least you can do," said Nory.

Esther was about to, but Matthias was the gentleman about it, scooping up the little Nory to the ledge just outside the box. With ease Nory opened it the glass door, and he placed the book inside it. He did not bother to say thank you, either way, nor did he need help down. With the skill of a kangaroo rat he leapt and landed neatly on the ground between the two humans. He looked quite triumphant about it too.

"I made it just in time!" he declared.

Matthias raised a brow. "This is the library?"

He crossed his arms when at first Nory did not act as though he had heard.

Esther looked around. There was nobody else about, and certainly not enough books to qualify as the type of library everyone had been talking about.

She exchanged glances with Matthias.

"I thought they offered breakfast," said Matthias.

Still Nory did not answer. He went instead to the little river, which was bound round a bend. Matthias and Esther followed slowly, and just as they took no more than two steps each, there was a chiming sound like the strumming of a harp behind them. Spinning round, they just barely caught sight of the birdhouse cupboard, books, pole and all, drop out of sight beneath the ground.

"No! I'm too late!" cried a near breathless voice in the undergrowth of the forest in anguish.

Neither Matthias nor Esther ever knew who had cried out as they heard now in Nory's direction, the sound of a deep-chest-strumming door being opened on a heavy but well-oiled hinge. They swung back around. Sure enough there was a door that certainly had not been there before, going right into the air— not even into a tree— right over the river. Nory was just slipping into it.

In a dash, Matthias grabbed the massive handle with its lion engraved face carved into the brass. Just he got it to stop he felt the firm but gentle grip of teeth. A shiver went down his spine as he recalled the teeth of crocodiles, but he shook his head. The teeth were not very sharp or else they were very well trained. He blinked at the handle now and it seemed to be trying to be helpful if the earnest expression of the lion's eyes meant anything. Since it did not hurt despite the grip, he held the door out further and allowed Esther in first.

At first she gasped. "Are you okay?"

"Um. Yes. Unexpectedly-so."

Though she hesitated skeptically, Esther stepped into an echoing place beyond. Matthias looked in after her along a grand staircase, and he could not help a little awe at the vast wonder of what awaited him. As he initiated following in after her the teeth loosened their grip on his hand and the heavy door swung shut behind just as he stepped past the type of threshold that might have blocked out a deluge from creeping under the door.