JMJ

Chapter Twenty-Four

Steeping in Dreams

"Yes," said Esther despite herself. "We must save them, and if you won't carry them, we won't go with you."

"There's too many to carry even if I wanted to!" snapped the Maltipook, and as he snapped with his words he snapped his teeth right into a coach in his frustration.

The kittens inside that particular coach mewled in fright.

"You're more a serpent than a dog, I think," said Matthias.

"I'm more a pookah than anything. Why don't you fight me like the hero in the Tulgey Wood? You wanted to so badly before," derided the Maltipook.

"We don't have time to fight!" snapped Esther.

"I don't even have a weapon," Matthias pointed out. "I would at least need a vorpal blade. I don't even think you're a pookah, though, anymore than I think you're a jabberwocky even if you'd jabber on your walkies enough to drive a person crazy."

"People who walk with you probably feel the same way," cut the Maltipook. "Besides, I think with how you're collared in green like you are, you'd be walking the green mile before long with how a walk with you might end with the wrong company."

"You think I'm a murderer?" asked Matthias.

"You know you're a murderer," said the Maltipook simply and very coldly; he was speaking less and less flustered and more and more mordantly as though he got sadistic pleasure from speaking like this. "Anyone who breaks a mother's heart is capable of murder."

"Nobody's incapable of murder," said Matthias, "nor is anyone else."

"Redundancy is wasting time," mocked the Maltipook.

"I wasn't being redundant," said Matthias.

"Speaking nonsense about people who don't exist is just as much a waste of time," said the Maltipook smiling wickedly.

"Not if it represents a thought or idea you're trying to work out, and there's nothing like Nobody to represent what somebody is capable of."

"And if you murder nobody you're just as much a murderer as if you murdered somebody," said the Maltipook.

"Yes," shrugged Matthias. "Glad you're started seeing it my way, Nick Sardine."

The Maltipook slowly began to sneer. The wider he sneered, the more his face became less puppy-like and more wolfish. The more his ears looked like furry owl horns, the more his lips became flabbier and his teeth became less canine-like, though far sharper at the bottoms like a set of white guillotines for a line of rats. His fur became thinner to reveal his skin scaly. His eyes bulged out like baseballs from his sockets. All the while his grin was growing so strained that it looked like something quite like the infamous herb of Sardinia holding it into that rictus position, and he would have given anything to frown. Like huge harry hooks his paws lifted out, three on each paw. His tail lashed like a rat's tail. His wings flashed out like Smaug's with glittering gold, and his whiskers were like those of catfish whipping out the sides of his face or perhaps like an ancient ryu. He wore also a waistcoat that was an intense bluish green, as bright as his eyes were ruby-colored like cold jewels of haunted pirates' treasure stuck into the sockets of a demonic puppet.

Matthias could see in that strange wolfish, fish-like face, a face that used to be his reflection, which was the most spine-tingling of all. It would have been just a beast if not for this. It was the reflection of the face he had seen in the ball, save far more neuro-toxic.

In a dizzy loop Matthias felt himself sliding forward, yet he felt himself waking in bed on the fateful hour when time had seemed to stop in that primordial clockwork paradise. It was the face of a false hatter in a false wonderland that would face him in the nearest mirror. It was the face of that man, that demon, who had stared upon his prone naked body in a nightmare that was more real than anything he had experienced in all his wandering wondering here, because it was not the land of dreams but a place he had been before he had been injected with Mercury's insane passion.

When he blinked he could almost feel the sheets.

Had this all been a dream?

Were even his memories of a real life somewhere far, far away only just dreams of a madman in a very small and boring world? A world that children dream of and think is grand, but were those children even real? Even the Cheshire Cat said that the children longed to be him. He was in Heartland, the last of Matthias' youth. Had he just been bewitched by him like the kittens that were children in his dream? Could this all be the desires of his heart about a woman who was only made of clockwork and he only a lonely little dweeb who had no courage for a woman who was real?

He could almost smell the tea starting on the Robinson-inspired clockwork system he had cleverly and pointlessly designed out of genius boredom. Out of his nervous energy.

Out of his mind.

His mind could not be taken apart physically to be put back together, but certainly psychologically it could be taken apart by these dreams like a million shards of a mirror. Was he only steeping in such delusions of grandeur and heroics to explain himself into a better and more fulfilling life.

If Lise was just part of someone's dream and not just anybody's but his, there was no more a nobody than Matthias Haddler, an ex-hatter lost in designs of his own making. A mad scientist was worse than a mad hatter, because at least a mad hatter only was mad by himself but a mad scientist was mad enough to create a world of madness that could suck everyone else around him into a black hole that was his own heart!

Was the lease only Lise, a clockwork doll that did not even belong to him? Was this his lease on Wonderland instead of hers? Maybe he had spent life since childhood in an experimental psychiatric ward for a mental disease so rare that he could not hope to escape to sanity if there even was such a thing…

What happened at the start?

Before you murdered the time yenned.

And spun round tables— weak rampart.

You're stalling at the end.

A voice echoed that was his. A voice echoed that was the voice of the Maltipook, the multi-poke, the choke of Nick Sardine, the malted curdling of his own fears and desires into an enemy that he could face with a vorpal blade of his tongue and cheek like a black adder mixed with a puffer fish.

You're stalling at the end…

Mocking? Warning? A sardonic mixture of both?

Nick Sardine? The Mad Hatter? How come he could not tell the difference? Was there even a difference?

He felt himself being sucked into his bed or was it only his body being sucked into the black hole of his brain that was the black hole of his heart like that metal ball striking the earth, merging both into one awful thing before blasting out the other side?

"Matthias!" screamed a whisper.

He felt a hot squeeze on his wrist and a sound like a deep lake's crack of winter's shielding ice blaring in his ears like the foundations of the earth at its birth. It boomed through his chest and he gasped like one who had almost suffocated.

He jolted back to the train as much as to any train of thought, and realized that the hand that had grabbed him was Esther's just before he also realized that the kittens were holding their teeth into the cuff of his shirt sleeves coming out the end of his coat sleeves.

They could none of them been able to keep him upright and had only been able to balance him from falling by a miracle. He stared gaping at the thought that he might just as well had pulled them with him into his own despair had he not woken sooner. There was irony in that as much as reflections of pasts and futures, but he could not tell what it was. Was it because the dry ice fuzz could no longer give reflections?

"Are you okay?" breathed Esther, a cold white puff escaping with her breath in the air that had suddenly become bluer and grayer and darker.

The suction sounds of deep ice shifting like seismic plates echoed all around them. As Matthias licked his suddenly very dry lips he wondered if it was the sound of the ball going through the earth.

He was steady enough now, but Esther and kittens had not released their hold. They continued holding until Matthias climbed back up from the edge where he had been apparently about to go for a dip into the sea of fuzz that likely would have sucked him away like into quicksand out of thought and time.

Once he was up on top of the upturned coach, he asked, "What happened to Nick Sardine?"

"He submerged," said Esther. "I'm sure he meant for you to follow him. Was it the mercury poisoning?"

"I thought I got rid of the mercury poisoning with the key that— pfft! My old man gave me," admitted Matthias, "but maybe this is deeper than that. Was Nick Sardine who abducted you?"

Esther shook her head. Both of their voices were hushed and the sounds of singing ice went on in the hushed empty world. It was as though something was crying or at least lamenting in some pre-human language about a languishing that was beyond their comprehension. It was a solemn thing despite the urgency of the moment, and yet it was bewilderingly odd like angelic whales or something of that nature.

"He didn't abduct me," said Esther. "He only distracted me, but why did he make you look like him?"

"I don't think he made me look like anything," said Matthias. "I think he made himself look like the Hatter of Mercury's creation just as she made me look like that."

"But then who is Mercury?"

"A reflection of my fears personified?" Matthias suggested with some lament of his own. He huffed. "I'm sorry, Esther."

"Sorry?" asked Esther, "It's okay. Well, I'm mean, it's definitely not okay, but it's not your fault. You're the one who was the victim of all this, and you've been helping me this whole time. I couldn't have gone through Wonderland without you."

"I made you come," said Matthias looking her straight in the face even though she was resisting it a little. "I didn't have to. I just suck, I guess. Being compared to the Mad Hatter is not a compliment."

"Being the Mad Hatter was no choice of yours."

"Esther… you don't—"

"Understand? Yes, I do. You're torturing yourself about something that you had no control over."

"Didn't I?"

"We been over that you wanted to try to get to the bottom of Reality Check."

"Like a stupid hero in a movie," agreed Matthias nodding. "Yep. That was definitely my fault."

"Then what's that got do with being the Mad Hatter against your will? You could have been the Catterpillar. You could have been the King of Hearts. Or the Knave."

"I would have preferred the Knave," teased Matthias despite himself with a laugh that was very cold out into the sounds of ice-wails. "We're so close to the end. I can feel it now, and we don't even know what to do."

"Well, you blaming yourself won't help," Esther said kindly.

Matthias put his hand over his crossed legs. "It's like we're at the end of the world and we have… kittens of all things! Kittens and trains like Chessie from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway!"

There was a short pause as Esther considered pursuing Matthias' out-of-place self-pity or leaving that for the riddles that were a bit more in place, and yet she was in indecision mostly because she could not decide if what seemed the more pressing problems were actually only distractions from other things. Matthias was just about to attempt to quell her fears about him, but Esther cleared her throat with her mind made up.

"Have you ever had anything to do with that railway? When I was little I thought it was the Casey Jones railway," said Esther, "and named my first cat Casey because I liked the picture on this card deck we used to have with that vintage logo on it."

"You mean the Casey Jones Railroad Museum? I don't think Casey ever had a railway named after him."

Now it was Esther who laughed; it was tinkling-dry but not quite cold.

"What's so funny?" asked Matthias raising a brow.

"I don't know," said Esther. "The fact we're talking about train history or just the fact that you know all this trivia. Can nothing stump you? You're marvelous, you know! You could win money with that talent."

"Pfffshsh," Matthias shook his head and grinned fondly at Esther, a kindled love warmed the cold despair away at least a little like a small fire in this otherwise hostile north pole of a waste land, and with that kindled spirit of care, his grin faded. He looked away to hide his sigh, but Esther was his wife, after all. He could not hide it. That was the point. "He kissed his wife at the station and it was the last he ever did before the 'promised land', you know."

"Matthias, you're not dying," snapped Esther. "Not anymore than I am."

"Everything's about separating," Matthias admitted then. "Everything. Haven't you noticed?"

"I've… noticed," Esther huffed, and she quickly leaned into him.

Matthias grabbed her into his side like the missing bone of his rib cage.

"You think you're gunna inevitably divorce me?" asked Esther.

"No."

"That you're going to die?"

"I don't think so."

"Then it's just irrational fears, isn't it?" asked Esther. "Besides I was the one who brought up Casey Jones. I forgot he died and I never heard the ballad before. Didn't Chessie after growing up have her husband come back safely from the war to help everyone on the train get back to sleeping like a kitten back to their families?"

Matthias nodded. "Peake? Well, we could go as a couple now to a game show, now couldn't we?"

"We have to get those kittens back," said Esther.

"We don't even know that for sure," Matthias pointed out more gloomily than he had meant.

"Well…" Esther looking out after the crater. "I know what you're afraid of."

"You are?" asked Matthias cocking his head.

"You're afraid that this isn't real just like I was afraid."

Matthias nodded and shrugged. "Probably."

"Then… let's go for it," said Esther. "We both know that the real world is more real than this one, and in the real world I'm married to Matthias Haddler."

Matthias held up his ring finger. She held her up too and almost clanked hers against his as though they were a superhero team about to transform into action.

Matthias could not help but click the roof of his mouth with a renewed grin. "So, Chessie? How are we going to have our kittens sleep soundly on the train without the train working? I think we at least need a substitute."

Esther tapped her chin in thought. "Unless you know how to—"

Cli-Clang!

Both humans jumped. The kittens white and black scurried behind them. In front of them was a blade black and solid but with no sheen. The handle was white like bone; it too was not reflecting any light.

The Haddlers lifted their heads to the most logical source, and there stood the man— or the creature disguised as one— Nick Sardine looking exactly like Matthias had in the ball, except for the earrings at the top of his ears that looked like double-vision mockeries of their wedding rings. Oh, and his red flaming irises burning from a very cruel and mocking soul so that the whole figure looked a little different despite it all.

Matthias reached out to grab the sword.

"Ah, ah!" said Nick. "You're not the one with the lease."

Matthias glowered.

"She is," said Nick nodding to Esther with evil glee plastered on his face like a mask. "She's Alice. She's the main character. SHE! It's a handmaid's tale, Matthias. She fights the creepy noodly adversary, and you sit the hapless damsel. Haven't you seen the movies?"

Rolling his eyes Matthias reached out to grab the sword anyway. Esther sure wasn't taking it; though she wasn't looking very pleased at old Nick with daggers in her eyes. Matthias picked up the sword but instantly dropped it again with a cry.

"Ah!" And he stumbled almost falling off the coach.

Nick snatched it back up with dexterous skill like a cross between a court jester and a ninja assassin. In a fluid motion he tossed the sword at Esther, and Esther despite herself caught it just barely falling over the edge herself. She tried to throw it away once she regained balance, but it was obvious just by watching her that she was stuck with the sword in her hands.

She screamed.

"Fight," said Nick then slipping a matching sword out his sleeve. "Or I kill Matthias!"

He swung down like a swooping hawk to hew Matthias in two, but just as he was about to feel the singing blade swing through his head down the middle, there was a deafening clang. Now he knew without a doubt that Nick could have slashed the sword through Esther's and had both swords slice into his flesh, but old Nick had stopped himself with her interruption and stood up with a predatory bow of his head as he slashed towards Esther.

Matthias shoved Nick from behind right off the train. Almost dizzily he stumbled back as he did; for he had not expected Nick to go down so easily. The beastly thing screamed all the way down, and it was dark comedy how long and shrill and pained he screamed as though falling down Reichenbach Falls instead of falling off a train.

Esther was frozen to her spot.

Matthias wiped the drool from his lip a little more theatrically than was probably best. Then just before he looked over the edge, Nick leapt back up like a demon to shove Matthias off the other side just as Esther was swinging her sword madly back at him in an attempt to stop him.

It seemed to be further down for him now too, or maybe it was just in slow motion. He suddenly hit the ground, stumbling and rolling. But he was surprised. He was neither freezing to death nor burning. He was not sinking either but rather on something soft and even supportive. He was floating over everything like on a magic carpet. As he looked down he saw that it was a fur carpet, but the fur was still attached to bodies and the bodies were very much alive. They may not have been flying, but they were gliding fluidly.

"Kittens!" he breathed; as he collapsed back down into them the lightbulb went on. "Cheshire kittens."

He sat up.

Although he could not prove it, he recalled how the Cheshire Cat in this Wonderland was a reflecting creature. Almost glasslike, he recalled. Were these kittens made of glass and that was why they could slide and repel against glass? More likely it was the kindling, through. They were actually melting the fuzzy glass shards into a liquid underneath their paddling paws, despite the normal temperature for cats on their backs upon which he was sprawled awkwardly. They shimmered visibly and invisibly in such a way that he sometimes could see right into the molten liquid as though he was riding the current himself, and there did seem to be a current. It was pulling them towards the crater slowly but slowly faster as towards a drain.

He bolted up to his knees as he looked back at the train slipping away. The fight was in slow motion. The blades moved like light sabers anti-glowing instead of glowing. Tears streamed down Esther's face and although she fought harder and harder Nick was treating it more and more like a game. Lying on his back one second, he would skip up spritely and dance from behind to in front of her. He made fun of her all the while, though what he said Matthias could not make out. Both voices were in almost comical slow-motion drones, but that only made it more difficult to watch and not take less seriously.

He did continue to watch, though, cocking his head slowly, trying to get his mind refocused on what to do.

Nick was goading her into self-annihilation forcing her to do that which she did not want to do for a scene she always detested in a part that made her want to vomit. Why? For the fun of it?

Matthias doubted it.

"Kittens," he said.

The kittens looked up at him, especially the white and black ones from their first encounter.

"Can you swim back?"

The kittens began to mewl excitedly and although there was a swirl of delay as they reoriented themselves, they began to swim back with strength for the train.

Matthias tried to keep his eyes on Esther as his mind raced. The gleam of the liquid glass grew stronger and stronger around him, causing a haze to grow. Through the haze he could see something contrastingly more clearly than less. The horizon, which was perfectly curved, began to look like long scales with light streaking through them. It looked like a very familiar phenomenon, though nothing he had seen in the sky that he could call by scientific names. The streaks grew longer and more metallic, yet like the glass liquid around him, it was not a hard substance. It seemed to be gliding out from itself like something gooey parting, but in a strangely dry yet elegant sort of way without real dripping.

Wait!

He knew where he had seen this before. It was when one looked through only partly cracked open eyelids through one's eyelashes.

The Lease! They would wake up soon. Or Esther would. Or would she?

Was that Nick Sardine's game? To have her kill herself before she woke? Or since he doubted they could die here, it was more likely just to driver her mad, and madness would take her like so many Alices before her. Mercury had been only one among who-knew-how-many since Nick Sardine stepped into Wonderland. Was she too wound up now to be broken from the curse Nick Sardine was winding round her?

The closer he drew, the more in-time he was with the fight.

Esther's scream pierced the air like a ghost in a dome sealed and in despair.

"You're alone!" Nick Sardine mocked her weakening muscles, her weakening strength, her weakening anger and hatred waning into terror and misery. "If you don't do it, no one can!" "Only a woman's touch is what matters." "No one will save you." "No one can save you." "You're the one with the sword. Use it." "Like a girl!" "The vorpal blade was held by what looks more like a girl than a boy in the illustration." "Alice became the son." "Everyone knows that now days." "Now she must take it up, because the sons all failed but the moons shine more wholesomely in the darkened sky!"

There were no reflections left but Nick Sardine's. He took full advantage of this with his voice shattering about like a million voices from every side echoing in this bulb chamber that seemed smaller and smaller as though they were inside a shrinking snow globe. He reflected the fear of a mocking Hatter after a humorous character in a children's book. Mocking laughter, mocking fun, mocking relaxing with human companionship in such a way that could make any human never want the company of another human again without renewed miserable echoes of this beast!

No matter how many horror movies had already done just this sort of thing, Matthias suddenly locked onto Nick Sardine as the only enemy he had ever known in the most novel of ways. He had only one desire: to rip off his head and go galumphing back with it, but he knew a better revenge than that.

Esther had already stabbed him through the middle twice and now her sword was stuck in his back. Her hands were still stuck to the hilt.

"Esther!" Matthias snapped as time at last was in time with his own time frame.

"Get him, Matthias!" wailed Esther savagely. "Prove him wrong! He can't escape now! GET HIM!"

Her voice pierced through Matthias' body like a vorpal blade itself, but he braced himself against it. He remained as calm as he could despite his wildly beating heart. He smiled, weakly though it was.

"That's what I planned to do. Esther. Jump."

A hiss echoed across the strange half-fuzz and half-liquid sea like a wind through reeds or an enlarged snuffing of a candle. Matthias could not help his withheld breath, but he held his hand out more eagerly than before as time seemed again to slow. Or had it stopped altogether?

Nick had stopped wriggling against the blade. Esther stood, her eyes wide and gaping down at Matthias. Her lips held into a tight thin grim line in her pale sweating face fevered to within an inch of her life. Tears watered at the edges of her eyes.

"Trust me," said Matthias feeling a slight swell of what could turn into tears of his own but he did not let them.

His smile faded but he did not stop looking straight at her.

With full understanding and full trust Esther jumped. Her reflection in the molten glass was perfectly gleaming beneath her without a fault and seemed to double her skill and speed.

Nick Sardine slipped off the blade as Esther went down, but the kittens did not catch her. To Matthias' dismay they formed a hole and she fell into the hot liquid with hardly a splash. His heart stopped and Nick Sardine laughed, but seconds later a splash exploded from the hole just as Matthias was about to dive in after her.

Esther gasped for breath. Her hands waved wildly but without the blade. Matthias almost rolled his eyes as he helped her up at how those cats had known that the liquid would part her from the blade. Had he known too, despite his fears? It made sense, though he did not know why or how. He pulled her into him a second time as a rib of his own chest, and Esther clung to him sobbing and choking, though trying hard not to be loud or obnoxious despite herself.

Matthias held her tighter still. They almost were one being then and there without words, without thought even. Just breaths, just heartbeats, and the cat raft drifted again for the crater almost without either passengers' knowing.

Nick Sardine knew it, though.

With a roar like a rabid lion he lunged after them onto what was left of the pile of metallic glass fuzz that did not reflect anything.