Текст книги "Figment"

Автор книги: Cameron Jace

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Chapter 16

 

The footsteps of the mortician are that of a slightly heavy woman. The marble floor squeaks underneath her cheap sport shoes. Or so I believe. It's hard to tell for sure.

Heavy steps. Very slow. Trudging.

I try to slow my breathing, as there isn't enough air inside the bag. This should be over soon. I need her just to roll my table out of the room. She's probably looking for my ID or something to identify my corpse.

The mortician stops a few tables away and waits.

Then she walks again. I hear her tap what I assume is a paper chart. Her breathing is heavy, like a shivering gas pipe about to explode.

I try to occupy my mind again with anything that will calm me down. In the beginning it is Jack. Oh, Jack, with all your absurdness, your silliness, and your cute dimples. But then Jack's image fades to the sound of music outside my bag.

The mortician woman probably uses an iPod with small speakers. A song I know well: "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult.

Interesting.

This might take some time. I don't think she is in a hurry. All I can do is wait for her to pick me up.

A flick of the mortician's cigarette lighter drags things into an even slower pace. I don't blame her. Time is probably worthless for a woman who spends her days living among the dead.

She inhales her cigarette shortly and then exhales, coughing. Smoke seeps through the bag and into my nostrils. I manage not to sneeze. Dead people usually don't, I imagine the Pillar saying.

But I know the woman is near.

I hear her pick up the paper chart again, and tread slowly toward me. She starts whistling with the song: "Don't fear the reaper...la la la la la la."

I want to wiggle my feet to the rhythm, but I hold back.

I wonder if she listens to the same song each day. While the Pillar's favorite subject is madness, this woman is surrounded by death. Maybe she grew too numb to it. That would explain her easiness and relaxed demeanor. I wouldn't be surprised if she orders pizza. Two slices, chopped-off heads topping, and some mayonnaise, please. I'll tip generously if you slide me a Meow Muffin from under the table.

"Alice Wonder," the woman mutters, flipping the chart. "Where art thou?" She taps her heavy feet, and then sucks on the cigarette.

I am imagining her in a white coat, a bit too tight for her size. Big-boned, almost square; red curls of thick hair with a pencil lost inside the bush. Fat cheeks, bubbly and wavy, too.

The waiting is killing me. I am about to zip up and scream at her: Here I am. Just take me out!

"So, here you are." She stands real close, reeking of cigarettes, the cheap stuff, and some other smell I can't identify. "Someone made a mistake shoving you here." She kills the boredom by uttering everything she does aloud. I know because I used to do the same in my cell. "Your sorry arse belongs somewhere else, young lady."

This blind game isn't fun anymore. I realize I will probably never know how the mortician looks like after she delivers my corpse to the chauffeur's car. Then she stops again and coughs. This time, she coughs really hard, as if puking. I hear the cigarette swoosh into something. What's going on out there?

A heavy thud causes a ripple through my metallic table. The rollers skew sideways. The woman chokes.

The tune of Don't Fear the Reaper continues in the background, but the woman stopped whistling, if not breathing.

"Help!" she barely pronounces, while her fat hand slaps like a heavy fish on the side of my bag.

What am I supposed to do? Help her, right?

And blow my cover?

What is happening to her?

Surprisingly, the woman stops choking.

"Bloody cigarettes," she mumbles. I hear her stand up. Her voice is a bit rustier, the music in the background making the whole incident sound like a joke.

There is a long moment of silence, only interrupted by her heavy breathing. She should also stop smoking. And eating—what's that smell again? Yeah, she somehow reeks of baking.

She decides to change the song on the iPod. Am I ever going to get out of here?

I am not familiar with the new tune. An American sixties song. A merry song, actually. Funny and quirky.

"'I am a Nut' by Leroy Pullins," the mortician documents. Then the lighter flicks again. "I love this song!"

What? She is smoking again?

This time she takes a long drag, as if her near-death experience rewarded her with an additional lung.

She moves toward me again, tapping her paper chart. Her feet aren't as heavy. I wonder how.

She takes another drag and whistles along with the song. The singer is a nut himself. All he says is "I'm a nut," a few fast words, then "I'm a nut" again. Then he stops to a stroke of a chord of his guitar and says, "Beedle-dee-bah, beedle-dee-bah, beedle-dee-ree-pa-dom."

I have to check this song out, if I ever get out.

I hear the woman stop and swirl in her place like she's Elvis Presley on mushrooms. I am about to laugh. What happened to this mortician woman? Am I back in the Radcliffe Asylum already?

She approaches my bag and taps a hand on it. "Here you are, Alice Wonder," she says. I picture her with a big smile on her face, pushing against those chubby cheeks. "Time to take you were you belong."

Finally! I sigh. This took forever.

The smell of baking on her breath makes me hungry. I should have had a big meal back in the asylum. What's with all the mentioning of food today?

I don't care. I just want to get out of here.

Instead of being rolled outside, the woman's hand reaches for the bag's zipper. Maybe she wants to check out my face. I wonder if I will look dead enough to her.

Hold that breath, Alice.

The zipper slowly reveals my face to her, and the reeking of baking strengthens in my nostrils. There is a long silence, followed by the end of the nut song. The silence doubles up uncomfortably. I do my best not to open my eyes. But I don't know if I can hold my breath any longer.

"Very paradoxical, I must say," the woman says with a satirical tinge to her voice. "If you hold your breath long enough, you're dead. If you give up and start breathing, you're mad. Isn't that so, Alice from Wonderland?"

My eyes snap open.

I inhale all the air it can. I am in utter shock. A silent shiver pinches through all of my limbs, and madness almost blinds my vision.

What did she just say?

Although the mortician looks exactly like I imagined her, the smell of baking on her mouth says otherwise.

It's the smell of a Meow Muffin.

Chapter 17

I am paralyzed with horror. All my wishes to rid the world of the Cheshire evaporate in his presence. His grin, plastered on the poor mortician's face, is unmistakable. Damned are those who lay eyes upon that grin too many times, for it's unforgettable and will guarantee a lifetime of nightmares.

"What do you want from me?" I scatter the syllables on my tongue. I wish there was a way to camouflage my fear—maybe some hookah smoke like the Pillar's that I'd hide my real fears behind.

There is none.

"Love you, too." The Cheshire flashes a chubby grin and then takes a long drag from his cigarette. His view from down here makes me feel like an ant. His posture is like a towering building of nightmares.

Instinctually, I slide myself out of the bag and jump off the other side of the table.

The Cheshire doesn't move. He watches as I wound my left knee and almost twist my ankle. I run toward the faraway bulb, the one I hadn't come near before. It turns out it leads to a metallic double door leading outside. I limp a few times, fall, and pick myself up again. Part of my escape is me hopping on all fours like a rabbit.

The Cheshire still stands still. I know because of the muffin smell. He is behind me, dragging on the mortician's cigarette, enjoying the show.

I am such a coward, running away like that. I reach for the door's heavy handles. I don't think I am ready for the Cheshire yet.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there," the Cheshire mocks behind me.

I stop in my tracks. I don't know why. A flash of a Lewis Carroll in Victorian England flashes before my eyes. It's like an electric shock. Painful but effective. It wakes me up and unwraps me from my spider webs of fear.

I give up on the handle and turn around to face the Cheshire. This is what I should do. I shouldn't run. I am here to catch him, not escape from him.

I don't know what Carroll's dream was about, but I know I don't want to end up regretful like him. I don't want to say, I couldn't save them, a week from now.

"Oh." The Cheshire licks his paws. Cat's habits. He stands between two rows of corpses on his sides. It's totally funny, in a very sinister way, to see the mortician gleaming with evil intentions. "So, you might be the Real Alice after all."

I stand with my back to the door, grimace, and shake my head, wondering why he says that.

"A Real Alice wouldn't run away from me," he elaborates. "The door is locked, however. But you didn't know that, did you?" He jingles a keychain in his hands. "Someone could still open it from outside, but no one knows you're here, Alice."

"How do you know that?" Frankly, I am shocked the door is locked. I don't know if he is lying to me. Maybe he is tricking me to see if I'll go back and try to open it. I stand my ground, fists clenched.

"Nobody cares for you, Alice." He grins. "You know that."

I can't argue with that. Only Jack seems to care. Where is he when I need him?

"You've always been like that," he continues. "Even in the books, you were a lonely, possibly mad, girl wandering Wonderland—which was probably all in her head." He laughs and smirks and grins and confuses the hell out of me when he says that. "You never made a real friend in that book, remember?"

"My sister was waiting for me when I woke up," I mumble, my head slightly lowered. The Cheshire hit a sensitive tumor in my soul. I am not only mad. I am lonely. I get it. It's time to get over it!

"Your sisters hate you, Alice. They hate you so much none of them bothered telling you the details of how you killed your friends. And your mother is too weak to protect you." He is enjoying this. "And your friends?" He kills the cigarette under his heavy foot and rubs his chin. "Oh, you killed them."

"You're lonely too!" I take a step forward. It actually unsettles him. He didn't expect that. "You've always been lonely, Cheshire. Humans killed your parents. You swore revenge on the world. Such a lonely lunatic who has no one to love him." The mortician woman's face knots. I press harder: "Even in Wonderland, no one cared for you. You and your silly grin, neglected in the Duchess' kitchen, then hiding on trees in the forest, appearing and disappearing, and commenting on the world only to take away attention from your miserable existence."

"Interesting." He steps forward, squinting at my face. "Tell me more. Is that really you, Alice?"

I shrug then lift my head up. "Why is it so important if I am the Real Alice?"

"Oh, it's important. You have no idea." He still glares, taking another careful step forward. "What puzzles me is that you don't remember any of it. I wonder why. What is it that the Pillar knows about you that I don't? Who are you, Alice?"

The Cheshire steps forward, the collective sum of the hate in the world glimmering in her eyes.

Chapter 18

"I don't care about either of you." I take another step forward, not knowing how this will end. Will I fist-fight a cat eventually?

"What do you care about, then?" His tone is investigative.

"To stop you from killing children and stuffing their heads in watermelons all over Britain."

He laughs. "Neatly executed crime; very artistic, you must admit."

I feel disgusted. I don't know how I look when disgusted but my face is in pain.

"Do you know how hard it is to stuff a head in a watermelon?" He is creepily sincere. Human lives don't mean anything to him. "No one appreciates art anymore." He rolls his eyes. "Is it because I am a cat?" The mortician's fingers turn into hairy claws, like Wolverine. "Do I have to change my name to Da Vinci or Picasso for you to appreciate my work?"

"You don't want anyone to appreciate you. The more you're hated, the more you love it," I say. "But since you asked, how about you just die? The world loves dead artists."

"Then I shall never be loved." The mortician slightly raises her meaty arm and waves her hands sideways. "Because I can't die." He smiles thinly at my attempt to humiliate him. "And the killing of fat kids won't stop. The real killings didn't even begin yet." She points at the dead corpses. "Humans are nothing but pawns in this Wonderland War."

"Why kill kids who are overweight?"

"Are you afraid to say 'fat' kids?" She smirks. "Is that politically incorrect? Is the blunt truth always politically incorrect?"

"Wow. You do have a grudge against 'fat' kids." I don't like the sound of it on my tongue, but I need to speak his insane language so I can read between the lines.

"You will understand what I mean if you figure it out, Nancy Drew." She breathes into her paws. "You and your hookah-smoking Inspector Gadget." This seems to amuse him to death.

"If this is an old grudge between you and the Pillar—"

"It's not that," she cuts in.

"If it's about the grudge you hold against humanity, please remember that this happened so long ago." I don't even know what I am doing, conversing with the enemy.

"Nothing is long ago." She still scans my face, as if she wants to spot evidence of me being the Real Alice. I catch her/him staring at my neck as well. "Don't you watch the news? Humans are walky-talky apes, still stained with barbaric behaviors after so many centuries of evolution. They might dress better, talk mellower, and invent cool gadgets. They will say that they prefer love over war, but it's all nonsense. Humans are still monsters. Always will be." He stops and takes a breath, not finding what he was looking for in me. "But then, all my grudges aren't what the Wonderland War is about."

"What is it about, then?" If the Pillar refuses to tell, do I expect the Cheshire to?

"If you were the Alice, you would've known," he says. "Right now, I need to put you to continued tests, until you prove you're her."

"By killing children?" I can't digest his logic.

"Whatever it takes," he says. "Besides, you can still minimize the killings by solving the riddles." He cocks his head with another grin. "Think of it as a Catch-22. Either you don't solve the riddles and I keep allowing the murders, or you solve the riddle, I know you're the Alice, and we start the Wonderland Wars." He rubs his claws together.

"What kind of sick lunatic are you?"

"The unkind type," the mortician sneers. "Let's not waste time, Alice." She starts smoothening her fingernails with one of the metallic instruments on the tables. "You were smart enough to get the muffin message, and smarter to realize all the victims are fat kids." He cocks his head at me as I glimpse a mallet resting against the wall behind the tables. Why is there a mallet in a morgue? "I see that you and your Pillar haven't benefited wisely from the clues I left you." Although spoken in a woman's voice, it has this sinister undertone to it. Something I can't explain. Something only nightmares can produce. "So here is my final clue." He raises a hand in the air, his thumb and middle finger close enough it looks like he is about to snap them. "Are you ready for my major clue, Alice?"

"I am." I'd say yes to anything until I get close to that mallet. I need to have some weapon prepared.

The Cheshire snaps his fingers, and a few corpses on his left and right come to life. They abruptly sit straight up and grin at me. Four on his left. Four on his right.

I freeze in place.

I barely learned how to deal with lunatics—other than myself, some might argue. But I am not prepared to deal with the living dead. This is beyond absurd. Why are there eight corpses coming to life?

"You didn't know I can possess nine lives at the same time?" She laughs, picking up two fork-like instruments from the table. What is she going to do, cut them open? "I can even possess them when they are dead. How kewl is that?" The Cheshire seems to be catching up on the lingo. "Let's dance, Alice. Let's dance."

I really wish I was mad now. This can't be happening.

Chapter 19

The two instruments in the Cheshire's hands are used in the most unusual way. I never expected it.

He waves them at the corpses, like a conductor guiding his musicians in an orchestra. On cue, the eight living-dead corpses on the table prepare to chant a melody of sorts.

I grimace, confused, perplexed, and overwhelmed as I watch the first headless corpse pick up its head. It adjusts it slightly off above the neck, and begins singing:

"Do you know the Muffin Man?"

It says it as if it's an obedient girl in school—she is actually one of the five kids. Then she tilts her loose head toward her friend on the table next to her. The other corpse fiddles with his chopped-off head, unable to place it correctly. So he decides to hold it out in both hands, and let it do the singing:

"The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?"

The corpse shakes its own head to the left and right when it says "Muffin Man," like a happy kid in a school choir. The head in the hand swivels toward the next corpse, indicating its turn. The third corpse has its head placed upside down on its neck, still good enough for singing with upside-down lips:

"Do you know the Muffin Man?'

It repeats the phrase, arching an eyebrow at the fourth corpse—downward, of course. The fourth corpse doesn't belong to the Watermelon crimes. Some old lady with an intact head, almost seventy, dressed as a cook with big a white hat. Her face is burned—she must have died in an oven, my guess. The lady finishes the rhymes with a raspy but faint voice.

"Who lives on Drury Lane?"

This time the old lady looks at me with no teeth.

I am not going to remove my head and sing a song!

The Cheshire gazes at me. So do the other four corpses on his right. "One more time." The Cheshire waves his forks. "With feeling!"

In unison they sing it all once more:

"Do you know the Muffin Man?

The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?

Do you know the Muffin Man?

Who lives on Drury Lane?"

Following the Cheshire's conducting, they end the verse with a double clap from their dead, blood-stricken hands.

And then they repeat it. Louder.

I hold my head with both hands and consider screaming. Rarely does screaming solve any problems, I know.

If there is a clue, again, I don't get it. If the Cheshire's intention is to drive me insane, he has done an exceptional job. If none of this is really happening and I am just imagining it, I'd prefer shock therapy in the Mush Room over singing corpses in a morgue. I feel like Alice in the book, falling down an endless rabbit hole where the falling will never stop.

As they keep singing, the desire to hit the Cheshire grows inside me. I step forward and pick up the mallet, my hands trembling. I want to hit the Cheshire so the madness stops. It's not like me, but I've lost it. The pressure is too much. And their voices too noisy. It's all become too much.

I raise the mallet in the air and plod closer to him. He doesn't move. His grin widens.

"Are you going to hit a fat, poor mortician woman, Alice?" he asks calmly, backed up with the maddening rhyme. "You don't know if she has children, takes care of a mother or a husband, Alice. You can't do that to her."

"I can!" I flip the mallet back to gain momentum. "The madness has to stop!"

I wave hard and then...

And then...

I stop, midair.

How am I supposed to hurt an innocent woman working in a morgue? She is annoying, smokes too much, and doesn't take care of her health, I know. But I can't kill her. She hasn't done anything bad to anyone. And I am no killer.

Even though I killed my friends on the bus.

Still, I am not a killer. This isn't how I see myself. If I hit this woman, the Cheshire will probably beat me and possess one of the many dead people in here. Not that I know how he does it, but I can't do it. He has me cornered in a way I can't react to properly.

"That's why you aren't the Alice." His eyes scan me thoroughly. "The Real Alice would hit and never blink. Because she knows that evil has to be chopped off by the roots and burned so it never grows again. That was the whole point of Alice's madness. She was strong. Powerful. Never afraid." He says the words with much admiration as resentment. "She was M-A-D. That was her trick. But you're not her." His voice saddens. He wants me to be her. God only knows why he needs her that much. Tears begin trickling down my cheeks. I don't know why. Am disappointed I am not her? Am I disappointed I can't kill him and save the world? I just don't know.

"The Pillar will tell you it doesn't matter who you are," he elaborates. "That it doesn't matter if you're mad or not. I'd say it matters a lot. How can you take sides when you don't know who you are? You know what the world's most common sin is, Alice?" He reaches for the mallet to snatch it from me. "It's indifference. Indecisiveness. Hesitation when it's time for swift justice."

He is about to pull the mallet away from my trembling hands when something inside me surfaces. Something I haven't met or thought of before. A strong urge to correct things, to stand for something, and to help as many people as I can. A strong urge to see behind the Cheshire's mask.

I can pretend it's not me as I bring down the mallet on the mortician's woman's legs, enough to hurt her but not kill her. I can pretend I am not that kind of girl.

But it's me. Truly me. Maybe not the Alice the Cheshire is looking for. But the Alice I want to be from now on.