Текст книги "Circus "

Автор книги: Cameron Jace

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Chapter 69

Buckingham Palace, London

Tom Truckle saw the Queen of England take the podium, that sinister grin glinting like a knife on her face.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Pardon me, I mean mad ladies and gentlemen.” She snickered and the crowd laughed. “I am about to offer you something that hasn’t been done in the history of mankind before. Something that will make us, Wonderlanders and fellow madmen and women, avenge what happened to us in the circus two centuries ago.”

Tom noticed the glaring silence of the crowd. Everyone seemed to be counting on the Queen now.

“What we’re going to do is going to shake this human world upside down,” she said. “It will make Wonderland look like such a very sane place to what we’re going to do to the real world around us.”

Tom himself was as anxious as ever. Although an imposter, he felt like he’d like to be part of the Queen’s lunatic plan. Who worked in an asylum and didn’t feel like the sane world outside wasn’t the enemy. To Tom it was the taxes he paid, the expenses of his divorce, and his medications. How much did he have to pay for those pills, just to stay sane in this mad world?

“But first, I want to show you a glimpse of the kind of madness you love to watch.” She pointed at the screen behind her. It showed people in England hunting all kinds of rabbits, opening them up to look for a bomb. Some people killed the rabbits, some ran when they saw one, even if it was on TV. The streets were a mess of accidents and panic. And oh, how insane the world looked right now. “This is just the beginning. In a few minutes you will be watching something much more insane, so keep watching.”

Chapter 70

Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

Time remaining: 53 minutes

“That’s why you hate me so much.” I nod at Lorina and Edith. “I never was one of you.”

In truth, I can’t remember the part of me knocking on their door with a knife in my hand. But I do remember the basement. The horrible circus inside the basement.

“We don’t just hate you, Alice. We loathe you,” Lorina says. “You’re like that itch in the top of my mouth that hurts more if I try to lick it away.”

“Even when you were put in the asylum, you still escape and make our life miserable,” Edith says, totally neglecting that I may have been just a troubled seven-year-old, but that the incidents in the basement—which were their fault—may have turned me into a loon.

“So how did you come up with the circus idea in the basement?”

“Because you told us about the circus in Wonderland,” Lorina says. “Or rather the silly idea that Wonderlanders had crossed over to the real world in the 19th century, and that humans thought of them as mad people and freaks, and sent them to the circus for entertainment.”

“Of course.” I sigh. “That was how I gave you the idea. So you decided to take it up a notch and make a circus out of me in the basement.”

“And it was fun, Alice,” Edith says. “I mean, if you bully someone in the real world you may get in trouble. But bully a mad girl, wow, that was a million-dollar idea we got away with.

“Because whatever you were going to say about it, no one was going to believe a lost mad girl who thinks she came from Wonderland.” Edith and Lorina high-five.

The Pillar comes to mind instantly. All his madness, theories, and the harsh ways he treats the people in this world seem just now. How I would like to choke both of them with a hookah’s hose right now. Maybe I was hard on the Pillar. Maybe the twelve people he killed were the likes of Lorina and Edith. Bullies who needed to be put to rest.

In the same time I stand, contemplating my past and what to do with Edith and Lorina, I realize I am too late again. Why do I always waste time lamenting my true past?

Edith tugs on her gloves and picks up a baseball bat from the floor, while Lorina shoots me an even more sinister look now.

“How about we play that circus game one more time?” she says.

“What?” I grimace, unable to comprehend their thirst for evil.

“Come on, Mary Ann.” Edith plops the bat against her fatty palm.

“What did you just call me?” I take a calculated step back. I was going to lash my None Fu at them when Edith caught me off guard with what she just said.

“Mary Ann.” Lorina sticks out her tongue and shakes her head like a bully teasing a kid on school grounds. “Mary Ann.”

“Why are you calling me Mary Ann?” I am fully aware that this is one of my names in the Alice in Wonderland book, that the rabbit mistakes me for a Mary Ann in the first chapter. But why do they call me by that name now?

What does it mean?

“Oh.” Edith nudges me with the bat in my shoulder. Lorina fans away. “We didn’t tell you?”

Both of my evil stepsisters wink at each other.

“You also held a pot next to the glinting knife the day you showed up on our door,” Lorina says, still forcing me to step back, closer to the cage’s opening behind me. “A pot with a tiger lily in it.”

“Remember that pot, loony tunes?” Edith swooshes the bar a breath away from my nose. “Inside the pot, there was a necklace, which probably was yours.”

“It belongs to someone called Mary Ann,” Lorina says. “My mother called you Mary Ann then, and you never minded. It was only later when she realized your obsession with Alice in Wonderland that she called you Alice. She thought it sounded better for your adoption papers.”

“And she gave you our last name, Wonder,” Edith says. “Odd how it all fell into place, isn’t it? Our last name being ‘Wonder’ while you think you came from Wonderland.” This part seems to amuse her the most.

“So I was really Mary Ann in Wonderland?” I mumble.

“Here she goes again,” Lorina tells her sister. “Did you see how bonkers she went, talking to herself about Wonderland again?”

“That’s why we need to see her in the cage one more time.” Edith pushes me harder, the cage against my back now. “Come on, Mary Ann. Entertain us one last time.”

Edith’s push does something to me. Something I was looking for all along: I remember them torturing me in the basement now. Vividly.

It’s an even worse memory than remembering the Mush Room torture. The humiliation. Their friends they invited over to laugh at me. The worst memory a person can relive.

But one thing strikes me the most. In that memory I’m gripping something behind my back. Something I don’t want them to see. I can feel it in my hand. It’s cold. And small.

“Get in the cage!” Edith roars now.

I close my eyes and don’t respond to her. My closed eyes are the draped curtain of my theatre of life, but they also open up another place in my memory when I was seven years old.

What was I holding in my hand back then that was important to me?

I can remember I didn’t care about the pain. I only cared about that thing I was gripping.

What was it?

Then I remember seeing buckets in the corner of the room. A lot of cleaning tools next to them. What did I do with those buckets?

Risking the loss of my precious memory, I open my eyes, seeing if the buckets are still in the corner of the room right now.

They are!

Something inside me tells me I hid that precious thing in the back of my head in one of the buckets. Something tells me that this is what all this is about.

I am supposed to find what’s in the bucket.

Edith and Lorina freak out when I aggressively beeline through them toward the buckets. I pull them out of the corner and rummage through them, having no idea what I am looking for, but knowing I will recognize it when I see it.

“What?” Lorina says behind me. “You missed your buckets, Mary Ann?”

“My buckets?” I turn back. “They are mine? Did they mean something to me?”

“The whole world.” Edith rolls her eyes.

“What do you mean?” I insist. “Why did I have them?” I can’t tell them about what I think I hid inside, because I’m somehow sure they shouldn’t know about it.

If only I could remember it clearer now. If only!

“Here.” Lorina holds a broom with the tips of her hand. “Yuck. Hold this.” She gives it to me.

The broom is old. I don’t know why it should mean anything to me. “What is this?” I shout then take a step forward and almost choke Lorina with one hand. “Tell me what’s going on. What do these buckets mean to me?”

“They were—” Lorina is choking under my grip, so I turn to Edith.

“They were tools,” Edith says.

“Tools for what?”

“Cleaning tools, duh!” Edith says. “Let my sister go.”

I do. I loosen my grip, and Lorina slumps to the floor.

But I don’t even bother. Cleaning tools?

“Yes, Alice.” Edith glares at me. “You were homeless. You were mad. You thought you came from Wonderland. You told us about that stupid circus. And we made fun of you as a kid. And guess what, you were also the maid!”

Both of them laugh at me again.

“That’s why you loved your buckets, soaps, and brooms.” Lorina’s voice is sour, but challenging. “Along with your crazy Alice books. You came to us in that dress you wore. Mum wanted to make you one of our sisters, but we insisted you stay the maid you probably were from wherever you came from. Mary Ann the maid.”

Tears stream down my cheeks, but I try to forget about them. Because my childhood couldn’t have been such a wreck. My existence, mad or not, must have a reason. A noble cause.

I kneel down and look for that damn thing in the buckets. What is it? Please make it something that brings back some of my dignity, my sanity.

And there it is, right in front of me.

I knew it.

I knew that my existence in this world must have a reason.

Chapter 71

Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

Time remaining: 39 minutes

I am staring at a golden key that looks exactly like the one Lewis Carroll gave me in the Tom Tower dream.

One of the six keys to Wonderland. The Six Impossible Keys.

Why I hid it here, I can’t remember. All I know is that it’s one of the six keys, and that as a child I hid this one here, for one reason or another. It meant the world to me, and was worth the humiliation I went through.

“What did you find?” Lorina demands.

I push her hand away.

Edith swings and misses my head as I duck an inch, or less. Time for some None Fu again.

I pull Edith’s arms and swing her whole body as if she were my own baseball bat against the wall. She sticks like a fat piece of fresh meat for a moment, her eyes rolling back, then slides down into my buckets.

Lorina surprises me with a kick in the back.

“Take this, $%$#@!” she shouts.

I find my body plastered against the wall. She kicks me once again in my lower back and I drop to my knees, drooling.

How come this Barbie doll is that strong?

When I turn to face her, I see she has unfolded her fan again. For the first time I notice how edgy it is. It could cut like a knife.

She throws it at me; it swirls and slices through the air before it reaches me, neck level.

I find myself catching it with a firm grip, right at a spot without blades.

“Learned a lot in your None Fu training, huh,” Lorina says.

I say nothing to her, but threaten to throw the fan back at her while running in her direction. Lorina thinks I am going to try to cut her with the fan’s blades, but I am not a killer. I won’t stain my hands with the blood of scumbag bullies.

I keep treading with fiery eyes, happy to see the horror in hers. I keep pushing her until she falls backward into the cage through the opening where they wanted to trap me a while ago.

I watch her trip backward and lock her inside.

“How does it feel standing inside the circus now?” I say. “How does it feel to be the clown?”

Lorina starts pleading and playing good sister with me, like last time. Thankfully, I have learned my lesson. I won’t be fooled.

I stare at the key in my palm and smile. Now I have two keys. I think this is my real journey. To collect the Six Impossible Keys to Wonderland—for what reasons, or cause, I have no idea.

But just when I think I have it all under control, I sense someone standing behind me. I turn to face them, thinking it will be Edith.

But it’s not.

It’s a man with a long hat, and teacups dangling from his black tuxedo.

Chapter 73

Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

Time remaining: 22 minutes

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” the Hatter says, although I can’t see his face—he wears a funny mask. Not so funny, really, since it’s a clown’s mask.

“Why show yourself now?” I grip my key harder, feeling it has to do something with it.

“Because you did like I planned,” he says. “To the letter.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You made me think I am chasing a rabbit, leading from place to place, so I could remember my past. What’s in it for you?”

“A lot,” he says. “But first let’s look into what happened. They call it the Rabbit Hole, a scientific term, I believe?”

The memory of me sitting in the psychiatry office in the asylum returns. That man in the dark with the smoking pipe telling me I am insane, that I am just a crippled girl living in my own imagination to escape the horrors that happened to me.

I remember he did tell me about the Rabbit Hole, one of the methods to push a patient’s imagination with their backs against the wall until they remembered what they were trying to forget.

“I had to go through all these puzzles, so I can tickle your memory,” the Hatter says. “You’d been in the asylum for so long and hadn’t remembered anything yet, Alice. Time was running out, and I needed you to at least remember one part of your past. A part that interests me the most.”

“My childhood?” I ask.

He says nothing. I think his clown mask is trying to forge a smile. A dark one.

“Ah,” I say. “I get it. You weren’t after my memories. Not really. You were after...”

“This.” He pulls my hand and snatches the key from it in one move. “The first key in six, so I can open the doors to Wonderland again.”

How foolish am I? Really!

“I don’t care about you at all,” the Hatter says. “I only care about the keys, which I believe Carroll hid with you, and then you hid them in separate places in this real world. Let’s say it wasn’t hard getting this one.”

I realize this Hatter is much stronger than me. I can’t get this key back. But I also realize he doesn’t know Lewis gave me a key before, in the Tom Tower dream. So, if it’s any consolation, and even if he finds the next four keys, I will always have one he doesn’t know exists.

“I am going to leave now,” he says. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“What makes you think I won’t stop you?” I step forward.

“Because you still have a rabbit to catch.” He grins. “Haven’t you seen the TV? The world is in a panic because of a tiny rabbit.”

“Because you made them, and me, think there is a bomb inside.”

“Who said that isn’t true?” He pulls off his hat and then a rabbit from underneath, the one ticking with the bomb. “Please take it,” he says. “Figure a way to stop the bomb. You have about eighteen minutes to do that.”

I hug the rabbit in my arms and pat it gently. Poor thing, pushed into a mad world of Wonderlanders.

“And by the way,” the Hatter says. “I wanted to make this as exciting a finale as possible, so I called the police. They are surrounding the house. People are out there everywhere. They all demand the rabbit be killed—choked, or drowned in the river to get rid of the bomb.”

“Why would you do that?” My mouth is agape.

“Why wouldn’t I? What’s the point of life if there isn’t enough madness?” he says. “See you later, Alice. For now, you’re stuck between exploding with the poor rabbit in your arms or giving it away to the people outside so they can kill it themselves. Talk about a paradox.”

Chapter 74

Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

Time remaining: 14 minutes

Outside, the police point their guns at me.

Everywhere around me there is some kind of microphone or a news reporter. Behind them, hordes of people boo at me.

“Get rid of the rabbit!”

“Kill it!”

“She is the one who let the rabbit loose!”

Slowly, I step forward as the police demand I hand them the rabbit.

“Do you have a bomb expert who may know how to defuse the bomb?” I ask politely, well aware my maid’s dress and the blood on my face isn’t really helping my image.

“We don’t need a bomb squad,” says the lanky officer I saw in the Six O’clock Circus. “We’ll drown it in the river and let it explode in there.”

“But what about the rabbit?”

“You’re not going to pull that ‘animal rights’ crap on us again, are you?” another officer says. “We know who you are, you and that imposter, Professor Carter Pillar. You’ve both escaped the asylum.”

“She is mad!” an old woman yells from the crowd.

Like always, I wonder who is mad here. Am I such a silly, unreasonable girl because I want to save a rabbit as much as I want to save myself?

“Hand me the rabbit, Alice,” a familiar voice says. It’s Inspector Dormouse, wide awake now. “I know who you are now. We got the memo. Let’s make this easier on everyone. Hand the rabbit over and let us escort you back to the asylum. You’re not well, young lady.”

I don’t move, patting the scared rabbit and hugging it closer to my chest. I can feel its escalating heartbeat.

For a moment, I realize the scope of what I have been through for two days. This Hatter, not only did he push me to remember the circus to get to the key, he also managed to raise my uneasiness with the world around me. Looking at the police, the reporters, and the crowd, I can’t overlook the fact that they are the descendants of those who created the circus and used the mentally ill as a form of entertainment.

The idea confuses me.

Am I supposed to take the Wonderland Monsters’ side? If not, then give me one reason why I should keep saving a human life every day.

“Pillar!” I shout. “Where are you?”

It’s funny, yet sad, how he is always my last resort. With all the madness surrounding me, I prefer his madness the most.

“The Pillar has been sent back to the asylum, Alice,” Inspector Dormouse tells me. “He can’t help you. Give back the rabbit. I think you only have three minutes left. Give it to us and we’ll drown it in the river. And we’ll all be safe.”

The world is such a useless place, that’s all I can think of now. It’s full of hypocrites, liars, and selfish people. And even if I’m dramatizing things, I realize I prefer to go back to the asylum. At least I know who is who in there.

But first, and since I am a mad girl on national TV, I need to do one last crazy thing.

I run through the cops with the rabbit in my arms, neglecting all the panic and shouting around me. I run away with the rabbit, which I am not going to hand over or drown in the water.

I don’t know what will happen to both of us. But I feel we’re both the same in this world. We’re both overwhelmed by human cruelty—and stupidity—in this mad world. I hug tighter and run away with it.

And before I know it, I hear the explosion.

Chapter 75

Buckingham Palace, London

“Hoooraaay!”

Tom Truckle was overwhelmed by the hailing crowd staring at the screen. They all stood up, clinking glasses and smiling and congratulating each other, as if celebrating an independence day.

Tom stood up, pretending to be as enthusiastic, unable to believe what he’d just seen.

Did he just watch Alice Wonder explode with that rabbit on live TV?

It seemed like it.

And it seemed normal, in a very abnormal way, to have all those lunatic guests of the Queen hail the explosion and the madness it caused. But why were people in the streets happy about Alice’s explosion?

Families congratulated each other and let out sighs of relief, as did the police officers and reporters. It seemed like Alice’s death was the best thing that had happened to them in their lives. Everyone was happy the bomb went off on the poor mad girl who’d just escaped the asylum. As long as it didn’t hurt them, it was just okay.

“And this, my fellow loons”—the Queen of England snickered in the microphone—“is just a small example of the kinds of madness we’ll bestow on this world we live in.”

Was that the plan? To drive the world mad, really?

“Enjoy this hilarious scene for a while,” the Queen said. “And then I will tell you about the ultimate plan. I will tell you about the real Wonderland Wars!” she said as if she were Hitler, brought back from the grave and wearing a wig.