ArchEnemy (13 page)

The climate inside Mount Isolation had always been chilly. During Redd’s occupancy, it had been impossible to generate enough heat to warm the place no matter how many fire crystals she added to the furnace. But now, with so many breathing bodies everywhere, the air was stuffy, oppressively warm. And so much for hearing her footsteps echo in empty halls. Her Imperial Viciousness and Sacrenoir drifted with the crowds . . .

The cavernous room she’d had carved from the land itself, in which hundreds of cages containing thousands of seekers—those hybrids of vulture and fly—used to hang from the ceiling, had been turned into a theater. A sold-out musical revue,
Redd Heart’s Blues,
was to begin in half a lunar hour.

“Who did this?” Redd rasped through tensed jaw. She had spent many comforting nights of self-pity in this room, serenaded by the screams of her aerial “bloodhounds” with bird-of-prey bodies and the heads of blood-sucking insects.

The rest of the fortress was no better. The Invention Hall, in which Her Imperial Viciousness had displayed prototypes of her inventions in spot-lit alcoves—a Two card from The Cut; a Glass Eye with one long horizontal crystal for vision-intake instead of the more humanoid orbs—at first appeared the same. But then Redd noticed that someone had designated it the Museum of the Macabre.

“Nothing macabre about it,” she steamed.

Even the ballroom at the foot of the spiral hall, the site of her now legendary battle with Alyss Heart, had been desecrated, turned into a cafeteria. Behind the orb-blasted wall where she had stowed the genuine Heart Crystal: a graffiti-covered replica.

“Stupid Wonderlanders.”

But it was in the Observation Dome that Wonderlanders were most rampant, crowding five-deep at the floor-to-ceiling windows to enjoy the view while others posed for photo crystals with the petrified wig-beast. The creature stood a meter taller than the tallest Wonderlander in the room, and was significantly hairier than the hairiest.

“It used to be so imposing in action,” Redd rued, recalling the moment she had imagined the thing into being from a curl of Jack of Diamonds’ wig.

“What’re those?” Sacrenoir asked.

A bank of mirrors Her Imperial Viciousness had never seen. In front of each glass, a Wonderlander stood making faces at his or her reflection, then pausing a gwormmy-blink and laughing. Some asked their reflections simple questions such as “How are you?” or offered trite observations—“It’s warm today”—then paused and laughed.

“Nonsense Mirrors,” Sacrenoir said, noting the sign as he and his mistress drew closer.

Redd scowled at each of them in turn—more so when she didn’t see the Wonderlanders’ reflections, which were visible only to those standing directly in front of the mirrors.

A young boy laughingly skipped away from his glass and Redd took his place. Her expression was as unfriendly as usual, but the figure staring back at her looked nothing if not comical: protruding front teeth, ears sticking out from the sides of her head like underdeveloped wings, her eyes, nose, and mouth scrambled into different positions all over her face.

“Is this supposed to be funny?” she whispered.

“Is this blahdeeblahdeebabooooo? Hunny funny hun hun!” her reflection said.

“Whoever’s responsible for all of this . . .”

“Whoever booever responsibobbility-whee!” said her reflection.

“Your Imperial . . .” Sacrenoir said, but that’s all he got out before the Wonderlanders at the other mirrors stepped back, gasping.

A black cloud had formed above Redd and crackled with jags of lightning. Glaring at her supposedly humorous reflection, she noticed none of it. She had let herself be insulted by doormen and booth attendants. She had waited in line (and paid!) to get into her own home, to see the rooms in which she’d spent years festering in enforced solitude despoiled by White Imagination losers.

“And now this!”

“Annow how this wow!” said her reflection.

The cloud above Her Imperial Viciousness’ head roiled like water heated over a fire crystal. Believing it a surprise performance, part of the Mount Isolation experience, the tourists in the Dome gathered five-deep around
her
. Redd’s dress began to move; the weave of its material squirmed, became serpentine vines blooming flesh-eating roses.

“I will
not
lie down and die! I’ll have what’s mine and kill
him
!”

Redd’s reflection translated this into nonsense but she was no longer listening, completely engulfed by a cyclone of blood-hued energy. The surrounding tourists applauded, but then—

A thorny vine shot out, fast as a viper’s tongue, from Redd’s dress, and a rose blossom gnashed its teeth into the neck of a gleeful Wonderlander sporting his Mount Isolation T-shirt and cap.

“Aaaaghrrrr!”

In their rush to escape the Dome, the onslaught of panic, Wonderlanders shoved, kicked, kneed, and trampled one another. More and more rose vines with teeth-clacking blooms stretched out from Redd’s dress, grew to impossible lengths as they trailed the stampeding crowd down the spiral hall to the fortress’ ground floor until—

The Wonderlanders burst out the front entrance, fled across the desert in every direction and—

In the Dome, Redd banged her scepter against the floor and the vines of her dress shrank back, coiling close around her. The teeming cloud of imaginative energy vaporized. All was, for a moment, calm.

Redd Heart, Wonderland’s supreme mistress of Black Imagination, was back.

 

T
HREE IN the morning. Most of the university’s lecturers were tucked comfortably beneath their bedclothes, but Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church College, sat awake in his bachelor’s apartment in Tom Quad. At his desk with his journal open before him, he stared dumbly at the puzzle he had written a fortnight earlier:

He had not been sleeping well of late, had in fact never been a sound sleeper, which accounted for these little math puzzles scattered throughout the pages of his journals. Their twofold purpose: to serve as agreeable diversion, but also to drive out the blasphemous, unholy thoughts that tortured him in these small hours. Yet as Reverend Dodgson glanced at the clock—three fifteen—he knew, as he’d known for the past hour, that this particular puzzle wasn’t working. He was not agreeably diverted or kept from thoughts of a world he never heard mentioned at church but only by the once young Alice Liddell.

He bent to the puzzle again.

Had he truly composed this puzzle himself? It
was
in his journal, and the writing
did
appear to be his own. Why then did he have no inkling as to how to solve it? This inability to comprehend his own writings had been getting steadily worse, an inability all the more frightening as he didn’t believe it the result of his recent trauma . . .

The authorities had found him on Sydenham Hill, in the Crystal Palace’s Greek Court, dirty and unshaven, dazed from hunger, and encaged by solid iron bars that blocked the court’s every window and door. He’d heard approaching footsteps and thought it one of Her Imperial Viciousness’ assassins bringing him food and water. He hadn’t been given anything to eat or drink in days. Under such conditions, he could never have succeeded in what Her Imperial Viciousness had commanded of him—to write a book about her more enthralling than
Alice In Wonderland
, to immortalize her on Earth as he had immortalized Alyss Heart.

The approaching footsteps had belonged to a bobby, who informed Dodgson that Redd and her horde had vanished. The bars of his prison were demolished. He was questioned by Scotland Yard detectives, then returned to Oxford. But fearing The Cat would track him down, he still tried to resign himself to the task Her Imperial Viciousness had given him. He’d come up with no more than a title,
I, Redd
, when he began to suffer the creative lethargy that had since become a vacuum. He felt empty, unimaginative, unable to think creatively. It was more than a lack of inspiration. It was as if he were losing the capacity to
ever
be inspired.

What was worse: He didn’t seem to be alone. He saw it in the lecture halls of the college. Once clever students had grown dim. And walking the streets of Oxford he noticed a lack of alertnesss on the faces of passersby, a curious clash in the garments each chose to wear, as if everyone had lost the ability to properly mix and match colors, patterns. He saw grocers unable to compute bills of sale, artists in Christ Church Meadow unable to complete the simplest sketch, people on park benches, blinking at their open books without ever turning a page, unable to comprehend what they read.

At his desk, he closed his journal. No point in torturing himself with a puzzle he couldn’t hope to solve. Despite his reputation as a prissy, puttering, fastidious bachelor, the reverend harbored a great affection for imagined worlds, though he had never confused imagined worlds for the real one.

Until now.

What other explanation could there be for the parade of characters from Alice Liddell’s long ago story visiting him? The Milliner, The Cat, the woman claiming to be Alyss Heart’s murderous aunt, they were either part of some elaborate conspiracy, actors employed in a hoax at his expense, or—

Someone was at the door. Dodgson cast a furtive eye at the clock—six in the morning. Much too early for visitors.

What if it were The Cat? Or worse, Her Imperial Viciousness?

“I doubt either would knock,” Dodgson mused under his breath. Daring fate to do what it would, he stepped to the door, uncharacteristically yanked it open and—

In the hall stood a man and young girl, both dripping wet and dressed in identical knee-length coats of cracked leather. He did not know the girl. But he would never forget the man, the violence of whose previous visit had left him without an apartment door for a week: Hatter Madigan of Wonderland.

PART TWO