Malice in Wonderland Prequel (11 page)

“That’s something worth considering,” the Queen said to him.

“I take it back!” wailed Tweedledum. “Likewise,” said Tweedledee. “I wish to have the divorce annulled!” “As do I!” “I want to more than him!” “No, I do!” They glared at each other. Their hands formed into fists.

The Queen rolled her eyes. “Very well then! The divorce is annulled. Your precious rattle shall remain intact. Now that you have wasted my time, I order you not to do so again. From now on, you shall settle your disputes amongst yourselves, or I shall have you executed. Understand?”

“Yes, quite.” “I daresay I understand more than him.”

The Queen nodded slowly, then burst into a fit of action—while screaming, she rushed toward the floating Cat’s head and tried to punch him with all her might.

But he swooped out of the way. “You’ll have to be faster than that,” he said with a chuckle.

The Queen, furious, shouted, “Oh get out of my sight, the obnoxious lot of you!” She turned and walked back to the croquet grounds, hoping that the flamingo named Morley hadn’t slinked too far away.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Witch Doctor

When Alice was 9

When Alice was 9-years-old, she went through a particularly dark and mournful period. She was woeful of the horrible treatment from all the creatures of Wonderland and resentful that she was being held captive there. She grew so woeful that she slept most of the day and went about her rounds slowly and unsmiling. She hardly seemed to react to things at all, and for that reason, the citizens of Wonderland began to find her a bore.

It was harder to make her cry, to shriek and show fear. Utterly boring, she was. And inside, she was consumed with dark thoughts, of sadness, hate, loneliness, and particularly troubling, a desire for revenge. But all those dark emotions were so overwhelming that she just ended up, ironically, feeling numb and hopeless.

At that particular moment, she was standing beside the Queen of Hearts in her game room, beside one of her newest toys, a billiards table. Since Alice was 9 and short, she had to stand upon a crate to be able to reach. She woefully held a pool cue in her hand, staring at her feet.

Next to her, the Queen of Hearts said, “You’re not paying attention to me, my girl!”

Alice woefully raised her head, with its precious blond locks. “Sorry,” she muttered. The Queen had already taught her much of the game, with the understanding that once she learned how to play, Alice would be expected to either lose every time or lose her head. Since she was only 9, she thought it would be easy to lose.

This day, they had an unusual guest—a man known as the Witch Doctor, who had come from a foreign land in a foreign continent or island or somesuch. He was completely bald and had a bone going through the middle of the inside of his nose, which Alice found quite curious.

The Queen said, “Now, what do we call this again?” She pointed at the white ball.

“A cute ball,” Alice said, then sighed.

“No, no! It’s called a cue ball! Now watch carefully. I have already showed you how to jump the ball.”

“Light a fire under its bum,” Alice said. That’s how the Queen had described it—according to her, she liked to imagine the cue ball was an enemy whom she was sneaking behind and lighting a fire to. The Queen seemed to have many violent thoughts associated with what was merely a game. When she referred to the act of knocking the other balls into the pockets, she likened it to “pushing enemies into their graves”.

“That’s right,” said the Queen. “Now for your next lesson, I’d like to teach you how to apply english to the cue ball.”

“If she can manage to do it properly…” muttered the Witch Doctor quietly, just loud enough to be heard.

The Queen turned to him. “What was that?”

“Nothing, Queeny, I was just saying you can do it most properly.”

She glared at him for a few moments as if deciding whether to believe him, then finally said, “Quite.”

The whole exchange caused Alice to give forth a slight giggle, a rare occurrence these past few melancholy weeks.

The Queen looked back to Alice with an expression on her face that seemed to indicate she was sick of looking at the Witch Doctor.

Alice said, “Apply English to it? Do you mean to give a stern talking to it?”

The Queen tutted condescendingly. “No, my silly girl. Although, I can understand your confusion. No, it is an entirely different use of the word than you’re thinking of. Some people refer to it as ‘applying spin’.” She leaned and edged the tip of her pool stick toward the cue ball and prepared to make her shot. “What it refers to is hitting the cue ball at an angle so that, as it moves forward, it spins. You tap it hard with the stick—boom!—and give it a twist. I like to think of it this way: it’s much like the cue ball is the head of someone you despise, and bam!!! You snap their neck with a twist and send their head rolling to knock the other persons, I mean balls, into their graves, I mean pockets.”

Alice had jumped when the Queen had loudly shouted, “Bam!!!”

“Yikes,” the Witch Doctor muttered, again just barely decipherable.

“What was that?” the Queen snapped as she again jerked her head to him.

“I meant yikes, you are astounding in the degree that you have mastered this game.”

Alice once again tittered despite herself. She thought the Witch Doctor was a bit too feisty and sarcastic for his own good. Didn’t he realize that the Queen regularly beheaded people and creatures for much less?

The Queen waggled her finger at him. “Watch yourself. You’ve got a mouth on you.”

“I shall,” he said, but it looked more like he shan’t.

The Queen huffed and turned back toward Alice. “Now after enough practice, when you apply your english to the ball, you can do all sorts of wondrous things. For example, you can cause the cue ball to curve in its path. Or, by using the proper amount of spin, you can cause the other heads, I mean balls, to twist in a certain way once they are struck. It’s most marvelously complicated, don’t you think, my girl?”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Alice answered automatically, but the words felt empty. Her whole life had seemed to be a vacuous exercise in futility, she thought morosely.

The Queen continued, “I like to imagine that these balls are all heads that I have myself all ordered to be decapitated. Now watch.” She applied some chalk to the tip, then with her pool cue, she struck the cue ball at an angle so that it curved, going around a striped ball and curving around to strike a green solid-colored ball which then sailed into a corner pocket.

“Aha!” shouted the Queen victoriously. “When heads shall roll, the Queen of Hearts is always in control!”

“Congratulations,” Alice said glumly. Her thoughts briefly reflected on the cue ball—if the Queen considered it a head upon a neck being snapped, how could it then also be a bum beneath which a flame was lit? That seemed biologically impossible, but she failed to mention the discrepancy, because her melancholy discouraged it.

The Queen seemed to notice her lack of talkativeness. “Is that all you have to say? No clever quips?”

“No, My Queen,” she said then clamped her mouth.

“Why my girl, I say, you’re no fun at all anymore. So I have appointed this Witch Doctor here to fix you.”

She waited for Alice to give the appropriate response of saying, “Fix me?” but Alice merely remained woefully silent.

The Queen said, “The Witch Doctor here is quite clever himself, though he lets his mouth get away from him at times. He shall be your mental aid, like a psychiatrist. Ha! A veritable head shrinker!” She began to laugh out loud and the Witch Doctor began tittering along with her.

Puzzled, Alice queried, “Your Majesty?”

The Queen said, “Well I made a bit of a joke there. You see, the magic wielders of his tribe have acquired the ability to shrink decapitated heads down to quite small sizes. It is really quite amazing. I have been asking him to teach me how to do it.”

“I doubt you could do it right,” he muttered, again under his breath.

“What was that?!”

“I mean, at
first,
Your Majesty. It is a most difficult procedure, but I’m sure, given enough time, even
you
could learn how to do it properly.”

She scowled at him for a moment. “You should watch yourself—you’re not as cute as this girl here. She is allowed to say things that
you
are not. But lately she has been as silent as a mouse, and so she is failing to entertain Your Highness sufficiently. So, Alice, I’m sending him home with you, my girl, to fix you with his primitive magic.” She turned to him and growled. “And you best fix her or it’s off with your head.”

“I highly doubt that,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Your Highness.”

“Oh, be off with you two. I’ve had enough of you for one day, Witch Doctor. You irritate me.”

And so Alice and the Witch Doctor returned to Alice’s hut. Alice dutifully chained herself to her desk, since the guard card who usually did it was away.

It started out rather awkwardly. Alice sat at her desk staring at this strange bald man.

“How did you do that?” she asked as she pointed at the bone through his nose.

He told her the painful process, which included pressing a sterilized needle through the tissue inside the nose, and Alice pulled faces and winced.

But afterword, she said, “It looks quite fetching though, in a primitive manner.”

“Why thank you, young miss. I’ve heard of you. Young Alice the girl from the outside world with the magical tears. I have quite a propensity for magic myself. I make potions and perform spells.”

And here he filled Alice in on all he could do. He told her how he could cast curses, could perform spells for good luck, bad luck and love, he even knew the formula for a potion that would convert a person into a will-less slave known as a zombie.

At the look of Alice’s horror, he reassured, “But don’t worry, I wouldn’t zombiefy such a pretty young girl such as yourself.”

At this she nodded and sighed, lost once more to her melancholy.

He observed her. “Ah yes, a dark cloud has passed over your spirit, stealing you of your mojo, yes?”

She sighed. “I don’t know what mojo is, but I think I might be lacking it, yes, kind sir Witch Doctor.”

“Ah, well I have been summoned here to help you, sweet child, but to do so, I must know more. Can you tell me what is wrong?”

“I’ll tell you what it is. I am a bad girl.”

He arched a brow. “How so?”

“I have dark thoughts, I am ashamed to say. I used to be able to push them aside, but lately they’ve been overwhelming. Why, these thoughts are horrifying…”

“Are you going to cry?”

“What? No, I don’t think so.”

“So tell me about these thoughts.”

“Well, the other creatures of Wonderland are so cruel to me, and though I try to stay a nice good girl and still keep love in my heart for them, sometimes, I just…have these visions in my head, of getting revenge, even though I know it is wrong to seek it.”

“I see. What kind of visions?”

“Oh Witch Doctor, they’re horrible! Why, I want to punch them and kick them and beat them and flay them and cut them and choke them!”

“Choke them?”

With wide eyes she said, “Oh yes, and cut them and disembowel them and strangle them and—”

“Well you already said cut them.”

“And bust their kneecaps and snap their necks and pull their hearts out of their chests and show it to them before they die.”

“Before or after you snap their necks?”

“I would perform those acts separately to two different individuals.”

“Oh I see. Those are indeed dark thoughts.”

She looked at him with eyes wide with sincerity. “Oh yes, Witch Doctor, they most certainly are! The thoughts have brought this black cloud over me, as you call it, and everyday the darkness rains upon me and enshrouds me in the sickly trickles of melancholy.”

“Oh my, dear child, that is quite poetic.”

“Thank you. I actually did even comprise a poem about it:

Oh, dark cloud of melancholy,

I feel you descend, and now embracing me.

I breath in deep your tempting wisps,

And feel you tingle upon my lips.

I mingle with your tendriled tongue,

Forgetting that I’m still too young,

For dark desires, of vengeance brought

To those who only their own pleasure, sought.

I yearn to fill their souls with fears,

To feast upon their trembling tears,

To serve at hatred’s beck and call,

To bring their broken neck and fall.

“That was the poem revealed to me in a dream. What do you think it all means?”

“I think it means you are a very disturbed little girl. But I know how to help.”