The old knight’s clanking footsteps announced his breathless arrival. Tightening his grip on his greatsword, Sir Albus drove it through the beast’s body.
Black blood welled up from the fatal wound and the creature let out an ululating death-cry that echoed eerily through the forest.
Tugging his blade free of the monster’s body once more, with one clean blow he severed its hideous screaming head from its neck, silencing it.
But as the echoes of its burbling screams faded, a deeper bellow reached them through the tulgey wood, as if in answer to the monster’s cry.
Nobody turned in the direction from which the horrible sound had come, and there, rising above the trees, he saw the silhouette of a tower against the lightening sky.
Garm tensed, his hackles rising, lips peeling back from teeth bared in a snarl as a rumbling growl rose from the dog’s throat.
Nobody exchanged glances with the knight. The old warrior had never looked older in the brief time they had known each other. He was clearly exhausted after battling the beast.
“Go,” he panted. “See what you can find.”
Nobody nodded and set off towards the tower, perched atop its rocky crag, picking up the pace again, leaving the knight to recover from his encounter with the Jabberwock, and Garm licking his master’s wounds.
* * *
Dawn was breaking as Nobody reached the foot of the crag. A mimsy mist rose from a burbling stream that skirted the escarpment and the rock face was thick with ferns and water-worn handholds. The youth began his ascent.
Disorientated by the trek through the forest as they had sought the Jabberwock, it was only as Nobody was scaling the crag that he realised he was climbing towards the same tumbledown tower where he had spent the night before arriving at the town. He’d had no idea that they had circled back to the hermit’s home as they wandered through the tulgey wood.
And yet he was sure the burbling bellow had come from somewhere nearby. Panic seized his heart then, his first thought being that the old man was in danger.
Scrambling over the top of the escarpment, he ran to the entrance of the tower. Trying the door, and finding it unlocked, Nobody entered the building.
He was about to call out, to let the hermit know he was there, when he noticed the trapdoor open in the floor of the tower in front of him. He had not seen it the last time he had been here; it must have been closed on that occasion.
Cautiously, he approached the square hole. The suffused glow of early-morning sunlight permeated the chamber beneath.
A stone staircase wound down into the cellar. His curiosity getting the better of him once again, sword in hand, Nobody descended the worn steps. But rather than barrels of ale, or a well-stocked wine cellar, or even an alchemist’s laboratory, what greeted his startled eyes was entirely unexpected.
The cellar had been divided into separate compartments by means of a series of wooden partitions. At the foot of the stairs, in the first compartment, were half a dozen straw-filled crates. Sitting within each was an egg bigger than a man’s head, their shells mottled green and purple. As he made his way through the cellar, one of the curious eggs suddenly twitched within its warm bed.
Nobody froze.
The egg jerked again, and a crack appeared in its thick shell.
As the youth watched, a tiny beak pushed through the breach and was soon followed by a bulbous head that wobbled unsteadily atop a scrawny neck, and in no time at all, squatting amidst the ruins of the eggshell was what was quite clearly a baby Jabberwock.
It was an ugly little thing, and yet somehow strangely appealing at the same time.
“Who’s a manxome fellow then?” Nobody cooed.
In response, the hatchling chirruped at him, fixing the youth with bulbous black eyes that reflected the morning sunlight like a puddle of lantern-oil.
The hatchling’s pallid flesh was covered with the prickles of feathers-to-be.
Unable to help himself, finding that he was drawn to the tiny monster—which was currently no bigger than a young borogove—before he knew what he was doing, the youth had put away his sword and picked up the baby Jabberwock, cradling it in his arms as he stroked the drying downy fluff on the top of its disproportionately large head.
Ignoring the pungent smell coming off the creature nestled now in the crook of his arm, Nobody passed from the hatchery into a section of the cellar where a number of larger Jabberwocks were housed in cages.
The youth judged that some of them might be as much as five or six feet tall when up on their hind legs.
The yearlings whiffled and burbled and the hatchling he was carrying gave another mewling chirrup, instinctively recognising the vocalisations of its siblings.
Passing beyond another partition, Nobody felt a gentle breeze on his face and saw that the cellar had been constructed from a shallow cave within the crag. The mouth of the cave opened onto a sheer cliff, looking out over a deep gorge, but was obscured by a screen of trees on the far side, and hence kept hidden from the sight of anyone approaching the tower through the forest.
The hatchling suddenly gave a rasping squawk, which made Nobody start, and which was answered a moment later by the burbling bellow of a much larger creature, right behind him.
Turning, he came face to hideous face with the creature penned there, the brood Jabberwock bringing its huge beaked head close to his, studying him with eyes of burning flame. It was twice the size of the creature he and Sir Albus had encountered in the forest.
His heart racing, the tension in his body eased a little when he saw that the creature was secured to the wall by a chain attached to a brass collar around its neck.
Some innate instinct enabling the hatchling to recognise its parent, the infant gave another squawk. And in a moment of horrible realisation, Nobody saw the monster’s burning gaze focus on the baby in his arms.
The mother gave voice to another burbling bellow and Nobody gagged at the fetid stink of rotting meat that assailed him.
It was then the hatchling bit him.
He gave an involuntary cry of pain and dropped the baby, the hatchling having taken a chunk out of the ball of his thumb with its sharp beak.
But the hatchling’s bite was nothing compared to the mother’s rage at seeing her offspring in jeopardy. The monster opened its huge, beaked mouth and gave a savage shriek of maternal fury.
Backing away from the monster, the young squire slowly drew his sword. But the pain in his thumb and the shock he had felt in the face of the mother’s fury were forgotten in an instant, as Nobody was struck violently from behind.
He dropped to his knees, the vorpal sword falling from his fingers.
Dazed, he looked up, fearing another attack might come at any moment. His jaw went as slack as the rest of his body when, through his swimming vision, he saw the hermit standing over him, a shovel held in his hands like a mace. The same hermit whose life he had feared was at risk from the fury of a full-grown Jabberwock.
“I told you not to hunt the Jabberwock,” Nobody heard the old man say, his voice sounding strangely distant. “I liked you. You were so full of youthful innocence and optimism. You hadn’t been spoiled by the world yet. But it seems like you’ve grown up a lot in the last couple of days.”
The cave-cellar resounded with the cacophonous roars of the mother monster and the distressed squawking of the caged yearlings.
Rolling on the floor, struggling to get up, Nobody reached for his sword, only for the hermit to snatch it up, out of his reach, before he could even get a hand on it.
“I didn’t want things to end like this for you.” The unkempt Jabberwock-keeper slowly raised the vorpal sword above his head, the shovel discarded. “But now you know too much.”
Nobody’s gaze met the hermit’s cold stare, and so he saw the look of surprise as the old man suddenly lurched forwards, struck from behind himself, by the lashing of the agitated mother’s tail.
Losing his balance, the hermit stumbled, landing the s
word-blow that had been intended for Nobody against the beast’s flank instead, and drawing blood between the feathers and scales.
The monster gave a screech of rage and turned on the old man.
In an instant it was done; the hermit barely had time to cry out himself before the monster’s beak-like jaws took his head from his shoulders.
The rest of his body slumped to the ground, as arterial blood painted the rough stone walls claret-red.
The vorpal sword clattered to the floor again. Recovering himself, on his feet again at last, Nobody reclaimed the ancient blade and plunged it into the Jabberwock’s throat. The chained beast gave another warbling cry as Nobody struck it again and again—one-two, one-two, and through and through—until the monster’s cries were no more than a breathless wheezing. Raising the blade one last time, even though his arms ached with the effort, he brought it down on the monster’s neck.
He heard the snicker-snack of neck bones breaking, and the creature’s hideous head rolled onto the floor, a long purple tongue lolling from its beaked maw.
* * *
Hearing twigs cracking under Nobody’s footsteps, Sir Albus looked up.
His delighted eyes went from the dishevelled youth’s face, to the bloodstains soaking his doublet, to the hessian sack his squire cast on the ground in front of him. Opening it, he peered inside, his eyes widening in astonishment.
“You’ve slain the Jabberwock?” he gasped, as Garm sniffed the sack suspiciously. And then, jumping to his feet, “Come to my arms, my beamish boy!”
He threw his arms around Nobody. Then, putting the youth at arm’s length again, he regarded the head of the beast he himself had killed.
“Yours is bigger than mine,” Sir Albus said, looking almost disappointed, until a wide grin split his face once more, then he pulled the youth to him and hugged him again.
“Oh frabjous day!” he cried, dancing a jig on his old pins, Nobody having no choice but to join in with the dance.
“Callooh! Callay!” the old knight sang, Garm jumping up at them in excitement, and soon they were both chortling in their joy, as they fell about laughing on the forest floor at the heart of the tulgey wood.
* * *
“Good Sir Knight,” said the Mayor, eyeing Sir Albus warily, as he entered The Slithy Tove again with Nobody in tow. “What can we do for you?”
The officials still appeared to be taking money from those wishing to go monster-hunting in the tulgey forest.
“We’re here to claim the reward,” Sir Albus said, and all those present within the inn stopped what they were doing, bringing their conversations to an abrupt end, and turned their attention to what was unfolding in the middle of the bar.
The knight tossed the head of the creature he had slain onto the clerk’s table, where it landed with a crash amidst the piles of paperwork, scattering quills and overturning inkwells.
“One thousand crowns, wasn’t it?” the freelancer said, relishing the look of shock on the clerk’s face.
“Um…” Mortsafe murmured. “Yes, that’s right.”
Nobody then dropped the sack he was carrying onto the table and upended it, its contents tumbling out.
The crowd of onlookers gasped.
The Mayor swore, while all his clerk managed was a strangled squeal, almost falling off his stool when he met the dead-eyed stare of the mother of monsters.
“And another two thousand crowns for this one, please,” Nobody said.
Judging by his reaction, the youth’s demand for more money was more shocking to the clerk than the delivery of not one, but two Jabberwock heads, and brought him back to his senses.
“Now wait a minute!” Mortsafe protested.
The not-so-white knight leaned forward across the table and said in a harsh whisper, “You can pay up, or we can expose your little money-making scheme. I killed the Gryphon, remember? I’ve seen for myself how much attention that brought to your manxome little town. Attention and money!”
“What are you talking about?” spluttered the Mayor, so Sir Albus turned his focus to the portly provost, who was now perspiring profusely.
“With the Gryphon dead, you took stock and saw how much coin all those heroes—coming from miles around, in the hope of killing the beast—parted company with while they were here. And you thought, wouldn’t it be handy if we had another monster for all those heroes to come and kill?
“I can see how prosperous your arse-end-of-nowhere backwater has become. I expect the entire economy pretty much relies on people coming to slay the beasts, bringing with them their hangers-on and all their attendant needs: weapons; stabling; saddlers; smiths; prostitutes; beer… I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole town is actually in on the plan, seeing as how it benefits everyone.”
As the old knight unravelled the workings of their scheme, the Mayor and the clerk listened, their faces reddening with every revelation. And all the while his squire just stood there, a beamish smile on his cherubic face.
“It would be easy enough to fake a monster attack and leave a few scales behind at the scene of the supposed crime. Then all your tame beast-master had to do was release an immature Jabberwock into the woods—one with its wings clipped, I might add—knowing that it wouldn’t prove much of a threat and that it would be soon done away with anyway, seeing as how the forest would be crawling with monster-hunters. Then it would just be a matter of who got to it first.”
“You can’t prove any of this!” the Mayor railed.
“Can’t I?” said the knight, thrusting a piece of parchment under his nose. It was a letter Nobody had found in the hatchery, addressed to the hermit. “That’s your signature, is it not, your worship?”
The Mayor blustered in indignation but could not actually think of anything to say.
“Are you threatening us?” Mortsafe seethed.
“Yes, it would rather look like that, wouldn’t it?” agreed Sir Albus.
At a sideways glance from the Mayor, a pair of rough-looking militiamen stepped out of the shadows. But a fierce, frumious glare from the knight caused them to freeze and reconsider their options, as Nobody put a hand to his heirloom blade—the monster-slaying vorpal sword—sheathed at his side.
“Pay up or we’ll tell all and sundry hereabouts about your deception. And there are a lot of armed men hanging around town at the moment. More monster-hunters than you have militiamen, I’ll warrant. Hard-bitten men too, used to going toe-to-toe with Snarks and Bandersnatches, and the like. You wouldn’t want a riot on your hands now, would you?”
“This is tantamount to blackmail!” protested the clerk.
“No, it is blackmail,” corrected the knight.
“Very well,” said the Mayor, taking three bulging bags of coin from the coffer hidden under the table, straining with the effort.
“A pleasure doing business with you,” Sir Albus said, passing the gold to Nobody, and offering the Mayor his hand. When the Mayor didn’t take it, regarding it in the same way that he might look at something he had scraped off the sole of his boot after a visit to the livestock fair, Sir Albus turned the unfulfilled handshake into a sharp salute instead.
“Good day to you,” he said.
The knight and his squire turned and started for the door. As they strode out into the brillig sunlight, Sir Albus called back over his shoulder: “By the way, there’s now a vacancy for the hatchery job, and you’ll probably be needing some new stock too.”
* * *
Dusk fell, drawing its crepuscular cloak over the tulgey wood, as something both manxome and frumious, with a long neck and the head of some hideous devil-fowl, lumbered through the mimsy air on large, bat-like wings, whiffling as it came.
Eyes of flame helping it find its way through the encroaching darkness, the creature homed in on the cave in the cliff face below the tumbledown tower. Landing heavily at the entrance, it dragged its great bulk into the cellar, horn-toed feet scraping through the half-rotted straw mess covering the rough stone floor.
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It hesitated, sniffing the air. Something wasn’t right.
Putting its beaked nose to the ground it sniffed again. Usually there was a ready supply of meat left out for it, but there wasn’t anything this night, other than a stringy corpse missing its head. And something else was wrong too.
Following its nose, the snuffling sire soon discovered the headless corpse of its mate.
A burbling rumble rose from inside its huge ribcage and the beast snorted angrily.
With the female dead, and having wolfed down the corpse in one gulp, the bull Jabberwock went galumphing back to the entrance to the cave.
But then it caught another scent on the evening breeze, the smell of roasting raths, and the beast’s belly grumbled.
It might have been prevented from sating its desire to mate that night, but it could certainly satisfy another appetite.
Taking to the air again, with powerful beats of its wyvern wings, the Jabberwock set off in the direction of the town, following the mouthwatering cooking smells to the agglomeration of flickering lights in the distance.
It would dine well that night after all. And it was still fearfully hungry.
About Time
GEORGE MANN
Lucy was beginning to wish that she’d never returned.
This was supposed to be her haven, the safest of places, away from all the madness of the real world; a place she’d always been able to escape to. But now… well, now this.
And she’d only come here to say goodbye.
Lucy had first discovered Wonderland during a long summer’s day shortly after her ninth birthday, when, playing outside, she’d lost her footing and tumbled head-first down a small hole behind the potting shed in her grandma’s back garden. Then, she’d been terrified to find herself popping out into such a strange, ridiculous land—and indeed, surrounded by such outlandish company—but she soon developed quite a fondness for the place. She’d decided to explore, searching every nook, cranny and warren of the unusual realm, meeting each of its residents—even the scary ones—until the place became like a second home to her. Adventures ensued, and Lucy found herself seeking any excuse to go and visit her grandma at the weekend, or after school—largely so she could dive with abandon into the secret hole and pay a visit to all of her outrageous friends. She’d never told anyone about it, of course—not even her grandma. Wonderland had been her secret, her special place.
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