by Cameron Jace
“So time knows how much the Pillar really means to me,” I tell myself.
Now take a breath, and give it up. The Pillar is gone. I killed the monks, by the way. We’re leaving soon.
It’s hard to really accept this, but the wind is stirring quite strongly, and my survival instincts take over. The Pillar’s death is shoved to the back of my head, though I can’t believe I am really doing this.
Next to me, I see monks spread dead on the ground. “Where did you come from?” I ask.
I’m British, from Kent.
“You know I didn’t mean it that way,” I say. “Did you follow me? Why are you helping me?”
No note this time because the Pillar’s pain below is tearing me apart.
“Another hit, sweet, big, stupid thing,” I hear the Pillar roar at the giant from below—at least he is not dead yet.
I turn to the Dude. “Can I ask you a favor?”
Anything you want.
“Help him.” I point to the Pillar below.
No. The Pillar isn’t on your side, anyways.
“What do you care? Didn’t you say you’d do anything I want?”
Anything you want that’s always in your best interest.
“This man cares for me,” I insist.
He surely may act so, but you don’t really know what his grand plan is.
“Look, others have warned me of him before. They’re all wrong.”
Again, my words are interrupted by the Pillar’s pain.
The Dude points at a hot air balloon he has ready in the distance. It seems like this is his escape plan.
“I am not leaving the Pillar,” I say.
You have to stop the Chessmaster.
“Like I don’t know that? I need to save the Pillar first.”
He is a lunatic, asking the giant to keep hitting him.
“I know.” I sigh. “I wonder why he is doing this.”
The Dude churns out another note: Alice, listen to me: you have to stop the Chessmaster. You have no idea who he is.
This gets my attention. “You know who the Chessmaster is?”
I do. He is the scariest man on earth. Only you can stop him.
“Enough with the puzzles. Who is the Chessmaster?”
The Dude points at the balloon and writes a note: Get in the balloon and I will tell you all about him.
I turn and look at poor Pillar, then back at the Dude. I am torn with what the right thing to do is. But I am so curious about the Chessmaster.
The Dude passes me another note. This one is prewritten. It’s the size of a letter.
“What is this?” I ask.
The story of who the Chessmaster is.
40
The Dude disappears into a storm of snow, as the wind begins to swirl all around me. It’s a sudden and extreme change in the weather as if unseen forces in the universe want to prevent me from reading the note.
I duck on all fours and clamp the note, trying to read it under the safety of my orange hood, still faintly hearing the Pillar’s pain. There is hardly anything I can do about it now, but I wish the wind would weaken the giant’s punches.
Underneath the protective hood, I begin reading the note. There are two separate parts, actually, and even under the hood, they are still hard to read in any detail.
The first note is written in old English. It almost has the tone of fairy tales or formal old English letters.
Skimming through, it talks about an eternal war between black and white. The black calling themselves Black Chess; the white, the Inklings. The note mentions it as a prediction, since at the time of writing—probably a long, long time ago—the two forces had no names.
The two forces are said to originate in Elfland, which a man by the name of Lewis Carroll may change into Wonderland. The forces have no boundaries. They will kill and fight for as long it takes until they find the Six Impossible Keys.
The wind throws me off balance. I tense my knees and then fall on my stomach, waiting for it to leave me alone. Even flattened on the ground I arch my back a little and keep reading using the weak light of my phone.
The note later mentions the Six Impossible Keys are used to unlock something, but not a door, nor is it a box. It unlocks the one thing no man can unlock—whatever that means.
But then it gets weirder—or clearer; I am not sure. The note talks about the Six Impossible Keys being useless without the Looking Glass.
This tells of the Looking Glass again but fails to mention why it’s important—unless it’s simply a mirror and I am reading too much into things.
Another howl of wind attacks me. I can still hear the Pillar struggling with the giant in the distance.
I bite the second note, clinging to it with my teeth, as I am about to finish reading the first one.
Only two paragraphs left.
The next sentences talk about a crucial point in the journey to unlock the Six Keys. One milestone is when a third force, neither black nor white, threatens to end the world before the Wonderland Wars begin. That one is called the Chessmaster, who is almost invincible. He is a monster of pain, created by accident, out of an unholy spell used by two irresponsible Wonderlanders.
I shrug, reading this, trying to put two and two together, but nothing comes to mind. It’s all too vague to comprehend, still.
Only the last two sentences show me what’s in store. The first explains that the Chessmaster needs to find a “missing piece”—I assume it’s the chess pieces we’re collecting now—to protect himself.
Protect himself? The Chessmaster is doing all this to protect himself? How can that be? Protect himself from what?
The revelation comes as a shock in the last sentence.
The Chessmaster desperately needs the chess piece of a knight, made from Lewis Carroll’s bone, so he can play the last chess game in mankind’s history. A game that will either protect him from a great evil or initiate the apocalypse.
I am at a loss for words, hardly imagining what kind of chess game the note means. I can accept the idea of a final chess game that will end the world—in a most Wonderlastic nonsensical way, of course. But what does the Chessmaster want to protect himself from?
Between the terrible wind kicking at my arched back and the Pillar’s struggles below, I part my teeth and let the second note fall into my hands. This one tells the story of who the Chessmaster really is.
41
Buckingham Palace
The Queen listened to Carolus’s story about what happened to Margaret, and couldn’t fathom what was going on.
“She just fell like Fabiola?” she asked.
“Yes, my Queen,” Carolus said.
“But if Fabiola dropped because of the appearance of the white queen chess piece, why would Margaret fall after discovering the rook piece?”
“It’s puzzling,” Carolus said. “We’re not sure our theory is right, but the two women got ill after each piece was discovered.”
“That’s nonsense,” the Queen said. “What is this, witchcraft, where you kill a person by poking needles and pins into a puppet?”
“A chess piece, this time.”
“How could they possibly be connected to a chess piece?” the Queen snarled. “I am not buying this. Are you sure Margaret and Fabiola aren’t faking it?”
“I suppose they’re not. Fabiola is doing pretty badly. A special committee of doctors are on her case, flying her to the best medical centers across Europe.”
The Queen paced around her chamber, hands behind her back, trying to put reason to this unreasonable world. “Assuming the chess pieces are so powerful, we need to know who the Chessmaster is.”
“We must,” Carolus said. “He is beginning to scare me.”
The Queen’s telephone rang. It was Mr. Jay, so she dismissed Carolus and answered.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Jay?”
“Things are getting complicated,” he said.
“I assume your men failed in catching Alice?”
“How so?”
“My men discovered the true identity of the Chessmaster.”
“And?” The Queen shrugged.
“It’s not good news.”
“Is he a Wonderland Monster?”
“It’s hard to tell.”
“But you said you know his identity.”
“And that’s the problem. The Chessmaster did something in the past, in Wonderland, that’s too scary to imagine.”
“So he did live in Wonderland, among us?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’m puzzled, Mr. Jay. Who is the Chessmaster?”
“Let me read his story for you,” Mr. Jay said.
“Read his story?”
“It was written by Lewis Carroll’s sister, part of his lost diaries.”
“Why hasn’t Lewis written it himself? I’m so confused.”
“You’ll get it once I finish reading the story. Let me begin with its title.”
“It’s a diary entry with a title?”
“Yes. The title is a number: 14011898.”
“Is that the date of—”
“Yes, now don’t interrupt me, and listen.”
42
Lewis Carroll’s diary. An entry written by his sister in Guildford, United Kingdom, on the fourteenth of January, 1898
As I write this, my lovely brother Lewis is dying in his room in my house at Guildford. He’s been here for some time due to his recent illnesses—mostly the intensifying migraines and the possibility of being schizophrenic.
I haven’t seen much of his split persona that he claims to encounter. On the contrary, my brother’s presence has been so pleasant that I regret not having spent more time with him earlier in life.
He will die a bachelor, but having affected every child in the world with his books—and, of course, he can’t stop talking about that girl who inspired him to write the books, Alice.
But I am not here to complain about my brother. I am here to write about what just happened and what I saw with my own eyes. Better write it right away before my fragile old memories escape me.
Let’s start with Lewis having been obsessed with chess since he went to Russia many years ago. He couldn’t get it out of his head that he had to write Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, based around a game of chess.
Ever since he arrived from Oxford to my modest two-storey house here, he’s had his own chessboard.
It’s been set up and ready on a table next to his bed for some time. Every time I asked him about whom he was expecting to play with, he laughed wearily and told me he was expecting an opponent to arrive at any moment.
I never understood; neither did I pay much attention to it. I was ignorant about chess and Lewis had always been an unusual man. You don’t ask him about what he is doing, for he is like a child who does what he wants when he wants.
In the last few days, his health had deteriorated much, and it was devastating watching him like that. He sometimes joked that I need not worry because he would not die, not until he played that last chess game with his expected opponent.
Which made it harder for me to hold my tears because I thought he was hallucinating.
But the expected guest came.
It was late at night when the doors to my balcony sprang open due to a snowy wind with an aggressive appetite for destruction. I stood up, locked the window back, and was about to go back to bed when I heard Lewis talking to someone.
Tiptoeing, I approached his room and could instantly see that Lewis had left the bed and sat at the table for a game of chess. Opposite him sat the awaited, and most unwelcome, guest. I couldn’t see his face, though, not from this angle. All I was sure of was that he was wearing a red cloak.
“I thought you would play the game, using your special chess pieces, carved from your own bones,” the guest said to my brother Charles—I mean Lewis, as most of you know him by that name.
“I knew you’d ask for them, but you will never find them,” Lewis said. “I’ve had someone help me keep them away from you.”
“Nothing is that far away, Carroll,” the guest said. “I will find the set. I will find the knight, eventually.”
“Then it will take you years and years to do so because I scattered them all over the world.”
“The world is mine, not yours,” said the guest. “I have time; you have none.”
“Don’t get carried away. You haven’t beaten me yet.”
“No one has ever beaten me when their time came, Lewis.”
“There is a first for everything.”
“My first will also be my last.”
“And it scares you.” Lewis looked unusually competitive. I wondered who the guest was.
“It does scare me,” answered the guest. “But when it happens, I remind myself that I never lose. It just never happened, because I am—”
“No need to tell me your real name.” Lewis raised a hand. “I’ve known your name since the days of Wonderland.”
It was sentences like these that made me doubt my brother’s sanity. He had lost his grip on reality, thinking Wonderland was real. But the guest didn’t seem to object.
“If only I had enough time in Wonderland,” said the guest. “I’d have killed so many.”
“But it still wouldn’t be enough,” Lewis remarked. “Because your sickness of killing is unquenchable. Blood will never taste like wine from Eden, no matter how much you spill.”
“You know I have the right to do what I do.”
“I sympathized with you in the beginning, but no more.”
“Why? Because you know it’s her who made me what I am?”
“Leave her out of it,” Lewis said and made his first chess move. That was when I noticed the small cups of liquor on both sides of the board. With each move, they had to follow up with one drink.
At some point I was going to enter the room, but then Lewis discreetly waved me off. I respected his wishes and stood watching, still wondering about the guest cloaked in red.
Later it was clear that Lewis was losing. What troubled me was the fear showing on his face with every move. It was unreasonable, not the kind of fear that shows in a game of chess, no matter what the price.
But the cloaked guest had another opinion. Close to Lewis’s seventh move, the guest was laughing. “Tell me, Lewis, what’s the most you’ve lost in a game of chess?”
Lewis preferred not to answer. He looked certain to lose but wanted to make the best of his last move.
“Say my name, Lewis,” said the guest in a mocking tone of voice.
Lewis said nothing, making his last move which seemed to make things worse. Instantly, the guest moved his knight and said, “Checkmate.”
Lewis shrieked in a silent way, unable to breathe properly. I wanted to go in again, but he waved me off again, nervously—I gathered I had to stay away, or I wouldn’t be safe from the cloaked man.
Lewis pulled the last drink to his mouth, which I later learned was poisonous—the kind of poison that strangely worked after the seventh sip—and gulped, glaring at the guest with a challenging stare.
“Don’t worry,” the guest said. “It won’t hurt. You will be dead in seconds.”
Lewis’s face was reddening, and he appeared to be choking when he said, “I am sorry, Wonderlanders. I failed you.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself.” The guest stood up and patted Lewis. “You were killed by Death himself. Like I said, I never lost a game of chess, not when my opponents played for their lives.” His laughter escalated. “Of all those whom I appeared to and challenged with a game of chess, no one ever beat me; and I doubt anyone will. But to tell the truth, nothing feels as good as killing you.”
“But you won’t be able to kill her.” Lewis clung to the edge of the table while on his knees, chess pieces rolling left and right on the floor. “I hid the pieces from my bones.”
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I shivered in place, watching my brother die, and listening to a man claiming to be Death itself.
And then the cloaked man turned and faced me.
In my mind I wanted to run, but my limbs were frozen. Even though he was an old man with a silly moustache, something inside me assured me that I was looking Death in the eyes.
“Don’t worry.” He brushed at his moustache. “I won’t kill you. Your time hasn’t come yet.”
I stood speechless and paralysed with fear, clinging to the door’s frame.
“But when it does, I will come for you.” He craned his head closer. “And I will challenge you in a game of chess, and I will win.” He laughed proudly again. “What? Did you think it was the Grim Reaper, some spooky guy with a scythe coming for you when your time comes?” He turned to face Lewis for one last time. “Rest in peace, Wonderland man,” Death said. “As for Alice, I will settle for nothing less than watching her burn in an eternal hell.”
43
Tibet
The storm ends the minute I finish the last sentence from Lewis Carroll’s sister’s diary. Even so, I don’t rise from underneath my coat yet. I’m not sure what I really read. The shock of reading this way outweighs the mystery of the storm.
Is the Chessmaster really Death? Then what does he want to protect himself from? And why does he want me to burn in hell?
And all aside, how can you kill Death?
My coat unfurls by itself, and I feel the sudden chill of cold outside. The world around me is an endless whiteout; I can’t see anything before me. I prop myself up on my knees, and the storm snatches the notes away from my hands and swirls them upward. The notes are swallowed by the thickness of white, but I am not worried. I know what I’ve read, and have memorized it.
So the Chessmaster killed Lewis Carroll? If so, what’s Carolus doing in this world? Why did Carolus even bother to fool me into killing him earlier? So many unanswered questions. The one thing that seems clear to me is that Wonderlanders—and maybe humans—die playing a last chess game against the unbeatable Chessmaster.
