Uninvited Strangers

by Jae Loren



  Afternoon Ceylon, A Chroniker, & the Shattered Looking Glass

  Book I: Uninvited Strangers

  By Jae Loren

  Afternoon Ceylon, A Chroniker, & the Shattered Looking Glass

  Book I: Uninvited Strangers

  By Jae Loren

  Copyright 2012 Jae Loren

  Rapunzel

  Table of Contents

  Very Late

  Very Late

  It was always tea-time with the Hatter, Alice had said, but he hadn’t decided to test the truth for his own edification. Oliver must have come down the wrong rabbit hole.

  He had half-listened to her stories when they were children, all about that fanciful place hidden away beneath the ground, with its glamorously frightful Queen and slightly disturbed inhabitants.

  Alice had called it Wonderland. While the rest of the classroom was memorizing arithmetic and various psalms, Alice drifted off with a vacant expression by the back window, her tablet filled with scratched stencils. Like all the other children, Oliver had paid her no mind and threw mud on her dress when she annoyed him enough, which she did easily by not responding to the insults. He had laughed and jeered at her and called her names, but thinking back to the schoolyard, never once did he remember seeing her bright blue eyes fill with tears that threatened to spill over her pale cheeks. Her defiance had only made the bullying worse and a couple of years later, after a few boys had taken to cutting her hair off with shears, Alice left the town.

  Not to say she had gone alone. Her parents and older sister had disappeared as well without a word to anyone else, gone as quickly as they had come. It seemed alright with everyone else, since the family wasn’t missed so much anyway. Oliver personally thought that the older, mature sister had been the most amiable of the whole lot. With long, glossy brown curls and a smile that warmed the entire room, it was a shame that she had such an unpopular sibling. The older sister was destined for better things. But as for Alice….

  Oliver supposed that he would be thinking of all that now; he shook his ankles, hearing the chain links rattle and scrape against the cellar floor. His wrists rubbed raw against rusted metal cuffs that dug into his skin at the slightest movement. They were probably red and blistered by now, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the tip of his nose in this darkness. Looking back at his immaturity, the school days spent joining in with the other jeering children, he felt a small twinge of guilt. It was really bad form for him to have tortured the girl, especially now, almost a decade later, when he realized that she had been right the entire time.

  He smacked his head against the cold, wet wall behind him in disgust. Streaks of water from the leaking foundation beneath the cottage slid down the brick face, tickling his nape. It was bad form for someone with his promising marks at University to be shackled to the wall like a prisoner, with little in the way of food or clothing. His shirt sleeves and the hem of his trousers were in loose-thread tatters, snagging on unseen objects. He felt like a month’s worth of dirt was glued to every part of his body, and would have given anything for a steaming hot bath and a fresh bar of soap, or even his own standard bed in the safe confinement of the dormitories.

  If only he hadn’t chased after that ball…

  So many times had he retraced his steps in anguish, thought of what he could have done differently and wished he had not done anything it at all. It had begun simple enough: on a short holiday from his studies, he had come back to his family’s village for visitations. He had taken the time to reconnect with his childhood friends who suggested a game of catch-ball for old times’ sake. As young boys, they had played nearly every day at the edge of the village, right next to the woods and beside the river.

  Allowing himself a few hours of leisure before his return trip to the dormitories, Oliver had let himself get immersed in the game. It had felt too nostalgic to shed off his early adult responsibilities and worries and play like a child again.

  Then it all had gone downhill.

  He had lost sight of the ball, missing the throw as it sailed over his head, and had offered to retrieve it. He traced the smooth furrow trail all the way within the deeper part of the village woods to the base of a rather large tree. Then he had fallen down a man-sized rabbit burrow as he lost his balance on the loose soil while reaching for the ball. It was like being pushed off a cliff; he remembered the feeling of air rushing around his body until he was knocked unconscious by some unrelenting object. When he awoke with blurry vision, a splitting headache and aching limbs, he had been in a strange forest with whispering trees that had odd-angled branches that creaked like old bones in the wind.

  There was so much color to the place. As his vision cleared, his eyes could barely process the assault of the vibrant scenery. It was so bright and interesting that Oliver immediately walked away to get a good look at the strangeness.

  Against the reasonable part of his persona, honed by years of fine education and his father’s strict nature, he had walked around for quite a bit, startled by the quiet that threaded through the forest. Not even an insect fluttered around the large, closed flower bulbs or the clear, sticky sap that leaked from some of the trees. He felt eyes watching him from the bare shadows, but each time he looked behind him, there was nothing but an empty path and a fading tinkering wind that sounded suspiciously like muffled laughter. Each breeze seemed to carry several hundred whispers. Whether it was foreboding or paranoia that trickled through his veins, Oliver couldn’t tell. Reason told him to turn tail and leave, go back to rejoin the friends that were no doubt waiting for him to return, but curiosity won out and he persevered on, confident that he would be back in time to return to school.

  When he finally stepped out the forest path, after following the almost endless winding roads, it was to find a lone table covered in goodies and teacups in a small sunny glade, the backdrop of a small, quaint cottage giving the scene a familiar touch. Flapping wings resounded behind him as a flock of small birds darted from a hidden spot into the skies as though spooked, their shadowed flight crossing the space of the clearing. Smoke rose from the smoldering coals in a ground pit beneath a metal kettle held aloft by an iron spit. One small man in an overlarge purple hat sat at the table, biting on a cookie and occasionally bringing a teacup to his mouth. The man looked up when Oliver approached, but the brim of the hat was too big for Oliver to see his eyes. A playing card with a slash between the numbers ten and six rested easily in the band of the hat next to a small faded bundle of dried flowers.

  When the man said nothing, Oliver offered a wan smile. At least he could ask where he was or get directions of some kind. “Hello, I was wondering if you could assist me, I’m not quite sure-”

  “Are you here for the tea party?”

  Oliver blinked, “I’m sorry?”

  “Are you a friend or aren’t you? It’s rude to stare and ask questions while someone is having tea. Don’t you know its tea-time? Sit down already!”

  Instinctively obeying the tone his parents often took, Oliver sat down at the only other chair at the table, which was across from the strange man. As he settled uncomfortably, the little man took another sip from his cup. There was something about him and his purple coat and white gloves that egged at his memory.

  He was still muttering to himself as Oliver stared, “Imagine that, at a tea party, no less!”

  Some girlish voice in his memory was chattering: “Always at a tea party…”

  Ah! That’s what it was! Oliver peered at the man again, “Are you a- forgive me, is your name Hatter?”

  The man stopped eating his cookie and frowned, “It is. Do I know you?”

  “No, I’ve just heard of you before.” But Oliver couldn’t recall from where.


  “Of course. Everyone knows of my tea party, stupid.” The last word was hissed in an undertone, but still audible in the quiet glen.

  Bristling at the insult, Oliver debated turning tail and leaving. He didn’t have to stand for such behavior, especially when he had done nothing to warrant it. But Oliver’s curiosity had the tendency to bolster his determination past normal levels. Whatever it was that was needling his brain had to be discovered. After a moment’s hesitation, he calmed down enough to reach for the plate of shortbread cookies, deciding not to wait for an invitation to partake. Lifting one up, he stared at the headless shape of a rabbit with surprise. Discretely, he attempted to find another cookie, only to find the plate filled with headless animal-shaped treats. How odd…

  To come down a rabbit hole and find all this…

  It was then that he remembered the pretty young girl in a blue dress that they all had teased in their younger days. Once a quiet, mouse-like child, she had never spoken up before, never voiced complaint nor opinion. She kept to herself and spent most of her time outside of her lessons with her older sister, reading in the grass or playing with a stray puppy close along the riverside during the twilight hours. Mostly,