by Lotus Rose
She looks away, wants to avoid seeing that girl again, doesn’t even want to hear the sound of her sexy voice anymore. And yet she can hear the quiet version of F-me Shoes’ voice as she resumes reciting her bedtime story.
Malice forces herself to redirect her attention to the Jabberwock, says, “Yes, you’re quite intimidating, but we all know you’re going through difficulties. We love ya, and we want to help you. Hatter, Humpty, and I have all agreed to go on a quest with you, to Jabberwock Valley—”
The Jabberwock lets out a groan. “I already told Sleepy B I wouldn’t be going on that quest. I’m a disgrace in the jabberwocks’ eyes. I was banished!”
“But I found out that your official exile ended four years ago. And there are so many good reasons to go. You couldn’t help it that your vorpal sword was taken when everyone thought you were dead, but you owe it to yourself to regain it. And the jabberwock doctors may be able to help you with your decapitation situation.”
“No! I can’t even show my face...or my head there anymore. I’m ashamed, okay?”
“But you have nothing to be ashamed of anymore. That was the past and you’ve served your punishment. And we’ll all help you in any way we can...” Malice feels a sudden sinking feeling in her chest.
Oh no, not now.
She continues, “We’ll go with you, and as Queen, they’re sure to listen to me.”
She feels the bad thoughts slipping in. Her heart is beating erratically.
The Jabberwock snarls, before trying to put on a pleasanter expression. “No, I’m not going, that’s final! And I’m tired of the nagging. I know this is your first time talking to me, but those two have been on me all week about this.”
Malice nods while trying to hide her worry. As she feels a coldness spreading through her chest, she realizes her ticktock heart has stopped functioning.
The Jabberwock’s brow rises. “Are you okay?”
But maybe it’s only a temporary glitch and it’ll kick in soon again—it’s been doing that a lot lately. In a fake cheery voice, Malice says, “I’m fine, just...” She gives forth a fake couple of coughs, to give her the excuse to slap her chest, hoping to jostle her heart back to running properly.
“Oh dear,” the Jabberwock says. “I’ve upset you. I meant no offense, really. I’m grateful you’re concerned about me.”
Malice nods, manages to smile, though she’d rather scowl.
“Get some water,” Sleepy B calls helpfully over to her.
Malice wants to yell back, “Good idea! Water, so I can drown you with it!” but she clamps her mouth shut. The chill in her chest is intensifying—soon she won’t be able to stop the heartless behavior. She slaps her chest twice, and her heart starts sputtering with weak heartbeats.
I really should just go, before it stops again, and I lose my composure.
She stands up too suddenly, sending her chair tottering backward and clattering into the floor.
She hears gasps. She chuckles nervously, and shrugs her shoulders to play it off. She says to the Jabberwock, “Please help us by letting us help you. We want to, really. So please just think about it. And now...I’ve bothered you enough...I’ll leave you alone...” She’s trying to sound cheerful, but to her own ears, she sounds terse and angry.
I wish I could knock some sense into that monster’s stupid decapitated head.
The Jabberwock stands. “Goodbye Queen.” He bows graciously.
Malice ignores him—she knows it’s rude, but she’s mostly concerned with getting out of this room without an incident.
Thankfully, that confounded Cat isn’t making any of his smarty cat comments—it’d be technically wrong to say he’s “keeping his mouth shut,” because he’s grinning—always grinning like a loon.
I wish he would materialize his lower body so I could wring his neck!
Malice balls her fists at her side and steps forward. If I can just make it to the door...
“Bye Queen Malice!” Sleepy B calls out cheerfully. She waves with her right hand, which is covered in a black fingerless lace glove.
Malice waves half-heartedly but doesn’t turn her head to look at her. She doesn’t want to have to see F-me Shoes, because Malice can’t even stand the sight of the little hussy. But at least F-me Shoes is choosing to keep her mouth shut, and Malice can at least respect that.
Malice is grateful to be almost at the door. She presses her hand to her chest. It feels cold now, but her heart is still thumping weakly, though it’s woefully out of rhythm.
She reaches for the door, just as she feels her heart stop beating. She pushes the door open.
She hears F-me Shoes sneeze. The fact the temptress has made her presence known once again is bad enough, but the fact that her sneeze was so cutesy and girly and attractive is almost more than Malice can take.
Malice’s hand curls into a fist, in the aftermath silence of that damned adorable sneeze. With her back turned to the room, she scowls without anyone seeing.
“Bless you,” the Jabberwock says.
F-me Shoes sneezes once again, with a little girly squeak at the end.
“That’s it!” Malice shouts. She whirls and glares at F-me Shoes, who cringes, and says, “I’m sorry!”
Malice rushes toward the dining table.
The Jabberwock says, “What are you doing?”
The Cat chuckles, says, “Oh ho ho! Here we go!”
Malice grabs a chair, holding it upside down in her hands. She heads toward F-me Shoes.
F-me Shoes is standing now, with an alarmed look on her too-pretty face.
Malice snarls, “I’m gonna beat your ass, because I can’t even stand you anymore!”
F-me Shoes whimpers, while edging toward the door. “I’m sorry, Queen. I’ll try not to sneeze anymore.”
“Queen...” the Jabberwock says in his best soothing voice.
Malice shouts, “No! As Queen, I order you to sit and let me beat your ass.”
“Beat my ass?!” F-me Shoes shrieks and makes a break for the door.
Malice runs at her and while shouting, swings as F-me Shoes passes by, but misses and the chair swooshes through the air.
F-me Shoes runs out of the hut.
“Bollocks!” Malice shouts. She slams the chair into the top of the dining table over and over, until it splinters into bits and the plates and glasses are shattered.
In the aftermath, she stands looking down at the mess, holding a broken chair leg in each hand. She is breathing heavily, trying to catch her breath.
“Bravo!” the Cat says. “You really stuck it to those dishes.”
She glowers at him.
The Jabberwock says, “I must say, I disapprove of you losing your temper.”
“Shut up, decap-head,” Malice mutters.
Sleepy B says, “So when is the Queen of Hearts going to check your heart?”
Malice whips her gaze at the girl. Sleepy B ducks under the blanket with just her frightened eyes peering over the edge.
Malice snarls, “Watch yourself little girl, or you’re next.”
She throws the chair legs on the ground and stomps out of the hut with the chuckling Cat hovering at her side.
Outside, F-me Shoes is nowhere to be seen.
“That was a most excellent tantrum, Queeny,” the Cat says.
“Oh, shut up.”
Her irritability only makes him giggle more.
Stupid cat.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT DAY, MALICE is informed that F-me Shoes had been upset and had gone to the Storyteller and had him send her into the Outside World. Malice feels guilty, but apparently F-me Shoes had been considering leaving Wonderland anyway, and the incident simply sent her over the edge. The Storyteller had never liked F-me Shoes’ influence on Sleepy B, so Malice can understand why he was so cooperative in helping F-me Shoes leave.
Malice feels guilty over the whole thing, which means her heart has started working again, but she keeps her appointment with Doctor Froud.
He happens to be a gnome a couple inches shorter than Malice, with a long white beard.
The appointment unfortunately turns out to be less than helpful. Froud is a mental doctor, a psychiatrist, he calls himself, so his expertise is in the mental realm as opposed to other parts of the body. In fact, he is currently running treatment sessions for the Mad Hatter and the Knight.
So when he tries to assess Malice’s heart, he’s out of his element, though he tries to cover it up with a bunch of psychobabble terms, which he probably uses to seem smart, Malice thinks.
He doesn’t even bring any medical instruments. When he listens to her heart ticking with a glass pressed to her chest and held to his ear, he does notice something awry.
“About every 64 seconds, the ticking of your heart temporarily goes out of rhythm for a couple of seconds. It’s like a burst of rapid beats!”
Malice is of course alarmed, thinking it is perhaps a sign of her heart malfunctioning.
Froud seems perplexed, but since it’s a mechanical heart, he is at a loss for an explanation or cure.
He does offer her his counseling services.
Malice says her problem is in her heart, not her head.
He says, “It’s all connected.”
She thanks him and sends him away.
So, Malice is left with the loathsome prospect of approaching the Queen of Hearts for help. But Malice would rather be slapped in the face than go to that beastly woman.
But after Malice’s unfortunate “tantrum” with F-me Shoes, Hatter and Humpty had insisted that she compromise with the Queen of Hearts, who’d been saying she knew a lot about hearts, and so, could probably help a great deal with Malice’s “condition”. Of course, the Queen of Hearts would only help for a price, and Malice had been too proud to agree.
But Humpty and Hatter had nagged her into agreeing.
And so now she stands in the dungeon hallway, outside the Queen of Hearts’ cell door, standing next to one of the guard cards, who are human-sized cards with arms and legs and flattish sort of heads.
The guard is there to protect Malice should the Queen of Hearts exhibit “unseemly” violent behavior. He also holds the vial of Malice’s tears in a stoppered glass test tube. He holds one of the cards’ typical spears in his other hand.
In her own hands, Malice holds the device known as a “stethoscope” that the Queen of Hearts had claimed she’d need to “doctor” Malice.
The castle used to belong to the Queen of Hearts, and she’d said she had a vague memory of where she’d stored the stethoscope away, many years ago.
Of course Malice and some of the guards, as well as Humpty and Hatter had ended up searching for hours, rummaging through storage bins filled with junk, until Humpty had found it.
Malice pounds on the door. “Miss ‘Of Hearts’! We’re here now!” Malice has been calling her “Miss” since she is no longer Queen of Wonderland after all, and since she never married, she must be a “Miss”. Of course, everyone else continues to call her “Queen of Hearts”, out of habit apparently, but Malice is not enough of a dictatorial monarch to force them to stop.
There is no response from inside the room. Of course, Malice could stand on tippy toes and peer through the little viewing slot in the door, but of course, she knows what’s going on. The former-Queen inside won’t respond if she doesn’t want, and if Malice wants to get on her good side, she better play along.
Malice feels a little bad for possibly hurting the Queen’s feelings. She takes a fortifying breath. “I mean, Queen of Hearts! We have arrived!”
“Enter!”
The guard card unlocks the cell door and swings it open.
The Queen of Hearts sits inside the sparse dungeon cell, wearing her usual poofy dress. But there is something different about the Queen of Hearts, which occurred just two days ago.
It’s her face.
Half the Queen of Heart’s face is made up like a clown—the skin is white, the hair frizzy and red. However, her nose isn’t split down the middle—it’s got a complete red ball on the tip. In the past, Malice’s tears had transformed the Queen of Heart’s face into that clownish appearance. But that had been before Malice attained the ticktock heart, when she’d been heartless and her tears were malicious in their magic.
But two days ago, Malice had used her tears to return half of the Queen of Heart’s face to its pre-clown state, to prove her tears still held magical healing properties now that she has the ticktock heart. After Froud had failed to be of any help, Malice had made a deal: she’d fix the other half after the Queen of Hearts helped her.
The Queen of Hearts sneers. “Why don’t you make a painting—it shall last longer.”
“But I already did,” Malice says. She’s referring to the painting she’d ordered made of the Queen of Hearts when her face had been completely clown. Because the Queen of Hearts had been in a state of denial, she’d refused to believe that she had a clown face until confronted with the painting. For some reason, that had finally convinced her, whereas mirrors never had.
“Yes. But you’re staring.”
Malice says, “Begging your pardon, Your Former Majesty.” She looks down at the floor again. She stands in front of the Queen of Hearts now, with the guard card standing protectively at her side.
The Queen of Hearts attempts to gesture with her hands, but her shackles prevent her, causing her to give forth a grunt of irritation. “Do you wish me to aid you or not?”
Malice feels suddenly guilty for her rudeness—that’s from her ticktock heart, making her be sappy sweet. “Begging Your Highness’s pardon. Of course I do. I’ve brought the tears and the stetho...um device.”
The Queen of Hearts nods. “Very well. I must say, your tears took quite a while to work, before. Alice’s were much stronger.”
Malice shrugs. “It’s quite inconvenient she’s not here.”
“Quite. Well let’s begin then.”
Malice says, “Righto. Here you are then.”
The Queen of Hearts’ chains rattle as she takes the stethoscope. She’s chained in such a way as to allow some movement, with a long chain between her wrists, but not too much movement—a long chain leads from the middle of the wrist chain to an O-ring set in the wall. “Ah, I remember using this listening device before. Then it got lost amongst all my clutter. I took it from a doctor I had beheaded. Of course, I am the greatest heart expert in all the land, for I have collected so many, over the years (along with heads), that I can tell so much just by their appearance—their color, their texture and such.” She stares at Malice’s chest and arches a brow. “Do you have a knife?”
Malice glowers for a moment, filled with rage, before her kindness programming intrudes itself in her thoughts: Be nice. After all, you want her to help you.
Malice struggles with her face muscles, but manages to smile politely. “Unfortunately, I have no knife.”
“The spear perhaps?”
“You’ll have to make do with the stethoscope.”
“A pity. But even so, I can tell a lot from the sounds. I’m an expert, you see. I know so much about hearts. Why, it’s even in my name.”
“Indeed,” Malice says.
“Come, child lean in. I won’t bite.”
Yes, but you just might try to strangle me.
Malice steps forward just enough so that the Queen of Hearts can reach her chest, but not her neck.
The Queen of Hearts slips the ends of the stethoscope in her ears, she presses the other end to Malice’s chest—Malice has worn a low cut dress just for this occasion.
The Queen of Hearts listens. “Ah, I can hear your heartbeat, but it’s not like a regular heart. It’s a bit more tinny, more metallic.” She listens more. “The mechanisms do sound a bit off. Perhaps the thing needs to be fine tuned.”
“Mmm...” Malice says, choosing not to say out loud what they both know, which is that the girl known as the Tinkerer, who gave Malice the ticktock heart, currently resides in the Outside Wor
ld, and is unreachable.
“What is this?” the Queen of Hearts says. She listens for a few moments. “Now it’s stopped.”
“What is it?” Malice asks.
“It’s very strange. It’s like there is some sort of message in your heartbeat that repeats once every minute or so.”
“A message? How?”
“In Morse code—it’s a way of sending messages using clicks that symbolize letters. When they’re put together they spell out words. The only problem is that, even though I recognize that it’s Morse code, I’m not skilled enough to decipher the message.”
“How curious. Did the Tinkerer add the message?”
The Queen of Hearts shrugs. “I was never informed of one.”
“You say the message repeats? I shall have to find someone who can understand this Morse code you spoke of.”
The Queen of Hearts says, “Very well. So you’ve told me how the device monitors your thoughts. Tell me, is it doing so very much at the moment?”
“I must admit, my ticktock heart is working somewhat to counteract your irritating nature and goading, but not overly so.”
“Oh, I see.” She smirks. “It presently struggles not quite enough for me to make a proper assessment...”
“Are you proposing something?”
“Yes. Basically, I must listen to your heart when it is working hard at keeping you kind.”
“So, you propose, praytell, what?”
“Well I must challenge your kindness. It pains me to say so, but I must perform upon your heart what is known as a ‘stress test’.”
“What is that?”
“I must compel your heart to operate to the maximum of its capabilities. Indeed, I must attempt to make it work beyond what it can bear to see how it behaves then, for I have a theory about what’s causing it to break down.”
“What’s your theory?”
“That it is breaking down due to overuse.”
Malice considers that. It makes sense—it seems that, lately, when she has been struggling hardest to be nice, that her heart would cease functioning for many minutes at a time. “If that’s true, how would I fix it?”
