The Ulysses Quicksilver Short Story Collection (Pax Britannia)

by Jonathan Green

  "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

  "Look, we have to keep moving."

  He was sure it would be only a matter of time before the hospital staff discovered that either he or the child had absconded and put out the call for them to be recaptured.

  If they continued across the open lawns they would be in full view of anyone coming after them. Heading left would expose them to the entire rear aspect of the house. To the right, the interestingly shaped hedges and gravel paths ran up to the boundary of a brooding forest offering far more cover.

  "This way," he said, pulling the girl after him as he set off for the shadowed perimeter of the ancient woodland.

  "What's your name?" he puffed as they crossed into the premature twilight of the forest.

  "Alice," replied the girl. "I think. Yes, Alice. I always liked the name Alice. I think I had a daughter called Alice, once upon a time."

  Ulysses' concern for the child deepened. Her mind was unravelling like a ball of wool being toyed with by a kitten. Here was a damaged soul, if ever Ulysses had seen one. Whatever diabolical experiments the doctors had carried out upon her, there would be hell to pay when Ulysses was back to his old self.

  He suddenly froze.

  It was as dark as dusk between the trees. Above them, glimpsed through the branches, the sky was the colour of a putrid bruise.

  "What was that?" Ulysses said.

  "What was what?" the girl said happily.

  "It sounds like people talking."

  Slowly, Ulysses advanced further into the wood.

  Gradually the close packed knotty boles of the wood gave way to the crumbling wall, lichen-scabbed gateposts and rusted iron railings of a fenced-off flower garden. Descending a few mossy steps, Ulysses found himself standing between flowerbeds riddled with weeds and rife with countless curious blooms that swayed above him like the fronds of palm trees.

  He gazed up and suddenly felt very small.

  Alice gazed up at the swaying flower heads with wonderment in her eyes.

  Ulysses wandered on, listening. And then the voices came again.

  "There it is," he said. "It sounds like the rustle of petals, or the rattle of seed heads."

  "But of course it does," the child piped up. "After all, it is the flowers that are talking."

  Ulysses turned and stared at the girl. She was off again. "But flowers can't talk!"

  "Yes they can."

  "I can't believe that!"

  "Can't you?" the child said, in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

  "There's no use trying," Ulysses laughed mirthlessly. "One can't believe impossible things."

  "I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day."

  "My age?"

  "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

  "We can talk," said a Tiger-lily, "when there's anybody worth talking to."

  Ulysses suddenly felt sick to the pit of his stomach. Was the child's madness contagious, he wondered, or were talking flowers merely another piece of evidence of his insanity?

  In fact, come to think of it, was he even there at all, or was he merely a fantasy vision brought on in someone's mind by a piece of undigested cheese?

  "Stop it!" he reprimanded himself. "Thinking like that could make a man mad, if he wasn't as mad as a hatter already."

  Ulysses broke off, unnerved by his new habit of arguing with himself. He had thought he had heard something else altogether more threatening than the sound of gossiping gladioli. In fact, it had sounded unpleasantly like the growling of a steam-engine, or the snorting of some wild beast loose in the woods.

  "Are there any lions or tigers about here?" he asked the child, who continued to smile at him knowingly.

  "It's only the Red King snoring."

  Ulysses looked about him, but couldn't see anyone, awake or otherwise.

  "He's dreaming now, and what do you think he's dreaming about?"

  "Let's not go there. We have to keep moving." He took hold of the girl's hand again, but then hesitated. "But I don't know the way."

  "Don't worry. I know the way," the child said, leading him up the garden path.

  They left the garden and set off deeper into the wood. In no time at all, it seemed, they were surrounded by a profusion of gigantic fungi. They walked on through the twilit gloom of this forest of toadstools.

  They stopped in the shade of a particularly large mushroom, its fleshy gills mottled the colour of a week-old corpse. The long mouthpiece of a hookah pipe trailed over the edge of the mushroom's cap. Something wet and sticky, like sugar syrup, oozed and dripped from the top of the fungus.

  His curiosity getting the better of him - having looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it - it occurred to Ulysses that he might as well see what was on top of it.

  Stretching himself up on his tiptoes, he peered over the edge of the mushroom and found himself looking into the lifeless eyes of a large blue caterpillar. It looked like the creature had been opened up with a butcher's knife, from top to tail, the yellow paste of its ravaged internal organs oozing out onto the toadstool.

  "Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice as she joined him on tiptoes.

  Were the bloodstains on her dress larger than they had been or was it all just part of the delusion Ulysses was suffering?

  He turned from the brutally gutted butterfly larva and stared into the girl's face.

  "Curiouser and curiouser!" she said, and smiled.

  VI

  Malice in Wonderland

  From the carnage of caterpillar's carcass, they made their way through the crowding fungi and back into the forest. Coming to a clearing, they came in sight of a curious cottage. The roof was thatched with fur and, just as bizarrely, the chimney-stacks were shaped like ears. The layout and proportion of the windows and the front door helped to give the cottage a distinctly rabbity appearance.

  Under a tree, in front of the house, a large table had been laid for tea. Slumped in an arm-chair at the head of the table was a man wearing a check waistcoat, a large spotty bow-tie, a white wing-collar shirt and a top hat with a ticket tucked into the band that read, 'In this Style 10/6'.

  Slouched in a chair one place removed from the Hatter, its chin resting on the matted fur of its chest, was the March Hare. Neither even so much as moved as Ulysses and Alice made their approach.

  The ropes of their intestines adorned the branches of the tree like party decorations. The rank stink of offal was hot in the air. Ulysses gagged, and tried to shield the child from the horror that she had already witnessed, pulling her close to his chest.

  But Alice simply pulled back and stared at the grim tableau of the tea party.

  Ulysses heard the rattle of china as the child reached across the table and removed the lid of the teapot, its cracked glaze sticky with drying gore.

  "Ah, and here's the Dormouse," she said. "At least I assume it's the Dormouse. Well, bits of him anyway. It's really just so much guts and fur now. How simply frightful! You don't want fur in your tea, do you? That would be disgusting."

  "What is going on here?" Ulysses hissed.

  The child studied him, a quizzical look in her eye, her head on one side.

  "Why, I would have thought that was quite plain. It's tea, of course."

  What had they done to the poor child to make her like this? She was utterly, utterly mad.

  "Is this all real?" he asked himself as he gazed around the clearing, at the house and the forest beyond, "or is it all in my head?"

  "Why does it make it any less real if it's just inside your head?" the child asked, her expression one of guileless innocence.

  "Come on," Ulysses said, tugging at Alice's hand again, shooting fearful glances at the shifting shadows of the encroaching trees. "We have to get you to safety, and quickly."

  The child fixed him with those wide, almost black eyes
of hers and he felt the layers of his consciousness being peeled away. He could feel his agitation rising, his carefully created facade of cool, calm collectedness crumbling.

  "But where to? Where can we go that's safe?" she asked, her eyes suddenly the imploring eyes of a fearful child, waking to find that the nightmare was real.

  It was up to him now. He was the adult, she the helpless innocent. She needed him.

  "Into the house!" he said, in a moment of decisive action, his eyes still on the tree line, the sky the colour of dried blood.

  The two of them - the madman and the girl - sprinted across the clearing, kicking up dead leaves with every pounding footfall as they made for the front door of the cottage. Ulysses could see things moving within the tree-line now, he was sure of it.

  And then they were at the door and he was barging it open with his shoulder, bundling the girl through, and then himself. Throwing all his weight against the door he slammed it shut.

  He closed his eyes and slid down the door to the floor. The come down from his adrenaline rush was making his hands shake; and then the blackness of oblivion took him as he passed out.

  Ulysses snapped his eyes open to be greeted by the gloom of the hallway. Night had fallen. How long had he been out for? He sniffed. The mouth-watering aroma of eggs and bacon reached him as the popping and sizzling of the frying pan hissed along the passageway from the kitchen. The delicious smell helped rouse him and, blinking the weariness from his eyes, he tried to stand. His back ached. His arms and legs were stiff. He had no feeling in his feet at all. But, nonetheless, he still managed to follow the tantalising scents to their source.

  The large kitchen was full of smoke and steam, and there was a cacophony of sounds to match the miasma of scents. Bacon sizzled and popped, a cauldron of broth bubbled, while pots and pans clattered as the girl worked.

  He could see her through the fug, standing before the range, a large ladle in her hand, stirring the contents of the cauldron. As Ulysses watched, Alice wiped a hand across her forehead, strands of dark hair, plastered to her skin, forming random fractal patterns across her face. As she stirred she sang to herself.

  "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men, couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again."

  "That smells good," Ulysses said.

  Alice turned and offered him a smile.

  "You prepared all this yourself?"

  "Well somebody I know, not a million miles from here, was too busy snoring as loud as the Red King to help. Did you dream of him, by the way, dreaming of you? Let's consider who it was that dreamed it all."

  "So," said Ulysses, peering over the girl's shoulder at the cauldron bubbling upon the range, "what are we having?"

  As Ulysses stared into the pot, and Alice stirred the bubbling broth, a calf's head floated to the surface, its boiled eyes white and sightless, its cooked tongue lolling from its slack mouth.

  Ulysses' grumbling stomach knotted and that same unpleasantly familiar sick feeling returned. He slowly took in the rest of the kitchen.

  The largest eggshell he had ever seen - at least ten times as big as an ostrich's - lay cracked on the kitchen table. Beside it, on a plate, sat a suckling pig's head. When he caught sight of the skinned cat, he turned away in disgust.

  "Soup of the evening, beautiful soup! Mock Turtle soup in fact," the child began. "Beautiful soup, so rich and green, waiting in a hot tureen!"

  "Followed by oysters and frog's legs, and a ham and pepper omelette. There's also dormouse and roast flamingo and gryphon wings. Then there's jugged hare - or lamb chops, if you prefer - and sausages, with jam tarts to finish, only there's no jam in them."

  "Why not?" Ulysses asked weakly, barely managing to hold it together as the world began to unravel around him once again.

  "The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today."

  "You killed them, didn't you?"

  The child looked at him. "Oh yes," she said, smiling.

  "And the Hatter, and the Hare."

  "That's right."

  "And the Knave of Hearts?"

  "As dead as a dodo."

  "You killed them all," Ulysses whispered, stunned. "It was you," he said as memories re-surfaced and facts he hadn't previously been aware of even knowing presented themselves to his conscious mind. "It was you that killed the visitors to the Phantasmagoria."

  "Oh yes. I don't deny it."

  "Then why didn't you say something before?"

  "You didn't ask me before."

  Ulysses suddenly felt horribly cold, despite the heat of the kitchen. He needed to sit down. Backing away, he collapsed into a chair.

  "They all came to see us, you know," the child said, abandoning her cooking, slowly crossing the kitchen towards him, swinging her hips in a way that a twelve year old girl never should.

  "Stop it, please," Ulysses wept. "You shouldn't have done it."

  "But we were not amused," she said, her crocodile leer remaining firmly fixed upon her innocent face. "'Til we set about butchering them, of course. Then we found them most amusing."

  Ulysses couldn't move.

  "But none of them will have amused us as much as you will, I suspect. Mr Quicksilver."

  The child's smile never stopped, the corners of her mouth stretching wider and wider. And her smile was full of teeth.

  And a verse entered Ulysses' mind:

  Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  VII

  Jabberwocky

  Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

  A children's nonsense rhyme nothing more. Except that it was something more. Otherwise, why should such a thing come into his mind at this very moment?

  Ulysses stared into the black, soulless eyes of the child as she continued to saunter towards him.

  "How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail," the child intoned, as she walked the length of the ever-lengthening kitchen.

  "Please stop," he begged her, fear colouring his voice.

  "And pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale?"

  "You don't need to do this."

  The girl paused, putting her head on one side again, regarding him with the same quizzical expression. "Is this really the great Ulysses Quicksilver," she said, amused, "begging for his life like some abused workhouse urchin?"

  "Look, I don't want to have to hurt you," Ulysses explained, backing away from her.

  "You?" she smiled coldly. "Hurt me?"

  A long purple tongue darted from between her teeth, running up and down her lips in hungry anticipation. "Come now, Mr Quicksilver, what do you take me for? You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you know."

  She was right, Ulysses thought. His eyes darted about the kitchen; he looked for a something to defend himself with. If only he had had his sword-stick to hand, or his trusty pistol.

  The trouble was, the further he moved away from the child, anything even remotely approximating a weapon was further from his reach. The carving knives and cleavers were in a block on a work surface at the other end of the room, as were the frying pans and saucepans hung above the range.

  What he really needed was a way out. Where was a rabbit in a waistcoat to direct you when you needed one?

  As if reading his mind, Alice stepped to one side, providing Ulysses with an unobstructed view of the range and the saucepans crowding the coals. There was the cauldron, full to the brim with bubbling broth, the calf's head still peering blindly from it, and there, next to it, was another pan, the lid that had been forced down upon it rattling wildly as its contents boiled over. Flopped over the edge of the pan was one drooping white ear.

  Alice followed his gazed and then smiled at him from beneath hooded eyes. "Oh, no, you're not getting away that easily. And didn't I mention it before? We're having boiled bunny too. It's my own invention, but it needs more pepper."

  He returned his gaze to
the girl as if she might leap at him any second. She was half his size, but something about her features gave him the undeniable impression that, as she herself had said, appearances could be deceiving.

  At that moment Ulysses spotted the bread knife that had been left on the table - it was only an arm's length away - and he made a grab for it.

  The transformation took place so quickly that Ulysses barely registered it. One moment, the child had been standing there rabbiting away, the next it seemed to Ulysses that she simply shot out her hand, as if to seize the knife before he could, even though she was still half a table's length away from it.

  As his fingertips brushed the handle of the bread knife, a bony talon slammed into the tabletop, pinning his sleeve to the wood.

  "Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes," the Alice-thing chanted. "He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases."

  Grabbing the trapped sleeve with his other hand, Ulysses pulled and, with a tearing of cloth, he tumbled free.

  Before he had even engaged his brain Ulysses was running out through the door, back along the passageway and out through the front door of the cottage.

  Drawing in great ragged lungfuls of cold night air, Ulysses spun to his left and hared away from the house.

  He found himself sprinting through a garden of cool tinkling fountains and carefully-trimmed rose trees. It might have been considered beautiful, were it not for the fact that it was also strewn with the bodies of playing card people, their blood having painted the white roses red, although, in the moonlight, the dripping blooms glistened blackly.

  Ulysses dared not stop, despite the bloody destruction that had been wrought all about him, and he dared not look back. For he knew that Alice was in pursuit. Her sing-song voice carried to him over the beating of his own panicked heart and his rasping breaths.

  "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at! Up above the world you fly, like a tea tray in the sky."