by John Pirillo
William jumped to his feet. “Dear God!”
Lewis leaned forward, putting his arms on the balcony railing and his chin on the back of his arms.
“You’re right; they are changing my lines. But for the better. I’ve never seen so much passion in the Jack of Spades before,” he sighed unhappily. He didn’t want the scene to be so…so…so dark!
William shook his head and sighed for an altogether different reason. Lewis Carroll would never be happy about anything. The man had too many personal problems. He had hoped that this play would get Lewis off his fatal attraction to young girls; but feared it would not. The man seemed troubled no matter how much good he had in his life.
He sighed openly. Sometimes, genius was more supported by madness than strength and courage.
The axe swept through the air and the Mad Hatter, struggled to get from its path, but the axe head struck his neck.
The audience gasped in horror as the Mad Hatter screamed horribly, fell forward onto the table, spilling a torrent of blood onto it. His head slammed noisily onto the stage floor and kept rolling, shooting off the apron of the stage and into the lap of a matronly woman and her escort.
William stood up about to clap. “Brilliant!” He roared with approval.
But the audience did not roar with approval. No, they flinched in their seats, uneasily pondering what had just happened. It was so real. So incredibly dangerous seeming and…real.
The fear now pervading the theater was ominous in its intensity. They laughed at first, shocked by the incident. But when blood poured from the severed neck and the Mad Hatter’s mask fell off, showing lifeless eyes and a look of utter disbelief and horror, Lewis jumped up as well, but not clapping. His face was a rictus of horror. “That’s not fake, William, that’s real!”
The Jack of Spades ran off stage, laughing like a man who has lost his mind. “The Mad Hatter is dead, but the rest of you…are not. Yet!”
The audience loved it.
Alice threw her hands to her mouth, pointed to the head in the lap of the screaming couple, and then hollered, “The Jack of Spades has killed the Mad Hatter!”
William and Lewis suddenly felt relieved. The actors must have planned this spontaneity. To surprise the audience, who expected something less horrifying, but instead had gotten a spectacle of blood and gore.
The audience broke into applause, jumped to its feet and began cheering, tossing flowers, sweets and fruit onto the stage.
But the old couple was not applauding. They were still staring in horror at the lifeless face lying on the floor before them. The woman gently bent down, ever so slowly reaching for the face on the floor. Her hands touched the cheek of the Mad Hatter and a fresh burst of blood erupted from his nostrils.
She screamed.
Looked at the substance on her hands and then screamed again. “This is not a fake head. It’s real. It’s real,” she began blubbering in terror, her husband trying to pull her away from the horror at their feet.
The husband of the older woman turned about to look at the audience. “She’s telling the truth, drat you all! The Jack of Spades has truly murdered the Mad Hatter!”
The woman fainted dead away finally, and the man soon after.
The audience thinking this was part of the act as well cheered even more loudly. Men began tossing gold coins onto the stage and women their handkerchiefs.
The actors, uncertain what had just happened, but thinking it was a last minute change by William and Lewis, which they often did, changing everything at the last moment, they went along with it. They rose to take their bows.
Alice hollered at the Mad Hatter. “Hank! Get up, you dumb oaf, take your applause!”
But Hank, the Mad Hatter, didn’t move. Blood kept pumping out onto the table from his severed neck. His arms and hands kept thrashing about, like a chicken with its head cut off.
“Hank, stop that!” Alice hollered.
The audience, thinking there was more to the play, grew so quiet a pin could drop.
Alice took a deep breath. Something was wrong. Why did he look wrong? Hank looked very, very wrong.
She touched his shoulder. When she did he rolled to the right and tumbled all the way to the floor.
“Hank?”
She leaned over him and pulled the clothing back from his neck. It was really skin. The head had really been cut off. She could see into the dead man’s body cavity where the heart was pumping out the last of its blood.
She screamed! Over and over and over!
Chapter Two: Mad Hatter’s Promise
Earlier that night.
Myron Forbes was a simple man with simple tastes. He had no end of useless dreams. Least that’s what his wife told him as he put on his costume for the play. Most of the actors waited until they were in the theater to do such, but he liked to absorb his persona in advance, acting out its nuances. It made him get into the role of his character more deeply and with more feeling.
“Honey, must you wear that awful costume to dinner every night?” His wife complained as she set down the last of the bread she had baked onto a platter before him.
He seized the butter knife, cut off a chunk, and then began spreading butter on it. He dipped the bread into a hot cup of steaming tea, and then dunked the wet part into his mouth. He sucked it down, and then repeated the process.
“Are you listening to me?” She asked, as she sat down opposite him, watching him perform the same bread ritual he did every bloody night. He was really starting to get on her nerves. How the man managed to hold body and soul together on so much bread she had no idea. But he provided for them and thus she could tolerate this idiosyncrasy. For now, maybe after he got famous, it wouldn’t matter anymore. He would be gone so much she could find herself someone who might appreciate her more.
“Sorry, my sweet,” he finally said, after he had filled his stomach. He gave her such a look of adoration that at once she felt ashamed of her thoughts.
He dabbed a cloth at his lips, then tossed it onto his empty plate. “Best bread ever,” he complimented her.
“It’s the only thing I ever make for you,” she told him. “I don’t know how you keep body and limb together on such a diet.”
He got up, leaned over and brushed his lips across her cheek. “It’s your love that feeds me, my sweet. Your love!” He proudly told her.
She sighed, not buying it. Her shame flew as it usually did after he opened his mouth.
He always did the same thing every dinner. Ate the bread after dipping it in hot tea, kissed her cheek, complimented her, all while wearing that horrid costume, then hurrying off to the Globe Theater to act out his part: the Jack of Spades.
“I’ve got a surprise for you tonight, my sweet,” he told her.
She brightened. “You have! What?”
She had hoped he might find some extra money from his major role to buy her some more cloth to put together for that dress she’d always wanted. She didn’t expect much. Just enough. She wasn’t greedy like the other actor wives were. She just wanted to look more proper. More ladylike.
He gave her a strange smile.
“Oh, you’re going to be so surprised.”
She grew a great big smile on her face.
“Really, what is it? What is it?”
“It’s something I found in Wonderland,” Myron told her.
He went to the nearby wall where he kept his acting axe. It was made of a soft wood and cloth and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He rubbed a forefinger along the length of its blade, drawing a tiny line of blood on his finger, and then smiled.
He turned about to face his wife.
He sucked on his finger as if it were the sweetest thing there was, then to her horror swallowed. That in itself wasn’t terrifying; it was when he lifted the axe. There was no blood left on its edge from the cut it had made on his finger.
It was as if the blade had never touched his forefinger at all.
Not only that, but his eyes color had chang
ed, his eyebrows grown closer together and thicker, the wrinkles in his face deepened and worse yet, he wiggled his nose like a rabbit.
He turned about with the axe and gave her a smile that absolutely put the fear of God into her soul. “I want to introduce you to my new girlfriend,” he joked, tapping the edge of the blade with his free hand to emphasize what he was talking about.
“Have you gone mad?” She uttered. She jumped to her feet, ready to try and make a dash for her bedroom and lock the door. The man had gone totally daft.
“Oh quite,” he replied, wiggling his nose again.
And for a brief moment she felt as if his cheeks had sprouted rabbit whiskers that twitched with his bizarre smile.
That did it for her. Her heart beating like a drum, she burst into a run for her bedroom door.
She never made it.
Myron raced after her with the axe and then swung it hard.
Myron smiled quite hard as the sound of bone and flesh being severed broke the gasping fear of his wife s she struggled to open the bedroom door, which was now suddenly locked to her.
Chapter Three: Spades
Myron Forbes, the Jack of Spades, raced out the back of the Globe Theater, his breath heaving in his chest. “Dear God! What have I done?” He cried out as he flew down the steps three at a time, hit the alley pavement and dashed for the main street.
A flood of actors came next out the door. Some were holding brooms, mops, fake swords, huge pieces of wood. They were all screaming bloody murder and hauling after Myron.
He didn’t stop to look back.
Death was on his heels.
His death!
And all he could think of was why he had done what he had done? Why? What had come over him?
He still had the axe in his hand. For some reason he couldn’t put it down. He hadn’t been able to resist picking her up and holding her since he had found her several nights ago, abandoned at the foot of a recent gallows hanging. The hangman always had an axe at the ready to finish off the hanging, when they didn’t die right away.
It was nasty. But it was final and released the poor souls that had to go that route of death.
At first he had thought himself a lucky man for finding the abandoned axe, but the moment he touched the weapon’s handle, she had become glued to the palm of his hand as surely as if a candle’s wax had melted there and clung to his skin. He had felt a reassuring presence slide into his thoughts. Something about it was wrong. He should have been terrified, but he wasn’t. Instead he felt like at last he had found the woman of his dreams.
That was when he realized that his wife had to meet his new friend. He had smiled in anticipation.
But now he was fleeing for his life. A murderer!
He had barely escaped the men after him earlier. Fortunately for him another man had fled in the same direction and he had managed to avoid capture.
But then as he ran images began to form in his mind. Cunning and clear. Precise and to the point. He smiled. He knew what to do next.
Chapter Four: The Murder of the Red Queen
Holmes and Watson were busy taking samples from various points on the Globe Theater’s stage, while William Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll stood on the right side stage, watching, both their faces drawn out and somber.
“I knew it. I knew it. I knew it,” Lewis kept saying over and over.
William finally turned about and smacked his friend hard across his cheek.
Lewis stood there stunned.
Holmes and Watson stopped a moment to look.
“Snap out of it, Lewis. You’re acting more insane than your Jack of Spades!”
Lewis began to wipe at tears in his eyes. “I never meant this to happen. Never meant anyone to be harmed. I just wanted to be taken seriously. For the audience to love my work.”
William sighed and gathered his friend into his arms to comfort him, while his eyes continued to watch Holmes and Watson as they took samples of the blood from the stage.
He felt Lewis shake with the grief he felt. William was not immune to the pain; but there was nothing he could do more than he had. The stain of this night would discolor the Globe Theater for a long time, unless he came up with a new idea to overcome what had happened.
And as he stood there comforting his friend, he began thinking about fairies and romance.
“This whole night has been like one, crazy, mad dream,” Lewis managed to choke out, before he began sobbing again.
William’s mind lit up like a bright fire. “A long night’s dream,” he uttered.
“What?” Lewis asked, looking up, wiping at his eyes.
But William didn’t answer. He had to give this new idea more thought. A long night’s dream with fairies and confused lovers. Inside himself, he clapped for joy.
But his joy was shattered when Inspector Bloodstone let out a loud series of snores from the front row seat he had sat himself upon to wait for Holmes and Watson to finish their forensics.
Constable Evans came into the theater from outside and Holmes looked at him. He shook his head. Holmes nodded and returned to the study of the head laying on a piece of wood before him.
“Watson, this is most peculiar, don’t you think?”
Watson put the sample he had taken into a vial, stoppered it, then slipped it into his ever present black bag, hefted it, got off his knees, and joined Holmes beside the head.
“What?”
Holmes touched his swab to the neck where the axe had severed it.
“Notice how clean the cut is.”
“Much too clean for an ordinary axe,” Watson agreed.
“Indeed,” Holmes commented. “From the description of the axe used, it was most certainly that of an executioner’s axe.”
“And made the same severe cut to the neck as the one that took off that poor werewolf’s head at the pub,” Watson observed.
“Indeed, Watson. But an axe was part of the act, and how it managed to be found here of all places…”
“Which is what Lewis Carroll intended of course, from what William told us,” Watson agreed.
“Yes, but paper axes don’t cut off heads and they most certainly don’t cut them off cleanly as this one has been. It appears as if it were sliced off with a blade instead of an axe head.”
“Even a guillotine blade is not this sharp,” Watson admitted, catching why Holmes was puzzled.
“Perhaps we need Harry in on this case,” Holmes suggested.
“Then I am just the man you are looking for,” Harry said as he leaped onto the stage and kneeled between the two men.
“Harry,” Watson greeted.
“Watson.”
“Harry,” Holmes greeted.
“Holmes.”
The Inspector continued to snore quite loudly. Harry glanced at the man. “Poor chap doesn’t get much shut eye, does he?”
Watson yawned. “I don’t blame him. I don’t either. We should all be home snug in our beds by this time,” Watson complained.
His stomach growled. “And with full stomachs.”
Harry patted Watson on his shoulder. “In your case Watson I don’t think that’s possible. Your stomach is always growling and grumbling.”
He patted Watson’s stomach. “And growing as well.”
Watson scowled at Harry, who merely shook his head, then eyed the neck of the bodiless head. “This is not a normal cut, Holmes.”
“Exactly, Harry,” Holmes agreed. “If I hadn’t already collected the testimony of numerous witnesses, I’d have to say that this was not done by an axe, but rather by a magical blade of some kind.”
Watson repeated, “Even the Queen’s guillotine isn’t this sharp.”
Harry glanced at Watson. “She still uses that horrid old thing?”
“Only on the worst of the worst,” Watson pointed out.
Harry shivered all over. “Hate the damn things. They never sever a man’s head properly and he lays about the platform hopping and jumping like a chicken wit
h its head twisted off.”
“On that note, Harry,” Holmes said, getting to his feet, “I suggest we return to Baker Street.”
“Meet you there,” Harry said. He watched Holmes and Watson step from the stage to speak to the Inspector a moment.
Harry eyed the headless body and the neck. He waved his right hand over the neck and it gave off a red glow for a moment.
Harry’s eyes widened in response. He shook his head as if trying to remove something that had fallen on it from above, then headed for the stage exit in back where Constable Evans had gone.
Holmes and Watson stood in front of the Inspector, waiting for him to become aware of them, but finally Holmes said, “Inspector.”
Inspector Bloodstone snorted several times, wiped at his eyes and then peeped out at Holmes from between his fingers. “What time is it?”
Constable Evans came from back stage, leaped to the floor, landing lightly on his feet and helped his father to his feet. “Time to go home, eat and sleep now, father.”
Inspector Bloodstone looked at the stage. “Someone has to clean up this mess.”
Constable Evans glanced at Holmes.
Holmes gestured to several constables waiting at the side entrances. They rushed forward.
Constable Evans took them aside and spoke to them. They nodded, and then hurried back onto the stage and out of view.
“Jim and Derek will wait for the forensics team to arrive and take away the body and head.”
The Inspector nodded. “They’re good men. Yes, that’s fine.”
William Shakespeare stepped to them. “My night crew will clean up the stage. After all, we still have more performances to do.”
Watson glanced at him. “You sure your actors will be emotionally capable of doing that, after….?”
William looked humiliated for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders. “They are actors! And besides, I have already started a new play.” He tapped his head. “In here. Now it’s just a matter of writing it down.”
