Chapter 4 We’re All Mad Here
CHAPTER FOUR
WE’RE ALL MAD HERE
“Isaid she’s not going! She doesn’t even have a hat!” Hatter’s loud shouts rouse me from a positively fantastic slumber.
“No hat? She’s been here long enough. What are you waiting for? You’re going to be late, Hatter!”
Lewis. That’s Lewis’s voice. Slipping into a pair of Hatter’s sleep pants, I knot them at my waist and fold them at the ankle hems.
Pushing out the door, my feet pad down the uneven wood floors to the living room. “Good morning.”
Hatter sighs. “Now look what you’ve done. You woke her. And with a head like that, she needs all the sleep she can get.”
I gasp. “I wish you’d decide if my head is perfect or perfectly alright already. The back and forth is giving me whiplash.”
I ignore how normal conversing with them is feeling, stepping toward Lewis to greet him.
“Where are you two going?”
“The palace,” Lewis says at the same time that Hatter says, “Nowhere.”
Looking between them, it’s obvious Hatter doesn’t want to leave.
“Why the palace?”
It’s very early outside. The only crooked window beyond a pile of books and fabric tells me it’s nearly dawn.
There are clocks everywhere, but all of them display different times. It’s very disorienting. I was unaware of how much time played a valuable role in my life until I landed here.
Here, time doesn’t matter much.
“Hatter works for the Red Queen. She has an event and needs her abnormally colossal head hatted for it. He’s the only one who can do it.”
“Despicable woman,” Hatter mutters, shivering as he shoves into a coat.
“You love to hat, though,” I offer, attempting to give logic to a man with mismatched buttons on his shirt.
“If one loved to swim with the Basilisk in the purple lake, should one do it all the time?” Hatter breaks into a mad laugh, and I am left bereft, listening to the melody of his insanity decorating the air knocked from my lungs.
Fuck, he’s beautiful.
But he also makes no sense. Ever.
Keep your head, Eleanor, I tell myself. I’m determined to make it out of this alive and unscathed. Mentally and physically.
“Basilisks sound awful, so I’d say…”
Lewis shakes his head at me. Not that I know what that means.
“Maybe one shouldn’t swim with them. What would happen if you didn’t go to this Red Queen?”
Hatter shivers again. “Doom. Murder. Malady. The typical things.”
I swallow. “None of that sounds good. What if I go with you?”
Hatter turns lethal, his eyes sharpening. “No! You mustn’t go. I’ll be off, and when I return, that awfully enormous head of yours will be all mine!”
I’m left with my mouth open as Hatter exits the house, Lewis in tow.
Lewis turns at the door, smirking. “Good day, Eleanor.”
“Good day, Eleanor, you and your large, perfectly alright head,” I mock as the door shuts.
Fuck, this place is getting to me.
I find pastry in the kitchen and make myself some tea as dawn breaks. I spend at least three hours tidying the living space until no hats or fabric are lying around.
Straightening Hatter’s workshop in the back seemed like an awful idea, so I only tossed fabric and things from the living area into it and shut the door.
After a sandwich from the platter that magically appeared at lunchtime in the kitchen, I find myself outside.
Staring at the woods, I wonder if I could find my way back to the place I fell through. So much so that I’m anxiously chewing the side of my thumb with a burning anxiety in my stomach as my heart races.
I contemplate my options for another moment. On one hand, while this place is absolutely fantastical and full of mad whimsy, it’s also not my reality. It’s theirs.
While my life might be headed nowhere but toward horrific misery, it’s still mine.
It’s where I belong.
Even if I came here as a child to escape the hurt and pain that went hand in hand with my childhood, it doesn’t mean I can do the same as an adult, not that I know how I got here before or this time.
A decision is made, and stones sink to the bottom of my stomach like heavy dread as I march toward the woods.
Swallowing, I stride past the berry bushes and use the path to walk deeper and deeper until I’m utterly lost. The only sound I can hear is that of my heart running away behind my ribs.
The surrounding signs are just as confusing to the mind and offer no help at all.
My feet stop when my gaze rakes over a patch of mushrooms that seem to glow. Crouching, I narrow my eyes to get a closer look. A faint flickering casts through a tiny window on the mushroom as if a creature lives inside.
Everything about this place is befuddling, yet breathtaking.
A scream gets caught in my throat when a face drops from above, the smile twisting as a voice says. “Well, hello again. Here for some fun?”
The naked man!
No, Hatter said he’s a cat… Stepping back, I take him in. He’s hanging upside down from a branch, stark nude, and his eerie smile taunting me.
No, definitely a man, not a cat.
“No. I’m trying to get somewhere. Leave me be!”
“Where are you trying to go? Maybe I can be of assistance.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re going in the right direction. You’ll find it soon enough.”
“What? That makes no sense.”
“Mm. Did you make any sense, though?”
I swallow. “Just leave me be! I don’t have time for this!”
“If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you’re going to be late?”
I’m exasperated, so I sigh and step back. “Can you help me find the place I fell through?”
The man laughs, the sound sinister, and it grates my nerves.
“You know what, never mind. I’m not taking directions from a naked man!”
“I’m no man! I’m a cat! The utter stupidity of you small-minded humans.”
Humans.
The word stares me in the face, forcing me to realize the oddness of this place where its people aren’t human. Not even a little.
Unwinding from the tree branch, he flips through the air, landing before me as a massive cat.
His fur is striped with varying shades of blue, his face flat, and his smile is more menacing on his feline face. His yellow eyes glow as they gleam.
“You are a cat.”
“Yesssss,” he hisses at me, curling his fluffy tail around my leg as he parades around me arrogantly.
“You can transform.”
“Can’t everyone?” he says in a riddle.
“No.”
“Lies. I don’t like lies in my woods. Only truth.”
“Can you help me or not?”
“Dependssss.” Walking to the front of me, he plops, still looking proper and rigid, with a bored look on his face.
“Depends on what?”
“If you can answer my riddle.”
This again?
“I’m not good with riddles.”
“I’m not good with directions.”
I hate to realize it, but this is probably the most straightforward conversation I’ve had since landing here, and it’s with a blue cat who was just a man in a forest of trees who wanted to… No, that line of thought will do you no good, Eleanor.
I swear I hear a tree moan in sexual satisfaction as I shut the thought down.
“What’s the riddle?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
“What do you break the moment you name it?” he says, lifting a paw and inspecting beneath his claw absently as if bored with my very presence.
My brain turns in circles, and my confusion causes me to panic that I won’t be able to answer and, therefore, won’t be able to go home.
Home.
Something I don’t even have, so I don’t know why I’m trying to get there so badly.
Focus!
“Uhm…”
Think, think, think.
I’m terrible at riddles and also terrible at being put on the spot. I once told someone my name was Susan because I couldn’t think of my own when asked. I panicked.
I’ve always been an awkward girl, now, woman. Half of me wonders if that’s why I seem to fit with all the oddities here perfectly.
“I don’t know.” I hang my head, defeated.
“Silence is the answer,” the cat says to my floundering. “No bother. I knew your head was too big to have a large brain. Full of rocks, most likely. I’ll help you.”
“You will?”
“I’m feeling generous.”
“Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it.”
“You follow the path back the way you came, and that’s how you’ll find where you came from.”
My lips purse. This is a palm - forehead moment.
“That’s no help at all, actually.”
“Would you like another riddle?”
Pushing past him in a furious huff, I follow the path. “No! I don’t want another riddle. I’ve wasted enough time!”
I don’t know why I’m in such a rush. It’s as dark as night in the forest, so it’s not like I’m racing the daylight. Nor do I think Hatter would find me in a furious rage.
I wonder if Hatter’s ever felt rage before, honestly.
It’s not long before I reach a massive four-way in the path. Standing in the middle, I try to recall ever having been here.
When Lewis tugged me along with him, I was more focused on the fact that a rabbit the size of a human was dragging me through a forest teeming with various beasts, waiting to gobble me whole.
I spin, regretting the action when I can’t recall which of the four paths spat me out here in the first place.
“Oh no!”
“Lost?” a voice asks.
Turning, my eyes land on a tree from which the voice seemed to emanate. Surely, a tree hadn’t spoken to me.
The trees love flesh.
I swallow. “I am lost. I’d be very grateful if you could point me in the right direction.”
Great. Now I’m speaking to trees.
A face emerges from the tree before me. Wooden eyes flutter open, a mouth yawning wide as if to stretch. “I could give you much more than directions, miss. Just… come closer.”
“No,” I stammer out. “I’ll stay right here.”
The tree chuckles. “Heard about me, have you?”
“I’ve heard about your type. I know you like flesh.”
“It’s not all that scary. You might even like it… Step closer, and then you can decide if you’d still like to go.”
“Why wouldn’t I want to go?” I ask shakily.
“You might like what I have to offer. You might decide that you’re not lost, after all.”
Looking around, I determine that there’s nowhere I can go. I don’t know which path brought me from Hatter’s home, and I don’t know which path takes me back to where I fell through the earth.
The only thing I do know is that I’m not going near the trees.
Plopping down in the middle of the crossroads, I curl into myself and wait.
For what? I don’t know.
But it’s the only option I honestly have at the moment.