Chapter 25 Scarlett
Scarlett
I wasn’t ready to leave.
I never thought I’d ever think like that about this hall. This hall filled with anger and pain and darkness, but here I was, the sound of Azrael’s watch ticking away.
I couldn’t feel the heat of his eyes, which meant he was staring at it. It must be almost time to go.
We had slipped into silence after he told me about satisfying that hunger. A hunger I thought I had done well at hiding. One that caused that pulse between my legs, that caused that pulse to shift to an ache the more he spoke it into existence.
I wanted to remain here in this story with him. In his world. It had to be his world, right? That’s why we were pretending. Or I was pretending. This was how he always was if it truly was his world.
This was who Azrael was. His real self. The snake, the tsunami, the ghost.
He was the corrupted, calculating Mad Hatter, and I was his enslaved Queen of Hearts, and the rivers would soon be as red as the heart he had slung around my neck.
But I had to follow his rules.
Anything to make this ache last longer. To keep this feeling growing inside of me. Anything to stay in this world.
I heard the slow click of the watch snapping shut. It had to have been his watch because the ticking stopped as soon as the soft click met my ears.
“Do you know what sign language is?”
Sign language? No, I had never heard of it.
He was quiet again. “When you leave this room, it will seem as if things are going back to the way they were, but that is far from the truth. You must remember who you really are because from now on, the girl you are outside of those doors, that’s who you are pretending to be.
The girl who follows. The girl who obeys.
Your true self, that belongs solely to me. Do you understand?”
That feeling I called excitement rattled under my skin. I tapped my finger. I liked this game. I liked pretending with him. It was like a secret, and I wasn’t allowed to keep secrets, but I would keep this one. My own perfect little secret. Just ours. Just mine.
“I have put clothes in that room worthy of your name, Scarlett,” he said, warm tingles spreading across my skin. I really liked it when he said my name. “Worthy of the girl you will be if you listen well.” He stood once again. “Tick tock goes the clock for Scarlett and her hearts.”
I felt those muscles twitch in my lips again, and this time, I think one corner lifted. I couldn’t be sure, it felt strange and ugly, but if Azrael made it happen, it couldn’t have been that ugly.
The metal branches slid around my jaw once again and lifted my head. “Tick tock goes the clock for the hatter and his slave,” he sang quietly. “Stand.”
And I did, allowing his cane to lead me.
“You are not to sit like that for anyone else,” he explained. “That position is only for our world, do you understand?”
I tapped my thigh, the skirt flowing around me comfortably. I would do anything for him. Anything at all.
“Remember, this is not the Wonderland you knew. Where we are going is my land. My world. Wonderland with a dash of hysteria and a hint of psychosis. Everyone has been cursed by a tar they cannot escape from, injected by the people behind these doors, but this Hatter will protect his pet from that very tar. It cannot touch his people. Trust is important in times such as these.”
I tapped my fingers, thrumming them against my thigh in agreement. He would protect me.
Nobody had ever protected me before. It made me feel…the only thing that came to mind was electricity warming my skin all around.
Wonderland had been tarnished by a darkness we couldn’t control.
Everything was twisted and wrong, covered in madness.
I could see it all forming in my mind. Everyone had turned evil, and we were the only ones sane enough to do something about it.
We had to save those who deserved to be saved and paint the world red with those who didn’t.
This was my true purpose; I could feel it in my soul.
My Hatter, my ghost, had given me a purpose and I would not let him down.
~ ~ ~
He had let me into his world. I was a part of it, and I knew, deep down, that there weren’t many people out there who he allowed to be a part of something so…sacred.
Truly sacred.
It awakened something in me. Something I didn’t have a name for. Whatever it was, it felt dark and out of control, but electric at the same time, and I never wanted to let that feeling go. I wanted to cling to it like Pastor Masters clung to his precious Good Book.
One of the Pillars from the church drove me back to the house. I had no idea where Thomas was, and I didn’t care. What I did care about was getting out the ideas I had in my head.
I loved to draw. It was one of my most favorite things to do, but Thomas desperately hated it, despite the fact that the church provided me with supplies.
He hated it so much that sometimes, he had punished me if he saw me painting on the cameras or if he showed up and I was painting, so several months ago, I had stopped.
Tonight, however, I felt my fingers itch for a paintbrush for the first time in a long time.
I pulled out my paints and brushes from underneath the sink, set them all up on the floor and started painting exactly what I had seen in my head today. I wanted to get it all out on paper before I forgot even a single detail.
The thing was, I couldn’t really remember what my lovely characters looked like from the story, but I suppose that was fine because they wouldn’t have looked the same anyway. “This is not the Wonderland you remember.”
The exhaustion today felt like a distant memory as I put brush to paper.
Everything twisted and turned, looking distorted and not quite right.
There were trees that curved with strange leaves, plants that were far too big and looked more scary than they did pretty.
Mermaids who had claws for hands and whose tails were losing their scales, the Cheshire Cat with red eyes and fur made of living shadows.
Everything was so beautiful but I could see why Azrael wanted to rid the world of it. Nothing looked quite right. Everything looked…well mad. Even the ocean seemed to be filled with a glowing green, the crocodile had clocks for eyes, and everything looked as if it were melting.
When I was done, I studied the work of art, chewing on my lip gently.
I had even painted us. Azrael in a tattered and torn top hat, shielding the top half of his face in shadows, his eyes glowing a solid blue, his smile sharp and wide.
I put him in a red and black suit covered in a few patches of the opposite color.
Black on red. Red on black. He had his cane too, long, thin, and black, with those metal branches growing from it like thorns threatening to swallow the world.
And me.
I was wearing a white and red dress, longer in some places and shorter in others, it was tattered and torn along the edges, marred in black and gray, with a big black bow around my waist. I was wearing the typical Mad Hatter hat too, only the ribbon that wrapped around the hat was laced in playing cards.
I had on that heart necklace, but my face?
I frowned.
It was blank. I couldn’t think of a good face to draw. It had been so long since I had seen my own.
I touched my lips gently, the paint on my fingers smearing across them. What did I look like?
I suppose it didn’t really matter. I had looked good enough to capture Azrael’s attention so fully that he rarely looked at anyone else in that church when he attended. That was enough for me.
I lowered my fingers and continued to study the painted versions of us as Azrael’s sing song voice drifted through my mind bringing with it new words from my own mind. “Fly away to Wonderland, and off to the ship we’ll see, something ticking across the water, a clockodile with sharp teeth.”
I liked the way it had sounded, the crocodile and the Jolly Roger.
I wondered if that was another fairytale.
I knew there were a lot of them, my mother had once mentioned it in an off-handed kind of way, and the way he spoke about it?
It must have been another story. I wanted to add it into my own story now, molding it around just like he had.
I bit my lip again and leaned over the large picture, almost the size of my coffee table, and I painted five words around the edges of the paper in black.
“Tick tock goes the clock.”
“Tick tock goes the clock.”
Over and over again, until the muscles around my lips started to hurt from being stretched so wide.