Soleil

by Jacqueline Garlick

  “Because that’s the fastest way to get there.” Its incisor-filled mouth, a tiny pair of scissors, clips open and shut.

  “That’s absurd,” Urlick snorts.

  “Isn’t it, though?” The creature laughs, falling back on his hind legs and clasping his bouncing belly.

  “Are you telling the truth, or is this just another riddle?” My voice is curt and impatient. I’ve had enough of this crazy world and all it nonsense. We need to find my necklace and leave here. Now.

  “Of course it’s a riddle.” The creature laughs. “Everything here is riddle. Ever since Sir Hatter went mad.”

  How extraordinarily infuriating. I feel for Alice, now. “Please sir,” I twist my hands, losing patience. “Can’t you just tell us how to get to the Castle? We’re told the Black Queen is expecting us—”

  “OooooOOoooo,” the creature creepily coos, “the Black Queen.” He draws his right pedipalp gingerly up to his smirking mouth. He taps it vigorously. “That is a dilemma.” His gunmetal grey face pales. “If I were you, I’d take the longest cut there.”

  “Enough of this nonsense.” Urlick grabs me by the hand. “We’ll find it in our own way, thank you very much.” He scowls at the spider, and proceeds to yanks me past. “Good day.”

  “Ah, ah, ahhhh.” The spider thrashes out a leg, blocking our path. The tip of his pin leg punctures the earth like a pointed blade of a guillotine. We stare at the place where it stuck and draw back. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The spider gnashes its teeth. “It behooves you to listen to me.”

  “Then say something we need to hear,” Urlick seethes.

  The spider says nothing, just throws out a leg, extending it sword-like across both forks in the road. It’s pin-sharp tip narrowly misses drawing blood from Urlick’s cheek in the process. The spider appears pleased with himself. “Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut,” he shouts, dancing across the paths on the tips of his toes. He doesn’t stop the madness until he’s cut crossed each and every one. “There.” He turns and dusts his torso with his claws, and clicks all his sets of heels. “You may go now.” He bows. “Give my regards to the Queen.”

  Urlick and I settle back on our heels, confused.

  “Well, go on.” The spider motions for us to advance, extending the metatarsus part of his arm in a sweeping semi-circle across all four roads.

  “But—”

  “Just go!”

  Urlick and I share a quizzical glance.

  “I thought you were in a hurry?” The spider taps his toes.

  “We are but—”

  “Then GO!” the spider roars.

  I take a breath and squeeze Urlick’s hand.

  We close your eyes and take a step.

  Just a small one.

  The next thing I know we’ve somehow been mystically transported into the city that just a moment ago eluded us. I open my eyes. “How did we...?” I look back over my shoulder.

  “I don’t know.” Urlick looks around, perplexed. He shakes his head, still a little bit daft from the perfume blast. He blinks.

  “A riddle!” I say, brightening. “It was a riddle.”

  Urlick frowns and rubs his eyes.

  “The long cut was actually the shortest way here, the result of the daddy long-legged spider shortening it, by cutting across our path.”

  Urlick scowls at me, then looks again back to where we’ve come.

  “The daddy long legs crossed our path and literally cut our journey short. Get it?” I’m not so sure of what I’ve said myself. This place is starting to make me go bonkers.

  I scratch my head.

  “Whatever it was, it worked. Let’s go.” Urlick grabs hold of my hand, and we launch toward the castle.

  We arrive breathless and shaken at the castle doors. The streets here are even darker than in the hills. The air is trolling with black gusting factory smoke. I cough, fanning the searing toxins away from my face.

  I feel a small twinge in my lungs.

  Shards of soot, feldspar and shale drift through the air, pelting our arms and faces. I step in a puddle and come up with a singed heel tip. Whatever is in that oil-slicked basin has eaten it away. I wave a hand, clearing the smoldering smoke.

  The wind picks up again at our backs. I’ve learned to fear it now. I spin around, caught up in the fierce rolling black ground clouds, now whirling like tiny tornados.

  “Come on.” Urlick urges me forward, up the shale steps, through the spiraling craziness. I bound along beside him, gasping and gulping, trying to breathe in the wind. It tastes of metallic copper and bitter strychnine.

  The muscle in my lower leg begins to seize then jump erratically. I feel the nagging twitch, release, twitch release as I run. At first, I think it’s the beginnings of a seizure again, but the sensation isn’t familiar. I stop, looking down at my leg like it’s a foreign object.

  “What is it?” Urlick stares at my boot.

  “The top of my calf muscle is jerking and convulsing.”

  “Come on, we’d better get inside.”

  Urlick’s hands fall hard on the entrance door. It’s twice the height of a normal one, and almost four times the width. More of a drawbridge-style entrance than a door.

  Perhaps this is part of the madness.

  An intimidating knocker hangs bolted to the front of it, directly below the cast-iron face of an angry dragon. I reach up to knock, but freeze when the dragon shifts and sniffs my hand. Gears in its neck grind. A spring-hinged jaw snaps open. I shriek and pull my hand away just in the nick.

  Urlick bats it in the snout.

  The dragon arches its neck and breathes a bout of fire.

  Urlick crouches back from it, his sleeve badly burned.

  “Oh, my goodness.” I flap out the fire.

  Urlick sucks in a tattered breath. “Seems like getting here is not the hardest part.”

  “Seriously, is this any way to treat your guests?”

  “Guests?” A guard appears through an exaggerated peephole window near the top of the door. The peephole is only big enough for his head, neck and one arm to show through. “Why didn’t you say you’d been invited?”

  Urlick and I stare up at the strange-looking little man with a head twice the length of a body. His normal-sized neck struggles to hold it up. He too is half-automaton, half-human, as everything appears to be in this land. His forehead is disturbingly made of flesh, but beyond that, his skull is constructed of an old cooking pot sitting sideways inside of a strainer. Sprigs of human hair pop through the strainer’s holes. He has one human eye and an aetherbulb in place of the other, with the likeness of an eye painted on its end. It flickers, screwed deep into the receptacle socket anchored into the bottom of the pot.

  His high-sculpted cheekbones are formed from flattened sardine tins, hooked together with his still-human jaw by two very rusty, Victorian Steeple Pin Hinges. A finely waxed moustache protrudes from under his rusty spigot nose, curled meticulously into tiny circles at the ends. His teeth are still present, though several are missing. Those that remain are white. For a moment, I think I recognize that mouth, those lips, the infamous curled stash. Livinea’s nightmare guard from Madhouse Brink.

  But that’s not possible. Is it?

  “What do you want?” the guard barks at us.

  Urlick scowls. “I thought we’d just established that.”

  The guard’s voice sounds manufactured, like it’s being projected through some sort of foggy megaphone device. I glance down and notice a hole in his throat near his voice box—a clear stab wound that’s been plugged up with a kazoo.

  His one good eye catches me staring.

  “We’ve come to see the Queen.”

  He raises his bent-spoon eyebrow. “Do you have an invitation?”

  “We just said we did,” Urlick sneers.

  I draw the slimy, golden invite from my pocket. “Here.” I pass the invitation to him. The green goo residue sticks to my fingers.

  The guard peels open the invit
e and studies the contents. He raises a curious brow. “Very well then.” He ducks, disappearing from the window altogether, only to reappear on the other side.

  There’s a churn of a lock. Three separate mechanisms squeal. Hinges, in bad need of oiling, creak as the massive door folds back, and the split down the middle divides into an awkward shaped ‘S’. Along the seam claw-like teeth, which once held it together, now gnash and snap, like snarling wolves’ giant incisors. I duck away from them as we walk through.

  “Just a little bit of extra security,” the guard assures me. Foam, from one of the fangs drops on my head. I peer up at the massive, yapping, door-mouth, and shudder. Urlick hovers behind me, never taking his eyes off them. We’re barely through when the guard presses a lever and the doors jolt back. Teeth snap as they swing past my shoulders. A lock drops into place with a stomach-jolting clunk. I whip around, wondering if things don’t turn out as they should, how we’ll ever get out of this place.

  The guard leads us through another strange door covered in silver-black metal scales. The scales flinch when touched, shrinking away. It’s the oddest, strangest thing. Two almond-shaped windows that resemble eyes, quicken. A second smaller pair below them flare like nostrils. It’s as though the door is a living creature. But it can’t be.

  Can it?

  I‘m driven backward by a waft of steam. It pours through the nose holes in the door. A glowing halo of pulsing, violet-coloured, mist engulfs us both. What on earth…?

  “Cleansing steam,” the guard explains. “Her Majesty insists upon it.”

  “Urlick?” I panic over the growing size of his pupils. “Don’t breathe it in!” I shout, recalling the purple steam at Madhouse Brink.

  “It’s harmless, really,” the guard insists.

  “I don’t believe you.” I snap my fingers in front of Urlick’s face. A strange wind whips up, twisting my hair high above my head, like fingers braiding it. “What’s going on?”

  “I told you, cleansing steam.” The guard’s moustache flutters upward. “A must before tea.”

  “A must, or not. I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. It just has to happen.” The guard pulls another lever and the wind suddenly subsides. “Just like, you had no choice but to come here.”

  “What?”

  He reaches for the door and the eyehole windows slam shut. The scaly covering shivers. “After you.” He bows, extending a hand, as he pushes the door open, nearly toppling over from the weight of his head.

  The inside of the castle is cold and strangely wet. The dark, dank hallways are dotted with puddles. I zigzag around them, watching them bubble and sizzle, rising up like fire water at the mere reflection of my presence.

  Our breath hangs in the air.

  There are hardly any light sources anywhere—just the odd glow from the moonstones embedded in the risers of the staircase. They dimly illuminate the way as we climb.

  At the top, the guard hands our invitation off to a second guard—a wiry little man who also appears to be half-made out of rubbish. A shiver creeps over me as I watch him shuffle toward us through the darkness.

  Is that half a cheesebox he’s wearing as a head?

  The other guard drifts away.

  “I am the castle’s concierge. I will take care of things from here.” He fishes a monocle, with shattered lens, out of his pocket, and stares down at the invitation. “Oh, dear.” He gulps. The light-hearted expression on his half-human side sours. “Oh, dear, dear, dear…” He scratches his water faucet nose.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I bend to get a closer look at the invitation.

  Reaching up, he compresses and decompresses the bladder and bellows affixed to the side of his cheesebox head. The apparatus fuels oxygen toward a cylinder full of quicklime, which in turn, ignites the blowpipe apparatus he wears strapped to the front of his head. I’m knocked backward by the intensity of the flash that occurs. Koniaphostic light, intensely white, like the magnificent follow spots used to track the actors on the stage. It makes a vulgar hissing sound.

  “What was that for?”

  “Clarity.” He blinks. The whole corridor now smells of burnt lime and sulfur. “You see, I was right.” He holds up the invitation up, squinting.

  “About what?” He shows me the paper. It appears to be blank. Was it always blank? Or has he just done something.

  The concierge looks up through his trembling klieg light eye. He gulps, and sweat beads his anxious half-human brow. “You’re late,” he announces bold and shrill.

  “We’re what? But how can that possibly be?”

  “See here in the fine print.” He flips the card around. “According to this, you should have been here yesterday.” He offers me the use of his monocle to see the very finely printed words.

  “Yesterday? Why, that’s preposterous. We only just arrived today. How can we possibly be late for a party we’ve only just been invited to?”

  The concierge laughs. “Anything’s possible where Sir Hatter’s concerned.”

  “What are you saying? What does that mean?”

  “It means you should have arrived on time.” The concierge turns his back and clatters away, on a pair of old, clay, factory rollers that form his legs. A conveyor belt spins around the outside of them, propelling his awkward scrap metal body forward. He scuttles on through a set of double, cast, iron doors, which seem even bigger than the last.

  I yank Urlick forward, following behind me. As we pass through the doors, I see our distorted images being photographed in the bubbled glass.

  “What was that for?”

  “Records.”

  “But—”

  “Uh, uh,” the concierge tuts, as we enter a long, dark, stale-smelling room with badly rumpled, papered walls. Weeds grow through the spaces in the wallpaper. Long black snakes slither through the weeds. Some flop down from the ceiling and twist about our ankles as we walk. I dance about, avoiding them.

  The concierge laughs again, and rolls right overtop as if they didn’t exist.

  “Why are there snakes here? What is this place?”

  “What time does it say on the invitation?” the concierge says, stopping before a panel of buttons.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I shout.

  The concierge says nothing, just snatches the invitation away from me and inspects it again. “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s no time listed.”

  “Then why did you think we we’re late?”

  “Because,” he laughs. “Sir Hatter’s guests are always late.” His voice slips low and sinister. Unlocking a thin door, he turns us each about and shoves us inside.

  I stumble forward through a turnstile gate and pop out into a cube-like room. Urlick follows after me.

  “Here.” The concierge stuffs a giant skeleton key with silver-tipped end through the hole after us. “This is your key to the party.”

  “Our key?”

  “Yes, key. Now get moving. You don’t want to be late.” The opening where his arm was slams shut. The room grows instantly dark.

  “But I thought you said we were already late,” I shout at the opening.

  “Never mind what I said. Just follow the path. And don’t stray from it. The consequences will be grave.”

  At that, his voice shorts out, as does all the dim light in the room.

  “What now?” Urlick growls in the darkness.

  A fluorescent painted arrow appears on the floor beckons us forward.

  “We go that way, it appears.” I wince.

  As we move, the tunnel seems to shrink. It’s not long before we’re crawling on hands and knees. “This reminds me of creeping through the ceiling of Madhouse Brink on my way to rescue you.” Urlick grins back at me.

  “We seem to find ourselves in a lot of tight places, lately, don’t we?” I scrape my knee on a rivet and stop to allow the blood to clot. Up ahead in the dark, something silvery glints.
/>   “This is ridiculous,” Urlick grumbles.

  “Shhhhh,” I hush him, remaining very still.

  “What?” He hovers over my shoulder, at last seeing what I see.

  The silver rabbit hop-creeps along in front of us, nibbling translucent clover.

  “There it is!” Urlick’s arm shoots out past me. She squishes between me and the wall and lunges after the it.

  The rabbit’s ears flop back, and it bursts into a gallop-style gait.

  “Wait!” I shout and chase after them both, dashing up the shrinking corridor and around a sharp corner, the flash of its mechanical glinting back our only light. Urlick gains on the rabbit. The rabbit jags to the right. Urlick goes for the tackle, sliding forward, missing the rabbit altogether and disappearing down a hole in the floor.

  “Urlick?” I speed-crawl after him, skidding to a stop at the mouth of the opening. He hangs below, dangling by his coattails, which have caught on an unthreaded screw. He swings slowly back and forth. “Oh, good Lord,” I gasp, and throw my hands over my mouth, then sit back on my haunches and laugh some. “You know,” I grin down at him, “we really should discuss these things before you go off half-cocked.”

  “Ha, ha, hah,” Urlick grimaces. “Now, are you going to help me out of this, or not?”

  I stick my head down through the hole, evaluating the situation. All around him, a black-walled room springs to life, long, large and deep. In seems Urlick was not far off, we were again crawling through the space in the ceiling, as clearly this is a full room below. Suddenly, things are not so funny. A fall from this height could’ve kill Urlick.

  Gears churn and engines sigh. I spot the culprit in the corner. The only glowing source of light in the room. A glass, bullet-shaped capsule, containing a floating, cloud-like entity, stands propped up and lit, in the far back of the room.

  “Well, don’t just sit there, give me a hand up, will you?” Urlick calls.

  I reach through the hole and tug at his arm, but he’s too heavy to lift. I lose my grip, and he sways again. Then his coattail shreds, and he drops, screaming.

  I wince as he crashes to the floor. “Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Coming down,” I announce, and throw my legs over the side.