The Complete Alice Wonder Series - Insanity - Books 1 - 9

by Cameron Jace

  "I dreamt about him last night. He mentioned the same thing the White Queen said," I explain. "That the power the Cheshire is acquiring is scarier than death itself. He also said the Cheshire needs Constance to complete the ritual."

  "So, that's it." The Pillar clicks his fingers. "The Cheshire needs them both, the mask and Constance, to perform the ritual to get his power back."

  "We could be too late."

  "No, we're not," the Pillar says. "Think about it. Why did Adam show up in your dream just one day before the Kattenstoet festival? A festival about cats. Something in the festival completes the circle of the ritual. A mask, a girl, and a crazy event about people throwing cats out their windows. That's all it takes. It's a mad world out there.

  55

  GROTE MARKT, TOWN OF YPRES, BELGIUM

  The Cheshire, wearing one of his grinning cat masks, sat with a glass of milk in his hand. He was rocking back and forth in a chair to the song "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin. The view in front of him was enchanting. He was looking over the famous Grote Markt in the Belgian town of Ypres. The sun was unusually present today, fighting against the stubborn snow. Everyone was preparing for the Kattenstoet festival.

  He lifted his mask for a moment and took one last sip from his glass. It was a special brand of milk, exclusively exported from Cheshire County. He let the warm milk sweep down his throat and let out a purr. Then he put his grinning mask back on.

  Lowering his hand, he pressed his fingers hard on the glass until it cracked. Red and white colors were spilled together on the parquet, and it felt good to him. Sometimes small things, like breaking a glass, were an even better release from the anger inside he suppressed for humankind. He let out an even longer purr through the opening in his orange mask.

  Behind him, in this abandoned Renaissance hotel, a girl lay tied on the floor. She was young, about ten years old. Unlike his other victims, she didn't have a grin sewn to her mouth. She'd been there for some time. She wasn't dead yet. She was very special, and he needed her.

  The Cheshire gazed briefly at the antique mirror next to him. It was old, wrapped up in spider webs and dead butterflies caught by the spiders themselves. But still, he could see his masked face. He looked silly in this mask, he thought. He missed his face. His real face. Most of all, he missed his Cheshire power, the one Lewis Carroll took from him. It was time to get it back.

  None of that was the reason he broke the glass of milk. He loved milk. It was his favorite thing in the world. The worst thing in the world was humans. He could not forget or forgive what they had done to him in this town when he was a kid.

  The Cheshire, possessing an old woman's body, for now, turned to look down from his French window. An old woman was a great disguise, in case he needed to take off his mask. He looked down upon the arriving tourists ready to celebrate.

  Everyone in this Flemish part of Belgium talked in the language he hated most, French. They were on top of his human-hate list. The Cheshire hated how the French ate raw meat without cooking it, like cannibals. He hated the way they pronounced his name with an accent: Che-cha-ree. It sounded uncannily close to "cherie" in French, which meant "sweetheart." The Cheshire didn't want to be anyone's sweetheart. He didn't want to think of having a heart. What he hated most about the French and the Belgians was the memory they brought back. That harsh memory that made him crack the glass of milk and not care about his bleeding hand.

  The memory was about this town, Ypres. It was many centuries ago when they started killing, throwing, and burning cats in Europe. A long time before he fled to Wonderland.

  People thought that cats died young, but they were immortal spirits. Wonderland was an unknown place then. It was a long time before Lewis Carroll, and the Cheshire turned into enemies in a chess game called life.

  The Cheshire closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and remembered the first time cats were massacred in front of his eyes…

  56

  YPRES, BELGIUM, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  He was a kid. A happy, furry, tail-wiggling, and purring cat, like the others. He had just stopped getting food and milk from his mother a week ago. His dad wasn't fond of his laziness and urged him to go out and start hunting for food. Cheshire wasn't fond of killing animals, but he had to eat.

  "Rats, my son," his mother purred. "That's our best food."

  "But they are horrible little creatures, Mommy," he said. "I mean, I get so grossed out by their noses and whiskers."

  "I hate them too."

  "Then why do you eat something you hate?" He always thought it a physiological defect of his kind to eat something they hated. What was wrong with butterflies? They looked lovely, and he loved the way they crunched between his teeth. Sure, they were hard to catch, but that was why he was fond of caterpillars. They were slow and full of vitamins since all a caterpillar did was eat. They were like raw butterflies, something the French would love—there was no room in his memory for remembering how the French ate frogs. Holy paws and purrs, why frogs? The Cheshire loved them when he was a kid.

  But the Cheshire ended up hungry, so he began to hunt for himself.

  Ypres was a small town by then, known for exporting clothes to England. They had that huge clothes tower where they kept the clothes for months before they were shipped away. Rats loved it and were fond of the tower, so humans encouraged cats from all over town to visit and eat the rats.

  In general, many Europeans didn't love cats around the sixteenth century. Cats were associated with witches and were said to be inhabited by demons and devils. But the clothes tower, that was the exception.

  The first time the Cheshire went there, he saw a cat rolling a dead rat with its paws and playing with it. He thought it was mean to kill someone and play with their corpse. A dead human was honored by burial or cremation; a rat's corpse should have been eaten right away in that context.

  "I am not playing with it," the other cat said to Cheshire. "I'm checking it for diseases. Rats are stinky. They spend their time in sewers and other people's cheeses."

  The Cheshire wasn't going to go through that conversation again. Why did they eat them, then?

  It only took him a week before he turned into a rat serial killer. It was his first form of serial killing. The rats tasted horrible but gave him the energy to run around and play all day. The townspeople began giving fish spines to the cats as a reward for killing the rats, as long as the cats only went to the clothes tower and not all over town, especially to the Grote Markt, where humans had their groceries.

  One day, the Cheshire's father brought his dead uncle's corpse to bury it. He was killed by the townspeople with a pan to his head for padding into the Grote Markt. It was the Cheshire's first epiphany about how humans hated his kind—of course, people now cherish cats and pet them, but that wasn't the case then.

  It was rumored there was a man with a pipe and pied clothes who could tempt rats out of any town. He played the devil's music with his flute, and the rats followed him out of town. If he had come, the cats would have been out of food and business.

  The Cheshire's father was one of the first to go negotiate with the man whom everyone called the Pied Piper. Cats from all over Belgium and France traveled to meet the Piper. They begged him not to come to Ypres, or they'd be out of food. The Cheshire accompanied his dad that day.

  After hours and hours of pondering, the Piper agreed not to come to Ypres. He remarked that his absence would make him lose a lot of money since rat-catching was a hot business at the time. So he made a deal with the cats that some of them had to sell their souls to him. He told them that demons and rogue spirits were lost in the cerebral realms of the world and needed bodies to inhabit. Cats were the perfect hosts due to their agility and smart moves. The Piper promised that it wouldn't change who they were as cats. In fact, it might make them stronger. Reluctantly, several cats agreed and were never seen again. Although the Piper had his eyes on the Cheshire that day, his father rejected the idea furiously, taking his
son back to town.

  Months later, a series of crimes and unexplained phenomena soared all over Europe. They were mostly connected to witches. In the town of Ypres, everyone believed witches performed their sins through cats.

  Suddenly, the clothes tower was shut, and fanatics began catching cats and throwing them from windows to kill them. It had become a new hobby, encouraged by parents and practiced by children.

  But the cats were as flexible as yo-yos. No amount of throwing killed them, and only an inexperienced few died. And then, in one of humanity's most absurd incidents, the Flemish townspeople, the raw meat eaters, gathered and decided to rid their town of the cats who had supposedly caused all their misery. Instead of investigating what they'd done wrong as humans, they decided it was the cats.

  As punishment, a parade and festival were run for days. The townspeople lured the cats to the clothes tower and caught them. They packed them into sacks and threw them from the highest towers down to the ground. A cat's landing skills and balance were useless when crammed into a sack. It needed space to curl its body in order to land without being hurt. Also, the heights were now unimaginable.

  The Cheshire twitched with the broken glass of milk in his hand. The memory was too gory to imagine. Thousands of fluffy creatures, forests of outstretched arms, flying in the air with no parachutes on their backs. The townspeople hailed and clapped while they cussed the devils and demons that they thought inhabited those cats. They smiled while cat blood was spattered on the streets of Ypres. He continued his memory, remembering the day when he and his family were caught.

  57

  One day, the Cheshire's family was caught: mother, father, sisters, brothers, and even him. They were packed into the sack, left in the darkness to die, wondering when they would hit the ground. When a human pulled the sack to crush it all the way down, the Cheshire pleaded all he could. He meowed, purred, and screamed. He hung with his claws upside down, thinking the humans might have mercy on him. But no mercy was given. The Cheshire cried so hard that the gods gifted him with the power of speech for a moment.

  "Help us!" the Cheshire pleaded, his eyes widening at the miracle.

  "Did you hear that?" one of the humans asked the other who was holding the sack. "I think the cat just begged for help."

  "It did?" the one who held the sack asked, and the whole Cheshire family felt hope.

  "It's me, the Cheshire," he shouted in his tiny voice. "Please. You don't have to do this."

  "It really talks," one said, "The damned cats are possessed by the devil. Throw it!"

  And with that, the Cheshire's sack free-fell through the air. With his family panicking all around him, the look of death painting their faces, the Cheshire felt an unstoppable need for revenge. An unstoppable need for killing everything that was human. His small claws sharpened and kept slithering at the sack from inside. A little before his family died, splashing to the ground, the Cheshire saw sunlight burning his eyes through the holes he'd created. He slid through them like cats do and jumped, landing on his paws, then used his balance center inside his ears to control the movements and not die.

  That day, he stood in his place as the sky kept raining cats. Each time their blood splashed onto his face, his grin widened. Each dying cat was his fuel for the apocalypse he was going to bring to humans of the world later. To do that, he had to gather an army of monsters. Later, he knew he could find plenty of them in Wonderland.

  Right now, the Cheshire walked with his human feet over the scattered glass. He knelt next to the captive girl, wondering how she'd look with a grin sewn to her face. But he couldn't do that to her now. After many trials and errors, this was the girl he needed to get back the powers.

  "Soon, I will perform the ritual." His voice was muffled behind the mask. "Soon, Carroll. Then I will have the scariest face in the world. The face that is not a face. I will have the one power that will make me invincible." His power was the kind of power no one could think about. It was smooth, yet deadly. To get it, he had to use Constance, a descendant of someone Carroll photographed. If only the world knew that these photographs weren't just a hobby, that each one held a secret within it.

  But the world was ignorant and pompous, like always. The Cheshire was going to teach them their last lesson ever. Let's see who has the last grin.

  58

  KATTENSTOET FESTIVAL, YPRES, BELGIUM

  The Pillar and I are licking ice cream at Il Gusto d'Italia, one of the most famous places in Ypres. It's not like we've come here for the ice cream, but licking it while staring at the madness around us is the best way to hang on to sanity.

  The Kattenstoet parade is immense. Many people, a lot of them children, come from all over the world to celebrate that crazy day. It's only seconds before we're pushed among the crowd, urged to walk ahead in the parade. In my modern-day Alice outfit and the Pillar's blue suit, we look like freaks. People are dressed as cats, wearing feline ears and hanging cat's tails, or meowing like cats. Girls have whiskers drawn on their faces, and elders have cat ears on, along with other medieval clothes and accessories. It's beautiful, actually—if only it didn't represent a horrible memory of killing cats.

  "This place is nuts." I laugh, holding the umbrella Fabiola gave me. She told me I would need it, but I still don't know how.

  "Every dog's dream." The Pillar puffs his pipe. He doesn't look happy. All he is looking for is a sign to spot the Cheshire.

  Among the parade, we pass by a famous clock tower, which shows the time is three in the afternoon.

  "Ding dong, something is wrong," the Pillar says.

  I don't know what he means, but we come across the belfry, where a huge bell rings, and people start to throw candy in the air.

  Colorful marching bands begin to fill the square in front of the famous clothes tower, where the Cheshire family was probably thrown out in the past—the Pillar educated me all about it this morning. He had his chauffeur research the Cheshire's background in Ypres.

  More children dressed in feline costumes make clawing gestures while elders twirl the flag of a Flemish lion. It's Ypres's national shield. How ironic, I think. A lion on the flag where they killed the same species in the past.

  "Balloons!" I cry out like a little child. Huge balloons gather and take the shape of one huge cat in the sky.

  I see young girls march next to us. They are dressed as Cleopatra as a tribute to Egyptian cats, which were considered gods back then. Viking-costumed flutists follow them with dancing girls in blonde braids as a tribute to Celtic cats.

  Things look ordinary until I spot horses drawing a wagon of a caged witch, who is acting as if she is pleading not to be burned. She is holding on to the bars and flipping her stiff black hair.

  "Gotta love humans," the Pillar blurts out as he still looks for the Cheshire.

  "Why? What's going to happen to the witch?"

  "In the grand finale of the party, they are going to burn her." The Pillar pushes a couple of cat-clothed kids away. "Woof. Woof," he blows at them. "Of course, they won't burn the girl herself. They will burn a feline version of her. Can you believe this is the twenty-first century? People still believe that cats and witches are the cause of their misery."

  Then I am distracted by a huge carriage made of feline fur. It looks like a huge red cat with scary jaws. They call it the Cradle. Children cheer upon seeing it and start climbing on the top and sides. I wonder if the huge cat on wheels is just hollow from inside because it's big enough to have a dining table and chair inside. For a moment, I wonder if the Cheshire is hiding inside.

  "And here comes Garfield." The Pillar points his cane at someone in a Garfield costume, walking next to a Puss in Boots.

  I try to act as the Pillar, not worry and enjoy the parade for a while. The buildings all around us are works of art. The houses are Renaissance style, and the fact that the place is full of people makes me happy. Again, for a girl just out of an asylum, this is heaven.

  Suddenly, the parade stops as we're
approached by a huge number of pro-cat activists. They are holding big animal rights signs, protesting against the cruelty that has been imposed on the cats of Ypres in the past. Their voices are loud and angry. I find myself pushed to the first row, with the Pillar next to me. When I get a closer look at the pro-cat activists, fear prickles the back of my neck. The Pillar holds my hand for assurance. What we're looking at might be normal for others, but not for us. All the activists in front of us wear the same orange mask on their faces. A face of a grinning cat, just like the mask the Cheshire Cat stole from Pott Shrigley.

  59

  "Ding dong… something is wrong," the Pillar says again, staring at the activists.

  "You think he is one of them?" The thought of me staring at the Cheshire without knowing him is unsettling. He could easily be anyone in this masked crowd. I'd rather face a devil I know than one I don't.

  "Brilliant, isn't it?" The Pillar looks angered by the Cheshire's trick. "He has an unstoppable need to attend the festival and perform the ritual. Now, with all those masks, there's no way to know who he is. He's mocking us again."

  "Shouldn't that mean that Constance is here?"

  "In many ways, it does," the Pillar says as the activists make way for someone approaching from the back. It looks like their leader, a man dressed in a Pied Piper costume. He holds a flute and a dossier in his hands and has a few grinning cat masks with him.

  "This is a peaceful protest." He raises his hands and talks to the people. I notice he is in his fifties, and his face is heavily lined as if he was a big drinker or smoker in his younger days. He has a good tan, though, and is not wearing a mask. "All we ask is that you let us pass to the clothes tower to mourn our cats."