by Ellen Datlow
“Put up thy sword, thou viper!” Mrs. Sam Houston scolded Ruby-Red, bristling self-righteously against this imminent attack. “We’re only playing! We’re naught but little flowers, and he is a big monstrous bear!”
Taking this as their cue, the vorpal roses released the imprisoned cheshires, whipping them out of the briary snarl with thorn-studded vines and decanting them onto the gravel walkway.
The ragged bear sobbed like a Mock Turtle with a bone in his throat, and did not rise. But the second cheshire, reluctantly emerging mouth-first from her vanishment, smiled with relief and patted herself down with tiny hands.
“Why, you’re a monkey!” Ruby-Red exclaimed, lowering her sword and sounding half her age. “I didn’t think cheshires came in monkey!”
“Pygmy marmoset, if you please,” replied the Cheshire Monkey, clearly resigned to being mislabeled henceforth.
“What brings you to the Hetch of the Borogoves?” Lily-White asked. “And what’s wrong with your bear?”
The Cheshire Monkey’s head-body trembled. “Oh,” she cried. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Can’t you see? He’s been snatched!”
Before either sister could ask what this meant, the poor bear let out another wheezing moan and stretched his mouth into a terrible rictus. The Cheshire Monkey rushed up to him and put her clever little paws on both of his cheeks and squeezed with all her might.
“Empty beehives!” she shouted. “Rotten river trout! Bad berries! Sad thoughts, damn you, Bear! Think sad thoughts! Don’t you dare smile!”
But her paws were small; the bear’s gaping mouth might easily have fit her whole body, fez and all. The Cheshire Bear rattled his head back and forth. His companion clung as long as she could, but there was nothing she could do; that rictus grin only grew and grew as the rest of the bear’s gray body faded out entirely. The mouth went last, as was the way of the cheshires. But instead of that glittering crescent of teeth winking and blinking in the air like a trickster sickle, Lily-White and Ruby-Red glimpsed a flash of empty gums that scattered a few last drops of blood like a passing raincloud.
Then it, too, disappeared.
The Cheshire Monkey lay where she fell and sobbed, tail beating gravel like a gavel.
“Oh, and he will never return,” the Cheshire Monkey sobbed. “He will never, not ever return. For our teeth are the first and last of us, and his are gone, gone, gone. He’s been snatched!”
“Yes,” said Lily-White impatiently, “you said that already. But who snatched his teeth, or what—if it’s a what—and why?”
“We don’t know!” the Cheshire Monkey shrieked, leaping agitatedly to all fours, and then up and down in place. “We have never seen our foe’s face, this night hunter who stalks our village. When we lay us down to sleep, we are smiling fools, Toms and Maudlins all in the lordly lofts of Bedlam. But when we wake, another of us has been snatched. Sans molar, sans cuspid, sans incisor, sans everything! And once the snatched ones vanish, they’re gone forever.”
“Can’t you just … not vanish?” asked Ruby-Red, weeping red tears in sympathy.
The Cheshire Monkey gave her a scornful scowl. “You try holding your breath the rest of your life! Cheshires are made to fade in and out on a smile. We’re a begimbled race, half-whole, half-hole, and that’s all there is to it. But so long’s we have our teeth, we can come back! That’s why we’re here,” she insisted. “We’ve come—or I’ve come, I guess, now that Bear is gone—to beg the Hetch of the Borogoves to seek out our enemy and kill it dead—before it murders us all!”
Lily-White and Ruby-Red took a moment to study each other from the corners of their eyes.
“Oh,” Ruby-Red said casually, “we’ll go. No need to bother Mimsy about it. She’s got the Motto to maintain and a caterpillar to incubate.”
Lily-White had already dashed to the cottage, meaning to gather up their things, but found the door locked fast against her. She tested it twice, then looked around for clues; Mother never locked the door without a reason. After a brief survey, she noticed the two packs nestled beneath the stoop and checked the contents: DRINK MEs and EAT MEs aplenty, gauze and theriac for wounds, pads for menstruation, plus one large bottle of Jubjub oil.
“Mimsy says it’s okay!” Lily-White called out, settling her own pack on her back. She dutifully trotted the other to Ruby-Red, who slung it over one shoulder, jaunty-style, and sheathed her vorpal sword at her side with an ostentatious hissy-click.
“Lead on, monkey!” she commanded, grinning. “We shall follow! Across the Motto and into the Dial, even unto the very nest of thy Bandit Tooth-Snatch, we go! Off with their heads!”
I really hope, Lily-White thought privately, it doesn’t have more than one.
* * *
Not so long ago, Cheshiretown had been the gaudiest, chaoticest, pranciest place in the Wabe. It was built around the VIII of the Dial—which, as you know, is the number associated with Flimflammers, Frauds, and Fools—and looked more like a carnival than a settlement. Pennants, balloons, colored lights, a House of Love (with swans), a House of Horror (also with swans), even a Ferris Wheel.
All dull now, and silent.
Those of its denizens who had not fled were in hiding, and those in plain sight had already been snatched. Like the Cheshire Bear, these grayed-out and grim victims had not yet surrendered to their inevitable vanishment. The Cheshire Hyena, the sisters noted, had wired her bone-crushing jaws shut, but to no avail. Her spots were disappearing, one by one, from her saffron-piled fur. Her mane a ghost ruff, unmoved by the breeze.
“I must see to my family,” said the Cheshire Monkey worriedly, and scurried off to clamber up a Tulgey fir. (The Tulgey fir, named after botanist-explorer Professor Theolodia Tulgey, is the second tallest tree in the Wabe, dwarfed only by the Tumtum tree, which is most notorious for never being where you saw it last.)
The palatial purple trunk of the Tulgey fir, with its bristling cobra nest of branches, was massive enough to host whole colonies of pygmy marmosets, whole generations. Lily-White and Ruby-Red awaited the Cheshire Monkey’s return in the undershade. They waited long enough that the VIII of the Dial fell under the shadow of Mount Gnomon, and Cheshiretown took its turn of Lesser Night.
Lily-White and Ruby-Red shivered and exclaimed aloud, delighted. Where they lived on the Motto, they had Greater Night but no Lesser Night, for the mountain’s shadow did not touch the southlands.
“Look! There’s the Looking-Glass Constellation!” Ruby-Red pointed between a break in the Tulgey needles, where night striped a precise slice of sky.
“And see,” Lily-White cried, “the Timeless Rabbit! And the Portal Maid!”
Occupied thus with celestial concerns, the sisters hardly noticed the shadow passing until Lesser Dawn had all but surrendered to the dazzle of IX AM.
When it was light again, the girls got antsy and hungry. No wonder they had breakfast twice up north!
“Where’s the Cheshire Monkey?” Ruby-Red asked. “I’m about to eat an EAT ME. Then I’ll be tall enough to look down into the tree and shake her right out of it!”
“Oh, save it,” Lily-White advised. “Mimsy wouldn’t have packed it just for snacking on.”
They lingered an idle minute longer. Ruby-Red huffed and stamped. Lily-White re-plaited one of her white braids.
The Cheshire Monkey did not crawl back down.
“I’ll holler for her,” Lily-White offered, craning her neck and opening her mouth.
But before a single word escaped, she slumped. She stumbled. She fell upon her fundament.
Stunned and sick, she stared at nothing. Pale. Pale. Everything was pale, inside and out. Queasy, squirmy, maggoty-pale.
Suddenly her sister was kneeling before her, tracing the vorpal scars on her face, reawakening the scorch and scrape of them. Memory countered foresight; Lily-White exited the future via the past, and re-entered the present.
Ruby-Red patted her on the shoulder, whispering, “Your eyes got pearls in ’em, Egg-White. Something bad’s
about to happen?”
Lily-White nodded, mute. Ruby-Red drew a deep breath, and Lily-White automatically did the same, having forgotten, until that moment, how.
“Let’s go see,” her sister urged. “Right now.”
Ruby-Red always wanted the worst over quickly—ever since she had rushed into the thorns. For Lily-White, the worst always happened before it actually happened, and maybe this was better all around.
“All right,” she agreed.
Ruby-Red grinned weakly. “At least we’re braced for it, eh?”
But she could not be, not really. Lily-White had not been. Whatever it was, there could be no bracing against it. She let her sister go first, not only because Ruby-Red insisted and was quicker anyway, but because Lily-White wanted the phantom pearls of future-feeling to clear from her eyes. Hard to see through all that milky murk.
When Ruby-Red screamed, Lily-White sprang to action. She leapt for the lowest-hanging branch of the Tulgey fir, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the shaggy purple trunk, and swung herself up.
About five or six levels high into the coniferous purple needles, a carnage of limbs greeted her. Ruby-Red clung to a branch, belly-down, head pressed to the bark, shaking and crying. Her hair spilled like magma across her face
Whatever had snatched the pygmy marmosets had been greeted with a fight. The pygmy marmosets had preferred violent death to vanishment, knowing that if they died before their teeth were taken, their bodies would remain. Poor things. Bravery had not kept their mouths inviolate. Even their tiny teeth had not been deemed too small to take.
Obviously (Lily-White hypothesized rapidly, her thoughts clear and untroubled), the ’Snatch had only just visited. This patch of blood was barely cool. It must have lurked in the highest branches of the Tulgey fir until Lesser Night, then got right to business as the sisters examined the stars.
Perhaps the Cheshire Monkey—whose little fez was nowhere to be found among all these strewn corpses—espying the ’Snatch upon her return, had crept upon it all slithy-like, and clung to its back as her brethren fell around her, knowing her only hope was to see where it fled with the light.
Lily-White shook her head. “She might have cried warning!” she said. “We were right below, vorpal sword and all. But cheshires,” she added, “never do the sensible thing.”
“Oh, they’re so small!” Ruby-Red sobbed. “They’re so small, and so, so many. And poor Hyena! And Bear! Oh! I can’t breathe! Oh!”
Lily-White scooted down the branch and laid her hand upon her sister’s shoulder. She drew a deep breath, and Ruby-Red automatically did the same, having forgotten, until that moment, how.
“I’m going below,” Lily-White said, when Ruby-Red seemed calm again. “I think the Cheshire Monkey rode hag on that thing, and I want to see if she left a clue.”
Without answering, Ruby-Red wiped her red eyes and dropped straight down. She landed on her feet, as she always did.
Lily-White followed more carefully. When she found her sister pacing and possibly trampling evidence, she gnawed her tongue against remonstrance. Ruby-Red needed a job, a distraction, and Lily-White needed to work in peace.
“You up for a tweedle?” she asked casually.
Ruby-Red lit up. “I’ll tweedle you a Borasco!” she cried, executing a fierce pirouette. “I’ll tweedle you a Brickfielder! A Brubu! Say the word, and I’ll run widdershins around the Wabe, and return with a cat o’ nine Cordanazos! I’ll have you a Sundowner by sunset, Lily-White!”
Lily-White grasped her sister’s arm. “Good. Go! Fly! Tweedle up a herd of hard winds, and drive them before you. Find me. I’ll be moving slowly, tracking from the ground.” She grinned and quoted her favorite of Mother’s Mottos. “Festina Lente!” Make haste, but slowly.
Snorting, Ruby-Red retorted, “Hora fugit, ne tardes.” The hour flees, don’t be late.
Then she was off. Ruby-Red ran even faster backward than she did forward.
In her wake, silence.
Lily-White bent down and found her first clue.
A fez.
* * *
Mount Gnomon was a hard-edged jut of glass, speckled black and red, cutting the sky with its peak and dividing the Dial with its shadow. If you peered close at the sparkling slabs of the cliff face, you could see the pips trapped inside, like insects in amber: hearts, diamonds, clovers, and pikes.
When Ruby-Red and Lily-White were children, Mother told them how she dug the black glass for her hexacle right out of a chunk of pike. The bargain she struck with the mountain to do so, she said, resulted not only in one but both of her pregnancies—but that was a story for when the girls were older.
When they were old enough to request the details of their conception, Mother said they were much too advanced for origin tales, and that they must invent the story themselves if they wanted one so badly.
Sitting in the sparkling red shade of a broken heart, feet tucked up under her and apron rolled in her lap, Lily-White had finished doing just that when her sister came hurtling out of the sky.
Ruby-Red tumbled about in the buffet, her winds moiling and roiling around her like spooked stallions. Breathlessly, she hailed Lily-White, who smiled up in greeting.
“What’s going on?” asked Ruby-Red.
“We have two mothers,” Lily-White replied solemnly. “Mimsy, and this mountain. Once upon a time…”
“Oh, you!” Ruby-Red cried impatiently. “Dreaming whilst I work! Hast thou espied the ’Snatch?”
“Ages ago.” Lily-White rolled her rigid shoulders. She had been there all night and all morning, waiting. “That was easy, for it won’t stop sobbing. The noise led me straight to its lair, then drove me back out again. My ears are still ringing!”
Ruby-Red frowned uneasily. “A sniveling villain will be difficult to kill.”
“It’ll be hard to kill anyway.” Lily-White tchawed. “That’s the whole point.”
All those gray dawn hours, Lily-White had crouched under cover of a clover-shaped stalagmite to observe the ’Snatch in its lair. How it had wept and blubbered, burbled and moaned, patching a dozen seeping monkey bites with stolen silk, and sinking the last of the Cheshire fangs root-first into itself.
But before it had made that last repair, Lily-White caught a glimpse of the creature that cowered behind its toothy spikes and misappropriated sticky-silk integument. She knew it for what it was, and why it had done what it did.
At its core, without accouterments, the ’Snatch was a frail and feeble thing. Like that old war song about King Humpty Dumpty—“an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg.” Only it was not an egg.
It was an oyster.
A flaccid, prodigious, soppingly gloppy, slurping, burping, gray-white oyster that had somehow lost its shell. Snot without a nose. Sentient paste. Slouching prey. Every which way it went, it went in danger of being eaten—for the Wabe is full of walruses, you know. Pitiful, really.
Before the ’Snatch had snatched its armor-making supplies from the caterpillars and the cheshires, leaving havoc and hecatomb in its wake, it would not have been hard to find its weak spot. Indeed, it was all weak spots.
Which would make Ruby-Red feel very sorry for it indeed.
Lily-White understood that her sister was ferocious and gallant, valiant, vigorous, and indomitable, as brutal as a thunderbolt when roused to ire. She also knew that Ruby-Red had the softest of hearts.
Lily-White, therefore, was prepared to be hard.
She stood. She let her apron unroll slowly, directing the tumble of its contents at Ruby-Red’s feet.
“What is it?” Ruby-Red gasped, though of course she knew. The winds muttered and grumbled. “What is that, Lily-White?”
The winds began to roar.
“It’s the Cheshire Monkey,” Lily-White said softly. “She unpieced herself to leave a trail. I collected all the bits. First, her fez. Then, her fur. She snatched her body bare. She snatched her claws, and then her paws. She cast away her arms and legs, her torso, he
r tail. She chewed the teeth out of her mouth and spat them, strewing a path to Mount Gnomon. At the very end of it, her head. I found it at the mouth of the ’Snatch’s cave. She trusted us to follow her. To finish this.”
Ruby-Red sobbed, shuddered, hugged herself—but her tears and her teeth were red. Lily-White was satisfied.
This, she thought, the rage that obliterates pity.
“Do you have a plan?” her sister demanded.
“I do.”
Lily-White stepped aside, revealing the fissure in the great glass heart behind her. A jagged doorway into the luminous depths of Mount Gnomon.
“Ride your winds, Ruby-Red, all the way inside. Brandish high your blade and drive it where you may. I, in turn, will ride your blade,” she continued, “and take my opening where you make it for me.”
Lily-White removed a DRINK ME from her pack, jiggled it suggestively, and slipped an EAT ME into her pocket. Ruby-Red followed each gesture with feverish eyes.
“But you will be so small!” Ruby-Red said. “What if you are crushed?”
Lily-White countered, “Well, I can’t die yet. I still owe you a quarter of my life.”
“Don’t you forget it!”
Lily-White laid her palm upon the hilt of the vorpal sword. Her skin was slick with Jubjub oil, with which she had anointed herself head to heel after her bout of forefeeling. Ruby-Red covered her fingers with her strong, brown hand.
“Egg-White … will this plan hurt you? I mean,” she corrected herself, “has it hurt you already?”
“Quite a lot,” Lily-White replied calmly. She had spent a not insignificant number of hours earlier that morning forefeeling her slow death in the digestive tract of a lachrymose oyster, and knew whereof she spoke.
Ruby-Red grinned suddenly. “Then I will avenge you!”
Her hair lashed her tear-bloodied cheeks like a thousand fiery bullwhips. Her winds snarled and stampeded behind her.
“Culpam Poena Premit Comes!” she yodeled. Punishment follows on the heels of guilt. “Drink up, Egg-White, and hop on!”
Lily-White opened her eyes wide. The Wabe had never been so clear, her body so much her own, her thoughts so present, as now.