Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  The little men had done that for her. They would have been content with a hole cut out from a rocky ledge, but for her they had created a floor. A pattern. A little bit of culture and glamour and pomp. For her. The same reason her larger wooden dresser and bed were adorned with spheres and cubes and statuettes of dragons and harts instead of the simple blocks of their own furniture. And the same reason her top drawer was filled with golden chains and colorful stones from the mines and the rest with fancy dresses they had traded for with the villages beyond the mountain. For her.

  They loved her.

  And she loved them.

  But that was no longer enough.

  For any of them.

  The faces were staring at her. Ugly. Wrinkled. Filthy. Prunes with noses, she thought. No. Rotten prunes with noses. She imagined that they’d smell horrible too if she could be close enough to fall prey to their odor.

  But the glass that had been her prison for years was in this case a grace, protecting her from the trollish monsters.

  In her father’s kingdom, years ago, he had gone to war with the creatures, and ultimately run them off his lands into the mountains.

  But her father’s kingdom was long gone, lost for centuries in the world on the other side of the glass. Her family had grown old, died, rotted and nested forests in their remains while she remained a captive of a witch who had stolen her away and sent her to this land of nightmares and hallucinations.

  “Alice,” said a voice she recognized instantly. “What are those horrid creatures?”

  “Long ago, when I was much younger and not younger at all, my father called them the darshve. He told me how they were creatures born from the sides of mountains and baptized to life in the blood of our ancestors. Monsters of the rock and greed.”

  She turned toward the voice and smiled.

  A white rabbit, dressed in armor save for his face and head stood before her, bowing.

  “What news, Ulysses?”

  “Alas, none, Alice.” The rabbit frowned. “I wish I had better news. But I’ve traveled as far as the ocean to the East and as far as the swamps of the Jabberwock to the West, and no one has any knowledge of another doorway into your home world. It appears that when the looking glass was destroyed behind you, that was the only path to your old world.”

  “No!” she screamed and flung her hands against the mirror between her and the darshve. “There is a way, rabbit, and you will find it for me. I will not be slave to this witch any longer than I have to.” Alice turned and glared not at her companion but through him to the door of her chamber. “And when I do escape, she will die.”

  She glanced toward the wooden desk beneath the mirror. On it sat a book bound in leather. Ulysses caught her gaze and asked, “And the book?”

  “Sadly, no. There are paths to and from other worlds, but none back to mine.” She released a heavy burden of a breath. “Yet.”

  The air between them wriggled. Then rippled out. She touched the center of the motion and pulled back.

  “Damn.”

  “Her?” asked the rabbit.

  Alice nodded.

  “I’m not going this time,” she said and sat down on the floor, crossing her legs in front of her. “She can rot before I let her collar me again with her beckoning.”

  “But Alice….”

  “Hush, rodent.” Alice glared at him this time. “Leave me alone.”

  The rabbit bowed, saluted, then turned on his left heel and strode from the chamber. When he was gone, Alice gripped her stomach and doubled over.

  “No …” she said through gritted teeth. “Not this time, witch.”

  But the pain in her gut became a fire. In a few moments she crawled onto her knees, then lay her face down against the stone floor. Her stomach churned.

  “No….”

  She pressed both palms flat against the floor and raised her face a few inches from the stone.

  “I will not obey you.”

  Her gut twisted and bile danced in her throat. She coughed. Three drops of blood splattered from her lips to the floor.

  “I will n—”

  Her stomach opened, pushing blood and water and acid and bile and pain and fire through her throat and thrusting it onto the floor in a puddle of green and red and brown.

  “One day, witch,” Alice said, reaching to wipe her mouth free of debris and mucous.

  But another churning sent her hand to the floor to brace herself as her stomach emptied its filthy contents into the puddle again.

  A voice in the air whispered, “Mirror, mirror on the wall….”

  Second Movement—There Lived a Princess

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Redbeard.

  “She’s beautiful, almost as pretty as Snow,” said Tallest. “And she’s young.”

  “Where is she?” Redbeard again. “Is she real, or the mirror a conjurer’s trick?”

  “Quiet, both of you,” said Leader. “She’s in pain.” He tapped on the glass. The girl turned to face him and retched a third time. “She’s real. That pain isn’t a conjurer’s game. No one could fake that. Look at her face.”

  His brothers crowded him at the mirror and he pushed them away.

  “One side,” he said. Not waiting for them to move, he pushed them away from the mirror and traced his thick, calloused hands around the oval edges. He tried to dig his nails between the glass and iron rim. There was no rim, as if the glass and frame were somehow molded from one piece of material. But it couldn’t be, he thought. As a miner he knew raw materials, and iron was as different from glass as he was from the human woman living with him and his brothers. “There’s conjuring here, but not necessarily only inside the mirror. This is made and bathed in magic. This is no ordinary mirror.”

  The smallest of his brothers, a golden-haired one with a mere few inches of a beard, shoved through the melee to the front. “Let’s take it to Snow!”

  “To Snow?” he asked.

  “Yes, she loves trinkets and jewels, and a magic mirror would be the perfect thing for her to use when she brushes out her hair.”

  The others sighed and oohed approval.

  “This is not a trinket, brother.”

  “No. It is a magic trinket,” said Redbeard. “And our brother is right. Snow would love us even more when we give her this.”

  Tallest puffed out his chest and made himself a few inches taller. “And with the year of maturing coming soon, we will need to find women of our own kind or find something more wonderful than mere jewels to woo Snow.”

  “Here, here,” said the others, in a sort of off-unison.

  “Quiet,” Leader said and stomped his boot into the dirty trail. “I say this is a bad idea. This mirror is enchanted and until we know what it does, it is far too dangerous to remove from this mine. But, we are brothers, and we will do what we will do. Who knows what role even this cursed looking glass may play in the evil that rides on the air through our Deadlands? We will put it to a vote and we will play our parts.”

  He let go of the mirror and leaned it against the wall of the cave. It teetered twice then stopped. The girl in the mirror had disappeared while they had argued, he noticed, though her chamber remained in view. Curious, he thought.

  He sat on his knees and drew two circles in the dirt. He poked two dots outside the top of the left circle and one dot with a line across the top at the bottom of the right circle. Then he stood up again and walked to the wall opposite the mirror. He raised his pick and cut several slivers of stone from the wall. Then he put the pick down and gathered up the shards of jagged rock. He walked from one brother to the next and handed each a fragment until he had given away six of them, then kept one for himself and threw the remaining pieces into the dark tunnel.

  “You know our way, brothers,” he said. “Cast your vote.”

  They formed a single line and as each walked by the circles, he placed his stone in one of the circles. Redbeard placed his in the circle with the two dots, as did Newbeard and Tal
lest. Stumpfinger dropped his in the other circle. Then Finder.

  That made two votes for each.

  After Finder, No-Talk dropped his shard into the two-dot circle, then Grunt-Mouth did the same.

  Leader gazed at the circles. Four votes to two. His vote was the only one left. Not that it would matter.

  He sighed, then grumbled and stepped forward and carefully placed his stone fragment in the circle adorned by one dot and a solid line. Then he turned around and addressed his brothers.

  “Let it be as we agreed. When we leave today, the mirror will go with us as a gift to Snow. Whatever danger befalls us and our love, let it be on our heads.”

  “Here, here,” said his brothers. Then they each shook on the decision with open palms and two nods.

  After they were done and finally returned to work, Leader carried the mirror to the mouth of the cave and laid it out in the sun. He slipped out of his tunic and spit on the cloth, then proceeded to wipe the dust and dirt and mud from the mirror and the frame.

  That’s when he felt the symbols etched into the iron.

  Old letters. Older almost than his own people. From just after the time of the great wars. The Dark Days, as the humans called them. His own people called them the Time of Great Adventure but even the oldest of them couldn’t remember the time. Only that they had been free to live anywhere in the land, not confined to the Deadlands.

  He cleaned vigorously for nearly an hour, passing the time with a tune that Snow had taught him. He had tried to whistle as she had tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t get the knack for it, and had to suffice with humming, though even that was difficult for his throat and mouth to conjure. In his own tongue, the old stories and songs were immensely disagreeable to human ears, and he had refrained from making the noises while in Snow’s company, but he did enjoy grunting and burping out a story from the old language in private as often as he could.

  Although—and the thought struck him as odd—Snow’s songs were growing on him. Far too sweet and kind for his race. He knew that. But still they were pleasant, and they seemed to relax him.

  There was no hurry, and he let the job take him another hour before he was able to at last make out the symbols around the glass.

  Only, he couldn’t read them. Not only were they older than his father’s father’s father, they weren’t in his tongue.

  But neither were they in any human tongue he knew. And admittedly he knew them all. The need to barter had dictated that knowledge.

  “’Tis a bad sign, it is,” he said, then spit again on his tunic to clean the glass itself.

  Dinner was ready when the little men arrived home, just vegetable soup this time, since her friends had returned so late from the mines. But they didn’t mind, and they each smiled at her in an odd way as she greeted them at the door and reminded them to remove their boots at the door.

  “Such a proper woman,” the one she called Smiles said as he entered. With a thick red beard and an almost permanent smile, the name seemed to fit him. Not that he’d acknowledge for himself outside her presence, she knew. His name would change among his brothers as often as his beard or disposition.

  The tallest came behind him and she kissed his head. “Good evening, and how was your day at the mine?”

  He only grinned and looked away.

  The one who took care of the others entered last and nodded toward her then bowed slightly. “We have a surprise for you after dinner, Snow,” he said.

  Another necklace, she thought, or perhaps a new gown from beyond the mountains. That’s what had kept them today.

  The gifts were nice, but so inferior to her trifles at the palace. Still, that was a world and a witch away, and there was no use letting it ruin her mood in front of her friends who worked so hard to make her happy.

  “Oh?” she said, feigning an excited squeal. “Perhaps we should skip dinner and just let me see it now.”

  “If you want to,” said the little one she called Grandpa because his blonde beard reminded her of her grandfather’s portrait hanging in the hallway outside her chamber at the castle.

  “No,” gruffed the leader of the group, a squattish stump of a man she called Squash for no other reason than it seemed to fit him. He coughed then relaxed his voice. “We will wait. Our stomachs are empty, and food and beer will make the giving more enjoyable for all of us.”

  “I certainly can’t argue with that, Squash,” she said, curtsying as she spoke, then let him take her lean fingers in his stubby hand and escort her to the table.

  Once dinner was eaten and the dishes cleared away for her to wash, Smiles and Grandpa grabbed her hands and whisked her from the table toward the door. They led her outside, the others following as a group. She couldn’t get back without trampling through them, so thickly were they packed around and behind her. Only Squash stood off at a distance, watching cautiously as he smoked his pipe. The foul odor of the ground bitterroot was nauseating from even a distance, but she dared not say anything to him, as it seemed to be his only real vice aside from typical dwarfish issues with hygiene.

  The group led her to the edge of the garden they had dug out for her. Leaning against the rock-hewn gate was a flat package about four feet tall and wrapped in a cloth tarp.

  “Open it,” they cried, almost in unison.

  Except for Squash, who remained a few feet away, still smoking his obnoxious pipe.

  “Okay,” she said and knelt down to unwrap the gift. As she did, her skirt fell away to one side, exposing her knee and she noticed that all the brothers grew quiet at once. When she looked, they were all staring at her smooth, white skin. She quickly recovered her leg. “Sorry about that.”

  Just as quickly, the little men started to grunt and whisper and jabber with each other as she returned to the gift and lifted the edge of the tarp away from the top corner of the package.

  “Hurry, hurry, Snow.”

  “Yes, we want to see your smile when you learn what we brought you.”

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”

  So she did. She ripped the tarp away and exposed the gift, twirling around with a flourish as she did. Almost in a dance, just for the benefit of her little friends.

  Then she stopped.

  Cold.

  The gift.

  It was a mirror.

  A very, very expensive and old mirror.

  Inside the mirror was a young woman, blonde, staring out at Snow with the same intense gaze with which she was staring at the girl in the mirror.

  She’d only seen a mirror this extravagant once before.

  Only once.

  Nearly fifteen years ago.

  In her stepmother’s chamber.

  It had the same girl inside.

  But the girl hadn’t aged a single day.

  The girl, Alice thought, the girl, the girl she thought she’d never see again. The hideous little blessed bastards had brought her directly to the stepdaughter of the wretched woman who had imprisoned her behind the glass and left her to die.

  Only she hadn’t died.

  No. She had instead conquered the people in that looking glass world and become the queen of her new domain. It had taken many hundreds of years and cost thousands of lives, but when she found the book and formed an alliance with the elder gods, she had finally defeated and beheaded the evil queen who stole the hearts of her subjects to sacrifice to the dreaded Jabberwock.

  Captive to the Queen, the beast had not been native to the land, but a dumb offspring of the elder gods from beyond. And when they had discovered how one of their own, albeit it one not a god as such, had been enslaved, they tore the life from the land and left it parched and mostly dead.

  But time causes all things to change and when the creatures from beyond had moved on, Alice merely waited, biding her time as the green returned to the soil and the fragrance to the air, and even the creatures of the woodlands and seas forgot of the darkness of the war and saw only the bright new beginning of their new Queen Alice.
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  Not only that, but she had also used her time in exile to befriend and nurse even that dumb Jabberwock until it would eat live rodents from her hand without so much as drawing a single drop of blood from her human skin.

  It refused to leave with its own kind. It was for the best, she knew. Its presence in her court secured the loyalty of the people.

  And she had reigned for a glorious epoch, it seemed, but even a kingdom isn’t necessarily a home, she had learned, and over time, all thoughts of political victory had simply faded away, replaced by the singular focus of returning home to kill the witch responsible for her exile.

  No queen could be slave to another and still be queen, she had said to her subjects many times, and for that, the witch would have to die.

  And her own stepdaughter would be the sword to raise against her.

  Only there was the matter of the runes.

  Alice stared at the dark-haired girl, envious for a moment for her pale, young skin. Already thousands of years older than she had been when she had fallen prey to the witch, Alice’s own skin looked as young as the girl’s but carried the calloused tightness of years of struggle.

  The creatures were helping the girl to her feet again. She had fallen aback at the unveiling of the cursed looking glass and landed in a disheveled heap in the dirty path. Alice laughed. Then thought it best to smile instead. No sense in looking maniacal toward the only person who had a chance of freeing her from the multiple lifetimes of trapped torment.

  When the girl was up and steady she returned to the mirror and cautiously placed her hands on the glass. Alice nodded and placed her own hands opposite those of the girl. The girl gasped and Alice said, “It’s okay. It’s safe,” though she knew the girl couldn’t hear her across dimensions.

  Using the frame of her matching mirror in her own chamber as a guide, she traced the outer edge of the glass where it met the iron frame. The girl looked at her, confused, and Alice traced the edges again, this time pointing as she did to the characters etched into the iron.