A Plague of Hearts

by Patrick Whittaker

  ‘So what?’ said the Panda. ‘This isn’t exactly news for me.’

  ‘But here’s something that is. About an hour ago, I was talking to Smith and he let slip that he and those two girls are both from different periods of Earth’s history. That can only mean one thing - with TARTS we have the ability to not only travel to other universes, but to other times as well. We can go back and alter the past!’

  The Panda leaned back in his chair and considered. Time travel could, of course, have many advantages. But then again, it was a two-edged sword. Supposing someone else got hold of the secret? Could they then not alter history in such a way that he, the Panda, was never even born? The risk was slight but not worth taking. At the first possible moment, he would have TARTS destroyed and all those who had even the remotest grasp of its principles would have to be eliminated. ‘All right, General Lazenby. Your point is duly noted. Leave it with me and I’ll let you have your answer in a day or two.’

  And the answer, thought the Panda, will be a bullet through the base of your skull.

  Chapter 17

  The Rise and Fall of the Red Queen

  Leaving the Grey Squirrel’s corpse to the flies, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare went back indoors. A warm breeze was beginning to rattle the windows like an insistent child wanting to make its presence felt. It was as if the whole world had been holding its breath, just waiting for this moment to happen.

  At the top of the stairs, the Mad Hatter paused and turned to his friend. ‘You understand that he had to die, don’t you?’

  The March Hare took a deep breath, then nodded. ‘If he was about to betray us, there was no choice. In fact, I think I would have pulled the trigger myself.’

  ‘I have no doubt of that. In days to come, you’ll look back on tonight and see it as an initiation, the start of a long, slow education in the realities of life.’

  ‘Tell me one thing then. Why do they call you the Mad Hatter? I mean, are you really as mad as all that?’

  The Mad Hatter opened his shirt and traced his finger across the grid work of fresh razor wounds. ‘By my own standards, I’m totally out of my tree, but now is not the time to contemplate such things. There’s a certain lady who’s been dying to meet you, and we really shouldn’t keep her waiting.’

  There were two doors at the top of the stairs. One led into the dormitory in which the March Hare had earlier met the Red Orchestra. Going to the other one, the Mad Hatter produced a key and unlocked it.

  ‘Before we go in,’ he said, ‘I should warn you that what you see in here will probably shock you. It may even make you angry.’

  ‘I can’t be shocked any more,’ said the March Hare. ‘Over these past few days, I’ve been to Hell and back. My emotions are overloaded. They’ve blown a fuse.’

  The March Hare pushed open the door and strode purposefully through it into a room illuminated by a series of candles placed around the floor. There was no furniture, only an electric generator and a grey metal cabinet resting by the window.

  ‘Like an alchemist’s laboratory,’ he observed, walking over to the cabinet. He looked down and found himself staring at the Queen of Hearts. She lay naked in the cabinet, her arms across her chest. In death, as in life, she was a grim and forbidding sight.

  The Mad Hatter closed the door behind them. ‘I suppose you heard the Queen disappeared shortly after she was removed from the court room?’

  ‘Only rumours.’

  ‘She lived a long and useless life. If she had a single saving grace, she kept it well hidden. But now she’s dead, and I shall lead her to the path of redemption. Tonight, the Queen of Hearts will rise again and atone for her sins.’

  ‘Rise? Then this box must be Ormus’ orgone generator.’

  The Mad Hatter nodded. ‘Call me Necromancer. I am he who can steal a soul from the devil and return it to its mortal shell.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long enough. While the Red King sleeps, His Queen will run her race. And in the morning, she will be back where she started. But if you’ve no stomach for this, then you’re free to go. There’s no reason for you to be involved.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m staying anyway.’

  ‘Good. I’d hate for you to miss the end game. We’ve played political chess against the Panda for long enough. The Queen is the strongest piece on the board. With her help, we can break the tyrant’s back.’

  The red light on the cabinet suddenly went out.

  ‘Now,’ said the Mad Hatter, ‘the Red Queen is with us.’

  ‘She’s not moving.’

  ‘I’ve given her a strong dose of refined buzz. She’s alive, but in a light hypnotic trance.’

  ‘I wonder at the way your mind works.’

  ‘Not my mind. All I do is follow the wishes of the Red King, as revealed to me by the cards. The Sleeping Monarch yearns for his wife. He wants to see her just one last time before she departs to the Netherworld for all eternity. Without my help, his desire would drive him to abandon his dream and awaken. And that would mean the end of the world.’

  Dropping to his knees, the Mad Hatter leaned over the side of the cabinet. ‘Your Majesty? Can you hear me?’

  The Queen’s lips trembled. Her nostrils flared. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked. Her voice was vague and distant. She spoke like a lost child.

  ‘A friend,’ said the Mad Hatter. ‘A friend and a loyal subject who has the most appalling news to impart to you.’

  ‘Leave me. I was sleeping. I was caught in a wonderful dream of flying down a long tunnel towards a golden light.’

  ‘Your Majesty,’ said the Mad Hatter. ‘There’s something you must know.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You’re naked, Your Majesty. As bare as the day you were born.’

  ‘No. Never naked… Not since I was six years old… ’

  ‘You have no clothes, Your Majesty. The Panda has stolen them.’

  The Queen tensed. ‘That heathen!’ she hissed. ‘That monstrous little freak!’

  ‘He hates you, Your Majesty.’

  ‘And I hate him!’

  ‘Perhaps Your Majesty would care to discuss this with the Panda?’

  ‘I have nothing to say to him.’

  ‘He’s stolen your clothes. Everybody’s laughing at you.’

  ‘Who dares?’

  ‘Your subjects are mocking you. Can you not hear them?’

  ‘Such wicked laughter! Make them stop. Tell them to go away.’

  ‘They won’t go away. When I ask them to leave, they laugh all the more.’

  ‘I am their Queen. They’re supposed to love me. Why then do they treat me this way?’

  ‘Because the Panda has been spreading evil, loathsome lies about you. Why don’t I take you where no-one can see you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Queen. ‘That would be best.’

  ‘Then stand, Your Majesty. Rise up and follow me.’

  The Queen opened her eyes. It happened so unexpectedly, the March Hare caught his breath. Her gaze passed from the Mad Hatter to the March Hare, then back to the Mad Hatter.

  ‘You must help me,’ said the Queen. ‘I am weak. I do not think I can stand by myself.’

  The Queen’s left armpit was sweaty. It smelt of stale perfume and almonds. For the March Hare, placing his paw into that hairy alcove was something close to purgatory. Coarse hairs dug into the soft pads of his palms. He shuddered.

  The Mad Hatter, who had to perform the same manouevre on the other side of the Queen, looked equally disgusted.

  ‘The things I do for Truth, Liberty and Justice,’ he complained, tensing himself for the task of lifting the Queen. ‘I hope somebody remembers to give me a medal for this.’

  Ten minutes later, the Queen stood in the moonlight, gazing into the distance at nothing in particular. Behind her, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter were kneeling in the grass, panting and groaning and wiping their soiled hands on the ground.

  ‘You can have this for a
game of cards,’ said the March Hare. ‘It’s a wonder I didn’t put my back out.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said the Mad Hatter, wiping a bead of sweat from his top lip. ‘From here on, it’s downhill all the way.’

  He got to his feet and approached the Queen. By the light of the silvery moon, her pale flesh possessed a celestial quality. The mounds of her buttocks moved strangely in the breeze, as if maggots crawled beneath her skin.

  Hearing the Hatter’s footsteps, the Queen turned. ‘I feel strange,’ she said. ‘As if I’m caught in somebody else’s dream.’

  From his pocket, the Mad Hatter produced a small bottle. Around its neck was a paper label with the words Drink Me printed on it in large, gothic letters. ‘This will make Your Majesty feel better.’

  The Queen held out her hand. ‘I am so very thirsty. And hungry. And lonely.’

  ‘And naked,’ added the Mad Hatter.

  Looking down at herself, the Queen trembled, not with rage but with a sadness such as she had never thought possible. It was not that her body was unbearably gross; it was the sudden knowledge that her love for her subjects had not been returned.

  She took the bottle from the Mad Hatter and dispatched its contents in one swallow.

  The Mad Hatter shrank before her. The horizon seemed that much closer.

  ‘The heavens!’ she uttered. ‘It is a dream after all. The world is growing smaller. Soon it will disappear completely. I shall be the only thing in all creation, and then I will wake up.’

  The March Hare realised immediately what was happening. In the space of a few short seconds, the Queen had tripled in size. Her great, quivering thighs filled his vision.

  ‘You bastard!’ he screamed at the Mad Hatter. ‘That was magic mushroom juice!’

  The Mad Hatter ignored him. ‘Your Majesty!’ he cried, backing away to what he hoped was a safe distance. ‘Don’t forget the Panda! He has your clothes.’

  ‘Yes!’ roared the Queen, majestic once more. ‘This may only be a dream, but I shall have my pleasure. Let me grow, dear God! Let me dwarf the mountains and become so vast that I shall dine on stars and sleep on the spiral arm of a distant galaxy.’

  Her buttocks brushed against a tree, producing a shower of broken branches. She was over fifty feet tall and still growing. A limb of the tree was embedded in her thigh. She swiftly removed this splinter and tossed it aside.

  In the meantime, the Mad Hatter and March Hare had taken cover in a nearby cornfield.

  The Mad Hatter lay on his back, rocking slightly from side to side as he tried to suppress his mirth. Everything was going as planned. Adrenalin flooded his metabolism, producing a high that felt like free fall. The March Hare, on the other hand, was neither amused nor elated. As the Queen of Hearts expanded before him, he felt again the sheer horror he had experienced in the Court Room as Alice toppled onto the Knave. Whatever the Hatter’s motives - and he did not believe them to be pure - what he had done was obscene. It was a sin against Nature, a perversion of the workings of the Universe. A blasphemy.

  The Queen’s foot swept forward, creating a draught that swept over the Mad Hatter and the

  March Hare, bending corn and whispering like a spiteful gossip. The foot came down on Mrs. Pogue’s Home for the Bewildered and Slightly Insane, pile-driving through the roof and grinding bricks into dust. A grey cloud billowed around her left calf.

  ‘My knickers!’ she howled. ‘How dare he steal my underwear!’

  Her voice was a hurricane, an explosion of words, a barrage of raw emotion.

  The March Hare fought a strong desire to curl into a ball. Again and again, his eyes were drawn towards the Queen’s breasts, swaying in tandem like a pair of drunken sailors. The nipples were rogue moons trying to escape the gravitational pull of her chins.

  She turned, presented him with a view of a white mass streaked with varicose veins. Her buttocks quivered, parted momentarily, leaving the March Hare with an image of the sky splitting in two.

  Shaking off the remains of the house from her foot, the Queen strode off into the distance, dust and thunder following in her wake. As she receded into the distance, tranquility began to fill the breach left by her passing.

  The Mad Hatter threw off his hat and stood up to watch her go. He had never in his life seen such an awesome and wondrous sight.

  ‘I feel,’ he said, with some pride, ‘that I have just created the greatest work of art this world has ever known.’

  Stubbing out an illicit cigarette, Private Roy Dawson of the President’s Own Regiment looked down nervously from his lofty perch. He had never been comfortable with heights and there was something about a watchtower which made him feel especially vulnerable. Beneath him, the Presidential Bunker sat like a concrete toad. Searchlights swept across its featureless back and forayed into the surrounding scrub, highlighting barbed wire and ditches of stagnant water.

  Beyond the bunker, a mist rolled along the Tired River. It reminded Dawson of a spectral army marching to damnation. He was not often inclined towards fancy, but at times like this there was little else to occupy his mind. It had been a quiet, disturbing night, filled with rumours and a sense of unease. Before he’d come on duty, the mess room had been abuzz with whispers of a momentous battle and a resounding defeat which had allowed the Spadishers to break through into Hearts. If such tales were true, then the Duke of Pancreas was only hours away from Enigma.

  He looked beyond the Tired River and gazed with fascination at an odd cloud formation. It was lower and denser than the few wisps of cirrus drifting across the sky, and it was going in entirely the wrong direction. In fact, it was approaching the Bunker.

  Could it be smoke? he wondered, lifting a pair of field glasses to his eyes. Stars swept before him as he moved the glasses in the direction of the cloud. Something white loomed on the horizon. Excitedly, he adjusted the focus and was startled to find a face looking back at him.

  Giant eyes blinked. Veins as thick as pylon cable radiated from pupils bigger than the moon. Dawson felt his knees give a little. His ears were filled with the roaring of his own blood.

  ‘The Queen!’ he yelled, pointing towards the face. Suddenly he felt foolish. Letting his field glasses drop, he looked around to see what effect his pronouncement had produced. In the watch tower next to his, the sentry waved but seemed otherwise unconcerned.

  Dawson peered into the darkness and examined the white mass. It was drawing closer with alarming speed. With his naked eyes, he could make out arms and legs and a black triangle which could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was.

  Almost without thinking, Dawson hit the panic button. As sirens rent the air with their shrill screams, he offered up a silent prayer that he had not just made the biggest mistake of his life. A firing squad was no way for a soldier to end his career.

  Doctor Ormus swore long and softly. From his hiding place beside the Tired River, he had spotted the Queen of Hearts almost at the same moment as Private Dawson. He’d been lying behind a fallen oak, a walkie-talkie in his hand, awaiting instructions from the Mad Hatter.

  And though he immediately identified the pale apparition as the Queen of Hearts, he could not know that she had flattened Mrs. Pogue’s, thus destroying the Mad Hatter’s radio equipment.

  Beside him, Julie and Lisa were watching the approaching giant. Neither recognised the dead Queen, but it was beginning to dawn on them that what they were seeing was not normal.

  Three gerbils who had been hiding in a nearby hedgerow with the Mock Turtle broke cover and stood in a huddle, each waiting for one of the others to offer a suggestion. Fortunately for them, the guards in the Presidential Compound were too concerned with the approaching Queen to continue their usual pattern of sweeps with the search lights; otherwise the three rodents would have been picked out in stark, merciless detail.

  Ormus waved frantically at them, but he could not catch their attention. Across the river, sirens howled and Blue Shirts poured from the Bunker’s sole ent
rance. Orders were shouted. Artillery men worked with hasty efficiency, manipulating their anti-tank weapons in the direction of the Queen.

  No-one was sure of the range. The Queen did not stay in one place long enough for them to judge her distance, and there’s something about a giant, naked woman which destroys all sense of perspective. Unless they knew her exact size, it was impossible to say how far away she was.

  Worse than that, many of them now recognised her as their Queen.

  Ormus swore again.

  ‘Oh boy,’ said the Cheshire Cat, strolling by with his tail in the air. ‘Will you just look at the dumplings on that?’

  ‘Get out of here!’ snapped Ormus, taking an angry swing at the Cheshire Cat. The blow did not connect. Even as his arm swept round, the Cheshire Cat vanished.

  ‘Bloody animals! We should cage the whole lot of them!’

  ‘My, my,’ said Julie. ‘I’d never thought I’d see you get so flustered over a woman, Doctor. Not even a naked one.’

  Ormus gave her a look of daggers and acid. ‘This is the Mad Hatter’s doing! I’m supposed to be his Second-In-Command and he told me nothing about this! What the hell does he think he’s playing at?’

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Lisa. ‘Whatever that thing is, it’s coming our way.’

  Before Ormus could answer, a hideous bellow drove through the night. ‘WHERE’S THE PANDA? I WANT THE PANDA!’

  ‘It’s the Queen,’ said Julie.

  By now, shock waves could be felt running through the ground. The Queen’s every step produced a minor tremor. The waters of the Tired River became agitated; waves slapped against its banks, here and there spilling over in plumes of foam.

  The gerbils were shouting at each other. Their squeals could just be heard above the sirens and the thunder of the Queen’s footsteps. One aimed his rifle and fired; it had no effect.