A picture flared up on the face: an old man lay on a hard wooden bed. His skin was peeled back from his chest and secured away from the body by small black pins. His rib cage was shattered and removed. Bloody organs were exposed to the elements, some of them removed, some of them still in situ.
“I could not find where his passion was. So, I thought for a long time. Perhaps his passion had escaped in the red oil. I found another study. This time it was a young girl. She was very passionate about flowers. I made a small incision in her throat,” said Coppélia, as it tapped its own neck with a spider limb. “I took all her red oil. She changed colour when I did this. Look, here is a before and after. You can see: before she was all pink, and after she was very white.”
Lucy was nearly sick at the image of the girl suspended upside down. In the first image, she could see the wash of fear in the girl’s eyes. In the second, the fear was gone, replaced with the glassy stare of a doll.
“I tried to examine the red oil. It turned out to only be water, with a small amount of proteins, glucose, mineral ions, hormones, carbon dioxide and some minute, ferrous-rich, cells—no passion. I began to think that maybe the oil contained the passion in a way I could not detect. I tried to ingest it, but it did not taste very nice. I tried to use it as a lubricant, but it was sticky and viscous and did not let me dance very well. I concluded: the red oil was not where the passion was.”
Coppélia’s head snapped to one side and whirred back as the more masculine voice spoke.
“That Munchkin girl will have forgotten me. She will have forgotten what I tried to be for her. Forgotten all the flowers I picked and all the wood I chopped—all of it forgotten. She’ll have met someone else now—someone of flesh and blood. She’ll be with him—not me. She’ll kiss him and hug him and love him and sleep with him—not me. That slut! It should be me. Not him! She will have forgotten all about me. But, I will make her remember!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Lucy.
She was totally confused. She didn’t know what was worse: a lecture from a psychopathic dancing doll, or this woodsman who wanted revenge on a Munchkin girl.
I told you that you would not like it, Intuition laughed.
Coppélia’s head snapped again, and the female voice returned.
“The red oil, Lucy, it didn’t contain the passion. So, I looked for it in the noises. The passion had been in Dr. Coppelius, but I had not found it in his insides, or in his red oil, but he had made noises when I studied him. Maybe the passion was in those noises?” There was a click and then a man’s screaming voice came from Coppélia’s mouth speaker. Lucy held her hands over her ears until the screaming stopped. “My study was a young couple.” continued Coppélia. “I knew men, and women breathed in and out, and I knew that men and women kiss. I hypothesised that kissing was the exchange of passion through the “in-and-out” breaths. I sewed the couple’s mouths together, but they turned blue and then stopped functioning. I do not know why they did that. Perhaps you can illuminate? Look: here are the studies.”
More images flashed up on the blank face. A couple with their lips sewn together, black cotton criss-crossing from one to the other—locked in a final, forever kiss.
Aww, how romantic.
“Stop,” Lucy said, her world reeling.
This idiotic, psychopathic dancing doll was just too much. The blood, she could smell the blood. It was thick all over this thing. It had killed; it would kill again; it simply didn’t understand, and it could never understand.
“Stop?” Coppélia asked. “But I have more studies where I go into detail of the inner working of men and women. I have not shown you my dissections of the brain on people with passion. I did comparative studies. I cut people who have passion for each other as they look at each other being cut. Yet through it all, I could not find the passion.”
What is this? Going to be sick are we, Gayle? Intuition said, in with gleeful malevolence.
“Don’t show me anymore!” Lucy shouted, as more images flashed up on the robot’s face.
Intuition laughed in triumph.
“Where is the passion, Lucy?” Coppélia asked, throwing all six of its arms into the air in supplication. Desperation poured into its voice as if a dam had broken. “You can tell me. You are human. You know where the passion is. Tell me. Help me. Help me understand. I must know where the passion is. I must have passion in my dancing. I must have it. I need it—help me, please. I have seen the insides of people and there is no passion. I have seen intestines, and lungs, and livers! Oh my! Stomachs, and kidneys, and brains! Oh my! However, there is no passion in these lumps of meat. So, where is it? Tell me!”
The robotic head snapped to one side, and the male voice began to spout its own insane babble. “She left, that slut—that whore! She left and forgot all about me, but I’ll make her remember me. I’ll carve my name on her chest, on her breasts, in her heart! Oh my! I’ll scrawl it in her own blood. She’ll remember me then, as I tear out her heart and eat it! She’ll remember me forever, and ever, and ever! Oh my! I HAVE NO HEART!” it finally shouted.
Lucy flung her hands to her ears, trying to stop the lunatic voice, but the sound seeped through her fingers like poison.
“Wind me up, Lucy, let me join your quest, let me walk free. I must find that Munchkin girl. I need to find her, you understand? Let me join your journey to your Emerald City.”
The voice became more and more hysterical with every word, “Please give me a chance. You just can’t leave me here. That wouldn’t be fair. Help me! I have to leave. I have to join you!”
The voice changed again, back to the unhinged doll’s high register. “Let me be free, Lucy Gayle. Wind me up, and I’ll continue my studies. I will learn about passion, even if I have to cut everyone in the world. I will know the answer. I will have all the data. I will dance again. Wind me, please, wind me. I can feel the springs running down. They are nearly unsprung. They uncoil in my insides. Wind me up, please. Don’t let me rust. Don’t let me die. Let me be free!”
“No!” Lucy finally shouted.
It took all her willpower not to let the magic run through her. She had promised Conscience that she wouldn’t fly off the handle, and it was a promise she intended to keep. She didn’t need the magic lion to stop this creature. She simply needed herself.
“I understand now. You’re my third companion, aren’t you? You are the tin woodsman, from the Wizard of Oz, and you’re the dancing doll from some story I’ve never heard of. But, you are both one and the same thing. You’re the robot with no heart, and I can’t take you on this quest—I won’t do it. You are insane and dangerous. Either one of you could turn and kill me at any point. I’m not going to wind you up. You can stand there and rust for all I care. You’re a murderer,” she spat at the robot.
It juddered and fell limp, the internal spring having finally wound down.
And so the prophecy is broken, laughed Intuition. You have refused your last helper. The tin woodsman with no heart is too alien for you. Your cowardly Conscience is all dead and gone, and your stupid scarecrow faun will kill you tonight unless he abandons you as well. It is done. My task is completed. Your quest and your pitiful rebellion are over. Without your helpers, there is no hope. Cry off, Gayle, cry off and give up. You have lost.
No, thought Lucy, in desperation at the insidious voice. That’s not fair! It can’t be true.
Had she gone wrong in her thinking? This murdering, dancing doll couldn’t really be that important to her quest, could it?
You have lost, Gayle, said Intuition, in victory. You have broken your own prophecy. This land belongs to the Dimn, forever.
Chapter 24 The Liquorice House
“Doubts? We all have doubts. Everyone has that little voice in their head, which tells them “you’re not good enough—give up.” Personally, I crushed mine and taught them to sing.”
General Thrax, Year After Ice 11956
And if you meet the spider-queen,
> flee, or you will die,
Old George he said,
’til he was dead,
when the ravens did fly by.
From the song “Old George,”
Year After Ice unknown
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Talbot asked, concern written on his face.
Lucy stumbled up to her companions, shell-shocked. She’d broken her own quest. She had refused her last helper. The whole thing was ruined. Well, if it were real at all. She couldn’t think about that now. The nature-of-reality-question had been settled by Conscience. She would have to get to the Falls of Wanda, and there she could decide. Now, with the prophecy broken, there was no guarantee she would get to the falls at all.
She was almost in tears. Tears and tears, tears and tears. And there came that blasted rhyme again. She still hadn’t sorted that out either. It was all too much.
And, there stood Talbot in front of her, concern etched deep on his face. The brave, foolish faun. He still thought of her as a hero—as a Childe. What would he say when she told him about refusing the tin woodsman?
“I think I did something bad,” she said.
His bear hug smothered her. Thick arms, like tree trunks looped around her shoulders, and she was pressed hard against his hairy chest.
“Come now,” he said, his voice rumbling through his chest and into her ears. “It can’t be all that terrible.”
You know it is, came the serpentine voice. It is the worst thing you could have done.
Shut up, you.
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it can be sorted out,” said Talbot. “Come on, we’ll get inside and find this grandmother to look after Poppy. Then we’ll try to put right whatever it is you think is wrong.”
The light was beginning to die in the sky as the trio walked up the path. Each footstep she took was heavier than the last. She hung her head, letting the weight of her failure fall on her shoulders like a yoke. She had failed. She had let everyone down. She was walking on…crunching crystals?
Lucy paused for a moment and looked at what she thought had been gravel. Shards. Shards and shards and shards of glistening toffee crystals. Light brown, and looking like gravel, and yet, they were toffee crystals. What the flip?
They approached the door, and she saw that it too was crystal. Two huge sugar crystals of an unnatural, glowing, green colour stood like stalagmites, joining together and forming a door.
The whole house was made of confectionery, from its black liquorice roof tiles to its candy cane load-bearing structures. There were pear drops, aniseed balls, bonbons, sherbet pips, cinnamon balls, gobstoppers and coconut rolls stuffed together to make up the walls of the house. Strawberry belts snaked through the lattice of sweets making interesting shapes in the brickwork. There were hard candies and soft candies, nougats and peppermints, toffees and fudge all jammed together in this one house.
In a daze of confusion, Lucy grabbed at the door knocker only to discover it melted into chocolate and gold foil.
Poppy’s eyes lit up as Lucy wiped the chocolate onto her trousers tops and gave one loud wrap at the door. It echoed down the candy hallway, bouncing off marshmallows and rattling off confectionery.
“Maybe there’s no one at home.” Talbot shrugged.
His arm was stretched around Poppy. The little girl had fully recovered, and her eyes gleamed with evident delight at the candy house. She struggled at Talbot’s restraining arm. Her face became a red berry of consternation as she tried to twist away from the faun.
“Sweets, sweets, sweets!” she chanted, as a mantra to her own hedonism.
“There is someone at home,” said Lucy, peering through the sugar crystal door. “I can hear them coming down the hallway.” She cupped her hands over her eyes trying to see through the glowing, green, crystal door.
There was a shape. She could just about glimpse it through the door, but it wasn’t clear. It seemed to change and flow. Sometimes it was huge and monstrous, and sometimes it was small and meek.
“Lucy, I don’t like this. We should get out of here,” said Talbot, the circular saw of fear cutting into his voice.
“Oh, don’t be so wet,” she replied, trying to keep her own voice steady despite every instinct she possessed screaming for her to flee. “We need help, and we’re going to get it. We can’t spend all night in a werewolf infested forest, can we?”
“You need to run. Get far away from here.” There it was, he’d said you instead of we. Well, she wasn’t going to let him leave that easily.
“No. We need to rest and find somewhere to leave Poppy,” she said, emphasising the we. “You’re not suggesting we take her along with us, are you?”
“Yes, take her with you and go. Perhaps she can help you.”
They both looked at the little girl in her blood-red cape, as she salivated and chanted, “Sweets, sweets, sweets, sweets, sweets.”
“Well, maybe she can,” said Talbot. “Nevertheless, I’m going and I don’t think you should stay. There’s one very important point you’ve forgotten.”
“And what’s that?” Lucy asked, exasperation and petulance edging into her voice.
“Whoever owns this house has chosen to stay here—in a forest infested with werewolves.”
“Ah.”
“And you’ve just banged on this stranger’s door.”
Lucy was just about to turn and flee when it all became academic. The door opened.
An old woman’s face peered at the travellers from around the sugar door’s corner. She was about sixty-five and her ash-white hair was pulled back in a tight bun exposing lots of forehead and liver spots. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was only four and a half feet from the ground as it peered at them through small round spectacles.
“Yes, dearies, I can help?” asked the woman, in a voice as thin as a pipe cleaner.
“Ah…hello,” stuttered Lucy, thrown by the old lady’s appearance. She had imagined that the owner of the house would be even more monstrous than the werewolves, not a cute granny.
“My name is Lucy Gayle. These are my friends Talbot and Poppy Pooh-pah. We…ummm…we need your help. We need a place to rest for a while, and we were wondering if we could…” she trailed off, hoping the old woman would take the hint.
“You beings lost and alone in this wolfen-forest?” she asked, in a broken dialect.
They all nodded.
“And you needing a place to rest-nest?”
They nodded again.
“And you wish to come into my house-home?”
They all nodded for a third time.
The old woman clucked to herself. Her fingers twitched like a pianist without a piano as she moved aside to let them pass. “Well, of coursings, of coursings. Come in, come in.” She led the travellers into a dark living room. The walls were made of marshmallow, and the armchairs they were hastened into were toffee apples stuck together and lined with baking paper. The rooms were gloomy. A large round window in the wall let in little light through the frosted sugar glass but not enough to cut the gloom.
The scent of baking cookies wafted from the direction of the kitchen, but, there was another smell underneath. It was just on the edge of Lucy’s senses, but it was certainly there, a dark, fetid smell which hung under in the air like cheap air freshener, stomping through the room like a house-proud ogre. The air should have been cloying and sticky, but it felt cold and damp like a cave.
She shivered as she entered the room, she could have sworn a sharp breeze flew past her, making her hair blow back, except that it didn’t happen.
Poppy trooped in, pulled a lump of marshmallow from the wall, stuffed it into her mouth, broke a vase made of chocolate and crunched herself into a toffee apple seat.
Talbot, sitting upon a cake stool, peeled his waistcoat from his shoulder. A massive clot of blood came away, like a scarlet brooch. Beneath the blood, the wound was already just a knot of scar tissue. Thick brown hairs sprouted through the knobbly flesh, like new wheat poking thro
ugh a furrowed field.
Lucy caught Talbot’s eye by accident. His expression was mournful but resolute. He was leaving and there was nothing she could do to stop him. He was going to run as soon as he could to protect her and the quest.
The idiot. Didn’t he understand that she needed him? She needed his courage, especially now that Conscience was gone. If Talbot left as well, she would be all alone. There would be no one to guide her. No one to help her. The quest would fail, if it hadn’t already, and then she would never get home. She wouldn’t let it happen. She simply wouldn’t. She’d make Talbot stay. She’d say something. There must be some words, some sentiment, she could express to make him stay. The words were there somewhere just on the edge of her tongue like half-forgotten song lyrics. She knew the tune, but she just couldn’t think of the rhymes. She didn’t know where to start.
“Talbot?” she began.
The faun looked at her, his eyes distant as if he’d already left.
“Now, dearies,” said the old woman, bustling in behind the party, “I introduce myself. My name is Redd. Just Miss Redd. Husband is all dead, you see. Yes, yes, quite dead—eat. However, my children around somewise,”
Miss Redd turned her head from side to side scanning the room for her errant children. “I sure you make their acquaintance in fullness of time.”
Lucy prepared herself to deliver her patent thank-you-you’re-very-kind speech, but the woman motioned for her to sit, and she had no choice but to comply.
“Now, dearie, no be thanking me. It no more than honestest folk can do. Take in strangers this close to dinner time and dark. Why, you might have walked on by and never come a knocking-wise at all. Would you like some drinkings with your…” she turned to Poppy, who had her mouth stuffed with vase, “What you eats there, my dearie?”
Ravens and Writing Desks: A Metaphysical Fantasy Page 31