Insanity (18 page)

“By the way,” the Pillar says. “The grinning cat carving in St. Christopher in Pott Shrigly was stolen this morning.”

Chapter 54

“What?” I put the magazine back. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

"You're always asking, Alice. I thought I'd feed your curiosity first.”

“The whole statue was stolen?”

“It wasn’t a statue, but a grinning cat carved in the wall,” the Pillar says. “It turned out this carving was removable. It’s practically a mask, disguised as a carving in the wall. That Richard Westmacott was a genius.”

“So what does this mean?”

“It means the Cheshire stole it,” the Pillar says. “And it means your theory is right. Somehow, the Cheshire was after the one grinning cat carving in those churches that was secretly a mask. My bet is he didn't know which one it was. Knowing how Carroll implanted secrets in everything, I bet it took the Cheshire some time to steal the right mask without messing things up."

"What do you mean?"

"Carroll was meticulous. I am not surprised if stealing the wrong mask would have resulted in the destruction of all the other masks by some Carrollian magic."

“So the Cheshire has the power Lewis Carroll deprived him from now?” I am disturbed by even thinking about it.

The Pillar nods. He looks more annoyed with the Cheshire getting the power than concerned with humanity’s fate. “The Cat is out of the bag. The White Queen said it wouldn’t be good if he got that power.”

“Adam told me the same thing in my dreams,” I mumble. “He said it would be the end of the world.”

“Adam, your boyfriend?” the Pillar says. I notice he's always focusing when I mention Adam.

“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 of 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.”

Chapter 55

Grote Market, 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
Cats in the Cradle
by Harry Chapman. The view in front of him was enchanting. He was looking over the famous Grote Market 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 he suppressed for humankind inside. He let out an even longer purr, waving 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's 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 a 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 never 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 chessboard 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...

Chapter 56

Ypres, Belgium 15th 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. Surely 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 used to love them when he was a kid. The way they hopped everywhere, it was like they were kangaroos for humans.

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 then. The rats tasted horrible, but gave him 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 Market, 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 on his head for padding into the Grote Market. 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 a body to inhabit. Cats were the perfect host 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, a number of 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 phenomenon 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 yoyos. No amount of throwing killed them, only an inexperienced few died. And then in one of humanities' most absurd incidents, the Flemish townspeople, the raw meat eaters, gathered and decided to rid their town from the cats who supposedly caused all their misery. Instead of investigating what they did wrong as humans, it was the cats.

As punishment, a parade and festival was 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. And while 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 was caught and killed.

Chapter 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 wondered, 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 sank free-falling into 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 is 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 onto humans of the world later. To do that, he had to gather an army of monsters. Later in the years, 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 down 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 sounded 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, one of the descendants Carroll photographed. If only the world knew that these photographs weren't just a hobby, that each one held a secret within it.