Mad About the Hatter (22 page)

Hatter blinked and looked from side to side, his expression puzzled. He finally pointed hesitantly to himself. “Me? I don’t have a plan. I thought
you
had a plan.”

“
Me
?” Leonard’s eyes flashed open wide, shock glinting in their depths. “I’m the King.”

Hatter nodded and shrugged, as if Leonard had merely agreed with him. He took his hat off, and dusted the brim with the cuff of his sleeve. “Exactly.”

“No, no, you misunderstand. I’m the Red King. I have people who do things for me, like polishing my crown, and fluffing my pillows, and drawing up plans and such.”

“I don’t have a plan,” Hatter said, looking slightly confused. He turned to Henry. “Do you have a plan?”

Henry shook his head. “I don’t have a plan. I wouldn’t know how to begin to make one.”

Leonard scowled at them. “Well,
someone
has to have a plan. Hatter, I command you to formulate one immediately.”

“Me? You can’t just… I…,” Hatter stuttered, looking back and forth between Henry and Leonard, and finally tamped his hat back on and swore. “Well, of all the slurvish scut shukm!” He began to pace, pausing every so often to shoot Leonard a look so black and foul it caused several flies unintentionally buzzing in its path to drop like tiny stones, dead. “Fine. Let’s think about this. We can’t very well storm the front gates, now can we?” He jerked his thumb toward the Red Guards, all of whom were still trying to disentangle themselves and stand up. “Not with this lot.”

T
HEY
CROUCHED
behind a low wall fashioned of fieldstones, peeking over the top at the entrance to the Red Castle. The immense wooden double doors, both painted scarlet, were tall enough for a giant to pass through without needing to duck, and were closed, no doubt barricaded from the inside.

The doors, however, were the least of their problems. Getting to the doors was going to be far more difficult than opening them once Hatter and his friends got there.
If
they got there.

“Beg pardon, Your Majesty,” the head Red Guard began, making a small bow to Leonard, a feat made far more awkward by the fact that the guard was already crouching behind a wall. “What do we do now?”

Leonard cleared his throat, and took another look over the wall. “Well, er… I suppose we should go inside.”

“Yes, sire,” said the guard. “But, um, how?”

“By ordinary means, I should think. Through the doors.” Leonard motioned the guard forward. “You first, then. Go on. We’ll be right behind you.”

The guard began to get up but then paused and sank even lower than he’d been before. “I think you should lead us, Your Majesty. Seeing you up front would give the men heart.”

Hatter rolled his eyes. “Your Majesty, it appears obvious we must think of a different tactic than merely waltzing in through the front doors as if we’re calling on the Queen for tea.”

“Why not?” Henry asked. “Isn’t that what she’d least expect us to do?”

“I should think she believes us dead, actually. She certainly wouldn’t have set the guards to watch for our return by the mirror in the White Castle if she didn’t think they’d kill us. The problem, Henry, is the moat.” Hatter pointed to the small drawbridge leading to the castle doors. It was up, prohibiting safe travel across it to the castle. Beneath it, muddy waters churned with red-tinted foam. “It’s filled with hungry crocodiles.”

“How do you know they’re hungry?” Henry asked.

“Because crocodiles are
always
hungry. They’re mostly just teeth and stomach, you know. Takes a lot to fill them up.” Hatter sat down and leaned his back against the wall. “Even if we managed to cross the moat, the front doors are patrolled by a Jabberwock, and that’s our biggest problem.”

Henry huffed, and scowled at Hatter. “Wait a minute. Alice told me a boy slew the Jabberwock with a… a vocal sword.”

“
Vorpal
. He slew it with a vorpal sword.” Hatter patted Henry’s arm. “Good try, though. And it’s true, but this is a different Jabberwock, a hatchling of the old one, raised and fed by the hand of the Queen, or so it’s said, and therefore especially vile.”

“It’s true.” Leonard’s voice sounded weary, and his expression was one of disgust. “She kept the damnable thing on a leash when it was little. Took it everywhere, fed it chicken fingers and toes, and tried to let it sleep in our bed until it became apparent Jabberwocks cannot be housebroken. There’s nothing worse, I tell you, than rolling over in your sleep face-first into a pile of Jabberwock droppings. She had a small house built for the beast then, and made sure it ate the best parts of whoever met the Axe that day. When heads rolled, they rolled right into the Jabberwock’s mouth!”

“And the only thing that can kill it is a vorpal sword?”

“As far as anyone knows, it is. It’s something in the way the blade is fashioned, you see,” Leonard explained. “The process makes it especially sharp and nearly unbreakable. The vorpal blade is the strongest known in Wonderland. Anything else would just snap against the Jabberwock’s armor-like hide.”

Henry sighed and sat next to Hatter. “I don’t suppose you have a vorpal sword in your pocket, huh?”

Hatter chuckled. “No. It’s been on my mind for some time to find one, but so far I haven’t had any luck. I have a vorpal letter opener, and a full set of vorpal steak knives, but vorpal swords are few and far between.” He patted Henry on the leg. “However, being my wonderfully inventive and incredibly resourceful self, I have a plan. We’ll simply go in the out.”

“In the out?” Henry cocked an eyebrow. “What does that mean? Please tell me it doesn’t have anything to do with Drawrof! I really hated that place.”

“No, no, of course not. If it did, I’d be speaking backwards, wouldn’t I? Then I would have said, ‘we’ll go out the in,’ which wouldn’t make a bit of sense.” Hatter thunked Henry on the forehead with his index finger. “Silly, silly boy. No, we shall go in the out, meaning through the back door, which is ordinarily only used for exiting the castle. It’s located near the dungeon, where I had the unfortunate luck to be incarcerated for quite some time.”

A wide smile slowly creased Leonard’s cheeks. “A most brilliant plan, Hatter! She’d never consider anyone trying to break
into
the dungeon, now would she? Not when so very many people spend all their time trying to break out of it!”

“Exactly!” Hatter tried not to sound so very full of himself, but he simply couldn’t help it. When he had moments of genius like this, he just couldn’t keep all of himself inside his skin where he belonged. It was unavoidable that some of him would slip out. “Now, everyone keep your heads down. We’ll follow this wall around to the rear of the castle.” Hatter bent his body in half, trying to keep his upper half lower than the wall and his lower half higher than the ground. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed.

Henry tapped Hatter on the back. “Hatter, doesn’t the moat go all the way around?”

“What? Oh, yes. The moat. Of course it does. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a moat. It would merely be a muddy, crocodile-infested pond.” Hatter put his hand on the top of his hat to keep it from falling forward over his eyes.

Again Henry tapped Hatter, knocking his hat askew. “Well, aren’t there crocodiles in the back half of the moat as well?”

Hatter sighed. “Yes, but there’s only one Jabberwock, and it’s chained up at the front of the castle.”

Once again, Henry’s finger poked Hatter. His hat tipped down over his eyes again. It was really becoming quite annoying. “But Hatter, don’t we still have to figure out a way past the crocodiles?”

Hatter stopped, sat down, and took off his hat. He rummaged in his pocket for a moment before pulling out a large roll of bright yellow tape. Measuring off a length, he put his hat on and used the tape to secure it to his head by looping the length over the top of the hat and under his chin. “Are you made up entirely of questions, Henry? Seriously, I begin to think there’s nothing inside you except questions and more questions, all waiting for the slightest opening of your mouth to escape.” He tested his hat, and made a slight adjustment until he was sure it would stay put. “We’ll deal with the crocodiles when we get there. At least we won’t have the Jabberwock to contend with, which was far more than half the battle if we went in through the front. Therefore, logic tells us we’ve already won more than half the battle, and here you are, worried about a few crocodiles.”

Henry blinked, and still looked confused, but at least his questions had ceased… for the moment. Considering it was Henry, Hatter had no doubt the respite would only be momentary. He grunted and gathered his feet under him, then continued his half-bent shuffle, following the wall around to the back of the castle.

It was quite a long walk, much longer than Hatter remembered it, and he wondered if the distance had grown longer in his absence. Perhaps the castle had had a growth spurt. By the time they rounded the far corner of the castle, Hatter’s back was in a foul mood from crouching for so long. In fact, it was screaming at him. Not with words, mind you, but with great, jagged jolts of pain that were perhaps even more effective than actual speech and left him feeling quite mimsy. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. Or as limber, it seemed.

He sneaked a quick peek over the wall to make sure there were no Red Guards patrolling the rear of the castle, which, of course, there weren’t. He hadn’t expected there to be any. As Leonard remarked earlier, no one ever tried to break
into
the dungeon, only out of it. Standing up, he winced as his spine loudly realigned itself. It sounded like a handful of pebbles dropped onto a china dinner plate.

“Now what?” Henry asked. He was bending backward, his hands on the small of his back, as if trying to keep his lower vertebrae from escaping.

Hatter carefully removed the tape that had held his hat to his head. Balling the used tape up, he dropped it into his pocket before tamping his hat back on. “Now, we cross the moat and enter the castle.”

“And how are we going to do that? I hate to point this out, but there’s no drawbridge on this side.” Henry gestured toward the moat. “I doubt if swimming is an option.” Even from the distance of the wall, the ridged backs of the crocodiles floating in the muddy, red-tinted water were obvious.

“Swim? How ridiculous! Of course we can’t swim,” Hatter said. He chuckled and shook his head. “Really, Henry, what could you possibly be thinking?” He placed a hand on top of the low fieldstone wall and hopped over to the other side. “We’re going to walk over.”

Henry’s eyes flashed open and he sputtered a bit. “Walk! How?”

“Most people use their feet to accomplish the task. Like this. Watch closely.” Hatter pointed to his boots, and placed one foot in front of the other. “See how it’s done?” He snickered at the frumious expression clouding Henry’s face. Henry, Hatter decided, was positively adorable when sputtering. He grinned and crooked a finger at Henry to follow as he set off toward the moat.

Henry caught up to him. “I know how to walk!”

“I can see that. Very talented, you are.”

“You’re starting to really piss me off, Hatter.”

Hatter grinned, and noticed that when Henry’s eyes sparked with fury they turned the most interesting shade of blue-green. “My apologies. I never intended to suggest you lacked the fundamentals of locomotion. I merely answered your question. You asked how we were going to walk across the moat, and I answered.”

“You know very well I meant how we were going to walk on water, since there’s no bridge!”

“Walk on water?” Leonard injected himself into the conversation, his expression one of deep interest. “Can you do that in your world? It’s impossible here, unless you’ve a spell, which I haven’t, or are a deity of some sort, which I’m not.”

Henry turned to Leonard. “No, we can’t walk on water in my world! That’s ridiculous!”

“Then why suggest it?” Hatter asked. He shook his head. “Really, Henry, sometimes you make no sense at all.” He pointed toward the moat. “We’ll use the stepping stones, of course.”

Henry peered in the direction Hatter indicated. “Are you crazy? Those aren’t stepping stones—they’re the crocodiles!”

“Of course they are. What do you make stepping stones out of in your world?” Hatter asked.

Henry threw his hands up in the air. “Out of… stones. What else?”

Leonard and Hatter, and a few of the Red Guards close enough to overhear the conversation, laughed.

“Stones!” Hatter elbowed Leonard. He turned back to Henry. “What good would rocks do you? They’d only sink to the bottom of the water!” He jerked his thumb at the moat. “The crocodiles float.”

“Yeah, they float, and bite, if you’ve forgotten,” Henry pointed out. “They’ll eat you if you step on them.”

“Eat me? The Red King? Don’t be silly, Henry.” Leonard’s eyes streamed tears from laughing, and he wiped them with a corner of his red velvet cape. “Do I look the sort who’d set crocodiles loose in his moat without spelling them to protect him and those in his charge?”

“Uh, no, I guess not.” Henry looked embarrassed and awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. “I keep forgetting everything is different here. You’d think I’d have learned by now.”

Hatter threw his arm around Henry’s shoulders and gave him a squeeze. “That’s okay, Henry. You’ll learn, and if you don’t, you’ve got me here to remind you.” He decided he would’ve faced a hundred hungry crocodiles for the smile Henry gave him in return.

Leonard led them to the moat. The great crocodiles, some upward of twenty feet in length, floated like deadly logs in the murky red water. Their jaws opened, showing mouthfuls of long, sharp, glistening, white teeth. “Now, let me think. What was the tune that turns the spell on?” He whistled a few notes. “No, that’s not it.” He tapped his chin with one finger, then smiled and snapped his fingers. “Oh, yes! I remember now. You’ll have to excuse me,” he said to Henry and Hatter. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to use the back door.” He whistled again, low, then high, and then somehow sideways.