Malice in Wonderland #1: Alice the Assassin (4 page)

As usual, they’re circling a toy rattle on the ground, grimacing and taunting each other. The squabble has gone on for quite a number of years, ever since the Queen of Hearts rewarded them a brand new rattle for helping her defeat the Red Queen.

Tweedledum glares at his brother and proclaims, “Mine!”

“Nohow!” says Tweedledee.

They continue circling and seem not to notice Alice as she takes the pistol out from her dress.

She takes a stance in the way she remembers from detective stories as a younger child.

She braces one hand with the other and does her best to aim with the little shark fin thingy on the edge of the bullet tube part.

But she encounters several problems. For one, she is not tall enough to get a clear head shot of either one of them, and her lack of height makes a
double
head shot impossible, due to the working of angles. She has studied angles a great deal, and knows that out of all of them, none of them would work, at least not without a ricochet.

Also, they are moving so rapidly, round and round in a circle, that it’s difficult to get any kind of clear shot, inexperienced as she is.

Perhaps she could aim for one of their hearts. As far as she knows, even though they are both vicious and cruel to her, they both have hearts. But pulling that kind of shot off seems difficult indeed. And maybe they don’t even have hearts after all.

She begins to realize her situation is dire and dreadful. Even if she manages to kill one of them, she would afterward be unarmed and suffer the wrath of the other, and that would not be a fair fight—she’s just a little girl.

She thinks she’ll put the gun away. Perhaps she can slip away without being noticed. They haven’t noticed her this whole time standing here, pointing a gun at them, after all.

She begins to lower the gun. She notices her hands are trembling from fear. It appears being heartless doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid.

But Tweedledum notices her, stops circling, points. “Well look at that! It’s Alice!”

Now Tweedledee stops and turns to look at her. “Well, ditto! It is! And she has a toy pistol!”

Thank goodness he thinks it’s a toy.
“Yes…” She musters up a grin on her face. “A toy! I brought you a new toy!”

Tweedledum says, “Well give it over. I know how to use it. Better than
him.”

Alice doubts that statement. They both seem generally bumbling and incompetent to her.

Tweedledee protests, “Nohow! I’m a cowboy I am!” He grabs his belt and does the side to side cowboy hop. “Yee haw!”

Tweedledum grunts. “Yeehaw! He’s no cowboy, nohow, no way. Why I’m a sharpshooter. Cool and professional. A sharpshooter you see, remains calm and collected and never says yeehaw…unless it’s to mock, which I just did right then. So give the gun to me and ignore this yahoo.”

“Nohow!” Tweedledee protests.

Alice does her best to steady her nerves.

She doesn’t know how she is going to get out of this most troubling predicament. She opts to distract them for a few moments. “Patience! First thing’s first, I’m searching for something that got stolen from me. By Humpty Dumpty, I suspect.”

Now they are nodding at her, both saying “Ditto. We saw the idiot doing it.”

“Well why didn’t you stop him?”

Tweedledum shrugs. “Why would we? He was only stealing from
you.”

Alice fights back the urge to put a bullet right into the middle of his pudgy, scrunchy face.

Tweedledee says, “Ditto on that. You’re so unimportant, it doesn’t matter. What did he steal anyway? We didn’t see.”

Tweedledum says, “Ditto to not seeing.”

Her voice quivers with rage. “He stole my heart!”

They both stand looking a bit perplexed, then dumbfounded, then at exactly the same time, they burst out laughing. “Is that all? So you’re heartless now, is that it?”

With a look of indignation, she nods.

Tweedledum says, “So are you no longer the goody two shoes?”

“Yeah, no longer a doormat? Are you going to get revenge on us, is that it?”

She shrugs.

“Ditto! Revenge of the little girl!” More laughter.

Their faces suddenly turn mean. “Just know, that if you try anything, it’s…” At the same time, they both make the gesture of slicing the throat with the accompanying sound.

“If you’re lucky we’ll kill you. If not, we’ll torture you, or tell the Queen and
she’ll
torture you and she’s much more imaginative than us.”

“Ditto. She’s like an artist of torture.”

They glare at her and cross their arms, daring her to speak.

“You already torture me.”

She’s referring to the twins’ playtime she’s forced to engage in. They have set times each day when she must visit them. They like to make her kneel and then either slap her or tickle her until she cries. Before she came to Wonderland, she never knew that tickling could be a source of such misery. And while they do these things to her, she has to remain as still as possible, until the tears come. Then the twins like to lick her tears, each one licking from one of her eyes. The twins think they’re delicious and also believe the rumor that her tears are magical, as does the Queen, who likes to spritz her face with them as a beauty treatment.

Tweedledum says, “We merely have a little fun. We haven’t
really
tried to hurt you.”

“Ditto. So don’t get any ideas in your head.”

Alice swallows nervously. She’s starting to realize that maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to tell them her heart had been stolen. But she is so unused to being deceptive. If she had just acted like she was the usual Alice, maybe this conversation wouldn’t be happening.

She decides to play it meek. “Okay, I’m not going to try anything. I’ll be good.” She doesn’t want to draw the wrath of the Queen or the twins.

“Very good. A well behaved girl is something to treasure. So let’s test how obedient you are.”

Alice sounds resigned. “Shall it be tickling or slapping this time?”

“Neither nohow. This time we’ll do a little hair-tugging and shaking.”

“Yes, we’ll put your hair in pigtails and tug them until you cry!”

“Okay,” Alice says, “just please show a little mercy, and I’ll do whatever you want.”

Tweedledee says, “You better, or suffer a spanking.”

“Whap whap!” says Tweedledum.

She lowers her head meekly. “But before that, if I may ask a quick question. When Humpty Dumpty left the party, I didn’t see the heart on him. Did he take it with him? I’d very much like to get it back, you see.”

They both shrug. “We don’t know, maybe he put it inside himself!”

The other brother laughs at the idea. “Why, he could make a heartegg omelet! Get it? It’s like ‘heartache’!”

“There’s not much to get,” says the other brother.

Alice says, “What is inside of Humpty Dumpty in actuality? He always claims he is most definitely
not
an egg.” She has never before given the idea serious thought, because in the past, whenever she would think of Humpty’s insides, it would be accompanied by fantasies of him falling off his wall and dying so he would no longer be able to torment her. But the thoughts troubled her so, that she tried to put them out of her mind. Until now.

Tweedledee says, “Well whether he is or is not an egg is a subject of debate, but inside, if you were ever to actually look, you would not find any egg material.”

Alice says, “What a curious answer. What do you mean? Do you know for certain what’s inside him?”

Tweedledee says, “We do now. See I used to assume that there were eggs inside him as well, but you can’t always judge someone’s insides by what you see on the exterior.”

Tweedledum says, “Yes, yes, sometimes when you look too hard inside others, you only end up seeing yourself.”

Alice was having a hard time understanding these puzzling statements. “Are we still talking about Humpty Dumpty? So he doesn’t have egg inside?”

“No, of course not. Didn’t I already say that?” Tweedledee says. “I know because I found out first hand.”

Alice’s eyes go wide in wonder. “How come you never told me?”

“You never asked. Have you never heard our poem? It is a wonderful poem. You should have asked earlier.”

She shakes her head. “Yes, well before, I found it too unpleasant to think about!”

“Okay, in any case, here’s the poem.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

But it turns out that fall, it was more of a shove,

To make a cheese omelet, a dish we both love.

Beware though, if from him, a meal you will make,

You must check the yolk. There is so much at stake!

For if you just rush, and don’t stop for a minute,

You’ll end up with too much of your
own
self within it.

See, Tweedle
him
and Tweedle
me,

We learned this lesson personally,

And had to sort and glue what the
one
had broken,

While the
other one
had not yet woken.

And just as the poem comes to a close, she feels the other brother grab her arm from behind. She hadn’t been paying attention and he had snuck up behind her.

He puts pulls her arm while making a grab for the pistol. But Alice squirms away. “Keep away!” she shouts. She runs a few steps, stops.

“I want that pistol!” Tweedledum shouts as he comes toward her.

Tweedledee shouts, “Ditto!”

Alice shouts, “Well, then fetch!” She tosses the pistol to the ground, in what she judges to be an equal distance between either twin.

The twins look at each other, then at the same time, run toward the gun.

They manage to each knock the other over, in front of the pistol. Then they begin taunting and grimacing again, circling the pistol.

“Mine!” shouts Tweedledee.

“Quite to the contrary! It is
mine.”
Tweedledum shouts back.

As the two squabble over the pistol, circling it now while snarling at each other, with their hands crinkled out like they’re about to start a wrestling match, Alice grabs the rattle and slips it into her dress pocket.

Wretched thing! If they can’t decide between themselves who shall play with it then it shall be neither! For shame, it is but a child’s toy anyhow!

They don’t seem to notice as she slips away.

CHAPTER FIVE

Humpty Dumpty

Alice holds the rattle to her ear, and gives it a shake with a demoniacal grin.

Perhaps it might have amused me a while when I first got here at the tender age of seven, but it’is nothing to me now that I’m thirteen. It’s hardly a trifle worthy of fighting over, but the Tweedles have always been rather simple. Perhaps one will end up shooting the other with the pistol. Good riddance. I would have found it most difficult to kill them both at once, and if I killed only one, the other would surely seek revenge.

Her next stop is Humpty Dumpty’s wall. It isn’t far from where the Tweedles dwell.

As she approaches, she can hear him singing to himself, over and over to himself.

“I’m Humpty Dumpty, here on my wall!

I’m Humpty Dumpty, and I cannot fall!”

Soon, she is standing in front of him.

There he is sitting on his very narrow, really quite low wall. (It’s only three bricks thick, three feet wide, and only a few inches taller than Alice herself.) He used to have a higher and wider one, but the Queen took it away and gave him this one after he offended her in some way a few years ago.

Alice waves hyperactively at him, with a goofy grin on her face. “Hello egghead!”

She’d only ever called him that once, as a sort of joke when she was eight. He’d laughed along with her, asked her to come closer, then surprised her with a kick to her face that bloodied her nose and knocked her backward onto her rear.

Do you remember, Humpty-so-grumpy?

“What is this?” he asks, then chuckles a little. Now he laughs, now he outright
guffaws
with thundering belly laughs, teetering back and forth precariously on his very narrow wall. And for a moment Alice is filled with hope that he will fall, but of course he never does. “That’s funny!” he shouts. “But you know what’s even funnier? Come closer, child, and I shall tell you!”

Alice puts on a darling girl smile, sweet as can be, with dimples and all. She twirls and curtsies, raising the bottom edge of her black dress. “No thank you. No offense, right? I’m just joking with you.”

But Humpty Dumpty, she knows, is a very non-joking sort. He’s quite vicious and cruel. The great curve of his smile turns immediately to an upside-down frown.