Behind Sanity

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Behind Sanity

Chapter Fifty-Eight

1

Alice came into the throne room, a place she’d never been before, even in her first visit here, and saw that it too had succumb to the same disease as the room beyond it.  This room was alive, and she wondered if the entire Keep was now a living creature, struggling to exist and fighting against inevitable arrest. 

The floor was soft and fleshy beneath her boots, but sections of the marble remained as if they were embedded in the tissue.  Tall columns touched the high ceiling, and they pumped with blood, entangled with veins like ivy.  They fed a large heart above that hung as the centerpiece of the room.  

How had this happened?  It didn’t matter, for at the end of that room, sat the one Alice had come all this way to see.  Sitting on a large throne a long stretch away, was the Queen.  From a distance, she looked almost human, but Alice knew she was not.  She could see her for what she was. 

She was shaped like a woman, but this tyrant was a monster.

Her regal dress was not a dress at all, only part of a plump, red body that split below the waist into nearly one hundred flowing tentacles.  Her upper body was armored in a metal plate, shaped like a heart, painted red.  There was no hair on her head, but a huge, twisted crown held several of the same sort of tentacles that made her dress.  The lower part of her face was hidden by a mask, but her eyes were there, watching the girl with great interest and repugnance.  They were a glowing yellow. 

Alice gave a short and mocking curtsy.  To the rhythm of the steadily pumping heart above, she approached.

“I hope you’ll forgive my terrible manners toward your feline,” the Queen said, resting her head on her hand, “but I couldn’t let him ruin it.”

The voice was pleasant and the words were precisely spoken.  Still, Alice misunderstood.  She kept walking.

“What?”

"It was mine to tell!” the Queen screamed, her thundering voice echoing all over the dripping chamber and shooting back at Alice like thunder.

Alice didn’t flinch.  The Queen had a terrible temper, like a spoiled child, and the girl had heard it all before.  She was the only one who could counter it.

The Queen relaxed a bit, leaning back in her chair that sat alone on a raised platform.  She seemed much calmer now.

“Come closer, child.”

Alice didn’t need an invitation.  She was already moving. 

When she got nearly five feet from the steps, she stopped.  The Queen didn’t appear to be shaken by her closeness.  Alice thought they both must have felt the same way. 

“You have something to share with me?” the girl asked. “Well, I want to know something.”

“Yes, my child?” the Queen bade as if this was still her world and she had the authority. 

“Is it that you are simply mad, or were you just born without a heart?”  Alice glanced around, looked at the huge vessel that plumped at the ceiling. “Perhaps all these years you’ve been compensating?”

The Red Queen seemed shocked by the question.  She was the Queen of Hearts, was she not?  And the foolish child had the audacity to ask such a question?  Even so, she contemplated it silently for a moment.

“May we speak informally, my dear?  Step out of character?”

“If it will get me my answers faster,” the young woman replied.