Rose with Thorns

Down the Rabbit Hole

If silence could kill, Catherine was certain it already had.

She laid there several moments more, her cheek pressed against the bloody block of stone from which many heads had rolled, waiting for the moment everything would cease to exist.

But the moment never came. There was no swing of the blade, no crash of iron colliding with stone, no sound of blade separating skin and bone. No sign of death.

Braving a glance, Catherine parted her thick lashes. She took in a breath, something she thought she would surely never taste again, and inhaled the pungent scent of old blood. Not fresh. Not hers.

She remained that way a moment longer, frightened that the headsman simply played a cruel joke, waiting until she had thought it done before striking suddenly. But that moment didn't come either.

Cautiously, she twisted on her side and looked skyward. There, poised gracefully only inches above her rested the axe's sharpened blade aimed right at its mark. Catherine instinctively jumped back and screamed, frightened that she would face the same garish execution as the Countess of Salisbury. But the blade didn't move.

No one moved. Not a soul. Even the wind that often whistled through Tower Green made no sound.

Catherine glanced frantically about her, searching the gathered crowd for a single soul that looked as confused as she, but she was alone in her frozen world. She alone seemed alive.

Or perhaps this was her own personal purgatory, a nightmare from which she would never wake. The thought of it brought her to the brink of insanity, and she feared it would drive her mad.

"I'm late!"

A frantic cry peeled through the silence. It startled her at first, and she searched for the keeper of the voice.

"Who's there?" She asked warily, standing and turning about, searching for the intruder of her personal hell.

"I'm late! I'm late! I'm late!" It cried thrice more.

Strange.

"Late for what?" Catherine called back.

"The king's coronation of course!" The voice answered. It was a subtle thing, one that would have gone unnoticed had everyone else not been frozen. Amongst the ashen legs and shoddy boots of her witnesses, there scurried a small white rabbit in a petticoat.

"First a grinning cat, now a dapper rabbit," she said, puzzled. "Strange indeed."

Her curious eyes followed the white rabbit down the motionless path that led outside of Tower Green.

"Well, aren't you going to follow him?" Another, more devious voice called. It appeared in the air like a ghost, invisible yet holding a toothy grin.

"You're the cat!" Catherine shouted, pointing to the purple-colored feline that stretched its striped body across a motionless bystander's top hat.

"A Cheshire cat," the feline corrected. "You'd better hurry if you don't want to be late."

"Late for what?"

"How should I know?" The Cheshire Cat lulled. "I'm not the one who's late."

Then the cat vanished, fading out just as he'd come, his smile bobbing in the air until it, too, was gone.

Catherine looked back down the path the white rabbit had gone. Why would there be a coronation? She knew the king, and he had certainly been coronated long ago. Then her gaze wandered towards the block. She put a hand to her cheek and felt the sticky wetness of blood that the axe's previous victim had left behind.