Night: Kendra and the Gunslinger Girl
And (Scenes 1-5)
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
—Alfred Tennyson,
Maud,
“Come to the Garden, Maud”
1
The lights overhead flickered on and off at the end of the hallway just before the turn around the next corner, flooding the premises with a darkness more than night and turning it into a void that drummed to a beating heart. And in that beating void, there appeared the hazy figure of Rancaster in wisps of fog emanating from his feet, returning him to the threshold of Katherine’s extra private boudoir after he had informed Alice of intruders in this house.
He pushed open the door and winced, still feeling the residual sting of Auna Wenger’s gunshot in the center of his chest. The bloodstains had dried into a dark (almost black) residue over his clothes that made him more proud of Auna going off script and throwing caution to the wind.
“You’ve played your part well, bambina,” he said and stomped his foot onto the floor and dispelled the haze from the doorway before entering.
Like before, he ignored the phalluses and the television and DVDs and DVD player and the set of books with titles such as Story of O and Lolita and Ada, among others, but paused at the translation of Marquis de Sade’s Juliette that he had placed in between the other volumes on the shelf.
He took it out and noticed blood (his own blood) caked over a small ragged hole punched through the front cover and deforming the back cover. So he flipped to the front cover, where he found the seal of his sleeper curse missing and Katherine’s name obscured in blood. Then he flipped the back cover and noticed more dried blood caked against it, till he saw a full metal jacket slug slip out and fall to the floor.
He crouched and picked up the slug in his hand, feeling Auna Wenger’s waning presence still imparted on it. Even on the verge of death on the stairs, Auna had managed the impossible, shooting through the shadowy veil of Rancaster’s astral presence and nailing a perfect shot on the book he had used to put Katherine Hearn to sleep.
He whistled at this feat, a feat rivaling Kendra’s shot through his reflection spell over the lake and into the hallway through one of Katherine’s mirrors, and said, “Were you planning on defying me, bambina? You’re turning out far more interesting than I thought.”
He then spied the residual afterglow of Celia’s seal inscribed with red roses by the bed that Kendra had moved. So he got up and crouched and placed two fingers on the seal and closed his eyes, looking through his mind’s eye at the refracted images of Colbie’s spell. Through that spell, he saw Colbie struggling to split off a simulated replica of Katherine’s ballroom from the real thing, engulfing several masqueraders at random, the jerky movements of her spell grinding the edges of her pocket dimension ragged and sharp as if she was working a spell far beyond her experience.
Entering now would be painful, even for Rancaster, so he bided his time and waited for her spell to stabilize just enough, so he could jump in through the seals.
2
When the applause died down after Alice’s speech, all the chandelier lights blinked in and out overhead, casting the whole ballroom in flickering light and panicking the masqueraders into a frenzy of complaints and questions and jibber-jabber. And in the split-second flashes of darkness and light, Alice saw the crowd gridlocked like a sea of bodies bottlenecked against rows of concrete roadblocks from the blue section all the way to the white section and into the—
That’s when she saw a young woman standing behind a Gatling gun, manifesting a gun in her hand and aiming towards the ceiling.
And that’s when she realized and yelled, “Everyone, stay—”
The report of three shots echoed down the ballroom, and the crowd screamed and lurched towards Alice in a crush of panic and haste, a tsunami of bodies heading her way. Alice screamed for them to stop and back up, but the collective mob was heedless of her words and urged forward towards the double doors and pressed her up against the roadblock set against the double doors, crushing her. The tsunami of panicked masqueraders suffocated her with every breath she took as she screamed for them to stop and back up, but to no avail.
Alice had fallen into a trap, and when she cast her eyes afar towards the other side of the ballroom, she spied three other girls behind a set of roadblocks throwing flash bangs after the retreating crowd.
Three explosions resounded through the ballroom, filling the entire space with more screams and sending another wave of bodies crushing up against her. Amidst the unrelenting crush, she began spitting up blood as she gritted her teeth in fury, for she recognized one of the bomb throwers.
She was the same incognito Alice had fought in this ballroom, and something within her burned and raged like the torment of Hell, like the acid of spite, like a score left unsettled between two bitter opponents.
Turning from that saboteur, her eyes blazed red like a basilisk’s against the suffocating crush of a panicked mob, as she fought to hold in her breath, lest her lungs collapse in her rib cage. She fought to stay awake, to ward off the slow-wave sleep of unconsciousness from desynchronizing her spirit from her astral body before the threads of her conscious mind could twine into a silver chord. Yet in her mind, she thought of Auna and the Red and White Queens and Rancaster in repeating succession, till a pattern emerged on the edge of her awareness, something just beyond her astral recall.
It was a mental block in her memory, one that lurked behind the atrocities done to her at the hands of Auna’s beast of a father, one that capered on the tip of her tongue and on the edges of her mind, one that . . . What, exactly? She couldn’t tell what it was, but only knew there was an absence somewhere. But where?
Before she could figure it out, the desynchronization process began, and everything stopped for her as if frozen in time, like the untethered mind left in a limbo of unanswered questions. If Auna was but a girl-character, as Alice believed her to be, and if Alice herself was the true persona, as she believed herself to be, then what had caused her to create Auna in the first place? On top of that, as she remembered meeting Celia Hearn on the landing, she wondered: why did she hold such animosity towards the Hearn family? But most important of all, as she remembered leaving Auna sobbing on the other side of the Looking-Glass mirror, she also wondered: how did Alice Liddell die in the first place?
3
On the other side of the blockaded double doors, the Red and White Queens were banging against the double doors, both listening to the chaos of panicked voices building inside. Yet as the banging of their fists echoed against the doors like drums, shimmering the barrier that Colbie had set up, the Red Queen couldn’t take it anymore.
She backed off and cursed and said, “Stop wasting your breath. There’s no way we can get in.”
Her white counterpart turned and glared at her, saying, “You might’ve abandoned Alice, but I won’t!”
“I didn’t say that!” the Red Queen said. “But we have to think this through, or else we won’t be much help to her.”
The White Queen huffed and spat, “I’d rather wait for Rancaster than wait for you!”
“If you haven’t noticed,” she said, “Rancaster’s not here!” And she stretched out her hand and manifested her knife there, grasping it and edging the tip of her blade in the sliver of gap between both doors and pushed it home, forcing a shimmer of light running up towards the top of the door jamb above her head. “Come on. Don’t just stand there. Help me!”
So the White Queen did the same and dug her knife into the gap and strengthened the sliver of light into a noticeable crack, gritting her teeth and locking her knees and raising herself on the balls of her feet. She turned to her uppity double and said, “I hope you know what you’re doing!”
“Shut up and keep pushing,” she said, and both girls kept forcing their way past the threshold, adding their combined strength to the crowd crush of panicked masqueraders pressing Alice against them on the other side, when anomalous memories flashed through their minds. These memories, hazy fragments in themselves, showed a man neither girl recognized spilling himself into Alice as she screamed in agony, . . . then switched to Aaron Rancaster driving a stake through her chest and completing his blood spell, . . . then switched to him reflecting Alice’s defiled corpse against a mirror, . . . and then switched to him reaching into the mirror and pulling out a copy of Alice from the reflection.
Both girls sucked in breath and backed away from the door, just as their minds began desynchronizing and merging insensibly with Alice’s on the other side, as Auna’s voice echoed in the back of their minds and called out to them with the names she had given them when she was but a child and they were but figments of her imagination.
“Auna!” both queens said and grabbed each other’s hands and looked at each other, both girls seeing Auna and Alice reflected in their own faces.
So the Red Queen said, “Remember who you are! Remember your name, and you won’t get lost! What’s your name?”
“Shiro . . . Shiromi,” the White Queen said. “What’s yours?”
“Akami,” the Red Queen said. “Shiromi, look at me. As long as we remember who we are, we won’t get lost. What’s your name?”
“Shi . . . Shi . . .” The White Queen struggled. “I . . . I can’t remember! What’s my name? Tell me what my name is!”
“It’s Shi . . . Shi . . . Ugh, damn it,” the Red Queen said, tears trailing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I can’t . . . I don’t even know what my name is. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I—”
And before the Red Queen could finish her sentence, before the White Queen had another chance to speak, they both collapsed to the floor as two shells of their astral selves, while their minds fell into the slow-wave sleep of oblivion. Thus, the Red and White Queens became enslaved to Alice’s will, rousing them to their feet like zombies from the dead. So they picked themselves up and manifested knives in their hands and passed through the double doors into the fray.
4
With the wave of masqueraders converging towards the other end of the ballroom, Colbie imagined the space splitting apart in her mind. The simulated ballroom and Katherine’s ballroom refracted into two separate spaces again, taking the masqueraders with her into the simulation, but got snagged on the anchor that was Alice raging against the crush of bodies pressing against her to get to the doors. Yet even in the crush of a panicked mob, in the midst of their collective screams and bodily weight, Alice somehow delayed Colbie’s spell, till Colbie looked to the opposite end of the ballroom and froze.
The blurs of the Red and White Queens slipped through the bodies of the panicked mob like phantoms through a forest and sprinted up towards her with knives in their hands.
Both converged on either side of Colbie before she could blink, yet they passed her by as if she wasn’t there. She heard the screams of her friends, the reports of gunfire and the clang of blades echoing behind her.
She turned around, manifesting her dagger in her hand, but her wrist got caught in a strong grip, and before she knew it, she felt a roundhouse kick to her solar plexus, knocking the breath out of her and bowling her over into a shoulder toss. She few through the space time of falling dreams, falling and falling and falling—
5
Till she woke up with a jolt to her spine and shook the simulated ballroom of Connie’s place. Colbie propped herself up on her elbows and found herself in Connie’s place in the company of the masqueraders from the ballroom. A number of them, about an eighth of their number, were lying incapacitated on the floor, while a few of them checked on them. The rest still wielded bladed weapons in their hands, glaring and cursing at Colbie (“Seize her!”), and charged en masse.
Colbie struggled to her feet, but got restrained under a mass of arms and grasping hands and a forest of blades poised over her chest and stomach.
“Stand down,” Alice said.
At first, the masqueraders didn’t move, looking at one another as though in confusion.
“I said, stand down, you idiots!” Alice yelled, and the masqueraders backed off from Colbie, allowing her to sit up and view the drama before her, but none of them sheathed their blades—only stood at attention before Alice. “I’m starting to wonder if you’re all worthy of the house of Rancaster,” she said, stalking up to one masquerader in particular. “If he were here right now, he'd have executed you at once!”
“But we were caught off guard, my Lady,” he said, and when she looked closer at the man, she recognized the fidgety masked doorman she had met at the entrance of the ballroom earlier tonight. “None of us expected an infiltration like this.”
And the crowd of his companions agreed with another yea of confirmation, but this was no democracy.
Alice laid down the law and said, “But you’re the doorman, Mr. Foster,” and the man froze at the mention of his alias. “As such, you hold the sole responsibility of letting uninvited guests into these premises!”
“My Lady, I’m sorry for my incompetence,” he said, kneeling down to her in submission, “but I can assure you—”
“Not another word, traitor,” Alice said, then looked around at his compatriots. “As for the rest of you, you’ve disgraced yourselves! You’ve pledged your loyalty to me and Lord Rancaster, but you ran at the first hint of danger! What do you have to say for yourselves?”
Now the masqueraders stood in the hush of judgment from their Queen Alice, none of them daring a word.
“Nothing? No word to defend your actions?” Alice said. “Then I’ll have Rancaster execute you all by daybreak.”
Another masquerader protested and said, “Then tell us how we may redeem ourselves, and we will, my Lady! By God, we will!”
“Then stand down, all of you, you miserable wretches,” Alice said, and the mass of parting bodies backed away from her and Colbie, forming a circle around them, and a bloodied and battered Alice approached Colbie and reached out her hand and pulled her up to her feet. “This is checkmate, Prince Prospero. Now tell me your name.”
Now both girls were face to face, and Colbie for the first time looked into the face of her formidable foe and said, “You haven’t tagged me yet,” then looked around at the perimeter of masqueraders encircling them. “And this isn’t a fair fight.”
So Alice looked into Colbie’s eyes and said, “You have such beautiful eyes,” and manifested her knife over Colbie’s face and raised the tip of her blade to her cheek. “But all’s fair in love and war,” and she drew blood.
Colbie winced and put her hand to her face, feeling the sting of it burning on her cheek.
But Alice did something totally unexpected, grabbing Colbie’s hand and licking her bloodstained palm, and a collective gasp resounded from the throats of the masqueraders.
“I have tagged you,” Alice said. “Now tell me who you are.”
Colbie just stood there, dumbfounded, but knew she had no choice but to answer and said, “I am Colbie Amame of the Amame baronetcy.”
To her words, another masquerader said, “A traitorous house! My Lady, you can’t possibly trust an Amame!”
And similar arguments resounded amongst the crowd, though Mr. Foster remained silent.
But Alice said to Colbie, “Ignore them, Colbie Amame. I call for a truce between you and me, at least until dawn. What do you say?”
“What are you planning?” Colbie said.
The masqueraders murmured amongst themselves, and the same man said, “Lady Alice, this is madness! I—”
“Do not sully my name with your lips, coward,” Alice yelled, then turned back to Colbie. “Tell you what: Let’s play another game, shall we? Hide and seek, what do you say?”
“You can’t be serious,” Colbie said.
“Oh, but I am.”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “How do I know you’re not gonna pull something on me?”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Alice said, and grasped Colbie’s hands in both of her own. “We may be enemies, but we can at least be civil for a time, can’t we?”
Colbie had her misgivings, though, and instead of saying so, she merely nodded her head.
“Good!” Alice said. “You’ll be the hider.”
“But if I’m the hider,” Colbie said, fixing Alice with a stare, “I get to choose where I’ll hide, right?”
“Bingo, right you are! It’ll make things much more interesting.” And she pointed towards the crowd, saying, “And these yellow-bellied rascals are the seekers. I’ll give you a head start, so you can find the proper hiding spot, and they must find you. As for you,” she added, turning towards the mystified crowd, “you all must find her before dawn to redeem yourselves, or I’ll have Rancaster kill you, one by one.”
“But, my Lady,” another masquerader said, “we’re already dead.”
“Don’t underestimate Lord Rancaster,” Alice said. “He’s the judge of the living and the dead. None of you know what the death of your soul feels like, but trust me. I know. I’ve been there, and I can assure you that it’s much worse than any of you can imagine, and unless you want to experience it for yourselves, you’ll all do well to heed my warning. But,” she added, fixing Colbie with a stare of her own, “you must promise me you won’t cheat and awake before dawn. It wouldn’t be fair for these miserable blokes, even if they deserve what’s coming to them.”
So Colbie thought of her words, then thought of Kendra and Nico and Mara going through God-knows-what with those two Alice doppelgängers, and finally thought of her mother’s encounter with Auna Wenger. She got a good look at Alice Liddell, looking into her eyes and wondering if Auna Wenger was there somewhere, and said, “I’ll play fair, but I won’t make it easy.”
Alice smiled. “All the better.”
“But if they find me,” Colbie added, “you won’t let them kill me, right?”
Alice kept smiling. “Why on earth would I do that?”
So Colbie kissed her eyes and lips, sending color to Alice’s cheeks, quelling the outrage of the masqueraders into dumbstruck silence, and whispered into her ear, “I’ll let you have more if you find me before they do.”
Then the outrage began anew, murmurs flying through the air, and one by one, the masqueraders edged towards Colbie and Alice.
“I said, stand down, you imbeciles!” Alice yelled.
They backed off, yet the murmurs continued.
