Alice in Zombieland, Page 4

  Chapter 5 Advice from the Conqueror Wurm

  The Wurm and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence. The Conqueror Wurm’s body was long and segmented, and the color of wet ash, and smelled somewhat like a dead mouse that Dinah had once brought home to lie at her feet last year. The mouse, all rotting flesh and patchy gray fur, had been dead for quite some time. The Wurm smelled as if it had as well. Or perhaps, Alice thought, it’s what it chooses to eat that makes it smell so badly.

  At last the Wurm took the half-chewed human ear out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. ‘Who are you?’ said the Wurm.

  This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Wurm sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’

  ‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’

  ‘I don’t see,’ said the Wurm.

  “I feel strangely cold all the time and I’m so dreadfully hungry for the bits and pieces of other living things. I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing”

  ‘It isn’t,’ said the Wurm, ‘hard to explain in the least. Quite natural here, young lady.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said the Wurm, writhing its long gray body into a loop so to better face Alice.

  ‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, I feel very queer indeed. Not myself.’

  ‘You!’ said the Conqueror Wurm contemptuously. ‘Who are you?’

  Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Wurm’s making such very short remarks, and she drew herself up and said,

  very gravely, ‘I think, you ought to tell me who you are, first.’

  ‘Why?’ said the Wurm.

  Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the ugly Wurm seemed to be in a very unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.

  ‘Come back!’ the Wurm called after her, bits of half chewed ear flesh dangling from its small mouth. ‘I’ve something important to say!’

  This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.

  ‘Keep your temper,’ said the Wurm.

  ‘Is that all?’ said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.

  ‘No,’ said the Wurm.

  Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it munched away on its grotesque dead meal without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the rotting ear out of its mouth again, and said, ‘So you think you’re changed, do you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I am, sir,’ said Alice; ‘I can’t remember things as I used—and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together! And I’m so cold! And starving for warm flesh! I have changed! I know it!’ And it was true. Looking at her hands and arms now, she saw they both had a slight blue tinge to them. And her long beautiful hair, which so many people made comments upon, was beginning to come out in stringy handfuls. She would hate to see her reflection now. There was no telling what terrible apparition would look back at her.

  ‘Can’t remember what things?’ said the Wurm.

  ‘Well, I’ve tried to say “How doth the little busy bee,” but it all came different!’ Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

  ‘Repeat, “You are old, Father William,”’ said the Wurm.

  Alice folded her hands, and began:

  ‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said,

  ‘And your hair has become very white;

  And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

  Do you think, at your age, it is right?’

  ‘In my youth,’ Father William replied to his son,

  ‘I feared it might injure the brain;

  But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,

  Why, I do it again and again.’

  ‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘as I mentioned before,

  And have grown most uncommonly fat;

  Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—

  Pray, what is the reason of that?’

  ‘In my youth,’ said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,

  ‘I kept all my limbs very supple

  By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—

  Allow me to sell you a couple?’

  ‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘and your jaws are too weak

  For anything tougher than suet;

  Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—

  Pray how did you manage to do it?’

  ‘In my youth,’ said his father, ‘I took to the law,

  And argued each case with my wife;

  And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,

  Has lasted the rest of my life.’

  ‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘one would hardly suppose

  That your eye was as steady as ever;

  Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—

  What made you so awfully clever?’

  ‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’

  Said his father; ‘don’t give yourself airs!

  Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?

  Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!’

  ‘That is not said right,’ said the Wurm.

  ‘Not quite right, I’m afraid,’ said Alice, timidly; ‘some of the words have got altered.’

  ‘It is wrong from beginning to end,’ said the Wurm decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.

  The Wurm was the first to speak, as it had almost finished its gory meal of graveyard ear. ‘What size do you want to be?’ it asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m not particular as to size,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Wurm.

  Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.

  ‘Are you content now?’ said the Wurm. It began to clean its mandibles by rubbing them against its legs and then to its bulbous and shiny gray stomach.

  ‘Well, I should like to be a little larger, sir, if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Alice: ‘three inches is such a wretched height to be.’

  ‘It is a very good height indeed!’ said the Wurm angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke (it was exactly three inches high). Its many legs waved in silent fury as it stared down on her with its dead eyes.

  For a moment she feared it meant to consume her next, and she backed away in fright. ‘But I’m not used to it!’ pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone. And she thought of herself, ‘I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended!’

  ‘You’ll get used to it in time,’ said the Wurm; and it continued to clean its mandibles. ‘Have you met the Red Queen yet?’

  ‘No, but I’ve heard such dreadful things about her that I’m sure I’d rather not meet her,’ said Alice, crossing her arms across her chest to show she meant business.

  The Wurm squirmed a little closer and looked down at her, still working diligently at cleaning its gory mandibles. ‘You certainly don’t want her to see you in that state.’

  ‘What state?’ asked Alice.

  ‘The state which you are in,’ it replied.

  ‘I rathe
r thought I was in a land, not a state,’ she said, quite pleased with her quick and logical wit.

  ‘She’s sure to show you, young lady,’ said the Wurm, not at all impressed with her play on words.

  This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again. In a minute or two the Wurm stopped cleaning itself and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the dead leaves and broken, rotting twigs, merely remarking as it went, ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.’

  ‘One side of what? The other side of what?’ thought Alice to herself.

  ‘Of the mushroom,’ said the Wurm, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment its squirming gray body was out of sight.

  Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question. However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.

  ‘And now which is which?’ she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!

  She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit. Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the left hand bit.

  ‘Come, my head’s free at last!’ said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of pale blue neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a tangle of spiny sharp dead branches and autumnal orange and brown leaves that lay far below her.

  ‘What can all that brown and orange stuff be?’ said Alice. ‘And where have my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can’t see you?’ She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant dead leaves.

  As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the dying branches, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large black raven had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its long black wings.

  ‘Serpent!’ screamed the Raven.

  ‘I’m not a serpent!’ said Alice indignantly. ‘Let me alone!’

  ‘Serpent, I say again!’ cawed the Raven, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, ‘I’ve tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about,’ said Alice.

  ‘I’ve tried the roots of trees, and I’ve tried banks, and I’ve tried hedges, and I’ve tried the gravestones and the tombs, too!’ the Raven went on, without attending to her; ‘but those serpents! There’s no pleasing them!’

  Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Raven had finished.

  ‘As if it wasn’t trouble enough feeding off the corpses of the dead,’ said the Raven, flapping its shiny black wings; ‘but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day! Why, I haven’t had a wink of sleep these three weeks!’

  ‘I’m very sorry you’ve been annoyed,’ said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning. But now as she got closer to the fat bird, she began to think of her hunger again, and her eyes lit up with a most dastardly eagerness. The Raven saw it and backed away on the branch upon which it was sitting. Alice smiled thinly, trying to pretend that she had not been just now thinking what the Raven might taste like if she grabbed it and plucked off its wings.

  ‘And just as I’d taken the highest tree in the wood,’ continued the Raven, raising its voice to a shriek, ‘and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky! Ugh, Serpent!’

  ‘But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!’ said Alice. ‘I’m a—I’m a—’

  ‘Well! What are you?’ said the Raven, beating those delicious looking wings once more in her face. ‘I can see you’re trying to invent something!’

  ‘I—I’m a little girl,’ said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.

  ‘A likely story indeed!’ said the Raven in a tone of the deepest contempt. ‘I’ve seen a good many little girls in my time-both alive and dead, young lady, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You’re a serpent; and there’s no use denying it. I suppose you’ll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!’

  ‘I have tasted eggs, certainly,’ said Alice, who was a very truthful child; ‘but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.’ And maybe even nice fat ravens, she thought while licking her dry cold lips.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Raven; ‘but if they do, why then they’re a kind of serpent, that’s all I can say. Oh, why can’t the Red Queen take better care of your kind? Why must I be frightened even this far above the ground? ’

  This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Raven the opportunity of adding, ‘You’re looking for eggs, I know that well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you’re a little girl or a serpent?’

  ‘It matters a good deal to me,’ said Alice hastily; ‘but I’m not looking for eggs, as it happens; and if I was, I shouldn’t want yours: I don’t like them raw.’

  ‘Well, be off, then!’ said the Raven in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest, and watching her with its beady mistrustful black eyes. Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the skeleton branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.

  It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. ‘Come, there’s half my plan done now! How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another! Now if only I could find some creature willing to give me a bit of itself to eat, I would be just right! However, I’ve got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful graveyard—how is that to be done, I wonder?’ As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.

  ‘Whoever lives there,’ thought Alice, ‘it’ll never do to come upon them this size: why, I should frighten them out of their wits!’ So she began nibbling at the right hand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high.

  Chapter 6 The Tiny Corpse and Pepper

  For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, shivering violently, fighting against the enormous and mindless hunger that kept growing inside her, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood—(she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a corpse)—and rapped loudly at the door with his torn and bony knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes; and both footmen, Alice noticed, looked pale and not quite alive, and not quite dead either. They both also smelled terrible; she could smell them
even from her distant bush. Each of them also wore strange jeweled collars around their necks. And both had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

  The arriving Footman gave a snarling grunt and began by producing from under his arm a great letter, nearly as large as himself, stained by dark blood stains and other unthinkable fluids, and this he handed over to the other, saying, in a solemn tone, ‘For the Duchess. An Invitation from the Queen to play croquet.’ The door Footman repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the words a little, ‘From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.’

  Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled together. And then there was a great tumult of flailing arms and gnashing teeth, and the two footmen were attacking one another, tearing at their powdered wigs and blood stained jackets.

  Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into the wood for fear of their hearing her; and when she next peeped out the delivery Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky, licking its bony bloody fingers. Alice didn’t like to think what had happened to the other footman, but she saw no corpse lying about, only one of those odd jeweled collars lying in the dust.

  Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.

  ‘There’s no sort of use in knocking,’ said the Footman, still nibbling at his gore-stained fingers, ‘and that for two reasons. First, because I’m on the same side of the door as you are; secondly, because they’re making such a noise inside, no one could possibly hear you.’ And certainly there was a most extraordinary noise going on within—a constant howling and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish or kettle had been broken to pieces.