White Rabbit Chapter 5

5.

“Where am I?” Delores asked. She was in a strange earthen room in a small bed with a quilt cover. There was a dresser painted eggshell white with lilies stenciled on the face of it and framed pictures of furry animals and a pathetic mirror that was cracked on top. The room was lit with an oil lamp and smelled like kerosene potatoes.

“You have just come out of a seizure.” A small voice said politely. There was a fire in the inglenook warming the room and the voice she heard was that of a woodchuck who was wearing a green vest and nothing else. Delores believed him for she had been epileptic since she was five. She took phenobarbital daily to control her seizures but she didn’t bring her medication with her and she highly doubted that there were any apothecaries around here. “I am Woodrow and this is my home. I put two beds together for you, my wife and mine, and my children’s.”

“I hope I didn’t inconvenience your family!”

“Not at all.” He replied modestly.

“Well, where did you and your family sleep?”

“Only me, I’m afraid. I have no children. And I slept in the hammock. I bought the bed for the children I expected to have.” He said somberly. Delores perked up in bed and smiled at the polite woodchuck expecting the beginning of a very blissful love story. She was gaga for love stories and didn’t care whether they were about birds, woodchucks or amoebas.

“Expected?” She asked curiously.

“My wife was eaten by warthog last June…” he said glumly, “….before we had children.”

“Dreadful!” Delores sighed. “I am sorry.”

“As am I.” Woodrow replied folding the extra blankets he had given her when she plopped on the bed from thin air. Thankfully, he was smoking a pipe when that occurred.

“This isn’t where I fell asleep.” She said looking around. “How did I end up here?”

“Oh, you see,” Woodrow explained, “here in the underworld you never wake up where you fall asleep. It makes things more interesting.”

“Underworld?” she gulped. “That’s bizarre.” When she heard ‘underworld’ she thought of Hades, who is as real as the Easter Bunny. There are such negative connotations to the term ‘underworld,’ but you must throw out everything you think you know or what you have been told by writers of fiction that do little more than to dog pile upon what they have read for lack of ingenuity and hear this: A person might find the underworld to be more preferable than the ‘overworld,’ as it would be called for a dearth in English diction. And that preference may only be for a lack of traffic, cell phones and idiot technology, and for a lack of the idiots who use and are obsessed with idiot technology…

“Regardless, if you want to go home at any moment and all you have to do is say the two magic words.” Woodrow told her.

“Which are?” She asked nervously. She might have said them if she knew them and she thought fervently about what they could be. She guessed every obvious combination she had ever heard. Open sesame. Abracadabra. Hocus Pocus. That is all she could think up. (Abracadabra, which she thought was two words but is, in fact, only one.)

Woodrow looked at her rubbing his furry face with a small paw, tapping a digit on his chin. “I cannot tell you.” he said.

“Or, you can, but you choose not to say.” She retorted.

“No.” he said. “I cannot because I do not know.” He was a horrible liar. “All that I know is you have to say them aloud and there will be a shift in the wind, then a swirling, and the next thing you know you will be back where you started. It is like a game board but not like a game. There is a beginning and clearly there is an end. “

“How do you know this?”

“It has been told in the book.” he said confidently.

“In what book?”

“The book whose title we don’t repeat.”

“What happens if you repeat it?” she asked curiously.

“Curiosity killed the cat.” Woodrow groused. Delores suddenly felt guilty again.

“I find it quite strange that no one around here finds the use in curiousness. Many good things come from curiosity! Magic words! Pfff!”

“Oh, but more bad than good.” Woodrow interjected.

“To what book do you refer?” Delores inquired.

“The book!” he said firmly. Then suddenly Delores remembered the book in the cat’s satchel and got up to retrieve it. Perhaps, it was the book he was referring to. She nearly hit her head on the ceiling and couldn’t remember feeling taller, except maybe for the time when she was fourteen and went back to her elementary school where she met a boy and made-out in the planted tractor tires that she once pretended was the belly of a whale. The goofy teens nearly got stuck. The satchel hung around the broken mirror of the dresser. The floor, she noticed, was made from little stones that had been pieced together in a swirl pattern meticulously as though every single one belonged just where it was. She pulled out White Rabbit and the cover didn’t declare an author or promise anything fabulous. It had only the profile etching of a rabbit on a white background and the rabbit could just as easily have been a cloud. The title was written simply in black. Woodrow gasped.

“Here it is, woodchuck! Here! It’s called—” she looked at the book again. “Well, it’s called….funny, I don’t, I, um, I don’t know know”

“Can you not read, girl? Why, you poor thing! Forget the book! Come to my table and let’s have some tea.”

Delores was delirious. She looked again at the book’s cover and tried pronouncing it but she couldn’t. She was helpless. If there was one thing she had always prided herself on it was her brain. After all, she could speak French fluently and was quickly learning Russian. She tried to remember the title but there was nothing in her memory to recall it. And she couldn’t even recall what the strange object on the cover was. “Woodchuck!” She complained ardently. “Will you read the title for me? It seems, I have lost my mind for the moment.”

            “Woodrow.” He reminded her. “And yes, I suppose. Let’s give it a look see.” He carefully put on his reading spectacles and regarded the cover for a long moment. Something was formulating in that rodent brain of his fabulously. “Hmmmm.” he began. “It appears to be titled, Black Rat.”

            “Black rat?” She said dissatisfied. She was very confused and it didn’t sound right to her. Perhaps, the seizure jarred her thinking; whatever part of her brain was in charge of literacy and recognition of simple objects was experiencing technical difficulties, on the blink, try again tomorrow. Maybe tea would help, she considered. Woodrow quietly slipped the book in a drawer and smiled at the girl who wandered to the table for tea. But as they were sitting and she as she began complimenting Woodrow on the tasty scones and the tea and his delicate tea cups, the table began to shake and the woodchuck began to get larger, much larger, which startled Delores. Instead of thinking of him in one way, she had to consider him in another. Before he seemed amiable and harmless, but now with his enormousness, had he the mind, he could eat her and his appearance was much more frightening.

            “Did you,” she paused to swallow her anxiety, “get larger?”

            “No,” he replied, “The room is getting smaller! This is how you know when it is time to leave. We need to go.”

            “Then why am I…” She looked around and the room was clearly getting smaller while the objects in it were staying the same size—all but her, she was getting smaller, too. She was again confused as it could just as easily been seen as her and the room were the constants and everything else was getting larger. “How are you and I suddenly the same size if you didn’t get larger?” She asked Woodrow in a panic as they made their way to another room that had yet to be changed. It was a coatroom and there were hundreds of interesting coats hanging from multiple rows, some furry, some leather, and some in plastic wrap. There was a small bizarre monkey sitting on the top row with a pill-shaped hat on his head holding a ticket that said ‘forty two.’

            “Simple.” Woodrow explained paying no mind to the coats or the monkey. “Well, Delores, you were getting smaller with the room. And had I not saved you, you would have continued to get smaller until you and the room were no more—had I not saved you.” he added again. “Yes, had I not saved you,” once more, “you would have been a speck of dust floating out and up and back to the overworld.”

            “You mean, all I have to do is to stay in a room that shrinks to go home?”

            “If that is what you would prefer. And if you prefer to return as a speck of dust no larger than a gnat. Though, after a while it would wear off and you would find yourself somewhere back up there in that dreadful place just as you were the day you left. If that is what you prefer.” Woodrow replied.

            “I am too curious to go home. I have to believe what you said that at the end of the game board, though this isn’t a game, there will be an end because I feel in place of an end there is a purpose. There is a reason I am here. This doesn’t happen to just anyone. Does it?”

            “No.” Woodrow smiled. “It certainly does not.” And with that the coatroom began to shrink and Woodrow grabbed her hand and they hurried out. “We certainly don’t want to be responsible for shrinking anyone’s coat!” They burst out of two folding doors and into what appeared to be a fine restaurant, or perhaps, an elaborate tea room that immediately seemed very familiar to Delores.

            “Is this a part of your house?” Delores marveled. All around there were white mice in brown suits and brown mice in white suits, the size of humans, sitting in fancy chairs like aristocratic people, sipping tea at tables, properly even, with legs folded, saucer in their left hands, and tea cup in their right. There were even children in dresses, or knickers, trying to be still, occasionally getting their hands slapped for being disobedient. The tea cups made beautiful sounds being softly placed on the saucers, or with spoons that rang on their sides while stirring sugar. Their eyes were beady black and unnerving to Delores and they looked upon her and Woodrow with an air of supremacy as though to say, “Whatever are you doing out of your laboratory cages spoiling our good time?” She was the rodent, she felt. And they were the cocksure humans.

            “Don’t make any sudden moves.” Woodrow murmured with lips tightly shut like a ventriloquist. She did as she was told and they stood there. Her eyes did the moving and they scanned about the room covetously regarding the beautiful dark pink hyacinths in the vases on the tables, and the blue foxgloves, and the yellow irises. It reminded her of tea with her mother, or when she enjoyed it, at the Russian Tea Room in New York. In fact, it very much resembled it with its rich green walls, the gilded birds and the vibrant pink booths and cushioned chairs. She looked around and could see where her mother and she always would sit. Every mouse in the room was looking at them, including the service mice who were dressed in all black like service people do in the overworld to simultaneously look both professional and invisible. They looked more angrily at the intruders than anyone else. And just as one such service mouse grabbed a broom and headed straight for them like a maniac, Woodrow yelled, “Run, Delores!” and a lady screamed, a glass broke, and the mouse children laughed and everyone but the angry service mice and the children looked disgusted and appalled to be in such a place that had humans and woodchucks scurrying about contaminating their sterile mouse setting and ruining their wonderful mouse tea.

            Woodrow and Delores made it outside without being injured by that broom or by any of the kitchen knives that threatened them, suffering only the bruised egos of misfits. They stumbled out into a street where there was no traffic, no cars, or no other living things. There were buildings and cobblestones streets and gas lamps that were lit. Delores’s mind was in a pounding state of delirium. “I always thought it was cruel that mice were so inferior! But I never…” she trailed off angrily deriding the disrespectful attitudes of those she once had so much pity for. When she was nine, her father attempted to kill a family of mice in their home with poison but she foiled his plan by retrieving the poison nuggets and flushing them down the toilet. After that failed, he bought a cat and the cat took care of business far more heinously, or naturally, whichever you prefer. Delores cried for a month.

            “Where are we going?” Delores asked as they walked down the street.

            “I have to take you to The Church.” Woodrow replied.

            “Mass? At this hour?”

“It is 6:30.” He said. “It is always 6:30, though, we are not going there for mass.”

“Then what in the bacon are we going for?” Her mother was religious, socially, and taught her at a very young age, instead of using curse words, to substitute them with bacon. Hell, her mother considered to be a curse word, although, as Delores once debated furiously before losing her gusto over the matter, it is not said explicitly, or even implicitly, anywhere in The Holy Bible that the word ‘Hell’ should not be used in vain. Bacon was just as well. She asked again when Woodrow failed to respond, “Why are we going to a church if not for mass?”

            Woodrow said plainly, “We are going for you to be judged.”

            Delores, “Gulp.” It’s worse than baptism.