White Rabbit Chapter 17

17.

           

The bears were as harmless to Delores as the oaks and as the poppies that surrounded the oaks and sung like a multiracial children’s choir. She was quite fortunate she came across the bears when she did for there could just as easily been a band of six warthogs which would have been unfortunate for her since warthogs have no sympathy for little girls and eat incessantly in a desire to get larger and fiercer. Intimidation is everything to a warthog as is being perceived as the vilest of creatures. Had they the ability to take anabolic steroids they would for they wouldn’t care of their shrinking testicles, or loss of hair, or shortened life spans. Don’t let anyone tell you different; warthogs live in the now more so than any other species and kill for the pleasure of killing; for that scream just before death; that last pathetic whimper floating away with a final breath. (Note: these are warthogs of the Underworld. The author is not trying to besmirch the reputation of any good honest warthogs in the Overworld trying to scratch out a living like the rest of us.)

            “You lost, little girl?” One bear asked fiercely before seemingly adjusting his tone to an appropriate bear-girl interchange. When you get used to speaking to other bears, wolves and oak trees, it isn’t easy conversing with humans, let alone human girls.

            “It appears that I am. I am looking,” she paused to consider her predicament seriously, “for the sempstress.”

            “The sempstress?” another bear considered rubbing his chin with his paw and looking around as though it would help him remember. “You will never make it that far. Not with the werewolves, the warthogs and the vampires.”

            “Vampires?” Delores gulped.

“Vampires.” the same bear assured her. “Flying things, wicked-looking men. Prey mostly on children for the easy blood.” It is worth noting that he wore glasses that neither seemed to fit his face or be of the right prescription. They were slightly broken, crooked and seemed as though something that he had taken off something dead. “You will need an escort if you wish to make it to the sempstress.”

“An escort?”

“Yes. And thankfully for you, we are available.”

“We?” Delores asked befuddled.

“The bears. No better protector than bears.”

“Well,” Delores said faintly. “How much? I don’t have money?” She showed them her pockets which she pulled out of her sweats and they hung there like white lint-peppered ears.

“Why must every human think everything requires money? Haven’t you learned that this isn’t the world you once knew and that life here is not dictated by logic or reason? And what in the hell do you think we could do with money?” The other bears laughed. They were a motley lot, a dirty half dozen. “We will escort you for the pleasure of having something to do, the challenge in it. And to get a sweet child like you through a dark and vile forest such as this will be quite a challenge!” The other bears nodded their heads in agreement. “Most things are done for the purpose of doing them. Purpose is more valuable than money, Delores.”

“How did you know my name?”

“Everyone knows your name.” another more modest looking bear added with humble reverence. He was the sort that looked like he did time in a traveling circus or a small depressing unauthorized zoo with barbed-wire fences and electric prods. He was scrawnier than the others, his fur was matted and he had that strange sad look on his face and his nose was dry like a vegetable left too long in the refrigerator. His name was Chuck, not because he lacked a name and thereby under previous prescription is prescribed Chuck; it was Chuck, given by a man named Carl Bloomquist who ran the worst traveling fleabag circus on the eastern seaboard based out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Bloomquist Family Circus, it was called, but there was no family behind it. Carl had a brother but he was an uninvolved sleazy bookie in New York. Chuck the bear was once the headliner who could do anything from riding a bike, to walking around carrying a suitcase wearing a hat and suit coat like a businessman, to his grand finale of climbing a ladder up to a twelve foot tall platform and cannonballing into a pool of water. The children went bananas for Chuck and they sold stuffed animals in his likeness and kids were photographed with him for five dollars a picture, or seven framed. But then his joints began to fail with old age and because of the unnatural humanization and he couldn’t do what he used to do so he was put in an uninspiring cage and advertised as a man-eating bear that ate fifty men. But no one believed it after he became frail and weak because of malnutrition and a hunger strike, when his bones stuck from his sides like broken tent rods. Kids strolled past his cage barely noticing him and the sign that boasted that he once ate fifty men fell down and no one would bother to rehang it, for the ridiculousness of it. Eventually, he was so pitiful looking, an abject pulp of fur, that when he became sick, Carl, in order not to foot a vet bill, let him loose in the wilderness of Maine. Carl had a gray handlebar mustache and twirled it when he opened the cage just as he always twirled it when he made a business decision. And he watched Chuck slowly stroll out into the snow, giant snowflakes stuck in his fur making him look older and more pathetic. It was in Maine that Delores saw him first, when she was ten or eleven, when The Bloomquist Family Circus came to town. She drew a picture of him and wrote about him in her…

“You staring at me for a reason, Delores?” he interrupted. He didn’t like to be stared at, not anymore. He once used to love to be regarded, to be seen, but not anymore, not since he was put in the cage and was washed up as a performer. It all seemed phony to him, even when he was doing it, and surely he knew under the glitz and glamor of the spotlight that it wouldn’t last but there was nothing he could do to preserve it and it was too impossible not to enjoy while it was happening. Glamor is fleeting and the white-hot spotlight of fame and affection burns out and leaves you cold, bitterly cold...      

“No. I’m sorry, Chuck. Or is it Charles?”

“How do you know my name?” He growled suspiciously. He seemed no longer to revere her as his queen but was suspicious of her as he was of all children and strangers, of anyone who looked at him for longer than a moment.

“I don’t know how I know it.” Delores replied baffled. “But I do.”

“We better get going,” a large brownish bear interjected glibly, “if we are going to get you to the sempstress alive.” Delores was given a black shroud to wear which she put on directly and she walked in the middle of the six bear convoy. They sang a peculiar song, one that she knew, humming most of it as they walked. She couldn’t see anything but she was confident of the direction she was to travel because she had a good sense of feeling; her inner-compass was astutely channeled the way someone blind becomes accustomed to navigating through someplace familiar like a hallway at home. Along the route she could hear the dreadful sounds of the violent encounters between the bears and the warthogs, or the vampires and their abhorrent screams, or with other mysterious enemies that she could not identify, perhaps the Torgans, she considered under the anonymity of the shroud conjuring up some twisted ugly beasts to fathom them into being.

In the depths of the blackness it seemed like such a silly ceremony, a foolish procession, but she continued to think. She didn’t know why she must wear the shroud but in one moment she figured it would galvanize the enemy to see her and in another she thought that what was happening was too terrifying for her to see being that she was a child, still, regardless of anything, she was still a child. Wasn’t she? She thought. She didn’t know why they wanted to attack or kill her, or if it was even because of her but she did what she had been told and kept walking feeling the breath of beasts upon her, smelling their stink but not being touched. It was like she was as helpless as being in bed with the door shut tight and her eyes wide open staring through the endless black universe of the ceiling, her mind racing on the Ritalin her parents fed her. She felt the vampires get close overhead but she had confidence in the bears that served her well. Had she seen the vampires she would have been more frightened at their wicked form, their naked pale green flesh and veins bulging through from their wings and their necks. They were bald and scrawny, subsisting on blood and guts and their dirty flesh was tautly drawn over a small skeletal figure with miserable black eyes and blackened red-stained teeth. They weren’t teenage heartthrobs; they were from Hell, proof there had to be a Hell. And the werewolves were insidious scurvy beasts running wildly like men whose humanity had been lost in lust and cursed depravity.

They both were awful things and she thought of what they must look like as they howled and screamed and died swarming over blood, smelling it. She heard their bones crushing, their flesh ripping, the growls, the screams, the last breaths, the demons fleeting from their carcasses swirling up into the night, the moon watching in terror. She imagined his face stained in their blood. Delores began to feel frightened when she didn’t feel anything around her as though she were suddenly alone. She was still walking but she stopped finally and realized the only sound was that of her feet trampling leaves, through rocks and dirt. “Chuck?” She cried out. “Bears?” she called blankly. She stood there and thought of taking the shroud off but she was afraid for what might appear, or what wouldn’t. Finally, she decided to and pulled it down over her face and the moon was gone in the daylight and all there was before her was the Sempstress’ cottage, the old familiar home. The bears were gone and there was no sign of anyone or anything that would cause harm to her. But harm often emanates from the people and the places suspected the least.