Alice in Zombieland (11 page)

     
Alice thought perhaps it was a nice juicy meat pie that did the trick instead, but she kept that to herself, for even thinking on a sweet meat pie was making her stomach grumble and roil with hunger. Instead, Alice whispered: ‘Somebody said that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!’

     
‘Ah, well! It means much the same thing,’ said the Duchess, digging her sharp little chin into Alice’s shoulder as she added, ‘and the moral of
that
is—“Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.”’

     
‘How fond she is of finding morals in things!’ Alice thought to herself. ‘I wonder what moral she would find in me taking a nice big bite of her cheek.’ And for a moment, Alice seriously contemplated it, for the older woman’s powdered pocked cheek was well within biting range, and her stomach was still demanding meat; but she forced herself to keep her teeth to herself. She wouldn’t want to risk hearing yet another moral from the Duchess. She’d heard quite enough as it was.

     
‘I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist,’ the Duchess said after a pause: ‘the reason is, that I’m doubtful about the temper of your leg. Shall I try the experiment?’

     
For a moment, Alice was confused by her remark, but then remembered she still carried her squirming leg mallet under her arm. ‘
He
might kick,’ Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all anxious to have the experiment tried.

     
‘Very true,’ said the Duchess: ‘legs and mustard both have a kick. And the moral of that is— “Birds of a feather flock together.”’

     
‘Only mustard isn’t a bird,’ Alice remarked.

     
‘Right, as usual,’ said the Duchess: ‘what a clear way you have of putting things!’

     
‘It’s a mineral, I
think
,’ said Alice.

     
‘Of course it is,’ said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everything that Alice said; ‘there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moral of that is— “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.”’

     
‘Oh, I know!’ exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, ‘it’s a vegetable. It doesn’t look like one, but it is.’

     
‘I quite agree with you,’ said the Duchess; ‘and the moral of that is— “Be what you would seem to be” —or if you’d like it put more simply— “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”’

     
‘I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said very politely, ‘if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.’ And even the dismembered leg must have been weary of the Duchess because it began to squirm most irritably and Alice had to use both hands to keep it in place.

     
‘That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,’ the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.

     
‘Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,’ said Alice.

     
‘Oh, don’t talk about trouble!’ said the Duchess. ‘I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.’

     
‘A cheap sort of present!’ thought Alice. ‘I’m glad they don’t give birthday presents like that!’ But she did not venture to say it out loud.

     
‘Thinking again?’ the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.

     
‘I’ve a right to think,’ said Alice sharply, for her hunger was beginning to become monstrous again, and she felt she must have meat soon or fall down and die.

     
‘Just about as much right,’ said the Duchess, ‘as pigs have to fly; and the m—’

     
But here, to Alice’s great surprise, the Duchess’s voice died away, even in the middle of her favourite word ‘moral,’ and the arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up, and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded, frowning like a thunderstorm. Her mouth was dripping with what Alice thought must be fresh blood, as if she had been eating something not altogether cooked. The blood was smeared down her dress front, and Alice was sure she could see bits of it in her disheveled hair as well.

     
‘A fine day, your Majesty!’ the Duchess began in a low, weak voice.

     
‘Now, I give you fair warning,’ shouted the Queen, stamping on the ground and spitting blood at them as she spoke; ‘either you or your head must be off, and that in about half no time! Take your choice!’

     
The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.

     
‘Let’s go on with the game,’ the Queen said to Alice; and Alice was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her back to the graveyard, shoved along by the cold wind coming in from the dark forest beyond. The Queen still carried that curious metal box under one arm and the bloody, notched stick in the other. Alice tried to stay out of range of the killing stick.

     
The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen’s absence, and were resting atop various tombs and headstones: however, the moment they saw her, they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a moment’s delay would cost them their lives.

     
All the time they were playing the Queen never left off quarrelling with the other players, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ Those whom she sentenced were taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of execution.

     
Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, ‘Have you seen the Corpse Turtle yet?’

     
‘No,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t even know what a Corpse Turtle is.’

     
‘It’s the thing Corpse Turtle Soup is made from,’ said the Queen.

     
‘I never saw one, or heard of one,’ said Alice.

     
‘Come on, then,’ said the Queen, ‘and he shall tell you his history,’

     
As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, ‘You are all pardoned.’ ‘Come,
that’s
a good thing!’ she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.

     
They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. (
If
you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) ‘Up, lazy thing!’ said the Queen, ‘and take this young lady to see the Corpse Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered’; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.

     
The Gryphon, who seemed to be mostly made of scraggly feathers and patchy, mangy fur, sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. ‘What fun!’ said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.

     
‘What
is
the fun?’ said Alice.

     
‘Why,
she
,’ said the Gryphon. ‘It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.

     
Alice gave a sigh of relief and said, ‘Truly?’

     
The Gryphon sneered nastily and replied, ‘No. She eats them of course.’

     
‘Eats them?’ Alice remembered the smeared blood around the old woman’s mouth and gulped.

     
‘No use wasting good meat, is there now?’ The Gryphon rustled its dead looking wings and smiled. ‘Come on!’

     
‘Everybody says “come on!” here,’ thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: ‘I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!’

     
They had not gone far before they saw the Corpse Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him moaning as if his heart would break. He was a rotting hunk of flesh, white and gray, smelling of saltwater, seaweed and death. His flappers were eaten down to pasty knobs, and bone stuck through the white meat; his teeth hung in his mouth by strings of dead meat; his eyes were dead ovals that rolled round in his knobby head. She pitied him deeply. ‘What is his sorrow?’ she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, ‘It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!’

     
So they went up to the Corpse Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

     
‘This here young lady,’ said the Gryphon, ‘she wants for to know your history, she do.’

     
‘I’ll tell it her,’ said the Corpse Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: ‘sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.’

     
So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, ‘I don’t see how he can
even
finish, if he doesn’t begin.’ But she waited patiently.

     
‘Once,’ said the Corpse Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, ‘I was a live Turtle.’

     
These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of ‘Hjckrrh!’ from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy moaning of the Corpse Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, ‘Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,’ but she could not help thinking there
must
be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing. After all, she wanted to know how he had become a Corpse Turtle, how he had died.

     
‘When we were little,’ the Corpse Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still groaning a little now and then, ‘we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—’

     
‘Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn’t one?’ Alice asked. She was exasperated; he seemed more intent on talking about his childhood and not his death.

     
‘We called him Tortoise because he taught us,’ said the Corpse Turtle angrily: ‘really you are very dull!’

     
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,’ added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last the Gryphon said to the Corpse Turtle, ‘Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!’ and he went on in these words: ‘Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn’t believe it—’

     
‘I never said I didn’t!’ interrupted Alice.

     
‘You did,’ said the Corpse Turtle.

     
‘Hold your tongue!’ added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak again. The Corpse Turtle went on. ‘We had the best of educations—in fact, we went to school every day—’

     
‘
I’ve
been to a day-school, too,’ said Alice; ‘you needn’t be so proud as all that.’

     
‘With extras?’ asked the Corpse Turtle a little anxiously.

     
‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘we learned French and music.’

 
    
‘And washing?’ said the Corpse Turtle.

     
‘Certainly not!’ said Alice indignantly.

     
‘Ah! then yours wasn’t a really good school,’ said the Corpse Turtle in a tone of great relief. ‘Now at
ours
they had at the end of the bill, “French, music,
and washing
—extra.”’

     
‘You couldn’t have wanted it much,’ said Alice; ‘living at the bottom of the sea.’

     
‘I couldn’t afford to learn it.’ said the Corpse Turtle with a sigh. ‘I only took the regular course.’

     
‘What was that?’ inquired Alice.

     
‘Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,’ the Corpse Turtle replied; ‘and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.’

     
‘I never heard of “Uglification,”’ Alice ventured to say. ‘What is it?’

     
The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. ‘What! Never heard of uglifying!’ it exclaimed. ‘You know what to beautify is, I suppose?’

     
‘Yes,’ said Alice doubtfully: ‘it means—to—make—anything—prettier.’

     
‘Well, then,’ the Gryphon went on, ‘if you don’t know what to uglify is, you
are
a simpleton.’

     
Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about it, so she turned to the Corpse Turtle, and said ‘What else had you to learn?’