A Plague of Hearts by Patrick Whittaker (best large ereader .TXT) 📖

to that lawyer you were questioning?’
‘He died. I didn’t even get the chance to pull out his finger nails. One good poke with a hot iron and he has a heart attack! It just isn’t fair.’
‘That wouldn’t happen to be my lawyer?’ said the Knave of Hearts. ‘Would it?’
The question went unanswered.
‘What about him then?’ said the Badger, pointing at the March Hare. ‘If I were to slit his throat before he could scream, nobody would ever know. I’ve always wanted a lucky rabbit’s foot.’
The Penguin shook his head. ‘He’s a hare.’
‘Same thing.’
‘He’s a protected species.’
‘But Martial Law - ’
‘Has nothing to do with it. He’s still protected.’
The Badger looked peeved. ‘Sometimes this job’s no fun at all. It’s not even as if we’re well-paid. I tell you, if it wasn’t for protection money, I’d never be able to make ends meet.’
‘Just handcuff the suspect, Constable. We’ve a busy day ahead us and I’d like to get on.’
The Knave of Hearts straightened the seams of his stockings before allowing the Badger to cuff his hands. ‘Ormus, he said, turning to the March Hare with a sad smile. ‘Go see Doctor Ormus. Maybe he can sort this out for me.’
The March Hare watched helplessly as the two secret policemen led his employer away.
The whole affair smacked of something sinister - something which was only just beginning to build its momentum. There was no doubt that other arrests would follow. Maybe he himself would be next.
He closed the door and helped himself to a slice of toast. It tasted stale.


2. A Mad Tea Party

On his way to Castle Ormus, the March Hare took a detour to breakfast with his old friend, the Mad Hatter. It was the final day of the Hatter’s tea party and he felt he ought to put in an appearance - for old times’ sake if nothing else.
The party was being held in the spacious garden that swept from the Hatter’s quaint little cottage down to a pond graced with purple and blue lilies. Because it was the height of summer and the skies this year had remained exceptionally clear, the table was set beneath the protective branches of a large oak.
When the March Hare arrived, the only guest still in attendance was the Dormouse; he was fast asleep with his right cheek resting against a mound of jelly. The March Hare sat next to him and waited to be noticed by his host.
Three cups of tea stood on the table in front of the Mad Hatter. He frowned at them with an intensity that bordered on psychotic. With careful sips, he tasted each in turn.
Dressed in top hat and tails, he would have looked elegant but for the obvious fact that his outfit was long overdue for a visit to the cleaners. A large blob of marmalade had conquered most of his left elbow. His cuffs were frayed. There was jam on both his sleeves and what might have been gravy on his lapels.
‘Strange,’ muttered the Mad Hatter, regarding the three cups with graphic distaste. ‘Really bloody strange.’
‘What is?’ ventured the March Hare.
‘This tea,’ said the Hatter without looking up. ‘Quite unlike any tea I’ve ever encountered before. In fact, I’m not at all convinced that it really is tea. And that is plain bloody weird. It was definitely tea when I prepared it this morning.’
‘It looks like tea to me.’
‘Undoubtedly. To a certain extent it even tastes like tea. And yet it appears to have undergone some strange transformation. If I didn’t know better, I would say that this was something closely akin to ice cream.’
‘You mean it’s cold?’
The Hatter snapped his fingers. ‘That’s it! What we have here, dear boy, is cold tea. Did you ever hear of such a thing?’
‘Elementary physics. Hot tea cools down to the ambient temperature of its environment. Clever people like scientists call it entropy.’
‘Well, I call it disgraceful. I paid good money for what I thought was tea and it turns out to be entropy - and not even good entropy at that! You wait till I get my hands on that grocer.
‘You can’t blame your grocer. Entropy is a Law of Nature.’
‘Oh is it? Laws like that have no right existing. It’s a waste of milk and sugar.’
‘Sugar,’ said the Dormouse, stirring slightly. ‘Sugar and spice and body lice...’
The Hatter hit the sleeping rodent with a tea spoon then turned his attention back to the three cups of offending liquid. He prodded the first with his finger and ran a thoughtful hand across his chin. How could the Universe allow good tea to degrade into something so dreadful? And to think there were still people who were convinced the world was created by a benign entity!
Shaking his head ruefully, the Hatter swept his arm across the table, sending all three cups tumbling onto the lawn. ‘There! That’s the way to deal with entropy.’
‘We have no more tea then?’ The March Hare could barely conceal his disappointment as he looked around the table, a scale model of some alien war zone. Fragments of china lay half-buried beneath bread crumbs and old tea leaves. A reservoir of sour milk with banks of ruined fairy cake provided a backdrop to a panorama of fruit peel. In the middle of No-Man’s Land, an ant patrol negotiated a treacle slough.
‘Fresh out of tea,’ said the Mad Hatter, who was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a wicked witch somewhere who spent her time magically transforming tea into entropy. ‘We’ll have to wait until the delivery man arrives. In the meantime, I’m sure I can find you some cake.’
‘I’m not in a cake mood.’
‘Oh come, come. Cake is the opinion of the people.’
‘Surely you mean opium?’
‘Not at all. Opium is something about which no two people have ever agreed, which is why nobody ever talks about a consensus of opium. Opinions, however, do occasionally match. Which is just as well otherwise democracy would never work.’
‘It doesn’t,’ said the March Hare. ‘At least not any more.’
‘Any more than what?’
‘Any more than it used to.’
‘But I’m sure it did work. I distinctly remember voting for the Panda.’
The March Hare was dismayed. ‘You voted for that tyrant? That bloodsucking vegetarian fur-ball?’
‘Me and three and a half million other people.’
‘That wasn’t a very good idea, was it?’
‘No use getting cross at me,’ said the Mad Hatter. ‘I’m mad. Plenty of sane people voted for him. It’s them you ought to be having a go at.’
Feeling his anger rise, the March Hare bit his lip and hoped that a few seconds of silence would be enough to kill the conversation. He had still not come to terms with the arrest of his employer, and right now he was liable to say something that he would regret for a very long time. Best to let the matter drop.
The sound of urgent footsteps broke into the awkwardness that sat between the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. They both turned to be greeted by the sight of the White Rabbit sprinting across the lawn. He was dressed in a formal suit that may have been a distant cousin of the one loosely adorning the Mad Hatter.
As he ran, the White Rabbit slapped a pocket watch against his forehead. ‘Foreign rubbish!’ he cried. ‘Bloody digital rubbish. I never had this problem with my old timepiece. Handmade it was. Didn’t lose a second in all the time I had it.’
The Hare and the Hatter watched wordlessly as this fluffy apparition sped by and disappeared through a gap in the hedge without so much as a hello or a by your leave.
‘The trouble with you talkies,’ said the Mad Hatter after a while, ‘is that you tend to take life too seriously.’
‘The trouble with us what?’
‘Talkies. Surely you’ve heard that term before?’
‘No, I haven’t. But I guess it’s an improvement on stuffed toys.’
‘Some of my best friends are stuffed toys.’
‘They’re not stuffed,’ said the March Hare. ‘They’re inflatable.’
‘Whatever.’
‘And I think it’s very sad they way you treat them as if they were real.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? I treat you as real.’
‘But I am real.’
‘How do you know? Who’s to say what is and isn’t real? Could all that we know - or think we know - be no more than a dream, or a dream within a dream?’
‘I take it you’re referring to the Creed of the Red King?’
‘Of course. You must be aware of my attachment to the Creed.’
‘It sometimes seems to be all you ever talk about.’
‘It’s very important to me. Have you ever been to Looking Glass Land?’
‘No. With the exception of the Albatross, no talking animal is allowed to leave the kingdom. We’re all wards of the King and he won’t let us travel. Thinks once we cross the border, we’ll be shot, stuffed and mounted. He’s probably right too.’
‘A shame. Looking Glass Land is a beautiful country, full of many wonders.’ A look of nostalgia crept across the Hatter’s face. It conveyed a sense of something lost. ‘In my youth, I traveled the whole of the North Continent, visiting not only Clubs and Diamonds, but also a lot of countries most people around here don’t seem to have heard of. I had adventures you would not believe, and I met many wonderful people.
‘But my favourite place of all was Looking Glass Land. It was there that I first heard of the Creed of the Red King. Fascinating stuff. I spent two years in a monastery studying ancient writings on the subject. That’s where I invented rock’n’roll.’
‘You invented rock’n’roll?’
‘Sure. I just took anger and angst and mixed in some blues. Then I added energy and optimism. An old monk lent me his electric guitar and I would play it for hours while contemplating the mysteries of the world. Basically rock’n’roll is a very spiritual thing, a reflection of inner space.’
‘I’d never thought of it that way before.’
The Hatter drummed his fingers on the table as if to tap out the beat of some almost-forgotten tune. Suddenly he stopped and pointed to a figure running in the footsteps of the White Rabbit. ‘Now what,’ he demanded, ‘is that?’
The March Hare looked up. ‘It’s a little girl. She must be lost or something.’
‘Well, get her off my lawn. Little girls are all well and fine but I won’t stand for them trampling on my grass.’
The girl looked as if the past few weeks of summer had passed her by. Her face was pale; her arms were a network of highly visible veins and arteries. From the style of her frock, she was either foreign or lumbered with a mother woefully out of touch with the latest fashions.
Without asking if she might, the little girl came to the table and sat down opposite the March Hare. If she had been chasing the White Rabbit, the matter must have suddenly lost its urgency. Perhaps it was forgotten entirely.
‘Good day,’ she said, panting loudly and speaking in an odd accent. ‘My name is Alice and I’m very pleased to meet you all.’
‘Sod off,’