MEETING HALL, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON
“I t started as a joke,” the Queen said. “At first, no one understood a person suffering from a mental disorder. Usually, they thought those people were possessed by demons, causing them to have those hallucinations. Then they thought of them as witches. In both cases, those people were killed, if not burned at the stake.”
Tom was sweating by now. Surely he sat among the maddest of the mad in the world, but the Queen was also reciting the true dark history of humans, which had been repeatedly documented—only historians always preferred to stay away from it.
People with mental illnesses were used as tourist attractions, as a means for entertainment, over the years.
In his office, Tom had a drawing of people watching mad people for entertainment.
“Then when physicians began suggesting this was an illness, calling it the Invisible Plague, humans came up with this humiliating idea of gathering the mad in prison, as if they had committed a crime,” the Queen explained. “And in a world where money dominates everything, there was nothing wrong with making a shilling or a buck on the side. The mad people were put into cages as tourist attractions. People from all over the world would entertain themselves by watching them for a fee. It was like going to a comedy movie.”
Tom reached for his pills and swallowed. A handful. Everything the Queen had talked about, he knew for a fact.
“So we, mad people, Wonderlanders, instead of being cured, were a source of a few laughs and snickers,” the Queen said. “We became the freaks in the circus.” She signaled for her mad crowd to sit again. “And now it’s time to have our revenge.” She clicked her remote, and the screen flickered again.
It was time to see what she had in mind.