Lewis Carroll’s diary.
An entry written by his sister in Guildford, United Kingdom, on the fourteenth of January, 1898
A s I write this, my lovely brother Lewis is dying in his room in my house at Guildford. He’s been here for some time due to his recent illnesses—mostly the intensifying migraines and the possibility of being schizophrenic.
I haven’t seen much of his split persona that he claims to encounter. On the contrary, my brother’s presence has been so pleasant that I regret not having spent more time with him earlier in life.
He will die a bachelor, but having affected every child in the world with his books—and, of course, he can’t stop talking about that girl who inspired him to write the books, Alice.
But I am not here to complain about my brother. I am here to write about what just happened and what I saw with my own eyes. Better write it right away before my fragile old memories escape me.
Let’s start with Lewis having been obsessed with chess since he went to Russia many years ago. He couldn’t get it out of his head that he had to write Through the Looking Glass , the sequel to Alice in Wonderland , based around a game of chess.
Ever since he arrived from Oxford to my modest two-storey house here, he’s had his own chessboard.
It’s been set up and ready on a table next to his bed for some time. Every time I asked him about whom he was expecting to play with, he laughed wearily and told me he was expecting an opponent to arrive at any moment.
I never understood; neither did I pay much attention to it. I was ignorant about chess and Lewis had always been an unusual man. You don’t ask him about what he is doing, for he is like a child who does what he wants when he wants.
In the last few days, his health had deteriorated much, and it was devastating watching him like that. He sometimes joked that I need not worry because he would not die, not until he played that last chess game with his expected opponent.
Which made it harder for me to hold my tears because I thought he was hallucinating.
But the expected guest came.
It was late at night when the doors to my balcony sprang open due to a snowy wind with an aggressive appetite for destruction. I stood up, locked the window back, and was about to go back to bed when I heard Lewis talking to someone.
Tiptoeing, I approached his room and could instantly see that Lewis had left the bed and sat at the table for a game of chess. Opposite him sat the awaited, and most unwelcome, guest. I couldn’t see his face, though, not from this angle. All I was sure of was that he was wearing a red cloak.
“I thought you would play the game, using your special chess pieces, carved from your own bones,” the guest said to my brother Charles—I mean Lewis, as most of you know him by that name.
“I knew you’d ask for them, but you will never find them,” Lewis said. “I’ve had someone help me keep them away from you.”
“Nothing is that far away, Carroll,” the guest said. “I will find the set. I will find the knight, eventually.”
“Then it will take you years and years to do so because I scattered them all over the world.”
“The world is mine, not yours,” said the guest. “I have time; you have none.”
“Don’t get carried away. You haven’t beaten me yet.”
“No one has ever beaten me when their time came, Lewis.”
“There is a first for everything.”
“My first will also be my last.”
“And it scares you.” Lewis looked unusually competitive. I wondered who the guest was.
“It does scare me,” answered the guest. “But when it happens, I remind myself that I never lose. It just never happened, because I am—”
“No need to tell me your real name.” Lewis raised a hand. “I’ve known your name since the days of Wonderland.”
It was sentences like these that made me doubt my brother’s sanity. He had lost his grip on reality, thinking Wonderland was real. But the guest didn’t seem to object.
“If only I had enough time in Wonderland,” said the guest. “I’d have killed so many.”
“But it still wouldn’t be enough,” Lewis remarked. “Because your sickness of killing is unquenchable. Blood will never taste like wine from Eden, no matter how much you spill.”
“You know I have the right to do what I do.”
“I sympathized with you in the beginning, but no more.”
“Why? Because you know it’s her who made me what I am?”
“Leave her out of it,” Lewis said and made his first chess move. That was when I noticed the small cups of liquor on both sides of the board. With each move, they had to follow up with one drink.
At some point I was going to enter the room, but then Lewis discreetly waved me off. I respected his wishes and stood watching, still wondering about the guest cloaked in red.
Later it was clear that Lewis was losing. What troubled me was the fear showing on his face with every move. It was unreasonable, not the kind of fear that shows in a game of chess, no matter what the price.
But the cloaked guest had another opinion. Close to Lewis’s seventh move, the guest was laughing. “Tell me, Lewis, what’s the most you’ve lost in a game of chess?”
Lewis preferred not to answer. He looked certain to lose but wanted to make the best of his last move.
“Say my name, Lewis,” said the guest in a mocking tone of voice.
Lewis said nothing, making his last move which seemed to make things worse. Instantly, the guest moved his knight and said, “Checkmate.”
Lewis shrieked in a silent way, unable to breathe properly. I wanted to go in again, but he waved me off again , nervously—I gathered I had to stay away, or I wouldn’t be safe from the cloaked man.
Lewis pulled the last drink to his mouth, which I later learned was poisonous—the kind of poison that strangely worked after the seventh sip—and gulped, glaring at the guest with a challenging stare.
“Don’t worry,” the guest said. “It won’t hurt. You will be dead in seconds.”
Lewis’s face was reddening, and he appeared to be choking when he said, “I am sorry, Wonderlanders. I failed you.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself.” The guest stood up and patted Lewis. “You were killed by Death himself. Like I said, I never lost a game of chess, not when my opponents played for their lives.” His laughter escalated. “Of all those whom I appeared to and challenged with a game of chess, no one ever beat me; and I doubt anyone will. But to tell the truth, nothing feels as good as killing you.”
“But you won’t be able to kill her.” Lewis clung to the edge of the table while on his knees, chess pieces rolling left and right on the floor. “I hid the pieces from my bones.”
I shivered in place, watching my brother die, and listening to a man claiming to be Death itself.
And then the cloaked man turned and faced me.
In my mind I wanted to run, but my limbs were frozen. Even though he was an old man with a silly moustache, something inside me assured me that I was looking Death in the eyes.
“Don’t worry.” He brushed at his moustache. “I won’t kill you. Your time hasn’t come yet.”
I stood speechless and paralysed with fear, clinging to the door’s frame.
“But when it does, I will come for you.” He craned his head closer. “And I will challenge you in a game of chess, and I will win.” He laughed proudly again. “What? Did you think it was the Grim Reaper, some spooky guy with a scythe coming for you when your time comes?” He turned to face Lewis for one last time. “Rest in peace, Wonderland man,” Death said. “As for Alice, I will settle for nothing less than watching her burn in an eternal hell.”