Heathrow Airport, London
L anding, the Cheshire looked as drunk as a priest shouldn’t be. Though he had flown first class, drank the best whiskey, and even had the Swedish stewardess give him his number, he didn’t feel good.
He got into the limousine and gave the driver Mr. Jay’s address. He was anxious to know if Mr. Jay would fulfill his promise. Was he going to provide the Cheshire with what he wanted, as he said earlier?
Most people would think the Cheshire was a man with no worries, just an angry cat with lust for revenge. It was true in a sense, but the Cheshire had a few old secrets from Wonderland. One of them was a secret he had trained himself to forget.
He lay his head back and remembered the Pillar back in Wonderland…
The forest had been the Cheshire’s best place to hide. That was long before he’d visited the real world. As a cat, no one paid attention to him. No one even cared to feed him. Stray in the streets of Wonderland, the only one who’d given him a chance was the ugliest woman in Wonderland. The Duchess.
That’s why he’d later become her assassin in real life. It was rather a payback for helping him out in Wonderland.
Lonely and lost, she’d accommodated him and made him a friend. In truth, all he cared about was the food. A hefty supply of food every day, without having to fight for it or kill. And the food wasn’t rats.
Tolerating the ugly face of the Duchess was one thing. But God, she had a foul smell. She snored so loud and crunchy he’d mistaken the snorts for farts sometimes. But she also cried. Alone in the dark.
All until she became pregnant and had a child. That was when she kicked him out.
True, he would have choked that chubby child of hers, but how was she to know? She’d just found compensation for love other than a stray cat.
Alone again in the wilderness, the Cheshire had the worst day of his life. He had no evil intentions or a scary grin at the time, so he was as weak as the day he was born.
All until he found the Pillar’s forest, or Garden as he liked to call it.
Pillar was a fascinating man. He’d seen something in the Cheshire. A talent the cat hadn’t discovered in itself. And now the Cheshire had a new owner.
The Pillar permitted the Cheshire to play all over the garden. He could eat as much as he wanted — it was how he’d met Alice later for the first time in his life.
But the Pillar demanded one thing. That the Cheshire eats a certain mushroom all the time.
It was a delicious mushroom. He ate it with a bowl of fresh milk every day. Yummy.
But it also made him dizzy. Made him see strange things Hallucinations. The most prominent was how he saw the world upside down, a realization that let him hang upside down on trees to see it in its normal form.
He liked it. Being absent-minded was great fun. Mad was fun. In fact, never had the Cheshire felt so free. Madness was a blessing. You did what you wanted. You didn’t care. And no one could blame you. The perfect crime.
Not when you ended up addicted to the mushroom, though.
Slowly the Pillar didn’t serve the mushroom on a daily basis. And the Cheshire began to feel pain. Withdrawals. Itches. Urges. Madness, but not the good kind.
“Why can’t you give me the mushrooms I want?” the cat asked the Pillar.
“You had enough.”
“But I need them. I can’t imagine my life without them?”
“Then you have to work for it.”
“Anything you want me to do.”
The Pillar smirked with beady eyes. “Anything?”
“Whatever you wish.”
And that’s how the Pillar enslaved him, like so many others he’d manipulated before.
The Cheshire did evil things to get his mushroom. For years and years, so much that everyone in the wilderness feared him. They thought it was cool to be feared like that. But the Cheshire knew the pain behind it. The pain of needing the Pillar’s mushrooms.
A few months into his evil addiction he’d began noticing this strange curve in his mouth. Whenever he tried to smile at someone, another girly cat he liked, for instance, they’d tremble with fear. He didn’t understand. All he’d meant was to show good intentions.
That was when his grin surfaced.
The terribly dark and morbid grin that should have been a sweet and innocent smile of a cat. The Cheshire realized the grin had been a permanent effect of the mushrooms the Pillar had given him. It was like a scar on the lips or a tattoo you had when you were drunk and could never remove again.
The grin made the Cheshire. He didn’t make the grin.