W e scatter like rats when this happens.
I thought Jack told me the Jabberwocky can’t spew fire when stabbed in the eyes. On all fours, my heart races, as one conclusion comes to mind: Jack Spades failed. The Jabberwocky’s heart is self-healing again.
I stand up with my sword in my hand, watching the beast rise again. I have no clue what to do this time.
“Here we go again,” the Cheshire rolls his eyes. “It’s like the Terminator movie. Is this real or fiction? Evil has to rise for one last time.”
“Except that I have no clue how to kill him,” I say.
In the air, the children’s voices diminish with the Jabberwocky’s rise.
“We ” Fabiola coughs, barely being audible. I guess she hadn’t time to listen to Constance’s words from the Pillar.
“Alice!” Constance screams behind me.
I don’t pay her attention, thinking of a way out. I’m not going to run away. I have to kill the Jabberwocky. How can I kill something as big?
“Alice!” Constance insists.
I turn and look at her.
She is pointing at something.
Someone.
A limping, worn out, almost dead, Pillar.
“Why do I have to always put the final touch,” he says with his beady eyes.
“Cockiness isn’t helping now, Pilly,” the Cheshire says. “You’re barely alive. Look at you.”
Beside me I see Fabiola looking like wants to kill him now, if only she isn’t worried about the Jabberwocky.
I watch the Pillar walk as if drunk with skin peeling off everywhere. Not only that. I think his guts are bursting open like a pillar turning into something else. A butterfly?
In all his drunkenness, he nears me and says, “Alice, darling, take care of my hookah. Put in the louvre, next to an Egyptian mummy.”
I have no strength to smile, but his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude while dying will be something I will never forget.
The Jabberwocky spews fire again, as if jealous the Pillar stole the show from him.
We run away again.
But the Pillar doesn’t. He stays facing the beast.
“Jabby, Jabby, Jabby,” the Pillar shakes his head. “You ever wondered what becomes of a pillar?”
The Jabberwocky dismisses him and looks for me.
But then the Pillar pulls his final trick. The greatest of all. A trick that he has been cooking for so long. This wasn’t a magic trick because it was himself in his final transformation.
With awe and wonder we watch the Pillar’s inside open up.
I think I finally understand the Pillar’s sickness. It’s not really a sickness. It’s a time bomb. A lifelong transformation. His wiry insides grow into the air with thousands of butterflies flying around.
Now the dead Pillar has caught the Jabberwocky’s attention.
In a morbidly beautiful metamorphoses, the butterflies from the Pillar’s inside knot together and begin to shape into something.
Something larger than the Jabberwocky.
An enormous beast made of butterflies.
You ever wondered what becomes of a pillar?
All of us are staring at Carter Chrysalis Cocoon Pillar, the beast.
In awe and shock, we stand and watch as the Pillar’s after-death beast devours the Jabberwocky like an afternoon meal.
In the back the Cheshire says, “So this is what happens when he dies on his own. I should have killed him. Shit, I should have been this monster!”
The children in the bubble of light stop reading and high five each other. That’s when I know that we won.
Then beast of the Pillar splatters into millions of butterflies flying all over London. From the corner of my eye, this brings a tear to Fabiola’s eyes. She doesn’t understand how he did this?
Frankly, neither do I. I will have to ask Constance later, but as for now, I can smile with a peaceful heart at everything he had done for me--even though I’ve only understood half of it.
“So we’ll never know who he really is?” The March arrives finally, wondering what the hell happened. I guess he had been asleep after falling from the mushroom.
“You mean the Pillar?” Constance says.
We all nod.
She looks at Fabiola and takes her hand again to tell her. I’m dying to know. We all are, but we have to respect his wish, and Fabiola’s privacy.
Later, I sit in farther corner of a building remnants alone. I try to put back some of the other missing pieces. Even though I know that part of the insanity is to never have an answer to everything—like life itself—I can’t help but want to know what Jack Spades meant: you have done the same, Alice, back in Wonderland.
But then it hit me. I remember what I saw inside the Jabberwocky. I remember what Malice said by me using her to do good.