Missives from Wonderland

This is my entry for LJ Idol: Wheel of Chaos, with the topic "Ambuscade."

The dusty chandelier suddenly dropped and nearly hit her head, but stopped with a jerk. She stifled a scream, then reminded herself to breathe. Staying calm was the only way out of this place. Against her will, she continued moving forward, stepping into the darkness.

Something brushed against her shoulder and scuttled away. A giant spider? She shuddered. "It can't hurt me," she told herself, the mantra she kept repeating, as she took each trembling step.

Through the doorway, a light flickered. Shadows grew on the wall as she approached, and then she saw a piano, sitting in the center of the room, which her eyes now realized was a sort of dilapidated ballroom. The piano was spotlit by a patch of moonlit, shining down through a hole in the ceiling. She couldn't stop looking at it, but knew that she probably shouldn't because...

Behind her shoulder, a spooky voice growled deeply. "Are you here for the party?"

As she turned to look at the phantom voice, the vacant piano suddenly started playing, an ominous tune that grew louder as she whipped her head back around to view it. Frozen in space, she didn't know what to do. Should she walk closer to that damned piano? Or try to find a way around it?

Her decision was made for her as the voice behind her said in booming tones: "Get ready for the dance of the dead!"

A cadre of skeletons emerged from the corners, their faces wide with toothy smiles as they clanged their bony knees together in the rough semblance of a dance. They chased her into the next room and then, just as suddenly, stopped at the doorway and slunk back into the shadows.

How long had she been in this place? Ten minutes? More? It felt like hours, as her legs shook with every step. Naturally, she was in another featureless black corridor. No way to see what surrounded her, but she felt feathery things brushing her face. "They can't hurt me, they can't hurt me," she breathed.

A red light grew ahead, flickering like a fire. She didn't know where this hallway was taking her but figured it couldn't be worse than the Dead Can Dance party.

A squealing sound next to her -- like a cat whose tail had just been stomped -- forced her to walk faster, despite her desire. Before long, she found herself in a cave-like room, with alcoves lit by flickering candles. In the center lay a sable coffin, with a barely perceptible name carved into the sides: D-R-A-C-U was all she could make out.

To her dismay, she knew she would not be able to get through this room without walking right next to the coffin. Perhaps if she sucked her breath in, she could go by unnoticed. Or maybe the right thing to do was just run? As terror drove her knocking knees forward, the lid of the coffin creaked open. Her breath caught. Then, behind her and much too close, she heard a heavily-accented voice: "I vant to suck your blood!"

By instinct, she whipped around and punched blindly into the dark, colliding with a surprisingly warm and soft body.

"Damn it!" the vampire shouted, bent over in pain. His black leatherette cape hung over his shoulders like an oversized towel. "They don't pay me enough for this," he gasped.

Immediately, her brain cleared, the fear that had clouded it dissipating like a bad dream. "I'm -- I'm so sorry," she muttered.

Like a prizefighter who had just lost the match, he remained bent over. "I know, I know. They all say that," he said. "But you're the last one. I'm done with this." He straightened up, he threw up his hands and started marching out of the room, to a door she hadn't even noticed before. As she watched, agape, he turned around and asked, "So, are you coming, or what?"

"You'll show me the way out?"

"Yes, of course," he said. "No reason for you to fight your way out."

The door he opened didn't creak: it barely made a sound. And once they were through it, the lighting switched to a dim fluorescence. The floor was clear of obstructions. She could see on both sides of her: nothing but a nondescript hallway of simple boards.

As they made their way through the snaky hallway, she could hear phantom moans and groans through the walls. Occasionally, she heard an unprogrammed scream, often followed by nervous laughter. She felt ridiculous, having ever been fooled by all of the sounds and visual tricks.

She wanted to talk to the vampire, but she didn't really know what to say to someone she'd gut-punched. Other than to apologize again, profusely, and assure him she'd never done anything like that before.

The pain must have worn off, because he brushed her apology aside with an easy laugh and said, "Don't sweat it." While the first part of her journey through the haunted house seemed to take hours, exiting it this way seemed to take mere seconds. She was almost sorry for the experience to end.

He opened the last door, the one that led to the carnival outside. A blast of color and noise met her, and she laughed at herself for ever being afraid. A carnival barker drew her attention, asking her if she wanted to win a purple gorilla. She said no.

Then, she turned back to her hero. "Thank you," she said, but her words trailed off, unheard. He'd already disappeared into the brightly-lit carnival grounds on the crisp fall evening.

---

This was based on a dream I once had. I used to have recurring dreams about going through a terrifying funhouse. While I knew it was fake, I was still very frightened.

Then, one night in a dream, I actually punched a vampire who jumped out at me. We had an exchange very similar to the one recounted above, with him leading me out of the haunted house. Since then, not only have I not had this recurring dream, but I've been more at ease with visiting real-life haunted houses when the opportunity arises.





A blurry photo of some of the day-glo spooks in my favorite haunted house, at Knoebel's Grove Amusement park in Elysburg, PA.

This is my entry for LJ Idol: Wheel of Chaos. This week's topic was "Re-imagine another contestant's entry." My piece is an alternate view of halfshellvenus's piece, "Cursecraft."


The Evil Queen had a name, but nobody ever asked her for it. She supposed they were too terrified: bobbing their heads and mumbling, "Your Majesty" before they could be zapped. It was just as well. Ursula Payne was a fine name, but a bit too much on the long, warty nose, to be honest.

And long her nose was, which was fitting for her elevated position. In fact, her schnoz had gotten longer over time, just as she'd turned a deeper shade of green, which changed shades with her mood. She turned lime green when in good spirits and acid green when she was in a foul temper. Right now, she was a neutral fern color.

Like her nose, her skin tone was enhanced with a glamour spell. She used it to make herself look perfectly evil. It saved her hours of hair and makeup, and it gave her an excuse to send her hairstylist to the oubliette.

As powerful as she was, Ursula often grew bored. She hadn't had to struggle for existence in such a long time that she couldn't remember what it was like. Her former schoolmate, Helga McTwittle, reminded her what those days had been like: scraping for every penny, hiring herself out for magical grunt work. I mean, Helga created potions for talking animals and magical creatures! Ursula shuddered at the thought.

Ursula lived in a fortress made of black galaxy granite, with accents of obsidian. While she could have whipped it up herself with a fabricate spell, she'd enchanted an entire village with a mind-control spell instead. Suddenly, they had all hit upon the idea of creating the darkest-looking castle ever made. They'd spent years planning the structure, hewing the stone, and heaving it into place, proud of their work. Proud, that is, until she finally released them from the spell and let them see the dreadful result of their labor, as well as the dastardly inhabitant who had taken possession.

That had made her laugh for several days, an evil peel that sounded off the bat-shaped turrets and bounced into the now-cowering valley below.

Once, she'd gotten so bored that Ursula had transfigured one of the village children into a mouse, but the mouse had still acted human, walking on its hind legs and playing hopscotch. She wasn't entirely certain the child had noticed the change.

The most tedious aspect of her reign had to be the weekly audience with those entreating favors. They would line the hallway that led to her throne room, murmuring anxiously. When they reached her, they would whine, "Please accept this fatted calf to remove the blight from our fields." "Would you kindly lift the mouse spell from my daughter so that she can return to school?" "Would you accept this golden comb and diamond tiara to release my brother, the hairdresser, from the oubliette?" Yawn.

The only thing she hated more than boredom was whining. She fulfilled most of the requests just to make the people go away. But to keep them on their toes, once in a while, she augmented their troubles instead.

"You made my goiter bigger! I look like I've got a second head now!"

"Well, that's what you get for sniffing the roses in the foyer."

"But they smell so good!" the supplicant whined.

"Too bad," Ursula sneered. "You didn't have to sound like a rutting moose while you were smelling them."

The steady stream of petitioners didn't originate only from her magical misdeeds. She fielded a fair number of requests from people who didn't understand how nature works. Sure, she could make the snow go away, but it might take a couple months, she'd tell them. They'd go away, mystified, but they'd sing her praises when spring came.

Occasionally, she met with someone who must have been sent there on a dare. "Can you turn me into a bear? I want to scare my little brother until he pees."

So, she vanished his clothing. "There, you're bare." He turned beet-red and ran down the crowded hallway as fast as he could go while shielding himself. Ursula laughed so hard she peed herself a little.

No matter how mercurial she could be, the crowds kept coming. Perhaps she shouldn't have magicked the castle gargoyles into softly humming songs of promised riches and wonders all day long. She couldn't even remember why she'd done that, but she thought it might have been to distract attention away from the ginger mermaid down by the ocean's edge who sang simpering songs in the moonlight. Dreadful.

Every once in a while, the serfs gave her something truly useful in return, like the woodsman who agreed to do away with that pale imitation of beauty who was shacking up with a bunch of dwarves. He might have succeeded if not for Ursula's erstwhile friend, Helga.

After he returned with the heart of a pig, instead of the heart of the brunette, Ursula had forced him to drink a time-tracer potion which had caused him to relate the previous 24 hours in detail. That's how she'd learned about his dilly-dallying at a very familiar-sounding house made of cookies and candy. After that encounter, he'd gone off-course, and Ursula knew whom to blame. Well, that could never stand. Who was Helga to confound the orders of the Evil Queen?

The next day, Ursula took action. She left the castle, disguised as a princess, and traveled into the woods to Helga's house. Once she was there, though, she couldn't quite think what to do. So she made up a story about being bored with the life of a princess and demanded that Helga turn her into a dragon.

When Helga aimed a transfiguration spell at her, Ursula fought it back with a silent counter spell, modifying Helga's spell enough so that she only turned into a tiny salamander. Helga gulped stupidly.

During her subsequent tries, Ursula launched a protective bubble around herself, so that Helga's efforts had no effect until Ursula morphed herself back into her princess form. Fortunately, the protective bubble was still intact when Helga hit her with a forgetting spell. That would have ruined all the fun.

Her confidence shattered, Helga began to mess up on her own quite royally. The peasants gossiped incessantly about how the witch in the woods only produced a pathetic number of daggers for the rat king when he demanded an army. And now the kingdom was plagued with human-sized nutcrackers, lording about the place.

To her delight, Ursula heard that Helga had become worse than a laughingstock: she was simply overlooked. A nonentity, as harmless as a white rabbit in a waistcoat.

That will teach her to stand in the way of the Evil Queen, Ursula thought.

As far as she was concerned, the matter was closed. She'd had her bit of fun, and Helga had learned her lesson. It had given Ursula an excuse to try on a new glamour, and she'd liked it so much that she'd taken the Princess character on the road. She developed a habit of popping in at balls, wooing princes, and dashing off before they got her name. As she fled, she'd leave a trinket behind for them to obsess over, and then transfigure herself into a hag so that she could sit outside the castle walls and listen to them swoon.

In fact, Ursula had become so highly entertained with her new games that she completely forgot about Helga until the silly thing showed up with a basket of fresh cookies. They smelled divine.

Immediately, Ursula's ire fell away, and she turned a lovely sea green. One bite of the dark chocolate cookies with crushed peppermint, and Ursula remembered the days of their youth, when the two of them would trade spells and cake recipes. Maybe she'd been too harsh on her?

Ursula should have known better. No sooner did she have a mouthful of cookie than she found herself with Helga's wand shoved in her face. For an instant, she felt the terrible pain of having her magic pulled out of her very cells.

Acting without thinking, she grabbed the magic mirror next to her throne and called out "Reciproco." The mirror trembled as it reflected the spell's force back to the traitor. Her old friend's magic enveloped Ursula in a twinkling cloud. Then, with a flick of her wrist, she absorbed it into herself.

She snorted at Helga. "Nice try," she told her. For a moment, she contemplated crushing Helga to crumbs, or at least giving her a goiter. But when she saw the pathetic woman trembling in her crusty boots, she was hit with an unfamiliar emotion. Was this what pity felt like?

With a snarl, she dismissed the diminished witch but held onto the cookies.

The experience ruined Ursula's good mood. She no longer went dancing with princes or tried to beguile upstart wannabes into eating foul apples. Instead, she found herself staring for long moments out her attic window, far across the fields towards the forest.

Once it had forgiven her for subjecting it to a direct magical attack, the Magic Mirror allowed her a glimpse of her former friend. Helga sat around, deflated, apparently without even the energy to rub toads on her face; her complexion was clearing up for the first time since adolescence.

Why on earth did Ursula care?

When she'd finished the last of the cookies, Ursula made a plan. She couldn't disguise herself as the Princess again, because there was too much risk of running into a former suitor and getting one's foot shoved into a glass shoe.

Instead, she made herself into the least fearsome thing she could contemplate: a young deer. While her original plan had been to get close enough to squish some of Helga's magic back into her when she wasn't paying attention, she couldn't help sampling a bit of chocolate icing from one of the eaves.

The next thing she knew, Helga was shooing her off with a dish towel. Really? How pathetic is that? Oh, poor thing. Was this... compassion?

Ursula found herself speaking honestly for the first time in ages. She may have looked like a deer, but it was her words as she told the witch how much she loved her baked goods. Before she could stop herself, she'd urged her to start a bakery.

And wouldn't you know it? Helga did. Before long, she was winning rave reviews from talking frogs and princesses alike. Watching from afar, Ursula was pleased to see the business prosper. Soon, the villagers began bringing these prized baked goods to Ursula as tributes, and she couldn't be happier.

Every once in a while, she even disguised herself as a child so that she could taste them fresh out of the oven, offering to do chores in return. For that delightful first bite of rich cocoa and sugar, she'd even gladly sweep the floor.