A Lease on Wonderland

Reflection or Reflected

It took a second or two, but Haddler's smile reemerged the rest of the way after a brief look of confusion. "Oh, Lise, that is stupid, isn't it?"

"Then prove to me you are where you think you are."

"You mean you think I'm dreaming this whole thing up," Haddler mocked.

"Sort of, but which dreamt it?" said Lise. "Not you."

Now where had he heard or read that before? He knew he had heard something like it somewhere in spoken words. Was it a twinkling? It was a blinking anyway. Like the blink of an eye it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He looked around him just to see if he could discover a twinkling now, but it moved faster than a twinkling.

In Haddler's distraction, Lise grabbed his hand which had loosened from the bar, and she shoved it into the heart.

Plinkle, came the most twinkling of sounds.

Haddler yanked his hand away. He rubbed it on his coat as he glared at Lise. Then he glared at his hand. He felt the same. It looked the same. He wiggled his fingers. Then he threw his head once more at Lise, but she was busy at the controls.

Steam hissed all around, and it was getting steadily worse. The heart itself seemed to be working harder than before— louder, deeper, more violently. The steam was overwhelming.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, but his voice was drowned by the hissing steam and the echoing titanic clockwork.

The thrwock, throok was going right through him like a sieve. It was... well, it was actually painful. More painful than...

Through him in and through him out. Every thrwock for every throok. Every second all consuming, the steam punk Hatter Matthias Haddler could concentrate on nothing else. In. Out. Up. Down. Pressure. Release. It was like a dry water torture. Pulsing through his skull, coursing between his ribs and spine to reverberate through his chest. He could not even breathe. It was a plunge and a thrust. Plunge. Thrust.

Lub. Dub.

A light bulb went on if only in his mind, but he could almost see it tangibly. He realized that it was his own heart!

He almost did not understand it at first, but now there could be no denying it. It came back to him. His own heart. It was as if he had forgotten it. Could anything sound so insane? When was the last time he had felt his own heartbeat? How idiotic!

Yet he was immobilized by it. It was a horror. Lub, dub, lub, dub. It was his own metronome as though he himself was the metronome. It was his own ticking and tocking as though he was threaded through on the line of Time. A slave in chains that ticked with every tock right through his chest throbbing with the agony of it until the bitter end when all little candles go out from this life that was but only a dream.

But whose dream? His dream? Her dream? The dream of a pantheon of gods torturing all that they dreamed up? But if it was a dream perhaps even they could not control what happened within their own dream worlds. Their power for creating might be completely automatic when they were sleeping.

There was an echo of wind blowing blusteringly. First one way. Then another. It was almost in time with the lubbing and dubbing, but it was certainly not in tune. How he could keep thinking at all, he could not fathom, but then why did it matter where one's head happened to be? A brain could keep working in theory as long as it was in one's head.

He was in an endless sea. Boiling churning within him rather than from without him. The heat was unbearable. The breeze was even wheezing. Wheezing, wheezing, panting, gasping.