Andrew Buckley - Stiltskin

“Ma’am, have you been drinking?”

“No,” said Gertrude and took another swig from the bottle. “Listen to me, you idiot, do you think I could make this up? I’m not drunk. There’s a hippo wearing a tutu outside my door. Come down and see for yourself. Oh, you probably can’t because you’re upside down. Now I think of it, you’re very calm for someone who’s upside down.”

“Look, lady, just sleep it off and I’m sure everything will be fine,” said the operator and hung up.

Gertrude downed the rest of the Scotch and turned it upside down to brandish the bottle as a weapon as there came another knock at the door. She crept over to the door, tightened her grip on the bottle, swung open the door and let out a war cry that would have made an Apache Indian proud.

Mrs Tibbot from the first floor was quite unprepared when Gertrude lunged at her, swinging an empty Scotch bottle.

Gertrude realized at the last minute that she was about to assault a seventy-year-old woman who was possibly the furthest thing from a hippopotamus wearing a tutu. Everyone knew that a seventy-year-old woman isn’t really the furthest thing from a hippopotamus wearing a tutu. The furthest thing was actually a wombat wearing a negligee, a sad but true fact of life.

She released the empty Scotch bottle, which shattered against the hallway wall, raining glass upon Mrs Tibbot, who screamed and shuffled off down the hall as fast as her seventy years would allow.

“Mrs Tibbot,” shouted Gertrude, “it’s quite all right, I just thought you were a hippo!”

Gertrude stalked back into her apartment and closed the door.

“Bloody stupid tenants,” she said to herself. She grabbed a broom and dustpan to clean up the glass in the hallway, swung open the door, and almost tripped over an alligator. The hippopotamus, which was still sporting the tutu, stared at Gertrude with love in its eyes.

Gertrude shrieked and ran back into her apartment, slammed the door, and locked all seven of the deadbolts she’d had installed. She grabbed a second bottle of Scotch from her liquor cabinet, settled down into the corner of her living room and resolved to keep drinking until all this madness ended.

At that moment, the creature in Robert’s apartment vanished and reality as Gertrude knew it, without alligators, hippos, and tutus, returned to normal.

Robert regained consciousness and immediately began to panic. For some reason, he couldn’t see, he was completely blind, he couldn’t be blind, what had happened? Had those small men plucked out his eyes? He didn’t want to live blind, he liked looking at things, he liked having the use of his eyes and… Realization dawned on him and, feeling like a complete idiot, Robert opened his eyes.

Several things were staring down at Robert as he lay on the floor. The first one he noticed was Lily, because she was beautiful; the second was the angry-looking blond gentleman who looked only a little less angry than before. The two small men who looked to Robert a lot like garden Gnomes were whispering between themselves while casting sidelong glances down to where he was lying. They seemed to be arguing about something. The last person staring at him was not a person at all but a giant white rabbit wearing a red housecoat. The rabbit looked sad and clutched its left shoulder with a fuzzy paw. It looked injured.

“What?” was all Robert could come up with.

Lily and the blond man helped him up so he was standing face to face with the giant rabbit.

“Robert,” began Lily, “this is the White Rabbit. He’s the Regulator. He lives here at the Exchange. All of these other rabbits worked for him.”

“What?” said Robert again.

“A bit slow, isn’t he?” said the White Rabbit with a flawless British accent that sounded a lot like Noel Coward. It was the kind of accent that indicated to everyone else in the room that the owner of the accent was far better than anyone within ten square miles. “I would have thought that with his lineage he would be a bit quicker on his feet. Why don’t you all come into the back room and we can talk about this.”

“You two,” said the blond to the Gnomes, “go and report back to your general.”

“Go to hell, ya Giant-killing moron,” snarled the Gnome on the left. The Gnomes hopped down off the counter they had been occupying and vanished out the door.

Lily took Robert’s hand and guided him through the circular door behind the counter. The White Rabbit looked at his dead rabbits and shook his head sadly before climbing through the doorway.

The back room was basically how the average person’s living room would look if it was moved into a cave that had been carved out by rabbits. There was a coffee table, a couple of end tables, a rather nice couch, a beat-up looking recliner, a blazing fireplace, and a big screen TV. A small kitchenette had been built into one corner. The overall feeling was warm and cosy.

“Be a darling, Jack, and make us some tea. I dare say we could all use a cup right about now,” said the Rabbit.

The blond man, Jack, busied himself in the kitchenette.

Robert took a seat on the couch next to Lily while the White Rabbit settled into the recliner. He pulled his paw away from his shoulder to reveal a deep knife wound that was still trickling blood.

“Are you going to be okay?” asked Lily.

“I should be fine,” said the Rabbit, “in a matter of hours this will be nothing more than a scratch and a painful recollection. One of the advantages of being imbued with magical significance, you know.”

Jack brought over a tray of cups and handed everyone their tea, then sat down in front of the fire. Robert noted that Jack must have played rugby in his younger days; he looked strong, well built but a little worn around the edges. His blond hair was tied back; his eyes looked stern but tired. Robert would have placed him in his mid-forties.

“Robert, this is Jack,” said Lily. “He’s an Agent, like me.”

“I’m sorry about before,” said Jack, “you can imagine how it looked, you standing there with the knife and the dead rabbits everywhere.”

“Uh, yeah, I can see how that would be a bad first impression.” Robert could tell that Jack was hiding something. There had been some sort of recollection in his eyes in that moment when he had entered the Exchange and seen Robert holding the knife. Robert’s thoughts were interrupted by the White Rabbit.

“Clearly the events that have transpired here today and the tragedy that has occurred within these walls have not happened without reason. I assume that you, Lily, and you, Jack, have come to explain just what is going on. What I don’t understand was why the Dwarf attacked me and killed my staff and why there is an Othasider sitting here in my living room. An event that I can assure you has not happened in a very long time. So, let’s start at the beginning shall we?”

Amillion thoughts buzzed around in Robert’s head and not one of them made sense. “Look, I know that something serious is going on and I’m all for going with the flow but I would like to know what’s going on here. I have so many questions and it seems that things just continue to get more and more confusing. I’d honestly be happy understanding maybe a quarter of what’s happened today.”

Lily, Jack, and the White Rabbit stared at Robert as if they’d momentarily forgotten he’d been in the room. Ten minutes of chatting had taken Robert from slightly confused to very confused. He had so readily accepted the fact that there was a completely new world hiding behind the reality that everyone else knew but now he was feeling more and more like a tourist being dragged around by people he didn’t know. And to what end? In a way, he was honoured to be here in the living room of a giant White Rabbit, but why had he been dragged along in the first place? The Dwarf that had randomly appeared in his bathtub had obviously known who he was.