Lewis Carroll - Alice in Zombieland

‘Well, if I must, I must,’ the King said, with a melancholy air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, ‘What are tarts made of?’

‘Pepper, mostly,’ said the cook.

‘Treacle,’ said a sleepy voice behind her.

‘Collar that Dormouse,’ the Queen shrieked out. ‘Behead that Dormouse! Turn that Dormouse out of court! Suppress him! Pinch him! Off with his whiskers!’

For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down again, the cook had disappeared.

‘Never mind!’ said the King, with an air of great relief. ‘Call the next witness.’ And he added in an undertone to the Queen, ‘Really, my dear, you must cross-examine the next witness. It quite makes my forehead ache!’

Alice watched the Black Rat as he fumbled over the list, feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like, ‘—for they haven’t got much evidence yet ,’ she said to herself. Imagine her surprise, when the Black Rat read out, at the top of his shrill little voice, the name ‘Alice!’

‘Here!’ cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jury-box with the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the zombies on to the heads of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset the week before. Some of the undead were making grabs for various members of the frightened and panicked audience. Alice could see one small bird subsumed by three of the zombie jurors and it disappeared in a shower of gore and feathers, with no time for even a squawk. Another zombie juror wrestled with a zombie lobster for a whiting, tearing the poor thing in half with their violent claws.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ she exclaimed in a tone of great dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could, for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once and put back into the jury-box, or they would die.

‘The trial cannot proceed,’ said the King in a very grave voice, ‘until all the jurymen are back in their proper places— all ,’ he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as he said do.

The Queen hammered unseen buttons on her metal box and soon the zombies seemed to calm down and stop eating their fellow creatures. She brandished the stick, glowering down into the excited crowd. Her face was enough to quiet them.

Alice looked at the jury-box, and saw that, in her haste, she had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable to move. To her great dismay, Bill’s tail snapped in half and went on wiggling at her feet. She soon got it out again, and put it right; ‘not that it signifies much,’ she said to herself; ‘I should think it would be quite as much use in the trial one way up as the other.’

As soon as the zombie jury had a little recovered from the shock of being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open, gazing up into the roof of the court.

‘What do you know about this business?’ the King said to Alice.

‘Nothing,’ said Alice.

‘Nothing whatever ?’ persisted the King.

‘Nothing whatever,’ said Alice.

‘That’s very important,’ the King said, turning to the jury. They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when the Black Rat interrupted: ‘ Un important, your Majesty means, of course,’ he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.

‘ Un important, of course, I meant,’ the King hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, ‘important—unimportant—unimportant—important—’ as if he were trying which word sounded best.

Some of the jury wrote it down ‘important,’ and some ‘unimportant.’ Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; ‘but it doesn’t matter a bit,’ she thought to herself.

At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out ‘Silence!’ and read out from his book, ‘Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court .’

Everybody looked at Alice.

‘ I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice.

‘You are,’ said the King.

‘Nearly two miles high,’ added the Queen, fingering her metal box, eyeing the zombies surrounding her. For the first time, Alice thought the older woman seemed to be a bit frightened by the sheer number of undead that surrounded her and the King. In any case, she clutched tightly at the box for protection. She hefted the killing stick, ready for a moment’s use.

‘Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,’ said Alice: ‘besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.’

‘It’s the oldest rule in the book,’ said the King.

‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice.

The King turned pale, and shut his note-book hastily. ‘Consider your verdict,’ he said to the jury, in a low, trembling voice.

‘There’s more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,’ said the Black Rat, jumping up in a great hurry; ‘this paper has just been picked up.’

‘What’s in it?’ said the Queen.

‘I haven’t opened it yet,’ said the Black Rat, ‘but it seems to be a letter, written by the prisoner to—to somebody.’

‘It must have been that,’ said the King, ‘unless it was written to nobody, which isn’t usual, you know.’

‘Who is it directed to?’ said one of the jurymen.

‘It isn’t directed at all,’ said the Black Rat; ‘in fact, there’s nothing written on the outside .’ He unfolded the paper as he spoke, and added ‘It isn’t a letter, after all: it’s a set of verses.’

‘Are they in the prisoner’s handwriting?’ asked another of they jurymen.

‘No, they’re not,’ said the Black Rat, ‘and that’s the queerest thing about it.’

‘He must have imitated somebody else’s hand,’ said the King.

‘Please your Majesty,’ said the Knave, ‘I didn’t write it, and they can’t prove I did: there’s no name signed at the end.’

‘If you didn’t sign it,’ said the King, ‘that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name like an honest man.’

There was a general clapping of hands at this: it was the first really clever thing the King had said that day.

‘That proves his guilt,’ said the Queen. She was so enraged and red-faced, she quite forgot all about the metal box and let it fall near her feet. Alice took note of it and edged a bit closer to her.

‘It proves nothing of the sort!’ said Alice. ‘Why, you don’t even know what they’re about!’

She could almost touch the box with her foot now.

‘Read them,’ said the King.

The Black Rat put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

These were the verses the Black Rat read:

They told me you had been to her,

And mentioned me to him: