The Mad Tasseographer

The cathedral was not as big on the inside as it seemed from the outside: it was bigger. The place was a literal cavern of marble and metal; the checkered floor of the place curved and depressed, and the walls vaulted storeys upon storeys upward, lined by uniform and smooth white beams, encasing the cold, massive hollow in a great stone ribcage. Pallid light trickled in through slits far above, from domes and skylights, sharpened by inversions of the spikes and spires that—Alice surmised—crowned up from them on the outside. If the slaughterhouse was like the reeking entrails of the necropolis, this monumental structure of spikes, pale stone, and cold space was the skeletal structure that ran through and enveloped and shaped it all.

The yawning emptiness of the hollow through which they walked was a welcome loneliness after the streets and the slaughterhouse—though only a loneliness, not aloneness: barely visible and flickering like shrouded ghosts in the shadows behind the rib-pillars were the variable forms of Underlanders in especially white garb. Acolytes, perhaps. Alisabeth averted her eyes from them; they were hard to see anyway, and they didn’t seem to be paying she and Taxis any mind. Didn’t seem to be though, until two of the forms peeled out from the darkness and into the light of the hollow, in step beside them. 

Alice’s gaze found them then, darted between them as they drew near. Their statures were massively different; to her left, a mouse-like creature, shorter even than Taxis; to her right, a hulking thing, not dissimilar from the Duchess’ beasts but set apart by the hare ears on its head and the sentience in its eyes. Both armoured in pure white metal, stark against their black pelts. Both with faces obscured by shuttered visors. Both silent.

“Who…?” Alice breathed sidelong to Taxis.

The rabbit did not sneer now, but only cast an anxious glance aside, barely meeting her eyes. Whether she was restrained by residual gratitude or a quieting fear was unclear to Alisabeth. She figured it was fairly safe to assume both were true. “The Tasseographer’s keepers. The Rook to the left, and the Knight to the right,” she murmured.

“Naturally,” Alice sighed. “Rook and Knight—like chess pieces?”

“Of course.” Taxis cleared her throat, turned her head. She was looking down now, down into the descending depth of the hollow towards which they drew, deadened eyes wide and fixed. Her voice dropped then, barely a whisper upon whatever facsimile of breath the Underlanders used to speak. “Alisabeth, I’m certain I won’t be coming with you to speak with the Tasseographer, so I must tell you something before you go. You must know—” she paused, glances flitting between the Rook and Knight “—you must know not to let down your guard in his presence. The Tasseographer is great and brilliant and—and oh, I fear—very, very old, and very, very mad. You may not guess it, but… oh, the things he does, the madness—! Such is why he has keepers nowadays, you see—it is the maggots, surely. Surely only the maggots. And you see, that is why one can’t leave their mouth open: the flies, and then…! Oh, but—please, do be careful. That is all I am trying to say. That is all.”

By the time Taxis finished, glancing between the two escorts once more as the last words left her, their path had begun to darken; away from the filtered skylights they had delved, the hollow narrowing around them until it became a dark and deep ravine in which they stood at the bottom. The stone of the floor eroded from greyish checker to the same white of the bone-like structures reaching above still: the spine at which they all joined. Each block of it was a staggered vertebrae, falling into the blackness in stairs that stepped down and down and down. They were already descending—descending to the Tasseographer, the great and brilliant and old and mad. 

Alice’s breath quickened with each step. He breathed to speak, maybe to call for a retreat, but then suddenly, as if materializing from the darkness, the door was already there. It loomed, grand and fearsome in hammered metal: a terrible and intricate mausoleum vault. The Rook and the Knight stepped forward and opened it in tandem, opened it out towards Alisabeth in an exhale of green-black mist—green-black mist with none of the familiarity of the cemetery, of home, but all of the same death. Nothing could be seen behind it. 

When Alice looked around himself, Taxis was gone. All there was was the shovel in his hand, the guards that held the doors open, and the greenish void within them. He breathed into the third as he stepped through the threshold; the second fell away, shutting him in with a creaking clang of metal sealing on metal; the third, he clutched as he stood in the utter blackness, clutched with all the unyielding solidity and stiffness of rigor mortis—a rigor mortis pounding with pulse, felt in the tightness of his palm against the worn wood. This was a mausoleum vault, utterly inescapable death. This was dread.

It was only after a few seconds that Alisabeth’s heartbeat became quiet enough to hear the clicking over. Infinitesimal but unavoidable once detected, the sound skittered like so many carrion-loving insects crawling over each other and bones and stone—the stone of the floor and walls and ceiling before and around Alice. “Christ,” she could not help from whispering—but a whisper was all it took. Suddenly, the darkness flared into green light—dim all the same, but visible and lined, positively lined with squirming, winding, pulsing white bodies of undulating flesh: elongated, overgrown, engorged maggots, all along the floor, walls, ceiling, clicking.

Alice was going to vomit. Her vision spun as bile hit her palate. She staggered forward, gloved hand clamping over her mouth, and something thick squished under her foot. She would have screamed if all the partially-digested matter that roiled and frothed in the pit of her stomach hadn’t shot out first, before the sound even had a chance to surface. She stumbled in regurgitative action, fell—but did not meet the ground. She was suspended over her own sick which now marred the white floor, although it was being swiftly eaten up by one of the horrible maggots, ridged mouth glutting upon it in the blind instinct to devour. She was suspended by a long and fleshy limb—another maggot—holding her up by the shoulder and pulling her to her feet, up to come face to face with something even more repulsive than the worms writhing around her: a completely green, pocked and speckled, slipping, yet youthful face, with yellow teeth and torn lips and pulsing white eyeballs. Young, but evidently ancient: completely rotted, decayed in body as much as mind. Madness. The Tasseographer.

His left eye squelched and clicked out of its socket, worming out in maggot hunger into the misty air, as he stared at her. “Why, why! Hullo! You’ve thrown your insides out, my friend!” His voice was small and ragged, talking like a broken baby doll. His face stretched around every syllable, threatening skin slippage with each word, contorting. Alice couldn’t look at his face any longer, so she looked down again. That was when she realized the worm holding her up flowed from and ran through the Tasseographer’s body, protruding from his shoulder socket where an arm should be. All of his limbs were the same. She couldn’t help but wonder, as her eyes dropped further to the floor and watched her vomit be consumed, how many of the flesh-tube mouths squirming around her right then were attached to him, how many of them would eat what had been inside of her too. The thought fortified her will to keep from regurgitating a second time, in some counterintuitive way.

“Friend?” the corpse said again. “Oh! Sickness! Oh, the living—yes, yes! Sickness: I do remember. I can remember! I remember. Yes: you must drink! Some tea. You’ll be feeling right after that!”

Already, the revolting limbs that lined the room set in motion, moving as if in concert back into some deep shadowy place further into the vault. With great speed they returned, a serrated mouth carrying within its teeth a simple, white teacup—not too full of but certainly carrying a dark reddish-brown liquid—into the grasp of the maggot that was the Tasseographer’s other arm. It looked enough like tea for Alice not to recoil when he held it to her, but not dissimilar enough to oxidized blood for her to want to consume it. 

She didn’t have a choice in the matter though; from simply holding it close to her, the Tasseographer then shoved the cup to her lips, tipping it until the lukewarm and pungent liquid slid over her tongue and down her throat. She choked against it, about as much of the tea spattering onto herself and the corpse in front of her as she managed to swallow. But then the cup was gone and the air was back in her; she coughed hard, still held on her feet all the while by the Tasseographer’s pulsing arm.

“There! Now you’ll feel better.” Though he spoke to Alice, his attention was engrossed in the cup that he withdrew. A small amount of liquid still slid around in it, against the smooth white porcelain. Tiny fragments of pulverized herbs floated about in it, suspended as the maggot-arm swirled it around in its rhythmically oscillating motion. He stared at them, his grotesquely chipper demeanour slipping like flaking layers of flesh from his face as the dark specks spun about. A look almost of trance replaced it. 

“Ohhh,” the Tasseographer sighed as his whole body began to fall in with the motion, swaying Alisabeth along with it until she was dizzy and nauseated anew. They stayed in that state for some time, seconds stretching to minutes, until all at once he stopped. His entire form, worms and all, straightened upward, the maggot-limb with the cup in hand extending directly into the air. When Alice looked up to it, she saw that all of the other maggots in the room were doing the same, drifting toward it and clicking in horrible symphony all the while. 

Suddenly, the teacup was flipped completely upside down. The remaining liquid spilled out in a sprinkle of residuals, but just as quickly as the vessel was tipped it was righted, preserving the dregs within. It seemed the whole vault, all the disgusting worms within, sighed in echo of the Tasseographer as the arm then brought the cup back down, descending in a dark and green fall until it was between he and Alice. Yet all the while, his eyes were completely unfixed either on the tea leaves or on her or on anything else in this reality: truly, they were dead as anything.

The Tasseographer sighed again, and the sigh became words. “Ohhh, the bonny boy in blue and white,” he groaned, “comes again, again. Again, to my prophecy. And again, I see—I see!” A yellow smile, cracking and painful, widened and widened across his face—a grimacing, wincing grin. Alisabeth’s heart pounded against her laryngeal prominence, beating against it in a bobbing and futile attempt at escape, as a cold chuckle began to creep out from within the corpse before her. His prophecy—he sees—again…?

“Again?” she whispered.

An exhale drawn, pulled out from between the grin’s black gap: “I see in the leaves: I see in the dregs the murder, the succession, the ascension of the new queen of all Underland. I see your victory: I see your downfall!” A terrific laughter tore from him, screaming like all the madness in any world, of the living or the dead. The cup fell to the floor, shattering on vomit-sodden marble, slithering with maggots. The two that made his arms came suddenly to Alisabeth’s face, gnawing mouths at her cheeks. She cried out at the abrasive touch, at the leering and laughing prophet in front of her, but he did not stop. 

“Bathed in red and with its head

Comes the bonny boy to us, the dead!

And we shall bow down and kiss the hand

Of the new Queen of all Underland!

“Ohhh, into the ceremonial armour, and into the nest of the queen of Underwocky! You must go, my friend, and go to checkmate! Checkmate! Checkmate!”

The metal door so far behind her Alice now tore open with a violent creak. The clicking all around her increased tenfold as the maggots recoiled from the fresh air, recoiled away into the shelter of the mists. The Tasseographer’s dead gaze met hers for just one moment—just a second of clarify—before suddenly they and the gnashing mouths on her face were gone, replaced by two sets of black-furred paws: the Rook and Knight, dragging her from the terror and insanity of the vault, up the stairs, and away to where Taxis stood at the top of the descending spine, waiting with eyes wide. Alisabeth returned the stare, her own eyes even wider and in them, perhaps, the few dregs of madness.