Outside in the harsh winter light stood Lewis Dodgson, clutching his tankard of stale mead and peering off into the distance. He was a very short man, with a greasy, pock-marked face and dirty-blonde hair that slicked and stuck to his forehead. His troll-face penetrated the snowfall with confusion, yet he knew he was at a safe distance from anyone who could be after him. He stood with the tavern door behind him, slightly ajar, unable to be completely opened due to piled-up snow. After another suspicious glare down the sleety lane outside the pub, as if something else were there, he trotted quickly back into the pub.
The pub was dimly lit, old fashioned and the typically cozy haunt of the hard-working men of Oxford. The only odd accessory was a large portrait of Queen Victoria which hung on the wall overlooking the bar, with a sober glare.
“Well Lewis are ye going to keep on taking my wares outside of me premises, or are you going to pay and bloody get out?”
“Oh, uh, right then.” He placed two copper pieces on the bar and tipped his hat. He walked back to the entrance with a feigned sobriety, and before he reached the door, Lewis stumbled due to a sudden splitting headache. It felt to him like something was kicking and pushing against his skull, from the inside out. He backed into the corner by the exit, and spread out his arms and legs just underneath the staircase which led to the barkeep’s room. His old and wrinkled countenance stretched, blinked and extorted in an unbelieving stare into nothingness. Panicked, he heaved the door handle and thrust himself outside. He then yanked his scarf and coat closer around himself, and quite bothered by the brilliant snow that lay everywhere, began to trudge back toward his quaint Oxfordian residence.
* * *
“He’s gone mad, absolutely bonkers, I’m telling you. He’s strictly catatonic, one of my acquaintances down by the University, he what told me about his type.”
“Well you know he ain’t such a bad bloke, just wants to get his work publish’d is all. Only my tuppence…” Hunched over the bar, he gave a small, modest nod and took a long, deep draft from his glass.
“Bollocks, Davenger!” bellowed a deep, urgent voice from a table in the corner, “What good example could possibly be had, by allowing Lewis to go about in public, unsupervised? Think of the women and children, man. ‘I’ve finally figured out how to get me character to work!’, or so he’s been telling us every bleeding day this week. He’s daft.”
“Aw com’ off it, the both of ye. S’no use arguing over what the fool makes of ‘imself,” he lifted up a mug and rubbed the counter underneath it. “Always got that scared look in his eye though, don’ he?” He flung the bar towel across his shoulder, standing up straight. “In fact I may just toss his arse into the gutter, the next time he comes in for a pint! I won’t let him bring his debt problems into my establishment! Seems like someone’s after the bloke, the way he goes on!” The door pushed open, and a sinister, gaunt figure under a flowing black cloak entered silently with the chilling night air.
“S’no issue of debt, Francis!” spoke up another man, “The man is sick! You saw how he went all, all ecliptic under the banister earlier at tea! He ought to be put down, like a dog, man! He’s past his prime anyway. Idiot’s a menace and waste to society.”
“Epileptic, dear Charles, epileptic,” groaned the cloaked figure who had just entered the room. “And don’t go about spreading rumors that Lewis is diseased, as you will find he is regularly of a nervous and stuttering nature, despite his recent change in attitude.”
“The usual, Geoffrey?” proposed Francis, as he took out a plate and pint glass.
“Oh yes,” he replied once he hung his cloak up on the hanger by the door. Geoffrey sat down and was just about to tuck in, when a disbelieving patron spoke up:
“Who the ‘ell izzat?!” exclaimed the hiccupy voice by the door, with a slam of a glass and the shaking of a table. Startled, Geoffrey exclaimed:
“It’s Geoffrey Harrowdown; I’m an old colleague of Mr. Dodgson, and you are…?” The drunken man by the door hit his table with a SLAM, headfirst. Two men picked him up and tossed him with care out the pub door and into the night.
“Perhaps you can shed some light on the subject of our Lewis, Geoffrey, since you seem to know ‘im so well,” suggested Francis. Grunts, nods and “here, here!” filled the tavern, to which Harrowdown responded, putting aside knife and fork, “Well, I heard you talk about dear Lewis as if he were a simpleton as I was entering, but I’ll have you know he and I used to work together down at Christ college, in experimental fiction. You know, he was always a fellow who never spoke too much, but he was very intelligent. I suppose that’s where he had talent in his writing; he always observed and never spoke. And whenever he did speak to the rest of the faculty it was always in metaphor; he always used such an eccentric vocabulary,” he took a long draft from his cup and picked up his cutlery. “He always had an affinity for genres of fantasy and the occult, all the escapist genres. Professor Walthorp even once suggested he was demented, due to a combination of his bouts of queerness and excessive shyness. Poppycock, he’s always been a good chap. We were in secondary together...”
“Shame though, innit? How an ol’ bloke like our Lewis could just go ‘n get so, well, unhinged, I suppose,” muttered Davenger.
“Everything just seems to have lost character for him,” replied Harrowdown, as he stabbed at one of the bangers on his plate. “Ironic thing of it is, he was never any good at coming up with characters in his writing, and the ones he could come up with always seemed like real corpses on paper. Poor fellow never could interact with others well; much less create them in a world where he had complete control.”
* * *
Outside clouds were gathering in a rather somber manner, and it was just the type of sky to allow various rays of sunlight pass through. Lewis pushed the door to his home open with an uncaring ease, allowing his arm to fall back down to his side automatically, almost carelessly. It was already five in the afternoon, just a little past tea. He stepped into his kitchen and halted as the door shut behind him, staring at his wife before him who had just set down for a cup. The kitchen was incredibly small and rectangular, with a ceiling that slanted to the right. All of its wares, surfaces and even the trinkets and fine china hanging on the walls had a worn-down and soft-edged quality. Everything was the color of pastels and seemed to glow with use, age and organization. His wife’s eyes flitted up at him when the door came to, and stayed glued on him nervously as he made his way cautiously to the pink lattice table. They both noticed every miniscule detail of his stop-motion walk toward the tea table, and while seating himself he grumbled in disgust and unfolded his newspaper, which read: The Daily Universal Register 11 January, 1876.
“Oh, lovely weather for this time of year, Lewis,” proposed his wife. Lewis glanced at her momentarily over the top of his newspaper, and returned his gaze to the paper almost as quickly. She picked up her teacup and saucer, and in bringing it to her lips, her eyes fell to the right. She inclined a quick sip and when she returned her saucer and cup to the lattice cloth a slight crack of worry opened up in the corner of her mouth, her eyes still to the right. Although she hadn’t realized it, she had set down her porcelain quite loudly.
“Lewis, I think we need to talk,” she confessed, “is something bothering you? What’s the matter? You’ve changed recently…”
Again the newspaper came down, and he thrust himself up out of his chair, his face repulsed. The immediacy of his jump made the chair scrape back along the thick wooden floor and balance slightly on two rickety legs before falling to its side. He downed the rest of his tea in one gulp while standing and reached for the basement door, which was already cracked slightly, and stumbled impatiently through the doorway. His wife remained fixed in her chair as the shaking and clinking of the saucer and teacup in her hands didn’t seem to bother her.
Lewis began to trot down the staircase before stopping momentarily to grab the straw torch hanging on the stone wall, and lit it with a matchstick he found in his jacket pocket. It took him a good minute and a half to descend his granite slab spiral staircase, and once he made it into his work study he heaved a sigh of relief. The flame from his torch shone over everything in his study, the ceiling of which was low-vaulted and damp with mildew. He started from the bottom of the staircase and paced to the fireplace on the other side of the room, pushing past rows and rows of desks piled with research: bound books, reams of parchment and other artifacts of antiquity. He tossed the torch into his fireplace, which he prepared for himself with wood earlier in the day. The luminosity of the fireplace was minimal, yet more than what the torch could emit. Lewis sat himself down in the gigantic, musty chair by the fireplace, threw his feet up onto the ottoman and with his elbow against the chair’s arm, put his face in his hands. He sighed and snuffled to himself in his armchair, while the buckles of his shoes glowed with dirty, golden specks of brass. Noticing this, Lewis got up from his chair and removed his jacket. He made his way to the nearest table and sat down, brooding over its contents. Complicated diagrams, designs, and instructions for what appeared to be a complicated animal trap were spread out all across the table. Lewis ran his finger over all the minute details of the schematics, mumbling to himself profusely, shaking out tangles in his hair. After a moment he glanced up towards the adjacent work desk and took in his finished prototype, calling to him urgently from under an innocent white sheet. Lewis rose from his chair and removed the white sheet in one swift, smooth motion, tossing it aside. It was an iron cage, perhaps two and a half feet in length, width and height, and gleamed strangely in the light of the fireplace. Lewis picked it up with great care and cautiously set it on the center of the hearth in front of the fireplace, so as to view his results in full clarity.
Lewis got up from his and went to the far wall of his low-vaulted study, and began to fumble with various jars and containers of unidentifiable liquids and objects, real artifacts of the weird and foreign. Soon after he started to search his shelves, however, he bellowed in frustration, screwed his eyes and spontaneously brought an entire shelf of jars and vials to the cobble-stone floor. He then turned on his heel and observed the rest of his study, all the desks and their respective contents. The table closest to him was covered in leather-bound books and scrolls, some of which read: Fictive Fictitious Refpite by Abaddonius, The Seventh Ode of Olympus by Pliny, the Theogony by Hesiod, various Homeric poems and other philosophical works and treatises of old. Nearest to that table was the table which contained all of his previous manuscripts of experimental fiction, which he noticed with a hateful glint in his eyes. Other tables touted books and sheets of parchment with huge diagrams, pictographs and alchemical symbols. There was even one huge illustration on another of the numerous tables which depicted a gigantic, bearded head which housed a fetus in utero rather than a brain. However, in following the instructions of his own blueprints, Lewis did not continue to rampage through and tear at his life’s works. He walked around his study calmly and diligently picked up all of his old manuscripts and books. With his life’s work and research towering up from his arms, Lewis ambled slowly over to the iron cage on the hearth of the fireplace and dropped everything into it. Once the books and reams of parchment fell into the iron cage, they vanished. There was no sound of the volumes hitting the floor. He trampled back and leaned up against the nearest table, staring intently at the unmoving cage and the shadow it cast from the light of the fireplace. After about a minute, the cage began to melt. The fortifications and iron bars began dripping hot, liquid metal which fell fast and pooled together in a bubbling puddle on the ceiling. The cage’s shadow over the hearth slowly took on the shape of the puddle which was accumulating on the ceiling, a strange and counterintuitive sight. It was as if the laws of physics did not care that the physical part of the cage was somewhere else, and Lewis was not surprised by this. As the final bits of metal melted away from the cage, strings and sections of flitting and flickering syntax were slowly revealed. The words themselves lasted only long enough to be read once, and would change immediately into a different word. The strings of words retained the shape of the cage, a verbose outline of what had been there previously. But now inside the cage was a creature which Lewis could not recognize. Its form was defined by fleeting, swift and tumultuous avatars; images that overwhelmed and molested the senses. Its temperaments were simultaneously frightened, coy, demonic, and stoic. It flitted from corner to corner of the cage, bounced up and down and was all at once gnarling, crying, singing, and laughing.
“THERE YOU ARE”, exclaimed Lewis, “this is it! The most real substantiation of character that anyone could ever imagine! I’ll be respected this time! You’re finally out of my head, where you’ve been kicking and screaming for so long. But now that I have you, this world is subject to my control!” The creature initially had a thousand faces, yet as the clock ticked on it began to assume a less protean shape. Lewis could make out green, scaly skin and white, pointed horns on what appeared to be its head. It was taking on the form of a man, but with huge red, circular eyes and a wide mouth with insanely crooked and pointed teeth. It heaved and wheezed riotously as it pulled and chewed on the bars of mutating words, which it could not break and seemed bound by. It now began to laugh menacingly at Lewis, and as it laughed an arrowhead tale sprouted out from behind it.
“Lewis!” shouted a voice descending the staircase, “Lewis, I’m worried about you! I’ve seen all your plans for experiments and satanic drawings. I think you’re sick, and want to take you to see Geoffrey and few doctors in the city. Oh, Lewis, I don’t…”
In a look of disbelief and sheer horror, Lewis turned his head and looked his wife in the eye as she entered the room.
“Dear God, Lewis what is that thing?! IT’S REACHING OUT FOR YOU!”
When he was not looking, the changeling reached out and grabbed Lewis by the ankle, sending him to the floor. It pulled him closer to the cage of rotating and whispering words, and in extorting and transmogrifying its grotesque head through the bars, consumed him. When the changeling pulled its head back into the cage, it hung upside down and screeched in both excitement and agony. After its cry, the lexical container quickly dissipated, and the changeling burst in a gust of evanescence. Lying on the floor of the hearth where the cage had been was a book bound in green, leathery skin, which read in glistening, gold letters: The Life and Sorrows of Lewis Merriweather Dodgson. END
[a rather old piece I did for a college course in writing fiction. basically my imagination didn't know what to do with itself. needs revision]