Figment - Jace Cameron - Страница 40
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"He has a name?"
"Of course. If he hadn't just popped up on national TV, I would have had time to tell you."
"Why am I going back in time if we know his name?"
"Because his name is Gorgon Ramstein."
Chapter 5 1
Wolsey's kitchen, Christ Church, Oxford University
Gorgon Ramstein, dressed in his cook's outfit, was chopping carrots on a metallic kitchen table in Wolsey's kitchen. He wasn't really cooking, or preparing to. Chopping carrots was his personal meditation to calm himself down and cope with the urge to kill again.
Every now and then he accidentally cut himself. He didn't mind. Blood spattering had stopped being a distraction years ago.
And now?
Now nothing mattered as long as the Queen didn't publicly apologize, as long as his demands had not been met.
Gorgon cut himself again. This time, the anger was too strong. He hurled the heavy kitchen knife at the wall and roared at the empty kitchen.
The knife plowed against one of the two turtle shells hanging on the wall. He looked at them through the haze in one eye. That turtle shell, he thought.
Only a few people knew that this turtle shell was Lewis Carroll's inspiration for the Mock Turtle character. Fewer people knew about the historical significance of the rarely visited kitchen underneath Oxford University.
Wolsey's kitchen. Oxford's legendary kitchen since the sixteenth century, where so many secrets were buried and hidden.
Gorgon was taught the art of cooking in this kitchen. He learned about the passion for cooking. That there was a rhythm, a tempo, and a song and dance to it.
Who were Auguste Escoffier, Alexis Soyer, or Isabella Beeton compared to him? They might have been great names carved in Victorian history books, but Gorgon knew he was something else. He was legendary. An icon to be remembered. He wasn't just a cook. He was a scientist turned cook. His approach was detailed and meticulous like no one else's.
But all that was gone now. And not because of what Margaret Kent did to his lawyer and his family in this world. His anger and hatred, although suppressed for years in the asylum, began when he was in Wonderland.
He pounded a heavy fist on the table, remembering what the Queen of Hearts did to him in Wonderland. The spoons and knives shook all over and bowls slipped to the floor. The pain was so strong that he fell to his knees from his own impact. And then a tear trickled like a drop of olive oil down his face. A tear that came out of his empty socket.
Slowly, Gorgon stood up and went to a side table, where he swallowed a muffin whole without even chewing it. Gorgon loved muffins—and pepper. He loved them because his kids were crazy about them.
Gorgon washed blood off his hand, staring at his reflection in the mirror.
It wasn't like he hadn't seen it before, but his image seemed to shock him this time. He had turned from victim to a ruthless killer, and he didn't know if he should like it.
The Cheshire certainly liked it.
Gorgon stood six feet four. His hands were lanky and very useful in cooking. He wore his double-breasted white jacket, which was actually the asylum's straitjacket. The main idea behind cooks wearing double-breasted jackets had been the possibility to reverse it many times and hide the cooking stains. In the past, when this kitchen was still proudly called Wolsey's kitchen, there was no time to change before presenting the food to the obnoxious and pretentious Victorian rich who had enough money to pay for it. They had to flip the working side of the jacket and present the cleaner side within minutes.
To Gorgon the idea was almost the same when he committed his murders, except he used it to hide the bloodstains of previous victims. It allowed him to kill two victims in the span of minutes before he had to change the jacket. Kill, reverse, and kill again. Or better: kill, reverse, escape while looking clean.
No one ever thought of the cooks to become serial killers.
Still, Gorgon's jacket had many other purposes. The thick cotton cloth of his jacket protected him from the heat of the stove and oven back then in Wonderland. Victorian kitchens weren't as safe as today's kitchens. Cooking was a dangerous profession back then; you were exposed to the insanely large stoves and not really protected from the splattering of boiling liquids. A good jacket had been a must. In present times, it helped him hide from his pursuers in a heated place that people usually avoided.
Under the jacket, he wore specially tailored trousers. They had black and white patterns. In the past, cooks wore patterned trousers to hide minor stains. Gorgon used them to mock the White Queen's belief in what she called the Chessboard of Life, where good people walked on white tiles and bad people walked on black. Gorgon believed he had walked both tiles evenly.
Gorgon stared at the toque blanche he wore on his head on his head, the kind of hat once worn by kings like Philip II. Some liked to simply call it a toque, as it had been the traditional headgear for magistrates—an officer of the state. In modern usage, the term usually referred to a judge.
Looking at it in the mirror, it seemed like an ironic coincidence. In his psychotic endeavor to correct the world, he was in many ways playing judge.
He didn't laugh at the thought. He rarely laughed at his thoughts. Gorgon, unlike other delusional killers, knew what he was. He knew his head wasn't buzzing to the right frequencies. But he just couldn't help it. What the Queen of Hearts did to him had shattered every single molecule of humanity inside him.
"Portmanteau." Gorgon tipped his toque, looking in the mirror. A French word, and one of the rare things that brought a smile to his lips.
Portmanteau was the art of combining two words or their sounds and their meanings into a single new word. Lewis Carroll loved that. That was how he invented the words like "slithy," which meant "lithe and slimy."
Gorgon loved hearing it from Lewis back then. Those were the lovely days. Still, Lewis couldn't save him from the Queen.
Sometimes, it struck him as funny being thought of as just a cook for the Duchess, like it was mentioned in the "Pig and Pepper" chapter in the book. He despised people thinking he was fired for using so much pepper and making the Queen sneeze when she was dining at the Duchess' house.
He reached for a copy of Alice's Adventures Underground, one of the few original copies of the book—he knew the Pillar owned one of them, and that it probably drove him mad that the cook had killed many people, but he didn't care the slightest about the Pillar.
The Muffin Man opened the book to a part in the "Pig and Pepper" chapter where it said: There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally. The only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze were the cook and a large cat, which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
"Well, here we are." The Cheshire appeared out of nowhere behind him. Gorgon could see him in the mirror showing his real face. "Me and you, immune to the sneezing pepper." He had a horrifying and ugly grin, which even Gorgon wished to avoid.
"You didn't knock." Gorgon hated surprises.
"I'm a cat, Gorgy." The Cheshire's grin widened. "We sneak, never ask for permission. Ready?"
"The Queen didn't apologize?" He knew she wouldn't, but still wished she would.
"You knew it was never going to happen," the Cheshire said. "That's part of why we're doing this."
"I thought we were doing this to expose her to the world," Gorgon said, still preferring to talk to the mirror.
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