Chapter 40: The Cheshire (Part 1

Chapter 40: The Cheshire (Part 1)

(Robert Quick, September 6th, 2011)

The elevator’s doors were the strangest I’d ever seen — covered in blue fur with a jagged purple stripe across the middle61. I reached out, hesitantly, to touch them, wondering what door fur felt like. As my fingertips were tantalizingly close, the doors slid open, revealing an empty, normal looking, elevator: three walls with hand rails and wooden paneling, a carpeted floor, and a ceiling with florescent62 lights.

I sighed in relief and stepped inside. I had been afraid that perhaps the inside would have been viscera or something. Absently, I tried to press the button for the third floor — and missed.

Instead of a double column of buttons for every floor, there was a grid of them that protruded from the panel that were in constant motion. New ones appeared as if by magic and others disappeared into nothingness, leaving behind a blank space. The buttons weren’t simply retracting — they were vanishing entirely as if they were never there.

As I studied the controls, a chime dinged and the doors began to slide shut.

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The title The Cheshire primes one to think of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, as made explicit in Part 3’s title. The Cat was defined by its ability to appear and reappear at will, or make only some parts of its body disappear — much as this elevator here seems to do with its internal controls. With this in mind, it is interesting that the version of the Cheshire Cat in the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland had purple stripes on his pink fur, while the version voiced by Stephen Fry in the 2010 live-action Alice in Wonderland pseudo-sequel directed by Tim Burton had blue fur.

It is fairly probable that Robert Quick intended to write “fluorescent”. However, the image of florescent

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(“flower-like”) lights is not without poetry, and it is not so far afield from the unlikely imagery often employed in Our Strange and Wonderful House for us to feel comfortable “correcting” the text in this instance. 87