"Mickey Zucker Reichert - Who Killed Humpty Dumpty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichert Mickey Zucker)

Who Killed Humpty Dumpty
Mickey Zucker Reichert
The icehouse was every bit as cold as its name, and Alice shivered as she walked amid the boxes,
straw, and ice blocks, lighting the way with her candle and using her hand mirror to reflect the dark
corners where monsters might lurk. "One can't be too careful," she told herself, scuffling through sawdust
to make certain nothing horrible lay sleeping beneath it. "Of course, if a monster slept there, then I would
have awakened it and I would much rather share an icehouse with a sleeping monster than a wide-awake
one." Alice moved more cautiously now to the big wooden crate that held the eggs. She reached inside to
brush straw aside when suddenly one egg leapt from the others and stood staring at her, tiny hands on the
roundness where a human would have hips. But an egg could not have hips, you know.
"Oh, dear," Alice said, unable to think of anything more clever in her startlement.
"It is very insulting," said the tiny egglike creature, "to be called a deer when you look nothing like
one. Very insulting indeed."
Another jumped up beside the first. "Contrariwise, if you were a deer, it would not be insulting at
all."
Alice looked around nervously, quite expecting more to join these two, an egg army with eyes,
noses, mouths, legs, arms, shoes, and cravatsтАФcertainly not the sort of thing one usually expects in an
icehouse. "I wasn't calling you a deer, I just said, 'Oh, dear,' because you frightened me."
"Some people," said the first, tipping back his head to look at her over his nose. Since he stood so
much smaller than she did, this required him to turn his eyes crosswise and to stare only at her shoes.
"Some people call others names when they get frightened."
"Contrariwise," said the second, "she could just as easily have called you a cow."
"And sounded just as stupid," said the first.
Alice stomped her foot indignantly, forgetting about the monsters she might awaken in the straw.
"You sound almost just like these two boys I know called Tweedledum and Tweedledee." (Truly, she
had only met them onceтАФduring her adventures through the Looking-Glass). "Only ruder. And you look
like Humpty Dumpty himself."
"Almost or just like," said the second egg. "You can't have it both ways."
"Our mentors and our father," replied the first, without giving Alice a chance to explain.
"Contrariwise," said the second, "our fathers and our mentor. But that wouldn't be right, of course."
At that, the first gave the second a kick that knocked him onto his bottom in the crate. Alice
cringed, concerned that he might break, but he rocked back and forth a few beats, then picked himself
up without so much as a glare at his companion, as if they did just this on a regular basis.
"I am Hum, and he is Dum," said the first with nary a look at his companion.
Alice thought the second name particularly apt, but she was too polite to say so. "Well, I would say
Tweedledee trained Hum and Tweedledum trained Dum."
"Then you would say wrong," said Hum. "And that would little surprise me. What more could you
expect from a girl who chatters to herself about monsters?"
Alice ignored the insults, not wishing to drag out the conversation. The coldness of the icehouse was
creeping into her fingers, toes, and nose.
"If Dum trained me," said Dum, "we would forever be calling ourselves by each other's name. That
would get too confusing. I might wind up raising him, and that just wouldn't do."
Alice didn't see how anyone could make such a mistake. Besides, Dum had the same irritating habit
as Tweedledee of shouting "contrariwise" all the time.
"Our father was killed, you see."
"Someone pushed him off a wall."
"The king sent all his horses and all his men, as he promised."
"But they couldn't put him back together."
Alice looked at each as they spoke in turn, though it made her quite dizzy. She remembered the
incident both from the poem and from the single time she met the giant egglike being who had been their