The Snark From Another Planet

The story so far: An Oxford don, known to the authorities as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, has been apprehended soliciting persons whose names begin with the letter B, urging them to participate in what he calls a "hunting of the snark". When pressed for more substantial details, the self-styled Mr. Lewis Carroll claimed that he had absolutely no idea what it all meant and that furthermore, he was himself being harassed by a certain Jubjub, a person of unspecified origin with possible links to a notorious organized-poetry syndicate.

And now …
A screaming comes across the sky. Somewhere a Jubjub bird was wreaking havoc on some other, less fortunate part of Oxford but the Butcher wasn’t buying it. Not anymore, not today. The Bellman had warned him long ago. Be a man, he’d said, and he said it three times, like he really meant it. 

But the Bellman was gone now. They were all gone, it was just him and the Beaver. And she’d lost it way back in Fit the Fourth, in that freakshow scene with the black lace.

It was all up to him now. Just play it straight, just take it easy, Carroll had told him. Sure, take it easy, try taking it easy when the anapaests are hammering your skull like jackhammers and the crosshatching makes your skin crawl. Yeah, take it easy while every two-bit, punk academic with a jones for a dissertation topic takes a cheap shot at you. Like the Butcher needed a college degree to know that it was all absurd, that it was all just nonsense and that there was a Boojum waiting for him at the end of the road.

The Beaver said something incomprehensible in Japanese and an origami crane fluttered by. It’s time, the Butcher thought to himself.

Without thinking at all, with his mind totally empty of any thought save one, the Butcher raised his hand, slowly at first and then faster, faster, as high as he could, even higher than the Other’s hand, that disembodied hand with which they all grappled, as high as that hand which was turning and pointing towards him. The Butcher thought to himself, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and then it was over — he’d already forgotten the question and it was too late, the Other’s hand had passed him over — again!

“Like a dunce!” the Butcher said, it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.