A bit late...but Happy Halloween from WCMI!

Art done by Mariana Garcia, who may be joining the comic’s art team very soon. :)

Happy Halloween from WCMI!

Inspired by a gloriously cinematic scene from season 4 of AHS where a woman's haunting song unwittingly summons a dark spirit in the form of a man wearing 1800's Victorian garb. Her mesmerizing voice lures him through the night like a moth to a flame in one of the best scenes to ever come out of AHS.

Click to see a HD video of that creepy, beautiful, mystical, atmospheric, moody, sexy and overall awesome scene. In time Reginald would follow Alice's voice out of his world, too....

Pub 33 is a sort of 'in between' social gathering point for any and all characters in the WCMI/Disney universe. It's not the last time the pub will be utilized in the comic, and yes - the pub's name is a wink at a certain exclusive Disneyland club.

Some elements were cut from the Pub scene for time. These include Rafiki showing up to take a swing at Reg with his staff and impart wisdom...at which point Jack would excitedly yell "A monkey! Shoot it, see if it's undead!" and one of the Tremaine sisters appearing as the bartender. We also toyed with putting Simba at the bar with the men...no really....and he'd be like "present her with a freshly killed zebra!" or something stupid like that. We cut it because while WCMI may be ridiculous it's not THAT ridiculous!

Lastly, the fellow that Genie is greeting with such delight is exactly who you all think it is. Like Elvis, he was away from his home world a long time and has been sorely missed by old friends. That's our little tribute.

The guy that Genie almost mows down is Mark, the artist who did this scene. The irate gal yelling at him is me, because dammit Mark you're not supposed to be in there GTFO!

I know a girl

She puts the color inside of my world

But she’s just like a maze

Where all of the walls continually change.

  And I’ve done all I can

To stand on the steps

With my heart in my hands…

It's good to hear your voice, you know it's been so long If I don't get your call then everything goes wrong I want to tell you something you've known all along Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

____________________________________________________

"Did it work, dear?" The Hare's dulcet welsh accent quipped across the phone line.

  "What?" Alice blinked rapidly, trying to gather her scattered wits. Her heart had lodged itself high in her throat and was reluctant to budge, while her arm still prickled where Reginald's ungloved hand had touched her. He had removed his gloves before he reached for her, she was candidly aware of that. Some women needed to be handled with kid gloves as the expression goes, but he already knew that the reverse was true for  -

"Are you there, dear?"

"Ears? Yes, yes. Did what work? Did....oh."

  "I saw the two of you pass by my yard and thought you might appreciate a timely interruption." Ears went on. "Saved by the bell, as they say."

  "Well, your timing was impeccable..." she stammered.

  Now Ears was a very intuitive fellow much of the time. Not all of the time, but much. Sometimes he seemed more aware of other people's internal workings than they were aware of themselves. He was a very old rabbit - although one would never know that from appearances alone - and he was remarkably observant when it wasn't March.

It was only October, and even over two miles of telephone wire there were things she could not hide from him. On the other end of the line Ears immediately put down his cup of tea.

  “I’ve made a mistake, haven’t I?”

  Alice was quiet.

  “I should not have called.”

  “Yes...no. Maybe. I don’t know!”

  “I am all ears, my duck…pardon the pun, please.”

  Alice sighed. “You know how fond I am of you, and we both know I've come to you for advice in the past, but right now I need to talk to a woman. You do understand, I hope.”

  “Perfectly, but I’ll still be here if you’ve a change of mind on the matter.”

They exchanged parting words and hung up. The hare stared at his telephone.

The telephone stared back at him questioningly, as appliances are wont to do in this realm.

Ears had always thought of Reginald as someone who usually couldn't see the forest for the trees. Now the hare suspected that he himself was guilty of the very same blunder, and quite possibly had been making the same misjudgement for some time now. The irony of this was not lost on him.

“A fine job, Edwin A. Roderick," he chided himself. "Good intentions or not, you may have just botched up royally.”

Ears turned away from the phone in a huff…and in doing so, he accidentally knocked his half-full teacup from the end table with an elbow. The fine bone china was very delicate; so delicate in fact that the plush carpet did not save it from breaking.

  The old hare blinked at the fragmented tea cup, watching the still-steaming tea soak into the carpet weave. What a pity. He rather liked that old cup.

  But perhaps he could fix it. That, and other things.

_____________________________________________________

Belle had just tucked herself into an overstuffed easy chair with a warmed blanket and a particularly enthralling book when Alice rang. The chair was abandoned and the book dropped in mid chapter – right before the plot twist, and she didn’t even pause to bookmark the page.

  Alice told her all that had occurred over the day. The impromptu zoo trip, the sprint home in the rain (why not call a coach, Belle had asked; Alice concurred that Reginald thought a walk in a light rain would be a pleasure, and despite her skepticism he turned out to be right) and the romp in the mud that followed. She was still caked in mud as she huddled there with the phone pinched between ear and shoulder, actually - on any other day she would have rushed for a hot bath the instant she set foot indoors, but today was not any other day.

  Belle was somewhat affronted at this part of the tale, and not because she considered it poor behavior or anything of the sort.

  “You’ve never done anything like that with me.”

  “Well, you did get me tipsy on one occasion and he's managed nothing of that sort. So you shouldn't feel too left out, I think."

  “Oh you weren’t tipsy. You were drunk.”

  “No, I wasn’t! I was just a little….snookered.”

  “Alice, you spent an hour in my hall closet yelling something about Narnia.”

  “……so perhaps I was a little drunk. But can we please bring this conversation back on topic? I didn't call to debate what may or may not have occurred in your hall closet last year."

"Yes yes, go on. What happened after the mud skirmish that I wasn't invited to?"

There was a very long pause on Alice's behalf. Belle leaned against the wall where she stood and said nothing during the lull, content to wait.

"He tried to kiss me. On the porch, when we arrived at my home."

Alice paused again.

"In the rain." As if such a detail mattered.

"And?" Belle was no longer leaning on the wall.

"....and...I was not entirely abhorrent to the idea." 

 "....and?"

"I would have allowed it, if the phone hadn't rung. It snapped me out of it, I suppose, and I sent him on his way." Alice finished in a rush.

"Oh." Belle resumed her lean against the wall. "It was Ears on the phone,  wasn't it?"

"It was." Alice laughed, but it was a strained, anxious laugh. "He thought I wanted a rescue."

 "Did you want a rescue?"

  Alice nervously twisted her fingers into the phone cord. "See, this is just the reason I've called. I need you to talk some sense into me - you're very good at it, you know. The conundrum here is that I'm...not entirely sure that I am glad for Ears' interruption." 

Belle waited.

"But I should be! I should be absolutely grateful for it, if not ecstatic. I should not have any romantic interest in this man and any notion to the contrary is...is simply absurd. A friend, by all means yes - but he is completely inappropriate for me as a suitor. Wrong, all wrong! Oh Belle, you don't know the half of it..."

"No, I don't know the half of it, and that's because you've been keeping to yourself so much as of late. So tell me." Belle cut in.

So Alice did, and what began as a simple explanation quickly unhinged into a verbal outpouring that she did not care to control. The blonde  paced the room as the words came thick and fast, the phone cord twisting itself around her body and straining to the snapping point.

"That man is a free spirit in every possible perception of the term. He does not care to check his impulses…nor conceal his ardor toward me, for that matter. He is…unbridled; I suppose that's the one way of putting it. He flips from one extreme to the other so quickly and everything is just such a blur when I am with him...a bewildering, infuriating and wonderful blur! Heaven help me Belle, one moment it’s like being in the company of an enormous four year old child who has snuck too many sweets, in another moment I seem to be in the presence of an absolute genius…and the next moment I am trembling at my bedroom window while sincerely wishing I had forgotten to lock the front door!"

Belle raised an eyebrow at that, but otherwise remained quiet.

  ".....he is a fantastic mess, a convoluted hodgepodge of everything my upbringing taught me to shun! He is everything that a well-raised person of my upbringing is expected not to be, and - "

"..and THAT," interrupted Belle sharply, "is exactly why you want him."

The line went dead silent, save for the faint hiss of static.

"Oooh. Hit a nerve, did I?"

No answer.

“Oh yes, I think I did.”

The quiet coming from the other end of the line was so perfect that one might have thought the connection had been lost. Belle knew better, of course. She always did.

“You know, Alice...” she went on, idly wrapping the phone cord around her wrist, “I once had to confess to myself that I was smitten with a beast. One with fur, great twisty horns, claws, a tail that he chased when he thought nobody was looking, and the fleas to match. If I found the fortitude to admit to that, then this should be teacakes for you.”

The phone line crackled. Nothing more.

Belle tried again, gently. “It’s only me to hear you…and honestly, you could do worse. At least he doesn’t have fleas – “

“YES!”

The brunette almost dropped the phone, startled by the deafening squawk that blew out of it.

“Yes, I want him! I confess, concede, admit, surrender, call it what you like! I am unbearably enamored and I haven’t a clue how, why or when it happened! Three months ago I wanted nothing, NOTHING to do with him and now I want everything to do with him!”

Belle held the yowling phone at arm’s length to protect her eardrum.

“…and what’s more, I shouldn’t want him! My good sense tells me to avoid him and sometimes I try; then I am horribly disappointed when I actually succeed at avoiding him. I’ve tried to talk sense into myself time and again, there’s this merry voice in my head that just keeps drowning me out, saying “oh, so sorry but I can’t hear you over the sound of freckles!”

Belle stifled a giggle into her hand.

“I consider myself a reasonable woman but then he came along and mussed it all up! Reasonable? HA! If he appears at my bedroom window and looks at me like that one more blasted time I just might lose my head like some stupid besotted gint and launch myself at him! Is that reasonable?!”

  Belle heard a distinctly frustrated screech on the other end of the line, followed by what sounded like a booted toe impacting a wall…followed (not unexpectedly) by “...ow.” She waited for a moment before warily bringing the phone back to her ear.

“Alice?”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t suggest launching yourself out your bedroom window. It’s on the second story, and you cannot fly.”

Alice snorted. “Oh I would be fine. He would break my fall, and gladly I expect.”

“Then he would not be fine.”

Alice’s voice cracked with a sudden fit of laughter. “Then should any launching occur I will try to retain enough sense to use the door. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. Now, what are you going to do next?”

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“He’s waiting! He has been waiting some time now, in fact. So go find the poor sod, give him a big smacking kiss – which he is absolutely desperate for, I am sure – and stop this business of running about in circles.”

“Oh, Belle…I can’t.”

“WHAT?” Now it was Alice’s turn to shy away from the roaring phone. “Why not? You are being a stupid gint, no launching needed! You want him, he wants you – what outlandish little upchuck of a explanation could you possibly have this time? Wait, let me guess: a deep-seated fear of freckles! That’s why you – “

“I don’t want to hurt him, Belle.” Alice cut through.

“………..ah?”

“Both you and I know that it was never really my intention to live here permanently. You know what everyone says here about people of my ilk – those who come here from...other places, I mean. We never stay past a few years, and I suppose I won’t either. “

Belle knew where this was going.

“So why start something that I cannot finish, and worse yet, start something that might inflict hurt on someone when I leave?”

You are already going to leave some sad hearts behind when you leave, Belle thought to herself. What's one more? Still, she had a point. Belle sank into thought for a moment, and worded her reply carefully.

“Who’s to say it would become anything of a serious matter? So many courtships are flippant things that end as lightly as they begin. This could easily cool off into nothing less or more than the friendship it already is. Then you’ll part ways with hardly a sour thought. Many couples do exactly that.”

“That is possible, yes. But there's the other possibility and I would be a fool to discount it. The possibility that we could…become overly attached.”

“You mean ‘fall in love.’ ” Belle stated bluntly.

“…...yes, that.” Alice was still for a moment. “I’ve come to know him fairly well, I like to think, and I get the strong impression that he wouldn’t handle loss very well. Not as you or I would, a least. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but my instinct tells me that sadness would affect him like…like…taking sunshine away from a plant. I don’t know how else to explain it, really…”

  “No, no, you have explained it rather well, actually.”

“That’s not the only concern. I don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s terribly selfish for me to say so, but there it is.”

“Alice…”

Alice went on obliviously, lost in her thoughts. “When I was young I watched my older sister go through just that very sort of heartache. It was not a gentle time for her, and..."

“Alice……”

“...I hardly want to experience the same for myself without…without very good cause, I can say.”

“Alice!” 

“Yes?”

“Listen to me! You must make a choice. If your decision is no, then you need to tell him that and be firm with it. If your decision is a yes, then by all means, launch away! Oh Alice, he has tried so hard..."

This time Alice’s verbal shutdown stretched into the double digits. When she spoke, her voice cracked. It was faint, but Belle heard it.

“I…I don’t want to be done with him."

“Then keep him! But you need to decide, Alice. Either open the door to him all the way, or shut it and lock it. It needs to be done for his sake; some would consider it a mercy at this point. Besides, for all you know the right woman could be within arm's reach of him right now, while he's too busy barking up the wrong tree to notice. Would you want to keep him from that?"

Not a peep on the other end of the line.

"Stop keeping him on a string while you go about perching on fences like a skittish bird. To do anything less would be cruel, Alice, and you are no more capable of cruelty than I am capable of walking on water."

  _______________________________________________

WCMI 23: 'Evasive Maneuvers'

You keep on denying Who you are and how you're feeling Baby, we're not buying Hon we saw you hit the ceiling Face it like a grown-up When you gonna own up That you've got it bad...