The Woman Who Looks Both Ways (Book 4 of White Rabbit)

The Woman Who Looks Both Ways

By Stuart Oldfield

Copyright 2022 Stuart Oldfield

Smashwords Edition

The four books of the White Rabbit series

1. The One Who Is Two

2. Friends and Enemies

3. Red Tape

4. The Woman Who Looks Both Ways

Table of Contents

Preface—the story so far...

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Preface—the story so far...

As Red Tape (the third book of the series) opens, Loofah believes that he has been betrayed by the charming and handsome Norbert Dentressangle. Moreover, the Frenchman seems to be in league with a seductive female compatriot, who not only has subjected Loofah to unspeakable torture, but is also in some unknown way involved with Loofah's doppelgänger.

Loofah rapidly finds, however, that all is not what it seems. For not only does the Frenchman himself have a doppelgänger of his own, but both Gallic lookalikes have the handy talent of being able to switch gender at will. Thus, Dentressangle now tells him, it is the Frenchman's lookalike (and his female manifestation) who are the forces of evil that are manipulating Loofah's doppelgänger, whereas he, Dentressangle, in both male and female forms, has nothing but Loofah's best interests—together with the common good—at heart. This does all stretch Loofah's credibility to breaking point—but then Dentressangle has saved his life on more than one occasion. And what's more, Loofah does wish to think the best of the ever charming and debonair Frenchman. Irrespective of his fondness for Dentressangle, however, Loofah does not entirely trust him, particularly when it transpires that the Frenchman is not a government official, as he had claimed, but a visitor from over there, where Loofah hails from. And so, despite the Frenchman's almost manic enthusiasm for joining Loofah in his search for The Woman Who Looks Both Ways, Loofah deliberately keeps in him the dark about his information gathering meetings with various senior members of the Secretariat.

It is during this part of the story that Loofah significantly develops his understanding of his place in the world and the power game—pivoting around the enigmatic two-faced woman—in which he has unwittingly become involved. Thus he learns that it is in the inherent nature of being a visitor from over there to be as two when in this realm—'two halves of the same whole,' as he is repeatedly reminded, 'two sides of the same coin'. Strangely, though, it also seems that the two halves have an innate hatred of each other; this is problematic, given that any direct contact between the two halves results in the immediate destruction of both and that the loss of one half dooms the survivor to a ghost-like semi-existence.

Indeed, it is from one of these diaphanous half-creatures that Loofah learns some of the history of visitors from over there. It seems that in the past visitors from his homeland were a large and successful group, their ability to travel at will between the two realms of here and there affording a certain special powers. But after an outbreak of internecine conflict, Mr Stobart (also a visitor) was able to engineer a permanent split—by which each visitor was divided into the one who is two, and was henceforth unable to travel back to there. With each half loathing the other, these tragic maroons gradually either annihilated themselves entirely or lost one half and became ghosts, until there was just Dentressangle (both halves of the whole) remaining here—and with Stobart residing over there, holding a monopoly on all connections between the two realms.

Not quite a monopoly, though. For even the mighty Chief Executive has been unable to neutralise the threat of The Woman Who Looks Both Ways, who is apparently the last remaining means of travel from here to there, and whom only Loofah and his doppelgänger can find.

And this, it seems, is why Dentressangle's own baleful double has brought Loofah over here—to find the double woman and use the connection to challenge Stobart over there, in his powerbase. Unfortunately the best laid schemes of mice and Frenchmen often go awry…and the fact that one half the whole needed to find the double woman (namely our hero) was spirited away from the Gallic lookalike's control soon after his arrival has caused a major upset.

And so there are now several parties desperately seeking The Woman Who Looks Both Ways, the last means of travel between here and there—Dentressangle and his doppelgänger, who wish to use the link to challenge Mr Stobart in his lair, Miss Leggett and her underlings, who want to deny this opportunity to either half of the Gallic whole, and of course Loofah and his double—the only means by which the enigmatic binary lady can be found—who simply want to go home. And then of course there is the government, whose agents guide and assist Loofah's search… and whose own motivation in wanting him to find the double woman remains unclear.

An unfortunate complicating factor is that no-one—not even the Secretariat—seems to know the whereabouts of the object of his search, or is even fully conversant with who or what she is. So far he has learned from the scraps of information that are gradually being uncovered by officials that the appearance of the double woman will be associated in some way with a circle of giant slugs, that she will not actually exist until she is found and—most bizarrely of all—that Loofah will be required to enjoy intimacy with this strange creature before she appears. He discovered early in his adventure that his doppelgänger was also able to find The Woman Who Looks Both Ways—it now transpires that the two of them must find her together, that she will not appear for a single half of the same whole.

Hitherto, the thought of working with his own doppelgänger would have horrified Loofah—but the intense instinctive loathing that he once felt for his lookalike has now faded. Indeed, he is beginning to realise that the two of them may be existentially closer than he would previously have thought possible, that the much-repeated phrases—'two halves of the same whole, two sides of the same coin'—may have more than metaphorical truth.

Red Tape closes on a sad note, for Loofah is finally unable to avoid the truth of his Gallic friend's treachery. Not only does he now realise that the occasions on which the Frenchman has saved his life were staged simply in order to win his trust, but he also now discovers that, once Loofah has found her for him, Dentressangle intends to use The Woman Who Looks Both Ways for his own exclusive purposes—and as this raft between the two realms can only take one, this would of course leave Loofah to his fate, marooned over here forever.

Chapter 1

Loofah clumped along the unmade track, stumbling in potholes and with sharp flints stabbing pain through the thin soles of his shoes. Fronds of cow parsley draped against his jacket, smothering him with the cloying sickness of their perfume, and tendrils of carnivorous bindweed tried to curl around his calves. He stared grimly at the jigsaw puzzle. The picture was beginning to form, and it was not the one he wanted to see. For although the body of the figure was lovely to look at, the face was not—it was now certain that it would the death-hungry velociraptor that grinned out at him from the completed image. Loofah's feet were lead weights and his blood ebbed and flowed like an oil-slicked tide, hardly pumpable by his torpid heart. The track began to fall away, descending towards dark and dreary woods.

At the edge of the jigsaw were some leftover pieces—little segments of a sharply dressed young man, sun-tanned and smiling behind his Italian polaroids, ready to leap out of the puzzle to snatch him from the jaws of death—and Loofah much preferred the image that these seemed to promise, however fragmented. But he knew now that they would not fit, that they were not part of the final picture, and with a sad sigh he swept them off the table and into the waste paper basket.

The main track turned to right, but he took the narrow path that forked off left and dived headlong into a dank mass of ash and adolescent beech. The path was steep, paved with fist-sized lumps of jagged flint that carved mercilessly into his metatarsals. High banks of moss lunged in on him, restrained only by the gnarled grip of ancient tree roots that twitched with sinister strength as they dug deep into the stony flesh of the earth. On top of the green parapets grew occasional bushes of holly—each leaf a torturer's tool—interspersed with clumps dying bluebells, their limp and fleshy leaves reminiscent of the genitals of spent debauchees.

Loofah's hand moved to his neck and stroked the vermilion silk, which wriggled against his skin, caressing his throat. A last memento from a lost friend—he had this, at least. He stumbled on, sliding into a sticky slough of despond. But who were his friends now? he thought, who would be snatching from the jaws of any future perils? A peg, a doll and an oversized flatworm—he couldn't lose, could he?

He reached another junction, where a smaller path led off to the left, out of the wretched gully. While an oil-strike at the base of his being pumped the black crude of despair through his soul, Loofah struggled to recollect the patrician cat's directions. Then, avoiding the clutches of the malicious old tree roots (thankfully slowed by arthritis), he clambered wearily up the slimy bank.

The new path wound along the top of a wooded slope that fell away to his right. It was more open here—the half-grown beech, young oaks and silver birch were keeping a respectful distance from each other—and the ground was smooth, with a soft carpet of dried leaves. But the dappled sunlight which now filtered through the less oppressive foliage failed to penetrate the black lake of Loofah's gloom. His misery-weighted legs swung like bags of sand and his progress was reduced to little more than a hobble. Eventually, paralysed by his despair-spawned fatigue, he stumbled to a halt. For a few moments he just stood and blinked as trees swayed around him, flowing in and out of focus. Then, with eyeballs sinking into his head like two lead balls in a pool of mud, the sandbag legs buckled under him and he collapsed onto the soft bed of the earth.

A huge brown beech leaf tickled his nose. Ribbed and curved, it resembled an empty hull, and behind it others jostled, a vast armada of deckless ships. Loofah watched dumbly as the fleet swayed gently at anchor, rising and falling on the oily swell outside the blurring portholes of the dark cabin of his skull, until from somewhere in the shadows an unseen steward reached across and drew the thick, velvet curtains.

At first he wasn't sure whether the isopod was part of a dream, crawling up a sunken log on her six stubby white legs.

She hauled the tiny white cigar of her body over ridges of decaying bark and ambled through forests of luminous green moss, moving slowly and patiently, without rush or urgency. Loofah could not help but to envy her: a simple, undemanding creature leading a simple, undemanding life.

He saw the assassin bug before she did; it darted forward from under a bark flake like a pouncing leopard and before she could react it had her in the iron grip of its forelegs. For a few moments she wriggled desperately, but then came the coup de grâce—with a fierce jerk, the bug thrust the short sword of its proboscis into her thorax. She squirmed in final agony as the bug devoured her, pumping in digestive fluids then sucking out the liquefied contents of her body as a child sucks milk through a straw.

Loofah had liked the harmless little isopod and his heart cheered when the wolf spider pounced from behind a golden frill of fungus. The eight seta-furred legs formed a lethal tent frame over the hapless bug as it struggled helplessly in the arachnid's powerful palpi. There was a satisfying crunch as the spider's chelicerae shattered through the bug's exoskeleton, releasing the nutrient nectar of its body fluids. The isopod was still feebly twitching, impaled on the proboscis of the now doomed bug, but she was too far gone to derive much satisfaction from the ruin of her own terminator.

The spider's triumph was a short-lived, however—the hunting wasp came in like a diving red kite, landed neatly on the frame of the spider's legs and, with gymnastic panache, swung in with her abdomen—livid red, like an elongated drop of blood—to deliver the paralysing sting. The spider convulsed once and then relaxed, slumping onto the rough bark with the dying bug still struggling weakly in its paralysed jaws.

The tiger beetle—as big as Loofah's thumb—ambled along the bark with leisurely nonchalance. He was a beautiful creature, all emerald green with matching pairs of dazzling white spots across each half of his elegant carapace. The wasp had thrust her ovipositor into the paralysed spider's abdomen and was laying busily when this arthropod Beau Brummell appeared over the curvature of the log. The beetle saw the wasp and she saw him. There was a nanosecond of dead stillness while simple neuronal pathways synapsed and processed—then the handsome coleopteran charged. The wasp struggled desperately to extricate herself from the flaccid tangle of the spider but in vain—she was still impaled when her enemy was upon her, tearing cellophane wings, amputating frantic legs, plunging his jagged green mandibles into the jewelled hemispheres of her compound eyes to bubble the yellow slime of her cerebral fluids onto the paralysed legs of her own victim.

In its turn, the beetle fell to a snakefly, the jolly eccentricity of her roller-coaster body belying her lethal disposition. She floated silently out the air on parachute wings and, with the headless wasp still thrashing in his jaws, pierced the beetle's thorax with her dagger-like proboscis. Her wings, however, did not save her from the ladybird larva. Loofah started as this creature—not much smaller than a domestic cat—charged past the top of his head and tore into the fly's undulating thorax with pincer mouth parts, splattering her viscous endolymph over the emerald wing cases of the dying beetle. As she herself expired, the snake-fly's legs scrabbled impotently on the bark and her wings flapped against the larva's body, a bloated cigar of black rubber tyres that writhed in obscene peristalsis as it feasted.

The crab spider—a gigantic pink petal with legs—came from nowhere, landing beside the log in a scatter of dried leaves and cracking twigs. As the huge arachnid bit deep into its leathery cutis, the cigar-larva convulsed violently, thrashing the crumpled snake-fly against the forest floor. Though the death throes of the larva were horrifying to watch, the spider herself was a visual delight; starting white with a hint of rose, as she sucked at the fat fruit of the dying body she changed from pastel colour to creamy pastel colour, as if being painted and repainted by an indecisive decorator.

There was a sudden burst of leaf noise from behind—but as Loofah twisted round to see the next arthropod behemoth before it was upon him, a stilettoed foot swept past his face and landed a firm kick on the feeding spider, sending her rolling down the slope in a flailing tumble of pastel legs and half-eaten invertebrate life.

'Norbert,' said Loofah, clambering quickly to his feet, 'Back so soon?'

Dentressangle smiled with blatant allure, allowing her elegant hands to slither swiftly over her body like a pair of sexually aroused planarians.

'Bonjour, mon petit,' she cooed, 'Were you having the little sleepy-by?'

The Frenchwoman had excelled herself this time; the lace suspender belt and the straps of her black sheer stockings were clearly visible under the diaphanous silk of her negligee, which—apart from the wet-look high heels and the black satin knickers that teetered on the edge of non-existence—was all that she wore. Loofah sensed danger and he snapped to full awareness as the last fuzzy tendril of sleep vanished from his