Return to Wonderland

by Various

  Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:

  Thus, slowly, one by one . . .

  ‘Wonderland?’ said Cheshire to himself. ‘What a curious name!’

  He touched his fur with a paw, licking the jam. A Queen of Hearts playing card was stuck to his leg. What a picture he must be! He marvelled at the nonsense that had brought him here. None of it made any sense. Not a single word.

  As he realized this, he released something held deep inside. The feeling he had felt before the Doctor caught him bubbled up uncontrollably. It stretched his mouth, pulled at his eyebrows, snorted air through his nose, and . . . Cheshire the Cat began to smile. He began to smile more and more, till the grin stretched right across his face like a slice of moon in an autumn sky.

  The more he began to grin, the more he chuckled . . . and then guffawed. He guffawed so much that he rocked from side to side, and he rocked so much that he tipped clean over into the hole . . . and started to fall . . . and he kept on smiling all the way down to the bottom.

  And there he remained, where he is still smiling to this very day, if you are ever brave enough to go looking for him.

  The Caterpillar and the Moth Rumour

  by Amy Wilson

  I grew up with Alice; my grandparents gave me her adventures when I was five, and I loved them dearly, have kept them with me through all the years, and shared them with my own children.

  It’s a huge honour to have been asked to write this story, but, also, such a joy! The love I felt for the Caterpillar by the time we finished our own adventure together was a gift I hadn’t expected. He now sits on his mushroom in a very special place in my heart.

  Amy Wilson

  Deep down in the dark they call to me, my brothers and sisters. In my dreams, they flutter about me, petals blown here and there at the whim of the wind. They laugh as they swirl, and their voices are still children’s voices.

  When I wake, their laughter continues to ring in my ears, but the joy of the dream is long gone.

  ‘Caterpillar?’

  Nobody knows my true name here. I left it behind when I came to Wonderland. It was a new start, and I brought nothing but myself and the magic, which grew here until it was a sparking, rolling cloud around my body.

  ‘Caterpillar, I’ve come to tell you. There is trouble among the tulips,’ says the Dormouse.

  ‘The trouble with tulips,’ I say, poking my head through the cloud, ‘is that their heads are too big for their stems.’

  ‘That may be,’ the Dormouse says, shifting his weight, twisting a whisker with a shaking paw. ‘But . . .’

  ‘But? Why does a but need to come into it?’

  ‘They are whispering, my dear Caterpillar. Of change to come.’

  I stare at him. That dream lingers in my mind. A flutter of wings, the spin and tumble through the air.

  ‘They say . . .’ The Dormouse blinks his shining black eyes, and his upper lip curls. ‘They say there is a dread moth . . .’

  Magic funnels up over my head. I take a breath and, with a great deal of effort, put the whole cloud behind me.

  No.

  Not here. Not now. This is my place. This is my mushroom, pale and smooth. This is my clearing, where the beech and the oak trees stand sentry. Where the thistles and buttercups and the tall green blades of grass gather to hear my wisdom.

  Along with the rest of Wonderland.

  ‘No more of this chitty-chatty,’ I tell him. ‘The mushroom is OPEN.’

  My voice fills the clearing, and the trees carry my words up high, and the birds call them over the rest of Wonderland.

  And they come, from far and wide. They come with their troubles and their wishes. They lollop, lope, march, crawl, prance, and there they stand, before my mushroom: the White Rabbit, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts herself. They all need my magic: to keep a hankie white, to grow a little wisdom, to make the tea pour out of the teapot rather than in, to hide the jam tarts from the marauding Queen of Spades.

  I sit and listen, and their troubles fill my mind and quiet the whispers of the night. I busy myself dishing out bits of mushroom, enchanted by my magic. This is my life, and it is the life I wanted, but I’ve noticed something. Every time I do this, my cloud gets thicker. Every moment of every day, it roils heavier about my body, until sometimes I’m hardly there at all. My visitors must speak to a shifting, shimmering cloud of sparkles with a foot poking out. Or, if they’re lucky, an eye.

  Today, the clearing around my mushroom carries the bite of a chill. Leaves have begun to fall, autumn is on its way and the hint of change has made everybody impatient. I let the cloud swirl up around me, for I know how it glints in the early morning light, how it billows and makes a show of me. By the time I look up, the queue to the mushroom is several yards long.

  Naturally, the Queen’s voice, as she arrives at the end of the queue, is the most insistent.

  ‘I must see him at once!’ she cries, drawing a spotted umbrella from her voluminous skirts. ‘Clear the path! Out of my way!’ And so she continues, charging with her head down, brolly sweeping hither and thither until she is standing before me, out of breath and quite pink in the cheeks.

  ‘Ye-es?’ I ask.

  ‘I must speak with you immediately!’ she demands.

  ‘And so you are,’ I say. ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Was what all?’

  ‘You said you must speak with me immediately, and so you have. Do you need anything else?’

  I give her a smile.

  ‘No! I mean yes! Confounded creature,’ the Queen mutters, before taking a deep breath and pasting a smile across her face. ‘I need your help, if you would.’

  ‘Would I?’

  There’s a titter. The Queen turns and waves her brolly at the crowd behind her. ‘Get back!’ she commands. ‘This is a private matter!’

  ‘You pushed in!’ shouts an oyster.

  ‘I am your Queen! I am here on urgent state business!’

  ‘Well, you are in a state, but there’s nothing new about that!’ comes another voice, a grinning, feline sort of a voice, from deep within the safety of the crowd.

  The Queen marches down the queue, which curls into the shape of a question mark, and her eyes blaze as she looks for the culprit. Clouds roll over the sun, and even the trees draw in, but the crowd is silent. Eventually she growls under her breath and marches back to me.

  ‘Well?’ she demands.

  ‘The more I give, the more there is.’ I sigh. ‘Just look at it all.’ I wave a foot through the dazzling, whirling storm of my magic. ‘Soon I shan’t be able to escape it at all.’

  ‘That is your problem,’ says the Queen, wrinkling her nose and stabbing the needle-point of the brolly into the grass. ‘I need you to help me with mine!’

  ‘And what is your problem?’

  ‘The roses are being difficult,’ she says. ‘I chopped off their heads, and they absolutely refuse to grow new ones.’

  ‘Why did you chop off their heads?’

  ‘They went pink!’

  ‘And what colour do you expect them to be?’

  ‘RED, OF COURSE,’ she roars. ‘But the colour won’t stay, no matter how many times we paint them.’

  ‘Let them be whatever colour they are, I should say.’

  ‘Oh, you should, should you?’

  ‘Or do you prefer the bare stalks?’

  ‘No,’ she snaps.

  I reach out a hand to very edge of the mushroom. The magic around me unravels, and one small section turns to rainbow colours that shimmer and shift. The sun breaks free of the clouds overhead, and the trees send down a scatter of leaves as they settle back. I break off the enchanted piece of mushroom and hand it to the Queen.

  ‘They will be what they will be,’ I warn her in my best sing-song voice.

  She shows me her teeth in not-a-smile-at-all and stalks off.

  The Mad Hatter steps forward. He takes off his hat, holds it to his chest and winks at me.

&n
bsp; ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Only to tell you what you already know.’

  ‘Be quick about it, then,’ I snap.

  ‘Change is coming,’ he crows. ‘We have all seen it. The dread wolf moth is here, and it calls for killing!’

  A wave of chatter breaks out through the queue. Wings flutter, out of sight.

  ‘No more!’ I shout. ‘No more magic today!’

  There’s a loud groan.

  ‘Blame the Hatter! Now off! Off with you all!’

  I retreat to the safety of my cloud until the clearing is quiet and still. Except for the infernal Dormouse. He folds his arms as he considers me.

  ‘We must construct a sign,’ I tell him.

  ‘And what are we signing?’

  ‘We-lllll,’ I ponder aloud. ‘CLOSED FOR BUSINESS.’

  ‘That is a sign,’ says the Dormouse. ‘A sign of trouble, I’d say.’

  ‘Oh, you’d say, would you?’ I demand. ‘And who are you to say such?’

  ‘A friend? Or, at the least, an accomplice,’ he says, with a furry sort of shrug.

  ‘Well then, accomplice, why don’t you sign me a sign?’

  ‘Are you going to investigate the dread wolf moth?’ His nose twitches. Mouse he may be, but oh how he hankers for adventure. ‘The Hatter did not lie, you know. As I was trying to tell you earlier, there have indeed been rumours of this moth. Down in the deep dark, beyond the old yew. They say its presence will bring change.’

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘They are wrong. They always are. Where did this rumour come from?’

  ‘The grass and the trees, and the worms that dig the soil. The birds that eat the worms, and the fox that chases the birds.’

  ‘Does he catch them?’

  ‘Not yet. He is only young.’

  ‘And yet you take his word?’

  ‘Better that than his sharp teeth! He says the creature casts a shadow over all it touches, and it calls for killing, killing!’

  The clover and the trees and the buttercups all are silent, the clearing completely still. I retreat into my magic cloud, but it itches at my skin, and the memories come bright as stars in a clear sky. Memories of the time before I was here, of a place far away. Of a life without this magic, without this cloud, or this mushroom. Of the thing that loomed over all of us. The thing I ran away from.

  I shiver.

  No.

  But the Dormouse is waiting. He has found a sheet of yellow parchment, a quill and a bottle of deepest nightshade ink. I write the words, and they curl and spark with magic. The sign, once complete, is hung with a silver chain over the tattered edges of the mushroom.

  Closed for Business.

  ‘What now?’ demands the Dormouse.

  ‘No more advice. No more magic. I am going to Have A Rest.’

  ‘But the moth!’

  ‘No! No to moths. No to you, dear Dormouse.’

  There’s a long silence. The woodland is listening. Every flower, tree, every creature. A golden leaf flutters to the ground. The Dormouse watches it, his black eyes deep in thought.

  ‘I will come with you to investigate,’ he says eventually, thrusting out his tiny whiskered chin.

  ‘You?’ I laugh. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am a mouse,’ says the Dormouse. ‘The question is, who are you?’

  ‘CLOSED FOR BUSINESS,’ I roar, pulling my cloud around me.

  Sleep doesn’t come easily. The cloud clings and sparkles at my knees and scratches at my neck. The more I struggle against it, the more it crackles. By the time the birds start to sing of the new day, I know.

  There’s no more hiding.

  There’s no more putting it off.

  Word of the moth has awoken the thing inside me that was always there. The magic is out of control, and the only answer is to confront it.

  I eat a few golden leaves, taste the bite of winter in their veins, and when I emerge from my cloud, there is the Dormouse, still waiting, just as I knew he would be.

  It is time.

  It’s a twisty, tangly way through the murk of the wood. The sun does not reach this part of the world, and the stream is a dark ribbon that winds from tree to tree. Dormouse is singing fala-la-di-da rather tunefully, but that’s no help whatsoever.

  ‘Please do stop,’ I burst out eventually, as we reach the yew tree.

  ‘La-oh!’ The Dormouse breaks off. ‘Yes. Perhaps a more adventuresome sort of ditty.’ And off he goes in a lower, more important sort of voice: ‘The woods they are a-trembling, but not the heroes-OH! The skies may be a-weeping, but we shall keep a-going-OH!’

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘Now, where was this rumour begun? Who spoke it first?’

  ‘They say it was the Cheshire Cat,’ says the Dormouse with a yawn, after a long and rather awkward pause.

  I stop. ‘What?’

  ‘He whispered of the worms and the roots and the . . . Oh dear, what was the order?’

  ‘The grass and the trees, and the worms that dig the soil. The birds that eat the worms, and the fox that chases the birds,’ comes a familiar, mocking sort of voice.

  The Cheshire Cat.

  The Dormouse gives a squeak of fear and disappears off into the undergrowth.

  ‘Well, aren’t you a little travelling cloud of adventure?’ the cat says with a grin, leaping down from the branches of the yew.

  ‘What is this nonsense?’ I demand, making myself larger to match his size. ‘It was you who made up that natty rhyme, and so now you have tricked me here, for what?’

  ‘It is no trick, my dear. It is the dread wolf moth . . . It calls for killing, and it casts its shadow, and all the silly creatures flee.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And what say you?’

  ‘I say it is none of my business whatsoever. The question, dear Caterpillar –’ the Cheshire Cat gives another of his slow, wide grins and begins to lick one of his front paws, claws glinting in the gloom – ‘is what it has to do with you, and whether you will stop hiding in that cloud of yours to find out!’

  ‘Where is this creature?’ I ask as the cloud spirals out over my head. By the time I’ve got it under control, the Cheshire Cat is gone, and only that malevolent feline grin lingers in my mind.

  Well. Then it is up to me. I make my way along the dirt path that winds between the trees, and as I go I let my size diminish, until I’m back to the perfect height of three and a half inches.

  And then I’m in a new part of the forest, and the change is clear to see. The sun steals in through the branches of the ancient oak trees, and tiny golden flowers grow between the feet of those giants, nodding their sweet heads at me. I take a breath of that clear, sun-filled air, and it tastes good. The grass is green; the sky is blue. In the distance, birds sing.

  My magic begins to itch, and darkness falls over me with fluttering wings and whispered song that sounds like killing but isn’t. I look up as the shadow of the creature looms larger and larger, and the golden flowers curl their petals, shrinking into the comfort of the sturdy oaks, as the birdsong drifts away. I wish I’d remained larger. I wish the cloud of magic was a wall that nobody could penetrate. I wish I’d never left the mushroom. I wish for the Queen’s screeching voice, for the gentle shiver of the Dormouse’s upper lip.

  My past has come to find me.

  Before I came to Wonderland, change had been coming. I saw it in my sisters and my brothers. In all of our friends.

  And I didn’t like it.

  I didn’t like their disappearance into private homes. I didn’t like their fluttering wings when they emerged as butterflies. We were caterpillars, we always had been, and that was only right.

  When the last of my sisters drew her home around her and shut herself away, I left. Marched on my fine furry caterpillar legs into Wonderland, where anything was possible, and the beginnings of my home became the shifting cloud of magic.

  Whic
h grew, and grew, and itched, and nearly overcame me.

  The dread wolf moth is no moth. And it does not shout for killing.

  It is my sister, Cassandra. And she is looking for me.

  ‘Colin!’ she calls. ‘Here you are! Oh, we’ve been so worried – how could you leave us for so long? How are you still a caterpillar? What is this that sparks and rolls over you? Isn’t it very uncomfortable?’

  She always did talk a lot.

  ‘Why won’t you let your wings come? Why are you hiding here?’

  ‘I am not hiding here,’ I say with a sniff, tucking the cloud behind me with a twist of feet and a great deal of willpower. ‘I have a role. I am an advisor to royalty! All in Wonderland have heard of me, and I use my magic with great wisdom.’

  She laughs. Her wings shiver constantly, and they are, now that I can see more closely, very beautiful. Black with a white streak.

  ‘What have you become?’ I demand.

  ‘A white admiral.’

  ‘They call you the dread wolf moth. You have brought terror with your flittering wings and your shouts of killing!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she says. ‘I found the bramble, and the nectar was wonderful, and so I stayed, and the longer I stayed, the more I felt your presence. I was calling for you, Colin!’

  ‘Yes.’ I sigh. ‘I suppose you were.’

  I let the cloud of magic waft free once more, and it twines about my body.

  ‘Just let it happen, dear brother,’ says Cassie, her voice more gentle. ‘You will do wonderful things with wings, as well as without them. You can be wise, you can still advise, but also you can fly! Have adventure, see the dawn from the sky, meet the stars as they fill the night. You can be with me, and with our brothers and sisters. It is a wonderful thing, to be a butterfly!’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I say, hearing the petulance in my voice.

  ‘You have never tried it,’ she says. ‘If this place, Wonderland, is the place where anything can happen, then this should happen too.’

  ‘And if I still don’t like it?’

  ‘You will still be you. You will be you, with wings. There is nothing not to like.’

  ‘I don’t like change.’