Wonderland

by Marie O'Regan

  Bridget broke and ran. The girls pursued. A moment later, Carter ran after them. All five were swallowed by the deep shadows before they had gone twenty yards. I followed at my leisure. They were all running towards the moonlit beach, which was where I wanted to be. I was content to let them get there first, having no fear now that I would lose them.

  Lose him, I mean.

  Brighton has a shingle beach. I would have preferred sand, for the look of the thing, but the ocean mattered more. Its sibilant surge and retreat filled the air around me like a hymn sung in a thousand voices.

  I found Carter at the edge of the sea. He had drawn the gun again, but his hands were at his sides. He looked bewildered, and exhausted.

  “I’m sure they went this way,” he said. “But there’s no sign of them.”

  It doesn’t matter, I said. Just the two of us now.

  I was closer than he had expected. At the sound of my voice, almost upon him, he started as though he had been stung. He turned quickly, backing away, and pointed the gun at my face.

  I laughed. I’ve yet to see you fire that thing, I said.

  “Try me,” he suggested.

  He still was not afraid. Not afraid enough, I mean. Obviously his own imminent death caused him alarm and despondency, but his fear was not focused on me with the intensity that I needed to see, in order to be sure.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he said. “One of the monsters.”

  No, I said. You are.

  “I’m human, you bastard!”

  That’s what I said.

  Ignoring the gun, which held no fear for me, I knelt and rummaged in my bag.

  “Keep your fucking hands off those things!” Carter shouted.

  I’m not looking for a weapon, I told him. Not yet, at least.

  “I’m warning you.”

  Yes, I know, I said. I continued to explain, because I needed him to stay still for a little while, until I found what I was looking for. Bridget was right about many things, I told him, but wrong about the most important. My people don’t eat yours for sustenance, or sport, or out of any malice.

  “You bastard!” Carter said. “You turn around, right now, and walk away.” The gun shook in his hand. He still didn’t make any attempt to fire it. I was unsurprised. I’d concluded long ago that he had no bullets. The gun was a prop to his sagging sense of self, a comfort blanket he clung to as his options were reduced, one by one, down to this beach. Down to me.

  I’m sure you’re familiar, I said, with the origin of the handshake. It’s meant to show that your hand—your right hand, which is presumed to be the strongest—is empty of weapons. It proves you mean no harm.

  In my world, when we meet a stranger, we shake hands with our minds. We open ourselves fully to the other, flow together, two things briefly becoming one thing. Then we flow back to ourselves again, knowing the other as deeply and perfectly as we know ourselves.

  “Last chance,” Carter said. He took off the gun’s safety with his thumb, revealing that—bullets or not—it had never been in any state to do harm to anything we’d met on our journey together.

  When we came here, I said, we tried to say hello to you humans in this way. It was… terrible. You’re so afraid, you see, of so very many things. Fears are the core of you. Some of them you know about, others you profoundly misunderstand. You’re even afraid of the parts of yourselves that are afraid.

  Imagine you’re staring into the dark. Something might be moving there, but you’re not sure. Mostly, what you see is just darkness, without features, without shape. But then, for just a second, you catch a glimpse of a bone-white face with elongated canine teeth. Or a woman with snakes for hair. A tiger. A cobra. A fiery angel with the wings of a bat. The impression doesn’t last long—only a second, or a fraction of a second—but the emotions that go with it are so much stronger.

  It’s a little like firing a pot. The clay is soft and malleable until it goes into the oven. But afterwards… well. The situation is no longer what it was, you see?

  I had found what I was looking for. I straightened up, holding it in both my hands.

  You destroyed us, I said. When we said hello to you, you seized hold of us. You swallowed up the parts of us that flowed into you, and what you spat back into us twisted us into a million grotesque shapes. The shapes of your fears; your endless, tedious nightmares. The only way we can get free, now, is to kill you and devour you—taking back the parts of us you stole and closing down the hideous, insistent power of your minds. Then we become ourselves again, invisible and immortal. One by one, we disentangle ourselves and go home. But the cost of our freedom is your deaths.

  Carter fired. The reverberation was loud, bringing many of my people out of the dark to watch. The bullet missed me and spent its force on the bodiless air.

  You are mine, I said. You made me be this way. But now you don’t remember me, and I need you to. I can’t break the bond, if you won’t acknowledge it.

  He fired again. The pain in my side took me by surprise, forcing breath out of me in a loud gasp. But it was only physical pain, and I am not, in any sense that matters, a physical thing.

  Here, I said. When I first arrived, I was wearing this.

  I put the hat on my head. It was a fragile, intricate thing, made out of a single folded sheet of paper. Its shape was roughly square.

  “Oh God!” Carter sobbed. “Oh Jesus!”

  Ah! I sighed. At last! That’s much better.

  Am I late? asked my friend, my beloved. She sidled out of the ocean and dragged her heavy bulk across the shingle, her tusks gleaming white in the moonlight. Their elegant curves were like the brackets around some impossible, ineffable equation.

  Carter emptied the pistol in her direction. Some of the bullets no doubt found their mark, but she was colossal, and under her gleaming hide was a layer of fat many inches thick. He caused her but little discomfort.

  He would have run, then, but others of my kind were crowded densely around us. This was our feast, not theirs, but they wished us well and they would not let him pass.

  It was the poem, then, that had frightened him. As a child, most likely, sitting on his mother’s knee, or his father’s. That was why he hadn’t recognised me, though some familiarity had nagged at him. It was not so much the characters in the poem that mattered, as the atmosphere. The deception, and the devouring.

  I had deceived him, and now we devoured him. We had no choice.

  The night is fine, my lover said. Do you admire the view?

  The butter’s spread too thick, I said. And a little later: cut me another slice.

  And finally: shall we be trotting home again?

  The White Queen’s Pawn

  GENEVIEVE COGMAN

  “Mrs Hargreaves.”

  “I prefer to be addressed as Lady Hargreaves.” The woman sitting on the far side of the desk had her withered hands folded over her handbag. There weren’t any guns in it, of course—it had been searched, just as the woman herself had been—but the sheer immobility of her posture somehow unnerved Lucy Hansen. Any normal woman would have been worried by her current situation. Even the woman that they thought she was should have been cautious, prepared, ready for action.

  She should be showing something.

  The afternoon winter sunlight slanted through the window of the anonymous room and lit up its only distinguishing feature—the portrait of the Leader which hung over the empty fireplace. Off-white walls competed with the beige rug for blandness, and both sides lost. Even the furniture—a desk, two chairs—was second-hand. This quiet little house was hidden away in a secluded London suburb so unimportant that even the taxi drivers had to think before they remembered where it was. It had been rented by another Party member specially for this meeting, via a third member’s bank account. If anything did go wrong, then the police would have no trail to follow.

  “Yes, we know that,” Mr Walters said. He smiled, pulling back thin lips in a gesture that simulated friend
ship. “And I think, just between the two of us, that we can agree you deserve that title, madam. Even if the world doesn’t acknowledge it. The world’s blind to a lot of things.”

  Mrs Hargreaves—or Lady Hargreaves—inclined her head in a gracious nod. “Thank you. You’re a very talkative young man. Perhaps you’ll tell me why you’ve had me brought here?”

  “My dear madam! I certainly hope that you didn’t feel in any way pressured. Miss Hansen, the lady behind you, was instructed to deliver an invitation. I hope that she didn’t confuse her orders.”

  “I think that Miss Hansen did precisely what she was ordered to do.” Lady Hargreaves turned in her chair to look across at Lucy where she stood by the door. She moved with the slow carefulness of an arthritic woman, turning her whole body rather than just her head, a small figure in the large leather armchair. “Didn’t you, child? You told me that you represented a private collector who was interested in purchasing some of my literary collection. Your story was very well rehearsed, even if it was obviously false.”

  Mr Walters raised his eyebrows. “Obviously false?”

  “Do you think I don’t know the current market, young man? It may be seven years since I sold my copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, but I’ve kept up to date with Sotheby’s and the other major auction houses. I could have reported her to the police on the spot, but I have always been far too curious. I wanted to see who was behind her.”

  Lucy kept her face still with an effort, and stared at the window behind Mr Walters rather than meeting his eyes. She knew that she’d be paying for this failure later. Bringing in the old woman for this interview had seemed an easy way to rise in the Party’s ranks. Failing at the first step by being recognised as a fraud… now, that was an easy way to fall. Even in the cold room, a trickle of sweat marked its way down her spine.

  “And I see that we weren’t misinformed.” Mr Walters tapped the brown file in front of him on the desk. “So if we’re not book-buyers, Lady Hargreaves, who do you think we are?”

  Lady Hargreaves flicked a bony finger at the portrait of the Leader. “I recognise Oswald Mosley’s face even if I haven’t met him in person. What is it that you people call yourselves? The New Party? The British Union of Fascists? The Blackshirts?” Her tone was cut glass, and as she ran through the list of the Party’s names, the lines of her face grew more and more disapproving. It was almost, Lucy thought in a flight of fancy, as though the woman was growing younger, as the classic lines of her skull, rigid cheekbones and chin, showed through her elderly softness.

  “I have the impression that you don’t approve of us,” Mr Walters said.

  “You are quite correct. I have yet to see anything from your set of which I approve.”

  “Lady Hargreaves.” Mr Walters leaned forward, folding his hands on top of the file. “While I don’t like to mention a lady’s age, you’re eighty-one years old. You’ve had the chance to see a great deal of the world. You’ve watched the decline of the British Empire, the pollution of our country…”

  “And I’ve met a great many young men like you. Get to the point.”

  Mr Walters pursed his lips, unaccustomed to such rudeness. “The point, madam, is that I would like to add your efforts to our cause.”

  “Out of the question. If that was all you had me brought here for, then I’m afraid you have wasted your time.”

  “Hardly.” He flipped the file open. “I think that you have a great deal to offer the Party.”

  The old woman’s laugh was thin and creaking, the product of ageing lungs and shortened breath. “As you pointed out just now, I’m eighty-one. My time has passed. My finances are devoted to my home and family. I have nothing to offer you except an endorsement—and that isn’t going to happen.”

  “But that wasn’t always the case, was it?” Mr Walters’ smile was far less pleasant now than it had been earlier. “You were quite an active woman in your youth.”

  Her voice was colder than a Yorkshire winter morning. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m referring to the White Queen’s Pawn.” He sat back in his chair, smile curling to a sneer.

  Lucy had been warned to watch Lady Hargreaves carefully at those words; but the older woman gave nothing away. She merely looked vaguely puzzled. She might have been reacting to a faux pas by some younger relative, or a bit of ignorant mischief by one of the lower classes. “I don’t understand.”

  “Vienna. Madrid. Rome.” Mr Walters gestured to the file. “A number of jobs in the eighteen-nineties. And after the turn of the century, well! Some of your work was so top secret that we couldn’t find out any more than the names of the operations. You’ve served your country well, madam. But that service doesn’t have to stop. You’re needed more than ever.”

  “Someone has been talking far too much.” The old woman’s hands tightened on her handbag, the lines of tendons and bones visible through her sagging skin. “I won’t waste time with pretence. You know things that you shouldn’t, young man. And you’ve dragged this girl into it now too. Shame on you!”

  “Miss Hansen knows precisely what she’s doing,” Mr Walters said. “We believe in the emancipation of women. They have a right to serve their country just as we men do. Just as you did, Lady Hargreaves.”

  “And what precisely is it you think I did?” Her words flashed out like a naked knife.

  “You killed people.” Mr Walters looked her squarely in the face. “You killed quite a lot of people, Lady Hargreaves. And we know how you did it.”

  Lady Hargreaves sighed. She sounded genuinely weary.

  “There are a great many ways of killing a person, young man, but none of them alter the fact that dead is dead. If you served in the Great War—as I hope you did—then you would be aware of that.”

  Mr Walters stiffened in his chair, but Lucy was the one who spoke, bursting in to defend him. “Of course he served! How dare you suggest that he didn’t?” He didn’t deserve that sort of insult. She knew about his war record, just as everyone else in the Party did. She only wished that she’d been old enough and able to serve too: as a nurse, as a farm worker, in any way that she could have done.

  “That’s enough, Miss Hansen,” Mr Walters said, but he gave her an approving nod. “I can answer Lady Hargreaves here. Of course I served. Almost everyone in the Party served—or was too young to fight at the time. Patriotism isn’t something that we lack.”

  “Maybe not.” The words were polite enough, but there was no sincerity behind them. Lucy didn’t believe for a moment that the old woman had given up. “So what is it that you want from me?”

  “Let’s go back a step,” Mr Walters suggested. “You killed a number of people, Lady Hargreaves. Grown men, some of them with military training. The question one might ask is how a pleasant lady like yourself could do such a thing?”

  “And the logical answer would be that I couldn’t,” Lady Hargreaves snapped.

  “We both know better.” He flipped pages in the file. “Let’s be grateful for the bureaucratic record-keeping instincts of Great Britain’s civil servants, Lady Hargreaves. Even among spies. They began to train you when you were a child. I wonder why you in particular were chosen? We haven’t been able to find information about any other girls. Are their records better hidden? Or did they simply not survive?”

  The old woman’s hands tightened on her handbag again. She seemed to be curling in on herself, settling into position like a statue or a chess piece. Lucy was surprised at her mental image, but then recollected Mr Walters’ earlier reference—the White Queen’s Pawn. That must be why it had come to mind.

  Mr Walters waited a moment, giving Lady Hargreaves the chance to reply. “No comment to make? Then I’ll continue. Your record says that you were trained to be able to induce what the doctors refer to as hysterical strength.” He turned to Lucy. “That, Miss Hansen, is the sort of thing that lets a mother lift a car off her baby in extremis, or allows a man to hold up a collapsing building long enough for hi
s friends to escape. It’s the sort of strength that would allow a young woman—or even a middle-aged one—to slaughter trained soldiers and walk away unscathed. And according to Lady Hargreaves’ records here, this was combined with an altered state of mind that allowed her to view the most appalling scenes of bloodshed and see it as no more than a children’s story. Soldiers came back from the Great War unable to bear what they’d witnessed. But Lady Hargreaves here hasn’t suffered a single night’s broken sleep. Or so she tells her doctors, at least. The perfect assassin.”

  “And is that what you want from me?” Lady Hargreaves demanded. “Am I to skip across the diplomatic fields of Europe and cry ‘Off with his head’ on your orders?” She laughed, and then coughed, and couldn’t stop coughing for a minute.

  “Of course not,” Mr Walters said. “As you yourself know, the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak. No, Lady Hargreaves, what we want from you is training.”

  “Training?” Lady Hargreaves said slowly. “Who am I to train? And why?”

  “Young women who are devoted to the Party. Young women like Miss Hansen.”

  Lucy’s heart leaped: her knees wobbled, and she briefly thought that she might collapse from sheer joy. This, this was what they wanted from her! A chance to help rebuild Great Britain, to sweep away the deadwood and remove the communists, the traitors, the enemy… She stiffened her knees and squared her shoulders. She didn’t want to look weak.

  The light caught the glass that covered the portrait of the Leader, and for a moment she caught her reflection in it. The mirror image seemed to smile at her approvingly.

  Mr Walters leaned forward. “You know who trained you, madam. You know how you were trained. England needs that training. England’s daughters must be taught to fight, just as you have done. I appeal to your patriotism, Lady Hargreaves. Can you really say no?”

  “Two questions,” Lady Hargreaves whispered. Her voice was harsher now, torn by her coughing, and each word came in a painful whisper. It seemed to echo in the room. “The first question. Who wrote that in my record?”