Wonderland

by Marie O'Regan

  “It’s only for one night,” her mum would say, stroking Lucy’s hair, curling it back behind her ear. “Think of your grandma. You can manage.”

  For the most part, her mum was right; and besides, Peter was a lot younger, and went to bed earlier, so was usually asleep by the time Lucy got up there. It was this that had given her the idea.

  Soon enough, the time came for Peter to turn in. Lucy wished him goodnight and took her book downstairs to sit with the adults for a while. Her grandma was asleep in her chair, the remains of an After Eight mint on her lips. Her mum and dad were watching some awful drama about people-smuggling, and so Lucy kept her nose in the fantasy novel she was reading, although she found it hard to think of anything else but the Queen of Hearts in her gilded cage, and the monster from under the bed, picking bits of foot soldiers from between its teeth.

  As soon as seemed reasonable—and after she was certain her brother would be fast asleep—Lucy bid goodnight to her parents and crept off to bed. Peter lay asleep in bed, his duvet tossed to one side, foot jutting nonchalantly over the side of the mattress. Here, she knew, was a child who had never wondered about the monster under the bed. Probably because it had always been too busy terrorising Lucy.

  Well, it was time for that to change, because, if there was one thing Lucy was certain about, it was that all children, at some point, have to believe in monsters.

  Carefully, working only by the watery light of the moon slanting in under the curtains, she formed her pillows into an approximation of her body and covered these with her duvet, to give the impression she was curled up asleep in her bed. Then, safe in the knowledge that the monster was, in fact, keeping himself busy elsewhere, she lay down on the floor between the two beds, and shuffled herself quietly beneath Peter’s.

  It was dusty under there—she supposed her grandma wasn’t really up to hoovering these days—nevertheless, she shimmied under until she felt the cold wall against her leg and knew that Peter wouldn’t be able to see her. Then, steadying her breathing, she reached up and raked her nails across the bottom of the wooden slats.

  At first, everything in the room remained silent. She did it again, louder this time, and she felt as much as heard Peter’s weight shift on the bed. The springs groaned above her head. She scratched at the boards again.

  “H… hello?” Peter’s voice was quiet, tentative. “Is there anybody there?”

  She waited for a moment, and then scratched again.

  “Who is that?”

  Lucy made her best “monster” sound, which was halfway between a snort and a groan, and it hurt the back of her throat to do so. She nearly spluttered on a mouthful of dust.

  “Lucy?”

  Peter shifted again on the bed. She could sense him peering under the bed now, and she turned her face towards the wall, holding her breath and hoping he wouldn’t notice her.

  “Lucy?”

  Her lungs were burning, but she held on. After a moment, she heard Peter lie back in his bed. She reached up and scratched again.

  “Whatever you are, I’m trying to sleep, so you’ll just have to stop,” said Peter. His voice was trembling. Lucy felt a sudden surge of affection for the boy, comingling with a sense of guilt. Should she really be doing this? “But tomorrow, we can have a proper conversation, okay?”

  Lucy grinned. She scratched again at the wooden slats, more gently this time.

  She gave it half an hour, before carefully sliding out from beneath the bed, dusting herself down, and slipping into her own bed, a broad grin on her face—almost as broad as that of the Cheshire Cat.

  * * *

  The following morning, after breakfast, Lucy was sitting alone in the kitchen, drinking a cup of tea and scrolling through her Instagram feed. Her dad had popped out to fetch the paper—she couldn’t understand why this was still a thing, when he had a perfectly good internet connection—and her mum was helping her grandma to have a bath.

  She heard Peter sidle into the room. He pulled out a chair beside her and sat down. She could sense him fiddling with his hands, nervously. She looked up. “Everything okay, kiddo?”

  He looked at her, opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, and then shook his head. “Yeah, all good.”

  “You know you can ask me anything, don’t you?” said Lucy. “It’s okay. I won’t tell Mum.”

  Peter chewed his bottom lip for a moment. “Well… um… did you hear anything last night? In our room?”

  “What sort of thing?” said Lucy.

  “A kind of scratching sound, and some… breathing.”

  “Oh, was I snoring again? I’m sorry—”

  “No, it wasn’t that! It was coming from under my bed.”

  Lucy grinned. “Ohhh! Right. That’ll be the monster.”

  “What? Now you’re just being silly. Mum’s told you not to wind me up, Lucy.”

  She put her phone down and laid a hand on top of his. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s not that kind of monster. Not really. Although he can be a bit grumpy sometimes.”

  “So you did hear it?” said Peter, wide-eyed.

  “Oh, I’ve known about him for years,” she said. “He’s always been around. Sometimes he’s here, and sometimes he’s at home. But all he needs is a bit of attention—a little chat every now and then. Nothing to worry about.”

  Peter was drumming his fingers on the tabletop, excited now. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. But don’t tell the grown-ups, because they don’t believe in things like monsters anymore. But we know better, don’t we?”

  “Yeah!”

  Lucy licked her lips. Now the time had come, she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about it. But she knew it was the right thing to do. “There’s something else, too,” she said. “Pop your shoes on. I need to show you something, out in the garden. You’re not going to believe it…”

  * * *

  Upstairs, Lucy’s mother turned away from the window and smiled.

  “Mum, Lucy’s taking Peter down to the hole behind the potting shed.”

  Alice was sitting on the edge of her bed. She met her daughter’s eye and gave a long, happy sigh. “It’s about time,” she said.

  Smoke ’em if You Got ’em

  ANGELA SLATTER

  The church is enormous; blocky, white-washed adobe stark against the red dirt. There are outbuildings, too, making up the compound: a barn, two smaller structures that might be a dormitory and school, cottage, outhouse, chicken coop, a smokehouse, and a well with a steepled roof. Alice is just guessing, of course; she can’t know for sure unless she goes down there, which she won’t because it’s not her goal. All this is surrounded by a high wall.

  Alice is up on the tree-covered ridge. A train line, newish, runs beside that high wall. If she turns her head to the right, squints real hard, she can just about spot Queen’s Gambit and, further along, the stacks of the smelter that services the silver mine. She’ll follow those tracks that link so many little towns together. As she watches, an engine—painted black and silver—clatters past. It draws a single carriage with Gambit in green and gold letters on the crimson siding. The sound reaches her, crisp in the autumn-cool air.

  Across the square of the compound small figures dash back and forth, all colours, and she wonders at the varied mix. What she’s grown used to seeing in this America are children, mostly brown, stolen away from their families to be washed in godliness. To prepare them for positions of subservience in life, as if that’s what the god on the cross intended for them, and the men and women in crow’s-wing black were put here on earth to enforce that.

  Alice glances at her own pale skin; it never burns or tans no matter how long she’s in the sun. A boon of sorts from her time in Wonderland, she guesses. She’s like Persephone with the pomegranate seeds, only she’s not condemned to stay in Hades, but to carry it around with her wherever she goes, a tiny bitter fortress inside her, like the unsuspected poison in the heart of an apple.

  Another
flash of movement: a tall ebony-clad figure comes out of the front doors of the church. He stops abruptly as if he sees her, even though she’s still as a stone up on the ridge. He shades his eyes with a hand despite the broad-brimmed black hat that looks like a dark halo. He calls over his shoulder, words that don’t travel up to Alice, and a woman appears, short, stocky, white blouse, light-blue long skirt. She shepherds the congregation of lost and abandoned young like ducklings into one of the smaller buildings. The priest stares a few moments longer, then follows.

  Alice thinks how big the church is, almost a cathedral. How many bodies are likely to worship here on this edge of Arizona? Queen’s Gambit is over the way, sure, and she supposes folk on outlying farms will travel to make sure their souls are kept clean in case of the unexpected inevitable. She’s found that religion is worn here like a raincoat, on and off at convenience.

  In the pocket-pouch of her tunic—a weird fawn-coloured melding of linen and fur, draped over dirty-cream canvas trousers and a shirt the colour of old blood—the thing is quiet. The strange fleshy compass, cut edge still pink where it was sheared off in the closing of the portal between worlds; the only thing of himself he left behind. There’s just the occasional pulse—a twitch to indicate that what she’s hunting came this way, but it’s so light, so feeble. Too many years of experience tell her that what she’s looking for is no longer around, not even close by.

  Yet the trail and her information led this way. The stories put her quarry here and she’s got no other choice but to follow. She gets closer every time, missing him by less at each location. One day she’ll catch up. Alice settles her tan-coloured Derby more firmly over the blond hair tucked underneath, the fringe kept back by a black velvet band that’s worn bald in parts.

  “Hup,” she says to the brown horse, giving him the gentlest of urges with her heels, and he ambles on. Alice’s stomach rumbles with hunger. She’s thinner than she should be, and can’t really afford to lose much more weight. Soon, if she turns side-on, she’ll disappear like a card-person. Wouldn’t that be a joke? To escape Wonderland and end up like that?

  * * *

  Queen’s Gambit is kind of big, maybe kind of small. No, thinks Alice, it’s neither one nor the other, something in between. Almost like it’s not quite true, but is on the verge of becoming so; will become so if given the right chance, whatever that might be. It’s precisely the sort of place he’d have sought out: porous, unfinished, somewhere he could slip between the cracks.

  People are moving across the wide avenues of packed earth: women in dresses with irrationally large skirts; men, the very old and the very young only—presumably the middling are working the mine. Alice remembers London streets from her childhood, from before she was stolen. She thinks of thin, tall houses stretching vertically because horizontally was simply not an option. She thinks of narrow lanes, so tightly woven that there hardly seemed enough room for air, let alone bodies.

  She thinks of the lack of true light in that great city, how seldom the sun broke through the industrial clouds. Here it’s entirely different: seemingly so bright that nothing can be hidden. That’s a lie for sure and she knows it.

  The saloon is like any other, maybe a little more rickety with what looks like, from a certain angle, a lean to the left. The Rabbit’s Foot is emblazoned on the signage in tall red letters outlined in gold; that paint’s kept fresh, but the wood of the façade is dry and splintered, bleached back to dead grey. Only superficial touches, then, like too much makeup on an old whore. Alice thinks she’ll find some of them inside too, they’re like decor that never changes from place to place, but the older they get the less the glamours cast by wigs, cosmetics and corsets adhere to the body.

  She hitches her horse to the rail over a brim-full trough, and goes up the steps to the sounds of the beast’s slurping.

  The floorboards are bare, but the bar itself is made of imposing and expensive polished wood; there is a wall of glasses behind it and a mirror behind that. The curtains are red velvet, with gold tassels, same colour scheme as the paintwork outside and in. But Alice can see wisps of cobwebs from the crystal chandeliers, and dust wheeling away from the drapes as a woman pushes past, taking drinks to a group of dour-looking men.

  There’s a boy serving at the bar, hardly old enough to sprout a moustache. Three, maybe four hairs bristle across his top lip; he’s eleven, twelve at most. Alice weaves towards him between the tables and chairs; clientele is thin on the ground, but it is morning after all. The few women hanging over the furniture look tired, bare-faced, their petticoats and housedresses wilted from age and wear. Apart from the young barkeep, there’s an old man at the pianola, chugging out a tune that’s too jaunty for his desultory peddling.

  “Whiskey,” says Alice to the boy who eyes her; he’s wearing pinstriped trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up as if it’s meant for someone larger, and a fancy vest, navy brocade with golden dragons embroidered on it, so fine that it has to be a hand-me-down. All he needs is a bowler hat and a cigar; in a big city, he’d have both, no question. Alice continues, “The cheaper the better.”

  The boy doesn’t answer. He’s got an ancient gaze and she wonders how long he’s been working here. Alice bounces a coin on the counter and the boy catches it with one hand, makes it disappear with a magician’s dexterity. He produces a shot glass and upends a bottle so generic she doesn’t recognise the name. The label looks handwritten. Alice throws the liquor back, finds it doesn’t burn any more than usual. She lifts an eyebrow, and the boy refills. Alice takes her time with this one, before she asks her questions.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  Still, the boy says nothing.

  Alice pulls a daguerreotype out of her pocket-pouch—her fingers brush the left-behind furred object, recoiling even with familiarity—and holds the image up where he can’t help but see it. It’s heavy, a copper-plate image in a neat stamped-metal case. “Little fellow, spruce, white hair, button nose. Snappy dresser, walks with a slight limp.”

  She came across the simulacrum in Chicago a year or two ago as she followed the pulse of the compass, the trail of missing children. Its creator, a widow with two small daughters, had met the subject in a park, had liked the man’s features and fancy dress sense so much she’d invited him for a sitting, hung the portrait on her wall. She had liked him so much, in fact, that she took him in as a boarder then bed-warmer for two months. Then one morning the nattily dressed boarder left, taking the little girls with him. No trace could be found of them by any law enforcement agency; of course, no one but Alice knew of the pattern, the connections. No one else gathered information the way Alice did or kept quite such an intricate network of informants. Word led her to the woman, and Alice heard, for such news travels on swift wings, that the woman had killed herself soon after they spoke.

  The boy tilts his head, gaze flat, considers the picture. However, he shakes his head.

  “Right,” says Alice equably. She knows a liar when she sees one, but she won’t pick a fight right now. She hasn’t lasted this long, surviving this world and the other, without developing a deep store of patience. “Where might I find a doctor? Must be one hereabouts.”

  “You feelin’ poorly?” The boy speaks at last and his voice is an assault on the ears. Alice doesn’t wince, though she wants to. The twang is harsh as a train applying its brakes too fast and hard, the volume unmodulated.

  “Nope, just want to talk with them.” Alice has invariably found that each time she’s missed her quarry, the next most useful port of call is always the local doctor. Physicians always keep more secrets than priests.

  The boy gives a long pause. “Doctor Reine’s almost at the end of town. Follow the main street, little blue house with a white picket fence.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Doc’s a good person,” he says, as if it might guilt Alice out of any ill intent.

  “I’m sure they are.” Alice puts her empty glass on the bar. “Thank you
kindly.”

  She leaves the horse tethered at the trough, deciding he deserves more of a rest. People are still milling across the thoroughfare in a kind of dance, no one really paying attention to the newcomer, or at least not appearing to do so.

  Alice walks down the street, taking in the buildings: general store, feed and seed, seamstress, a stable and blacksmith, a boarding house, a telegraph office. There’s a small church propped between two bigger structures and she wonders why it’s there when that great big cathedral is not so far away; then again, faith has its different stripes. There’s a jail, too, where she catches sight of a man’s florid face pressed against the window, bald head, drooping brown moustache, narrowed eyes, chequered shirt under a black leather vest, gold star shining on his chest. She nods, tips her hat, keeps on pacing; he doesn’t acknowledge her. And there are houses, more and more as she gets further away from the saloon.

  Alice is careful: she sometimes still looks like a young girl, because time moved differently in Wonderland and she was there long enough for it to affect her, to stop her clock or slow it at least (I’m late, I’m late, I’m late). Something she learned, though, on the other side, was how to change her face, make it a little older, just enough to turn aside glances; she doesn’t do it all the time, mind, because it’s tiring. She keeps a weather eye out, does Alice, always wary of men and women who pay her too much mind, who touch her arm or hand or shoulder or back in a certain way. She carries a Colt Peacemaker in the holster by her hip. Eventually, the crowd drops away entirely and the stretch of street before her is deserted.

  So yes, Alice is careful and not stupid, but she is tired. She’s been in the saddle for days, weeks, months, she’s been hungry and thirsty and sometimes damned near lost. Now she’s had two whiskeys on an empty stomach, and she’s wandering in a strange town, and whoever is behind her is, to give them credit, impressively silent.