Wonderland

by Marie O'Regan

  She doesn’t know a thing until that sliver of a second just after they rabbit punch her and just before everything turns to black.

  * * *

  “Fucking hell.” Alice doesn’t swear often, but she figures this is an occasion that calls for it. The base of her skull is throbbing and even her eyes hurt.

  “Ah. Awake, are we?” The voice is low, bad-whiskey rough, but somehow comforting. A woman, though that’s hardly distinguishable from the tones. Alice blinks and blinks and blinks but there’s a light above her that’s blinding. She’s lying down on an uncomfortable bed or table or weird concoction of both. An arm goes around her shoulders and helps her to sit a little; a tin cup is held to her lips. “Drink this.”

  Something bitter lemon and so fizzy the bubbles almost make her sneeze, but Alice manages to swallow it all down. She starts to feel better pretty quickly, or at least less awful. She swings her legs over the edge of the whatever she’s sitting on and sways.

  “You gonna stay upright? If you’re gonna puke or fall, try to let me know. Here, have a bucket.”

  The item in question is old and has clearly been used for the purpose before, and washed less well than one might prefer. The smell makes Alice think she will puke, thank you very much indeed, even though she probably wasn’t going to before… she pushes the thing away.

  “Well, okay then.” The woman hands the receptacle to someone standing beside her. Alice gets her eyes to focus, recognises the boy from The Rabbit’s Foot, and glares.

  “Did you do this to me?”

  He nods.

  “Then brought me here?”

  Again, a nod.

  “But you knew I was coming here anyway.”

  “Didn’t want you to hurt the doc,” he mutters and looks away.

  “Jesus.”

  “Jesse, you head back to the saloon. Someone’ll be looking for you, and you know Old Alston will have told Sheriff Dawkins a stranger was asking questions. You hear anyone’s coming this way, you get back here lickety-split. Go on now.”

  The boy scurries out and Alice takes her first good look at the woman.

  She’s tall and raw-boned, rangy, and she’s lighting a hand-rolled cigarette. Soon blueish smoke is making a halo around her head. A green skirt hangs low on slim hips, and her black shirt is baggy; she could do with the attention of a good seamstress. She’s thin in the same way as Alice: too much to do, too little time to do it in, and feeding oneself falls by the wayside. There’s an apron over the top of it all, which is white and washed, but there are long-term stains resident in the weave. Blood, thinks Alice, and her hand moves for the six-shooter even though she knows the woman’s a doctor, blood’s no surprise. The surprise is that the holster at her hip isn’t empty. She takes her fingers away.

  The woman grins with a wide mouth; her teeth are very white, tombstone-shaped. Her hair is a mix of red and silver, though for all the age her face shows she might be anywhere from thirty to sixty. In her hand is the daguerreotype, which she shakes as if needing to draw attention. “Ain’t never found anything to fear from a woman who’s had something to do with this fella. They’re always looking for help in one shape or another.”

  “I’m looking for him. I find him and a lot fewer women will be needing help.”

  “I can believe it.” Doc nods, then says, “That’s quite the accent you’ve got there. Not from around these parts.”

  “Not even close.” Alice shakes her head, feels nauseous, regrets it.

  “Sorry about Jesse. Wish I could say he doesn’t think, but he does, only decision-making ain’t his strong point.”

  “Well, his heart’s in the right place, I guess. Pity about his fists.”

  “Yeah, he’s strong for such a squirt.” Doc smiles fondly. “Jesse’s a good kid, really. He tries hard.”

  “He’s yours?”

  “Lord, no. Orphan boy. Started out at the mission, but got hisself a job at the saloon as soon as he could see over the bar.” She puts out her hand, which Alice takes, finding the grip firm. “I’m Mehitabel Reine.”

  “Alice.”

  If Doc Reine thinks it’s strange there’s no last name offered, she doesn’t say anything. Alice jerks her chin at the cigarette between the woman’s long fingers. “Got a spare?”

  The doc fishes one from the pocket of her skirt and hands it over, a wry grin quirking her lips. “You look a little young, but then again”—she tilts her head—“maybe not. In some lights, from some angles…”

  “I’m older than I look.” Alice leans forward, the tip of the rollie dipping into the flame of Doc’s Vesta match, and draws breath through it. The smoke zips into her lungs and she holds it there a while, savouring the bitterness.

  She takes a second puff, at last looking around the room: a doctor’s surgery for sure. She’s on a high, leather-covered examination table. There’s a desk against which the doctor leans, a chair pushed off to the side, shelves heavy with books, glass cabinets filled with silver instruments, a bench scattered with pestles and mortars, tiny blue bottles, all manner of things for mixing medicines. And there’s another bench against the far wall that’s lined with specimen jars, the forms inside floating in some sort of fluid.

  “That accent,” says Mehitabel again. She waves the daguerreotype. “Only heard something like that once before, neat little fella with a limp.”

  “Really?” In Alice’s pocket the compass kicks at her, a protest, something fearful about the motion. She pulls it out, says, “He’s missing this.” It’s a single toe, covered in white fur, large, dangling from a leather thong. “What’s he calling himself nowadays?”

  Doc eyes the toe, blinks uncertainly. “Jack Hart.”

  Alice snorts, puts the toe away. “I call him Rabbit.”

  “Rabbit?”

  “When I’m being polite.”

  “And when you’re not?”

  “You don’t want to know. He still around?” But she knows the answer from the trembling thing in her tunic. Alice has figured out, over the long years, that it knows when its owner is in danger of being found, just like it knows when he’s close. It can’t stop itself from reacting.

  Doc Reine shakes her head. “Gone almost two years.”

  Alice closes her eyes tightly for a few seconds. “If he’s not here, then I’d best be getting along.”

  “Don’t be too hasty. He left behind friends.” There’s a warning tone in Doc’s voice. “Left a mess behind, too.”

  “Always does.”

  But the doctor’s not finished. She pushes away from the desk and paces to where the specimen jars catch sun from the window, gestures for her patient to join her. Alice takes a tentative step, finds she’s steady enough, and reaches the bench top without either vomiting or fainting. As she gets closer the toe begins to thud and thump in the pocket-pouch.

  “The first girl carried all the way through. Baby didn’t live. After that, any girl who’d been with him came to me. Didn’t want their parents to know. Look.”

  “I need to go. I need to get after him before the trail gets even colder…”

  But whatever Alice might have said is lost as she looks. At first she’s confused, then she begins to make out details. Foetuses, curled in on themselves, not carried to term but far enough along that their features are identifiable as mostly human…

  It’s the ears and tails that set them apart. Rabbit ears, crunched and crumpled to fit in the jars, the fluffy button tails waving like anemones in the liquid, though there’s nothing to move them. On some, a line of white fur runs down the spine.

  Alice finds her vision swims. She can’t count the number of vessels on the bench because they don’t seem to be staying still. Turning away, Alice finds by sheer luck the bucket where Jesse dropped it.

  As she retches—which is especially painful with an empty stomach—she hears what she at first thinks is thunder. It takes a few moments before she realises it’s someone banging on the front door of Doc’s little blue house,
and Doc’s gone pale and is starting to swear.

  * * *

  “Well, that went south quick.” Mehitabel Reine has a bloody nose and a split, swollen lip, so when she talks a fine spray of red taints the air.

  There’s one body on the floor of the surgery. A nuggetty man with a bald head, drooping brown moustache, staring eyes, chequered shirt, gold star shining on his chest. There’s an entry wound in the soft flesh beneath Sheriff Dawkins’ chin, and one for the exit somewhere in the top of his head. Jesse’s covering his ears as if the retort of the gun is echoing still. Kid looks stunned.

  Alice, still kneeling, has a smoking Peacemaker in one hand, the other grips her ribs. She’d have preferred not to shoot him, or at least not here and maybe not so soon, but he telegraphed his intentions when he arrived by kicking her as she hunched over the odious bucket. When she gets her breath back, she says, “Would this be one of those friends Mr Hart left behind?”

  Doc nods.

  “And I’m guessing that, in addition to those”—she points the gun towards the specimen jars and their contents—“that you’ve got a problem with missing children?”

  Doc says, “And I’m guessing you rode past the mission on your way here? Did you wonder why there were so many orphans there? Seem like a large number for such a sparsely populated area?”

  Alice half-sits, half-rolls onto her backside, legs bent, arms hanging over the knees. “I did.”

  “Okay, none of those kids are ever there for long. None ever grow up here. No one gets to adopt from there even though there’s plenty of childless couples hereabouts, plenty of farming folk who’d be glad of a helping hand even if it means another mouth to feed.” Doc pulls open one of the glass cabinets and grabs a cloth pad to press against her bleeding nose. “Jesse’s the only kid ever got out, but that was before Mr Hart arrived and set up his business.”

  “Looks like at least one of the friends isn’t prepared to take chances on me asking any more questions.”

  “You get this sort of thing a lot?”

  “Sometimes.” Dead men and women littered Alice’s trail, either because they wouldn’t give her the information she needed or because they tried to stop her from getting it. No point telling the doc that, though; she was a smart woman, she’d have figured it out.

  “Jesse, you go sit out front. You holler if you see anyone. And uncover your goddamned ears.” The boy goes, eyes as wide as teacups, arms clamped at his sides. “Kid has the worst timing.” Jesse’d burst in to warn them just as Dawkins’ boot connected with Alice’s flank. Doc nodded at the girl on her floor. “Anything broken?”

  “Some doctor you are,” grumbled Alice, and clambered to her feet, grimacing. “Probably.”

  “I’ll strap your ribs, and while I’m doing that let me tell you about Rabbit’s other friends, the priest and the railway magnate.”

  “Tell me first why you haven’t done anything about this before now.”

  * * *

  “So, no one complains?”

  Doc Reine gives Alice a look like she’s a slow child. “What would you do? The sheriff’s in on it, the priest’s in on it, and the man whose money started the town is in on it. Who else would you complain to?”

  “The sawbones. The last responsible adult in town.”

  “I do what I can. When the first of the girls came to me, those Mr Hart had favoured, I thought I was going mad. It took a while, too, for me to realise what was happening at the mission. I almost said something to Mr Gambit one day—I spent a long time trying to figure out who to confide in—but then I saw him and Hart together, laughing, watching a young girl walk down the street.” Mehitabel Reine takes a deep breath, pats the neck of the roan she rides. “Who was I going to tell then? And what good was I if I got myself killed, buried in some back tunnel of the silver mine? I could show them the… babies… but that’s no proof of either Gambit’s or the priest’s collusion.” Doc shifts her shoulders as if to adjust the weight of the shotgun strapped to her back. She’s got a range of scalpels secreted in various pockets of her jacket and trousers too, one slid down her right boot.

  Alice sighs. They’re heading through the woods out of town, towards the home of the town’s founder. They’d left Jesse to dig a shallow hole in Doc’s garden for the sheriff’s corpse. “Rabbit moves on but the others stay, benefiting from whatever commerce he set up. He stays a step ahead. This is how he works: finds likeminded folk, makes promises, then he leaves with his share before things go bad.”

  “By things, you mean you arrive?”

  Alice nods. She’s told the doc what she thinks the woman can bear—she’s seen all those little remnants of Rabbit’s pastimes, after all, collected them in her specimen jars, but that doesn’t mean she’d accept the whole idea of Wonderland as a place you get taken against your will, kidnapped for the amusement of Queen and King and Court. It’s enough to say that she, Alice, was taken and bad things happened, and now she spends her time trying to stop those bad things happening to other children. She doesn’t mention the land across the way, that she destroyed it for a time, kicking apart the playing-card flimsiness that had done her so much damage; that she made a deal with the Queen of Hearts in order to go home; that now she was honouring that and getting her revenge at the same time. Alice had found most folks can only believe so much.

  Doc continues. “There’s no mayor here, no council of wise men. There’s just Lutwidge Gambit and all his money. He financed the surveys that found the silver seam, he paid for the mining and smelting equipment, he paid for the railway tracks to be laid out here. Hell, he brought half the workers out with their families; shipped in women to make matches for those who wanted them, and the whores for those who just preferred something less burdensome.” Mehitabel Reine shakes her head. “And he’s smart—they’re smart. They don’t take any child from town, unless they’re utterly unwanted. They harvest from around, a long way around so it’s hard to see a pattern unless you’re looking for it.”

  “What were they doing before Rabbit?”

  “Who knows? Being much sneakier, taking private pleasures and disposing of the evidence. Now… well, now it’s a business.”

  “At least the priest’s not going to be a problem anymore.”

  The mission had been emptied of children when Alice and the doc had burst in, and the woman Alice had seen with the orphans that morning was nowhere to be found. Alice had resisted the urge to pin the priest, Father Eustace, up on his own cross, and just shot him in the head after he’d told them all he could or would. Doc helped her tip him down the well; she also suggested that the woman, Annabelle Foreman, had gone with the children to keep them calm.

  The sun’s almost set when they rein in their mounts just beyond the treeline that borders Gambit’s mansion. The house is a three-storey thing, white with columns and broad verandahs that would look more at home deeper south, surrounded by bayous and cotton fields. Alice takes in the rail lines that lead around the back where, parked as casually as a horse and cart, an engine waits. It’s the one she saw earlier today, but now two cars are attached to it. The first is the luxurious-looking private carriage, the second a windowless boxcar. No steam comes from the engine’s stack; presumably departure won’t be until morning. There’s no sign of an engineer or fireman. From where the women sit they can hear the muted sobs and cries of lost children.

  “Where are his men?” Alice takes a breath, scans the area.

  “Men?”

  “Henchmen, Mehitabel. They’ve all got henchmen.”

  “Most of Gambit’s employees work in the mine, live with their families in town, but he’s got a staff here. They must be around…”

  “Maybe they’re lying in wait. Or maybe they’ve been given the evening off because they don’t know what he does on the side.” Alice chews at her bottom lip. “You okay with the boxcar?”

  “And while I’m doing that, you’ll be…?”

  “Making the acquaintance of Mr Lutwidge Gambit.” A
lice urges her horse forward. “You watch out for that Foreman woman; there’s every chance she’s in on this, and in my experience women fight harder to avoid consequences.”

  “What do you want me to do with any henchmen I might come across?”

  “You’ve got a gun. What do you want me to do, draw you a picture?” Alice gives her a solid stare. “Do you think they’re going to be much of a loss to this world?”

  “Just checking.”

  * * *

  The house is silent and that makes Alice ever more nervous. She’d slipped in through the kitchen door, finding no one there, no housekeeper or cook or maid. There’d been no one in the stables, either, no one in the barn. Then again, she tells herself, if you employ folk to do one thing, but they’re not aware of the other things, the bad things you do—and let’s face it, the more people know a secret, the less secure that secret is—then you’re likely to give them the night off when you’re about to ship out a bunch of kidnapped children. So, thinks Alice, maybe this is better. Easier to take out a couple of men rather than a small private army.

  The mansion is precisely what you’d expect of so much new money. All the furniture glossy oakwood and mahogany, items designed less for sitting on than looking at. There are inlays of marble and mother-of-pearl, gold filigree, the floors so highly polished they’re slippery, the rugs rich and exotic, the curtains thick and velvety. The paintings on the walls are portraits of men and women with high foreheads and receding chins. Alice thinks it all very vulgar. The windows are pristine and the blackness of the fast-falling night is clearly visible, not a single smudge marring the panes.

  At the end of the corridor on the ground floor only one door is closed, and she heads towards it. Alice turns the handle and pushes, keeping herself to the side of the frame. Bullets bite at the wood, splinters fly up and flick at her skin. She counts the shots and when the sixth goes as astray as the others, she waits a moment longer, listens to the jingle of panicked fingers trying to reload. Then Alice steps into a library: a lot of chairs, a big desk, shelves filled with books, and behind the desk is a man with an empty gun.