Wonderland

by Marie O'Regan

  “Time.” Cook’s voice was at her shoulder and Alice jumped; she hadn’t realised the sly, wiry woman was leaning over her. “Time you grew out of it.”

  Alice was certain she felt the wicked woman’s chin press into her shoulder before she turned away, back to her soup. “Belongs in the pot,” Cook muttered over her shoulder, pointing with her ladle, sending soupy droplets flying across the floor.

  Alice followed the gesture but saw only the teapot, knowing that wasn’t what she’d meant; then saw the pig trussed ready for their dinner, its turned-up nose and tiny closed eyes, the apple thrust between its jaws.

  Alice made to leave, but Cook hadn’t finished. She muttered again, something about rabbits doing what they do, and Alice thought that was rather sweet; that she meant the creatures were nothing more than they are, or were yesterday, or would be tomorrow—so very unlike people, so unlike her visitor, and then Cook added, “They give us meat.”

  The woman turned, her eyes as small and narrow as the pig’s. “One plus one is four,” she said. “Or six, or eight, or however it shall be. Put those together and you shall have forty-two, or a hundred and one, or eight hundred and seventy.” She looked Alice up and down as she spoke, then gave a lascivious wink and Alice realised what she meant.

  A grin more akin to a grimace formed on her lips. It didn’t feel as if it quite belonged to her, just hung in front of her face like a separate thing altogether, but Cook didn’t seem to notice anything strange. She put out a hand as if to feel Alice’s belly, to see if she was ripe, perhaps—and Alice stepped away, letting her own hands fall, feeling the lithe, warm body of the rabbit slip to the floor and hop away.

  She gave a little cry and hurried after it, to the echo of Cook’s laughter. As Alice reached out for the rabbit, she noticed on her own hand the ring her visitor had placed on her finger. When he had handed her the gift, she had thought it nothing but a golden thimble; in her confusion she had almost imagined it uncurled in the palm of her hand, stretching like a serpent before wrapping itself about her finger, biting its own tail so that she couldn’t take it off again.

  Henry wore stiff collars and smelled of Rowland’s Macassar oil. His waistcoat buttons were small and black, like a haddock’s eyes, and when he looked at her, his eyes were just as bright and shiny. When he’d put the ring on her finger he’d smiled like a fish, too.

  She hadn’t imagined that the ring would be so heavy, hadn’t suspected it would be so tight. And yet she didn’t wish to take it off—it made her special. Everyone would want to see it, to look and admire. It shone so much more brightly than Henry’s eyes.

  Alice had looked away from him and glimpsed her mother peering in through a crack in the doorway, had seen her delighted smile. She could almost hear the words her mother had said to her before the tea-party: “The truest kind of happiness, dear child, the only kind that is really worth the having, is the happiness of making others happy, too!”

  Now Alice carried the white rabbit into the drawing room, where she sat in front of the posy of white roses Henry had given her, still tied up in their ribbon. Each time she looked at them she thought a spreading stain was marring their whiteness—as if the roses were gradually being painted red: red like a heart, red like a bloodthirsty queen, or perhaps both together. She reached out, touched her finger to the stem, noticed the blood already beading on her skin. She did not know if she’d pricked herself on a thorn, or if she was just about to; as if her body already knew when it was supposed to bleed.

  * * *

  Alice leaned over her rabbit’s cage, watching his long yellow teeth munch. So easy, to be him—so straightforward. There was food and he ate. He had paws and he ran. He had no sense of time passing, of what might happen in the future or what had happened in the past; he had no pocket watch. She let her eyes slip out of focus. The inside of his cage had a dry, earthy smell. It was set into an unused alcove at a turn in the passage and it was shadowed, safe, almost tunnel-like. She opened the latch on the cage, though she didn’t lift him out. Instead she leaned in, feelings crowding up inside her: the momentousness of something, a decision made perhaps, a path taken that could not be undone. And she found herself falling—falling a long way, though slowly and with time to look about her.

  She drifted down past cupboards and shelves laden with little bottles and cakes labelled “EAT ME” or “DRINK ME”. They reminded her of a strange story she’d read years ago, where such things made a little girl shrink or grow bigger so that she was never the same size twice. She shuddered at the idea. Only yesterday, her mother had said she must resist eating cake; anyone knew that young ladies must never grow any bigger, must keep a respectable waist. Her sisters had tried but it didn’t last; they grew fat eventually, though no one had liked to mention it, nor the squealing and shrieking of the babies that followed. Tomorrow—or was it now today?—her mother had promised to tight-lace Alice’s corset. She had joked about snipping off her toes to better fit her wedding slippers.

  Alice scowled and without thinking she reached out, snatching a bottle from a shelf, putting it to her lips. The taste that flooded her mouth was of sunshine and childhood: cherry tart and caramel and barley sugar (to sweeten the temper, her mother would have said), and her teeth ached with its impossible sweetness. She flung the bottle away from her, not caring if it struck anyone passing below.

  Then she wondered—was the potion changing her somehow? Had she already changed? She didn’t suppose Henry would like that very much. Was she now taller than him, or did she reach only to his knees? There was no way of telling. And then she was sitting on a soft pile of leaves and twigs and what felt like fur, on the ground in front of a wall with a tiny door set into it.

  She stared, wondering if the door really was tiny or if she had become huge: some clumsy, ugly, unacceptable thing.

  She turned the minuscule handle and pushed it open, then lay down on the floor so that she could see through it. It was all wrong, everything turned sideways, but she knew at once what she saw. For there she was: Alice with her hair neat and golden, wearing a golden crown. She was sitting on a gilded throne next to Henry, whose red face was round and satisfied. Other people were lined up at the table: her mother and father, her sisters and their husbands. She knew at once that this was her wedding breakfast, though she had missed the soup and the fish, for they were bringing out the main course: not a suckling pig but a great roasted rabbit, bigger than the whole table.

  Everyone started beating their plates with their fists, setting up a wild cacophony. Queen Alice merely sat as if she were in a world apart, plucking the petals from a daisy, and she heard the words as if they were falling from her own lips: “I love my love with an H. I love my love with an H…”

  Everyone raised their glasses in a toast. “Alice! Alice!” they cried, but not in a happy way, not in a pleased way. They screamed the word until it was meaningless, nothing but empty noise spilling from their gaping mouths, and instead of drinking the wine they poured it over their heads, licking it from each other’s faces, red like a stain, red like a heart. When they laughed, the wine coated their teeth like blood.

  Alice slammed the little door closed and lay staring upwards. A long, long way above her was a tiny pinprick of light, impossible to reach.

  After a time she realised there was nothing else to be done but sit up and look around. And she saw that everything had changed: a bank of smooth grass sloped away from her, a neat path wending down towards a little river with sunshine sparkling from its waters. And there, just rounding a bend, was a boat—a gentleman rowed it, and with him were three little girls in white dresses, intent on his words, rapt in some story he was telling them.

  Alice leapt to her feet. “Wait!” she called. “I’m coming too!” She started to run towards them, faster and faster. She could still make out the charming cadence of their tale, their merry laughter, but no matter how hard she ran, the path misled her; she ended farther from them than she had been before, findin
g the little door in front of her instead of the river, so that she had to whirl about to see it. She tried again, ending once more at the top of the hill, staring as the boat rounded the next bend, drifting away. She called out again for them to wait, she was coming, her voice rupturing into a scream, but they did not stop. They showed no sign of having heard her at all.

  When she slumped down on the grass, however, something else had changed—a round, black hole gaped in front of her, leading directly into the ground. She leaned over it, seeing nothing. The scent was of damp soil and of the dark. After a moment, she stepped into it.

  This time she fell heavily and fast, though not far. The drop could only have been a few feet. She landed on more black earth and saw a circular tunnel stretching away in either direction. The smell was stronger down here, of the earth and time and decaying things, with a hint of sweetness that was not unpleasant. She wasn’t merely down the rabbit hole any longer, she realised; she had entered the warren.

  It seemed to make little difference which way she went and so she started along the tunnel, feeling earth crumbling into her hair, gathering under her nails as she ran her hands along the walls. It wasn’t altogether dark, though she could not tell where the light was coming from, and she realised the walls were not entirely bare. A few sparse flowers clung to them, their stems long and thin, their colours pale.

  She paused as she passed a little clump of daisies, thinking she caught some faint sound, and the daisies opened their eyes.

  “Where am I going?” Alice asked them.

  “You are. You’re going,” came their weak reply.

  “But where?”

  “Yes. Going.”

  “You should leave off asking them. Hjckrrh!” The voice that came out of the dark was deep and lugubrious, yet finished on a high rasp that made Alice jump. “They can barely speak any longer, don’t you know. They can hardly move on their own. All they can do is agree with everything that is said to them. You’ll find them best for looking and admiring, nothing more.”

  Alice blinked. For a moment the daisies were nothing but golden rings shining in the dark, their heads nodding like ladies bending over their sewing. She pulled a face, snatching at the stems as if to pluck the flowers—didn’t they know she would be a queen?—but they danced away from her with little squeals.

  “Faded,” they said, their voices now filled with spite. “You’re already beginning to fade.”

  And the stranger, stronger voice said, “He’s coming. You should hurry.”

  Alarmed, Alice glanced down at herself—was she fading? That seemed of greater concern than the warning about the strange He, though she glanced behind her anyway, seeing only darkness. She went onward, wondering what had happened to the owner of the voice, then cold air gusted at her hair and she realised there was a side tunnel. A lithe form, almost filling the passage, slunk cat-like away from her, its tail swishing. No, not a cat: a lion, yet as it twisted its head back over its shoulder, she thought she saw the outline of a beak. And were they wings, folded over its back?

  The voice echoed back along the tunnel: “You must learn the lessons of the Mock Turtle.”

  A Mock Turtle—that also reminded her of something she had read long ago. In her childhood book, the Mock Turtle had gone to school in the sea. He had learned Reeling and Writhing, which she had thought meant reading and writing—though an image came to her of the cook, counting in her coarse arithmetic, groping with her rude fingers. The Mock Turtle had learned other things, too: ambition, she remembered, and distraction, and perhaps derision; adult things, things she hadn’t been certain she could learn or even wanted to. Those, and uglification: he had learned that, too.

  She put a hand to her face, feeling her skin, hearing again the daisies’ voices: Fading. She shook her head, thought of the cold ring still wrapped about her finger, of Henry’s fish-smile. She whispered the words her mother had taught her: “I love my love with an H. I love my love with an H…”

  She stumbled onward, seeing only more passageways, one leading into the next or branching into multiple mouths, taking this one or that without hesitation or thought. Sometimes the light grew brighter and sometimes it dimmed almost entirely, leaving behind the faint scent of smoke, like a candle just blown out. She began to see objects scattered across the floor, wasted and broken things: crumpled playing cards, smashed dishes, flamingos with broken necks, hedgehogs’ empty skins, a fan with splintered leaves, a soiled kid glove. She stepped over them all and went on until she turned a corner and saw something unexpected and beautiful and bright hanging in the air in front of her.

  It was a butterfly. The creature was exactly the same height as Alice. It slowly beat its wings, though it did not fly away, only turning gradually and carefully to hover in front of her. Its wings, little use down here, flashed every shade of the summer sky. They were so bright it hurt to look at them.

  “You did tell me,” the butterfly said, “that it would all be terribly confusing.” Its voice was forlorn—it sounded lost and alone, and with a sigh it added, “It was so much simpler when I was a caterpillar.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came; indeed, there was only a void where they had been. She wasn’t certain she could even have told the creature her name.

  “You must find the looking-glass,” the butterfly said. “Mirrors only ever tell the truth. Unless, of course, they get things backward.”

  She only felt more puzzled. She wished she could tell him how to find the sun. She wished she could see him spread his wings wide, float away on a summer breeze. Why did so many creatures have wings, if they couldn’t really fly? But she remained silent as he began to turn from her again, with the words, “Be what you would seem to be.”

  He started to move away, his wings knocking clumps of earth from the walls and ceiling. They pattered to the floor, but that was not the only sound. A rumbling, low and deep, came from beneath her and everywhere. She tried to cry out, to warn the butterfly—whatever was coming was big, and it felt like trouble—but it was as if she were a child again, waking from a terrible dream, full of all the things she wanted to say and unable to say them. A tear, large and cold, ran down her cheek, just as something like lightning flashed in the distance. For a moment the butterfly’s wings gleamed like a winter’s night and then one wing was suddenly ripped from the other, parting like the unwrapping of a gift. They fell to the floor, separate, useless.

  It had been so quick, and so quiet—somehow that was the worst thing of all, at least until she saw the form that was uncoiling at the end of the tunnel: the flash of a scaly limb, the suggestion of a serpent’s back, the flexing of a sinuous tongue.

  Jabberwocky. The name was on her lips, coming to her so much more easily than her own, and yet when its face appeared, it didn’t look like a monster. It was Henry’s face that was balanced on its long and twining neck, Henry’s eyes that peered for her along the dim passageway, black and expressionless.

  She pressed into the wall, not caring if she dirtied her clothes. Henry’s face bobbed and swerved, as if he were trying to sight her like a bird. His nostrils distended, as if sniffing for her. She remained perfectly still, it seemed for an age, until his mouth finally stretched open. She thought of the tone he had used at their last meeting, low and playful, the voice he might have used to speak to a kitten.

  But the voice that emerged was high and shrill. “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyena,” he cried, “and you’re a bone!”

  She ran. She ran as a child might, her hands outstretched and her eyes closed, until she felt her heart would burst. The tunnels were all the same; she ran until she could run no further and then she turned, steeling herself to feel the Jabberwocky’s hot breath on her skin.

  The tunnel was empty.

  Time passed. Nothing moved. And eventually, it came to her that she was lost. She did not know where she was or how she had got there or how to get out again. She could wander for weeks in here, or months, or years,
and all she would find were more tunnels and more darkness. She closed her eyes, thought of a little blue river with a boat bobbing on its surface, the bright voices of three little girls clamouring for their story.

  After a while, she cried.

  Then she remembered the butterfly’s words about the looking-glass and something a little like hope rose within her. If only she could find it, perhaps she would understand who she was, and what, and where. She would see exactly where she belonged and which way she should go. She would see if she was the same person she had been yesterday, if she would be the same again tomorrow. Maybe she would even remember her name. But she didn’t know how to find the glass, had no idea where to look.

  Unless, of course, they get things backward.

  She caught her breath. Had that meant something, too? She remembered a drop of blood beading on her skin, unsure if she had yet pricked herself on a thorn. Perhaps she should find the mirror first and then she could look. After all, wasn’t that what one did with a looking-glass?

  She felt a sudden certainty that it was close by, that the answers she sought were already waiting. She strode to the end of the tunnel, turned the corner and saw in front of her—

  The thing waiting there was not a looking-glass. It wasn’t anything she had expected to find, though it was something she recognised, something that made her heart throb painfully in her chest.

  She stepped towards it. She told herself that if she didn’t truly look at it, it couldn’t be real; it would simply melt away, like everything else in this world.

  But it didn’t melt away. The thing ahead of her was a rabbit. Its fur might once have been white. Now it was soiled and bedraggled and maggots as big as her fist wended through it. Shards of splintered bone had broken through its skin, spearing the tunnel walls. Its teeth were tall as gravestones, twin slabs of dirty yellow smeared with dried blood. They barred the way into the tunnel of its throat. Its eyes were filmy, but had once been pink. Its body was broken and crushed from where the rabbit had—what? Grown? There was no way it could have crawled here as it was, along this tunnel. It was far too large for that. The claws jutting from one out-flung paw were as long as swords.