Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  Orla couldn’t understand her daughter’s desperation; even a tenderhearted child knew better than to try and nurse a slaughtered bear back to life. But Eleanor Queen never took her eyes away from the beast, and she struggled to push past her mother to get to it.

  “Eleanor Queen, you can’t. Stop, it’s—”

  “Papa!”

  Had he emerged from behind the garage? Orla, still clutching her daughter’s coat, spun around so fast she accidentally flung Eleanor Queen into the snow. “No…no.” It came out so softly, a misted prayer.

  But once she saw it…“Eleanor Queen, get back in the house!”

  “But Mama—”

  “This instant! Get inside and shut the door!” She used a furious voice Orla barely knew she possessed. She didn’t turn to make sure Eleanor Queen obeyed her. With her mother’s vision, the eyes that really could see behind her, she saw everything: Eleanor Queen tripped her way toward the house, still mesmerized by the bleeding animal and her mother, its murderer. Orla gazed at what she had done—at what Eleanor Queen had seen from the start.

  “Oh God.” Orla collapsed onto her knees beside the body.

  It wasn’t a bear.

  It was Shaw. Facedown. His innards ripped apart by the shotgun blast.

  The snow beneath him turned red as it absorbed his blood.

  24

  It couldn’t be real. Couldn’t be real. She’d become a contortionist who couldn’t unknot herself. Her strongest impulse was to go back in time one minute, just one minute back in time to undo what she had done—couldn’t have done. “No, no no no no…oh Shaw. Oh God, I’m so sorry…”

  The warmth she’d felt in the air earlier in the day was gone. Her tears turned icy before they slid past her cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry!” She grabbed him, turned him over, clutched him in her arms. Rocked him, though she was the one who needed comfort. How could she have saved her husband from killing himself only to finish the job for him hours later? There came a sharp new aroma in the frosty emptiness, something rancid with life but unpleasant. Blood. And beneath it a heavier level of stink, the smells emerging from her husband’s punctured organs.

  A faint cloud of breath emerged from his mouth. A sound like wind, accompanied by a bubble of bright blood.

  Orla startled, shifted to see his face better when she realized he wasn’t dead. “Shaw, baby—I love you, I’m so sorry, I’ll get help!”

  “Leave,” he whispered.

  “I’ll get help!”

  His chin bobbed a little as he tried to shake his head, and his eyes drooped, unfocused. “No…can leave…now. Go.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind!”

  “Sorry. Here…all my fault.” More blood gurgled from his mouth. “You…go…now. Love…”

  He fell silent.

  “Shaw?”

  She absorbed the full collapse of his muscles as he passed. His head sagged to the side, and his mouth hung open like he still wanted to speak.

  “Oh, my love, Shaw…oh my God, what have we done. What have I done…” Her sobs became too heavy for words.

  As she held him, her sweater sleeves soaked up his blood. She rocked him, wailing. Couldn’t think about leaving, or seeing to the children, or moving from the spot where she had killed her husband. Maybe she’d never be able to think or reason again, not with confidence. She’d blasted a thousand pellets through her own sanity. The pressure of his loss crushed her chest. What had he said to reassure her? That no buildings would collapse on them; it was safer here. But she felt the bricks, the walls, the suffocating debris of her mistakes. She should have known—the two-headed hybrid, the talking snow dragon, the menagerie of white animals that disappeared when someone else turned to see them. Not everything was what it seemed. Salty tears and cold air stung her eyes. This couldn’t all be in her head—Eleanor Queen had warned her…

  What had her daughter known?

  Papa’s in trouble.

  It was too much to make sense of. For a while she was unaware of the cold. But Shaw’s body heat dissipated quickly. Time passed. She found herself holding a heavy, frigid mass. Her arms ached. Her knees, crumpled beneath his dead weight, begged for her to move. But she stayed there, back hunched, blind and deaf, too distraught to cry or protest. If she moved it would all be over. She’d never be able to go back. He would always be gone.

  She prayed for time to reverse itself. Why couldn’t it? When so many other fucked-up things had happened.

  It started snowing. The wind picked up. How long had she been sitting there? She needed a coat, gloves, a hat. The snow covered some of the blood. Maybe if she stayed out there long enough, she and Shaw would disappear beneath the fresh white. The tragedy would be erased.

  “Mama?”

  Eleanor Queen. Not screaming. Not at a distance. Beside her.

  Orla didn’t want to look at her. What if she saw a rabid dog and her instinct was to grab its throat and squeeze until it went limp in her hands?

  But she turned her creaky, half-frozen neck. Her daughter had bundled up in snow pants, coat, mittens, hood. She draped the throw blanket that lived in a crumpled ball in a corner of the couch over her mother’s shoulders. Orla wondered if she meant to sit vigil beside her. Why wasn’t the child angry with her? Where were her tears? Maybe they should get Tycho, make it a family affair. Maybe they could all disappear together.

  Eleanor Queen, on her knees, squeezed in close to her, hugging her with one arm. “You’re going to freeze, Mama.”

  Her daughter—Shaw’s daughter—brought warmth with her. A living heart still full of blood. The lingering heat from Shaw’s blasted furnace. What had Shaw said? It was so important now that she remember every incredible thing that her husband had uttered. A heart stopping. A cold seeping in. Had he been dreaming of his own death? Had Orla played some predetermined role in fulfilling his prophecy? Orla couldn’t meet the girl’s eyes, not after she’d killed her father.

  “I’m so sorry.” Her chapped skin, stiffened by frozen tears and the merciless wind, stretched painfully as she moved her jaw.

  Eleanor Queen wrapped both thin arms around her, squeezed her, pressed their cheeks together. Her voice broke as she cried, “Oh Mama, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I thought he was…I saw a…”

  “It was my fault, it was all my fault.”

  Her tearful confession brought Orla out of her gloom. For a time, she’d almost forgotten her children, in the house alone and scared. And Tycho, now abandoned. Where was he? Had he seen? But Eleanor Queen…she knew something. And though Orla would never hold her responsible for what this place could do, she needed to know.

  “Eleanor Queen, love.” With Shaw’s head still in the crook of her left elbow, she embraced Eleanor Queen with her right arm. “You warned me, before—”

  “Nooooo!” the child wailed. Her voice grew shrill with emotion. “No, I was all wrong!”

  “But you knew Papa was in—”

  “Nooooo! Mama, listen to me! It was telling me that Papa was in trouble! That he’d done something wrong! It was angry with him! And if I’d understood what was gonna—”

  “No no no no no.” Orla pushed herself away from Shaw’s body, laid him as gently as she could on the frozen ground. It pained her to move, but she gave herself to her daughter, took her in her arms. Finally, maybe her rocking would soothe someone. “This wasn’t your fault. I saw…I know it sounds ridiculous, but I thought I saw a bear. That wasn’t you. You can’t—this had nothing to do with—”

  “I didn’t think it was that mad—I just knew it didn’t want Papa to leave! Don’t you see, Mama? If I’d just told you what I felt, that we couldn’t leave. Papa—”

  “No! No, Eleanor Queen, look at me.” She took her daughter’s face in her hands. Eleanor Queen looked stricken, on the verge of breaking, and it gave Orla the resolve she needed. “I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know what it’s saying to you. I don’t know why these things are happening,
but I know you aren’t to blame. You are not to blame. Do you hear me?”

  Eleanor Queen gave the tiniest of nods.

  “The truth is…” No point in denying it. “We wouldn’t have listened. If you’d told us not to go. So this was on us—me and Papa. And Papa…we were trying to keep you safe.” By getting them all away from this place, and the thing that haunted it. Their instincts had been right.

  Orla didn’t want to contemplate what was happening or why, but she had to. Whatever they were dealing with wasn’t a mindless partner, as she’d hypothesized before, a cycle of action/reaction, music/dance. That had felt comfortable because it was a reactive process that she fully understood. But the circumstances had become too…personal.

  As if something really was listening.

  She’d toyed with the idea, but hadn’t really believed it. It was a mental exercise, an exploration of completely impossible alternatives. How could she be dealing with a conscious entity?

  An inventory of events scrolled through her mind. She’d always wanted to see the aurora borealis. Tycho had mistaken ten inches of snow for ten feet, then after the real ten feet arrived, he wished it away. Eleanor Queen had spoken of polar bears. And she and her father both—what had they heard? Whispering among the branches? Was something trying to communicate with them?

  And then there was the day when she’d almost grabbed the gun, stupidly afraid an animal was breaking into the house. She’d thought it, how she’d never be able to forgive herself if she accidentally shot her husband.

  What kind of wish fulfillment was this? Certainly not granted by any power she’d ever heard of. More devil than god.

  Yet they’d had a theory, and not a completely ridiculous one. Had no one ever experienced the collective power of angry, frustrated ghosts? Had the hapless souls who’d died here been trying to warn them that this place was not a cure? That death awaited, and they hadn’t listened?

  If Eleanor Queen was interpreting things correctly, it was—they were?—angry with Shaw. Was it mad at him the day he got lost? Was he wandering too close to the edge of the homestead, so it issued a warning? But since then, they’d been off the property—even together, as a family, to get groceries or pizza. Did the rules change, or was she still getting it wrong? That first full day, Shaw had followed a plume of smoke and found the cure-cottage chimney. She’d smelled that woody, burning fragrance when they arrived, coming from the same direction. Maybe what Shaw had experienced that day on his walk wasn’t a warning but a greeting. An acknowledgment of some kind, of his presence?

  It had summoned Shaw—she was starting to understand that in an entirely new way. Maybe, after that initial visit, the choice to move hadn’t been fully his. Could this thing have wanted him, and then grown vexed that he couldn’t understand or wouldn’t obey? Shaw had been destroyed by the very muse who’d summoned him. It wasn’t fair, but maybe, if It had wanted Shaw to fulfill some transcendental task, maybe the rest of them were irrelevant. Collateral damage. And maybe it was over now.

  Is that what he’d been trying to say as he died? Had It possessed him, as he’d feared, and that’s why he’d appeared to her as a polar bear?

  And if the thing had been inside him when she pulled the trigger…

  That’s what he was saying! They could leave now—it was over!

  Orla launched to her feet, hauling her daughter up with her even as her aching bones protested. “Go back to the house, help your brother into his snow pants—I’ll be right in. Right in, and then we’ll get away from this place, okay? I think it’s safe now.”

  Eleanor Queen looked toward the trees, listening. “I don’t hear it.”

  “Go—it’s time to leave!”

  A flash of relief bloomed on her daughter’s face—and in Orla’s heart. This time, she watched as Eleanor Queen trudged through the snow back toward the house, the nylon of her pants squeal-swishing as she hurried. When she opened the door, Tycho was there, sobbing, and held out his arms for his sister.

  “I’ll be right there, Tycho!” She hoped he could hear her over the wind and distance.

  As soon as Eleanor Queen shut the door, Orla draped the flimsy throw blanket around her neck so it wouldn’t slip off and straightened Shaw where he lay on his back. Bile and heartache poisoned her throat, threatened to make her vomit, but she grabbed her beloved by the ankles and dragged him through the snow toward the far side of the garage so Tycho wouldn’t see. They’d come back for him, the emergency personnel, after she got the kids away and could call for help. She glanced up at the satellite dish, now believing in the intentionality of its destruction—something wanted to keep them isolated.

  How would she ever make anyone understand? Maybe they’d send her to prison. At best, they’d declare her insane. I thought he was a bear. She wasn’t dead, but her children might yet end up alone. Worries for another day.

  Fighting another wave of sickness, she dug through Shaw’s coat pockets and found the car keys. Maybe he’d cleared enough that she could back the car out, drive away. She tossed aside the split logs that secured the tarp over their wood supply. After folding it in half, she used the waterproof blue material to cover his body, weighting it at the corners and edges with the displaced logs. As if it would protect him; as if the worst hadn’t already happened.

  This was all too savage. She hurled the half-buried shovel out of the way and almost tossed the shotgun after it. But she couldn’t for fear that someone would find it. What if it brought misery to someone else’s life? For now, she propped the gun against the woodpile, determined to secure it back in the locker before they left. At least no one could accuse her of that particular carelessness, even if she had accidentally—no. She put the words, the images, the reality of what she’d done in a mental box. Wrapped a chain around it. It would undo her, and she had to get her children back to civilization. She stuffed the word mourn away too. If she stayed focused, she might not fall apart.

  It took only moments of trying to step through the deep snow wedged against their SUV for her to realize she couldn’t escape that way. Shaw hadn’t gotten that far; she’d need to shovel for hours just to get to the car, and she couldn’t waste so much precious time in this bedeviled place. She might have killed It, but there was nothing left here she wanted. Before heading back into the house, she retrieved the shotgun, cracked it open, and dislodged the unused shell into the snow. If one of the children turned into a monster, she’d be in no danger of destroying another irreplaceable life.

  25

  No one spoke when Orla got back inside. She didn’t know how Eleanor Queen might have explained the situation to Tycho, but his slightly dazed look of trauma matched theirs. Orla was glad they didn’t ask questions. Small blessings. She changed into dry clothes—clothes not stained with blood—and got the kids ready as best she could. Finally, they gathered at the front door and took a silent moment with their mittens, surgeons all, pulling on gloves for the most difficult operation of their lives.

  They left everything behind. Orla didn’t even bother to lock the door. She brought a small backpack with their money, official papers, IDs, charged but nonfunctioning cell phones, and a bottle of water, which would probably solidify into ice before they reached St. Armand.

  Tycho followed behind Eleanor Queen and Orla brought up the rear so she could keep an eye on both children. The sky was leaden and the snow whipped at their faces. They each kept a hand on the rope guideline, and Orla was grateful they’d constructed it. She didn’t trust herself anymore to even walk in a straight line. The fresh snow was deep enough to make walking difficult, especially for Tycho, but it had buried the blood by the time they left the house. His youthful energy kept him going forward, stretching his legs to plant his feet in his sister’s footsteps. And stalwart Eleanor Queen never faltered even as Orla wondered if they should have put on the snowshoes. Her daughter understood the seriousness of the mission—and hadn’t contradicted her plan—and Orla was counting on easier walking once
they got to the more compressed road. Everything, she told herself, would be easier when they crossed the property line, away from this awful place.

  The wind teased them and she sensed it wanting to play a cruel game—knock them, spin them, turn them around so they couldn’t leave. It’s just weather. Onward they traipsed. Tycho never asked, Where’s Papa? His silence bruised her heart.

  The visibility worsened, and for a time Orla feared another whiteout would block their way. But while the whiteouts had come on suddenly, the current air grew denser by degrees as the sky seemed to gradually lower itself. She glanced upward from time to time, claustrophobia setting in as the heavy clouds sank. Would the clouds snuff them out? Murder them like a giant pillow held against their faces? She wanted to urge Eleanor Queen to go faster, impatient to reach the end of the winding driveway, but her daughter and son were already huffing out noisy gusts of exertion. Driven by their own anguish, they didn’t need to be urged on.

  It seemed as if the driveway had stretched and twisted and would never end. “Almost there,” Orla called out, hoping it was true, desperate to give them something positive, a reward for the misery of their day—their mother would yet get them to safety. Even if they never forgave her for what she’d done to their father.

  They rounded the last bend and Orla expected to see a rising hillside covered with austere sugar maples and beech trees, black trunks and a webbed canopy of bare limbs decorated with garlands of snow. The road that led to their house cut through a swath of forest, but that was not what she saw ahead of them. Instead, there lay a soupy fog. And an expanse of lumpy terrain that looked almost extraterrestrial.

  Eleanor Queen abruptly stopped and Orla had to grab the back of Tycho’s jacket to keep him from plowing into his sister. He’d kept his eyes downward the entire time, fixed on his sister’s guiding footprints.

  “No. No, no, this isn’t possible.”

  “Mama?” Eleanor Queen’s quavering voice hid a terrible, unspoken question. She’d reached the end of their roped rail: the mailbox. But the world they’d once known beyond it had been smudged out, replaced by a plateau of fissured ice. It ran opposite of how the road should have been, the floor of ice rising on their right where it had once sloped downhill toward a larger thoroughfare. The plateau was too broad to see across, as if it lay between the peaks of a towering, clouded mountain range.