Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  Shaw had come here to reclaim all the colors they’d lost. And no matter what else he’d sensed in this place, he’d found his talent.

  He’d found himself. And lost everything.

  She turned her back as their children strummed his guitars, and wept silently.

  They spent some time looking through Shaw’s old poetry journals. Tycho, especially, liked the silly scribblings that went nowhere or made funny rhymes. By the way her daughter touched the pages, Orla saw she was reading more than the lines; she was taking in her father’s handwriting. Sometimes Shaw had left little notes for her in her lunchbox. Before the mood could grow morbid, Orla suggested a snack, and they fled to the kitchen.

  Cleaning became a fun activity…for a few minutes. They grew bored of hide-and-seek. Orla taught them some dance moves, and that was fun…for an hour.

  Desperate for something new to do, Orla concocted a treasure hunt. She’d started to wonder more about the old man who’d lived—and died—there. Had he sensed anything? When the real estate agent told them he’d died in the house, they’d assumed it was of old age, but what if he, as they were doing now, had locked himself in out of fear? Could he have starved to death? She hoped he had left a clue behind.

  Along with the tools and books they’d found in the basement were a couple of tightly sealed boxes. She carried them up, cut the tape, and set the kids the task of looking for treasures among his papers. While they busied themselves with that, Orla brought the old books down from her room, including the local history book with its ever so compelling but not informative enough photograph, and looked through everything again. Perhaps the old man had collected these particular books because each held a piece of the puzzle?

  Eleanor Queen made neat piles of the photographs she unearthed, but Tycho whined about the boring boxes full of nothing. Orla didn’t find anything in the books; some were in terrible condition, pages clumped together with mildew, and others were exasperatingly off topic. From what Orla could tell, the man had been either an actuary or a lawyer with a passion for mushrooms and birds. Later, after the kids were asleep, she planned to investigate the upstairs closets and bathroom; maybe she’d find a hidden compartment, a place where someone who was losing his mind would stash his most troublesome secrets.

  For a few minutes they huddled together examining Eleanor Queen’s pile of old photos. Orla couldn’t spot any clues, though there were a number of faded color pictures and black-and-whites that showed portions of the giant evergreen that towered over the property.

  “Look how fluffy the branches were,” Eleanor Queen said.

  Indeed, the tree had been a lot healthier once, with numerous, thick boughs. Judging by the cars on the lawn, Orla guessed the photos dated from the eighties and nineties. She stuffed everything back in the boxes and set them aside. Another thing she’d scrutinize later in case she’d missed anything, but the kids were too impatient to dwell on any one activity for long.

  Full-on grumbling set in at suppertime; no one liked Orla’s bland, carefully rationed meal. Without new entertainment to stream, the children argued over which of their DVDs to watch. They were tired of their games. Eleanor Queen found no comfort in her books. By the next morning, the kids were a unified front, begging to play outside. The weather made Orla’s life all the more difficult by being well behaved: moderate temperatures, clear skies, a fresh layer of powdered snow; a tempting landscape like a baker’s display of beautifully frosted delights. But she knew It was still dangerous and only pretending to be good. “No” became her answer to every question.

  Still itching for more information, Orla planted herself in the ugly but comfy chair, which she dragged in front of the door to keep the kids from escaping, and reread the entire chapter in the Saranac Lake Village history book where they’d found the cure-cottage picture, hoping to find a detail she’d missed. The book was vexing, so tantalizing with its initial clue, yet it revealed nothing else specific to their area or anything that might explain what was happening. If only Shaw had been able to get online to do more research.

  She ignored the kids as they squabbled and didn’t object when they decided to hold a race back and forth across the upstairs hallway. As their feet thundered above her, Orla turned back to the photo of the cure cottage and the women who had once stayed there. She scrutinized every inch of it and felt very much the detective scouring a crime scene photo. Could these women, or others like them, be part of what was troubling their land? (Ruining their lives?)

  They looked so mortal, so fragile, that it was hard to transpose them into a future where they terrorized a family. She didn’t know what sort of evidence she was looking for, and nothing jumped out beyond the sadness of the wan faces. Had they believed this place would cure them? Or did they know they’d been sent here to die? One, especially—the youngest of the group—appeared too emaciated for her clothing. As Orla looked closer, she realized that the arm around the girl’s tapered waist might not be a gesture of friendliness but a necessity of the girl’s weakened condition.

  Inspired by the impressions that began to emerge, Orla burst up and darted into Shaw’s studio. She found his magnifying glass in the top drawer of his desk and returned to the chair and the book. The tree, even without magnification, was certainly the one behind their house.

  “Mama, can we slide down the stairs?”

  “No.”

  “Can we make cookies?”

  “No.”

  From upstairs she heard the children harrumph, and within seconds they were back to racing. Orla let them, in spite of how the noise grated on her nerves; maybe it would tire them out and they’d all get a better night’s sleep.

  She passed the magnifying glass over the people, taking in the details of their clothing. The smug look on the man’s face. The smoke coming from the stacked-rock chimney. She hadn’t noticed it before, but the branches of the deciduous trees were bare; it was later in the season than she’d previously thought. When imagining a healing climate for tuberculous patients, Orla automatically pictured spring or summer—sunshine and warmer weather. But maybe the patients stayed year-round. Or maybe they came after the first frost, when there were fewer allergens in the air?

  All of a sudden the picture was full of minutiae she hadn’t noticed. There was a wreath on the front door. The people posing for the photo weren’t wearing coats, but could it have been as late as December? A few of the women were wearing necklaces with small pendants that under the magnifying glass became crosses. The skinny girl—the sickest—was holding something in her hand, a chain, but the thing that dangled from it was the wrong shape to be a cross. The image only blurred as Orla brought the magnifying glass closer.

  Using her finger as a bookmark, she clutched the book and sprinted up to the second floor.

  “I win!” Tycho shouted, out of breath, as Orla reached the hallway.

  “Can I borrow your microscope?” she asked her daughter.

  Excited to have something new to do, Eleanor Queen charged into her room, her little brother at her heels. They all sat on the floor in front of the bed as Eleanor Queen set up her junior microscope.

  “What are we looking at?” she asked.

  “I need to see this picture. Here.” Orla opened the book and pointed at the item in the girl’s hand. “Can you focus on that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I look?” Tycho asked.

  “After Mama,” said Orla, holding the book flat as her daughter focused on the image. Suddenly certain that this was of great importance, she grew antsy as Eleanor Queen fiddled with the knobs. “Can you see it?”

  “It’s a necklace. I think.”

  “Do you feel…this was taken near here. I was telling you about this—your papa found a chimney, and we found this book. There was a cure cottage on our land, a place where they sent people, women, who had tuberculosis.”

  “What’s tooberk?” Tycho asked.

  “It’s a lung disease—it makes it hard to breathe.
” She watched Eleanor Queen, curious to see if, beyond the image, anything else came to her.

  Eleanor Queen slid the book out from under her microscope and brought the picture very close to her face.

  “I wanna see!” Tycho shrieked.

  “In a minute; this is important.” Orla turned back to her daughter. “Anything? A sense of something being familiar?”

  “Maybe…only in the faintest…I’m not sure, Mama. Maybe.”

  “Can you tell what’s on the chain?”

  Eleanor Queen slipped the book back under the lens. “I can’t…”

  “Let me. Please.” Responding to the urgency in her mother’s voice, Eleanor Queen inched over and let Orla peer through the eyepiece. She tightened the focus until the image was clear.

  She gasped. She was right—it wasn’t a cross like the other women were wearing.

  “What is it, Mama?” her daughter asked, her curiosity piqued.

  “A star. In a circle. It’s called a pentagram.”

  “Does that mean something?”

  “Maybe.”

  Something ancient and invisible touched her between the shoulders and she shivered.

  Orla’s prayers that the children would sleep easy went unanswered. Tycho lay on the couch kicking and screaming instead of brushing his teeth. And though he then insisted on sleeping in his own bed, he ran out every fifteen minutes to demand something: A drink of water. The retrieval of a missing toy. Another trip to the potty. A story. Another prayer for Papa. Finally he fell asleep, with tears on his cheeks.

  Eleanor Queen didn’t throw a tantrum, but she also didn’t want to go to bed. Instead she stayed up past her bedtime and watched a movie. Orla sat with her on the sofa, still clutching the history book. Sometimes she thumbed through it, but she was too distracted to read, and though she’d meant to make some notes—her spare remembrances of paganism or druidism or Wicca—the only word she wrote down was nature. She was almost certain that nature applied to all three, as perhaps the pentagram did. She drew a star in a circle. Over and over. Ever since identifying the object in the dead girl’s hand—and she was certainly long dead—Orla felt a new unease. A wraith of paranoia floated around the room, a chill that defied the temperature on the thermostat, and she almost believed she saw the wispy apparition of the girl from the photo.

  From upstairs, Tycho coughed. They’d been fortunate, so far, that the children had remained healthy through all this. But judging by the phlegmy nature of the cough, that luck might be changing. As the fit subsided, Orla couldn’t help but think of the girl who might have coughed literally to death.

  Everything she learned only brought more questions, and she had no resources for answers other than her own befuddled brain. The pentagram was an old symbol, that much she knew. It had been used across multiple religions, but were any of them routinely practiced in the late nineteenth century? Had the girl worn it as a decoration, or had it meant more? The way it dangled from her hand, more like a rosary than a piece of jewelry, made Orla think it was important to her. It was active, the opposite of the passive crosses that the other women wore, as if it were used with a purpose.

  Or maybe it meant nothing.

  Until they could flee, escape this place forever, Orla needed to keep working on the puzzle. Perhaps it was little more than a mental pastime, not so different than her children’s made-up games; they all needed to do something. She’d wanted to engage with Eleanor Queen all night, but her daughter grumped every time Orla interrupted her movie. Finally the music rose and the image faded and Eleanor Queen clicked Stop.

  “Can we talk now?” Orla asked, wishing she weren’t so desperate for the girl’s help.

  “About what.” Maybe Eleanor Queen was simply overtired, but she sounded crabby. It probably wasn’t the best time to talk, but Orla couldn’t wait any longer.

  “We’ve been inside for a while now. Do you sense It moving away?”

  “No. It’s just waiting. This is stupid.” Eleanor Queen huffed off the couch, ready to head upstairs.

  “What do you mean, waiting? Eleanor Queen?” Orla untangled herself and sprang forward to stop her daughter’s exodus.

  “I don’t know. But we can’t just sit inside forever. What are we doing?”

  “I thought we’d agreed—”

  “I think it’s clear it didn’t want us to leave. You were the one who said we shouldn’t go outside.”

  “It was for your safety—”

  “How long? There’s nothing to do.”

  Orla sighed. Eleanor Queen tapped at the bottom step with her foot, in limbo between fleeing and staying.

  “I’m just afraid we…we might do something wrong outside, something It doesn’t like. It’s safer inside, don’t you think?”

  Eleanor Queen shrugged. “I guess. But I don’t think it’s going to forget we’re here.”

  “Then what? What do you think we should do?”

  The revenge for asking a nine-year-old’s advice was seeing what she’d be like as a teenager: The exaggerated eye-rolls. The slumped you’re-hopeless shoulders. The you’re-too-annoying-to-talk-to tone of voice. “I don’t kno-wuh.”

  “We agreed to figure this out together. I know we can’t stay inside. I don’t want to stay here forever, but I need you to tell me when it’s safe to—”

  “It’s waiting. That’s what I know. It…learns by seeing what we do, and we’re not doing anything.”

  “I wanted It to lose interest in us—you.” But Orla felt it and knew her daughter was right: it was time for a better plan. The image of the old man too weak to get out of his bed spurred her on. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go outside. Cautiously. We won’t try to leave, we’ll just…see what you sense—are you up for that?”

  Orla saw the rebelliousness deflate. Eleanor Queen just seemed tired then. Small and uncertain.

  “Yes. Maybe we can try to talk to it,” she suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” Orla said. “Ask some direct questions?” Eleanor Queen nodded. “Maybe about this girl in the book?”

  Eleanor Queen shrugged, then nodded. Her head sank to her chest and she trudged up the stairs.

  It wasn’t fair, Orla thought, for her daughter to bear this burden. And it was crazy that they were having such conversations. While she hadn’t anticipated such a quick onset to her children’s cabin fever, the time indoors hadn’t been a total loss; her achy muscles felt better. She was strong enough to do whatever came next. Explore new tactics. Orla had to find them all a better way out of their predicament, and if leaving remained a fraught and uncertain possibility, maybe stepping outside and listening was a fair compromise.

  Ask the thing—the ghost—what It wants.

  30

  She put a little splash of milk in the children’s oatmeal—the last of the milk. Another beautiful day, and she’d already promised them they’d go outside after breakfast. Eleanor Queen wouldn’t make eye contact with her over her bowl of hot cereal and Orla wondered if she was worried about the mission they’d agreed on the night before. She’d never asked her daughter how it felt to be aware of this thing that was haunting them, imperiling their lives. It had to be terrifying; maybe Eleanor Queen pushed it to the farthest reaches of her consciousness. Maybe her sensitivity would undo her, draw her to the brink of madness (like Shaw), if It couldn’t make her understand.

  Tycho warbled a song as he ate. “Papa, Papa, sleeping in the snow. Papa, Papa, nowhere to go.”

  Her children were going mad. This place was going to continue unraveling them. At some point Orla would have to weigh the merits of keeping them physically safe against the likelihood that they would become batty fragments of their former selves. Lost in the mind. Lost on a glacier. She considered talking to him—both of them—about Otto and how her family had survived that devastating loss. But what could she say, what had she learned? You wake up and keep going. They were already doing that.

  “You feeling okay?” she asked him. “I heard you co
ughing last night.”

  Instead of answering, he hummed as he chewed. Orla put the back of her hand against his forehead; she’d have to reconsider their plan if he was coming down with something. “You don’t seem like you have a fever.”

  “Nope!”

  “Just choking on some water last night?”

  “Nope. Not coughing, Mama.”

  Maybe he didn’t remember it. Or maybe…she shook her head; if only it were so simple to make improbable things go away. Was she hearing things now too? That’s what she got for obsessing over the girl in the book.

  She left the dishes in the sink to soak as Eleanor Queen challenged Tycho to a race to see who could put on all their snow gear first. Orla let them charge out of the house ahead of her while she zipped her coat, adjusted her scarf.

  Tycho stomped through the snow like Godzilla, annihilating one building, then another, and another, and a bridge for good measure. Orla, hands in her pockets, stood sentinel, her eyes on Eleanor Queen, who did her looking thing, her listening thing, but didn’t seem to find anything to concentrate on. She leapt farther into the yard and made a snowball. Threw it at Godzilla.

  “You’re wrecking all the snow!” Eleanor Queen told him.

  Godzilla roared and stomped around.

  “I think there’s plenty of snow for everyone.” Orla kicked at the top layer as she meandered a few feet away from the children. She felt like a prison guard, watchful that the cooped-up inmates might make a sudden run for freedom. She wished she could take them somewhere, hop in the car—even if she only had a learner’s permit—and drive them all away. How had she ever wasted any energy being afraid of driving? How easy it sounded compared to this. She wanted to hug her parents and cry. Be a child instead of the sole adult trapped with her children in a nightmare.