Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  Not so much as a gust of wind. The tree—and whatever resided within it—appeared dead, or at least unresponsive. Its bark was paler than that of the trees around it. As she looked upward, she worried for the first time that too much wind would send its lifeless branches, each the size of one of the neighboring trees, crashing onto her head.

  “Hello? You can’t accuse me of not listening and then ignore my offer. This is what You wanted. You need a human. I am the only one who understands and is fully willing.”

  A whisper of wind moved through the trees. She watched, unsure what to expect, but then everything grew still again. Was it possible…could the evergreen’s last living cells have died during the night? Or perhaps She had overextended Herself, coming to her as Shaw. If the tree died before the girl’s spirit moved on…could She be entombed now within Her former host? Safe as houses?

  Could Orla go find her daughter and take her back to civilization?

  She felt no sadness if the entity had died. But the lack of response started to anger her. She kicked at the tree, chipped away at the thick but surprisingly brittle bark.

  “Wake up! You can’t terrorize my family because You want help and then refuse it when it’s offered! Wake the fuck up!”

  A noise like a horn startled her, a deep, hollow sound. At first she mistook it for the reply she’d demanded, but then realized it was coming from a distance. It made an insistent lowing, like a Tibetan long horn. But as it moved closer, it sounded more animalistic. Behind it, she heard chuffing and grunts. And as it came nearer still, there was the crunch of trampling snow and breaking branches.

  She pressed her back against the tree, eyes wide and alert for the first sign of the creature moving toward her. While she’d been gazing upward through the boughs, a fog had settled in behind her, obscuring the view, heightening her fear as the strange sounds reverberated in the gloom. As the call grew louder, she drew on her gloves, made fists. Ready to fight.

  A mass of beasts moved on the horizon. In the murk, she couldn’t tell at first what they were, only that they were large, and there were a lot of them, ambling toward her through the trees. The low calling sounded again, this time very close. Louder.

  Orla squinted, as if that would clarify their form. She was prepared to meet her end but didn’t like the not knowing; was she about to be devoured, or trampled, or killed in some fashion by that sorrowful cry? She saw the antlers first, massive and wide, poking through the fog. The animals moved at a steady, deliberate pace, but once she recognized them—moose, dozens of them, all snowy-white albinos—she didn’t doubt their intention to impale her against the tree.

  She could’ve run for it, turned and dashed deeper into the forest than she had ever gone. Maybe they’d follow her, grunting and murderous, or maybe she’d just collapse from exhaustion and die lost in the snow. But she’d told her daughter to tell the police that she’d be at the tree, and that’s where Orla intended to stay. Let these beasts take her—she’d offered herself, after all.

  Something akin to joy tingled across her skin. In Shaw’s form, She’d all but admitted She couldn’t do two things at once: if these creatures were here, then Eleanor Queen was elsewhere, heading away.

  The moose spread out, surrounded her. She knew now; the white animals weren’t fully there but conjured by the spirit’s powerful magic. But, as Shaw had, they looked real, sounded real. The long-legged, knobby-kneed herd, heavy-antlered and shaggy-furred, came to a stop a few feet away from Orla. The lowing quieted, though some of the herd still grunted, chuffed.

  They exhaled plumes of fog and Orla wondered if that was the source of the mist. Maybe she was inside their lungs. Maybe She had accepted her sacrifice, and Orla’s transformation—her journey—had begun. But then a final moose moved through the murk, a mighty beast, and headed toward her.

  Orla’s joy blistered, burst, rotted into black, and her legs gave way. She sank to the ground, the bark ripping the fabric along the back of her coat, mesmerized by what she saw—what she didn’t want to see. From the ground, the animals loomed above her.

  “No!”

  40

  Orla blinked hard once, then again, willing it to be another part of the illusion. If only the king moose had come forward as her executioner, the one summoned to impale her. But there astride its muscled back sat her daughter, bow in her hand, a smile on her face.

  “Eleanor Queen…”

  Her daughter gripped a tuft of fur behind the moose’s head. She looked so small atop the beast, like a character from one of her favorite books who rode a polar bear. The herd appeared quite docile, unlike what Orla had heard about stampeding moose. A single moose could trample a person to death, according to a dancer friend who had grown up in Alaska. But that was in real life, and they weren’t in the real world anymore. Little girls rode giant moose—tame and friendly, like the stuffed animal Tycho had cherished.

  “She wouldn’t let you go…” Snow seeped through her pants, but she couldn’t get up.

  “It’s okay, Mama.”

  Orla shook her head.

  “They’re very gentle.”

  “But they wouldn’t let you go.”

  The king moose bent its knee, lowering itself regally so Eleanor Queen could slip off its back. It stayed down, transforming into a misshapen lump of ice before melting into the ground.

  As Eleanor Queen approached her mother, the rest of the herd turned in unison and evaporated into the fog. Orla let out a vicious cackle of laughter. “You should have shot one of them while they still had a shape. If we can’t get out of here, we’re going to need something to eat.” But lost hikers, stranded mountain climbers, died from eating snow; it lowered their body temperature. No, snow animals, even while they looked like real ones, couldn’t feed them. This is what hunger—delirium—was doing to her. I’ve lost it.

  Eleanor Queen dropped onto her knees beside her mother—her braids, her bow and quiver of arrows, her smile. Orla couldn’t help it; she flinched from her reaching hand, just for a second, convinced her daughter had become someone else.

  “No, it’s good, Mama. I learned something—something so important!”

  “Did you?” Orla sounded exhausted, half dead. The failure weighed on her. The spirit didn’t want Orla, even to talk with; she was out of options. And she already knew what her daughter was going to say. “She wants you.”

  Eleanor Queen laughed. “We did it backward!”

  Orla burst up from where she’d crumpled to the ground, manic with a new resolve. “No! Absolutely not!”

  “Mama—”

  “Come on, we’re going home.” She grabbed Eleanor Queen’s coat, and when the girl resisted, Orla hauled her away from the tree.

  “Mama, you don’t understand!”

  “No, you don’t understand!”

  “She doesn’t want to hurt me, She feels connected to me—like I feel connected to Her. I understand now. And that’s why She wants us to live together—”

  “Live? As what?” Orla yelled in her face and didn’t care when Eleanor Queen shrank from her. “You don’t understand what She’s asking—”

  “I know more than you! She was a girl once, but now—”

  “Whatever She was once, She’s not that girl anymore. Look at Her power. You can’t…if She were inside you, where would you be?”

  “She won’t hurt me! And Mama—”

  “She will replace you!”

  Eleanor Queen glowered at her with her too-wise, too-old eyes. The starvation that had settled in her face, forming ridges of her cheekbones, made her look even older. “You’re wrong, Mama. She didn’t replace the tree. The tree’s been alive this whole time, doing fine. Maybe it’s the reason the tree lived this long—you’re still not listening.” Scorn and pity oozed from her words.

  Orla grabbed her daughter’s arm and continued marching back toward the house. Violent thoughts stormed inside her, none of them directed at her daughter. Get the ax. Chop the tree down. The thing had
lived long enough. She didn’t deserve another chance. “Old things die, Eleanor Queen. It’s the way things are.”

  “But then we can leave. I’m trying to save you, Mama!” She shook herself free from her mother’s grip. “You and Tycho.”

  Orla stopped. Gazed at her daughter with a look that blended terror with revulsion. Was it too late? Had the spirit already corrupted her daughter’s mind, made a trickster and liar of her to get what She wanted?

  “Tycho’s dead, you know—”

  “No, Tycho’s gone. But I think we—I—can get him back.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not…not completely sure yet. But it’s part of…if She makes me Her new home, then…”

  As if She were trying to prove how far removed She was from human—did She really think Orla would bargain one child for another? She rested her hands on her daughter’s narrow shoulders, her anger gone. She couldn’t fault Eleanor Queen for wanting to save her brother.

  “You don’t owe Her anything. You don’t owe me anything, or even Tycho. I knew…I offered Her myself. That was a fair compromise. I’m an adult, I can make that decision. What She’s asking of you is not something a nine-year-old can decide. I explained that, and She didn’t listen. She can’t be trusted. When She was a girl she practiced witchcraft, or believed in something…dangerous—that’s why this happened. She transferred Her soul into a fucking tree!” Orla took her daughter’s hand and resumed the trek home. “We’re done now—we’ll wait it out. The tree will die, or She can choose another damn tree. Or a fox, or a rabbit—it’s not our fucking problem. We shouldn’t have come here, but I’m getting you out, not the other way around.”

  “I just wanted to help,” her daughter said in a small voice.

  “Of course you did, because you’re a brave, smart, strong girl. Trust me, not Her. Whatever She’s become, She’s not your friend.”

  Eleanor Queen gazed up at her with keen, evaluating eyes. Slightly distrustful eyes. Orla wished she could read her daughter’s mind, desperate for the thoughts she kept to herself.

  They strode the rest of the way home in silence. Sometimes Orla shook her head. This could’ve been finished. The spirit was too stubborn for Her own good. Or maybe…she shuttered the thought. Didn’t want to remember the way Eleanor Queen had stood in the yard, receptive since the beginning to something the rest of them couldn’t see. Maybe it was Eleanor Queen She had wanted all along. The familiarity of a girl. Shaw might have been aware of something he didn’t want to understand. But their daughter had always been the more susceptible one. Fireworks of impossibilities, regrets, exploded in her brain. Appearing as Shaw had been the ultimate attempt to influence her. No, well, presenting Herself as Tycho would have been worse. But she wouldn’t be fooled; She couldn’t be trusted. And yet…

  What special connection—what magic—did Eleanor Queen inherently possess?

  Maybe that’s why everything with the move fell into place; maybe we were fulfilling some preordained destiny and my daughter belongs…

  No.

  Because she also remembered her daughter’s fear. That plaintive question as she’d gazed at the windowless windows: “Are we going to die?”

  Eleanor Queen didn’t want this. Had never wanted it. She wanted a house on a residential street and children to play with. A normal life. She wanted to practice a musical instrument too quietly for anyone to judge her.

  Waiting for a tree to die wasn’t the most proactive operation she could undertake, but keeping her daughter alive was her calling above all others. Keep her from starving. Keep her from giving away any more of herself.

  Orla wished she could flee on her own, run for help. But if she left Eleanor Queen alone—or even turned her back—the girl would run into the woods and offer herself. And then the last quadrant of Orla’s heart would wither; the Moreau-Bennetts would be gone.

  Shaw’s brother’s family would be home in a few days. Their inability to reach them might not cause immediate concern, but they would come. One week, two weeks. She just had to keep Eleanor Queen safe—alive—until then.

  41

  Eleanor Queen stamped into the house without bothering to kick the snow from her boots. She tossed the snowshoes by the door, propped up her bow, and threw herself into the ugly plaid chair. Orla closed the door behind them. And locked it.

  “Why are you locking it?” Eleanor Queen demanded.

  Orla shrugged. Locking it was a useless defense, but the impulse to keep Her out was strong. “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.” Eleanor Queen tugged off her sweater and threw it onto the floor. “I could do something and you don’t want me to do it.”

  Orla wished her mattress were in its proper place, on her box springs, upstairs in her room. She wanted to crawl up the stairs, get into bed, pull the covers over her head, and awaken only when she was certain the tree—and the blasted thing within it—was dead. But she couldn’t keep an eye on her daughter from there. “What’s the saying? ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’?”

  “You aren’t making any sense.” Orla saw the false bravado in her daughter’s exasperation; Eleanor Queen was close to tears. She perched on the arm of the plaid chair and pulled the girl in close. “You’re smothering me.” She pushed away Orla’s needy arms.

  “I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  “It’s too late, why can’t you just let me—”

  “It’s not too late. She’s dying, with the tree. When the tree’s dead, the spirit inside it won’t be a threat to us anymore. But in the meantime, before we’re too weak to do it, we need to try our hand at hunting.”

  Eleanor Queen shot her a cautious look. “Like…kill an animal?”

  “We can’t wait until there’s literally nothing left to eat. And there’s almost nothing.”

  Something complicated made the muscles in her daughter’s face twitch. “We don’t all have to die.” The wistful words, barely a whisper.

  “That’s right.” The truth was Orla didn’t see herself as a hunter, skinning an animal as its warm flesh steamed in the cold air. Nor did she see herself as a survivalist, learning her way around the complicated woodlands that surrounded their house. They had water, electricity, heat. And if she could keep them fed…

  “Sometimes…” Orla said. “I read something, a long time ago, about how when you die, your electrical circuits go crazy, and maybe that’s why some people who were briefly dead come back and report seeing a tunnel of light, or visions from their life. I know you feel connected to the spirit, the girl, but dying is a natural process.” Unless it happened because of a gun. “I think what we’re seeing is Her…circuits. Going crazy. We tried to help Her—you know we tried. But I think we need to let Her go. And we need to keep ourselves as healthy as possible, while we wait. Are you okay with that?”

  “Mama, I don’t want to kill anything. I don’t want to shoot an animal, and I don’t want the spirit to—it’s a life, Mama. I believe Her—we saw Her picture. She was a girl who came here from the city, like me. We share a connection, and it’s easier for Her with me than with Papa. She wasn’t trying to do anything bad—you told me there was no cure for tuberculosis. What was She supposed to do?”

  Of course Orla couldn’t blame a scared young woman for wanting to live, but whatever was happening now wasn’t natural. A girl didn’t just become a supernatural element that lived in a tree. But she wouldn’t admit any sympathy for the course of the girl’s life; it might give Eleanor Queen even more reasons to feel sorry for Her.

  “She hasn’t been a girl for more than a hundred years. She knows about…things, far beyond—”

  But Eleanor Queen tuned her out, a rapturous look on her face. “It’s amazing, when I feel Her inside me, because I understand it all better now. She’s not evil. She’s like this amazing creature. She’s…” She searched for a word, struggling to find it. “Maybe…like when we studied the Greek gods in school.”

  “She isn’t—” But Orla’s d
enial fell flat. Maybe She was. That didn’t make any part of what was happening any better. With power came selfishness. “We tried to say goodbye and help Her move on. I offered Her a new home, Bean—She said that’s what She wanted.”

  “I know. And I know you’ll never forgive Her because of Tycho and Papa. But…it makes me sad. I can hear Her, I can feel Her. It’s like something’s dying in me too when She tries to make me understand.”

  Orla fingered her daughter’s hair, the gathered ends below her braids like silken paintbrushes. The caged animal within her wanted to toss her last baby onto her back and run as fast as she could. Eleanor Queen was right; she’d never forgive Her for Tycho and Shaw, but she also held a volatile grudge about being trapped. Sometimes the sensation was so strong, Orla gasped for air. She was trying to make peace with their prison, but it always tugged at her, the urgent desire to get away.

  “I know you want to help—She’s taking advantage of your goodness. I hate that She’s hurting you, but She needs to let you go, and you need to let Her go. You have to try. Build a wall in your mind, your heart, when you feel Her trying to get in. That’s how you help Her move on now, you make sure She knows you aren’t the answer. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Eleanor Queen slumped against the armrest.

  “When She’s trying to get in, you tell me. And I’ll talk you through it, building a wall, shutting the door. Locking it. The symbolism is important. I think She will understand.”

  Eleanor Queen nodded but didn’t seem very confident. Orla was afraid the girl had already opened herself too much, that some tendril of the spirit’s consciousness was already inside her, expanding, tying Herself to her daughter’s soul.

  “And if that doesn’t work, I’ll…bang the pots and pans, jump around.” Orla did a crazy dance, bounding around, flailing her arms, shouting random whoops and battle cries. Eleanor Queen giggled. “No one could concentrate through that. Right?”

  “I guess.”