Then the wolf began furiously scratching behind his ear with his hind leg and for a moment seemed to forget Alice entirely.
Alice attempted to open the gate, but it was locked. Actually, it had so many keyholes that she didn’t know which were decorations and which were real.
“I don’t have the key,” she said.
The wolf began to gag. Suddenly his entire shiny coat rippled and heaved, and Alice feared that he was having some sort of attack. His eyes burned brightly. Finally, the wolf spat something out on the grass, exhausted. A key. Picking it up and wiping the saliva off on her T-shirt, Alice closely inspected the key. It smelled of hunting.
This is the first key, the wolf whispered. The first of three. Keep them all safe, for you shall need each of them.
Then it spat out something else, which looked like a rabbit bone. The wolf cocked his head for a moment and began digging a hole in the grass.
“Thank you,” Alice said.
Alice found the shapeshifter at once charming and strange. Had he eaten a rabbit whole? And how on earth had the key ended up in his stomach? Once he finished digging his hole, with a look of intense concentration the wolf buried the rabbit bone.
Alice stood helpless before the gate with the key in her hand. How on earth was she to know which keyhole it would fit? Alice tried the key in a few holes, but nothing happened, no matter how hard she tried to pull the gate open.
Behind her, the wolf sighed. Alice turned to look at him, and he quietly said, What is your name?
“Alice.”
There is your answer.
Alice didn’t understand. She turned to look at the gate. She inserted the key at random in one of the holes and said, “Open, says Alice!”
The gate still didn’t give even the slightest hint of opening. Alice stroked the curling figures on the gate, and then she realized: The designs were letters. They were just so fancy that she hadn’t seen their real shape at first. She looked for the A and then put the key in the hole and turned it. The gate stayed locked. She thought for a moment and then looked for the L, then the I, then the C, and finally the E. At each letter, she turned the key in the hole.
Once she was done, the gate opened with a sound like a howling cat. Overjoyed, Alice turned to the wolf. He returned her gaze with a slight look of concern.
Go, he said. I do not know all that awaits you, but I hope that we will meet again.
Alice stepped through the gate, and it shut behind her with a snap as it locked. She glanced back one more time. In the dark of the night, the wolf’s eyes blazed with a friendly, attentive glow, as if encouraging her to step into the unknown. Alice felt horrible leaving him outside the fence, and she decided that she would invite the shapeshifter in as soon as she could. She was surprised how much she trusted him after such a brief time together.
Alice was nervous, but her nervousness was more a tingling anticipation than fear. Then she stepped forward and entered the Garden of Secrets.
The deeper Alice walked into the garden, the more astonished she was. The Garden of Secrets, you see, was always changing. First she walked in the dim light of a dark, cool primeval forest, but then, within a few steps, she was surrounded by the warm damp of a jungle saturated with color. Then Alice was suddenly in a field of flowers full of brightly colored butterflies, and then she was in an oak grove where a family of squirrels ran up thick trunks with acorns in their mouths.
The garden stretched on beyond sight, full of ponds and springs that appeared unexpectedly as Alice walked. Paths wound between the trees. There were waterfalls and bridges, arches made of branches, ropeways and vines. There were enormous rosebushes, cliffs and caverns, tree houses and gazebos. Meadows danced in the wind. The limbs of the ash trees stretched so you could walk from tree to tree as far as you pleased without touching the ground. There were swings tied from garlands, clearings lit by fireflies, and forest lanes lined with white lilies.
Alice had taken off her heavy winter boots and woolen socks, and went barefoot, but not a single stone or twig or pinecone hurt the soles of her feet. It was as if her feet already knew the paths and roots of the garden, because she walked with confidence and always stepped in the right spots. The garden was familiar, like a dream that she’d had many times but never remembered after waking up. The garden was the most amazing place Alice had ever been, and she felt her heart fluttering with excitement and joy.
Alice wasn’t tired at all, and she walked along the path, whistling as she went. Her legs wanted to skip for joy. Suddenly a pinecone fell in front of her on the path. Alice looked up. In a large tree sat a girl about her age, staring at her.
“Who is walking in my garden?” the girl asked.
“Is this your garden?” Alice asked.
The girl started nimbly climbing down. Once she made it to the ground, she wiped the bark from her hands.
“Well, I haven’t seen anyone else here, so I assume this must be my garden.”
“Is that so?” Alice asked.
The girl gazed at her thoughtfully. Then she suddenly burst out laughing.
“Although I only arrived here a moment ago.”
The girl had long brown hair and bangs cut just above her eyes. Those eyes were the greenest Alice had ever seen on anyone. She was wearing a T-shirt and leggings, and her feet were bare.
“Marissa,” the girl said.
Alice took a second before she realized that the girl had just said her name.
“Alice,” she replied.
Then they stared at each other for a while without knowing what to say. Alice wasn’t very good at meeting new people. The first things that came to mind were always strange, and she never wanted to say them because the other person would think she was strange too.
“Are you from here?” Alice asked. “I mean from Sisterland.”
“No. I’m from another world that’s covered with snow.”
“So am I! How did you end up here?” Alice asked Marissa.
“I saw a dragonfly and followed it. Then I fell through the snow into this world.”
“Me too!” Alice exclaimed.
Marissa also said that a wolf had given her a key, which she used to open the gate by turning the key in the letters of her name.
“But why are we here? There has to be a reason,” Alice said.
“There has to be,” Marissa agreed. “And I’m sure we’ll learn what it is when the time is right.”
“How can you be so calm?”
Marissa laughed. “I’m not. I’m ridiculously excited. This is an adventure! I’ve always wanted to have a real adventure. Haven’t you?”
“I have,” Alice replied. It felt so good to know that Marissa had the same dream as her.
Alice didn’t realize until later that when they met, neither of them said anything about their families or homes. Things like that didn’t seem to matter in Sisterland, or at least they never came to mind. The whole place was like a story or a dream, where the most important thing was only what was happening right then.
“Have you ever seen singing roses?” Marissa asked.
Alice shook her head. Somewhere else, Marissa’s question would have seemed odd, but here in Sisterland it sounded perfectly normal.
“Come on. Let me show you something.”
Marissa grabbed Alice’s hand and set off guiding her along a path. Hanging over it were trees with blue and red flowers covering their trunks.
But just then, the garden began to change around them and beneath their feet. In an instant, the path became a stream of clear water, and Alice and Marissa jumped with a scream onto the bank, their feet soaked. There they laughed, but their laughter quickly broke off as the stream bank began to rise, growing steeper and steeper….Throwing herself to the ground, Alice held Marissa’s hand and clutched at the grass.
Finally, the mot
ion stopped, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief. But then she felt a jerk and realized that Marissa was slipping over the edge. Grabbing Marissa with her other hand, she quickly pulled her to safety.
Gasping for breath, they lay on the grass atop a cliff.
“Whew! That was close!” Marissa finally managed to say. “Without you, I would have fallen.”
Alice thought that this was the first time she had ever saved someone else. She never could have guessed how good it would feel.
Standing up, the girls looked around. Part of the garden had changed, and part was the same.
“Look! There are the roses!” Marissa said.
The singing roses bloomed on bushes so large the girls could crawl under them. Even more amazing than their size were the colors of the flowers: White and red blossoms stood gleaming side by side on the same stems. Every color of rose was present, from the purest white to the deepest crimson. Some of the flower petals were a delicate pink at the edges and a flaming red inside. But Alice didn’t hear any music.
“Don’t they sing?” she asked Marissa once they were sitting together beneath the bushes.
“Shhh. Wait,” she whispered.
They sat in silence. A moment later, it began, so quietly that Alice wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it or not, but then the song gradually grew louder. The roses really did sing. Each flower had its own voice and its own melody, but the most amazing thing was that they all fit perfectly together. The songs of the roses had no words, but they had a scent. And the song of each rose smelled slightly different. Not just like roses, but like many other good things: lemon, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, morning dew, fresh-cut grass, a pine forest in the sun, blueberries, nighttime rains, wind over a lake, and autumn dawn.
“This is the most wonderful place in the world,” Alice sighed. Then they made a nest of grass and twigs under the roses and fell into a deep sleep as the five moons of Sisterland cast their gentle light down from the sky.
The next morning immediately after waking up, Alice and Marissa went to explore more of the Garden of Secrets.
In one field, a swarm of tiny fairies flew up to them, bringing them bread and soup with little sausages and cheese.
“Thank you,” Alice said in surprise. “Are you good fairies?”
“No,” replied one of the fairies, and the others gave a ringing echo: no-no-no-no-no-no-no.
“Who are you, then?” Marissa asked.
“We are the wind fairies. Because the wind is blowing from the east today, we bring everyone a feast,” the fairies replied.
Alice and Marissa looked at each other.
“And what if the wind comes from the other directions?” they asked together.
“If it comes from the west, we go on a quest. If it comes from the north, we fly back and forth.”
The wind fairies flew around the girls, setting out dishes on the rocks and stumps. Then they spread a quilt for them on the ground. Alice and Marissa sat down to eat. Once Alice had gobbled down a piece of bread, a thought occurred to her.
“What if it comes from the south?”
The fairies went silent. Suddenly they looked very sad and gray.
“That is a time of sorrow for us.”
“Why?”
“Because the south wind is when we remember our sisters and brothers who aren’t with us anymore.”
The fairies shook their wings, and the sound was like the hollow boom of a mourning bell. Alice was embarrassed she had asked. A moment later, the fairies cheered up again, though.
“But now the wind is from the east, so we continue on to feed other hungry souls!”
Then they flew off and left the girls to eat the delicious food.
“This is so crazy fun,” Marissa said to Alice with a grin. “Crazy and fun all at once.”
Alice nodded, her mouth full of sausage.
* * *
—
After eating, the girls continued walking and came to an orange grove that smelled so tart and sweet it made their heads spin. In among the trees, under the green-and-yellow shade, they saw dozens of looms. At each loom sat someone weaving. The weavers were old, with long white hair and long white robes, and neither girl could tell whether they were women or men.
Alice and Marissa approached one of the weavers, who was making cloth from gold and silver threads.
“Who are you?” Marissa asked.
“We are the dream weavers,” the weaver said. “We weave all the most beautiful and strange dreams. We seek out the strands of hidden thoughts and fashion them into imagination that wraps sleepers and carries them to the kingdom of dreams.”
The weaver’s fabric was almost done.
“What kind of dream are you weaving now?” Alice asked.
The dream weaver took the cloth from the loom and showed it to the girls. When the sun shone on the threads through the branches of the trees, it revealed a golden dragon.
“Once, long ago, dragons sometimes flew over the Garden of Secrets. Proud, majestic creatures they were. But so many years have passed since then, perhaps centuries, that now dragons only fly in dreams,” the weaver said.
She offered the fabric to Marissa and Alice.
“Take this. You look like the kind of girls whose dreams should have dragons flying in them.”
Thanking the weaver, they accepted the gift. The fabric was as soft as the gentle touch of the first moments of sleep.
* * *
—
Next in the garden, Alice and Marissa met the question flowers, who had silly plumes like birds and were always asking questions: “Who is it? What is it? Where did it go? Where did it come from? What did it say?” They also met moss trolls and barkers and sillyhops and leafplayers and nightwalkers and all sorts of other creatures whose names they didn’t even learn that first day. If Alice had been asked later to describe how the creatures looked, she would have had a hard time, because they belonged so naturally to Sisterland, seeming to grow out of the surroundings. But there was nothing like them in Alice’s world. The Garden of Secrets was full of different inhabitants, large and small—strange creeping crawlers, beautiful forest animals, and other beasts, from deer and shrews to bears and swallows.
It was as if every creature from every fairy tale in the world had found this same home. And they all seemed to live in surprising harmony. At least based on the girls’ first encounter with them, the creatures of the Garden of Secrets also seemed to have something that people had lacked in Alice and Marissa’s world when they fell through the snow. Was it warmth? Warmth inside and out? But all the same, there was something strange in how happy everything was in the garden. Something threatening. Alice felt as though someone were constantly watching them from afar. But she couldn’t quite put the feeling into words, and in the next moment the wonder of the garden had her so strongly under its spell again that she forgot her anxiety.
* * *
—
“Do you have any hobbies? In our world, I mean?” Marissa asked Alice when they stopped to rest.
“Astronomy. And archery,” Alice responded. Then she added, “And thinking.”
“Can thinking be a hobby?” Marissa asked.
Alice shrugged.
“I don’t know. But at least I do it an awful lot. And I imagine things.”
“Like what?”
Alice was a little embarrassed. Did she dare to tell?
“Well, I don’t really believe in imaginary friends, but there are a couple of people I talk to sometimes. Mirror Alice and Shadow Alice. I see them in the mirror and in my shadow. They’re a little like me but still different. Sometimes I talk with them for a long time.”
Cautiously Alice glanced at Marissa to see if she was going to laugh at her. But Marissa just appeared to be deep in thought.
“I draw
a lot,” Marissa said. “And while I draw, I talk to the people I’m drawing. And they answer me.”
Alice felt a warm feeling of relief. Marissa didn’t think she was strange after all. Marissa understood her.
“Some people say it’s embarrassing to imagine things when you’re eleven years old,” Alice said.
“I don’t believe you should be embarrassed. I want to keep imagining until I’m as old as my grandmother!” Marissa proclaimed.
“Then we can start our own secret club: the Imagining Grannies! Or the Imagine Grans!” Alice said.
They laughed as they planned everything they would do together when they were old.
“We could go to day care centers and schools and tell wild, made-up stories about when we were young,” Marissa said.
“We could dress up as unicorns and run races through the city,” Alice said.
Then they calmed down and breathed in the gentle summer air of the garden.
“What’s your family like?” Marissa asked Alice after a moment of quiet.
Alice had to concentrate.
“I have a father and mother…and an older sister,” she finally answered. “What about you?”
Marissa’s brow furrowed as she thought.
“I remember my dad…,” she said after a while. “And some little brothers. Twins.”
Alice heard uncertainty in Marissa’s voice. It was the same uncertainty that chilled her inside. She thought of her room but suddenly couldn’t remember what her wallpaper was like. She didn’t remember what books she had on her shelves. Alice had a dim recollection of arranging her stuffed animals on the top shelf by the ceiling, but she would have found it impossible to list their names or even to say how many of them there were. When she thought of her house, it was like looking at a picture that became blurrier with each passing second.
The worst thing was that when Alice tried to think of her family, she didn’t properly remember their faces or how their voices sounded. They were like distant relatives you haven’t seen for ages and wouldn’t necessarily recognize on the street.
Sisterland Page 2
