by A. G. Howard
“If you’re right,” Jeb says, “then our guidebook is screwed.” He looks at the pinhole of sunlight overhead. “The entrance is still open.” He lowers me to the ground but keeps holding my elbow.
I grip his tuxedo’s lapel. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter that Wonderland’s different than what Carroll wrote. All these years, Alison’s been locked up in a psych ward for nothing. It’s real. You weren’t there today. They treated her like an invalid. If they fry her brain, she might end up incapacitated forever. I won’t leave without helping her!”
“We’ve got stuff to help her now. The cake and the bottle.”
“It won’t be enough. I have to fix something Alice did. He told me—” I stop myself too late.
“Who told you?”
“I … I found a website.” I clench my jaw. I’ve already said too much.
“Some perv lured you here via a magical website?” Jeb won’t let go of my arm.
“Not exactly.”
“We’re done.” He’s not even listening to me now. “I’m getting you somewhere safe.” He slides one of the tasseled cords from the curtain behind me, and then drops it to the floor in a golden coil. “First, we get every rope and tie them together to make a lasso. Then we’ll use the furniture along the tunnel wall to get back up. It’ll be like that time we climbed rocks in the canyon a few summers back.”
I don’t know what scares me more: the fact that his plan’s so good it might work, or that I don’t want it to.
My guide’s voice returns, stern this time, almost angry. “I tire of these games. Drink from the bottle. One sip. Find me.”
I wrestle Jeb’s grip, but he’s too strong. He’s already drawing down his fourth rope when a gritty, grinding sound reverberates overhead. We both watch as the pinhole fades to blackness—the statue shutting us in.
Mouth agape, Jeb drops both the rope and my arm. I make a break for the corridor, grabbing the backpack and a candle from the wall on my way. I duck into the darkness with Jeb’s shouts ricocheting all around me.
After nearly tripping over my boot laces, I use my mouth to hold the candle so I can free one hand. I rummage in the backpack for the brown bottle. The candle’s flame casts flickers of yellow along the walls.
Jeb’s close behind. I don’t want him any deeper into my mess, but the only way I can keep him safe is if he’s with me.
I hunch down to keep going as the passage gets smaller. Lifting the chain off my neck, I wrap it on my wrist so the key dangles free at the end. Somehow I know that unless I want it to shrink, too, it can’t touch me. Far ahead, where the passage is smallest, the miniature door comes into sight.
With the backpack looped over one shoulder, I pull out the brown bottle and pop the cork, slopping a dash of liquid into my mouth opposite where I still hold the candle. The bitter flavor burns going down. I recork the bottle and tuck it away into the backpack, dropping it for Jeb.
“Just one drink!” I yell over my shoulder, and leave him the candle.
Muscles jerk—bones click. Every inch of my skin warms and tightens, as if I’m tumbling in a clothes dryer, growing smaller with each step. Nausea turns in my stomach while the corridor seems to grow alongside me.
When I look back, Jeb’s on his belly, snaking toward me with one arm outstretched to catch me in his hand. I weave between his fingers, stumble forward, and, struggling with a key now the size of my palm, I unlock the door and dive headfirst into Wonderland.
I scramble to my feet, as small as a cricket, just like in my recurring nightmare. Only this time I’m not Alice. And so far, I still have my head.
Climbing onto a mound of dirt, I take a look around. A flower garden towers above, casting enormous shadows. Between openings in the trunklike stems, a beach stretches along an endless ocean. An empty rowboat waits on the shore—gigantic compared to me. Salt and pollen season the air.
“It can’t be,” Jeb’s voice thunders.
I spin on my heel to face him, covering my ears. One huge eye peers out from the rabbit hole’s door.
“Drink from the brown bottle,” I answer.
“I can’t hear you.” His mumble shakes the ground under my feet.
I mime drinking something and hold out a forefinger, signaling the number one.
Then he’s gone.
I hope he wears the backpack for the transition. Judging from the current size of my clothes, everything touching him will shrink.
In a matter of seconds, Jeb plunges through the opening with the backpack in tow. The door snaps shut behind him, with the key on the other side.
Catching me around the waist, he pulls me against him. “What were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ won’t fix this mess. We’re the size of bugs and locked out of our only exit.”
“Well, you’re the one who left the key!”
His face flushes. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“We eat a bite of cake and get big again.”
He slaps his brow in feigned shock. “Of course. We’re just going to eat a piece of hundred-year-old magical cake.”
“You can stay this size if you want to. I’ll carry you in my pocket.”
Snarling, Jeb slips the backpack from his arms. “Whatever. Let’s just do this. We’re smaller than the stinking flowers, for crying out—”
“The boy thinks we stink, Ambrosia.” A craggy, witchlike voice erupts out of nowhere. Movement sweeps along the garden, as if wind blows the blooms.
Jeb and I edge backward, nearly tripping over the fallen pack.
One of the giant daisies bends low, casting a long blue shadow. A distorted mouth widens in the flower’s yellow center, and rows of eyes blink on every petal. “That he did, Redolence. The nerve,” she says. “After all, if anyone stinks, it would be him. We haven’t any sweat glands.”
Jeb drags me behind him, reversing our direction. “Um, Al? I’m not the only one seeing a talking flower, right?”
I clutch his waist, my heartbeat pounding into his spine. “You get used to it.” I try to suppress the panic stabbing me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t have the chance to answer, because Jeb crashes us into a huge stem.
A nasturtium leans down, snarling. A hundred gray eyes nestle on her bright orange petals. “Watch where you’re going, would you?”
Several dandelions bob the fuzz on their heads, scolding. Tiny eyeballs protrude from their tufted seeds like snails’ antennae.
I swallow a scream as they all start talking at once:
“How long has it been since we’ve had such delectable visitors?”
“In our living-backward years or their moving-forward years?”
“Doesn’t matter, really. I was more just making a point.”
Jeb eases us into a small clearing in the midst of the chattering creatures and turns me to face him. “Did they just call us ‘delectable’?”
Behind us, a dandelion sneezes. Her seeds burst from her head in tufts, leaving bald spots. “My eyes! Someone catch my eyes!” She reaches out with her leaves to try to grab them.
Two places down, a geranium bends at midstem and opens a bucket on the ground. The word Aphids glitters on the side in red paint. Fishing out a pinkish bug the size of a mouse, the flower pokes the writhing victim into his mouth and chews, drool oozing down the petals that make up his chin. His eyelids close underneath the slobber.
Jeb’s expression grows wild. “A flower eating an aphid. The eater becoming the eaten! People sometimes eat flowers, Al. Delectable …”
That stab of unease becomes a full-blown punch. “We should—”
“Run!” Jeb grabs my hand and jerks me into a sprint toward the rabbit hole’s door.
“How do we get in?” My thighs strain with each jarring step.
“We break the friggin’ lock.”
I almost trip on my boot heels. Jeb is unrelenting, dragging me along. “We don’t have to
go so fast! They’re rooted in the ground!”
“Don’t bet on it,” he says.
I follow his gaze over my shoulder. It’s like a zombie movie—the flowers moan and rip their stems up from the dirt; their mouths stretch wide, pressed open by long, spindly teeth, clear and dripping with slobber like melting icicles. The balding dandelion gets free first and sprouts humanlike arms and legs. She uses her roots for added momentum, as if she’s being propelled by snakes. She whips out a strand of ivy and loops it around Jeb’s ankle, lassoing him. With one tug, she drops him to the ground.
“Jeb!” I catch his wrists in a tug-of-war against the hissing flower.
“There’s no out the way you came in,” another flower growls as it squirms from its grave of dirt a few feet away. That’s when I realize none of them are flowers, not really. Just like with the dandelion, arms and legs appear as they burst out of the ground.
They’re part humanoid, part plant—multi-eyed mutants.
“The rabbit hole only opens into our realm. The portals that open out to yours are guarded in the castles far across the ocean, inside the pulsing heart of Wonderland,” one flower says while waving an arm. Vines cling to the greenish flesh along its naked biceps. “Therein is the only escape. Don’t you think we would’ve already left, were there a way out of the hole?”
I picture all the furniture pinned up along the tunnel wall with ivy. So, they’d been trying to build a way into our world? I shiver.
Jeb struggles under the vines now roped around his waist. “Al, run,” he mumbles.
“Yes, run,” the dandelion mutant taunts. She cups my chin with mossy fingertips and tilts her head to see me with her three remaining eyeballs. “Run or be eaten.”
A fresh wave of terror trickles through my spine. I shake it off as a flash of knowing comes to me: The netherling boy from my memories once taught me how to defeat this flower.
It’s as easy as blowing tufts in the wind.
On impulse, I reach up and pluck off what’s left of her seeds, leaving her blind. A white, gooey liquid dribbles down my hands from the exposed eye sockets. She shrieks and droops to the ground, incapacitated.
I’m peripherally aware of Jeb fishing the knife from his pocket beneath the greenery binding him. If I can provide a distraction, maybe he can get us out of this.
I hold up the dandelion seeds. The sticklike eyeballs writhe in my hand, trying to stare at me. I toss them down, stomping them. “Who’s next?” I hope to sound tough, but my voice quavers.
The zombie flowers howl and fling their vines around my ankles. Ivy snakes around my legs and torso and up my chest, sealing me within a leafy cocoon so thick only my head and upheld arms are free. Then two strands cinch my wrists together. With a yank, they flip me onto my stomach. I can’t budge.
Jeb and the incapacitated dandelion are all but forgotten as the others surround me.
Misshapen hands, green with chlorophyll, skim across me—cold and rough like leaves shaken from trees after a storm. Dizziness clouds my head. The vines are too tight. I can’t jerk away. I can’t even get enough air to scream.
Hot gusts blow over me. Eyes clenched shut, I sob. Slobber drizzles along my nape from someone’s mouth, glomming strands of my hair together.
“Wait!” one of them shouts close enough to my ear that it rings. “She’s wearing the gloves!”
Sliding my cheek against the gritty ground, I peer up at hundreds of eyelashes blinking in rapid succession.
“It is true!” a white-rose-headed freak gasps. “Do you have the fan, as well?”
Neck craned, I nod. My left nostril fills with dirt at the effort.
“We should celebrate!” They pass the bucket of aphids around among them.
“Do you think it’s her? After all this time?” a flower with pink petals asks, munching on her snack.
“She does look rather like you know who.”
“Even more of the devil’s seed in this one, to be sure,” Pinky adds. “The eyes of a tiger lily she has.”
“Just think of it.” One of the flowers pops a screeching aphid into its mouth as the bucket passes by. “We’ll soon be connected to the heart of Wonderland once more!”
The rose-head leans low, intent on me. “So, are you here to set things right?”
My gaze drifts between their body stems. Jeb has almost sawed his way out of the vines. Just a little longer. Over the fear nested in my chest, I force myself to talk. “Yes. Set things right.”
“About time. We can pick up roots, but we can’t traipse across the water, even in a boat. We must stay connected to the soil. The path to Wonderland’s heart has to be opened to us. For that to happen, Alice’s tears must be dried up. That’s your job!”
“Hear, hear!” they all say in unison. “Your job to fix her messes.”
The rose snaps two thorny fingers to silence the rest of the garden. “You must go across the ocean and onto the island of black sands. Inside the heart of Wonderland, the Wise One waits. He has been here since the beginning. He smokes the pipe of wisdom. He knows what must be done.”
“Pipe? You mean the Caterpillar?” I ask.
Wicked laughter erupts among my captors.
“The Caterpillar,” Pinky scoffs. “Well, I suppose you could call him that. That’s what the other one called him.”
“The other one?” I ask.
“Your other,” the rose says. “The one whose tears formed the ocean that now isolates us from the rest of our kind. High time a descendant came down to mend things.”
Before I can respond, an orange monstrosity steps up to speak. Spindly fronds fall from her mouth, where they cling to her drool. Stinging nettles tip her fingernails. “We could ask the octobenus to take her across. We’ll use the elfin knight as leverage. His blood alone is worth all the white gold in the Ivory Queen’s palace. The octobenus can trade it for a bevy of clams. He’ll never go hungry again. He cannot refuse such a bargain.”
“This boy is no knight,” the rose says. “He came down with her.” Orangey shakes her petals. “He was sent to escort her. He has emerald eyes, and the blood droplet beneath his lip has crystallized to a gem. He’s indubitably and undeniably an elfin knight of the White Court.”
I try to calm my racing thoughts enough to analyze their conversation. They think Jeb’s garnet labret marks him as one of the netherlings. I shoot a gaze toward him to see if he heard, but he’s no longer trapped by vines.
“Well, he hasn’t the uniform!” Pinky screeches. “Let us see if his ears are pointed.”
They turn around. “He’s escaped!”
They surge toward the sound of the backpack’s zipper, but Jeb already has the cake in hand.
In less than two blinks, he grows high above us. Body coiled and tense, he takes a swipe at the garden with one of his giant boots. The blossoms scream, grouped together in a bouquet of trembling petals.
He’s as graceful and majestic as a Greek god, lovely and appalling in his wrath. He lifts me so I hang from his fingers by strands of ivy, strung up in my cocoon like a helpless yo-yo.
Nervous energy courses through my limbs. I have to escape … the bindings are too tight … I can’t expand my lungs.
“Can’t breathe!” I struggle, but the effort only swings me faster. My stomach flops like a pendulum. The flower creatures cry out and grapple for me, but Jeb curls his fingers and nestles me within his fist—a snug, tender darkness.
“Shh. I got ya, Al …” His whispered breath rushes over me as he opens his palm.
My fear of heights battles a newborn claustrophobia. I roll along his warm flesh until his thumb, careful and tender, stops me. I freeze on my back to let him unwind the strands of ivy. His giant, callused fingers are gentle despite their size.
The minute I’m free, I catch his thumb—almost bigger than me—and nuzzle it. He tastes like grass and icing and all the flavors of Jeb, magnified. My heart hammers against his inner knuckle. “Thank you,” I say, knowing he can’t hear
me.
Carefully, he holds me level to his face. His eyes are the size of teacup saucers, huge and framed with eyelashes like a thicket of moss and shadows. “Hang on,” he whispers.
He lifts me to his shoulder. I straddle the backpack’s strap. With one hand and both boots tucked under for security, I wave.
Taking my cue, Jeb kicks over the bucket of aphids, freeing them. He roars at our captors and they root themselves back into the ground, re-creating the flower forest that once surrounded us. He walks over them in one step. They’re lucky he doesn’t crush them.
We arrive at the rowboat and Jeb offers a palm to lower me onto the closest seat. The wood grains look like ripples of sand on a desert, and splinters peak like porcupine quills. I find a smooth spot and wait.
Jeb sets the backpack into the hull of the boat. He digs through it, and his hand reappears with a chunk of cake balanced on his fingertip. To him, it’s probably nothing but a crumb. I stand and eat from his finger, closing my eyes as my bones and skin strain and expand like rubber bands. When I look again, I’m perfectly proportioned, sitting on the seat, with Jeb crouched in front of me, watching anxiously.
“You okay?” He rubs his palms along my thighs.
I grip my stomach. “Yuck.”
“Yeah. Let’s hope we’re done playing musical sizes. It’s hard on the innards.” His jacket is crumpled in the bottom of the boat, and his bare arms sparkle with sweat. He rakes a hand through his hair, leaving it disheveled. “Those gloves saved your life,” he says. “What gave you the idea to wear them in the first place?”
I’m unable to put into words the fluttery feeling or the memory of a childhood here, so I try to downplay it. “Lucky guess?”
I can still see the flowers morphing into monsters before our eyes. Like Jeb said, this is not the Wonderland Lewis Carroll created. Yet somehow, my instincts have served us so far. Thanks to my absent netherling guide.
I have to find him. The longer I’m here, the more I feel drawn to him. We’ll go to the Caterpillar, like the flowers said. In his wisdom, he can help me find my guide and break the curse.
As if reading my mind, Jeb hops out of the rowboat and shoves the bow toward the expanse of glistening waves. Sand grates along the bottom and he leaps inside once we hit the water. “They said there’s a way out across the ocean. Guess that’s our only option.” Taking the seat opposite mine, he works the paddles, biceps straining.
