Unhinged

by A. G. Howard

  After changing into comfier clothes—navy checkered leggings and a silver tunic sweater—I sneak into the living room to watch from around the corner as my parents cook together, just like they do every evening. Mom sneezes while holding a cup of flour. White dust ends up all over Dad’s face, and a food fight breaks out. Before it’s over, they’re both laughing and covered in pancake ingredients. Dad draws her close and tenderly wipes her lips with a damp washcloth before kissing her.

  I ease back into hiding, wanting to smile so much it hurts. Seeing them flirt like kids in love breaks my heart into so many different pieces. They’ve earned it after all the years they missed together. I just don’t want this to be the last time I see them so happy.

  When we sit down to eat, the pancakes are light, spongy, and dripping with syrup. They taste like home and comfort and security. I swallow it all down, drowning in the sweetness.

  While my parents do the dishes, I escape to my bedroom and feed my pet eels some chopped boiled eggs. Aphrodite and Adonis perform a graceful dance, entwining their bodies, capturing the food as it floats down like they’re lovers catching snowflakes on their tongues.

  The scene reminds me of the snow globe the clown held in my hallucination today, and just like that, I’m hit with a Wonderland memory; it crashes over me, so vivid I feel like I’m there again: my five-year-old self, glaring at my eight-year-old netherling companion and competitor, driven to near tears as he held a snow globe out of my reach.

  It was the time Morpheus and I visited the Shop of Human Eccentricities. He always brought me to Wonderland in my dreams, but we didn’t often interact with other netherlings. Unless Morpheus let them, they couldn’t see through the veil of sleep standing between us. We could observe them, though, like watching fish swim in a tank.

  But that day there was something Morpheus wanted me to learn, so he had temporarily dropped the veil.

  “I’m busy,” Morpheus teased in his young, cheeky voice, shaking the snow globe in front of me again. “You want a toy of your own? Find a way up on your own.” His black wings brushed across my bare foot as he turned his back to explore the store.

  “But you’re the one who can fly,” I grumbled, poking the end of my braid through the space where I’d recently lost one of my front teeth.

  When he glanced over his skinny shoulder and rolled his inky-patched eyes, I knew his mind was made up. I looked at my red pajama top. The matching pants were mud stained from an earlier game of tag beneath some giant mushrooms. Morpheus had won that game without even dirtying his white satin shirt and black velvet pants. I was tired of him always winning.

  I pouted and strolled around the shop. A woven canopy of branches and moldering leaves made up the ceiling; the floor and walls were decaying stone, and moss peeked through the cracks. It smelled damp and felt cold to my feet.

  Solid wooden shelves stood back-to-back to form aisles. The shelves were lined with sparkling new plates, silverware, lamps, toothbrushes, combs, and thousands of other items from the human realm. Our ordinary artifacts were prized collectibles in Wonderland.

  A top shelf in the back of the store caught my eye, too high for me to reach. A cheerful muslin rag doll slumped over the edge, eyes the color of cornflowers and a smile kissed with pink glitter. On the seven shelves stacked beneath her, other shiny new novelties sat: a silver Christmas ball; a magnifying glass; a stuffed yellow canary in a cage—so lifelike, I questioned if it were really dead; white crockery jars with happy, smiling ladybugs painted on the front; fancy perfume bottles; a doorknob; and candy keepers made of converted kerosene lamps whose lids were topped with vinyl doll heads. But none of those things intrigued me like the rag doll.

  Morpheus had wandered off to another set of shelves, purposely ignoring me.

  Hesitant, I padded to the front of the shop, where the clerk, Mr. Lamb, sat next to his cash register. He was an odd-looking creature who appeared to be pieced together from the same curiosities that lined his shelves: raised gray and white patches coated his humanoid face, as if his flesh had mildewed. His lips, eyebrows, whiskers, and hair were made of fungus, green and nappy like worn felt. His body—nothing more than a tattered dress form—had twenty sets of pencil-thin robotic arms and legs affixed to the empty shoulder sockets and torso’s edge with rusted nails and hinges.

  “Mr. Lamb, I found something I’d like. Please reach it for me?” I pled in my most polite tone.

  His flat, open-ended bottom teetered on the bar stool, and he peered over square glasses with eyes as sharp and shiny as wet rocks.

  “No,” he snipped.

  Knitting needles clacked between his brass fingers and toes as he wove butterfly wings into strands of glistening rainbow cloth. With the help of his abundant appendages, he kept adding more knitting needles and was producing bolts of the fabric at an alarming pace. The pile of butterfly wings that had touched the ceiling when I arrived now came to just above his head. I looked at them longingly, wistful for a set of wings, although I knew I would never use them because I didn’t like heights.

  “My job”—his guttural voice scraped inside my ears like fingernails clawing across a coffin lid—“is to assure the customers don’t get bit. It is up to you to capture your own buys. And mind you don’t offend the shelves. They’re made of tulgey wood. Now step off. I’m busy sewing myself a new dress.”

  I wondered what was so special about tulgey wood and what he meant about customers getting bit. But I had a bigger problem. The only way to get the toy would be to climb, but my tummy kicked anytime I went high.

  I wove through the maze of aisles back to the rag doll. Plush and clean, she looked down on me. Her pretty face promised hours of fun make-believe in my sandbox at home. Something inside me thrummed to life, a subtle assurance that I could meet this challenge.

  I cautiously balanced my bare feet on the first shelf, gripping the one above it with my fingers. I made my way up slowly, as if climbing a ladder. Two shelves, four, then six shelves high. The steady clacking of the clerk’s knitting needles gave my movements rhythm.

  I didn’t dare look down. Instead, I focused on my prize, only two shelves away now. The backs of the bookshelves appeared to have holes that showed only in my peripheral vision. When I looked straight at them, all I saw were dark lines in the wood.

  At last, I was at the highest shelf. Nervous tremors shook my hands. For comfort, I leaned in to nuzzle the doll’s soft yarn hair. She smelled of detergent and vanilla. I drew back, grinning, then spotted a clown next to her, propped against the back of the shelf. Something about its jolly smile called to me. I reached toward it, the fingernails of my other hand digging into the wood for extra balance.

  “Ouch, you’re pinching!” A shout came from behind the clown, gritty and breathy, like two pieces of sandpaper rubbed together. There was movement where the dark lines I had mistaken for wood grains formed a set of lips. They yawned open to reveal a cavernous hole with splintery teeth and a bumpy gray tongue.

  The shelf had a mouth …

  “Ease up, would you?” it barked at me.

  Startled, I almost fell backward but gripped the shelf even harder with both hands just in time.

  “Want to play rough, eh?” the mouth screeched at me, its breath as rank as a compost heap. Without warning, jagged teeth—embedded in black gums—snapped out of the wood like an old man spitting up his dentures. Biting down on both toys, the jaw retracted back into the mouth and the rag doll and clown disappeared. The hole vanished, too, leaving only the wood grain and an empty shelf.

  Terrified, I lost my balance. Morpheus caught me in midair before I could even scream. As we drifted toward the floor, the mouth and teeth seemed to chase us down the back of each consecutive shelf, catching and swallowing the display items.

  “You just had to wake the shelves,” Morpheus scolded the moment we landed. “Don’t you know that tulgey is the most irritable of all kinds of wood? You’d best hope whatever you wanted to play with so badly does
n’t come back to haunt you.”

  “Come back?” I asked, my heartbeat still scattered from my almost-fall. “But they’ve all been eaten!”

  “No. A tulgey’s throat is a two-way portal to another dimension. A place called AnyElsewhere … the looking-glass world.” Morpheus tapped his fingers on his knee nervously. “If the items that went through are turned away at the gate, they’ll be sent back. And once something is spit back out, it rarely returns the same way it left. It’s changed. Forever.”

  “Drat it all.” Mr. Lamb’s complaint carried from across the room. We couldn’t see him for all the aisles between us, but the clack of knitting needles had been silenced and a mechanical whir rang out. Metal feet ground along the stone floor as he came around the corner.

  He took one look at the empty shelves, then pointed to the door with several of his brassy fingertips. “Get out!” he demanded. A loud belch from behind us masked the echo of his voice. We all turned to the lowest shelf, where the wood-grain mouth had reappeared. With another belch, it coughed up everything it had swallowed.

  The items were mangled—altered nightmarishly. The Christmas ball had withered down to a black coal. A large bloodshot eye opened in its middle, glaring at us. It rolled toward me, but Morpheus kicked it away. The magnifying glass had shattered and blood leaked from the cracks. The silver handle wailed so loudly my spine shook. The stuffed yellow canary—now pale pink and featherless—opened its beak and squawked. Eight wire legs sprouted from the cage’s base and shuffled the raging bird toward us.

  We backed up. The clerk said a word his mother would’ve spanked him for and clambered toward the cash register, mumbling something about nets.

  Morpheus took flight and left me alone on the ground.

  “Help me!” I cried up at him. My heart pounded in my chest, making it hard to breathe.

  “I can’t always be there to carry you.” The jewels under his eyes were a sincere blue. “You must figure out how to escape.”

  Something pecked my ankle, and I jumped back with a yelp, facing the screeching canary. I shoved the cage over. The wire dome rocked and the metal legs squirmed in midair, like a turtle rolled onto his shell.

  More freakish mutations surrounded me.

  The white crockery jars spewed up thousands of beetles with snapping pincers, nothing like the smiling ladybugs painted on their fronts. The doorknob had been transformed into an old man’s hand and pulled itself closer with bent and gnarled fingers, while the vinyl doll heads on the candy keepers snapped their teeth—tiny and sharp like straight pins.

  I took several cautious steps backward, keeping them in my sight as I made my way to the front of the store. “Morpheus!” I screeched again, but now I couldn’t even see him overhead.

  The mutated items parted to form a path. My rag doll and the clown appeared—their middles stitched together with bloody thread, like a gruesome surgery gone wrong. Instead of four eyes, they had three between them. One eye had been caught in the seam. “Help me find my other eye,” the rag doll pleaded. “Please, please. My eye.” Her little-girl voice and the clown’s distorted laughter chilled the air, and I sobbed.

  Blinded by my tears, I stumbled away. Mr. Lamb stood on the counter scooping mutants up in a mass of nets. “Hide, you fool child!” he shouted.

  “Do something, Alyssa!” Morpheus reappeared and yelled from above as the creepy mutants encroached on me. “You’re the best of both worlds,” he prodded. “Use what you have. What we don’t. Make something that can save us all!”

  I dove beneath Mr. Lamb’s pile of butterfly wings for sanctuary. The knitting needles were scattered on the floor, and I chanced sticking out an arm to grab some. Inside my frail refuge, I ignored the growls and snaps closing in. I took two wings and held them against a needle, imagining them joining as one, forming a whole new breed of butterfly with a body of metal, lethal and sharp.

  The knitting-needle butterfly came alive in my hand, wings fluttering. Gasping, I let it go, and it flew out toward my attackers. For a moment, I was too shocked to move.

  The clerk’s screeches spurred me again to action, and I made more butterflies, sending them to help the first.

  My bug invasion dive-bombed the attacking beetles, herding them back into their jars; they swooped into the vinyl doll heads and tangled in their hair, ripping it out at the roots.

  Soon all the mutants retreated with hisses and snarls.

  Inside my hiding place, I imagined that the remaining wings could lift me, attach to every inch of my pajamas. In a matter of seconds, I was floating beside Morpheus. I covered my face, unable to look down.

  “You did it,” he said and put an arm around me. I couldn’t see the pride in his eyes, but I heard it in his voice.

  Just before Morpheus dropped the veil of sleep over us again, the clerk started cheering for my metal bugs.

  I’d saved him. I’d saved us all.

  My aquarium’s air pump gurgles, and it shocks me back to the present.

  I brace myself against the dresser with my palms, legs weak.

  So that’s why Morpheus sent the clown, almost an exact replica of the one from the shop. It was a trigger to the memory.

  I stumble backward and sit hard on my bed, rattled. Since I was so young when he first started visiting me, and most of his visits took place in dreams, our adventures are stored deep inside my subconscious. He’s the master at helping me recall them.

  I’m aching to talk to Mom. To find out if she knows anything about the tulgey wood. Maybe she could make sense of why Morpheus wants me to remember it now.

  Morpheus and she have a past, too, before his persistence landed her in the asylum. But I don’t know if he visited her dreams or if he just contacted her through the insects and flowers. I’ve often wondered what sorts of memories bind them.

  She’s never been to Wonderland. The mere thought of going through the rabbit hole terrifies her—the fear of the unknown. That’s why I’ve never pressured her to tell me her experience. She always seems so fragile. And that’s also why it will be up to me to figure out Morpheus’s motivations today.

  “Use what you have,” he said in the memory. “What we don’t.” Once again, he’s contradicting himself. If netherlings are as great as he says they are, what could humans have that they’re lacking?

  I get up and dig through a drawer for Mom’s old Lewis Carroll novels, opening the copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Unlike Mom’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where she made notes and comments in the margins—the ink now too blurry to be legible—these pages are clean, old, and yellowed.

  I skim over the Jabberwocky poem in search of the tulgey forest, but there’s nothing about volatile, gaping mouths in trees that spit things out in nightmarish forms. Flipping to chapter three and the “looking-glass insects,” I search for a reference to the looking-glass world or AnyElsewhere, the alternate dimension Morpheus mentioned. Again, nothing.

  Finally, I stop at chapter five: “Wool and Water.” In it, Alice visits a store. As the scene unravels, I see similarities to the place I visited in my memory, but differences, too. Of course it’s not the same as Carroll’s version. Things never are. I learned last year that his books are softer, more palatable versions of the real madness of Wonderland.

  In the Carroll rendition, a sheep who likes to knit is the store’s clerk. In my memory, there’s a shopkeeper named Lamb who’s fascinated with knitting. The set of bookshelves likes to play tricks just like in the original book, although the tricks I experienced were much more gruesome than the fairy-tale version.

  The doorbell rings, and I slam the book shut. I invited Jeb to come by after dinner. Stashing the books in the drawer, I rush into the entryway.

  I’m too slow on my still-shaky legs, and Mom gets there first.

  Jeb waits under the porch light. We make eye contact; it’s obvious he wants to rush in and hold me close, just as I want to run to him. It seems like forever since I’ve
seen him, and the harsh reality is, it could be forever until I see him again.

  Mom places herself between us. “I’m sorry, Jebediah. Allie’s had enough excitement for one day. You can talk to her on the phone.”

  I gesture behind her shoulder to get his attention. Holding up five fingers, I mouth the word Sanctuary.

  He nods my way, politely says good night to my mom, then steps off the porch into the twilight. Mom closes the door and follows me into the living room, where I drag my chemistry book out of my backpack.

  “Way to be nice, Mom,” I grumble. I don’t want to hurt her, but if I don’t pretend I’m angry, she might get suspicious.

  “Your boyfriend should respect that sometimes you need a break,” she answers.

  “He’s not the only one who should respect that.” I rally a convincing scowl. “I’m going to the backyard to study.”

  Mom and I have spent many afternoons over the past few months working on a lunar garden that shimmers at night. We planted lilies, honeysuckle, and silver licorice. We even have a small fountain that lights up. The flowing water helps to drown out the whispers of bugs and plants. It’s one of my favorite places to study and think.

  When Mom starts to join me, I turn to face her. “I don’t need an escort, please.”

  “You need help with your chemistry vocab,” she insists.

  I frown. “It’s a one-woman job, Mom.”

  Dad steps from the kitchen with a dish towel on his shoulder. There’s still flour all over his clothes. He looks back and forth between us.

  I bite my inner cheek, doing my best not to explode. “May I please have some downtime to get my head cleared before school tomorrow?” I direct the question to Dad.

  Mom wipes her hands on her apron.

  Through the kitchen doorway, the cat clock on the wall ticks away, its tail twitching in time with each second. I can’t have her tagging along. There’s no way I’m diving into the rabbit hole tomorrow without talking to Jeb first, without being in his arms one more time.