Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  Reason I noticed, though? I wasn’t looking in the mirror, either. It’s not something cutters really go for, right there in front of other people. It’s like our eyes might flash different or something, give us away.

  “How does it end?” Tabby said to Alice. “That story?”

  “It was a horror story,” Alice said, leaning back on the vanity.

  “So, what?” Lewis said, tapping one of Aunt Cyn’s 1978 barrettes under one side of the camera. “Chainsaws, machetes?”

  “Something did crawl up the tunnel,” Alice said, shrugging like it didn’t matter. “Something always crawls up the tunnel in these kinds of stories.”

  “Let me guess,” Lewis said without looking around. “No one saw it at first, right?”

  “When she—and it was a she—came through,” Alice said, “she was kind of … I don’t know. She walked through the house after the people were asleep but her feet didn’t make any noise. And then she reached into some sleeper’s open mouth, found something to hold on to—a memory, I think it was a memory—and she pulled herself in. That was the first step. She’d been living behind the mirror so long, watching everybody through the glass, that now she wondered what they were like on the inside.”

  Now we were all staring at her.

  “She already knew their outsides, I mean,” she added. Like that would make it better.

  “So after that it was just run-of-the-mill possession stuff?” Lewis said, finally satisfied with the camera.

  “Pretty much,” Alice said, leaning over to look directly into the camera lens. “There were some more steps or something. Like a ritual, or rules. No—like instars. That’s insect stages of life, right? Larva, pupa, all that? Doesn’t this freak y’all out just a little?”

  “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” Lewis said. “The Riemann Hypothesis. That Collatz bullshit. Now, that’s scary.”

  “It’s all just numbers underneath,” Tabby said. “After everything else.”

  “My God, it’s full of numbers,” I misquoted. Nobody smiled.

  “So do it, then,” Alice said, about the record-button.

  Lewis started to but I brushed his hand away, positioned my middle finger above what felt like the right button. “Here?” I asked.

  “Three, two, one—” he said, and I hit it.

  We all looked to the mirror. For some shadow spider-crawling up a series of wider and wider frames.

  There was just us, though. Three stupid, drunk grad students packed into an old woman’s bathroom. And a fourth, looking into the hall, like—and I say this with retrospect—like she’d seen something scuttle past.

  I make it sound like a photograph itself, don’t I? That moment.

  That’s what it is, in my head.

  * * *

  When the camera’s playback in the little eyepiece was about fifty times too small to count the reductions and settle the argument for us, we had to eject the tape, slide it into Aunt Cyn’s equally-antique VCR. It was so old it still had the kind of tray that rises up from the top.

  The television wasn’t much clearer than the camera—it was still cathode-ray—but it was bigger, at least.

  “Eight,” Lewis said, sitting in front of the screen, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Eight” was his ante, his bid, his gamble.

  “Prime number,” Tabby called for herself.

  “You?” Alice said to me.

  We were on the couch. The only ones on the couch, with Lewis sitting on the floor, Tabby leaning in the doorway to the hall, her arms crossed.

  The air changed subtly. Like somebody’d dialed the thermostat back to “high school.”

  I instantly forgot what to do with my hands. They were just these lumps of mechanical possibilities, these fumbling appendages I knew were going to betray me the first chance they got.

  “Infinite,” I said—my gamble. “Not a tunnel, but a bottomless well, straight to Hell.”

  Tabby shook her head, said, “You can’t claim resolution failure, you know? We have to reach consensus on how many rings of this particular hell there are. And none of us can count to infinity.”

  I bolstered that with Zeno’s Paradox.

  Lewis laughed while looking around, corrected me to Dichotomy Paradox—the one where you can never reach a point because first you have to get halfway to that point, and halfway to halfway to that point, and on down finer and finer, until you’re never moving, are just stuck forever in that event horizon, not quite to the black hole, but not ever going anywhere else, either.

  “Yeah, that,” I said, maybe playing up the wine a bit. Then, to Alice, my eyes fixed on her bare knees, “What’s the humanities major’s wager?”

  “One reflection,” she said. “Just, a thousand times.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Lewis said, but didn’t want to argue it, probably because he already assumed he was winning this thing anyway. These other bets were all just formalities, to him.

  He rewound a half second, hit Play.

  It took a moment for the tracking to dial in through the static, and for the vertical to hold, but finally our image of the bathroom shook onto screen.

  Lewis, being Lewis, had lined the camera up perfect, looking right into its own soul, right through the heart of reality.

  We all leaned in, holding our breaths. I don’t know about everybody else, but I wasn’t counting yet. I was looking for the hint of a shape down that smaller and tighter tunnel.

  At the very smallest reduction, though, either the last or the first reflection, depending on where you started, in this world or in that one, the image just blurred into darkness, and then was suddenly replaced by the comparatively monstrous-large face of Aunt Cyn.

  She was either teaching someone how to knit or stashing that knowledge here, on tape, for if she ever forgot.

  “Think she can see us?” Lewis said, not expecting an answer, just leaning in to cue the tape back to where we needed it, in order to count.

  Twenty-three diminutions.

  A prime number.

  Tabby wouldn’t have to do dishes for the rest of the week.

  Not that any of us were anyway.

  * * *

  A discreet amount of minutes after Lewis signed off, saluting us all goodnight then rotating slow on his right heel like falling back into the hall, Tabby fake-yawned onto the back of her right hand, said she’d better hit it as well.

  “Take your winnings and leave?” I said.

  “Know when to walk away,” she said, “know when to run,” and then she was gone into the more private parts of the house.

  Not that we couldn’t hear their desperate operations in the master bedroom.

  “They’ve got some certain math problems to work through, I guess,” I said to Alice without quite looking over. I could see her in the black screen of the television, though.

  She hissed a laugh out, crossed her legs the other way than they had been. “She told me to stay away from you,” she said.

  “Who needs friends when you’ve got friend’s ex-girlfriends like her, right?”

  “No,” Alice said. “I mean, she said that, but I think she said it to like push me toward you. If that makes sense.”

  “We’ve got to be fast,” I said, using my fakest voice. “My parents’ll be home right after bowling.”

  Alice laughed. It was a good sound. It was honest.

  “Marly would have fallen for that ‘stay away from him’ tactic,” Alice said, kind of in apology.

  “But you’re not Marly anymore,” I said for her.

  “Ask me who I am tomorrow night,” she said, then leaned over, pecked me on the cheek, and stopped to pick her shoes up before making her exit, careful to point her knees mostly at the other wall than the one behind me.

  Mostly.

  The sounds of Lewis and Tabby’s various attempts at solving their complicated equation didn’t help my abandonment on the lonely couch in the lonelier living room, an intense spot of heat practically
glowing on my cheek.

  I rose like a puppet on a string, followed my hand to the kitchen, to the counter, to the wine bottle, and took it with me to bed, the dishwasher coming on like a tidal wave for a moment, then pulling its water back into the unknowable depths of the house.

  Only after I was ensconced in the sheets did it occur to me that we’d left that image shuddering on the television screen, trying to hold in place.

  Would the tape, stretched to its limit, finally snap?

  I shouldn’t have been worried about the tape, though.

  I should have been worried that we hadn’t posted a sentry there on the couch. One who knew to stay awake. To not look away, even for an instant.

  * * *

  The next morning was one of those where ten o’clock came and went without me. Eleven probably would have, too, but there were pans clattering in the kitchen. Alice was scrambling eggs.

  All around her, the kitchen was a mess. Every box plundered, every bowl turned over.

  “I could have told you where the forks were,” I said, impressed.

  “Raccoons,” she said.

  I sniffed the air like I knew what a raccoon might smell like. Musty and fetid, I supposed. And, evidently, quieter than the mess accounted for. Either that or I’d been somewhere deeper than sleep.

  Alice set a plate of the eggs at the table for me, leaned against the counter with an ice cream bowl of them.

  I probed the yellow with my fork.

  “Just eggs,” Alice said.

  The dishwasher was surging and thrushing, louder than usual.

  I speared a bite, held it up to her in thanks, and sent it down the hatch.

  “They still trying to figure where that last integer plugs in?” I said, pointing down the hall with my fork.

  “Tab left an hour ago, said Lewis must already be up there.”

  “There?”

  “The office, the department.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Back to the math mines…”

  Alice shrugged, was watching the doggie door like a small furry bandit was about to peek through.

  “You have any dreams?” she said, still watching the door.

  It took a moment for me to think this one through.

  “I mean last night,” she said. “Not, like, in general.”

  “You?” I said back, just to stall.

  She shook her head no, but you don’t ask about somebody’s dream if you’re not still suffering from one.

  “I turned the television off this morning,” she said, like that was going to be my very next question.

  I forked another bite of yellow in.

  “Weird morning,” I said, kind of obviously.

  “It’s just because of normal food,” Alice said, and set her bowl down into the sink with the rest of the crusty dishes. I don’t think she’d eaten any of the eggs she’d made. We drifted to our own naps and television shows and reading and wine and staring at nothing for the rest of the afternoon, and on one of my trips back through the kitchen I noticed maggots wriggling up through the yellow eggmeat. I’d seen exactly this happen with a series of roommates, but had, for no real reason, kind of imagined Aunt Cyn’s house would be cleaner, or better, or immune.

  Nope. The maggots were massing up, blind and ravenous. It was only four or five o’clock then. How long does it take for an egg to hatch?

  I ran the hot water onto them then ground the disposal, imagined them screaming down there, then imagined their fly mother watching me from the side of the refrigerator, that image of me fractured into sixty-four hexagonal panes at once.

  Alice sat in the backyard on the chaise lounge in her miniskirt, sunning her legs. I think if I hadn’t been there, she’d have stripped down some.

  Tabby finally made it back for what would have been dinner, if we’d bothered to cook.

  Lewis wasn’t with her.

  * * *

  At first Tabby was confused, thought for sure Lewis had just beat her home, slipped into their room for a nap or a shower.

  His phone was still on the nightstand in the master bedroom. Dead.

  In a fit of hopefulness, Tabby plugged it in, yelped from the blue spark that arced from the prongs to the outlet.

  Nothing was making sense. Including Alice. The dream she finally told us about when the three of us reconvened in the living room, she qualified it by saying that she didn’t think she was exactly asleep. That she did that sometimes.

  What we hadn’t considered at breakfast, we considered now: that raccoons had surely had their greedy little hands on everything in the kitchen. Our solution wasn’t to wash the dishes, it was for Tabby to come back from the corner store with two boxes of cereal and a half-gallon of milk. Plastic spoons from the condiment counter by the deli, bowls from the clearance rack. We called it dinner, and while we ate, Alice told us what she remembered. That’s how she phrased it. Not what she said she’d dreamed, but what she remembered.

  All it was was a sense, upon waking, like a fact she already knew but was now thinking about for some reason. That fact was that we were five in the house, not four.

  The way she just said it flat-out like that, it made my elbows pull into my sides without me telling them to do that.

  Tabby wasn’t so easy a mark.

  “That’s your big scary dream?” she said, trying not to smile around it.

  “There’s only four of us, though,” Alice countered.

  Tabby stared into the living room like seeing us there two nights ago, smoking and drinking and laughing.

  “We’re a field experiment for you, aren’t we?” she said. “You’ve got a closed system here. A social scientist’s wet dream. Introduce a little folklore, trick us into participating in what we think’s an experiment, then watch the results—watch us reduce to our superstitious medieval selves. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “I’m not a social scientist,” Alice said.

  Which wasn’t the same as denying Tabby’s accusation.

  “Is Lewis in on this with you?” Tabby asked then, fixing Alice in her suspicions. No, I could tell from her eyes: Fixing “Alice” in her suspicions.

  “Are we sure it was raccoons?” I said, trying to break the awkwardness.

  They both looked over to me.

  “Lewis wouldn’t mess up a kitchen,” Tabby said.

  “It was like this when I came in,” Alice said.

  “I mean—no,” I said, using my hands to emphasize my words where my mouth was failing. “What I’m saying is, wouldn’t a cat fit through that door as well?”

  “Great,” Tabby said, standing all at once, spinning away from the table in a grand gesture. “You’ve infected us all, Alice.” Then, to me: “A caterpillar would fit, too, wouldn’t it? Did the smoke detectors go off? Should we check all of Aunt Cynthia’s hats for mercury? Are we having a tea party later?”

  “We don’t know what happened to Lewis,” I said. It was the best defense I could muster.

  “Don’t say it like that,” Tabby said. “We don’t know where Lewis is.”

  And now I tuned in to the waver in her voice, the sheen to her eyes.

  Shit.

  Everybody knew she and Lewis were on the long road that ended under a wedding arch. Everybody knew that they’d end up together when grad school and first teaching posts and last flings had all been traipsed through in proper fashion. It stood to reason that she’d know that, too. And now that probably seemed to be falling apart, to her.

  I stood to, I don’t know, stand with her, be concerned alongside her—Lewis was practically my brother—but she gave me her shoulder, ran down the hall, slammed the door of the master bedroom behind her.

  Whoever starts crying gets the big bedroom, I didn’t say.

  “Sorry about that,” I said to Alice. “That’s kind of why Lewis is always breaking up with her.”

  “I think those eggs were bad,” Alice said.

  Already I could see myself in ten minutes, vomiting into the toilet. Watching t
he scummy surface of the water for wriggling motion.

  But not yet. Don’t let it rise yet.

  “He’ll show up,” I said. Mostly for myself.

  “I dreamed—” Alice started, then backed up, tried again: “I was watching the fingertips of her right hand,” she said. “I don’t know why her fingertips were so important.”

  “Her?” I said, already wanting to reel that question back in.

  Alice just shook her head no, nothing.

  It didn’t do much to settle my stomach.

  * * *

  The screaming woke me.

  I was on the couch again. The glass of wine I’d had balanced on my stomach spilled onto Aunt Cyn’s beige couch, the one with that kind of suedey fabric you could fingerwrite your name in.

  The scream had come from the master bedroom, I was pretty sure.

  I rose, lurched across the living room, and stopped in the doorway to the hall, suddenly aware I was at one end of what could be construed as a dark tunnel. At the other end, there could be the dark shape of a woman with matted hair. Just standing there, fixing me in her stare.

  I kept one hand to the wall all the way down to the open door of the master bedroom.

  It was Tabby who had screamed. I knew because I could hear her jerky breathing, like she was building to it again.

  I stepped in as carefully as I’ve ever done anything. The bedroom was dark, the bed empty, the air musty. Skirting the bed, since arms could stab out for ankles, since eyes could be watching from under there, I made it to the bathroom.

  Tabby was pushed up onto the sink, her back to the mirror in a way that made me want to pull her back, keep her from falling through.

  What she wasn’t looking away from was Alice, in sleep pants and a sports bra, bare feet. She was standing in the bathtub, facing into the corner, a kind of hoarse moan coming from her slack mouth. Her scars were a filigree of pale ridges, coming around almost to her spine—as far as her pinching fingertips could reach a razor. Meaning her front side would be worse. Her front side would be deeper, more intricate, a map to her true self.

  No, she hadn’t wanted to look in the mirror.