Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  “She’s not there,” Tabby said, clamping onto my shoulder.

  Alice wasn’t there. She was asleep. Or something.

  “Turn the water on,” Tabby said, stepping forward to do it herself now that I was here.

  I held her back. If we flipped the water on, then Alice would turn around, fix us in her blank stare. And she’d still be moaning that creaky sound. And there would be that instant shame, on all our parts: her, for doing this, and us, for seeing her do it.

  I led Tabby out by the hand, clicked the door shut behind us.

  “We should leave the light on for when she wakes up,” Tabby said.

  “She’s just sleepwalking,” I whispered, hating the way it sounded: like we were cutting her loose. Abandoning her. No, like I was.

  But I didn’t even know her, shouldn’t be the one responsible for her. It wasn’t on me, was it? Was she Marly, or was she Alice? Had she made that stupid story up, about someone living in the space behind mirrors, just waiting for a tunnel out into this world?

  We’d just accepted it, too. A secondhand, out-loud PDF. When we’re supposed to be better than that. We’re supposed to be grad students. If you don’t set your research criterion up to “stringent,” then you’re just asking to get played. There’s proofs and there’s proof, one of our math profs used to say.

  Not that your heart knows the difference. Not in the dark. Not at two in the morning. Not with a tranced-out sleepwalker who’s ninety percent stranger anyway.

  “I think she did something to Lewis,” Tabby said, gripping my hand tighter, more meaningfully. “He wouldn’t just leave.”

  “We should,” I said back. “Leave. Now.”

  “Without Lewis?”

  I closed my eyes, felt myself falling.

  What we finally did was that TV thing where you chock a kitchen chair under the master bedroom doorknob. We held hands like ten-year-olds all the way back to the couch.

  Hardly any minutes later, something thunked solidly in the master bedroom end of the house. I pictured Alice, collapsing like a rag doll into the bathtub, lying there with her eyes open. Or her running fast from the bathroom, tripping, catching her forehead on the edge of the bed frame.

  I didn’t know which I wanted, really.

  Moments later Tabby’s phone buzzed in her hand. She flipped it over. Lewis’s goofball face smiled up at us from her screen.

  She answered without thinking, pulled the phone up to her ear.

  She passed it across to me.

  It was … maybe Alice? Lewis’s phone was on the nightstand in the master bedroom, anyway. But this voice was deeper, creakier. Like Alice’s mouth was a puppet mouth. Just, saying nonsense. Not even people words.

  Tabby took the phone back, said into it, “Alice.”

  The mumbling stopped, like this had worked, like Tabby had woken Alice up at last. But then there was a soft chuckle, there and gone. “She never told you about the third part,” the voice said.

  Tabby hung up, kept her thumb there, pressing where the red had been. I cast around for a blanket, not because we were cold but because a blanket can be a shield from horror, if you need it to be. There wasn’t any blanket, though. And Aunt Cyn was old, should have had blankets everywhere for her thin blood. Maybe she’d put them up for my visit.

  “What does that mean?” Tabby said. “Third part?”

  “When she was telling the story,” I said, rising. “Didn’t she say that, that something was the first step?”

  “When she, that girl who crawls through, when she reaches into your mouth,” Tabby recited. “She reaches in for a memory. But, shouldn’t there be a second part before a third part?”

  Maybe this is it, I didn’t say.

  What I also didn’t say out loud: Alice had called herself “she.”

  “Come with,” I said, pulling Tabby up from the couch, and together we made our way into the hall again. The linen closet. Where normal people keep their normal blankets.

  I needed some normal.

  The chair chocked against the master bedroom door was still there, still secure.

  “What are we going to do?” Tabby said, watching that chair.

  “Not answer your phone anymore,” I said back, and pulled the closet door open for the blanket we needed.

  I was reaching to a high shelf for what looked like an afghan—Aunt Cyn had passed through a crochet-frenzy a few years back—when something clumped out from the storage space under the shelves, latched on to my knees.

  It was an arm. A pale hand.

  It was Lewis.

  He was trembling, his shirtfront wet with saliva.

  * * *

  We hauled him to the couch, laid him across our laps.

  He couldn’t speak. His breath kept hitching.

  “Water,” Tabby said, so we tried that.

  It ran back out his mouth.

  We gave him what body heat we had. He was clammy, wrong.

  “Where were you?” I said to him.

  “He’s here now,” Tabby said. She had his head cradled in her arms.

  “We’ve got to leave,” I said.

  “Just let him warm up,” Tabby said back. “We’ll go anywhere.”

  “The hospital.”

  “The hospital,” she agreed, holding Lewis tighter.

  I was breathing too deep. It was making my vision swim.

  Tabby’s phone buzzed again with the healthy version of Lewis’s face. I threw it clattering into the kitchen. Tabby didn’t go after it. Her chin was trembling.

  “It’s not her anymore, is it?” she said, because I guess one of us had to.

  I wanted to argue, to defend Alice or Marly or whoever she was or wasn’t, but Tabby was right: that voice on the phone, it hadn’t been the Alice we sort of knew, the Alice I thought I was getting to know, through the scars we shared.

  “Alice isn’t Alice,” Tabby went on.

  I shook my head no, for her to please stop doing this to us, and then Lewis mewled, trembled all over. His forehead was damp with sweat. I went to wipe some of it away, keep it from stinging his eyes, and his left hand jerked up all at once, pushing his shirt up, so his fingernails could pinch and scratch into the slack skin of his stomach. Like he was trying to pick through it.

  I stilled his hand but Tabby guided me away.

  “He’s telling us,” she said, watching, rapt.

  “What?”

  “You saw her cuts,” Tabby said, looking to the other end of the house. As if in pity.

  “She doesn’t do that anymore,” I said, no give to my delivery.

  Lewis was still picking at his stomach, making blood blisters. Next would be the blood.

  “She’s Marly again,” Tabby said finally. “Alice might not be a cutter. But Marly was. We can’t—we can’t leave without hiding everything, right? She’ll get out after we leave. She’ll hurt herself.”

  I studied Tabby in the dusty green reflection of the television screen. She was patting Lewis’s hair down.

  “And then we’re gone?” I said.

  “Hospital,” she promised.

  Shaking my head no, that I hated this, I policed the kitchen and the dining room and the living room, commandeered a wicker basket to hide all the sharp objects in—sharp objects that could have been triggers for me, years ago. Triggers, licenses, invitations, it’s such a slippery slope.

  But I steeled my eyes, set my jaw.

  There were the usual handfuls of knives, and there were also two razorblades in the sewing drawer, one corkscrew with the wine glasses, and what we almost missed: Aunt Cyn’s wrap of knitting needles.

  “There,” Tabby said, pointing from the couch to where I should tuck this basket: under the counter, closer to the hall than I really wanted to leave it, but it was a good hidey hole. I covered the open top of the basket with a placemat. It looked like a picnic, forgotten in the corner.

  “Now?” I said back to Tabby, kind of bouncing on the balls of my feet, the back of my calf itch
ing like the tattoo was still new or something.

  “Just let me get—” Tabby said. When she couldn’t push Lewis off, I came over, took his weight onto my lap. Tabby wormed out and up, hesitated about braving the hall from the living room.

  “Nothing’s that important,” I said, trying to keep Lewis’s arms from spasming too much.

  “I’m not leaving it with her,” Tabby said, and stiff-legged it through the living room, to come at the hall from the kitchen, so that light could be her welcome mat—she wouldn’t be stepping onto darkness, at least. I couldn’t see her right at the end, but she was safe as far as I could track her anyway. “Keep talking!” she called back.

  I did. What I ended up saying was multiplication tables—the fives. It was all I could think of. Maybe fifteen seconds later, Tabby was back.

  “Get it?” I said.

  She shook her head no, looked about to cry.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “His cell,” she said. “I thought he might—” She didn’t finish but she didn’t need to: she thought Lewis might call. When he was right here with us. Or, when his body was. But getting the phone would mean going back into the master bedroom.

  I didn’t blame her for just standing there. But I wasn’t going to offer to get it for her, either.

  “Now?” I said, and exactly when she nodded yes, Lewis seized. Like, double grand-mal. All that was touching the couch was the back of his head and his heels, like he’d tapped into some line of current, and that current, it was cooking him.

  “His tongue, his tongue!” Tabby said, coming across, sliding on her knees to jam the heel of her right hand against his teeth, to try to force his mouth open.

  Lewis’s eyes were rolled around to the whites, his fingers crooked and hard. I’d have sworn they had an extra joint to them somehow, except that’s impossible.

  Right at the end of it, Lewis looked over to the hall doorway. It stilled him. In that quiet, we all heard what he’d sensed: the chair down there, its wood back scraping slowly down … something.

  “The master bedroom door opens inward,” I said aloud, like the announcer for this evil game. Neither me nor Tabby had ever tried to block a door, evidently.

  “It always works on TV,” Tabby said.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said, crabbing out from under Lewis.

  Tabby stayed where she was, bringing her other hand around to cradle his head. Just as her fingers found the base of his skull, his lips creaked open, and it was just like someone had their hand behind his face, was moving his mouth for him.

  “The second step is migration,” he said tonelessly, and then coughed once, twice, and the third cough was a bubble of dark blood, followed by a runny thread of vomit.

  What was in that frothy red vomit was shards. Of mirror.

  So that’s where he’d been. Back there.

  One mystery solved. A thousand more opening up.

  Tabby pushed back from him, covering her mouth with her hand, but Lewis’s trembling right foot had just given up the ghost. Along with the rest of him.

  * * *

  I had my hand to the inner doorknob of the front door when Tabby registered for me. She was grabbing my pants leg.

  “We just going to leave him?” she said, about Lewis.

  “He’s not him anymore,” I said. Not like I was tough, or heartless. Like I was collapsing on the inside. Like I was begging her.

  She hugged her knees and sobbed, her hand falling away from my pants leg.

  “Police,” I said, my big compromise here, then cast around, trying to remember where Tabby’s cell phone was.

  Oh, yeah: I stared over the dining room table at the refrigerator, the sink, the window, all so many impossible miles away. Tabby’s phone somewhere over there. Where I’d thrown it.

  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right?

  More like every action comes back to bite you in the ass.

  But hesitating wasn’t going to save any days.

  I stepped across Lewis, held my hand out for Tabby to wait.

  Four steps later I was standing beside the dining room table. It felt like I was in the calm eye of a great storm. Like this was a little moment out of time. No—like the world had calmed down special so I could cue into something.

  What?

  I scanned, studied, did it again, and … no. Please no.

  There was an empty place under the counter, by the doorway to the hall. Where the basket of blades and knitting needles had been. It made the back of my calf itch even more.

  We wouldn’t have heard feet on the carpet of the hall, would we have? We wouldn’t have heard an arm reaching around, for all this necessary sharpness.

  I didn’t want to think what came next.

  “I’m sorry,” I said back to Tabby, not really loud enough, and stepped past the counter, thinking only of the backdoor, and all the wide-open world past that door.

  That was where I was going, this was where I was going to live, where I was going to hide, what I was going to appreciate like I never had before.

  Until a pair of eyes were watching me, the doggie door flap resting on top of its head.

  A raccoon. I was ninety percent sure.

  Maybe eighty.

  I flinched to the side, backed up to the sink, and held on to the counter.

  And now Tabby’s phone was buzzing on the floor, skittering on the tile.

  Slowly, I looked at this caller, dread welling in my throat: Aunt Cyn.

  Yes yes yes: she could call the authorities, she could fix this somehow.

  I punched the call open to establish some sort of lifeline, some tether she could pull me out of this with, but what I heard instead was that same moaning Alice had been making, in the master bathroom.

  Only—it wasn’t only coming from the phone.

  It was also coming from Tabby, the house phone stretched across from the dining room wall, pressed to her face.

  She’d bitten something in her mouth. Black blood was seeping past her lips. Past her smile.

  Migration.

  The other Alice had been in our Alice. Now it was in Tabby.

  I dropped her phone, fell back into the farthest corner of the kitchen from her, then slid down to make myself smaller.

  This was it, then, I told myself.

  I should have run. I should have done a thousand things. I scratched hard enough at the tattoo on my calf to draw blood. What was happening to me?

  “But what’s the third part?” Tabby said, actually in the voice I knew from her. Which made it all worse. “That is what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You’re a smart boy. You should go to graduate school, do something with yourself.”

  That last bit had been my whole family’s chorus, four years ago.

  When I shook my head no, like this was all cobwebs I could break free of, Tabby laughed, then began winding the phone cord around her neck, tight, watching me the whole time.

  I closed my eyes, kicked my feet out like I could break free from all this, and, in doing so, thunked into the stainless-steel dishwasher. Evidently right where Aunt Cyn had told me to.

  The water in there stopped, and the door clicked open, fell forward like a drawbridge, belching days of rotten steam up.

  Tabby stopped strangling herself. She was just watching, now.

  “You are a smart boy,” she said, her voice half-choked. “Part three…”

  I followed her eyes.

  There were no racks in this dishwasher anymore. No dishes at all.

  Just a pale, naked body. One not quite ready yet, it didn’t look like. The skin was still loose, the hair pale, the fingers too spindly.

  Without the door to hold it, it leaned over, falling halfway out, a right arm hanging over the door.

  And—the face.

  I kicked back hard, harder.

  The face was me, minus the scruff, minus the bloodshot eyes.

  The first step had been inhabiting one of us. The second w
as moving from one of us to the other—from Alice to Tabby.

  The third step, it was this. It was replacing one of us. It was being the lone, wasted survivor in a house of dead people. The one coddled out into the light by emergency personnel, into the world. To infect it.

  Except I’d opened the door too early on it. I’d opened the door before I’d been dealt with. Corollary to this, I had to think, was that to repair this situation, I now had to be dealt with.

  I came back around to Tabby like to ask her why, like to reason with her, but then my whole body spasmed. Starting with my left leg. With my tattoo.

  It was alive. The cat there, it was motile, it was moving, it was scratching. It was trying to break free.

  I sucked in air to, I don’t know, scream, cry, die, but ended up making zero sound at all. I couldn’t. My cat tattoo was reaching one bloody paw up from my skin, feeling for the ground.

  Then the rest of its blue-lined self birthed through, and I knew what this was: whatever was happening, it could grow a me in the dishwasher, from stray hair or skin or whatever. But it couldn’t ink a tattoo.

  So it would just call mine across.

  “Take it!” I screamed, pushing back again, slipping in my own blood. I pulled myself up, stood against the counter, knew I could rush past Tabby. That I could still make it. That I had to.

  When I finally pushed away from the counter for my big rush, I saw that the steam from the dishwasher had fogged the glass of the kitchen window. Written there all along, probably from when she first came through the television screen, was ALIS.

  I could almost see the wonder on her shadow face as she wrote it—surprised to be granted corporeality again, after all those years behind the mirror. Relishing the way the glass pushed back against the pad of her finger.

  Or—did she have to mark each place she came to, as fair warning?

  Was ALIS written all over the house, on every reflective surface, to ensure we couldn’t leave?

  I shook my head no, please, and, keeping one hand to the counter, I crept away from the dishwasher, away from the doggie door, away from the window, ready to dive past the dining room table the instant Tabby looked past me.

  Except then she did look past me. Without smiling.

  I closed my eyes, opened them again, and turned around to what she couldn’t look away from.