by Ellen Datlow
They come from all over: Japan, Brazil, Norway, China, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Yemen, South Korea, the States, the UK, plus lots of elsewheres and elsewhens. Wonderland has become one of the Things to See Before You Die, like the Matterhorn and the Grand Canyon and the Great Wall of China. They come in dusty coaches, packed to near-bursting, that pull right up to the River Isis and befoul the once-sweet air with carbonized exhaust. The coaches vomit out dozens of people onto the riverbank, once so quiet you could hear the delicate sound of leaves brushing the ground in autumn. Now there’s a franchise cafe selling sandwiches and espresso, fifty sets of metallic tables rusting under towering elms, and two dozen bright kiosks offering everything from Cheshire Chocolates to CDs with studio-recorded tracks of “Beautiful Soup” and the “Lobster Quadrille.” The garbage cans always overflow.
After de-busing, a few kids inevitably cry. Adults and children rush to the lavatories. Pinafores are purchased and donned. Mediocre coffee is bought for exorbitant prices. Parents wrinkle their noses as they examine free maps (which are less maps than warnings), while spouses look on uneasily.
Are you sure you want to do this? You’ve heard the stories.
Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
Tickets are £186.40 per person, adults and children alike, sold only on location, on the day of arrival, discounts unavailable, admission never guaranteed. And all must sign a waiver absolving Wonderland of any harm, physical, mental, or otherwise, that might befall them while there.
The wise read the waiver first, but everyone always signs. None can resist the lure for long, because even though they think they know what awaits them down the rabbit hole, it’s never quite what they’ve imagined. And after, no one’s ever quite the same.
I go down there twelve times a day.
* * *
I’ve been leading tours of Wonderland for forty years, though it feels like twice that. And though my bones ache and my knees throb, my retirement’s a distant ship on the horizon that might just be a floater in my vision. A lucrative job this isn’t, and I’ve got spousal maintenance payments, a crushing amount of debt, and various court orders to consider. Plus, the boss has, let’s just say, more pressing things keeping me here. In other words, I’m trapped.
I predict one day I’ll just keel over in the middle of the Croquet Ground or collapse into the Duchess’s manger. I wonder if they’ll take my body back to Earth, bury me in Wonderland, or just flush me down the Pool of Tears. Some days I’m convinced the entire realm will suddenly go up in flames with everyone inside, myself included, like some virtual particle evanescing. The thought is not entirely unwelcome.
* * *
I’m on tour nine of twelve, we’re in the Hall of Doors, and I’m so bloody knackered I could fall asleep standing up. But the show must go on. I yawn and cross my arms and lean against one of the hundreds of locked and mismatched doors, checking the time on my mobile (no signal), as my group of thirty-nine grows and shrinks and laughs and shrieks as they sample the food and drink on the table.
Back in the old days, we used to take hundreds at a time. But now we cap it at forty persons so we can more or less keep an eye on everyone, this ever since that poor boy guzzled all of the Drink Me fluid, even though we have signs in twelve languages warning people to take but a sip. He howled as he shrunk and vanished, and though we scoured the hall for days, his body was never found. To this day I still sometimes hear a faint squeal when I enter the Hall of Doors, and while I suspect it’s Mouse having a laugh, I always look twice before I step there.
It tastes like rosewater! one says.
Gingerbread! says another.
In runs the White Rabbit, saying, “Oh, the Duchess, the Duchess, she’ll be savage I’ve kept her!”
Damn. Rabbit’s mussed the line, and though I doubt more than a handful have noticed, a few among the tour wrinkle their noses and frown. If the boss finds out, she’ll be livid. I can’t manage another inquisition. Underneath Rabbit’s layers of makeup and dye, he’s a little ruffled around the ears. The edges of his coat are tattered, and as he scurries past, dropping his fan and gloves, he smells strongly of whiskey. During today’s lunch, he told me he’s down to three flasks a day from upwards of seven, lauding himself as if this were great progress. But, I thought, what happens after zero? Beyond lurks only a great void, like Wonderland’s starless sky, and when Rabbit wasn’t looking I took a deep draught from his flask.
When he vanishes down the hall, saltwater trickles in from under the door frames to pool around our ankles. My group giggles nervously at first, but when the water reaches waists, their faces turn sober.
It’s cold! they shout, smiles fading.
By the time it reaches the children’s shoulders, out swims Mouse, paddling furiously. Some shriek. (Mouse is a mouse, after all.) And just like the story, a few wags try their French on him, and he feigns fright and darts off before returning. The kids, floating easily in the saltwater, adore him. And though Mouse is masterful with an audience, I watch him closely. He’s on parole for petty larceny, and though he’s been nothing but kind to me all these years, I keep a tight hand on my wallet as he swims past.
The water keeps rising, and by the time Duck and Dodo swirl by, you can see in the people’s eyes they’re thinking on the rumours again, the ones they’ve heard but didn’t believe or conveniently forgot. But now they’re worrying that maybe they should’ve read that map of warnings a little more carefully, and really, what had they gotten their families into?
Hold on to me! parents shout, scaring the kids, and their sudden burst of tears feeds the pool for my next tour.
As they shout and slosh and flail, the Eaglet pauses before me. Without words, I slip him fifty quid under the rushing waters, and he slips me two grams of the finest psychedelic mushrooms Wonderland has to offer, before swimming on.
Few seem to know or remember that Mouse will soon dry them on the riverbank with a lecture about William the Conqueror, because the parents are still panicking. The kids are still crying. With this, at least, the boss will be pleased.
* * *
I have a thousand rules I must follow, but the paramount one is this: Under no circumstances must one ever stop the show.
One afternoon many years ago, my tour came upon the Mock Turtle, who had somehow rigged up this enormous boulder to come crashing down upon his shell. It was meant to kill him—and it did, but only after his smashed body bled crimson soup all over the rocks for the better part of a day. The Gryphon, upon seeing the bloody mess, snorted and said perhaps it was best if the Mock Turtle died, because, really, everyone was so damned tired of his empty sorrow anyway.
I panicked and ran off to find help and left my frightened and bewildered tour to the vagaries of Wonderland. Some wandered away to drown or be eaten. Some were found naked and laughing in the forest, pulling out tufts of their hair. More than a dozen went missing and were never found.
The boss sat down with the ones we recovered and had what she termed “deep conversations” with them all. None of us heard what was spoken, though we had our intimations, because each emerged from their meetings with a curiously confused expression on their faces, as if they weren’t quite sure what had just occurred, and as we escorted them back to their coaches and cars they seemed not quite sure even who they were.
And when the boss got finally to me, let’s just say I wish I could forget what she’d done. But she made bloody well sure I remembered. Seldom a night goes by where I don’t wake up screaming, dreaming of her teeth.
* * *
A few decades back I was still married, had all my hair, and my daughter had just turned seven. I’d finished my last tour, had a newly lit joint dangling from my lips, and was pulling out of the car park when a playing card suddenly appeared on my dashboard, causing me to swerve. There were too many people left waiting, the boss had scrawled on the back of the Queen of Hearts, and I was to do a thirteenth tour. I cursed and screamed as I pulled my car back into its re
served rectangle by the riverbank, and I punched the steering wheel so hard my knuckles bled. (I still have the scars.)
It was late afternoon and the rays of the blazing orange sun cut the forest into ribbons. It wasn’t yet autumn, but the air was crisp and held an early chill unusual for the season.
I remember noting the shine of her black hair, her faint freckles, but most of all the way her blue eyes shone like translucent marbles. She clutched a natty grey stuffed-animal cat to her belly, and she approached me and the rabbit hole only after severe coaxing from her parents.
But I’m scared, Mummy. I’m scared.
Thinking back now, I wonder if she sensed the menace waiting below. But down they went, and it was only after the tour had reached the Caterpillar on his toadstool that I noticed she was missing. Her parents chuckled at the Caterpillar’s witticisms, and politely waited their turn to sample the body-altering mushroom, but they seemed otherwise unaware of their absent child. I looked around, thinking she might have wandered off, but there was no way I would stop the tour, not after what the boss had done to me the last time. And so I led them on.
By the time the tour awoke from the shower of playing cards to wipe their groggy eyes and find themselves on the riverbank, the sun had set, the cafe had closed, and two idling coaches and a handful of cars waited in the once-full car park. Each person was given a pocket mirror, a discount voucher for the Through the Looking-Glass Tour, and a firm shove. The people wandered off, stunned and disoriented. Had the world changed, or had they?
It stood beside her parents, unsteady in the wind, a patchwork girl fashioned from mouldy leather and fraying twine, with marbles for eyes. I waited for her parents to wake and say, This is not our little girl.
Instead, with beatific smiles, they drifted away, holding the thing’s hand. And I knew that in a week or a month this patchwork thing would disintegrate like cardboard in rain, and they’d come to think their child had died from some unknown and incurable disease, when she would be elsewhere alive and very much unwell. If Wonderland wants you, it takes you, and there’s nothing you nor I nor anyone can do. And though I knew this well, my heart broke as I watched them go, and so I turned back and jumped down the hole.
Wonderland’s checkerboard forest was already dark, the horizon limned with overlapping waves of purple and emerald, and the locusts were making an unholy racket by the time I reached the Caterpillar in his treehouse at the edge of the forest. Patron saint of all pot-smoking college students everywhere, the Caterpillar has been sober since the late ’70s (he smokes an inert herb mixture on-shift), and he hasn’t liked me very much ever since he discovered how much I partake of Wonderland’s chemical fruits. So when I asked after the missing girl, he was less than forthcoming.
“She’s just a child,” the Caterpillar snapped, “and therefore perfectly expendable.” Then he went back to reading his Dostoyevsky in reverse and would say no more.
But I couldn’t accept this, and so I darted off in search of her. I scoured the Croquet Ground, the Duchess’s house, the Queen’s Court, and soon found myself in the murky woods, calling for her. I didn’t know her name, but I knew she was here, lost and terrified, and that I was the only one who could find her.
Animals answered my calls: birds, rodents, insects, and other things I could not name, but which made me think that making loud noises was maybe not such a good idea, and that wandering into these dark woods, alone and without a light or weapon of any sort was perhaps the stupidest thing a man might do. I fell quiet, but I went on searching.
The woods were so dark that soon I couldn’t see ten inches in front of my face, and the air was so thick and humid it felt as if I were not walking through a forest but swimming at the bottom of a deep and lifeless sea. I held up my hands so as not to slam my nose into something, and my ankles and shoes grew waterlogged from traipsing through the dewy grasses and puddles of mud.
I heard her cry faintly at first, but it grew louder as I followed it, stumbling as I went over twigs and stones and soft, wet things the size of small dogs that slithered away unseen in the dark. The air smelled thickly of mouldy earth and fragrant roses and a not-too-distant salty sea.
I stumbled again, and it felt as if someone had stuck out their leg to trip me. I lay on the ground staring up at the empty sky as my body slowly sank into the warm mud.
“It’s me,” someone whispered softly in my ear. And though I had only heard her voice once, I knew it was the missing girl. “Will you stay with me?” she said as a small, cold hand gently lay on my forearm. “We can stare up at the stars together.”
But there were no stars. I wanted to rise, but could only lay there as her hot breath fell upon my cheek. I heard a massive gurgle of wet slithering in the mud nearby, as if an army of giant slugs were fast approaching. Warm, wet creatures crawled onto my feet and legs, covering them. They climbed onto my chest, enwrapping me in their wet warmth, and when they finally closed over my face, I tried to scream. But I could only lay there like a rotting tree.
“They want to be our friends,” the girl whispered. “Can they be our friends, Daddy? Can we play with them, forever and ever?” She giggled and whispered things to me I couldn’t quite hear, while the things on my body shivered warmly, and my head was filled with dark dreams.
I don’t know how long I lay there before I rose from the ground. I grabbed the girl’s arm and stumbled with her through the dark forest toward home. It wasn’t until I had reached the riverbank, under the sickly light of Earth’s crescent moon, that I realized I didn’t hold the girl’s arm, but the leg of her grey stuffed-animal cat. Its eyes were gouged out, and it was covered in pearlescent slime.
* * *
I’m on tour twelve of twelve (at last), we’re in the Duchess’s house, the Baby Pig is weeping, and I’m leaning against the door frame, barely able to stand. I was saving my last Chesterfield for the end of my shift, but bloody hell, I can’t wait anymore. I light it and blow smoke out the door as the Cheshire Cat goes through his shtick and vanishes, leaving behind his trademark smile.
Like the call-and-response of church, the group recites, Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing …
They laugh and rub their children’s heads, as if to reassure them that the terrible frights they’ve had today, the bizarre and growing sensation that they’ve become something not quite themselves, that they will never be the same person again, that something small and very much alive has niggled its way into their minds and will live there, growing, festering, forever, was all worth it just for this fleeting moment. And here it’s always the children who notice first, who ask about the one who’s been missing all along.
But, Mummy, where is she? Where is Alice?
Then all eyes turn to me, hopeful, expectant, with a twinge of fear. Yes, they ask with a hint of desperation, because they cannot fathom why they haven’t considered this very obvious question themselves. Where is Alice?
I flick my cigarette away and pull out a pocket mirror. I hold it up to their faces and make sure each catches their own distorted reflection within it. “To find your Alice,” I say, “look no further than a glass. For if you ask yourself, ‘Where might she be?’ the answer, quite plainly is, ‘She, it seems, is me.’”
This satisfies some and frustrates others, the girls in their blue-and-white pinafores most of all, these poor kids who have been told endless tales and have read countless books, and have bragged to all their friends about this impending moment, only to realize it wasn’t anything like what they had expected, that there’s a curious emptiness at the heart of it all, that just maybe they’ve been lied to all along, or at the very least have been told countless exaggerations, none of which could ever approach the empty truth: there is no magic here, only chaos.
Some look sickened. Others cry. Still others become lost in a faraway dream they might never fully wake from.
We move on to the Tea Party (it lasts a small ete
rnity), the Croquet Ground (the hedgehogs’ screams make my flesh crawl), the Mock Turtle (brought back from the dead, don’t ask me how), the Lobster Quadrille (where some show off their dancing), the Queen’s Court (in which everyone on my tour is sentenced to death, then immediately pardoned), and at last the Pack of Cards (which sends them flying back to Earth, forever changed and bewildered, but with discount vouchers for the next tour) and, hallelujah, I’m done at last.
Seven of Diamonds lights a fag and I bum one from him. He’s all creased and worn, and his painted colours have long-since faded to grey. “Come for a drink?” he says, exhaling smoke from the back of his paper frame. He tends We’re All Mad Here, a small pub on a blue-grass checker of the forest beside a bubbling brook. “Three-C’s playing tonight,” he says as he takes a drag, and by this he means Three of Clubs, who’s a mean guitarist and an even meaner drunk.
I know I should go home. But there’s nothing there but my mouldering bed sheets, an empty fridge, and a picture of my daughter on the dresser that’s slowly turning ashen like Seven of Diamonds. I’d just go home, eat some take-out, and pass out watching TV, only to wake up from yet another nightmare, only to return tomorrow to do this again. So I go to Seven’s for some drinks and listen to Three-C jam for a few hours, until I can barely keep my eyes open.
Eventually I leave Seven’s bar and stumble along the dark path that will take me back to Earth. Along the way, I pass the familiar stone house set high upon the hill, its windows flickering with orange light that sends long, foggy beams deep into the evening mist. My feet turn before I know where I’m going, and soon I’m climbing through the corkscrew path through the flower garden set alight by a million swarming glow bugs. I shouldn’t be here, not without her permission, but I just can’t stop. There is a stone underneath one of the flickering windows, and I step upon it to ever so carefully peek through the glass.
