Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  But this was the last straw! He cast his pen point-first, harpoonlike, into his desk-sponge (where it stuck, quivering), opened his stationery-drawer and drew forth a single creamy white sheet, which he placed in the precise centre of the desktop. He would draw many things in his career, Tenniel vowed as he worked his pen free from its Arthurian depth, but never would he draw a wasp in a wig!

  My dear Dodgson, he began.

  Against the windowpane, a wasp, identical to the one Mrs. Cabot had killed, bumped softly once, twice, three times, unnoticed.

  * * *

  “The Haunted Lady; or, ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass.”

  The lady of the house, resplendent in a shoulder-baring, narrow-waisted dress, its hoop skirt filling the frame and threatening the adjacent columns, looks in horror at a mirror that reflects, not her beauty and newfound finery, but the corpse of a needle-woman, her head lolling and jaw slack, dead in a garret of exhaustion and starvation. “We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any sacrifice,” buzzes the dressmaker looming behind the lady’s shoulder. She pats her pincers together in what may be satisfaction, clacks her mandibles together in what may be a smile. Her fashionable headdress is perched atop an unfashionable wig. She continues to buzz, clack, buzz, as the ink lines sharply converge on Milady’s shrieking mouth.

  * * *

  “Pat? Where the devil are you, Pat?”

  The doctor had opened the first-floor window of his consulting-room and stuck his head out, to somehow yell both up and down at once.

  “I say, Pat!”

  Sir John, sitting patiently before the doctor’s desk—having already been told, as he was told annually, that he was in surprisingly fine health for one so near death—heard a crash of broken glass, from which he concluded that someone had fallen into a cucumber-frame, or something of the sort.

  Next came a voice he had never heard before: “Sure, then I’m here, yer honour!”

  “Pat, what is all that noise out there? Don’t you know I have patients, man?”

  “And yer good to be patient with us, yer honour, and no mistake,” said the unseen Pat. “We’re trying to clean yer chimney, we are, but we’ve reached what you might call an impasse.”

  “Well, what’s wrong, for God’s sake?”

  “Sure, it’s a wasps’ nest, yer honour. Got to knock it down, we does, afore we go another step closer to that chimney, yer honour. And so we’re bunging shingles and cobbles from below, yer honour, and apples, whatever projectiles come to hand, only we got wasps all amongst us, and spiling our aim.”

  “Well, keep the racket down, will you?”

  “Sure, I don’t like it, yer honour, at all, at all! But what’s to be done, yer honour? It’s a worrity, it is, and no mistake. Oh, it’s coming down! Heads below!”

  Screams and crashes ensued just as the doctor slammed the window closed, reducing the aftermath to a hectic murmur. “My apologies,” said the doctor, resettling himself. “Where were we?”

  “You noted that I’m still alive,” said his patient.

  “And delighted to say so,” said the doctor. “But tell me, Sir John. Do you ever find yourself, well … seeing things?”

  Sir John cocked his head. “Seeing things? Such as?”

  “Oh, anything that, how shall I put this … anything that’s, ah, not there.”

  “You mean hallucinations.”

  “Exactly. It’s not unusual in men of advanced age, who have some form of visual impairment. Blind in one eye, for example.” He winked, which Sir John found tasteless in context. “Bonnet syndrome, it’s called. Named for a Frenchman. Quite sound, though, for all that.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Sir John said, brushing imagined lint from his knee.

  “Do you have ’em, then?” asked the doctor. “Hallucinations?”

  Sir John considered his answer for a few moments. “I cannot say that I have,” he finally said, truthfully.

  “Glad to hear it,” the doctor bellowed, and stood, extending his hand. “Always good to see you, sir. Punch isn’t the same since your retirement, no indeed.” Hearty blather propelled them into the outer office, where the attractive nurse dimpled a greeting. “Oh, that reminds me,” the doctor said. “My nurse has a request—if you’re willing, of course.”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” said the nurse. “If you could just sign a book while you’re here, I’d be so awfully grateful.”

  “I’d be honoured,” said Sir John. As she unwrapped the book, apparently a new purchase, he found himself preening his moustache, and felt ashamed.

  The book was Alice, of course: both novels under one cover. He couldn’t recall when he last had seen them published separately. He supposed Dodgson’s text did well enough, if you liked that sort of thing. His own illustrations were trivial—yet, he conceded, strangely popular with children.

  “And your daughter’s name is…?” asked Sir John, accepting the pen the young woman proffered. The doctor had fallen silent but was standing too close to him, a looming, jovial, intrusive presence.

  “I have no children, Sir John,” replied the nurse. “This is for me, if you please. My name’s Alexandra. Oh, no, not there!” She flattened her hand atop the title page, to which he automatically had turned. He watched, perplexed, as she flipped the pages to Chapter Eight of the second book, to his drawing of Alice and the White Knight: the young girl astonished, the old man toppling comically over the bowed head of his chesspiece-horse. The nurse tapped the page between the two figures. “This is the spot,” she said. “I’m nothing like Alice—I’m too dark—but you’re quite like the Knight, I think. Tell me, was it a self-portrait? Did you use a mirror?”

  “It was not,” Sir John grumbled, “and I did not.” And my God, woman, that was forty years ago!

  He signed hastily, neither his name nor hers being, in his view, quite legible. He did not so much resent this silly girl, as resent the fact that she was quite right: He was an old man with an absurd moustache, likely to fall at any moment. Dodgson had intended the Knight as an author surrogate—Sir John was quite sure of that—but in illustrating the scene long ago, Tenniel had drawn his own future.

  Ah, well, Sir John thought, it could be worse. Alexandra could have asked him to sign the drawing of the Knight’s two feet sticking out of the ditch. Still looking at the drawing, wondering where the years had gone, he absently handed the pen back to the nurse, who claimed it with a clawed insect-hand.

  “Thank you zzzo much,” said the not-nurse. “But tell me thizzz. When will you draw my picture, Zzzir John?”

  Aghast, Sir John turned his back on her, just in time to see the doctor, wings a-blur, fly out the window.

  * * *

  “The Nemesis of Neglect.”

  Floating through a filthy alleyway, its unseen feet not touching the cobbles, is a hideous, hooded, taloned figure with the word CRIME inked onto the shroud that almost covers its staring, bulbous eyes. A butcher-knife is raised and ready in its right hand. Finally, Tenniel thinks, as the loathsome spectre drifts past like an odour, here is one I finally got right the first time. As if hearing Tenniel’s thought, the dread figure slows, stops, turns to face the artist. The eyes grow even larger; the jaw retracts until the mouth is gone, not merely closed but folded inward; the chin protrudes and separates into mandibles. The wraith advances on Tenniel, the knife raised even higher in that single fingerless inhuman claw. Tenniel falls backward in horror, stumbles across something at knee height: lines of poetry, typeset precisely to the artist’s forgotten specifications:

  There floats a phantom on the slum’s foul air,

  Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,

  Into the spectre of that loathly lair.

  The other lines all have turned to Zs, unreadable, and Tenniel’s vision is filled by the buzzing not-face, its wig-locks crawling forth to frame the horror, like pale corpse-fingers fondling a skull. Choking, helpless, Tenniel paws the slum’s foul air, and screams. His hand rends the phanto
m’s rotting shroud, and a Londinium of wasps pours out, swarming into Tenniel’s hair, eyes, mouth.

  * * *

  He thrashed awake, in his own bed, surrounded by doctors and nurses.

  “Eazzzy, Zzzir John! Eazzzy-steady, now.”

  “You’ve juzzzt had a nightmare.”

  Sir John’s mouth was ropy and dry, but empty. He felt vast relief, and shame: They all were staring at him, as if he were dead already, a specimen on exhibit. He swallowed, lifted his head, peered about. The room was too close and hot, the fire in the grate too high. He saw wheeled carts, and bottles, and those stinking flowers from the Palace. But where was his desk?

  A nurse produced a glass of water, which Sir John gulped with relief, ignoring the spiked claw that held it. “You gave uzzz quite a zzzcare,” said the wasp-nurse.

  Handing back the empty glass, Tenniel tried not to look into the vast, prismatic eyes that gazed down all around. He would fight them no longer. He knew what he had to do—while the memory of that floating Whitechapel horror was fresh in his mind.

  “Paper,” he said, flinching at the toadlike rasp of his voice, “and pencil.”

  “What’zzz that, Zzzir John?”

  “No deadlinezzz today.”

  “Are you hungry? Perhapzzz an egg? Or zzzome laudanum?”

  “No food,” Sir John said. “No drugs. Please, only paper and pencil. They’re in my desk. Please.”

  He had them in moments, along with a lap-desk. Feeling better than he had in months, tongue protruding unnoticed from one corner of his mouth, he sketched with confidence: the bold, thick outlines, with the flat of the lead; then the sharp-tipped details; then the crosshatching. He stopped midway to demand a penknife, refreshed the point, and resumed.

  In thirty minutes, he was done. He looked at the result. He nodded his head. He hadn’t drawn the nightmare, not quite, but he had drawn an accurate caricature of it—as with Bismarck, or Balfour. A parody, like Dodgson’s poems. He even had included the wig.

  He had not bothered to draw Alice, though there was room enough, in that empty space, as the wasp reached for her hair. But Alice was never the difficulty, was she? Alice was easy.

  He nodded and handed the drawing to the nearest doctor, who reached for it with a lightly haired, five-fingered, quite human hand, and looked at it with tiny, close-together, quite human eyes, his face displaying quite human bafflement. The other humans clustered around, looking at the sheet.

  “What’s this?” the doctor asked. Hearing no answer, he looked back at Tenniel. The old man lay flat in the bed, his head slightly off the pillow, his eyes closed. He looked peacefully asleep, but the doctor, who had decades of experience in such matters, knew that Tenniel was, in fact, dead.

  “Remarkable. It’s his final drawing.”

  “Sort of his last words, eh?”

  “But what is it supposed to be?”

  “Some sort of … insect?”

  “Those certainly aren’t hands.”

  “What’s that on its head?”

  “He was having us on, I expect.”

  “Joking? In his last moments?”

  “He didn’t know they were his last.”

  “Punch will want it,” said a nurse. “They’ll want to publish it.”

  This gave everyone pause.

  “Perhaps,” said the senior doctor, the one still holding the drawing. He paused. “Perhaps, Miss Price, it would be best that the public … not see this.”

  Almost everyone quickly agreed.

  “Quite right.”

  “He couldn’t give permission, could he?”

  “Not his best work, anyway.”

  “We don’t even know what caption he intended.”

  “Punch wouldn’t mind that,” said Miss Price, who already contributed to The Girl’s Own Paper under a pseudonym, and later would be a founding editor of the Women’s Dreadnought. “They could do a contest. ‘Write the Caption for Tenniel’s Last Drawing.’”

  “Oh, please,” said the senior doctor, with a shudder. Before anyone else could speak, he turned and fed the drawing into the fire-grate, where it went to ashes on the instant.

  You filthy brute, thought Miss Price.

  With a cry, the senior doctor leapt back from the fire, one hand across his face. “My eye!” he cried. “Oh! Oh! My eye!”

  His colleagues, save Miss Price, gathered around, concerned. When they pulled his hand away, his right eyelid already was swollen shut, an angry red welt spreading across his face.

  “Some damned thing stung me!” cried the senior doctor. “Where is it?”

  Of course, they couldn’t find it. Miss Price opened all the windows, in hopes the whatever-it-was would have an escape, and thrive, and breed.

  * * *

  The mourners, crepe-swathed hats in hand, slightly windblown in the cold March air, watched in silence as the hearse jingled and rustled through the red-brick archway of Golders Green and turned onto Hoop Lane. The single layer of ostrich plumes atop the carriage, the single black horse drawing it, the practical, sanitary and compact inkpot-shaped urn within—all befit an artist who remained, despite his knighthood and other laurels, a precise and modest figure, a pen-and-ink draughtsman in a blurred and garish world. The horse nodded and nickered its respects as it clopped past the new Jewish Cemetery, en route to Tenniel’s final resting place, of which Chesterton would write:

  For there is good news yet to hear

  And fine things to be seen,

  Before we go to Paradise

  By way of Kensal Green.

  Not among the mourners, his absence remarked by some, was Tenniel’s dear Dodgson, who had preceded his combative artist into the endpapers sixteen years before, to lie in a no-nonsense family plot in Surrey. As for a certain Oxford girl-child named Alice, now a respectable lady of sixty-one living with her cricketer husband in a distant wicket of Hampshire, her absence was noted by no one.

  It was a normal Edwardian funeral in every respect but two. One was the incineration of the body, which was smart and of the moment but in no way traditional. The other was an unseasonal flurry of wasps. They droned among the crowd, neither attacking nor threatening, but swarming from all directions. As the hearse rounded the corner and passed from view, the wasps went with it, hovered just above and behind, like flickering yellow cinders from the Golders Green chimney—almost, said one onlooker (a fancier of children’s stories), as if the tiny, fretful creatures were paying their respects to the dead.

  Author’s Note: The lost “Wasp in a Wig” section of Through the Looking-Glass, which Dodgson deleted from the page proofs before publication in 1871, surfaced from a private collection more than a century later, when the proofs were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Tenniel’s letter of 1 June 1870, which appears here verbatim, shows that removing the scene was a rare instance of the micromanaging Dodgson heeding his illustrator’s advice, rather than vice versa. I would have known none of this but for the late Martin Gardner, as the missing passage, with extensive commentary, can be found in every edition of his Annotated Alice from 1990 onward. I take this opportunity to dedicate “Worrity, Worrity” to Gardner, a personal hero who humoured me in correspondence and phone conversations from time to time, and who encouraged all my obsessions.

  EATING THE ALICE CAKE

  Kaaron Warren

  The dead man had been a great gardener, his front yard lush and green, but overgrown now, and wild without his constant care. Alice heard sobbing as she reached the front door and paused, trying to remember if the lawyers had mentioned a resident relative. No: The house should be empty.

  Dunroamin, the dead man had called it.

  As expected, the front door wouldn’t open, so she pushed her way through a forest of red bottlebrush bushes on the left side of the house, making a tunnel through to the backyard. There, the light seemed different. A big tree overhanging the yard cast a shadow, and the autumnal leaves threw a tinge of colour over all.

  The backdoor key w
as where they’d told her it would be, hanging off a hook on the worm farm, which stood blockishly on bricks. Alice had a worm farm at home. She liked the way you could tip your potato peelings in there, your broccoli stems, and before long the worms would writhe up through the dark, rich earth in the box and eat the waste, turning it into even better soil. This worm farm was an old, well-established one, many generational, hand-built using old Styrofoam boxes. The earth in there was almost black with nutrients and Alice took a moment to run her fingers through it before unhooking the key.

  Pushing through the back door, she sniffed tentatively. That was always the sign of what sort of job it would be. A house that made you retch as soon as you opened the door was going to be tricky work. She’d seen some awful ones, houses so full of rubbish you needed to shovel your way in. Razors, rotting beds, broken glass, bags of shit, glass bottles filled with piss, newspapers piled to the ceiling.

  She’d seen houses where the body had lain for weeks so you could see the outline of it in grue.

  You can get used to anything.

  She loved her job but was very glad she didn’t have to touch any dead bodies, leaving that to the guys known as the body-lifters, who went through the houses before she entered. That job attracted a particular kind of man (they were all men), the kind whose senses were dull, almost null and void. She shuddered to think of the evening she’d spent with the one called Floyd, whose nasally speech patterns should have alerted her to the fact he had no real sense of smell or taste. And his touch …

  She shuddered. Her uncle had dealt with Floyd directly, showing an uncharacteristic fury.

  There was no smell in the house beyond the distant scent of burnt toast. Anything else would have surprised her; the owner, a quiet, habitual man, had died outside, while collecting his mail, so there should be no hint of death inside.