Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  Her lips are red with beet-blood. He supposes his must be as well. Peter orders a second scotch.

  “Are you angry, Alice? Do you hate him? I can’t think whether I should feel better or worse if you hate him. I can’t think whether I hate mine or not. I can’t think whether he is mine. I am his, that’s for certain. His, forever. A shadow that’s slipped off and roams the streets hoping to be mistaken for a human being. For a while I was so flamingly angry I thought I’d char.”

  “Not angry … angry isn’t the word. Perhaps there isn’t a word. Charles came back to see me once, after that summer. I was a little older. Eleven or twelve. A little was enough. He looked at me like a stranger. Like any other young woman—a slight distaste, a tremor of existential threat, a very little current of fear. He could hardly meet my eye while I poured the tea. Like a robber returning to the scene of the crime.” She stopped watching the other woman and turned her blue eyes back to Peter. Their cold, triumphant light filled him up like a well. “He came to my window and saw that I’d grown old and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”

  Alice’s Right Foot, Esq.

  “You’re going to spoil it,” snapped the hare. “Oh, I know she’s going to spoil it, it always gets spoiled, just when we’re about to have it out at last.”

  “I won’t spoil anything, I promise,” Olive whispered, quite out of breath.

  “You can hardly help it,” sighed the wolf’s-head capital. “Any more than milk can help spoiling outside the icebox.”

  “Raven was finally about to tell us how he’s like a writing-desk when you came bollocking through! I’ve been waiting eons! There’s no sense to it, you know. We’ve said a hundred answers and none of them are at all good. But he won’t say, because he’s a stupid wart. I’d advise you to tread more quietly, young lady, if you don’t want to alert the authorities.”

  “What authorities? It’s only a forest inside a looking glass. The constable is hardly going to come arrest me on my way from Nowheresville to Noplace Downs.”

  “The Queens’ men,” the wolf whispered. His whiskers quivered in canine fear. “All ways here belong to them.”

  “Which Queen? Elizabeth? She’s all right.”

  “Either of them,” answered the hare with an anxious tremor in her quartzy whiskers. “Twos are wild tonight and they’re the worst of the lot.” The pale rabbit tilted onto her side just as a real, furry hare would if it were scratching its ear with a hind leg, only the capital hadn’t any hind legs, right or left, so she just hitched up on one corner and quivered there.

  “All right, I surrender,” cawed the raven’s head suddenly. “I’ll say it. But only because our Olive’s finally going places, and that deserves a present.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly!” Olive demurred, though she was quite delighted by the idea. “It’s quite enough to have properly met you three at last! And to think, it would never have happened if I hadn’t gone totally harebrained just then! It was all that silver polish, I expect.”

  The marble hare went very still. “I beg your pardon? What is the trouble with a hare’s brain, hm?”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything cruel by it,” Olive said hurriedly. “It’s only that I’m … well, I’m obviously not playing with a full deck of cards this evening.”

  “Only the Queen has a full deck at her command,” the marble wolf barked. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Nobody!”

  “Then we’ll be on our way!” The hare huffed. “There’s no point in talking to nobody, after all. People will say we’ve gone mad!”

  “Oh, please don’t go! I only meant…” She looked pleadingly at the marble raven, who offered no help. “I only meant that I went mad a few minutes ago, and as I’ve only just started, I’m bound to make a mash of it at first. I’ve no doubt I’ll improve! The most dreadful sorts of people go mad; it can’t be so terribly hard. But I only ever wanted to say that darling Mr Raven hasn’t got to give me a present, it’s present enough to make your acquaintance!”

  “Would you prefer a future?” the hare asked, her pride still smarting. “It’s more splendid than the present, but you’ve got to wait three days for delivery.”

  “Of course, the past is particularly nice this time of year,” the wolf grinned.

  “No! All we’ve got is the present, and not a very pleasant one at that.” The raven snapped at a passing glow-worm. “Rather cheap, honestly. I’m only warning you so you won’t be disappointed.”

  “Oh, stop trying to impress her! You haven’t got the goods. Admit it!” The wolf howled from within his thicket of carved Corinthian leaves. “You just made up that bit of humbug because it sounded clever and shiny and it alliterated you never had the tawdriest idea of how to solve it. Confess! Perjury! Pretension! Petty thief of my intellectual energies! Hornswoggler!”

  “I have got the goods, and the bads, and the amorals, too! But if I’m to give up my present, after all this time, we must have a proper party for it! You lot have abused me so long that just handing it over in the woods like a highwayman won’t do—no sir, no madam, no how nor hence nor hie-way! I will have a To-Do! I will have balloons and buttercream and brandy and bomb shelters! And one good trombone, at minimum!”

  The marble hare rocked from one side of its flat column-base to the other in sculptural excitement. “Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shall we join the dance?”

  The three capitals leapt off down the forest path, bouncing and hopping like three drops of oil on a hot pan. Olive raced after them, ducking moonlit branches and drooping vines clotted with butterflies that seemed, somehow, to have tiny slices of bread for wings. But no matter how Olive ran, she seemed only to go slower, the wood around her only to close in thicker and deeper, darker and closer, until she could hardly move at all, and had lost sight entirely of the talking capitals. At last, she found herself standing quite still in a little glen, staring up at the starry sky and the starry leaves and the starry massive skeleton sheathed in moss so thick it could keep out the cold of a thousand winters. Tiger lilies and violets and dahlias and peonies grew wild in the skeleton’s teeming green ribcage, its soft, blooming mouth, its sightless eye sockets. It lay sprawled on the forest floor propped up against a tree as vast as time, arms limp, legs bent at the knee. A galaxy of green and ultraviolet glow-worms ringed the giant’s dead green head like a crown, and the crown spelled out words in flickering, sparkling letters:

  THE TUMTUM CLUB

  No Thought of Me Shall Find a Place

  A violinist, a cellist, and an oboist begin to set up their music stands in the corner of the Stork Club. They are nice young men, in nice new suits, with nice fresh haircuts and shaves. The violinist rubs his bow with resin as though he is sharpening a sword.

  “I always felt … Alice … I always felt I was two people. Two Peters. Myself, and him. The Other One. And the Other was always the better version. Younger, handsomer, jollier, bolder. Of course he was. I had to bumble through every day knocking things over and breaking my head open. But the Other One … he got to try over and over again until he got it right. Until he was perfect. Dreamed, planned, written, re-written, re-re-written, edited, crossed-out, tidied up, nipped and cut and shaped and moved through the plot with a minimum of trouble. Nothing I could ever say could be as clever as the Other One’s quipping. How could it be? Everything I say is a dreadful cliché, because I am alive and human, and live humans are not made out of dust and God’s breath, no matter what anyone says. They’re made out of clichés. So there are two of me—what a unique observation for a muse to make! No, no, it isn’t, it can’t be, because I only said it once, I didn’t get to decide it was rubbish and go back, erase it, add a metaphor or a bit of meta-fiction or a dash of theatricality. So I just say it and it’s terrible, it’s nothing. But the Other One would be delighted with two Peters, you know. What adventures they would have together. Nothing for mischief like a twin.”

  Alice’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Pete
r … I’m not sure I follow, dear.”

  “Yes, well, no one does. I don’t, when it comes down to it. If you don’t mind a confession before the main course … I … I went … well, all this about two Peters and suchlike … wound me up in a sanatorium. For a while. Not long. But … well, yes. Er.” He finished lamely, flushing in shame—shame, and the peculiar excitement of sharing a secret one absolutely knows is unwelcome and untoward.

  “Oh, Peter!”

  “Oh, Peter, indeed. It’s such a funny thing. Nothing in the world so much like Neverland as a sanatorium. The food isn’t really food, no one’s got a mother, there’s a great frightening man in a waistcoat who harries you night and day, and you keep fighting the same battles over and over, round and round in circles, forgetting that you ever fought the minute it’s over and the next one begins. All of us lost boys in that awful lagoon, dressed as animals, wailing for home.”

  She puts her hand on his. The tableware shifts beneath their fingers.

  “Did you ever feel … like that? Like there were two Alices?” he whispers.

  Alice laughs wanly. “Good heavens, no. There is only one Alice, and I am her. He only … took a photograph. One great, gorgeous photograph, where the sitting lasted all my life, and he sold that picture to the world.”

  Cinders All A-Glow

  Olive found that, if she walked very, very slowly, as though she were dragging her feet on the way to some unpleasant chore, she could speed along quite gaily through the shadowy glen. It hardly took a moment of glum shuffling before she stood at a tapering, rather church-like door wedged into the giant’s skeleton, just where its briary ribcage came to a Pythagorean point. It certainly was a door, though rather absurdly done. It made her think of all the overdecorated, slapdash rooms of Fuss Antonym, thrown up without reason or sense, for the door was spackled together out of pocket watch parts and butter and breadcrumbs and jam, and she felt entirely sure that if she were to knock, it would all come oozing, clattering apart and she should be billed for the damage.

  “Hullo?” Olive called instead, for she had forgotten her pocketbook on the other side of the looking glass.

  A slab of cold butter bristling with minute-hands like a greasy hedgehog slid aside. Two beady black rodent eyes peered down at her.

  “Password,” the Doorman whispered.

  “Well, I certainly don’t know!” Olive sputtered.

  Oh, bad form, Olive! she cursed herself. Haven’t you ever read a spy novel? You’re meant to say something extra mysterious, in a commanding and knowledgeable voice, so that the doorman will say to himself, “Anyone that commanding and knowledgeable has to be on the up and up, so it stands to reason the password’s changed, or I’ve forgotten it, or I’m being tested by management, but any way it cuts, it’s me who’s at fault and not this fine upstanding member of our society.” Now, come on, do it, and you won’t have to feel embarrassed when you think back on this later when you’ve gone un-mad.

  Olive stood on her tiptoes and stared commandingly into those black rodent eyes. Something extra mysterious. Something knowledgeable. Preferably something mad. Like a chicken in spectacles and a powdered wig.

  “Eglwysbach,” she said slowly and stoically, fitting her mouth around the word as perfectly as possible, even tossing in a proper guttural cough on the end.

  The eyes on the other side of the buttered watch-parts blinked uncertainly.

  “Er. That doesn’t sound right. But it doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds passwordy. Am I asleep?” the Doorman whispered.

  “We both are, most likely,” Olive laughed.

  “I’m not meant to sleep on the job. I’ll be sacked for wasting time, even though time doesn’t mind. He does need to lose a bit round the middle, to be quite honest. In fact, I wasn’t asleep! I heard every word you were saying. Very naughty of you to suggest it.”

  “I won’t tell. Now, if you heard what I was saying, then you heard me say the password very well and very correctly.”

  “Did I? That’s nice.” The creature yawned, but didn’t open the door.

  “Let me in!”

  “Oh! Please don’t beat me.”

  The pocket watch door wound open, leaving a slick of butter and jam as it swung. The Doorman was not a Doorman at all, but a Dormouse, standing on a tall footstool in a suit of armour bolted together out of pieces of a lovely china teapot with blue pastoral scenes painted on it. He stood rather stiffly, on account of the armour.

  “I feel most relaxed and un-anxious snuggled into my teapot,” the Dormouse said defensively, puffing out his little mouse chest. “So my friend Haigha invented a way for me to stay in it forever. In the future, everyone will be wearing teapots, mark my … mark … my March…”

  The Dormouse fell asleep stuck upright in his armour. He leaned back against the door so that it groaned shut under his little weight.

  Envious Years Would Say Forget

  Peter takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his thin nose. The musicians begin a delicate, complicated piece that is nevertheless easy to ignore.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs—Alice. I thought I wanted to talk about this. I thought I wanted to talk about it with you. But I think perhaps I do not, not really. I’m an awful cad, but I’ve always been an awful cad. Even the best version of me is a cad.”

  Alice quirked one long white eyebrow. She leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her blue lap.

  “Am I doing something wrong?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Am I doing something wrong? Am I not behaving as you imagined I would behave? Ought I to have ordered the mock turtle soup instead of the cucumber? Or perhaps you’d like us to leap up and dash round the table and switch places whilst I pour butter into your pocket watch? I could curtsy and sing you a pleasant little rhyme about animals or some such—I’m told my singing voice is still quite good.” Alice’s thin, dry mouth curled into a snarl. “Or shall we simply clasp hands and try to believe six impossible things before the main course? What would satisfy you, Peter?”

  Beneath the table, Peter dug his fingernails into his flesh through the linen of his trousers. He felt a terrible ringing in his head.

  “It’s nothing like that, Alice. I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, I think it’s precisely like that, Mr Davies. You ought to be ashamed. It’s disgusting, really. How could you do this to me? You, of all people? You didn’t come snuffling round my skirt-strings so that we might find some pitiful gram of solace between the two of us. You came to find the magic girl. Just like all the rest of them. You’re no better, not in the least bit better. Life has hollowed you out, so I and my wondrous, lovely self must fill you up again with dreams and innocence and the good sort of madness that doesn’t end you up with an ether-soaked rag over your face. Well, life hollows everyone, boy. I’ve got nothing left in the cupboards for you. Oh, I am disappointed, Peter. Rather bitterly so.”

  A kind of leaden horror spread over Peter’s heart as he realized he was about to cry in public. “Mrs Hargreaves, please! You don’t understand, you don’t. You can’t.”

  Alice leaned forward, clattering the tableware with her elbows. “Oh—oh. It’s worse than that, isn’t it? You didn’t want me to be magical for you. You wanted to be magical for me. In the library. Just like a nursery, wasn’t it? And for once you would really do it, fly up to a girl’s window and sweep her away to a place full of crystal and gold and feasting, and she would be dazzled. I would be dazzled. You tell everyone else that you’re not him, to stop gawping at you and only seeing the boy who never grew up. But you thought I, I, of all people, might look at you and see that you are him. Or, at least, that you want to believe you are, somewhere, somewhere fathoms down the deeps of your soul. Only I’m spoiling it now, because an Alice makes a very poor Wendy indeed.”

  Peter Llewelyn Davies gulped down the dregs of his scotch and thought seriously about stabbing himself through the eye with his oyster fork. It would be worth it, if he could escape thi
s agony of a moment.

  “Very well, then, Peter,” Alice said softly. “I am ready. I am here. I am her. I am all the Alice you want me to be. Now that we’ve seen each other, if I believe in you, you can believe in me.”

  “Stop it.”

  Let’s Pretend We’re Kings and Queens

  The Tumtum Club was a wide, round room carpeted in moonflowers. Wide toadstool-tables dotted the floor, lit by glass inkwells in which the blue ink burned like paraffin, and all the sizzling wicks were quills. Creatures great and small and only occasionally human crowded round, in chairs and out, dodos and gryphons and lizards and daisies with made-up eyes and long pale green legs and lobsters and fawns and sheep in cloche hats and striped cats and chess pieces from a hundred different sets, all munching on mushroom tarts and pig-and-pepper pies and slices of iced currant cakes and sipping from tureens of beautiful soup. The revellers were dressed very poorly and very well all at once. Their clothes were clotted with sequins and rhinestones and leather and velvet, but it was all very old and shabby and worn through, and no one wore shoes at all. Advertising posters hung all round the mossy bones walling them in. One showed a rose with a salacious look in her eyes and two huge fans over her thorns, promising a LIVE FLOWERS REVUE. Another had two little fat men in striped caps painted on it yelling at one another, which was, apparently, THE SATIRICAL SPOKEN WORDS STYLINGS OF T&T, TWO WEEKS ONLY. On one end of the club stood a little stage ringed with glowing oyster-shell footlights. A thick blue curtain was drawn across the half-moon proscenium. Olive could hear the tin-tinning sounds of instruments warming up backstage. Whatever happened in the Tumtum Club at night had not begun to happen yet.

  On the other end of the room stretched a long bar made of bricks and mortar and crown moulding. It was manned, improbably, by a huge egg with jowls and eyebrows and stubby speckled arms and a red waistcoat and a starched shirt collar and cravat, even though he had no neck for it to matter much. An orchestra of coloured liquor bottles glittered behind him. A couple of chess pieces, a white knight and a red one, leaned past the empties to catch the eye of the egg.