Mad Hatters and March Hares

by Ellen Datlow

  “I’ll take a Treacle and Ink, my good man,” the red knight said.

  “It’s very provoking,” the bartender answered, filling up a pint glass, “to be called a man—very!”

  “I’ll have an Aged Aged Man, Mr D,” the white knight whispered. “Or should I spring for a Manxome Foe? Oh!” the knight fretted and pursed his horsey muzzle. “Just mix a bit of sand in my cider and don’t look at me. You know how I like it.”

  The egg-man turned to Olive. “And you, Miss…”

  “Olive.”

  “Ah, with a name like that you’ll want a martini. With a name like that you’ll be small and hard and bitter and salty. With a name like that you’ll be fished out when no one’s looking and discreetly tossed in the bin!”

  The notion of being served a martini, no questions asked, rather thrilled Olive. Darling Mother was very strict with everyone’s indulgences but her own. “I can’t pay, I’m afraid. I haven’t got half a crown to my name.”

  “No crowns allowed at the Tumtum Club, my dear,” the white knight whispered, “Not even one.” And before he was done with his whispering, a cocktail glass slid down the bar into Olive’s hand. Whatever was inside was nothing at all like a martini, being completely opaque and indigo, but it did have an olive in it. Frosted letters danced across the base of the glass: DRINK ME. So she did.

  A voice like a crystal church bell wrapped in silk rang out over the club.

  “Will you all come to my party?” cried the Monarch to the Throng

  “Though the night is close around us and its reign is harsh and long?”

  A long, slim, orange and black leg slid out from behind the curtain. A rude and unruly applause burst through the room, catcalls, foot and hoof-stomping, snapping of fingers and claws, a great pot of hollering and whistling stirred too fast. A long, slim, orange arm emerged from the blue velvet, its elegant fingers curling and dancing with each new word.

  “Gather eagerly, my darlings, tie your troubles in a bow

  For the Tumtum Club is open—are you in the know?

  Are you, aren’t you, are you, aren’t you, are you in the know?

  Are you, aren’t you, are you, aren’t you, aren’t you ready for the show?”

  Olive stared. This was, perhaps, a naughtier show than she really ought to be seeing. But then, if the mad are naughty, who can scold them? She scrambled for an empty seat among the toadstool tables. Only one remained, far in the back row, wedged between a large striped cat and a thin, nervous-looking chess piece, a white queen, knitting a long silvery shawl in her lap.

  A huge saffron-coloured wing spooled out over that coy leg like a curtain all its own. It was speckled with white and rimmed with jet black and veined with ultramarine. Finally, a head emerged: hair like a beetle’s back, skin the colour of flame, eyes as green as swamp gas and cut-glass. The girl swept and twirled her massive butterfly wings like the fans of a harem-dance and sang for the roar of the crowd:

  You can really have no notion how delightful is our art

  In here there is no Red Queen and there is no Queen of Hearts

  Only me and thee and he and she all in a pretty row

  Alive as oysters, every one—now, shall we start the show?

  Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shall we start the show?

  Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shan’t we set the night aglow?

  “The Queen of Hearts?” Olive whispered. “I read a book with a Queen of Hearts in it once.”

  “You must be very proud,” yawned the cat.

  It Must Sometimes Come to Jam To-Day

  The candlelight lights up her cheekbones ghoulishly. She has the look of a fox on the scent of something small and scurrying and delicious.

  “I shan’t stop,” she needles him. “If you know any bloody thing at all about Alice, you know that she doesn’t stop. She keeps going, all the way to the eighth square and back home again. She’s the perfect English Girl, greeting the most vicious of things with an ‘Oh My Gracious!’ and a ‘Well, I Never!’ You haven’t the first idea what sort of stony constitution it takes to go through life as the English Girl. At least your Other One got to be wild and free and rule-less. A man can aspire to that. My Other One cannot rise above charmingly confused, because no English Girl may be allowed to greet nonsense with a sword or else all Creation would fall to pieces. But you wanted to meet me. You wanted to compare notes. You wanted a sympathy of minds, so no Oh My Graciouses for you, Peter. Only Alice, and Alice will have her tea and her crown if it’s the death of her. Alice is curious, don’t you remember? It is her chief characteristic. Curiouser and curiouser, as the meal goes on. Tell me everything. Leave off this poor mad little me act. What was Neverland really like?”

  Peter coughs brutally. His vision swims with liquor and humiliation and the violin and the cello and the love he had prepared so carefully for this person, only to find it spoiled in the icebox. With the perfect timing of his class, the waiter appears with steaming plates of beef bourguignon and quails in a cream-mustard sauce, ringed in summer vegetables glistening with butter.

  “You’re mocking me, Mrs Hargreaves. I never imagined you could be so vicious. I might as well ask you what Wonderland was like.”

  “You might at that. It smelled much better than New York, I’ll tell you that much. But no more. I am operating a fair business here, young man. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

  “You can’t be serious. Are you quite drunk? Does it amuse you to pretend to a silly clod that Wonderland was a real place?”

  Alice blinks. She turns her head curiously to one side.

  “Does it amuse you to pretend that Neverland was not?”

  Did Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe

  The acts went by like leaves blowing across the stage. Three young girls in shifts called Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie did an acrobatic routine, pantomiming any number of things that began with M: mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness. Olive couldn’t imagine how a handful of gymnasts could act out memory or muchness, but when they froze in their tableaux, Olive knew just what they meant, and applauded wildly with everyone else. A pig in a baby-bonnet stood in a lonely spotlight and belted out one long, unbroken oink of agony that lasted nearly two full minutes before he fell to his knees, scream-snorted MOTHER WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME while tears streamed down his porky jowls, then sprang up and bowed merrily while roses flew at him from all directions. A lovely turtle with sad eyes sang a song about soup. It seemed to be a sort of communal thing—anyone could whisper to the gorgeous butterfly master of ceremonies and take the stage, if they felt inclined. There was a bit of a queue forming in the wings. Olive shrank back as a monstrous thing crept onto the boards. He had claws like a great hairy dinosaur and eyes like headlamps and a tail that coiled down over the footlights, casting broken shadows over his violet-green-scaled body. His dragon wings were so tall and wide he was obliged to bend and scrunch them to wedge under the half-moon shell of the stage. A couple of fawns pushed a little rickety pianoforte over to him with their dear spotted heads. The monster tinkled out a few experimental runs up and down the keys. Olive could hardly believe his horrid tarantula-talons could manage such graceful scales.

  “It’s only a Jabberwock, my dear. You needn’t clutch my hand quite so hard,” said the White Queen. Her face was so serene and crisply carved, like a jeweller had done it.

  “A Jabberwock! Like ’twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe? Whiffling through the tulgey wood and that? The Jabberwock?”

  The monster at the piano began to play a mournful torch song. He fixed his moony headlamp-eyes on Olive and sang in a gorgeous tenor: I never whiffled, I never; and it weren’t even brillig at all. Nobody gave me no chance to be beamish; I could’ve been someone, if I’d been born small …

  The White Queen frowned at her knitting. “That’s Edward. He’s rather a war hero, don’t you know? He lost his right foot at the Battle of Tulgey Wood, se
e?” Olive leaned forward—the Jabberwock worked the pedals of his pianoforte with only one crocodile-foot. The other was wrapped in gauze and seeping. The White Queen sighed like a tea kettle boiling. “He’s going to lose the other one in an hour, poor chap.”

  Olive blinked. “What? What do you mean he’s going to lose his other one? How do you know?”

  Edward belted out: You can take a Wock’s head but you can’t make him crawl! He stopped, leaned his long, whiskered snout over the footlights into the audience, and whispered: “On account of my brain’s being in my tail, yeah? Joke’s on you, O Frabjous Brat!”

  “It’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly.

  “Oh!” Olive whispered excitedly. “I know this part! Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday, right?”

  “Will you please be quiet?” growled the striped cat. “Talking during performance is a biting offense.”

  The White Queen blushed pinkly. She reached down into the knitting basket at her feet and drew out a toasted crumpet spread generously with raspberry jam. She brushed a bit of wool fluff off of it and offered it to Olive.

  “I have learned a few lessons since I was deposed,” she said softly, and with such a tender sadness. “Very occasionally, it costs one nothing to bend the rules.”

  Dear Me! A Human Child!

  Alice stares down at her four neat quails adrift in their sea of golden sauce.

  “You can’t be serious,” Peter hisses at her. “This is … this is unkind, Alice. Monstrous, in fact. Why are you doing this to me? What purpose is there in it?”

  “I’m not doing any little thing to you, young man. Now, stop it. You needn’t pretend. What was Hook like, really? I always wondered if his stump pained him, at night, in the cold of the sea air.”

  “For Christ’s sake, this is madness. You ought to be locked up, not me.”

  Alice’s face goes dark and furious and sour.

  “Say that to me again, boy. Say it, and I’ll whip you like the child you are, right here in this lovely restaurant. Don’t think I can’t. I raised three sons and a husband, you know.”

  Peter blanches. He feels his blood rebel, not knowing whether to flood his cheeks or flee them. He begins a deep study of his beef. After a time, Alice softens.

  “I am sorry—it’s a wonder how many times I’ve said it in such a short while! But I am, I am sorry, Peter, I simply assumed. It was only natural, to my mind. Only logic. I only thought … if for me, then for you. Goose and gander and all that rot. Oh, I never told anyone—my God, how could anyone be told? How could I even begin? But you, you of all people! The moment you introduced yourself I thought that we had veered toward this, careened toward it, that we would converge upon it long before dessert, and at last, I would know someone like me, and you would know someone like you, and what peace we should have then, at the end of it all. Peace, and something nice with butterscotch.”

  “Please. You mock me, Mrs Hargreaves.”

  “I do not, Mr Davies. I make you my confession. In the summer of 1862, something rather astonishing happened to me. I was ten years old. And naturally, when it was all done, I ran at full pelt to tell my best friend all about it just as soon as I could. To my eternal fault, in those days, my best friend was a mathematics professor with a rather large nose and a rather large anxiety complex and an interest in writing.”

  The beef tastes like nothing at all. The wine tastes like less than that. He gives up. “It was real,” he says flatly.

  “Well, of course it was. Who could make up such a thing?”

  Everything’s Got a Moral

  The egg brought Olive another indigo martini.

  “From the fellow onstage,” the bartender whispered. “He was very insistent that it arrive as he was performing, not before or beside or behind.”

  The fellow onstage was an old-ish man in muttonchops holding an improbably large lavender top hat with the size-card still stuck in it. He watched the crowd solemnly as he drew object after object after object out of the hat: a croquet ball stained with blood, a pocket watch with a bayonet thrust through the fob, a silver tea-tray with a great, unhappy boot-print on it.

  “Deposed?” Olive said to the White Queen, who went on calmly with her knitting. “But you’re the White Queen! Shouldn’t you be off Queening about with the other Queens?”

  “I wasn’t red, so I wasn’t needed,” she sighed. “That’s what they said. There were four of us once. The perfect number for bridge. The Red Queen, the White Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and…” The White Queen suddenly clammed up, shaking her head in distress.

  “The Other One,” the striped cat purred. “We aren’t allowed to say her name. The Queens have ears. Hush hush.”

  “She kicked down the Queen of Hearts’ horrid cards and shook the Red Queen so hard she nearly broke her neck—more’s the pity she didn’t finish the job. Everything was going to be all right, you know. With the Other One here to keep those scarlet women in line.”

  The cat licked his paws. “I met her. She was rather thick, if you ask me. And she kept going on about herself, which I think is very rude, when you’re a guest.”

  “But you knew it wouldn’t be all right,” said Olive, who had a little brother, and therefore was immune to distraction. “Because of how you live backwards.”

  “Yes, yes! What a clever girl! I knew, but no one listens to me because I’m always screaming about one thing or another—but you would scream, too, if you remembered the whole future of the world until Judgment Day and past it! You’d scream and scream and never stop! I knew she’d vanish like a shawl in the wind and she did and just as soon as she did, the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts would decide Wonderland needed taking in hand. Needed one crown. We were all conscripted. My Lily died on the Croquet Grounds. I wish I had. I wish … I wish a lot of things. The Other One came back, of course, nothing only happens once in Wonderland. But as soon as she was gone again, those red ladies holed up in their castles and started building their armies once more. We are not at war now, my child, but we soon shall be. Now, we simply hold our breaths and wait.”

  “Something like that happened in my world, too,” Olive said softly. “Is happening. Germany and Russia and America and … well, everyone, I suppose.”

  “The Tumtum Club is the only place the Looking Glass Creatures are allowed to be mad anymore.” The White Queen sighed. “Outside, we have to report for duty at dawn. In here, the Hatter can pull his heart out of his hat.”

  The gorgeous butterfly slipped out of the curtain again to master further ceremonies, twirling on her tiny black feet in a sudden cloud of stage smoke. She peered into the audience as though she were speaking to each of them in particular, as though what she said were more important than anything that had ever happened to them, and the whole of the universe waited upon their answering her.

  I am young, little darlings, the Butterfly crooned

  My wings have become very bright

  The larva I was drowned inside my cocoon

  Growing up really is such a fright!

  I hardly remember the old mushroom now

  I liked hookahs, I think, and fresh dew

  Yet I’ll still have my answer, I do not care how:

  Who Are You?

  Something knocked into their toadstool table and toppled Olive’s drink. She tried to keep mum for the sake of the Hatter and shout indignantly at the same time, which is impossible, but she tried anyway.

  The marble raven capital blinked up at her.

  “Come on, then,” he cawed. “This is our five-minute call. We’re on, Olive, old girl.”

  Living Backwards

  The trio of musicians wind down. The lights are dim now. The restaurant nearly empty, nearly shut. Peter and Alice toy with the notion of eating their slices of plum-cake awash with double cream, but neither can fully commit to it. They speak of Wonderland, of cabbages and kings, of riddles and chess and what sort of tea could be got in the wilds. It is pleasant, there is a jo
y in it, but it is unreal. It is like listening to someone try to tell you the plot of a radio play you missed. Peter feels a chill. Perhaps another cold coming on.

  “I want to believe you,” he says.

  “Clap your hands and give it a go. Or decide I’m a barmy old woman and go on with your life. It won’t change what I know. Oh, Peter, how disappointing for us both. You thought we were the same. I thought we were. But Alice in Wonderland could never take me from myself, because it was myself, it always was. We’re both the victims of burglars, dastardly fellows who stove in our windows and bashed up our houses. But my robber only took the silver. Yours took the lot. Of course, Charles got it half wrong and put a great lot of maths in to amuse himself; and perhaps if I’d been the one to write it, I wouldn’t have to sell my first editions to keep the lights on in my house; but losing Wonderland didn’t ruin me. Losing…” and then she cannot continue. She grips her beer glass like it can save her, but it will not. It never has saved anyone. “… my boys … all my pretty boys…”

  “My brothers, too,” Peter whispers. There is nothing more to say than that, than that they are people of a certain era, and people of a certain era know an emptiness in the world, a place where something precious was cut out and never replaced.

  “Coffee?” asks the waiter.

  “Tea,” they answer.

  “What I don’t understand,” Peter ventures finally, “is what you’re doing here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If it was all real, why don’t you go back? When the lights have gone out and … your boys have gone … why stay here, in this dreadful world?”

  “I never went on purpose. It just happened. I saw a white rabbit one day. I touched a looking glass. I never decided to go. It decided to take me. It’s never decided since. Wonderland is like my son, my last son. It’s just so awfully awkward for him to see me the way I’ve ended up, it avoids me as much as it possibly can.”