Unbirthday

by Liz Braswell

  She tried pulling the cabinet away from the wall as if she were opening a normal, if oddly shaped, door. It didn’t budge.

  “Not another Wonderland puzzle,” Alice moaned.

  “Slide it, you silly girl!” the Hatter said impatiently. “Have you never been in a secret room before?”

  Alice pushed, and the whole thing simply slid away from her with very little effort. She allowed herself exactly one Wondersecond of chagrin. A cold, dank wind blew from the slim rectangular opening as if it were trying to escape whatever was within. Reluctantly she stepped in, taking the Dodo’s wing and Hatter’s hand and pulling them behind her.

  (The Gryphon stayed behind. When she last looked, he had been allowing a sick person to be loaded onto his soft, furry back to be better examined by a doctor magpie.)

  The room they entered looked just like Alice would have imagined the hidden base of a secret rebel cause: cold and dark but for one candle on a crate being used as a table. Filling the darkness was the smell of stale sweat and exhaustion, sour at one end of the scent spectrum and earthy and moldy at the other. Four bone-weary creatures huddled on sacks of supplies: a large muskrat, a man all dressed in newspaper, a ruby-eyed white bird, and a—

  “Caterpillar!” Alice cried.

  He was not as the Caterpillar should have been. The arrogant, plump morsel only too perfect for a bird to snap up was now skinny in the wrong places and flabby in the others, as if a caterpillar without the right things to eat or think shrank into itself like a sponge. There were deep bags under his eyes.

  Alice wondered for one wild moment whether, if she gave him a big juicy leaf or glass of lemonade, he would puff back up again into his former glory.

  At least his bearing was the same: he turned a desultory head toward her and regarded the girl with exhausted, world-weary eyes.

  “Of course it’s you,” he drawled. “Who are you?”

  “I’ll tell you who she’s not,” the muskrat snapped, voice rasping and almost cutting out entirely. “She’s not…” But the Caterpillar surprisingly and deftly clapped a stubby foot over his mouth.

  The white bird began to flutter and coo. It shook its wings and head, and feathers flew out from under its arms.

  “Where is Mary Ann?” the Hatter asked, looking around as if he expected her to leap out and shout Surprise! from behind a barrel or shadow. “We’ve come to join her and you. I believe Alice—that is her name, you know. Most girl children have them. Names, I mean, not Alices. She was summoned here by Mary Ann specifically to help us against the tyrant.”

  “None of us knows what you’re talking about,” the muskrat muttered, looking away.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Alice cried. “You’re in a hidden room in a hidden place called the Grunderound. You’re tending to the wounded and frightened out there, and in here you’re plotting your next move against the Queen of Hearts. Mary Ann came to me—she called me here to help. And so did you, Caterpillar! So please, produce her at once!”

  “Produce her,” the bird cackled hysterically. “Turn her into produce. Yes, yes. A pumpkin or an egg. That would be much, much improved. Compost.”

  “Well, that’s very rude!” Alice said. “To say that about your leader.”

  “No—you don’t understand. We’re just no good with-out her. We’re lost,” the man in paper said sadly, watching the bird. “Her words were worth a thousand pounds a letter.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” Alice said, taking a deep breath and trying to remain patient. “Where. Is. She?”

  The bird cackled again. “Where is one when not in Wonderland? When the other’s won and you’re Undone?”

  “I don’t…” Alice began, but she began to suspect.

  The man in paper looked at her with gentle, doleful eyes.

  “Mary Ann is dead.”

  “What?” Alice gasped. “No! In the picture, when I saw her…”

  Well, if truth be told, and Alice tended to tell the truth, at least to herself, the girl did not look well in the photograph. She seemed to be incarcerated. There was blood and a blindfold. But she had been alive.

  “Where was that?” the muskrat demanded.

  “Don’t you mean when?” Alice asked shakily. “How long ago it was?”

  “Time is meaningless, unless he’s offering to pay, you know that,” the Hatter said, but the words were thin and scratchy, and his heart wasn’t in it.

  “She was being held against her will somewhere. But I thought she had escaped!”

  Alice wrung her hands and twisted her lips to avoid tears. Why was she so distraught? She had never met Mary Ann. Not even during her first time in Wonderland. Mary Ann had always seemed like a figment, a ghost just out of reach, a white rabbit. Now she was beyond Alice’s grasp forever.

  She hadn’t felt anything when the other girl had died, had she? Some sort of tremor, or echo of feeling? If each resident here had a counterpart in Angleland, surely there was some connection she would have severed when she passed away? A phantom pain in Alice’s own neck?

  For surely—

  Off with her head—

  “The Queen of Hearts,” Alice murmured. “She did it, didn’t she? She found and executed Mary Ann.”

  “Less execute and more murder. Less capitalism and more capital punishment,” the Caterpillar said sourly.

  The Dodo sat down suddenly next to Alice, collapsed, like a human boy rather than a bird, feet splayed out and a dumbfounded look on his face.

  “She didn’t come back here—she didn’t want to draw the Queen’s attention here, to have her find out about us and the refugees. We had hoped she made it to the Unlikely, but she didn’t,” the muskrat said woefully.

  “Mary Ann always gets away,” the white bird trilled. “She always gets away with it somehow.”

  “I guess her luck ran out with the postman,” the man in paper said sadly.

  Everyone was silent. This had been Alice’s one lead, her one goal, and it was gone.

  She voiced the thing everyone was thinking.

  “What are we to do now?”

  “Why, you’re to take over the resistance and lead us to victory in her place, of course,” the Hatter cried. Then he scrunched up his face in pain and pulled his giant hat down over it. “Oooh, it hurts to make sense!”

  “I haven’t an ounce of tactical or military knowledge!” Alice cried. “You would be foolish to put your and everyone else’s fate in my hands! Apparently I can open holes—that’s my singular talent here now. I can’t—”

  “Hush!” the muskrat hissed.

  “I shall not!” Alice cried. “Listen for once! You need a leader with experience. Wonderland always puts one in the most ridiculous positions—judging caucus races, choosing between identical brothers…But this time it is deadly serious! I have just learned that a poor innocent girl has died, and now you have me taking up arms like a centurion! I was to take you to Mary Ann, not take her place.”

  “But Mary Ann thought you could do it,” the Dodo said softly. “She brought you here.”

  “No, hush; do you hear that?” the muskrat repeated, cocking his head.

  Everyone immediately grew quiet, but to Alice’s ears there was nothing but the rise and fall of the chaos outside.

  “Hatter, Dodo, let us find the Gryphon and Bill and the Dormouse at once,” she said after a moment, trying to bring some semblance of order to her thoughts. “And the Knave. Sadly, you are the closest thing I have to an advisory council. Somehow I must make sense of all this.”

  She made herself stand up and went back through the secret door, desperate to get out of the dank and suffocating room full of sad people.

  For, despite her protests, Alice was already moving past the sad revelation of Mary Ann’s death. Her arguing with the Hatter was merely an instinctive reaction. She had promised to take them to Mary Ann, and she had done her best. Now there was another job to do. She had no idea what to do or how to do it, only that she must. It was inevitable a
nd solid as a boring granite statue of some bewigged leader of yesteryear at a park. In the same way that as a child she had just done, she would just do now. Maybe it would work out. The deceased Mary Ann had apparently put all her hope in Alice. What other choice was there?

  The question was, what could she do? She wasn’t a native of Wonderland, well versed in its rules and laws and shifting geography. She had no great military knowledge, having ignored all her sister’s boring lessons when she was a child (fancy that actually coming back to haunt her!). She had never actually been engaged in any sort of job or organized anyone else to do anything.

  Then again, the poor Wonderland creatures couldn’t get themselves together even when actively trying to help one another. Back in the secret room, the leaders of the rebellion were just sitting around grieving and waiting for another Mary Ann to come along and save them. And outside, in the temporary hospital ward…

  Alice watched as a mole ran around with a nice sterile bit of moleskin in his paw, shouting “I’ve got it I’ve got it!” and, like the answering call of a mated duck (a midwife duck, in fact), came a quack back, “I need it I need it! Where is the moleskin?”

  Who else, in the end, could save them?

  Only Alice.

  “There’s the Gryphon,” she said, spotting the creature, who was kindly giving a few lost tots a ride on his back to cheer them up. “I don’t know how we’ll ever find the others, they’re so tiny. BILL! DORMOUSE!” she shouted, hands cupped around her mouth.

  “Have you seen a lizard, about yea high?” the Hatter asked an owlet. He still had his hat down over his face but was somehow making the correctly sized motions with his hands.

  “A small Dormouse, probably asleep in something,” the Dodo explained to a goose-necked lamp-goose.

  “And the Knave, let us grab him, too.” Alice looked around, surprised when she couldn’t see him. Surely he would have stood out in his immaculate red velvet doublet and hat. Actually, he would be the only person in here at all with a fancy matching suit.

  Matching suit.

  “A knave in a matching suit,” she said to herself. “Why does that ring a bell?”

  But it was hard to focus on the beginnings of what seemed to be a fairly important thought: a low vibration began to thrum across the Grunderound, irritating and disruptive.

  Ba-Boom. Boom. Boom.

  It wouldn’t stop, working its way into Alice’s bones in a very upsetting way, along with the thought she couldn’t quite complete.

  “Hatter,” she said slowly.

  Boom. The vibrations grew louder, like a giant was striking the earth with a mighty hammer.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  “There he is,” the Hatter said, jumping up and down and gesticulating at a chandelier onto which the Dormouse clung. The tiny creature was strangely awake and pointing desperately.

  Alice turned to look. At the far end of the great hall was a vaulted ceiling and multi-paned rose window, which taken together made it all look like the apse of a church. The thin glass shuddered with the strange vibrations, bowing in and out with the force of the thumps.

  “Funny,” she said to herself, “if that really is the apse, then the tavern bar is the chancel! And the place I fell into is like the nave….

  “Oh,” she said as it all came together in her head at once.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Boom.

  Everything rattled; creatures were screaming.

  Matching suit.

  “Hatter!” She took his hand, which surprised him into stillness: he looked at it as if the whole idea were outrageous. “What do a church, a jail, and a suit all have in common?”

  “Alice, this is hardly the time for riddles—”

  “Knaves, Hatter! Knaves!”

  The Hatter blinked.

  “Churches have naves, jails hold knaves, every suit of cards has a knave! He’s gone! I don’t know if he even came down with us!”

  “He went back to the Queen,” the Hatter said, swallowing.

  “Oh, the Cheshire knew! He tried to tell me…” Alice lamented. “We must leave this place immediately—I don’t know what is going on, but it can’t be a coincidence that he’s gone and now this is happening….”

  “Quickly, out the back door,” the Dodo said, nodding.

  “We’re in the Grunderound!” the Hatter cried. “There is no ‘back door.’”

  “Of course there is. This is Wonderland,” Alice said fervently. “There’s always a tree with a door or a hole in the floor or a door in a door. Come on. We’ll find it and then—”

  And then the booming stopped. So did everything else in the Grunderound: for one magical moment all the chaos was still, every eye and antenna frozen, every beak, muzzle, pair of lips, and snout open but quiet, everyone immobile, waiting.

  And then the walls caved in.

  “Just like a house of cards,” Alice observed a little crazily. “Or a really cheap pasteboard house, or one of the paper balloons your uncle likes to fold out of a discarded magazine.”

  There were no real bricks behind the brick walls, no stone or log to hold them up—not even dirt, as one might expect underground.

  The edges of the building folded down, thin and flimsy, and soldiers marched over the crumpled remains.

  Not that the soldiers were much heartier than the Grunderound itself, but there were so many of them: tens, nines, eights, and aces, all in bloodred armor. They wielded short, ugly swords and viciously sharpened axes. Row upon row came over the ruins of the old tavern, crushing it into dust under their feet and flowing over the rubble in a relentless flood.

  “Run!” Alice cried. “Everyone, run! Run!”

  This time she stood her ground.

  She had no idea how big she was compared to the cards; the sight of them was so terrifying she didn’t even stop to see if she could put them in her pocket. Like mad ants, like nothing she had ever imagined, they filled every bit of free space and attacked every Wonderland creature in their path.

  “No!” she shouted.

  She flung her hands out in front of her, unable to think of anything else to do.

  “No! It doesn’t end this way! NO—”

  And then, of course, she woke up.

  “Easy, steady on!” a voice was saying.

  A voice that had a smile in it—but no matter how friendly it sounded, a voice that irked Alice entirely. Wrong tone, wrong time…

  She continued to struggle and strike out with her hands, but her waking mind already knew the indisputable truth of where and when she was.

  “No! You mustn’t! I must go back!”

  “Back where?” the young man asked with faint amusement.

  Alice stopped her pugilistic feints and sat up. She was under a tree—the big spreading oak she had fallen asleep against so many years before, as apparently she had done now. The ground was hard and a little chilly, even through the golden cape she had put down. Katz had carefully laid his coat over her. It smelled faintly of an aftershave with warm and pleasing lower notes of moss. There was, an idle part of her mind noticed, a single piece of purple thread or hair stuck on the back.

  In her hands were dead leaves, left over from last year perhaps, crunching like flimsy cards.

  Katz was smiling down at her, a little confused but not concerned.

  “You know, back,” she snapped. “I have to go back to—to…”

  But there she paused, feeling as lost as her body was. Already her latest adventures in Wonderland were dissipating, spun on a breeze back to wherever they came from, too fragile to remain long in this world. The urgency she felt had the urgency of any nightmare upon waking. Real—but not.

  “I have to find a way back there,” she said helplessly. “They need me. I’ve left them again.”

  “If you were anyone else I would ask if maybe you were overindulging in laudanum,” Katz said, offering his hand to help her up.

  “Not at all, I’m afraid.” She
sighed, taking his hand, and creakily rose. She wished she could tell him everything, even if it would be just like telling a dream. It might keep the memories in her head a little longer, and it would be nice to finally share the stories with someone.

  “That would be a most convenient excuse,” she said instead. “The laudanum, I mean. If a terrible revelation. Here is your coat back—I’m afraid I’ve rather crumbled some leaves on it.”

  “Oh no, leaves, heaven forfend,” he said mildly, and the space under his arched and solid brown eyebrows made two little sunrises of skin; he was a man who could smile with every part of his face and not have to move his lips at all. He took the coat and threw it over his shoulder carelessly.

  Alice busied herself with patting her dress down and carefully shaking out the cape and folding it back up while she flushed, trying not to look at him.

  She had to figure out how to get back to her friends and save them—because they were in trouble, weren’t they? It was all soft and blurring now. The Queen of Hearts was involved somehow…. She had to be defeated…. Right?

  But Alice also had to get home before anyone had a fit because she had been gone so long. There was the sun finally yearning for the horizon, its rays stretching out to the west as if it couldn’t wait to be there.

  The two walked in silence for a while, for which she was supremely grateful. Katz seemed to sense she needed a little quiet time. He wasn’t asking her questions and demanding the due diligence of a sexist etiquette that usually came with these sorts of situations: There, I watched you and loaned you my coat, now you owe me conversation at least. In some ways, being with him had the ease of being with a Wonderland resident. As a two-time and now experienced visitor, Alice realized that for all their frustrating mannerisms, at least one didn’t need to feel indebted or obliged to follow the commandments of social customs there. It was like tea with a toddler: messy but without guilt or rules.