Then she saw the remains of a bonnet crushed against the ceiling along with its ears, and she knew that this was her rabbit. It was Mr Rabbit, always twitching, always nibbling, never still, though he was motionless now. And she saw the little glass bottle that lay at his feet.
Eat Me, she thought. Drink Me. Mr Rabbit had come to find her, to comfort her perhaps, and he had reached this place—and found food, a little respite in the darkness. And he had eaten, never knowing what it would do to him. He had grown bigger, and bigger still, hadn’t been able to stop himself. He had become the wrong thing in the wrong place, and it had killed him.
But she could also see that the bottle had a label, one in handwriting she thought she recognised. Slowly, she walked towards it, anger building inside her. And she realised it wasn’t a bottle at all: it was one of Cook’s empty jars, the ones in which she kept all sorts of things.
Time, the mean-faced woman had said. Belongs in the pot.
But Mr Rabbit would never go in the pot. She had always known that. She put out a hand and stroked him, the glassy smoothness of claw, the dampness of clogged fur. She snatched back her hand when something wriggled under her fingers.
Time.
The jar at the dead rabbit’s feet didn’t say “EAT ME”. It didn’t say “DRINK ME”. It was an old label, smudged and faded and finally crossed out, though she could still make out the words “ORANGE MARMALADE”. The residue at the bottom did not look like marmalade, however. It looked like something else entirely, and the glass was clouded, as if it had been kept at the back of a high and little-used shelf.
She turned it, making out the marks of fingers pressed into the dust. The cook’s? She placed her hands around the jar—her own little hands, the ones that had held Mr Rabbit, had cuddled Mr Rabbit, had loved Mr Rabbit with all her childish love. And the prints fitted exactly. She examined them again, finding the scratch where the glass had been scraped by a golden ring.
She flung the jar from her, heard it shatter in the dirt. She told herself that she could have made those marks just now—or had she only known where to look?
She backed away from the rabbit. She could smell him now, the decay at the heart of him, the decay she’d been able to sense as soon as she entered the warren—no, sooner, as soon as she’d made her decision, to do… what?
She had leaned over his cage. It was so easy, to be Mr Rabbit. He simply was. He had paws and he ran. Time you grew out of it. But he had no sense of time passing, of what might happen in the future, and that was a relief, in a way. She had to leave him behind, she knew that. He had become the wrong thing in the wrong place, but he would never go in the pot; she promised him that. The dry, earthy smell of his cage had filled her nostrils—
There was food and he ate.
She backed away, shaking her head.
Alice, she thought, the name returning to her all at once. But who was that?
She knew who she was. She wasn’t this. She turned and ran. She didn’t get far, though, because the tunnel had changed, opening out, the ceiling rising to form a chamber. At its centre, there was the thing she had sought: a looking-glass, framed in ornate gold, an exact copy of the one that hung in her drawing room.
For a moment she saw the reflection of a dead rabbit, its leering, bloody teeth hanging before its face in a grin—and she stepped aside so that she couldn’t see it any longer. She circled the mirror. What would she see when she stood straight in front of it? Would the mirror be clear, reflecting only herself? Or would it shatter when she looked into it, fracturing into a thousand pieces? Would it be opaque, revealing nothing? Or would its surface soften, turning to mist, allowing her to slip through to whatever lay on the other side?
She didn’t want to look. If she did, and saw only herself, just as she was—would that be wonderful or dreadful? Would it make everything clear or drive her mad?
Still, she continued to move closer, because there was nothing else to be done. And closer still, its gleam entrancing her, drawing her to it until she stood with her nose inches from the glass. She stared into the mirror and she did not blink. She stood there for a long time, looking at the reflection—her home, a fire blazing in the hearth, casting its warming light about the walls; the wing-back chairs; the bureau; the bookshelves. Cook had served a meal, she noticed. A great silver tureen waited upon the table, surrounded by shining dishes. A posy of roses was placed next to it, tied up in a ribbon, though in the firelight Alice could not be certain if they were white or red.
She realised she could hear the crackle of the fire, smell the peppery aroma of soup. The room was behind her too and all around, and so fascinated was she to see her solid, familiar, dependable home again, that for a long time Alice did not notice the strangest thing: that although she stood directly in front of it, she could not see herself in the looking-glass at all.
How I Comes to be the Treacle Queen
CAT RAMBO
When we grimbled, how we grambled, children, down in those treacle mines, with a slow syrup slurry that clung to your boots, your hands, and every bit of skin, so you’d lick your lips, vicious-like, and taste gritty burned sugar and wonder what was happening up in the blue-sky world. And then we grimbled and we grambled moresome, and when we were weary walking, sleep stepping, we came up to the wasty world and tumbled into our flea-scampering blankets, and then in the morning afore the sun came into the sky, we went back down and did it all again.
We were seven sisters then. There had been more, once, but time creeps up on you sometime and snatches a few, leaves others, still grimbling, and pays no attention to your preferences on who or when or how.
And then one day there was eight, because they opened the door, way up tops, the one we don’t come in by, the one where sometimes they lower down a very clean chap in a big oaken bucket, and he looks around and ticks a tricky, ticky mark on the scroll of paper in his hand, and sniffs once, making a fish face, afore they pulls him back up.
This time they don’t lower him. They throw the girl in. She’s grabbing at the rope and bucket, trying not to fall, but she ain’t too far down when she does and then there she is in the darkness with us grimblers, her with her hair like yellow flowers and her dress blue as that sky we’d been told of, and her feet like little white fishes swimming in the treacle and being swallowed whole.
There’s one slant of light as falls down from above, and she stands there in its center, looking around with eyes as wide as dish-plates, with us’ems all round, a-looking back.
Salla tilts her head and considers the girl, and she’s so worried that her eyebrows nearly knit together. There’s a clank and clunk from up above when they close the door, and the light where the girl stands quarters itself, but she don’t huddle into it, just keeps standing and looking, with a what-next expression on her face that ain’t fear and ain’t defiance or hate or even disgust at all that dirty treacle. It’s just curiosity.
Selle says to Salla, low and hissing-like, “What is it?”
Salla says back to Selle, “It’s a child.”
Then there’s some silence, as though they expect the girl to talk and yet she ain’t.
Sullu nudges up, rubbing at her eyes, because the light hits her harder than most, and says, to the girl, direct as always, “What’s yer name?”
“Alice,” says the girl, and her voice is like a sunshine that don’t burn, or water that ain’t got bits of treacle in it.
“What you down here for, Alice?”
The girl shrugs, one shoulder, then the other, and it’s like the motion unfreezes us all, and I push forward, just like all the rest, snuffling and sniffing at her. She don’t flinch away, stands there all patient-like, and we get our fill of smelling, which is nicer than most, because she smells like green grass and forest shadows—not that I had smelled those in years, back then!
And finally she says, “Take me to where the newest digging is.”
None of us ask questions. Sollo and Sullu take her hands in their
sticky ones and guide her through the darkness, to where we been tunneling the most recent.
Out in the widesome world, there are birds and butterflies and bees. But down in the treacle mines there are no little friendly things except the nibblemice that live by licking the places where the lamp-oil kegs have rested. But as we went deeper and deeper, I see the mice following us, eyes all a-glimmersome, and then other little things, like glass bottles walking on spindly legs, and a winking lamp that smiles at me, but only when I ain’t looking directly at it, and other creatures crossed ’tween imps and insects, their whiskers all a-bristle.
They creeps after us in the dark, and if the others sees them, they don’t say nothing, so I keeps my mouth shut and go along.
Fourteen shafts down was the newest digging, and no one hadn’t never dug deeper than that. But Sullu had said she was following the smell of treacle and we’d broken down into there only the day before: a natural cavern, and the veins of treacle rolling along its side and feeding a sticky river that vanished down, down, downest, into the heart of the earth.
There was a candle Sullu had set there and I knew she’d been reading again, or pretending to, at any rate, given that they’s no libraries, not down in the mines where we live all our worksome days. But she likes to sit there and imagine turning the pages. I gives her a look now, and she hisses at me, “This is the best place for it I evers found!” then breaks off at a look from Salla.
It was a good new vein of treacle, and you could see it starting to ooze out of the stone, the way it does, even though new treacle’s nearly solid, thick as clotted blood or drying clay. Well, you could smell it better than you could see it, that sweet and sour and earthy all wrapped up together in one smell that fills your head and don’t leave room for nothing else.
Alice is quiet for a bit. She digs around in a pocket and pulls out a little glass jar, and pours it onto the floor of the mine. As it pours, halfway to the floor it turns to silver light, but one that don’t hurt my eyes or anyone else’s, even Sullu’s, and spreads out like spider-webs all over the floor and then the walls. We can all see the heart of the treacle vein in this end, a big black spot that gleams in the silvery light. All the creatures that have followed us down be lurking in the shadows, watching and wiggling.
The girl walks over to it and sticks her hand in afore anyone can say anything about treacle worms and the way they bite. Maybe she’s lucky, because she pulls out her hand again unbitten and unchanged other than being covered in a thin layer of treacle, and held between thumb and forefinger now, she’s got a key.
As we watch—and this is startlesome, because some of my sisters do love to grumble and grimble, even when everyone else is being quiet-like—that silvery light burns away all the sticky treacle on it, or makes it vanish at any rate, because what’s left behind is no residue, just a shiny silver key with two words written on its face in big plain letters, so plain even I can read them, saying, “Use me.”
I looks at Salla and Selle and they looks back at me as though they expect me, by virtue of being oldest, to be doing something about all this strangeness getting in the way of the day’s normal treacle production.
I says then, speaking for the first time, “Use me on what?”
Alice turns and looks at me. She says, “Have you never come across a lock down here?”
We all shakes our heads, one after the other, the proper way like our mother taught us. Alice frowns and looks around. She stares at the walls as though she’s trying to see through them.
I knows when her eyes light on the treacle river that there’s going to be trouble, because you can see the idea flash into her head, even though it’s a terrible, terrible idea that shouldn’t come to no one.
She jumps in.
We all stares after her, and then looks at each other, and even though this is an even worse idea, we all jumps in after her.
Why does we do it? You could chase me quarrelsome-like or torturous, and I still ain’t got the words. It was the way she looked, and the way she spoke, and the way she shone.
She was a queen, like her in the Red and her in the White, even though I’d never seen neither, only heard tell. Down in the darksome mines, we are not part of the Great Fight. We only help furnish its refreshment and provide the gingerbread without which no meal-made accord can come to pass.
Hoity-toity me, maybe you is thinking, tracking everything that my betters is a-doing. But when you’re down grimbling and grambling, and scrabbling to see how much treacle you can scrape into a carry-bucket, you need something to think about.
And there was something more than all of this, more than wishy-washy watching and wishing I was elsewhere whilst doing nothing about it all. It seemed to me that if I wanted to change my life and not be grimbling anymore, I needed to follow someone capable of changing things, and if there was one thing I knew about people who looked like her, this Alice girl, it was that they changed things.
I don’t know why my sisters jumped in. We all had our reasons, I think.
So there we is, bobbing in the treacle after her.
It’s a horrid mess, all that sticky treacle smelling of burned sugar and molasses, and I thinks to myself that drowning is a distinct possibility. But I moves my arms and stays on top of it all, and every once in a while, I collides with a sister and reassures myself that they’re still around and kicking just as hard as I am. Maybe harder.
They says that queens are lucksome, and that may be how some time later we comes to be falling down a waterfall, or moving slower than falling, though still not in control. That treacle is thick, and it clings to the cliff-face, and lowers us slowly, stickily, inevitably, and every time I licks me lips, I taste old, old sugar, so hard it’d take a thousand years to lick through it all.
The only light is Alice’s key, shining through the sticky layer covering it.
At the bottom, we wades through treacle until we finds ourselves on the shore. The key burns away its coating as Alice holds it out, and it gives enough light to show that we stands at the edge of a vast lake of treacle, which spreads away into the distance so far that we ain’t be seeing the opposite side.
Alice looks like she’s doing a little curtsey to the lake, but then I realizes she’s dipping the key into the treacle, and it doesn’t sticky it up none. Instead it writhes and wriggles and moves away from the key, until there’s a big wide patch of sand as dry as dry can be.
And that’s how we crosses that lake, we does, and it’s a fearsome thing, looking up at those walls of treacle all around us, but not pressing inward on the key, just shifting as Alice steps forward, step by footstep.
A lifetime later, I thinks that we are climbing, and then another lifetime later, I knows that we is, because there’s light coming down in big clumps, and as we come up farther, I sees it’s snow, big fluffy clots and blots of it and we come out into the light and everything is like it’s never been before. We’s standing on a hillside, and there’s a door in front of us, standing all by its lonesome in the snow, which stretches out all around us. It’s cold, but not too cold just yet. The only tracks is ours.
“What’s this the door to?” Salla pipes up.
“It leads us further into the story,” Alice says, and she turns the knob and swings the door open. There ain’t any snow inside, just green, green grass and I see we’re at the center of Wonderland, and not at its edges in the treacle mines no more. The air inside is warm and I can feel the treacle falling away from me in a most un-treacle-like manner.
“And here we are, having won through,” Alice announces. I squints at her with one eye and then the other. She notices me, and says, “What?”
“Pardon me,” I says, and I don’t add “my lady” the way I might have, because certain ideas and notions is coming to me. “But ain’t you supposed to, you know, defeat something?”
She shakes her head and looks at me in a way that is both patientsome and grating. She says, “The Hero’s Journey can be about overcoming inte
rnal obstacles too, you know.”
I nods, because I can see what’s coming up behind her, and it’s a Jabberwock.
Long time the manxome foe she fought, and you know, she would have lost, but Salla and Selle throws rocks, and Silli and Sollo throws stones. Sullu does a lot of shouting and waving her arms about—to distract it, she says later, and no one wants to say anything about whether or not it had been successful. Sylly trips it at one point, or tries to, at any rates.
And me? It seems to me the safest spot be where those teeth can’t reach me, and so I runs up its back and settles behind its head, and that might have been more distracting than anything that Sullu was doing.
And finally it lies at her feet, or our feet being more accurate, and that’s how we comes to slay the Jabberwock through collective action.
Alice says to me sister, “Do you want to be a Queen?” and quick as thought, Salla shakes her head no.
So she asks Selle, and Silli, and Sollo, and Sullu, down to Sylly, and then she’s to me and instead of shaking me head, I nods but says, quick as a nibblemouse’s nips, “But I has Terms and Conditions.”
“I would expect no less,” Alice says grandly. “But first, though, will you replace the Red Queen or the White? I’ll take whoever is left.”
“That’s the first of it,” I says. “We be holding the means of production in trust for the workers, rather than contributing to an outdated system of monarchy.”
That makes her blink, but she says, “And so?” She beckons with her hand and a little notebook creeps up on wavering legs, and then a pen creature jumps it and knocks it over and starts writing in it, while the notebook keeps kicking, trying to stand back upright.
“And so if I’m the Queen of anything, it’s Treacle Queen, to remind me an’ the others of our origins, and that’s as far as any naming like that might go,” I tells her.
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