I stare at the beautiful, plump face of Alice. Her smile is genuine and I know from Mom and Dad that this photo was taken on her eighth birthday, her last birthday. Her favorite book was Alice in Wonderland and she’d begged them for the costume. After receiving it, she rarely took it off. Everything we do here is for her, for Alice’s memory. For the little girl who’ll never get to grow up and go on adventures or think of six impossible things before breakfast. All we do is for Alice.
Chapter Six
Shilo
It took his mom. A trail of fresh blood marks out its route over the snow and through the trees, red on white. He runs but doesn’t seem to move. The blood around him becomes brighter, thicker, and more voluminous. He slips in it and puts his hands out to steady himself. When he lifts them they are scarlet and raw. The tears he cries begin to add to the salty masses, more and more until he’s drowning. The sloshing in his ears overcomes all his other senses. He gasps and swallows mouthfuls. It fills his lungs. He feels heavy and trapped. He opens his eyes and can see through the wall of tears and blood … the Kushtaka. Its grotesque, otter-like form dives into the waters with him and he watches as it swims toward him, jaws wide, talons outstretched…
Shilo gasps and wakes.
“Are they back?” asks Mr. Custard. “The nightmares, are they back?”
Shilo looks down at the urine stain beneath him and begins to cry.
“Don’t worry. Come on now, you need to strip the bed. We can hide it so no one ever knows.” Mr. Custard motions to the extra linen stacked neatly in the closet.
“But you know. You know what I did,” whispers Shilo as he squirms in the cold, wet patch beneath him.
“Only you can see and hear me, Shilo. I’ll never tell.”
Mr. Custard gingerly sits on the edge of the bed and reaches out to stroke Shilo’s head but stops his reach in midair. He quickly pulls his hand away.
Chapter Seven
Mouse
Bad things are meant to happen on dark and stormy nights, not crisp, sunny mornings. I can still hear my mother humming. She always seemed to be busy with something or another in the house: cleaning, polishing, washing, folding, and cooking. Then the cycle would start all over again. I used to watch her, fascinated by the ritual. It was comforting, familiar, and safe. The sun was high that morning. It made the freshly washed white sheets even brighter as Mother stretched them to their limits on the line. I was in the house, playing with a doll, and my brother was reading. Everything was fine and normal, until her humming stopped. Silence crashed over us. He ran outside first. I followed when I heard him scream. Years have transformed what I saw that day, years and therapy. My mother was lured away by her ex-boyfriend. In a passionate moment they ran into the woods together, never to be seen again. My brother would tell you a different story, but that’s why he’s locked up.
I was seven years old when Mother abandoned us. She left us alone in the house in the small but wide town of Little Bell, Alaska. Our father worked on an oil rig. He was barely around when Shilo and I were little. We saw him so infrequently that, if it came to it, neither of us could have picked him out of a police line-up. Mother had one photo from when they were married. It was black and white and locked away in an album, only to be brought out on special occasions, which he frequently missed.
He was working on the oil rig when Mother went missing and he wasn’t due home for another month. Hungry and afraid, we went looking for her in the woods by our house. She wasn’t there. All we found was dirt, snow, and a few broken branches. My brother was convinced he could track them, so he pushed us further into the cold wilderness. A few miles in I grew tired and numb and he let go of my hand. I saw him marching off into the distance. I called out to him through uncontrollable sobs. But he didn’t hear. He just left me there. I tried to find my way back to the house, but all the trees looked the same, and fresh snow had covered our tracks. I blindly wandered those woods for hours, lost and alone. Darting eyes followed my movements from the shadows. Dark shapes skipped between the trees. Hands reached out to me. I fell and my foot felt like it was on fire.
At one point I would have welcomed the sight of a gingerbread house or even the Blair Witch’s lair. Finally, I saw trees I recognized, one having suffered the pen knife of my older brother the month before.
I waited for him. Eventually he showed back up. He didn’t mention the fact that he hadn’t found Mother or that he’d left me alone in the woods. We only talked about what we would do next. We couldn’t decide on a specific course of action, so we waited the month for Father to come home. We should have walked the three miles to the neighbor’s house. That was my suggestion, but my brother thought Father would save us. He would know we were in trouble and come home early. He didn’t. Then when he finally did come home, he fell apart. My father, Dwayne, killed himself within the week, leaving me and my brother truly alone.
While Mom and Dad talk with Cheshire, I find my gaze drawn back to Alice on the mantel. I may have had a bad experience when I was young—a couple, actually, but who’s counting—but at least I’m still here. Alice is another story entirely.
Chapter Eight
Kushtaka
All the lost belong to it. It searches them out, lures them from their misadventure, and shows them the sharp edge of its talons and teeth. Thick, matted fur protects it from the cold Alaskan winds that gracefully bully the fresh snow gathered among the trees.
It hears a sweet song coming from somewhere behind the trees, so inches closer to spy on a sweet young couple singing and kissing in the woods. The girl is plain but has long, straight black hair, the kind it likes, the kind it enjoys ripping from scalps. They laugh and it ducks behind a massive tree. It wants her, but she isn’t lost. The boy is the one who has her now. In his arms she is safe from the Kushtaka, safe for the moment. Most people are lost and don’t even know it, the logistics of life making them choose the wrong path, to go down the road less traveled in the hope of finding their way back to where they should be. Damn that she isn’t lost. It knows the rules but curses them all the same. It moves on in search of another victim, knowing that it won’t have to look for too long.
Chapter Nine
Mouse
Alice wasn’t as lucky as the rest of us Wonderlanders. She got lost and never came out of the rabbit hole. She was one month past her eighth birthday when she was snatched from the swing in her backyard. A very bad man parked by her small white fence and whispered an invitation. Although warned to never talk to strangers, she found herself edging closer to hear his story. Too close. Her parents, now my parents, called her to dinner only moments after she was bundled into a dented Ford truck.
They waited for eleven days for news of Alice. Eleven days filled with tears, arguments, hopes, all the while the police assured them that they were doing everything they could to get their only daughter back. And they did get Alice back. Her body was found by police dogs in a building site down the road from the Kane’s suburban house. She had been abused, stabbed, and discarded within the first day of her ordeal and laid waiting to be found for ten days.
After burying their child, most normal parents go through a series of stages involving grief and anger. They sometimes split up. They sometimes fill the void with something else, if they’re lucky something good, if they’re not something bad. But Kenneth and Sandra Kane were not normal people, and they did not follow the normal pattern of grief. You see, Ken and Sandra met while working for a government agency. I was never really told which one, but I could take a good guess. When Sandra became pregnant with Alice, they decided to join the real rat race and have the typical American family experience. They got boring jobs and let their skill sets go dormant.
Alice’s death woke them up. Those forgotten talents came bubbling to the surface like hollow bones in hot soup. The police had no leads on the killer, although they did share with the Kanes the knowledge that he had killed before. My mom and dad got angry with the police’s legal and imagi
native limitations, so they tapped their ex-colleagues for information, equipment, and resources to track down the monster themselves. He killed two other little girls in the meantime. One had a young uncle who had gotten rich from developing software; he was so devastated by the death of his niece that the Kanes reached out to him and shared their identities and plan. He agreed to bankroll their whole operation and Wonderland was born. The three of them tracked the killer down, but he was never given over to the police. Instead the other grieving parents were sent anonymous e-mails informing them that their child’s killer was no more. And more of them joined Wonderland. The Kanes became known as the King and Queen of Hearts and our rich computer genius benefactor is known only as Hatter.
Chapter Ten
Marion
Her dog is barking. “Hale!” she yells at it. The dog looks around, worry in its eyes that doesn’t belong to a domesticated animal.
“Hale?”
He sits, but continues barking.
She had never been worried about being alone in her new home. Her husband was in his truck three out of four weeks of the month. It was normal. It was why he had bought her the big Husky, Hale, whose barking now was almost without breath. Although the house still felt foreign to Marion, and sometimes she would feel out of place, she was warming to it. Miles from any other neighbors, it was so much more freeing than the stuffy streets of Chicago. Finding Hale’s noise too much to bear, she lets him outside. She smiles as she watches him sprint into the snow.
It’s lunchtime, and for a moment she sighs in relief that it isn’t dark outside. With the forest surrounding their house, it was very dark by night, unnaturally so. She turns on the TV. A chat host is flirting with an actress. Her bulbous chest is massive and doesn’t move when she laughs.
Marion opens a peach yogurt and starts to scoop it into her mouth. The sweet dairy taste glides down her throat.
Hale stops barking.
She snaps her head to the door. It would be nice to have him sleep at the bottom of her bed tonight, a treat that her husband didn’t approve of, but he’d never know.
“Hale!” she calls as she opens the back door.
He pads in, tongue out and snow dusting his silver coat.
She reaches down and strokes his head. He shakes off the snow and leans into her touch. “Good boy,” she whispers. A cold draft effortlessly slips through the door, so she turns back to close it. Strange, she doesn’t remember leaving the door open.
A shape eases forward from behind the open door and a claw encircles her exposed wrist. She screams and Hale growls. Her brain cannot make out what is in front of her. It’s tall, covered in a hairy coat, and looks like it’s wearing a pinched animal mask. It pulls her out, slamming the door shut behind her, stopping Hale from attacking it.
“Come with me or I’ll come back and kill your husband and your dog too,” it states as she struggles in its grip.
The words don’t register with her and she begins to cry out; although she’s miles from any neighbors, someone might still hear…
The monster shakes her, smacking her head against the glass door. She mumbles her last scream, then goes limp in its arms.
It carries her into the woods.
Chapter Eleven
Mouse
After my father’s death I was put into a foster home. I’ll bet you’ve heard many fairy-story style tales of wicked foster parents who make their wards sew cheap knock-off purses by night and systematically starve them by day; mine were nothing like that. Bob and Jon didn’t have an army of foster children. They just had me. They were kind and loving and I always went to bed with a full belly. If I had been a normal child, I’d have stayed with them without hesitation. But I wasn’t normal. My fears had gripped onto me, their claws so deep I couldn’t leave the house without holding someone’s hand. Bad things happen when you don’t know where you are, even worse when you’re alone. That much I knew.
After two psychologists’ consultations, I was prescribed medication. Those bright, tiny capsules were sticky in my hands. Bob and Jon watched me as I examined them.
“Will I be like my brother if I take these?” I had asked them.
They exchanged painful looks. Then Jon reached over and took the medication from me and flushed it down the toilet.
They had asked several times if I wanted to visit my brother in the hospital. Each time I declined. He was still claiming that a monster took our mother. No amount of candy-colored pills would help him.
I was with Bob and Jon for nine months. They helped me overcome my fears. We played hide-and-seek, deciphered corn mazes, and went camping. They bought me a compass and a cell phone with GPS. They spent lots of time with me, and some days we’d just pack up a case and drive anywhere, deliberately getting lost so as to find our way back home. But although my fear had retreated, it had never truly gone away; it was just hiding in the dark depths of my young mind. I still could not bring myself to be the fun-loving little girl that I once was. I had seen too much. A red-tinged affliction had crept in around me, encasing little Kayla in a careful cocoon to grow the stronger, deadlier Mouse.
As much as I loved my foster parents, I couldn’t stay with them. That was when Kenneth and Sandra Kane came into my life.
“Who’s this little mouse?” Kenneth had asked as I’d hidden behind Bob’s leg.
“I’m not a mouse,” I replied with a smile.
“But you’re as cute as one.” He laughed and pulled me out so they could see me properly. I didn’t know their story then; I’d never even read Alice in Wonderland, but I could see the sadness that lurked in their eyes, even when they laughed. It takes one to know one.
I still see Bob and Jon. We Skype together every week. Years later I found out Bob’s only sister had been murdered some time back, and that they too were part of Wonderland. I never did learn their code names, though, and they would never tell me.
Chapter Twelve
Shilo
“If you had to give up something you loved or something you needed, which would it be?”
Shilo opens his mouth, but Mr. Custard raises his hand to stop him. Shilo pauses. He knows not to look directly at his friend, so he attempts to look thoughtful instead.
“Tell her something you love. It’s better to keep what you need,” advises Mr. Custard.
“Something I love. I’ll keep what I need, thank you very much.”
The psychologist smiles and writes something on her spiral notepad.
“Okay, Shilo, now tell me, what do you see here?” She thrusts forward a card covered in inky smudges.
Staring down at the random black blobs, Shilo can’t help but see its face. Its curled lips, teeth bared, claws out and curled around the slender waist of his mother as it pulls her out into the snow-covered forest. It was laughing at him. A tingling need scratched its way up his arms and down to his palms. He couldn’t get the monster in the hospital, but he could tear up its effigy into tiny pieces…
“No, Shilo,” soothes Mr. Custard, “it’s just a spilled ink cartridge, nothing more. We’ve seen hundreds of the damn things. In fact I think this one looks more like a puppy playing in a spring garden with a kitten, don’t you?”
“Well, Shilo, what do you see?” The psychologist leans forward so that her heavy bosom drags over the bottom of the paper.
“It looks like two puppies playing.”
“Excellent,” she says, sitting back in her chair.
“Was that okay?” whispers Shilo.
“Close enough,” replies Mr. Custard, “close enough.” He leans over and takes a good look at the psychologist’s cleavage, then grins at Shilo.
Chapter Thirteen
Mouse
It’s such a cliché that you always remember your first time. My first operation was when I was thirteen years old. You might think that is a little young to be sent out as serial killer bait, but I was more than ready. Wonderland trains its operatives well. We don’t go to school. A normal education d
oes not keep you safe in this world; it just keeps you afloat. Instead we were taught by the best ex-government agents, martial artists, weapons instructors, gymnasts, escapologists, psychologists, and even other serial killers. We’re molded to look like the perfect victim, but we have a soft squishy killer center that oozes out when cracked.
Although Wonderland has many operatives, I had grown up with only two others at the Ranch, Rabbit and Cheshire.
Rabbit is Albino and one year older than me. She has long, beautiful white hair and unnerving pink eyes that she hides behind various contact lenses, mostly animal eyes like cats and lizards. For Halloween she wears zombie ones, but sometimes they have more than one showing in a year. Rabbit was adopted as a baby and it took her longer than me to start fieldwork. So when Wonderland was contacted by five sets of distraught parents, and Rabbit wasn’t ready, I stepped up. The missing girls were six and seven years old; this one hit close to home for the Kanes. With the right outfit I could pass for eight, so I was dispatched along with Mom and Dad to a lovely suburban house right in the middle of the killer’s comfort zone. Similarities among the abductions were strikingly clear, but alas the police were legally bound by certain rules. We were not. Bank accounts were hacked, phones tapped, and viruses sent to computers in and around the area, but you can’t catch a killer in the virtual world just armed with technology; they exist in the real one and things needed to get more physical.
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