by Ellen Datlow
RUN, RABBIT
Angela Slatter
Rabbit has been running from the Queen for so long he’s almost forgotten what he did.
Almost.
Such a small indiscretion, really. Just a teensy-tiny step out of line, really. On this side of the worlds a rabbit’s foot is considered lucky, but he’s sure folk would rethink that if they knew his many travails and trials. Missteps. He wiggles toes, all seven of them; inside the big black boots he’s obliged to wear here, he seems to still feel the one that’s missing. Feels the absence of the left little one; it doesn’t upset his balance too much anymore. Besides, there was so much to adapt to when he fled, it was the least of his worries. It barely registered beyond the pain when it was taken off, the portal closing its teeth a little too soon, a little too late.
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.
Rabbit looks around. The place is dimly lit, darkly decorated with striped wallpaper that’s trying to make a break for it where wall meets ceiling, and small reddish-orange lanterns sit on sticky laminate tabletops; the leather-buttoned benches are tacky, too, both physically and decoratively. He prefers to sit at the bar, likes the stools because they make him feel taller, and he’s less likely to be trapped against a table or in a booth. It would have been stylish, he supposes, back in the day, but he can’t hazard a guess on precisely when that might have been. Still, he likes it, feels relatively safe there, the stuffy closeness is like the hugging safety of a burrow and there’s an earthy smell, too, that almost reminds him of home.
Safe.
Safe-ish.
Not so safe that he doesn’t keep glancing at the door whenever it opens. Not so safe that he doesn’t already know he can exit quickly through the back office, the kitchen, the tiny men’s room, and even tinier Ladies’. He knows what to look for in newcomers.
When he’d come through—and come through properly this time, not just jumping over the border then back again like a child on a dare or defying a parent who’d said This far and no further—he’d changed. Changed his shape to become like one of the humans. However, he wasn’t entirely solid—not entirely three-dimensional, but flimsy, weightless as a playing card, feeling as if he turned side-on he might disappear. Not that the humans noticed—such a subtlety was beyond their blunt perceptions—but he knew this strange flatness, lightness, thinness afflicted the Queen’s assassins, too. He could pick the bounty hunters from the way they moved, as if fearful a strong wind would carry them away.
“Another?” The barman’s voice startles Rabbit, but he does his best not to show it; he smiles at the young man who wears a plain black shirt and matching jeans, no nametag, for this is a not a place where names matter. He’s handsome in a rough sort of fashion; a good bath and some styling and he’d pass for civilised. Just the sort Rabbit used to like, over on the other side, although he finds he prefers the women here.
“Yes, please,” says Rabbit softly, wistfully, “same again.”
The barman has large hands, black hairs curl across the backs of his fingers; Rabbit imagines it’s on his chest, too, a densely tangled inverted triangle, and thinks of the line of it that will surely travel from his belly button down to the loins. Not very muscular, slender, with ropey veins in his forearms that remind him of the Ace.
Oh, but he’s melancholy tonight! Perhaps he should slow down on the whiskey. Perhaps not.
Rabbit watches the barman surreptitiously at first, then realises the youth isn’t interested, doesn’t care if he’s sized up or not; isn’t the sort to take offence at being found attractive by another man. He’s new here, Rabbit is certain, but he’s not sure if he’s feeling anything genuine or just an echo of once-upon-a-time.
* * *
When the door opens about an hour later, it lets in a rush of cold air and driving rain, and Rabbit tenses. He unhooks his heels from where they’ve been propped on the lower bars of the stool, ready to run.
It’s just a girl.
Then he realises she’s got a heart-shaped face, and for a moment his pulse quickens. But she’s not a feeble thing, not a fragile card person, not one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting or hunting hounds or assassins or executioners, or any of the range of professional murderers that woman employs. This girl is solid, walks with a weight on the earth as if she belongs there.
A heart-shaped face, thinks Rabbit, almost sadly. Thinks of the card-courtiers with their tattoos to mark out their belonging; that they are owned. Thinks of how pretty they were, embracing their servitude yet adding their own twist to it: changing their designs every week (although not the shapes—always hearts) to stay in fashion or ahead of it. He remembers the legions of artists kept to undertake such artwork, the best ones bartered away to the highest bidder for ever-more ridiculous favours (a cake frosted with fairy breath, a dress of sunlight embroidered with moonbeams, a necklace of a child’s new teeth).
And he, moving amongst them—hadn’t he been a perfectly good courtier and procurer? Obedient and biddable and loyal, bringing new toys as per the Queen’s commands. All those fresh amusements and oddities, children from the other side, sometimes to cosset, sometimes to hunt, depending on Her Majesty’s whim. And all he’d requested in return was that his foibles be overlooked, his peccadilloes go unpunished. Was that so much to ask?
The last one he’d brought through—just doing what he was told, mind you—that girl! Such trouble; how could he have known? They’d never been like that before. The child was everything the Queen had demanded—a challenge!—yet she’d not been prepared for the consequences.
Hadn’t he said? For years. Hadn’t he warned? All those times. He’d told her in his most polite, courtly manner how wild the creatures were, no matter that they looked like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. So much the better, the Queen had shrieked. Adds spice to the day, the hunt, the night! And so it had, though more than anyone could have expected. It took ages to put the kingdom back together again, to re-establish order. And in the wreckage, all of Rabbit’s sins were brought to light.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” A voice at his elbow—what a stupid phrase, thinks Rabbit—pulls him back. Not the barman this time, though he’s gone and refilled the glass again at some point without asking. Rabbit could afford better booze; he makes good money trafficking just the way he did in the other world, but there’s something louche about the cheap hooch that appeals.
He looks at the girl—woman, really, though young, youngish—a little blearily. Green eyes, muddy brown hair, unkempt eyebrows that are almost a single entity, freckles sprinkled across a nose that’s been broken and healed not as well as it might, and the trace of a scar on the right cheek, a fine raised line old enough to have turned white. Perfect teeth, though, and pretty mouth. Her dress is brown, a strange sack of a thing, some kind of coarse linen with a wide deep pocket across the belly, almost like a pouch; perhaps something so haute couture that it doesn’t need to worry about being pretty. Comfortable in its ugliness.
Rabbit doesn’t know enough about fashion to make an informed decision. He only knows he misses his stiff collar, starched shirt, and tidy waistcoat. And the gold watch, which was the first thing he sold off when he came through, the only thing of value he managed to bring, and something he misses like a limb (even more than the toe). Something he’s never been able to find again, no matter how many pawn shops he visits. He thinks regretfully of the treasure rooms of Wonderland, all the gold coins and gemstones stamped with the head of the Queen, their eyes following you everywhere. Then again, the idea of carrying those around … might they not act as spies? As beacons for Her Majesty’s assassins? Something that would help the hunters find him?
“Is it all right? If I sit here? I shan’t bother you, only I don’t like the booths, they always feel like a trap!” She giggles and the sound is infectious. Rabbit laughs, too, in spite of himself.
The girl-woman is nothing like his type, the female type at least. He prefers them more matronly and wonders if he
still yearns for the aloofness of the Queen, the untouchableness of her, and the mysteries hidden forever beneath her voluminous skirts. But the laughter is like a sudden drug, a drink from a quick silver stream, a ray of sunshine breaking through clouds.
“Of course,” he says with rusty grace, a shyness not common to him. Rabbit ponders that—usually he’s smooth. Usually, he doesn’t have to try too hard; he’s short but pretty with thick white-blond hair, pert nose, rosebud mouth, and muscular body—he’s going soft around the belly, beneath the chin, but he does okay, can still attract women to his bed and children to points of sale. He’s fine for now.
The girl smiles, no idea of what’s going on in Rabbit’s head. She offers her hand, which bears many healed scars, fresh scratches. She notices his gaze and says, “I’m Pleasance and I work as a gardener.” By way of explanation she adds darkly, “Roses.”
“Ah. I’m Ned.” Tonight he is Ned; he has a range of identities, different ones in each city he inhabits. “Can I buy you a drink, Pleasance?”
He assumes this is what she wants. She could have sat anywhere, there are plenty of vacant stools, but she came to him. His nerves are soothed, his confidence firms. She wants.
“Why, yes you may, Ned.” She leans close, maintains eye contact. “The cheaper, the better.”
He laughs in surprise.
“A place like this requires cheap booze,” Pleasance says, eyeing the faded velvet wallpaper, and Rabbit can’t help but smile with delight.
* * *
They chat and flirt and laugh. Rabbit talks about his import-export business but doesn’t mention the true nature of the goods. Pleasance confesses that while she loves gardening, she does hate the roses; they’re beautiful but treacherous, not to be trusted. They move closer and closer without seeming to do so, and at some point Rabbit realises their arms and hips are touching and he can’t think how long they’ve been like that. He can feel her every breath, every tremble, every giggle shivering through her. She smells like some exotic blend of tea.
It’s almost an hour before he notices something strange about the pocket of her ugly dress. He looks down, cocks his head, and watches. Every few seconds there’s a jerk, a twitch, in the right-hand corner, sometimes it bumps against his thigh; a small rhythmic pulse, like a frog in a sock. Pleasance, reaching for yet another drink, courtesy of the barman, sees the direction of his gaze and follows it.
She smiles suggestively and says, “Do you want to see what I’ve got?”
He’s nodding when the door opens again, and the rain and wind blow in, far too easily, three thin men. Rabbit knows them immediately for what they are; with barely a thought he grabs the girl’s hand and yanks her from her stool. She doesn’t fight but follows, crouching down as he does so they are concealed by the bar. Rabbit’s credit card is by the cash register, but he doesn’t care. It’s one of many in an identity he’ll easily discard; there are more pieces of plastic in his wallet. They make it into the Ladies’, and soon Rabbit is offering his interlocked hands so Pleasance can use them as a step and slip out of the small window. He watches her backside wiggle and is momentarily distracted from his panic.
In the alley, they lurch, then run like naughty children, fingers entwined. Perhaps Pleasance thinks it a game; they’ve had a lot to drink and Rabbit knows that inhibitions and caution are the first things to flee in the face of the alcoholic flood. When he detects no sign of pursuit after four blocks, he slows; his lungs are burning. He’s out of shape, but the girl isn’t puffing, she’s laughing that joyous laugh again. She leans against a wall, still holding his hand; he swings in, presses his lips to hers, she responds, curls her arms around him, her hands up to the back of his neck—and then there’s a sharp, unconceivable pain and he passes out.
* * *
“Rabbit? Oh, Rabbit? Wake up.”
The voice sing-songs but cuts right through him. His headache is so great that he doesn’t pause to consider who might know his true name. His mouth is dry, blood pulses hard in his ears; he feels fractured. The voice comes again, sharper this time, impatient. Rabbit opens his eyes with an effort that’s like prising open a window with a crowbar. The light is blinding and he blinks, blinks, blinks until its bite lessens. Until the pain recedes and objects begin to resolve themselves into pieces of furniture: stylish sofas, an architectural coffee table, framed paintings that look suspiciously expensive, light fittings cleverly recessed into the walls, a fireplace with copper screens and blue-orange flames in the hearth licking obscenely at each other. Rabbit tries to move, but he’s tied to a chair; beneath his mutilated now-bare feet is a plush rug, Kandinsky-patterned.
He’d have expected to wake—if he woke at all—in some abandoned warehouse in a bad part of town. He’d have expected to be cold and wet and uncomfortable; as it is he’s warm and not completely uncomfortable, but he smells very bad indeed. No blood as far as he can tell. Not yet.
His field of vision expands beyond his immediate surroundings. There is an enormous patio outside the sliding glass doors, and a silhouette blocks his view of the Manhattan skyline where dawn is threatening. The outline is blurred at first, then firms up, comes into focus.
A girl.
Pleasance, but not.
The girl.
But not as she was, or not most recently.
The girl as he first saw her when he lay in wait; when he first hopped across her path as she curled on the riverbank beside her bookworm sister; hopping and tutting “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” knowing that children can’t resist either a bunny rabbit or a mystery.
A blue flounced dress with a white apron, the pockets of which are trimmed with red, black shiny shoes and white stockings, waves of golden hair held in place with an ebony velvet band. The same outfit, but the girl is taller now, just a little, strangely grown, strangely childlike. The scar on the cheek remains, the bump in the nose; she wears her markings with pride. She’s human, she never looked like the playing card people, had the right weight, the right heft to fool him.
“Rabbit,” she says almost tenderly. “Rabbit, do you remember me?”
“Alice.”
“After all these years! Very good.” She smiles but there’s no true mirth in it.
“What are you doing? Here? Now? You escaped. You went back to the other side.”
“Oh, yes, I did, but time moves differently between the worlds, Rabbit, as you well know. When I got home too many years had passed, everyone I’d loved was dead or almost so, their memories crumbled to dust and cobwebs. There was nothing left for me. So, I returned to Wonderland.”
“You destroyed the kingdom,” he says, then runs his tongue along his teeth to see if any are broken. He wasn’t hit; perhaps a Taser—that would explain how fast he went down, why he lost control of himself, why his brain feels so scattered.
She shakes her head, the golden hair shimmering. “Disrupted, that’s all. An easy thing to rebuild. Anyway, after what you did my sins were barely remembered. Besides, your Queen and I found we had a common goal.”
“Alice…”
“She wasn’t happy about you and her son. You should have known better.”
“The Ace. My Ace.”
“Not actually yours, the Queen’s lovely boy, her bargaining card, a pristine husband for the King of Spades’ daughter, an alliance that might have settled much of the infighting. But you dirtied him up, didn’t you? Took that lovely virtuous shine off him.”
“They’d never have found out but for you, never come looking for me at such an inopportune moment if you’d not wreaked such havoc. Wasn’t that revenge enough?”
“No,” Alice says quite simply. “I lost everything. How many other children over the years have you led astray, you shitty little bunny? Why do you deserve compassion when you showed none yourself?”
“Please, Alice.”
The left-hand pocket of her apron judders again and again. She notices him noticing once more, and digs her slender scarred fingers into the
fabric depths. “Do you want to see? Do you want to know how I found you?”
He nods reluctantly.
Alice pulls out the end of a golden chain. She keeps pulling, pulling, pulling until his precious lost gold watch is revealed and, hanging from the end of the links, is his severed toe. Still furred, the cut end pink and fleshy as if it had only been removed an hour ago. The thing twitches and jumps, trembles and thumps against the watch casing.
“You left this behind. The Queen was reluctant to let me have it—she’s fond of wearing it as a pendant—but I told her that if she parted with it I’d bring back your entire skin and she could do with it what she wanted.”
Rabbit closes his eyes in relief; he’ll be dead before he reaches the Queen of Hearts. It won’t matter what she does with his corpse. He won’t feel it, he won’t care.
“But,” says Alice, and Rabbit cringes at the glee in her tone. “But I think she won’t mind so terribly if I bring you back alive and in one—well, two—pieces and let her watch while I skin you. I’m a dab hand, nowadays.” There’s a moment when it seems she changes, back to her sack-like linen dress, which is now made of fur, the pocket is a pouch, something she’s harvested from another such as he—how could he not have noticed? “But sometimes it takes a while. A long while before you die, Rabbit.”
Alice listens to him weep. She wonders if he’ll cry as many tears as she did when she was small and lost and so far from home. She doubts it, but she’ll do her damnedest to make sure he comes close. She looks at his thick white-blond hair and nods.
He’ll make a fine cloak; the Queen will be pleased.
IN MEMORY OF A SUMMER’S DAY
Matthew Kressel
“He’s twelve, yes?” I say to the smiling couple from Kyoto as their child looks up at me fearfully.
“Yes,” his mother insists, flashing me a toothy grin. “Just last week!”
I’d bet fifty quid and my last Chesterfield the kid’s not even nine, but I just smile and pull the rope aside to let the boy and his parents leap down the rabbit hole together. Their screams and laughter fade as they fall, while the queue presses ever closer to me. The languid river beside us glitters prismatically in the afternoon light, sending a flurry of rainbows across their anxious and eager faces. Among them I spot half a dozen kids of questionable age, but I’ve got orders to let everyone in now. Old, young, disabled, senile, deranged. Everyone but infants. And sometimes even them.