by Ellen Datlow
She and Little George had wrestled it up onto the mantel and snagged the thing on a couple of rusty nails. They hadn’t any kind of level or ruler, so the poor looking glass hung up there at an unhappy angle that Olive informed Darling Mother was “unbearable,” while privately thinking of it as “rakish.” Little George had wandered off to beg the sheep for his paintbrushes back, and Olive coiled herself into the mustard-coloured wingback chair for a good long stare. She could see just the barest top of her own head from here, her dark bobbed and fringed hair, her white scalp like a pale road through her own head. She could see the back of the little brass clock on the mantel, the woebegone door to the kitchen cracked open a wedge, the bland pastoral paintings hanging against vaguely mauve wallpaper, all turned backward, and therefore slightly more interesting. The shepherdess on the moor was holding her black lamb in her left arm now. The fox was running the opposite way from the hounds and the horses. She could see the rain beating out a marching rhythm on the windows, and the green hills beyond disappearing away into a fog like forgetting. And she could see the broken capitals glued to the wall in the looking glass just as they were glued to the wall in the parlour, their faces turned the wrong way round, too, like the shepherdess and the fox, which was certainly why their eyes looked so odd and canny, the way your own eyes look when you see a photograph of yourself. Very odd and very canny. Really, awfully so, actually.
Olive stood up on the wingback chair. The upholstery springs groaned and complained. Now she could see her whole self in the looking glass: Olive, not much of anyone, in a shift dress the same colour as the wallpaper, with pearl earrings on. The earrings belonged to the Other One. She’d given them for Christmas, to curry favour. Olive wore them to vex and to vex alone.
She leaned forward toward the looking glass. She blinked several times. She opened her mouth to call for Darling Mother, which was pure idiocy, so she shut it again with a quickness. She glanced over at the capitals in the parlour, then back to the capitals in the looking glass. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“There you have it, Olive,” she told herself aloud. “You’ve gone mad. I expect it happens to everyone in Wales sooner or later, but you’ve certainly broken the local speed record. Well done, you.”
Before now, when she’d considered the idea of insanity, chiefly when Darling Mother came home from meeting with Father Dear and the barrister and the Other One and started drinking gin out of a soup spoon, all night long, one spoonful after another, like sugar, she had imagined that going mad would feel different. Wilder, more savage, more lycanthropic, more like a carousel spinning too fast somewhere inside a person’s brain. But Olive felt perfectly Olive. She didn’t even think of the gin bottle in the cabinet. She only thought of the wolf. One thing was certain—she had nothing to do with it. It was the wolf’s fault entirely.
The marble wolf in the parlour had a noble expression on his face. His muzzle was smooth and gentle and sorrowful. It looked almost soft enough to pet.
The wolf in the looking glass had raised his stone muzzle into a fearsome snarl.
Phantomwise
Peter asks the man at the Stork Club for scotch on ice. Evening light turns the tablecloths pink and violet. The ice is his last bulwark against total, helpless nihilism. He rolls the oily ambrosia of the bog over the crystals.
Alice orders a glass of beer. It arrives quickly, dark and thick and workmanlike. She smacks her lips and Peter nearly calls the whole thing off then and there. He had imagined her drinking … what? Delicate things. Tea. Champagne. Rain filtered through a garret roof. She is a lady of a certain era, and ladies of that certain era do not drink porter. After the beer come oysters from some presumably dreadful, mollusc-infested swamp called Maine, which would not pair at all with her black beer. Peter found himself in an apoplexy of flummoxed culinary propriety.
Alice runs her fingertip around the rim of her glass and puts it between her lips, slicked with sepia foam.
“One ‘drink me’ out of you and I’ll have your head,” she scolds him, but her eyes shine. “My husband loved his beer. The darker the better. None of this prancing blonde European stuff, he’d say. Porter, stout, dubbel! I pretended that I had never met so curious a creature as a man who adores beer. That’s how a girl makes her way in this world, Mr Davies. Pretending awe at the simplest habits of men. But beer has been the bitter tympani keeping time for the long parade of sad, strange, lonely men I’ve loved. My father and Charles called it ‘our most ancient indulgence’ and made a lot of noise about the pyramids while they poured their pints. Even our Leopold had barrels brought in from Belgium no matter where we were staying—imagine the expense! Nothing to a man of his station, of course. But to us? Impossible magic. Though he liked everything blonde, the rake.”
“Prince Leopold?” It sounds absurd even as he says it, but he cannot think of any other fabulously wealthy Leopold she might mean.
“The very one. Didn’t you know Alice had adventures in places not called Wonderland? Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna. All the lions and unicorns you could ever want. He never could decide between my sister and me, and in the end we were nothing but … well. Talking flowers, I suppose. He named his daughter Alice. That’s something, at least.” She strokes the silvery flesh of the oyster with a tiny pronged fork. “He died.”
“The prince?”
“My husband. In the war. My sons, as well. Everyone, as well. My sister is long gone, a ghost in Leopold’s locket. I’ve got one boy left and he doesn’t visit anymore. It’s too awful for him to face ruin in a blue dress. Oh, Peter, I live crumblingly in a crumbling body in a crumbling house and I burn my heating bills in the furnace for lack of coal and every so often I crawl out to tell a few people how wonderful it was to be a child in Oxford with a friend like Charles to teach me about all the sundry beauties of life so that I can buy another year’s worth of tinned beef. And how are you coming along in the world, Peter Pan? How are you crumbling?”
Peter Llewelyn Davies flushes and eats in silence. The oysters taste like spent tears. His toast points stare back at him as if to say: what else did you expect?
“I’m in publishing,” he offers finally.
Alice laughs sharply. “How hungry a thing is a book! Devoured you whole straight from the womb, and still gnawing away at your poor bones. Oh, but it was different for you, wasn’t it? It was only ever that summer, really, with Charles and me and Edith and Lorina, punting on the river. But your James raised you, didn’t he? Adopted the whole lot of Davies orphans. I can’t tell if that would be better or worse. Tell me. Should I envy you?”
The soup course arrives. He frowns into a wide circle of pink bisque. His brain is a surfeit of fathers—his own, a-bed, rotting cancerous jaw like a crocodile, all teeth and scaled death, his older brothers, always running, fighting, so far ahead, so untouched, and Barrie, always Barrie, Barrie always kind and generous and ever-present, ever watching, his eyes like starving cameras freezing Peter in place for a flash and a snap that never came.
“He drank me,” Peter whispers finally. “And grew larger.”
Large as Life and Twice as Natural
Olive put her hand against the looking glass.
She was balanced rather precariously on the mantel, one knee on either side of a portrait of Darling Mother as a young girl, before Father Dear, before the Other One, before Olive and Little George and Eglwysbach and the sheep and the paintbrushes and all of everything ever. A book of matches tumbled down onto the hearth as Olive tried, somehow, to grip the brickwork with her kneecaps.
When she’d been cleaning it with vinegar, the mirror had felt cool and slick and perfect as dolphin-skin. Olive pressed her other hand against the glass. It wasn’t cool now. Or slick. It felt warm and alive and prickly, like a wriggling hedgehog thrilled to see its mate waddling through a wet paddock. The marble wolf’s head in the looking glass parlour still snarled. The one in Fuss Antonym’s parlour still did nothing of the kind.
“Don’t be
stupid, Olive,” she scolded herself. Darling Mother never did, anymore. Someone had to pick up the slack. “Really, you’re such an awful little fool. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s ever going to happen to you. That’s just how it is and you know it. You’ve gone barking, that’s all, and pretty soon someone will come and take you away to a nice padded room by the sea where you can’t bother anyone.”
The looking glass writhed under her hands. It spread and stretched and undulated like a great glass python just waking from a thousand years asleep. Slowly, the mirror turned to mist, and the mist stroked the bones of her wrists with fond fingers.
“Mum!” Olive screamed—but the looking glass took her anyway, scream and all, and in half a moment she tumbled through to the other side into a cloud of green glow-worms, and a thumping, ancient forest, and the hot, thrilling blackness of a summer’s midnight.
Each Shining Scale
The salad course appears amid the wash of unbridgeable silence. Beets, radishes, hard cheeses as translucent as slivers of pearl, sour vinegars, peppercorns green and black. Peter sighs. The other diners around him simply will not stop their idiotic noises, the belligerent scraping of silver against china, the oceanic murmur of inane conversation, the animal slurping of their food. The oysters begin to turn on him. He feels a pale bile churning within.
“He said not to grow up, not ever,” he whispers. “He made me promise. But I couldn’t help it. Not for a minute. Even while he was telling his tale, scribbling away at his own cleverness while my father rotted away in bed, I was growing up. Becoming not-Peter all the time while he told me to stop, stop at once, hold still, keep frozen like … like a side of lamb.”
Alice rolls her eyes and bites through a red radish. She has a spot of mauve lipstick on her teeth. “Oh, how very dare those precious old men prattle on and on to us about childhood! The only folk who obsess over the golden glow of youth are ones who’ve forgotten how perfectly dreadful it is to be a child. Did you feel invincible and piratical and impish when your father died? I surely did not when Edith passed. You simply cannot stop things happening to you in this life. And do you know the funniest thing? An Oxford don, living in the walled garden of the university, with servants and a snug little house in which to write nonsense poems and puzzles and make inventions to your heart’s content—that’s more and more permanent a childhood than I ever had. He used to moan and mewl over me about the horror of corsets to come, the grimoire of marriage, the charnel house of childbirth, the dark curtains that would close over me upon some future birthday—well, for goodness sake! What would he know about any of that? He never married, he never had a child, he never so much as scrubbed his own underthings! How dare he tell me four years old was the best of life when I had so many years left to face?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Pardon?”
“When Peter left for Neverland. He was eighteen months old. In a pram in Kensington Gardens. An eighteen-month-old child can barely speak, barely walk without falling. But that was the best I had ever been, in his eyes. The best I ever could be. And all those people went to see the play and clapped their hands and agreed he was right, and all the while I was twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Thirty. As old as Hook. Watching myself fly away. Watching from the back row while my bones screamed, all in quiet: That’s not what I was like, that’s not how any of it goes; Christ, James, I was never heartless, I wish I was, I wish I was!”
Alice frowns into her beer. She rubs the glass with one fingertip.
“It’s not children who are innocent and heartless,” she says—bitterly? Pityingly? Peter has never had the knack of reading people. Only books, and only on good days. “Only the mad,” she finishes, and goes after her beets with a vengeful stab.
A Life Asunder
The very first thing Olive did was look behind her. There was dear, familiar, batty old Fuss Antonym’s wall—but it was no longer dear or familiar at all, and quite a bit battier. Instead of storm-slashed whitewash, the house sported a shimmering blackwash, roofed with overturned tea-saucers, and crawling with a sort of luminous ivy peppered with great, blowy hibiscus flowers in a hundred comic-book colours. She had come through the middle window in a row of three. On the other side of the window, she could still see the parlour, the mustard-coloured chair, the painting of the shepherdess and the black sheep, the peeling moulding, the chilled grey afternoon peeking in past the curtains on the ordinary wall opposite. All right, yes, fine, Olive told herself, half-terrified, half-irritated. This sort of thing happens when you’ve gone mad. It’s nothing to get in a tizzy over. You’ve sniffed too much silver polish, that’s all. Might as well enjoy it! The other side of the looking glass was a window, and the other side of the house was a deep night, and a deep summer, and a deep forest, deep and hot and sticky and bright.
Olive’s knees abandoned her. She tumbled down onto a new, savage, harlequin earth. She was going to have a tizzy, after all. For God’s sake, Olive! She plunged her knuckles into the alien ground. Even the soil sparkled. Hot mud squelched between her fingers, streaked with glittering grime like liquefied opals. An infinite jungley tangle spread out before her, and it simply refused to not be there, no matter how Olive tried to make it stop being there. A path tumbled down the hillocks and shallows, away into rose-jet shadows and emerald-coal mists. Delicate wood-mushrooms curled up everywhere like flowers in a busy garden: chartreuse chanterelles, fuchsia toadstools, azure puffballs.
Something was moving down there, down the path, between the mushrooms and the ferns and the trees no prim Latin taxonomy could pin down. Something pale. Something rather loud. And, just possibly, not one something alone, but three somethings together. There is nothing for a tizzy like a something, and before she could tell herself sensibly to stay close to home, no matter how odd and unhomelike home had suddenly become, Olive was off down the path and through the garden of night fungus, chasing three hard, pale, loud voices through the dark.
“You’re such an awful brat,” growled something just ahead. “I don’t know why we trouble ourselves with you at all.”
“And deadly boring, to ice the cake,” sniffed something else. “Why even tell a riddle if you don’t have any earthly intention of answering it for anybody? It’s not sporting, that’s what.”
“I think it’s jolly sporting,” crowed a third something. “For me.”
“A raven isn’t like a writing desk. You can smirk all you like, but that’s the truth and I hate you. It just isn’t, in any sort of way that makes sense—” the second something spluttered.
“The farthing you go for sense, the furthing you are from the pound,” the third something said loftily.
“Do shut up,” snarled the first something.
Olive rounded a bank of birch stumps and mauve moss wriggling in such a way that she absolutely did not want to look any closer—and yet she did, for that was a something, too. The moss wasn’t wriggling at all, rather, hundreds of silkworms wriggled while they feasted on it. Only these were actually silkworms—not ugly blind little scraps of beef suet, but creatures made up entirely of rich, embroidered silk brocade, fat as a rich lady, writhing greedily over the bank. Olive shuddered, and in her shuddering, nearly toppled over the somethings she’d been after.
In a clearing in the wood stood three hacked-off marble capitals, the sort meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or Hungarian cathedral. Her capitals. The very ones that hung so stupidly and dearly on her parlour wall. Only these were hopping about on their own recognizance, as if they were really and truly the wolf, hare, and raven that had been carved into their fine stone blocks.
The wolf’s head, surrounded by carved fern-heads and flowers, the very one that had snarled within the looking glass and snoozed without, looked Olive up and down. The hare wriggled her veiny marble nose. The raven fluffed his sculpted feathers.
“Bloody tourists,” the wolf snipped.
Seven Maids with Seven Mops
Alice watches another couple
without expression. The man cuts the woman’s meat for her. The woman stares into the distance while he saws away silently at her pork. A repeating face, turned away, a woman watching a woman watching nothing. Staring and sighing and gnawing, the great human trinity. Peter has a strange and horrible instinct to lean over the table, the salads, the beer, the scotch, the candles, the world, their whole useless strained, copyedited lives and kiss Alice. To make himself cheap, as Wendy did in that cruel first scene in the nursery. He has always kissed first in his life. Always tried to redeem that little viciousness in the other Peter, whose heart was an acorn and whose kiss was a jest. She is so much older than he, but Peter loves older women, since he was hardly yet a man. Guiltily, and to great sorrow, but who could ask more of the most famous motherless boy in all of history?
He doesn’t do it. Of course he doesn’t. He, too, is of a certain era, and that era does not clear dining tables for the madness of love.
“At least your man stayed to look after you,” Alice says finally, without turning her face back to his. “It’s a kindly vampire who tucks you in and puts out the milk by your bed once he’s drunk his fill of your life.”