Think, Alice, think, think.
No one is coming to save you now.
Alice remembered the first time she’d really felt her magic, when she put on the Red Queen’s crown and she’d saved all the lost children. Her power had filled her up then, had burned through her so easily. And even though she’d given up the crown she’d been certain that she’d be able to find that magic again, that it would bloom through her as simple as the sunrise. It had seemed, in that moment, like it would.
But once the thrill of defeating the White Queen faded away she’d been unable to find the spark again. Her magic receded into a small and half-forgotten thing, but it was not because the power was actually small. It was only that she didn’t really know how to use it.
Remember when you killed the White Queen? You slashed your hand and off went her head.
(But that was because of the Red Queen, not me.)
And that, Alice thought, was the real trouble. She wasn’t certain that in that moment, giddy with easy power, she was the one who’d done the spellcasting.
I think you ought to try, though. I really think you ought to.
The reason she really thought she ought to was because the creature was half in and half out of its prison, and it certainly was aware of her presence because it was looking right at her and screaming and the screams were making her ears hurt, the screams were penetrating inside her head and snaking around in her blood and making her brain swell against her skull.
Alice pushed her fingers against her ears trying to block out the screaming because the noise was half of the problem. It was so noisy she couldn’t think, and she realized that this was part of the way the creature subdued its prey. It would keep screeching so that she would stay in place and wait to be devoured, rather than doing something tiresome like running away and forcing it to chase.
Think, think! You aren’t just some ordinary Alice. You’re the Alice that defeated the Jabberwock, the Alice that killed the Caterpillar.
But it was so hard to think, so hard to cast a spell or even to make a wish.
I wish all this noise would stop.
The creature’s screaming halted, but only for a moment. It was almost a hiccup, and Alice could imagine its bewilderment. But then the sound started again, seemingly louder and more terrible than before.
I WISH this NOISE would STOP, Alice thought.
And it did.
The monster’s screaming blinked out like a snuffed candle.
Alice looked up.
Her little ball of light had continued to burn despite Alice’s lack of attention. That was a very good sign, she realized. She hadn’t been fully engaged with it, yet her magic had perpetuated the light without her conscious knowledge.
Now that the creature had stopped screaming she felt herself much calmer. The light illuminated its confused face—could such a monster feel confusion? It certainly seemed to—as it opened and closed its mouth and found that it couldn’t do anything to subdue her. It was the same sort of creature as the one she’d encountered outside the door, except this was a newborn version, slick with fluid, its features somehow younger though not in the least less terrifying.
Alice laughed, though it wasn’t quite the merry ringing of the boy in the snow. It was the laugh of a gravedigger, someone standing very close to death. She’d managed to make the monster stop screaming, but now she felt terribly wrung out, and it was probably because she was exhausted and starving and had nearly frozen to death, and she thought that if she wasn’t all of those things she might be able to dredge up the energy to turn the monster into a grasshopper or a cuddly kitten, or perhaps to make the whole house wink out of existence. But she didn’t have that sort of energy at all and she thought it was better just to leave before the monster managed to wrest itself from its chrysalis.
Then there came another sound of something thick and wet falling to the dust-coated floor, and Alice saw one of the other egg-swings had torn open. Soon the new creature that broke through would start its own scream and she’d be straight back to the beginning again, like a pilgrim unable to find the center of a labyrinth.
She needed to stop worrying about weapons to defeat the monsters and think about the door.
She didn’t want to turn her back on the room—that seemed deeply foolish, even Alice knew that one should never expose the back of one’s neck to a predator—so she groped behind her for the door handle. It was not a regular knob but a straight handle like the one on the front door.
She pushed it down again, vaguely hoping for a different result than the first time, but still nothing. If the door was anything like the one she’d used to enter the room there would be a bolt somewhere on the frame on the other side. All Alice needed to do was find a way to undo the bolt from this side.
Surely you can do this even if you are tired and unsure and unmoored. Surely you can manage to move the bolt with your mind or some such thing.
The rainfall-patter had begun again. That meant the second creature’s head was nearly out. Soon it would scream. Soon Alice wouldn’t be able to do anything except hold her head and wait for them to come for her.
The first creature had worked its second wing out of the chrysalis and flapped them madly, its mouth open even though it couldn’t make a noise. Alice thought that in a moment the rest of its body would slide out but it seemed its legs were still encased in the fluid inside the membrane.
Open, door. Open, lock.
A faint, almost pathetic sound reached her. It sounded very much like a rusty bolt moving, but only shifting a tiny bit—the length of an eyelash, perhaps.
(Alice, don’t you want to live? Don’t you want to see Hatcher again?)
It’s a strange thing to be chided by oneself, Alice thought, especially since the tone adopted sounded an awful lot like her mother’s when Mama was annoyed with her.
(Don’t think about Mama now! Don’t think about those other things now! You must get out of this room! You must save yourself!)
Yes, she must save herself. Save herself as she had done before, as she had saved Hatcher and everyone in the Old City when she turned the Jabberwock into a butterfly.
There was an ominous squelching noise from above, something that sounded very much like a creature finally wriggling free of its egg. Alice didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see her death flying to her.
She turned her back on the room, and the light above winked out. Now she was alone with the sounds, the sound of monsters wresting free from their prisons, the sound of wings in the still air.
Alice pressed her hands against the door.
It’s coming for me now.
It’s coming.
I don’t want to die.
OPEN, LOCK!
She heard the bolt fly free. In the same instant there was a rush of air against the back of her neck. Alice grasped the handle and the door flew open.
She stumbled through the door and slammed it shut behind her, throwing the bolt just as the creature crashed into the place where she’d been standing a moment before. Alice heard a faint, frustrated hissing coming from the back of its throat—the only noise it could make now that Alice had muted its cry.
She leaned her head against the door, breathless, her face covered in sweat.
Alice, when will you learn not to wait until the last moment? When will you learn to use your magic properly?
This last was a silly question to ask even of herself, for the only person she knew who would admit to being a Magician and who wanted to teach her lived in a rose-covered cottage far away. She’d run from that person, as she’d run from everything in the City, both Old and New. She’d run because she wanted a life free from shadows and pain, and because she wanted that for Hatcher, too.
But you can’t escape from shadows or pain. You only find new ones. It’s better, I think, not to try to escape th
em at all but to accept that they will be there, and to remember that good things happen, too, even if you can’t always see them.
(But in the meantime, you need to get out of this house of haunts, even if it does mean going out into that terrible storm again.)
The creature slammed its body into the door then, making it rattle in its hinges. Alice backed away, staring at the door like it was a box that held something horrible, something that might burst forth at any moment like an unwanted gift.
But the door held firm, just as the other had when she entered the ballroom. She noticed then that she was in a space lit by the same faint and flickering lamps as the front hallway, and turned slowly to see what terrors were in store for her now.
She was in a kind of antechamber, a very small space with a low ceiling. Behind her was the door into the ballroom and on either side a lamp. In front of her was yet another door.
Alice reached for the doorknob, then paused, shaking her head. Her hand dropped away and became a fist at her side.
No, she thought. I have had ENOUGH of doors and ENOUGH of games and ENOUGH of being afraid. I’m not going to be a plaything for a monster or anyone else, anyone who might be watching and laughing while I struggle.
OPEN, DOOR!
The door flew open as if caught by a hard wind, and Alice felt a rush of something leaving her.
Well, you know you can do something if you get angry, at least. Although I don’t think it’s a reliable way to go about things.
The anger simmered just under the surface, made her stride forward ready to attack.
There was nothing except a stairway.
Alice felt herself deflate a little, felt the fury recede into the background. But the thought that had occurred to her a moment before—the thought that there might be someone watching her fumble through the house, someone who might be throwing obstacles in her way—that thought became surer. Of course there was some hand designing all of this. There always was.
And the only kind of hand that could do this was a Magician’s.
Somewhere in this house, a Magician waited for Alice.
The stairway before her curled upward like the stripe on a candy stick, and as her eyes followed its course she thought that the house must be taller than she first thought, for the stairs seemed to go farther than her initial impression of the house would allow.
Or perhaps it’s only another trick, an illusion to make you think you must climb and climb until you are too exhausted to fight.
The very instant that she thought this the stairway shimmered like something seen in the distance when it is very hot out, a kind of hazy warping of the air. A moment later the vision resolved itself, and Alice saw a stairway still curved like a peppermint stripe, but one that rose only to the next floor, where it met a long landing.
And you didn’t even need to be angry to see that, Alice. Your magic is there, if only you would let it be instead of fighting it all the time.
Was that what she did? Alice wondered as she climbed the curving staircase. Did her magic struggle because she struggled, searching for it and trying to draw it forth only when she wanted it?
Yes, you are like an engineer trying to tame a river with a dam, or to reroute the water only where he wishes it to go. Water will always push through the cracks and find its own path.
She knew then that despite what magic had done for her that she had always fought it, always tried to keep it in a place where she could control it. The only time she hadn’t was when she’d worn the Red Queen’s crown, and it had been easy enough afterward to decide that the ease with which her power flowed had been due to that external force, and that it wasn’t really her at all.
You’ve been scared to be a Magician, Alice. Deep down, underneath where nobody can see—not even Hatcher, who sees everything—you’ve been afraid.
She’d been afraid of her power, afraid to be something she’d always been taught was wicked and wrong. It didn’t matter that the people who taught her that were small in heart and mind, that those same people had sent her away from them when she’d become an inconvenience. It had been her first lesson about magic, and the first thing you learn always stays with you whether you want it or not.
Her second lesson had been that people who did not have her power would want it, and that they would do anything to get it.
That lesson, too, had made its mark.
And so even when she’d felt the wonder of her own magic flowing freely Alice shut it away again, locked it behind a door where she could keep it—and herself—safe.
While she thought all these things her feet moved of their own accord, taking her to the next floor, and her hand brushed against the banister as she climbed. She noticed (in a distant, vague sort of way) that the banister seemed to pulse like a vein beneath her fingers, as if blood flowed through the house like a living thing.
When she stepped onto the landing she felt that same pulsing in the floor beneath her boots, and she glanced down, half expecting to see the boards shifting. But they appeared still and quiet.
Another illusion. They only seem like they are quiescent, but you know better. You can feel it.
She stepped forward cautiously, thinking hands might reach through and grab her ankles. There was an uncomfortable sucking sort of feeling as she walked, a sense that her boot soles were planting deeper than they appeared to be.
It’s not those monsters that are the problem, you know. It’s the house itself. Somehow the house is a live thing, something watching and waiting, something testing and judging. It’s trying to frighten you, to trick you. But to what end?
The landing was shaped like an “L,” starting from the point where Alice stood at the top of the stairs, wrapping around the wall to the left before stopping at the following corner. The walls that lined the landing were smooth and white, no doors or windows that could be seen by human eyes.
But there are doors here nonetheless. Doors that I can feel even if I can’t see them. Doors the house is trying to hide from me.
The other two walls were lined with enormous glass windows that showed the still-blowing blizzard outside.
Just to remind me, Alice thought with a sour twist of her mouth, that I can take my chances with the house or the storm.
She turned the corner of the landing, ignoring her sense that there were openings in the wall before that. Those were not doors for Alice. She wasn’t interested in playing games for the house, or whatever entity was controlling it. Her only thought now was to discover the house’s heart, or its brain.
It can amount to the same thing sometimes, when the heart leads the brain instead of the other way around. That’s your own difficulty, very often.
Halfway down the second part of the landing Alice stopped. She rested her hand against the wall—smooth, unassuming, white.
Nothing to see here, she thought, but there is something on the other side all the same.
The tips of her fingers glowed as she pushed against the wall, and a rectangle of it slid away, smoothly swinging open as if it hung on greased hinges. Alice felt a momentary satisfaction, for her magic had come easily and naturally, and she hadn’t been deceived by any trick.
But as her eyes adjusted to the gloom behind the door, she wished she hadn’t found this one, that she’d never known what was here at all.
Alice’s feet moved of their own accord, taking her closer, and here in this room there was no deception of wooden floors at all. The ground beneath her was soft and pink and pulsing, the twin of the ceiling in the ballroom below. It was, in fact, the room directly above the ballroom, for it was as long and wide though not nearly as high.
She did not want to stay in this room. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere for her to run except back out to the snow, and she saw now how neatly this had all been arranged, and how helpless she’d been to avoid it.
; All throughout the room there were people, men and women and sometimes—Alice’s heart clutched at the sight of them—even children. They were encased in pods made of some kind of clear film filled with a jelly-like substance. She could see each pod pulsating gently. From each pod ran something like a cord or vein that connected to the floor, and Alice realized that these people were feeding the eggs of the monsters below.
At first she thought to rush about, to try to find some way to break open the pods and save the people inside. But as she knelt beside the first pod and looked closer she saw this wasn’t like the White Queen drawing energy from living children. There was no cord of magic that she could cut.
The person in the pod was already partially decomposed, the flesh of his abdomen eaten away, revealing half-gone organs beneath. He had no eyes and no tongue and the skin under the jaw had begun to peel away, showing white bone beneath.
Alice turned her head away, shuddering. There was nothing she could do here, no valiant rescue to be made. These people were already dead, their living flesh preserved to feed the creatures below.
But to what end? She stood, scanning the massive room. Is the house breeding these monsters to set upon the world?
She heard someone laughing behind her then, a high-pitched squeal full of merry joy. Alice spun on her heel and saw the boy standing in the doorway, his white hair and strange eyes glowing in the snow-light that came through the windows.
“Did you do this?” Alice asked, anger bubbling up under her skin.
“Don’t you like my creations, Magician? Won’t it be a wonder to see all my beautiful children flying throughout the world?”
“Children,” Alice said, as if the word were something filthy upon her tongue. “Those things below are your children?”
She could imagine them flying, yes. Imagine them flying in a flock and sweeping down upon each settlement they saw like locusts at the feed, destroying the human population inch by inch until there was nothing left but the terrible, triumphant screams of those things that should not be.
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