(Re)Visions: Alice ((Re)Visions)

by Kaye Chazan

  Upstairs, he eats his breakfast, which has not grown terribly cold, though the eggs and cheese have settled together into a difficult cake-like tier and the juice of the tomatoes has spread all over the plate and everything is, of course, thoroughly peppered beyond olfactory recognition. Aelister eats it, and his hand stops shaking even if the sweat doesn’t abate. The servant who helps bathe and dress him doesn’t talk at all except to remind him to keep his cast from slipping into the water, or to tilt his head this way or that, and the pain in his head does not abate. Perhaps it really does hurt to think, Aelister considers, and yes, that pains him as well. He wonders if anything, even the simplicity of following orders (the Duke’s or otherwise), could turn off his mind.

  In an hour, he returns downstairs, and walks into the library with his head high and eyes bright and angry. The Duke has kept his promise, at least, and sits behind his wall of white pieces, refilling his pen. He says nothing, and neither does Aelister.

  Aelister takes his place, and moves first his king, and then his rook, into the castle he has waited several days for.

  The Duke smiles, but does not comment except for one short breath that could be either a laugh or a sigh the way his black eyes are shining. He moves his bishop into the path of Aelister’s, and sets it down as if the threat means nothing.

  Whatever the bait, Aelister takes it, and swats the Duke’s bishop down. “What kind of magic are you making me do?”

  “The truth is I’m not making you do it,” the Duke says, writing the moves down as if nothing at all is wrong with that question. “But that was a much better truth to ask of me.”

  “The truth is you haven’t answered me,” Aelister snaps. “What kind is it? It’s not fae and it’s not Christian and I know what both are supposed to look like. And you’re going to tell me.”

  “I could take a task.”

  “Don’t.” Aelister puts the bishop next to the pawn he’s already taken and taps them together.

  The Duke laughs. “Fine, then. The kind of magic you are engaged in—which, I maintain, I am not making you do, through any compulsion or corruption of your person—is not of this world. Not of this England.”

  The headache burns behind Aelister’s eyes, and he only sees the Duke’s next move—sliding his queen across to threaten Aelister’s, and the castled rook—through a bright and terrible fog.

  Either way, Aelister will lose his queen, so he takes the Duke’s first. “Does that mean neither of us is of this England either?”

  “That is the best question you have asked yet, boy,” the Duke says, taking Aelister’s queen with his nearest pawn. “And the answer is yes. Now, my question to you is whether that answer changes what you want to learn from me.”

  There is a certain enormity to having one’s fears confirmed, even if those fears are more than half hope. For a moment, Aelister cannot, and does not, move even to breathe. The Duke’s eyes shine, and Aelister searches them, and wonders if that’s where the Duke’s shadow has gone.

  “If you would rather not answer,” the Duke goes on, “I can promise that my next task will include the opportunity to meet more of those displaced, and I suppose now that you have some idea of what you are doing, it won’t seem as much a task at all. On the other hand, it will delay the game, and if you have any further questions driving you mad, I suggest you ask them now.”

  If I am to be driven mad, Aelister thinks, quite clearly, I suppose I have already asked the question which would do it, and have it answered.

  “Send me on the task,” Aelister says.

  “Are you sure?” The Duke records the moves. “It is a task befitting of a pawn who sacrifices queens.”

  “You sacrificed yours first,” Aelister says. “Send me, your Grace.”

  Twenty-four faces stare blankly at Aelister, and not a one of them is real, and all of them are mounted on pikes. Aelister stares back, not that the former King and Queen of France (and whatever Robespierre called himself) care about the politeness therein. The others might, but they don’t say anything, seeing as they are all dead or made of wax or, most probably, both.

  Perhaps Aelister holds on to his letter a little too tight. The Duke’s instructions this time are clearer than they were the last, but the way Aelister’s head is spinning, he might have trouble remembering them all:

  Await two ladies in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, the Duke said, underneath the largest of the hanged men in cages. They will not be expecting you, but glad to see you—well, one of them will be, at least—and you will recognize them much the same way you recognized me. If pressed, introduce yourself as my page. They will find it amusing. Put this envelope into the hands of the elder, if you can bring yourself to ask which of them the elder is. As with my friend the Actor, do not permit either of them to touch you. You may spend as much time with them as you like, or, more pertinently, as they like, but once again I cannot speak for the truth of what they say.

  So far, Aelister has seen many people, even women and children, walking thorough the Chamber of Horrors, and recognized none. They come and they gawk and point, and the youngest children cower and cry. Even if the blood is frozen on the corpses, it’s real enough to scare or at least startle everyone who walks in, and Aelister doesn’t hear a single gasp that carries with it the power of the Duke’s voice or presence.

  And, to be frank, Aelister getting rather frightened himself. Not that he thinks the waxworks will come alive, certainly not, though they do look entirely capable of doing so. And most of the statues in here are of people who are quite certainly dead, decapitated and hanged and starved and sometimes all at once. Even if they did come back to life, there is no way they could rise up on limbs they don’t possess and torment Aelister in any way.

  Or, perhaps, there wasn’t, until he began to believe in magic.

  He tries, valiantly, not to sweat all over the envelope, and tucks it into his sling instead, since the plaster cast on his arm has stayed dry all the way here. It is raining again, of course, but the dreary sort of rain that is more surface-fog than anything else, and Aelister has been standing in the cold waxwork room so long that even his shoes are nearly dry.

  That is the most dreadful thing about this room, Aelister decides, the cold. Because only the living shiver, but the wax constructs seem to, in this light. Brave though he might be, he cannot imagine anyone walking into this museum and not being the least bit frightened.

  “Sister dear, is this better?”

  “I do say so. Why, this must be the rainiest summer we have had since coming here, don’t you think?”

  “I could never think contrariwise,” says the first voice, and Aelister turns away from the waxwork heads fast enough to startle anyone who had been watching him, including these two fair ladies.

  Or one of them, at any rate, for the second of them wears a thick ribbon over her eyes, the same deep grey as her dress, and has not been watching anything at all.

  “And here I thought you were another waxwork,” the lady who isn’t blindfolded says, letting her hand down from her lips, which she had covered politely when she gasped. “I say, you dear thing, you’ve given me more of a fright than anything else in here.”

  The ladies are less alike than Mistress March and Mistress Milliner, though closer in style and age. They are both rather young, young enough to presume they would prefer miss to madam; and the blindfolded lady is taller, and clad all in grey, and the other broader and wearing lion’s-mane gold. Like the Duke, and upon reflection like the Actor as well, their hair is very little off from the color of cloth they wear, and even their skin takes a cast to it of the same, with the result that the blindfolded lady looks a touch in poor health for the grey undertones to her skin.

  “You startled me as well, miss,” Aelister says, and reaches into his cast for the envelope. “I think you are the right people to give this to. In fact, I hope it.”

  “Give what to?” the blindfolded lady asks, and reaches out a glo
ved hand in Aelister’s precise direction, so near that he wonders if she really can see.

  Aelister is about to extend the envelope to her, when he remembers, “The Duke said I was to give this to the elder of you.”

  “Then it is mine to open,” the lady in gold says, “and my sister’s to read.” She opens the envelope with a slash of her gloved finger, and Aelister can see that underneath the fabric, her nails must be quite sharp and refined to points. He glances sidelong at the wax horrors and how their hands are similarly crafted. Though she is the one to open the envelope and read the letter, she hands the two enclosed cards to her sister. From where Aelister is standing, he cannot see what is on the cards’ faces, but he knows their backs are the same as the card he brought the Actor. A fear unlike what the Chamber of Horrors induces creeps up Aelister’s shoulders, right to the knot of his sling.

  Then the lady in gold laughs, and leans up to her sister’s ear. “Oh, you know very well what this says, don’t you?”

  “I can imagine,” the blindfolded lady says, with less humor, and she holds the cards close to her chest. “It simply isn’t right,” she adds, “but he taunts us with the hope of it.”

  “I agree,” the lady in gold says. She holds on to her sister’s arm, and for a moment they are as still as the wax statues. “And you,” she goes on, turning to Aelister, “what are you to him, I wonder?”

  “He said to call myself his page,” Aelister answers.

  “Well, no more can he turn you.” The blindfolded lady nearly spits to say so, and turns her gazeless face more fondly on the wax heads of dead kings. The head of Louis XVI is flat and strangely conical at the sides, like a newborn’s, and she reaches out one gloved hand to touch the underside of his neck, right where the remains of his spine would be. “My name has no place in that man’s errand, no more than it did the last time.”

  “The last time?” Aelister cannot help asking.

  The lady in gold laughs again, and it echoes enough that even the corpses must hear. “Is that our story to tell?”

  “Not to him, if he doesn’t already know. He isn’t a page. If he were, it might be our place.” The blindfolded lady’s glove comes away from the wax dry and unstained, and she touches the tip of her finger to the face of one card as if to smear something Aelister cannot see. “Are you ours for the day, child?”

  “I am my own, or at least I think so,” Aelister says.

  “Then please, stay with us of your own volition,” the blindfolded lady says, and hands off the cards to her sister, who replaces them in the envelope. The lady in gold puts the envelope in her purse, and gestures toward the exhibit’s exit. She escorts the blindfolded lady with an arm around her shoulders, so Aelister walks alone, checking back all through to ascertain he is going the right way.

  Once they are out of the museum, a servant of the sisters’ climbs the stairs and brings them a wide-open umbrella. Aelister narrowly dodges the lady in gold’s hand and nudges himself under the umbrella as well. He keeps a step ahead of them on the way to their carriage, which is slow going with the blindfolded lady as she is, and Aelister worrying the whole while about their resting their hands on his shoulders to guide him. But he waits—“like a little gentleman!” the lady in gold exclaims—and is the last to come up into the carriage, and conveniently for him, they have both sat on the same side and he is in no danger of being set against them.

  “I imagine you have some questions,” the blindfolded woman asks, just as the carriage peels away from the curb and into the street.

  “Several,” Aelister answers, and looks between them. “The Duke told me that I would meet others of those displaced. Where are we displaced from?”

  “Home, of course,” says the lady in gold. “Where else could we be displaced from?”

  “But where is home?”

  “Presumably, right where we left it,” says the blindfolded lady.

  “And it must think itself none the worse for our severance,” the lady in gold agrees.

  “But where—oh, no,” Aelister says, and hangs his head in his good hand, because it has begun to ache again. “Of course we must all speak in riddles about it. It’s just what I’ve been doing to everyone else since I came here.”

  “They aren’t riddles if you know what’s concealed within the words,” the lady in gold says.

  “They’re jargon.” the blindfolded lady explains.

  “A matter of knowing the language.”

  “And of talking around it. You do it earnestly, for simple half-truths, don’t you?”

  “We do the same.”

  “It is always good, though never best, for others to see what they want in you. Good, in that it implores they keep looking—”

  “—but never best, because language itself is so dreadfully imprecise—”

  “—and what they want of you is so rarely the essence of your person,” the blindfolded lady finishes, with a gentle toss of her head.

  “Think of the people you have met, and spoken to the way that feels most natural to keep your truth close,” the lady in gold says. “Do they not find what they want to find in you? They seek amusement, or anger, or hope if they want it, and unless you are defined by the very absence of these things, they will find it in you.”

  Of all the things he has heard since coming to London (excepting, only possibly, the Duke’s confirmation that there is magic afoot), this makes the most sense to Aelister. He considers the teachers who wished to simplify him into a delinquent, and his mother who was so quick to call him prodigal, and especially the Prince, so concerned with his own entertainment that he overlooks Aelister’s flippancy and construes it as mystery instead.

  The carriage wheels over a break in the road, and Aelister’s heart leaps in his chest.

  “So this magic is a language,” Aelister says, very quietly and slowly. “And the people who do not understand it hear only the sound and none of the meaning.”

  “Yes,” the ladies say in unison.

  “And I have been learning that language.”

  “No,” they say in unison again, but the blindfolded lady goes on, “you have been recalling it.”

  The carriage draws up at its stop, and Aelister searches out the window. He sees column after column rising through the fog, but the fringe of the carriage top prevents him from seeing how high they go.

  “Have you yet been here?” the lady in gold asks him.

  “Where is here?”

  “The British Museum,” the blindfolded lady answers, and the carriage door opens. Aelister slips out first—again, they remark over his head, like a little gentleman—and stands aside for the ladies when their driver brings the umbrella around once again. They walk across the lawn in a cluster, and because the fog is so low to the ground, Aelister still cannot see how high the columns grow, nor make out the device at the center of the façade.

  Aelister waits until the driver is gone, once they are under the great stone awning, to begin, “You’ll forgive me for asking—”

  “I have never understood the connection between curiosity and forgiveness,” the blindfolded lady says, laughing into her glove. “Either one is too ashamed to inquire, or bold enough that forgiveness oughtn’t matter.”

  Aelister coughs and apologizes. “All right. Why do you go to a museum, if you can’t see?”

  “There is no connection between going and seeing either, dear thing,” she says, and her sister holds her tighter across the shoulders. “And aside from that, though there is a connection between seeing and understanding, it is not nearly so vital as you think.”

  “You know best the things you can’t see,” the lady in gold says, opening the arc of her other arm to gesture Aelister into the building proper. “That’s why you fear them most.”

  And if the Chamber of Horrors proved that contrariwise, the statues in the museum stand to reason for the rest. After spending all morning with the waxworks, perhaps these are even more horrific in their decay. Aelister sees giants
in them, trapped and crumbling, and the din of the city and its people echoes off them without passing through their frozen stone mouths. He knows he will never be able to sit quietly in the Duke’s house again, not with hollow marble eyes watching him around every corner, reading into him the way he reads into them. The ladies talk, about things that pass over Aelister’s head, and soon enough even their voices are lost in the buzz overhead.

  But the stone that arrests Aelister right in his tracks has no face on it at all.

  It is merely a stone, nearly as tall as Aelister, carved through with three different kinds of script, shining though a layer of chalk and wax. Aelister knows just by looking that each set of words means the same thing, even if he only has every third word of the Greek text on the bottom. Not only the visitors in the room are staring at this; the statues and carvings on the museum walls, human with the heads of animals, with only one eye turned out at a time like playing cards, point their beaks and scepters toward it.