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

by Kaye Chazan

  Aelister is, as he was at the start, very smart about running away. He goes to his room, and changes into dry, warm clothes (as best he can with only the use of one arm), and gathers all the money and cuff-links and little knickknacks he can carry. He piles up the remaining playing cards and stuffs them in his pocket. And this time, he leaves through the front door.

  September is already partway over, and most of the children of London are going to school. Aelister passes by groups of them, in matching hats and gloves. He follows them only to blend in with the morning traffic, not that he matches it at all.

  He hides under his umbrella and walks for hours, listens to the chaos get thicker and thicker as he nears the heart of the city. As sensible as he was about running, he didn’t take a map (mostly due to the fact that those who live in a city rarely require a map of it, and thus the Duke does not possess one) and he’s not sure what it will cost him to get in one of the hansoms since the last thing he wants is to accidentally hail the Duke’s, or one of his friends from baccarat, or anything. No, what’s best, at least as Aelister sees it, is to get as deep into the thickest crowd he can find, and just try to keep his head above water.

  He finds the very thought dreadful. But he’s resolved to do it, and that’s more than he can say otherwise.

  It’s worse and worse by the time he makes it to Covent Garden again, knots through the crowded sidewalks and uses his umbrella more like a shield than anything else. The horses in the street kick up filth around his ankles, but Aelister steps over as much as he can, tries to predict where the water will fall. By then, the noise is deafening, but even if he doesn’t quite know his way, he knows his destination.

  It takes him another hour to find Larkspur’s flower shop, and this time he doesn’t knock over the stand trying to get out of the rain. He shakes out the umbrella, but can’t fold it quite closed, and he stalks up the stairs and bangs on the Actor’s door.

  There is no answer. Aelister remembers what the Duke said last time and repeats the instructions in his head: Arrive between the hours of two and five in the afternoon, otherwise it’s extremely unlikely he’ll be there. Aelister rifles through his pockets, but though he has all manner of baubles and coins, he couldn’t find a pocket-watch to make off with, and he doesn’t have the time. Even if he did have time, he might not have enough. And worse, he cannot tell by the sun, since it seems it hasn’t shone in London since the day Aelister arrived. It could be before two, and he could have no time to wait at all; or it could be after five, and the prospect of spending a night in Covent Garden with that murderer on the loose, with the knowledge that those killings are connected to him somehow, sets Aelister’s heart racing and his fingers twitching.

  He sits with his back to the Actor’s door and takes the fifty-one cards out of his pocket. They’re dry, and even if Aelister’s ankles are muddy, his thighs and the floor are dry, too, so he piles the cards on one leg and turns them over on to the other. Minutes pass, or possibly quarters of an hour, or even hours, left alone as he is with his own imagination. The rain drums down onto the roof, and the crowds outside barter and holler and hawk until long after the sun goes down. Aelister swears that the walls of the house shake as the streetlamps light, one by one.

  By now, it is nearly too dark to see the cards, and all the spare chill that the end of summer carries seems to be threaded through Aelister’s clothes. His arm aches in its cast, and the stiff hems of his trousers scrape against the floor. The music at the opera house claws through the floor and the walls, the violins hissing into Aelister’s bones like creeping mice. He hadn’t known he was that close to the opera house, but then again, maybe he isn’t. It doesn’t matter, and he hears it all told, the climbing strings and shouting horns and the rumble of pitched drums. He shuts his eyes and spades dance behind them like soldiers.

  Even long after the opera should be done, after songs of war and passion and burial alive, the music rings in Aelister’s ears. He thinks he must be dreaming it now, nonsense Italian song out of the mouths of creatures with falcons and wolves for heads and raw human chests, painted like turtleshells. They parade through the hall and up the stairs, trampling in mud and blood to the rhythm of their chanting. They ask Aelister the time, and Aelister doesn’t know it, so they drum it louder and louder on the door behind him—

  “Wake up, lad,” the Actor says.

  Aelister nearly jumps out of this own skin, and in doing so bangs his cast against the door and cries out. The Actor laughs, and then hisses through his teeth. It is dark, the dead of night, but there is just barely light enough to see the Actor’s bright smile, if not the rest of his face or even his body. “All hours of the night, lad. How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know,” Aelister whimpers, and cradles his arm close. It aches, and the sweat and rain on the inside of the cast itch in places he cannot reach. He shudders to think what grime from the city has made it into his cast since last night, or if even the blood from the gutters is in there somehow, if the murderer can smell it, if the authorities could too—

  “Do you need to come inside?” the Actor asks.

  “Yes,” Aelister almost shouts, “I mean, yes, thank you,” and he crawls up to his feet as the Actor steps back into the dark and unlocks the door. It’s even darker inside than out, but Aelister feels the Actor brush past him and slip inside, so he follows.

  When Aelister can see at all again, it is because the Actor has lit a candle, bowed over the room’s lone table. The firelight fills in all the hollows of the Actor’s face, which is still made-up in places from tonight’s show, all the bright reds and pinks from when Aelister first saw him. He passes the candle over to another, and brings them to his stove. “Are you wanting a bath?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you wanting a bath, lad? If you are, I’ll put on enough water for both of us.” The Actor gestures to his face, smears his fingertips over the rouge and greasepaint. “I cannae sleep with this all over me.”

  “Oh,” Aelister says. “Then yes. Thank you.” He shuts the door behind him, perhaps a little quickly, and comes deeper into the room. He watches the Actor heat a cauldron of water for a while, and stands in silence until the heat in the room makes his palm sweat around the deck of cards. He stacks them together as best he can and puts them back in his pocket.

  “So did you run, or did he throw you out?” the Actor asks, hovering his face over the steam so that the makeup beads and loosens.

  “I ran,” Aelister says.

  “Then good on you,” the Actor says. He stipples a kind of cream over his face that seems to erase him entirely, leaving only his mouth and eyes to shine. “Do you ken where you’re going?”

  “No,” Aelister admits.

  “Not home?”

  “Not back to Warwickshire, no.”

  “But not home?”

  “I think that’s what the Duke wants of me.”

  “And is it that you dinnae want to go, or that you dinnae think much of doing what his Grace wants?”

  “...I don’t know,” Aelister answers, after a time.

  The Actor considers this, more seriously than Aelister thought he would, and wipes the cream away from his face.

  “I can’t go back to a place I’ve never been,” Aelister says. “I mean, I’ve been, but I don’t remember being. It’s like what you said before, about whether I can remember where I was born or not. I can’t. And it might not matter that I can’t, because now that I’ve run out on the Duke I don’t think I have any choice but to stay.”

  “Do you think he’s got any choice either?” The Actor tests the water with the tip of his littlest finger, then dips the corner of his towel in and starts wiping at his face again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he’s here with the rest of us, isnae he?” Half of the Actor’s face is fresh now, if a little ruddy for the heat and the cleanliness. “Maybe he’s the one who wants to go back, whether you will or nae.”

&nb
sp; Cold terror washes down Aelister’s spine. “I—hadn’t thought.”

  “I’m sure he counted on that,” the Actor says, and now that all his face is stripped clean, he sets the towel down. “Have your go at it, lad,” he says, and steps away from the cauldron. “If you’d rather, I can turn my back.”

  “No,” Aelister says, “it’s fine.” He has off with his clothes, folds them as neatly as he can and sets them on the chair. He can reach the cauldron without much trouble, and soaps up the other towel that the Actor has left. There is blood under his fingernails, and he attacks that first, scrapes at his hands until he’s sure they can clean the rest of him. The Actor doesn’t watch.

  “So, if you dinnae ken where you’re going, what are you running from?”

  “I don’t know that either. But I don’t know where to go.”

  “That’s the trouble with running,” the Actor says. “You have to pick a direction, otherwise you get nowhere.”

  Aelister wonders if he should laugh, but he doesn’t find it terribly funny.

  “And if ye dinnae want to go back, well, every other way is a kind of forward,” the Actor goes on.

  Aelister hides his eyes with the towel and tries not to think about anything at all. It is surprisingly difficult.

  The Actor comes over to him, and laughs, and holds out a dry cloth. Aelister reaches out to take it, but stalls when he sees, just as before, that he might come too close to touching. And then he remembers, don’t let him touch your skin, not even the tip of your nose.

  “Still got his voice in your head, do you?”

  “Not as such,” Aelister says. “But yes.”

  The Actor drops the dry cloth on the countertop, and steps back, hands raised. “Stay the night, and I’ll feed you in the morning. But that’s it, if you’re running in his circles.”

  Aelister nods and understands.

  The night passes quickly, and the morning more quickly than Aelister would like it to, especially since the Actor isn’t there. He left Aelister with more than breakfast, a little knotted square of cloth around bread and hard cheese, so Aelister only eats half of it and bundles the rest up again. He leaves, more because it is polite than because he actually wants to, and sets off into the city again.

  For a few days, he waits in the Chamber of Horrors, for hours at a time. Soon enough, he knows every crack in each waxwork, and he learns that the fake blood melts in tiny increments, but the blindfolded lady and her sister in gold never come by again. By the end of a week, no matter what care Aelister has taken with his clothing, he still smells like an urchin, and the guards don’t let him into the museum.

  He tries to make the most of the money, sells the cuff-links and baubles and buys himself food and a new shirt. He washes his clothes in a horse’s trough outside one of the hansom stations, though he does get caught and thus only manages it once. Another time, several days later, he tries to make off with someone’s hanging laundry, but it is slow going with his arm still in its cast, and the shirt he steals is several sizes too large.

  But dirty children are no rarity on the streets of London, and other than to pity him, no one blinks twice. He sleeps in parks and abandoned houses, and buys what food he can, and keeps as far away from the opera house as possible. The music still makes it to him in dreams, the screeching strings all too much like the riots on the streets, like the men who choke the police with numbers and vitriol alone. All of London knows the murderer, the killer in Whitechapel, but no one knows his face. Doors lock, people disappear from the streets, but London is never quiet, always crackling from beneath. Aelister feels more to blame than perhaps he should. Lightning flashes in the back of his mind whenever he turns a corner, and he hides the dark stains on his cast whenever he catches someone looking.

  At night, if it is not too windy, he talks to the cards. No matter how he shuffles, the jack of hearts is still missing. He tries to play with the queen instead, but the cards are only cards, and also he tends to lose.

  In the dark, he wonders if he is only still here because he is waiting for the Duke’s next move.

  And of course, the other trouble of not knowing where you are going is that your feet tend to guide you where your head least wants to be. So on the night the storm breaks, and the sky, though still clouded and hot, is finally dry, Aelister finds himself standing just south of Whitechapel road. He sells his umbrella, because he is out of money again, and waits out the night by the back door of a bakery. He sleeps, or tries to at the least, since he knows he will have to wake in the night because all bakers wake long before dawn.

  He hopes his mother misses him as much as he misses her.

  It is as clear a night as Aelister has seen in London. It still surprises him that he can see at all in the dark, but the Duke is all in white, as ever, and standing on a spiral staircase across the back yard, near the roof of the next building. Aelister blinks, and stands, one arm heavy in its sling and the other limp at his side. His toes drag through yesterday’s rain on the cobblestones, and steam curls where he steps.

  The Duke extends his arm, palm up, nonchalant. The green pouch dangles from his gloved fingers, heavy and steady, and Aelister stalls, watches it swing and doesn’t know if it’s a threat or a favor or both.

  In the end, he decides that knowing means more than caring.

  He reaches the base of the stairs, and climbs the first two. He’s close enough now to see the Duke smile, but Aelister doesn’t smile back, just sets his teeth and steels his eyes and climbs. Rust scrapes free under his feet and leaves streaks on Aelister’s shoes, kicks up its rancid scent. He is dimly aware that he and the Duke are not the only ones in the yard, that his are not the only footsteps he can hear, but nothing matters to Aelister nearly much as the top of the stairs and the answer to his question.

  Just as Aelister reaches the platform two storeys up, the Duke lets the pouch drop at Aelister’s feet and disappears. “Pawn to queen,” he says, though the rest of him is gone, “if that’s the metaphor you want, little fool.”

  The pouch contains nothing but a rabbit’s foot.

  Aelister could scream, but the woman in the alleyway does before he can even take a breath. Her scream, though, is immediately cut short by the knife gliding across her throat.

  Over at the Duke’s house in Islington, the chess table stands as they left it.

  Without a hand to lift it, the Duke’s white knight leaps up and takes Aelister’s red rook.

  Very few things can make a boy run as fast as Aelister runs now, very few indeed. He barrels across the rooftops of Whitechapel, and he knows with every sense he has that the murderer is chasing him. And why wouldn’t he? It is twice now, twice, that Aelister has seen the ghastly work done and heard the body hit the stone and smelt the blood and tasted the heat and sweat in the air. Twice, now, and now he has been caught in it, more caught than he was the last time. Lightning snaps across the sky and Aelister shuts his eyes to it and charges forward.

  Away is not a direction. So when Aelister tries to run there, leaps from one roof onto the next and feels the shingles give way under his heels, he doesn’t get any closer to where he needs to be. He can hear the murderer’s steps pound behind him, the whiff of his breath and the snarl behind his jaw. Aelister’s throat burns red and his blood drums up in it, one-two, one-two, out of time with his feet, beating out an ostinato of away, away.

  But away, once again, is not a direction, and not a destination either, and Aelister finds himself faced with a sheer black wall, the side of a building too smooth to climb.

  He turns, and the murderer’s foot and knee plant on the far side of this roof, just barely out of time. He uncoils like a great snake, knife in hand, teeth bared. Thunder rolls and Aelister swears that the man has claws of lightning, eyes of fire, and his blade snicks through the air as he reseats it in his hand, and Aelister is armed with nothing but a pack of fifty-one cards and a rabbit’s foot—

  Fire, Aelister thinks, as clearly as he’s thought an
ything before. The city of London is always on fire, and it isn’t raining anymore.

  Aelister isn’t sure what possesses him to reach out his broken arm and smash the cast into the wall behind him. He is, however, fully certain that it will achieve something. The plaster shatters and peels off of Aelister’s arm, and as it touches the rooftop, light spills out between the cracks. It should hurt, something should hurt, if not his arm then at least the searing light, but there is only a rush where the pain should be, a sting like falling in a dream. The sun itself breaks through Aelister’s eyes and teeth and spreads over the concrete, drives the murderer back, singes the hem of his coat and the tips of his scraggly hair.

  “Do not touch me,” Aelister says, in a voice he will spend the rest of his life trying to find again. “You are not so chosen.”

  When the murderer smiles, wide and gleaming across his face, Aelister flattens himself to the wall and glowers through the heat as hard as he can. The murderer meets Aelister’s eyes, then tilts his head and raises his brows as if to ask for certainty or confirmation. Aelister gives him neither, but the murderer turns away all the same. In profile, with the blinding light obscuring him full to the waist, Aelister can imagine the symmetry of hearts and vines and spirals, the curl of a feather, the glint of an axe.