Alice

by Christina Henry

  Hatcher, ever practical, said, “No sense troubling ourselves over him now. We need to clean up this mess before any of his other men come looking for their friends.”

  “We’ll have to wait a bit before we take them out,” Harry said. “It sounds as though the rest are having a bit of fun outside.”

  Now that it was mentioned Alice heard the sounds of trouble in the streets—breaking glass and wood, rough shouting, the horrified screams of women. She started toward the door, but Hatcher grabbed her arm, shaking his head.

  “We can’t just leave them out there,” she said. The screaming was hurting her brain, hurting her heart. Those girls were going to be taken to the Walrus.

  “We’re not an army, Alice,” Hatcher said. “You and I, we can manage a few tough boys, but we can’t stop them all.”

  “I don’t want to leave them,” Alice said. “All those girls. All those screaming girls.”

  She remembered screaming herself, screaming until she was hoarse, screaming until blood ran and her scream mingled with his, a knife pushing into soft flesh (into his eye, his blue-green eye) and she ran, and she couldn’t scream anymore because she needed her breath to run.

  Hatcher shook his head again, and his thumb wiped away the tears on her cheek. “We can’t save them all.”

  “This place is terrible,” Alice whispered. “So terrible. Why did you take me away from the hospital? I was safe there, safe from all this.”

  Hatcher pulled her close, put his arms around her. Her head rested against his chest and she heard the steady, reassuring thump of his heart. Harry and Nell and Dolly seemed to fall away, to disappear outside the little circle of Alice and Hatcher. “How could I ever love you properly with a wall between us for all time? I won’t let anything happen to you, Alice. I will kill you before I let the Walrus or anyone else take you away from me.”

  She gave a choked laugh through her tears, a grim and not-so- merry sound. “Most men give a girl a ring, you know, not threaten them with murder.”

  Hatcher put his hands on her face so he could look in her eyes. “A ring won’t save you from the men who would use you and break you. I don’t want you to suffer, Alice, not one moment. I won’t let them take you.”

  She was staring in his eyes, so she saw when it happened. Saw the love and the fierce will disappear, and his eyes go blank. His arms fell away from her, limp at his side.

  “No,” she said. “Not now. No.”

  “He’s coming,” Hatcher said, and his voice was not like Hatcher’s at all. It was low, full of menace and glee.

  “The blood is like honey to him. He’s coming.”

  Hatcher slumped to the floor on his knees like a marionette with cut strings.

  “What’s happening to him?” Dolly asked. “Who’s coming? The Walrus?”

  Alice barely heard her. She crouched at Hatcher’s side, shaking him, tugging at his hand. “Not now, Hatch. Don’t let him in. Hatch, stay with me. Stay with me.”

  He hadn’t fainted, but this frozen blankness was far worse. It was as if Hatcher could only feel the Jabberwocky, see what he was seeing.

  The noise in the street stopped abruptly. Harry crossed the room to Dolly and Nell and put his arms around them both. Alice could see her breath in the air. The shadow of the Walrus had been replaced by something else, something infinitely more terrible.

  There was a footstep on the walk outside, a deliberate ring of heels. The shape of a tall, thin man in a topcoat and hat drifted underneath the door, and as it passed they all exhaled the breath they’d been holding.

  The footsteps stopped. The shadow under the door inched into view again. The knob began to turn.

  Hatcher clutched Alice’s hand with a sudden bruising force, and she saw blood and fire in his eyes.

  “No,” she said again, and felt something rising inside her. She wrenched her hand from Hatcher’s and faced the door, her body filled with fury. She would not lose Hatcher to this thing. She would not. “No, you can’t have him. You can’t have him!”

  The room was lit by light then, a light that was as red as Alice’s burning, bleeding heart. There was a hideous sound from outside, the sound of all the monsters beneath the bed howling as one, the sound of all the lurking nightmares that clung to the darkness, the sound of something terrifying realizing that it could be frightened itself, frightened by a power it had long considered gone and vanquished.

  The shadow under the door disappeared. Alice was rooted in place, her heart galloping in her chest, sweat running down her face and in the small of her back.

  “Alice?” Hatcher’s voice, small and confused.

  She turned back to him slowly, feeling like she wasn’t entirely herself in her own body, feeling like something inside her had woken up and she didn’t really want that something there.

  “He was here,” Hatcher said. His eyes were clouded, waking up from a dream. “But he went away.”

  “Yes,” Alice said, helping him to his feet. “Thank goodness, he went away.”

  “Not goodness,” Nell said.

  Alice and Hatcher looked at her. The tavern keeper’s wife loosed herself from Harry and Dolly, approaching Alice with shining eyes.

  “Not thank goodness,” Nell repeated. “Thank you.”

  “Thank Alice what?” Hatcher asked.

  Nell gestured at Alice with a trembling hand. “She sent . . . whatever that was at the door. No, don’t say its name. I don’t want to know. When you know the name of a thing, it can find you. She sent it away. She’s a Magician.”

  “A Magician? No. There are no more Magicians. Not really,” Alice amended, thinking of Bess and Hatcher and their Seer’s blood.

  Hatcher glanced from Nell to Alice. He shook his head like a dog with a flea in its ear, and the dazed expression cleared away. He peered closely at Alice, his eyes focused on her but also on something else, as if he were listening to a voice in his head.

  “Yes, you are,” Nell said, taking Alice’s hands in hers. She was crying now, even as she smiled up at Alice. “Now that you are here, everything will be better. The other Magicians will return. All of this darkness and grief will go away.”

  Alice tugged her hands away from Nell’s, panic rising up inside her. “I’m not a Magician. You’re mistaken. I’m just a perfectly ordinary girl.”

  Hatcher shook his head. “There’s nothing ordinary about you, Alice. Nothing could have sent the—”

  “Please, don’t say his name,” Nell repeated.

  “Him,” Hatcher said. “Nothing could have sent him away except magic, real magic. He’s not afraid of people or weapons. But he is afraid of Magicians, for a Magician put him in his prison, and could do so again. Bess said you had a fate, that only you and I could defeat him. Now we know why.”

  “I’m not a Magician!” Alice said again. She felt that if she could just go on saying it, if she could say it often enough, then it would be true.

  “Leave the girl be,” Harry said. He watched Alice with troubled eyes.

  “But she is a Magician,” Nell insisted.

  “I said to leave her be,” Harry said. “We’ve enough troubles here with this lot to clean up.”

  Yes, a lot to clean up, Alice thought. Seven bodies, and so much blood her boots were sticky with it.

  The leader had long since stopped twitching. Alice reached for the hilt of her knife, protruding from his back. As the blade slid wetly from the flesh she again had that flash of (memory? dream?) blue-green eyes, and a man’s voice howling in pain and fury.

  Outside in the street was the sound of movement again, although the screaming and shouting and breaking had ceased. Instead it seemed that everyone drifted aimlessly, just awakened from a terrible dream. Alice hoped that some of the girls would come to their senses and escape before the Walrus’ men could take them away.

  I wish I were a Magician, she thought. I’d find all those lost girls and bring them home. I’d take all those men who hurt those girls and make them cry. />
  But she wasn’t a Magician, whatever Nell or Hatcher liked to believe. She was born to an ordinary family in an ordinary part of the New City. There had never been a hint of anything out of the way in their blood, not on her mother’s side or her father’s. They were quiet and perfect and eminently respectable.

  Except you, Alice thought. You were not any of those things.

  That did not mean she was a Magician, though. It just meant that she didn’t belong.

  “You shouldn’t bother with the cleaning,” Hatcher said. “If what you say is true and the Walrus will take a cut too large for you handle, then you need to leave. And if he finds out his men were killed here your life won’t be worth a tin coin.”

  “I thought you didn’t know who the Walrus was,” Harry said.

  “I don’t,” Hatcher said. “But I know how these bosses are. If they let you get away with killing their soldiers, then others will think they can do the same. That’s how these fellows lose their power, and they don’t like to lose power once they’ve got hold of it. So once it’s discovered that these boys went missing after visiting you, the Walrus will come back to you, swift and hard. You’ll wake up one night in a burning bed and find there’s no way to escape.”

  Dolly whimpered. “If they leave what’ll happen to me and me mam? I need this work. She can’t walk. And I don’t want to be taken by the Walrus if he’s moving in.”

  Alice looked at Hatcher, who only shrugged. She felt helplessness rising up inside her, the inability to solve problems for all of them. It was just as it was when they left the hospital. They could save everyone, and they all could die. Or she and Hatcher could jump out of a window and leave the others to their own lookout.

  “Give her some money, Hatch,” Alice said.

  “Why?” he asked. “We need that money for ourselves.”

  “Give her some, and Harry and Nell too,” Alice said. “We can’t watch over them, and we can’t help them get away.”

  “You needn’t worry about us, girl,” Harry said. “You’ve done enough keeping them from taking my Nell.”

  “I need it,” Dolly said. “I can’t move me mam on me own.” “Hatcher,” Alice said.

  He frowned at her, but didn’t protest any further. He drew several coins out of his pocket and passed them to Harry. The tavern keeper tried to refuse them.

  “Take them,” Hatcher said. “Alice will feel better about it if you do.”

  Harry looked between them, and Alice nodded. He took the coins from Hatcher with obvious reluctance.

  “We must leave now,” Hatcher said. “I don’t want to tangle with any more of the Walrus’ men unless it’s unavoidable.”

  He jogged up the stairs to collect their things from the room. Nell went into the kitchen to gather some food, and Harry passed a few coins to Dolly.

  “Go on home and get your mother, girl,” he said. “And leave as soon as you can.”

  Dolly nodded. Harry followed Hatcher up the stairs, presumably to collect things for his own journey. Alice and Dolly were left alone with the bodies and the mess in the serving room.

  “What was it your man called you? Alice?” Dolly asked.

  “Mm,” Alice said.

  She wasn’t really paying attention to the girl. She was thinking about a blade and a blue-green eye. Did she dream that? Or had she taken out the Rabbit’s eye when she escaped? If she had, then maybe he was dead. Maybe the face that had haunted her for ten years was moldering away under the earth, never to worry her again.

  “Alice,” Dolly repeated, like she was trying to remember it. “Alice. And Nell says you’re a Magician.”

  Something in Dolly’s voice drew Alice back from her reverie. There was a flash of cunning in the girl’s eyes that Alice didn’t care for.

  “I’m not a Magician,” Alice said, her voice harsh.

  “But I seen you,” Dolly said, all innocence now. “We all seen that light come out of you and that scary thing under the door went away. So that makes you a Magician, to my way of thinking.”

  Could Alice have imagined that look in Dolly’s eyes? The girl seemed as dim as ever now, amazed by what she thought Alice had done.

  I should show her my knife, make sure she understands not to repeat what she saw, Alice thought. But then she hesitated. Firstly she didn’t want to get in the habit of flashing her blade around. She wasn’t a street tough, even if she was dressed like one. Secondly she didn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than she already had. Dolly would likely be more concerned with getting away from the Walrus. Once Alice and Hatcher left, she would forget about what she saw, or perhaps her mother would tell her she imagined it. And that would be that.

  Then Hatcher came down the stairs, carrying his sack, and Nell came out of the kitchen carrying armfuls of pies. She pressed several on Alice and Hatcher, who took them gratefully. After a few more moments of farewells and wish-thee-wells, Alice and Hatcher managed to extract themselves from Nell and slipped into the alley behind the tavern.

  There was nobody in the alley, no working girls at their trade.

  Already scooped up by the Walrus, Alice thought. She could hear the occasional scuffle out in the street, a scream cut short, the wet slap of boots on stone. Hatcher leaned close to her ear.

  “We get out of Carpenter’s streets quick as we can,” he said. “We don’t want to get mixed up in a territory war.”

  “But how will we know when we’re out?” Alice whispered.

  She was conscious of the silence in the alley, and the shadows that lurked farther on. Anyone could be hiding there. Anyone could be waiting.

  Hatcher wouldn’t let her be taken. She wouldn’t allow herself to be taken, come to that. But she was weary of blood and fighting and running, which seemed to be all they had done since they left the hospital.

  “There will be sentries at all the borders,” Hatcher said. “When we cross them, we cross out of Carpenter’s streets.”

  “And what do we cross into?” she asked. “We could be heading straight for the Walrus.”

  “If the Walrus is moving on Carpenter’s streets, then his attention will be here, not in his own space. And every territory has four sides, Alice. Walrus could be on the north, and we’re heading west.”

  That was certainly news to Alice. It seemed they’d wandered willy-nilly through the Old City, despite Hatcher’s claims of following a map in his head.

  “How far to Rose Way?” she asked.

  Hatcher moved through the alley, quiet and cautious. “We should be there by morning.”

  If nothing else happens, Alice thought. She wanted to ask about Cheshire, but it was wiser to stay silent while they knew there was still a chance of being discovered by Carpenter’s men.

  She deliberately ignored any thoughts of magic, or Magicians, or the Jabberwocky. Bess said they had to find him and capture him again, and to do that they needed to find the thing the Jabberwocky was looking for, the thing that a Magician had taken from him long ago. Alice would do her best there, because she didn’t want Hatcher in the Jabberwocky’s grip any longer. But she didn’t have to dwell on why the Jabberwocky had run from the door of Harry’s tavern. She didn’t have to think about that if she didn’t want to.

  It was another long night of darting through dark places and avoiding the street soldiers who seemed to be everywhere. Alice convinced Hatcher that climbing over a roof near a checkpoint was more efficient than killing off the sentries again, and once they were above the streets they decided it was nicer to stay there. It wasn’t precisely easy to clamber up and over roofs, and several of the spaces between buildings were a little too far apart for Alice’s liking. But there was no fear of blades and blood, for anyone with sense kept both their feet on the ground.

  It was even more impossible for Alice to track their path through the City from this height. Above, all the streets underneath faded into a disturbing sameness, their mazelike quality ever more pronounced. But the air was a bit clearer. The hea
vy fog and the entire surrounding stench tended to settle in the canyons of the City, seeping into the layers of wood and stone. On the rooftops Alice could see the faint hint of stars through the haze.

  They stopped once to stuff their mouths with Nell’s pies, now cold but still delicious. Alice’s flagging strength revived then, and she was better able to keep up with Hatcher’s silent-footed bounding.

  Really, he is like a cat, she thought. His boot heels never seemed to ring on roof tile like hers, his weight barely touching down before he sprang forward again. She had yet to see Hatcher confounded by any circumstance. Alice felt as though she had been teetering on the edge of a black hole (a rabbit hole) since they’d escaped, and one more strange or frightening event might tip her into that hole. Yet Hatcher never seemed permanently affected by their circumstances. Even the possession of the Jabberwocky fell away from him as soon as it was over.

  The sun was pushing faint orange rays through the fog when Hatcher suddenly raised a hand to indicate they should stop. Alice crab-walked to his side—they were on a slightly steeped roof, and Hatcher was perched like a pigeon on the crux of it—and peered at what he was staring at.

  Almost directly below and across from their perch was a little house nestled between the larger, multistoried buildings that occupied the street. It was so small compared to its neighbors that it seemed like a toy. Alice half expected to see a little girl’s hand pushing a doll through the front door to water the roses.

  And there were roses—masses of them, so many Alice could scarcely credit it. They twined over the door and the window, up the walls, and covered the roof so thoroughly that the tiles were not even visible. The roses seemed to glow with an unearthly light, pink and red and white and yellow wrapped together in an impossible bouquet. The scent of sweet flowers drifted up to them.

  Alice inhaled deeply. The smell made her head feel like it was drifting away from her body. For a moment everything spun in a circle.

  She didn’t realize she’d tipped forward until Hatcher grabbed her shoulder, keeping her from tumbling off the roof. “What . . . ?” she asked, her voice faint. She tried again, shaking her head to clear away the scent of roses. “What is that?”