Beware the Little White Rabbit

by Various

  “Er, right, okay then.” Good-bye lovely new phone. Wait for me! “Which way was it to the backstage area again?”

  It’s just as well I asked because I’d never have found it on my own. I slip into line behind the last model and try my best to look inconspicuous.

  “Critics are already calling them millinery works of art…” comes the sound of Maddy Hatter’s voice through the curtain. “So lifelike it’s hard to believe Nature didn’t craft them herself.”

  My hat lets out a snort of anger, and I have to cover it up with a cough.

  “Shhh, be quiet back there,” someone hisses, “or we’ll miss our cue.”

  “And so, without further ado,” says Maddy, “I give you Wonderland’s latest creation: the Maddy Hatter Bunny Beret!” There’s a tumultuous burst of applause and the sound of cameras flashing as the line of beret-bearing models moves toward the stage.

  “Hurry up,” orders my hat. “You don’t want to get left behind.”

  I shuffle forward, waiting to be spotted and hauled out of line. Given that all the other girls are wearing matching white suits and six-inch heels, I must stand out like a sore thumb. Oh yes, and their berets are white, too. With properly dead rabbits stapled to the top, not a hot, heavy live one whispering helpful comments like, “This is it. Get ready for the big showdown. Watch out below. This could get messy!”

  I’m close enough to see the stage now – I mean, catwalk. It’s a dazzling blare of light and noise out there, and my legs are starting to feel decidedly wobbly at the thought of all those people just watching and waiting.

  “You’re on,” hisses my hat, thumping his back paw down onto the top of my head to spur me into action. “Go, go, go.”

  “All right. I’m going.” It feels like I’ve forgotten how to walk all of a sudden, but I force my legs forward. And now I’m through the curtain, blinking in the camera-flashing glare like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

  “What is that?” snarls Maddy, pointing at my beret with a look of ill-concealed disgust. “It’s not one of mine. That’s for sure. It’s all red. It’s all baggy. It’s hideous!” I guess last season’s extra-large men’s berets are no longer flavor of the month.

  “Go on then,” I whisper, giving my hat a gentle prod. “I think you’ve got their attention now. Time for the big reveal.”

  “I can’t do it,” he hisses back. “I’m a rabbit. You lot don’t even know we can talk, let alone give impassioned speeches to the media. They’ll lock us up all over again for scientific experimentation, slice us up into little pieces to see how we work. You’ve got to do it.”

  Okay, now would also be a really good time to wake up. “Me? But I don’t know what to say. I’m terrible at speaking in front of a crowd.”

  “Get her off! She’s an imposter, a fraud,” screeches Maddy as a TV camera zooms in for a close-up of my face. But my hurriedly applied mascara is the last thing on my mind when I spot the herd of rabbit-costumed heavies heading straight for me.

  “No, wait!” I yell back. “She’s the fraud. Those aren’t beautifully crafted works of art on their heads. They’re corpses!”

  “Dead little bunny-wunnies?” gasps the stunning lady in the front row. I know that face. It’s Dana Duchess! She whips off her complementary beret and begins weeping over her poor stapled rabbit.

  “Yes, Dana,” I cry, “dead little bunny-wunnies. Stiff, lifeless little rabbit-wabbits.”

  A collective gasp goes up from the audience. Now there are hundreds of cameras zooming in for a closer look at my clumpy mascara.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Maddy shrieks. “Stuff and nonsense. Lies and poison.”

  “Yes, poison. Exactly,” I say. “She feeds them up in her horrible underground warehouse, and then she poisons them. Slaughters them needlessly in the name of fashion.” I’m starting to get into this now, though I could do with something catchier – something with a bit of headline punch. “It’s rabbit death row down there!” That’s better. “And Maddy Hatter is a beret bunny boiler!” Ooh yes, I like that last one. And so do the reporters.

  A fresh wall of camera flashes hits me in the eyes, half blinding me, and I don’t see the big, burly bunny bouncer until it’s too late.

  My hat-hopper’s reactions are much quicker. He leaps into action, launching himself clean over the bouncer’s head with a pitiful squeal.

  “You see,” I manage through a mouthful of furry arm. “A real rabbit. And there are hundreds more downstairs where he came from.” Only that’s where I’m wrong. They were downstairs, but not anymore. The single pitiful rabbit cry becomes an entire orchestra of high-pitched squealing as a river of white fluffiness rushes out onto the catwalk, knocking me clean off my feet. There’s a dull thump inside my skull as I hit the deck and a single blinding moment of pain. And then nothing.

  Well, I did it. I finally woke up. And it looks like I was right about the hospital bed. I wonder how long I’ve been out. Wow, long enough for Jason Hopper to have made it to my bedside with a huge bouquet of flowers.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks as I do my best attempt at a smile.

  “Oh, you know. A bit sore.”

  What’s he grinning like that for? Like I’ve just cracked a joke?

  “I’m not surprised.” He laughs. “You went down with quite a thump.”

  How does he know? He wasn’t even there. Has he been reading my medical notes?

  “Quite the YouTube sensation actually. Seven million and fifty-six views at the last count. But they’re all likes, because everyone thinks you’re a hero.”

  What, viral YouTube footage of me knocking myself out on a broom closet? Terrific. So much for my undercover reporter routine.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get your scoop,” I mutter. “A few photos from before the event and some pictures of a corridor, that’s all, I’m afraid.” I feel down the sides of my hospital gown. “They’re on my phone. Wherever that is.”

  “Don’t worry, Alice, I think we’ve got plenty of material to go on.” He holds up a copy of The New York Times with a color photo of me plastered across the front page. Me in my ridiculous rabbit hat. Only that can’t be right because it was all a dream. Wasn’t it? STUDENT REPORTER UNCOVERS UGLY TRUTH says the headline underneath. He holds up another paper: BERET BUNNY BOILER BEHIND BARS.

  “Obviously I’ll be expecting an exclusive interview for the Dodgson High Echo once you’re back on your feet,” he says. And then he blushes and looks at the floor. “I was thinking we could do it over dinner, maybe?”

  “You and me?” I stammer. “Dinner? Together?”

  “Only if you want to, of course. And then perhaps a few photos of you and one of the rescued rabbits another time?”

  I want to, I want to, I want to, I’m screaming inside.

  “Okay then,” I say, playing it cool while my stomach leaps around like a demented rabbit. “Dinner might be nice.” If this is just another dream, I’m thinking, as he smiles that killer smile and hands me the flowers, then please, please, don’t wake me up. Not ever.

  For my three nieces, Kait and Lois and Neve.

  Alice peered over the top of her book as the rabbit – white, about three feet tall, and standing erect on its hind legs – went rushing by. It stopped a little way ahead of her, pulled a pocket watch on a chain from its oversized waistcoat, and hopped in alarm. After announcing in a metallic, clanking voice just how late it was, it rushed off in a cloud of steam, with only a sly backwards glance of a pinkly glowing lens to show that it was even aware she existed.

  She sighed, made a mental note of her page number, 345, easy enough to remember being half as large as the sum of its proper divisors, and put the book down on the root of the tree that shaded her reading spot, before setting off in pursuit.

  It was obviously one of Uncle Charles’s inventions: a steam-powered, oversized mechanical rabbit indeed. But without a closer look, she couldn’t tell if it was malfunctioning or merely following its creator’s increa
singly bizarre instructions.

  When she had been younger and not much taller than that fur-covered automaton, she’d delighted in her uncle’s flights of fancy and in the marvelous inventions that came out of his underground workshop. Indeed, it was this inspiration that had turned her inquisitive young mind to the pursuit of science and to mechanical textbooks such as the one she had just abandoned on the riverbank.

  But her uncle’s genius never seemed to go anywhere; he might as well have been a mere toymaker. That would have suited his childish delight in getting each new clockwork or steam-powered device to work. Such a waste. For Professor Charles Dodgson, engineering was merely an enjoyable diversion, a way of entertaining his mind while not engaged on the latest arcane mathematical challenge. Whereas it seemed to Alice that his dusty dry mathematics ought to be relegated to his moments of leisure and he should give himself over fully to his inventions, he seemed blind to his own genius, to the concept that his mechanical marvels could in a very real way free mankind from its arduous toil, from the dangerous and menial burden of manual work.

  Alice would not make the same mistake. There had been great strides forward even in her short lifetime. Airships sailed over London, ever-faster locomotives sped up and down the country, and steam-powered vehicles had begun to replace the old fashioned horse-drawn carriages. Smooth macadamized roads were taking the place of bumpy cobbles and rutted dirt tracks befouled by the passing horses they served.

  But nothing as yet rivaled the complexity of even such pointless creations as her uncle’s latest, an unpunctual bunny. How much better would the world be if her uncle shared his remarkable talents beyond the idle amusements he built for Alice and her sisters?

  It was not as though the world was entirely ignorant of his engineering abilities. Twice a week, sometimes twice a day, a suited industrialist complete with top hat and cane, or an engineer with the goggles and geared brooches of his guild, would beat a path to her uncle’s door, carrying contracts or schematics and asking for his advice and help.

  The professor would turn them all away.

  Their schemes did not interest him, nor their inducements.

  He was already quite comfortably well off, living on the generous stipend that Christ Church College paid in return for his occasional lectures and tutorials and for the respect that his purely academic papers, published in incomprehensible mathematics journals and read only by other equally dusty professors of mathematics, brought.

  Only Alice had unfettered access to her uncle’s library and, better even than that, to the wild designs that emerged from his workshop.

  She learnt fast, dismantling her uncle’s mechanical toys to see how they worked, trying to put them back together again, trying to improve them.

  This despite her parents’ steadfast refusal to take her passions seriously, confiscating the utility belt she’d fashioned for herself, and now, as late summer lingered over the wilting Oxfordshire countryside, forcing her outside to “play.”

  Unbeknown to them and even to her uncle, she had already established a discrete legal entity in the fictitious name of “Lewis and Carroll, Engineering Ltd” for the sole purpose of patenting her modest variations of his more novel inventions. As soon as she was of age, she would leverage these to build her very own workshop. She’d dedicate her life to solving mankind’s many problems, to making things that were neither frivolous nor mere amusements, but were definitely, undeniably useful.

  Sometimes she wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier if she had been born a boy. Though this was an attitude she was increasingly determined she would change just as soon as she could. In these enlightened times, it was ridiculous that only men could vote or join one of London’s many Guilds.

  She came across the rabbit slumped at the foot of a large tree, a pile of cogs and gears spread about its feet and spilling from beneath its tartan waistcoat as though it had been rudely gutted. She turned away, upset by the image, before steeling herself to examine the steam rabbit more closely.

  The fire within was fading fast, the eyes no longer glowing pink as they had before, and only the hands on the pocket watch still moved. Though, curiously, not the second hand.

  That appeared to be stuck pointing at the base of the tree, which, now that she came to look at it, did appear quite unnaturally symmetrical.

  She pried the watch from the rabbit’s frozen grasp and allowed the wavering needle of the second hand to guide her to a spot half hidden beneath the tree’s spreading limbs, where she discovered the entrance to a sizeable tunnel. She looked down at her pastel colored dress and her pretty little shoes and shrugged. Her preferred leather boots had that very morning been deemed “unladylike,” and their impractical replacements were bound to be ruined. But perhaps that would serve as a lesson to her mother, who might in the future allow Alice to stay in the library, poring over the latest scientific journals rather than cruelly forcing her outside into the sunshine with only a single smuggled textbook for company.

  Alice peered down the dark hole, a warm gust of wind tugging at her hair. It wasn’t clear how far down it went; she certainly couldn’t see the bottom. But surely it couldn’t go too far, not with the river so close by, not unless her uncle had branched out into hydraulic engineering. How long had he been digging it for? Or rather, knowing her uncle, what over-engineered device had he employed? A mechanical steam mole, perhaps?

  She knew he’d been expanding his workshop; he always seemed to be short on space. What people took to be a small shed lurking in the grounds of her father’s extensive gardens was merely the tip of an increasingly large iceberg. And she’d always known he had an alternative way in or out; it was that or accept he’d developed a teleportation device. Which is what he claimed when questioned, though Alice was far too sensible a young girl to believe half of what her uncle claimed.

  Much though she had searched, she had not before now known where this hypothesized back entrance might be and doubted she would have ever found it if she hadn’t followed the rabbit and its compass-like pocket watch. The bore was mostly smooth, though odd roots stuck out into the center of the hole from every direction and as far down as the eye could see. It was as she was reaching for one of these that she felt the edge crumble beneath her, and she couldn’t help but emit a sharp shriek as she fell…

  …and fell…

  …and fell.

  Drawing a stuttering breath, she realized she was hardly moving at all. The strong updraft, presumably steam generated, had only made it feel like she was falling. That, plus a steady rhythmic mechanical pulsing of the things that lined the tunnel, had effectively arrested her motion a few feet below the hole’s sunlit entrance. She peered at them curiously. What she’d taken for roots were obviously artificial arms of some kind.

  If she was still descending at all, it was only slowly.

  Much too slowly.

  She guessed the whole tunnel was meant to function as a lift, but one without the need for a car or a pulley. Perhaps it was rated for her uncle’s more considerable bulk and what was capable of delivering him safely to some underground level might suspend her indefinitely mid-tunnel, as indeed this one had done.

  Or, perhaps she simply didn’t know how this lift of her uncle’s was supposed to operate.

  There were no obvious signs of any buttons, no levers like the ones she was used to in the hydraulic pressure lifts she rode on her occasional visits with her parents to London. So how did you choose whether to descend or to ascend?

  And obviously it must have that control, because in addition to the artificial roots, there were also a number of shelves set into the tunnel wall: extra storage, something the professor was always short of, cluttered with empty jam jars and other assorted bits and bobs.

  None of which seemed useful to her in her current predicament.

  Even if she were to try to collect them all, they wouldn’t, she calculated, alter her weight by anything like enough to drag her downwards. But it showed that con
trol was possible. How else were the jars so neatly stacked on the shelves?

  She was nearly horizontal, her skirt rustling in the wind like a miniature parachute. Perhaps if she made another shape? If she changed her angle? The updraft should be proportional to her cross section, so if she was vertical instead…

  She tried it.

  Gathering the loose material of her dress close to her, she tilted until her feet pointed straight down the hole. And down she shot, far too fast for her liking. She slackened her hold and allowed her petticoats to billow up around her waist, slowing her descent. Being unable to see where she was going was surely better than being able to see but not being able to stop.

  Her legs folded gently under her as she hit the bottom of the shaft. She stood tiptoe to tiptoe with a large fan driving hot air up the tunnel, metal blades whizzing inches away from her face. She took a sharp step back and found herself being lifted into the air. Exasperated, she wriggled free of the root-like arms and darted to the side where she took a moment to catch her breath.

  Typical of her uncle; a normal lift would surely have sufficed, but no, he had to invent a whole new, dangerous, and ultimately disagreeable method of getting from top to bottom.

  Brushing the dirt and leaves from her dress, she looked around the room she found herself in. Gas mantel lamps flickered on the walls, but there wasn’t much for them to reveal, just a three-legged stool, and at the far end of the room, a tiny door set into one of the walls.

  Well, she thought, I’m not going back up that shaft in a hurry. She tried the handle of the miniature door and was annoyed to find it firmly locked.

  Alice approached the stool and peered at the ornate bottle that sat upon it. Golden, almost glowing liquid swirled within, and a label attached to the neck said Drink Me. She picked up the bottle, tilted it back and forth trying to guess its contents, and noticed that there was a key glinting at the bottom.