After Alice

by Gregory Maguire

  The Jabberwock flexed its wings and circled above the crowd in the courtroom, snatching at a sleeping dormouse. It deposited the dormouse into its open maw, but the dormouse simply dropped through and landed into a barrister’s starched wig, snoring all the while. Ada thought, Is that all that happens by walking into the mouth of doom?

  “For a creature with a magnificent wingspan, it doesn’t seem to be able to attain any useful altitude,” said the King of Hearts, diving flat upon the judge’s bench to avoid being taken for a ride.

  “Naturally,” said the Tin Ballerina. “Its wings are merely an armature. The air goes right through them, providing no lift. It needs skin, it needs an area of resistance. Like the cloth of a kite.”

  “I have just the thing,” said Ada. She took off her shoe and removed the seaweed cloak. It was none the worse for compression. As Ada began to unfold the triangle of material, she said, “Come here and behave; it’s time for you to knuckle down and accept correction. It’s for your own good, mark my words. You’ll never be much, but you can be better than you are now.” The sentiment wasn’t hers but Miss Armstrong’s, retailed of a morning after shucking Ada of her nightgown and submitting her to a brisk scrub. Hateful words, but they came in use now. The Jabberwock settled docilely enough upon the head of Humpty Dumpty, who held still and kept his eyes squeezed shut, pleading that the iron claws did not clench, or the yolk would be on him.

  “I’m fried,” he whimpered. “This is it. I’m finally cracking up. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t be able to put me back together again.”

  “Shhh,” said Ada. “Don’t worry. Why the King’s horses and men? I’m sure the Queen’s attendants are much more capable when it comes to managing eggs, but no one ever mentions them.” She nimbled upon the helmet of the White Knight and flung wide the unfolded cloak.

  “This will only take a moment,” she said to the Jabberwock. “There. That’s much better, don’t you agree?”

  The Jabberwock turned its head this way and that to regard its wings, newly fledged with seaweed. It fit perfectly, as if it were custom cut by a Parisian seamstress. Oysters in a crate began to shriek in joy and beg to be taken for a ride.

  “We’ve no time for that now,” she told the oysters. “Come, now, Jabberwock; we must be off.”

  “Must you leave so soon?” asked the White Rabbit. “Can’t you leave sooner?”

  “It’ll be as if I was never here at all,” promised Ada. She stood still. The Jabberwock came forward and settled itself around her. Ada buckled the strap about her neck and another about her waist. She fit her arms into the rings that clamped tight in her armpits. The Jabberwock had grown, but so had she, it seemed. The fit was even keener than it had been this morning. Of course, Ada was accustomed to being shucked into the apparatus below her clothing, and now it was overlaid, and public, like a suit of armor, but she had no intention of stripping to her smalls in a court of law, however deranged the audience.

  When she was properly corrected, she said to the White Rabbit, “You’re the time-­keeper here. What time is it?”

  He looked at his pocket-­watch. “It’s very late indeed.”

  “Then there is no time like the present to say good-­bye.” With this Ada flexed her new wings and pushed her way to the front of the room. Humpty Dumpty exhaled sulfurously. Ada knelt below the bust of the marble dodo. “Alice, my dear, it’s time to go home.”

  Her friend was breathing nicely enough. She didn’t stir. She was lost in some dream-­world. With the strength allowed by iron reinforcement, Ada reached down and collected Alice beneath her armpits. She hugged her close, as if she were a tender mother, or even an older sister, and Alice a child who had fallen asleep under the dining room table.

  Rising, Ada cast a glance toward the door to the garden, but the door was closed now, Siam behind it, and the sign that had said

  KEEP OUT.

  now said

  KEEP IN.

  and there was no longer a keyhole.

  Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight. Though usually a dreamer of commonplace notions, once in a while Ada had enjoyed dreams of flying. So she was hardly surprised to find herself not only capable but skilled at this exercise. The wings of her iron cage flexed mightily. She moved upward in a spiral, leaving behind without regret all those creatures, their idiocies and affections. She disobeyed earlier advice and looked up rather than down. She could see in the underside of the glass tabletop a reflection of the impossible wonderland, a looking-­glass simulacrum that could entice without either endangering or offering reward. On the other side, above the glass, which had widened to roof all of this underworld, rested the key. If she could leave with the key she could, perhaps, come back someday and rescue Siam. When he was ready to allow it.

  As she was pumping her iron wings to batter against the glass ceiling and claim the key for once and for all, a hoary old tench drifted above this world. He waggled his brown fins at her. He swallowed up the key, tag and all. He swam away.

  She felt a sudden rage. The ascent of the human creature—­one has to fight to be born, after all. She bashed against the glass with every ounce of her might. She would break through, she would. So she did, being a child with more force of intention that she’d previously allowed herself to acknowledge. The tabletop split with a jagged line. The glass shattered. An ocean of water rolled over Ada and Alice. Whatever was below the wave was lost to view. Anything that might be above it could not be imagined. There is a limit to the nonsense even a dream can attempt.

  CHAPTER 49

  Gasping for air, Ada pulled Alice safely into the shallows. The bank was low. Though Alice was limp and heavy, Ada felt in herself the strength that accompanies terror. She saw Lydia still sitting by the tree, though the light had shifted across horizons, and the air had lost its morning warmth. Lydia had nodded off over a boring text. Good. The tracks of a few tears showed on her cheek. Ada was able to hoist Alice the several feet to the trunk of the tree. Alice murmured something that Ada couldn’t quite make out, but Alice’s voice even in nonsense syllables sounded like herself. Ada believed she would be all right.

  She turned to look in the river to see if she could find that damnable tench. If he was in there, taunting her, she would come back another day with a fishing pole and a handful of bait stolen from the larder. She’d go to work to rescue Siam. There was always a key somewhere. One only needed to know where to start looking.

  For a moment the river seemed to cease its endless motion. Perhaps Ada was having a dizzy spell of some sort. She leaned over the surface, which was as still as a waxed tabletop. She caught sight of her bemused face. Her hair was drenched and bedraggled. She had lost the perfect form of the ringlets that Miss Armstrong always tortured into her hair. But a fierce light rain was beginning to fall (no matter what Darwin had predicted). Ada would seem only to have got caught in a downburst.

  She glanced back. Alice was already beginning to stir. She had crawled nearer and placed her head in her sister’s lap, and murmured her sister’s name. In her own somnolence, Lydia had let her hand fall over Alice’s outrageous brow, comforting.

  Ada looked back at her reflection again, to see if she could find on her face any trace of what she had been through, the details of which were beginning to fade. She could not. All she could see, drifting in the water now like the wreck of a dressmaker’s dummy, were the struts and buckles of her closest companion, drowned for good. If it had once worn a seaweed skin, all that was dissolved away.

  She left it there. She straightened up—­straighter than she’d ever managed before—­and wondered which way in this fantastic world to turn.

  A girl, even a clumsy one, who had managed to rescue her best friend might prove qualified to serve as a big sister.

  A white rabbit hopped out from a stand of grass. It was that hour when rabbits fee
d, though they don’t often come out in the damp. It twitched at something appealing, but then turned to look at Ada. It had no waistcoat or pocket-­watch. Still, it stood upright, as if a lone member of some honor guard. Then, without possible doubt, the rabbit pointed at the path toward Alice’s home.

  So Ada gave a curtsey, the first real curtsey she’d ever managed in her life, and set off at a startling clip to surprise Mr. Clowd and Mrs. Brummidge, and whomever else might be lingering at the Croft of a summer evening, and to apologize for having lost a gift of marmalade, somehow, along the way.

  CHAPTER 50

  Darwin had nodded off at the rocking of the train. When he woke up, he guessed they were nearing Paddington. London was purple in the midsummer gloaming, so its lamplights, just being lit, made a fever rash of amber sparks. He glanced at Josiah Winter, the only other traveler in the cabin. The American was distraught, picking at his nails. Darwin knew about fretfulness as well as he knew about anything else. To distract the poor fellow from whatever he was suffering, Darwin made a remark. The noise of the train wheels muffled it.

  “I beg your pardon? Did you refer to a catastrophe?” asked Mr. Winter. “Or epiphany?—­I misheard.”

  “I was musing on the notion of a cataphany.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Cataphany. My own word, from the Greek cata, meaning down, and phantazein, to make visible. Also the root of fantasy, don’t you know. Cataphany: an insight, a revelation of underness. The findings of Odysseus in Hades, interviewing the shade of Achilles. Or Gilgamesh, hunting Enkidu. Or even, meaning no disrespect, the Christ arising after three days in Hell. What sort of revelation can occur in perfect dark? What would Eurydice tell us if Orpheus had been able to bring her back?”

  Winter gave a shrug, looked away. A sequence of lights and darks played across his shuttered face. He shuffled a few ha’pence in one hand. A sound like small jangling keys, or the links of a slack chain falling upon one another.

  The elderly man continued, out of mercy and out of curiosity, for that was what he was like. “Let me put it more scientifically. If separate species develop skills that help them survive, and if those attributes are favored which best benefit the individual and its native population, to what possible end might we suppose has arisen, Mr. Winter, that particular capacity of the human being known as the imagination?”

  —­finis—­

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GREGORY MAGUIRE is the New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister; Lost; Mirror Mirror; and the Wicked Years, a series that includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz. Now a beloved classic, Wicked is the basis for a blockbuster Tony Award–winning Broadway musical. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  www.gregorymaguire.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY GREGORY MAGUIRE

  Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

  Mirror Mirror

  Lost

  Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation

  Matchless

  The Next Queen of Heaven

  Books in the Wicked Years

  Wicked

  Son of a Witch

  A Lion Among Men

  Out of Oz

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Adam Johnson

  Cover illustrations: cup, c. 1899, courtesy of the Winterthur Museum Library; map, c. 1824, courtesy of the British Library; rabbit, 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; woman, c. 1877, courtesy of Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

  COPYRIGHT

  AFTER ALICE. Copyright © 2015 by Gregory Maguire. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-­0-­06-­054895-­7

  EPub Edition OCTOBER 2015 ISBN 9780062410825

  15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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