by Liz Braswell
He let go.
She went flying back, smashing into the stone wall of a house behind her.
As the world went dark, Alice noticed that just beyond the little fern she had so admired was a green and gloriously exuberant garden.
Gardens weren’t at all unusual in Kexford—except in this part of Kexford, and this kind of garden. Anyone would have blinked twice and fallen in love with it; the perfection of detail, the exuberance of the flowers, the color of the leaves, the precise yet natural placement of the vines, the bright paint on the house, the neat little cabbages in their artfully dishabille cold frames. Alice immediately saw it for what it was: Wonderland.
And familiar Wonderland at that.
“Why, it’s the White Rabbit’s house!” she declared.
She put her hand thoughtlessly to her neck, and then head—had they hurt a moment ago? Had she suffered a headache? Whatever, it was all gone now.
And then seven-year-old Alice remembered she was now eighteen-year-old Alice, and this was no harmless little white rabbit: he was a Queensman. “But then again,” Alice said to herself, “he didn’t seem so harmless back then, either. Why, when he ordered me to fetch his gloves, thinking I was Mary Ann, I went and looked for them just like that! Scared to disobey.”
But there were other differences in the two visits besides Alice’s age and attitude: red heart card guards marched around, looking important and deadly in helmets that revealed only glowing red points instead of eyes. Fortifications had been erected around the house that were not there last time; a new wall here and a sandbag there, all befitting someone important and indispensable to a queen at War.
“Why am I here?” Alice wondered.
She had thought that if she made it back to Wonderland she would be returned to the place where she had been plucked so suddenly and horribly from her friends—the battle at the Grunderound. She had prepared herself to go back and face whatever had happened, to rescue those who hadn’t made it out—and seek vengeance for those who didn’t make it out alive.
Here, except for the soldiers and the walls, all was bright sunshine and peace: no real clues or revelation about the War currently being waged.
“Also, the last time I was here, I was the size of a rabbit, or a lizard, and then suddenly the size of a giant, and became stuck in the house. Poor old Bill! I hope he didn’t get captured by the cards. He always has the worst luck.”
Alice looked down at herself and then back at the house: she seemed to be about the right size to enter it. Old Alice wouldn’t have thought twice about this, but now-Alice wondered if this was on purpose—if she was meant to go into the house. Or were there soldiers waiting for her inside? Old Alice also would have gone up the front steps immediately and knocked—or even entered directly without knocking, perhaps feeling a little naughty but mostly adventurous.
“I think I’ll at least evade the guards,” now-Alice decided.
This proved to not be very hard at all.
Much like Tweedles Dum and Dee fighting over a rattle, despite looking scary, the guards were very close to being useless. They marched stylishly and loudly around the house clockwise and widdershins and occasionally slammed into each other—perhaps because it was almost impossible to see out of their fearsome helmets.
Alice waited to make her move until a collision occurred on the side of the house away from her (she couldn’t see it but heard the clang of the helmets and muttered swears). Tiptoeing quickly she let herself through the kitchen door—which was almost heartbreaking in its fine carpentry and snugness. There was a tiny heart-shaped window set in the middle, glazed in red glass.
Inside there were cookies freshly iced and sitting on a pan with the words EAT ME piped on them. More out of habit than anything else Alice grabbed a couple and stuffed them into her pockets. The murmurings of a housekeeper or chef rose and fell from the pantry, so Alice quickly moved on.
She still wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for. Gloves? Bill? War plans she could steal and thus figure out some sort of counterattack? Unlikely. Alice had no experience in the military, as said, and she was fairly certain Wonderlandians didn’t work in such a logical, tactical fashion anyway.
What she did find was the Dodo.
He was chained up in a small study, certainly not the most uncomfortable of prisons. There was a soft rug and a cheery fire. It was as if the White Rabbit had no real idea of the proper way to go about treating treasonous criminals. The poor bird was perched on the floor, legs drawn up under him, looking bedraggled and tired. There was a gash across one of his eyes, and his wings were folded tight against his body in a far more avian fashion than the creature generally held himself. He had lost some tail feathers and his jacket was torn and missing buttons.
“Oh, Dodo!” Alice whispered in dismay, rushing over to him.
“Alice!” The Dodo brightened. “I knew you would come! I said so. And here you are.”
“Shh. Let’s see if we can get you out of this,” she said, pulling at the cruel iron chain. The cuff was solid enough and sized perfectly for the Dodo’s leg, not too tight but not able to slip off, either. There was a heart-shaped keyhole on the side that would of course require the usual Wonderland search for an iron key (with a heart on it as well, no doubt). Alice would bet her camera that the key would be hanging around the Rabbit’s neck on a tiny and delicate version of the iron chain around the Dodo’s leg. Or dangling from a high bookshelf, or…
“We haven’t time for that nonsense,” Alice murmured, pulling out one of her purloined biscuits and gulping it down. Then she put a hand on either side of the iron cuff and gently pulled her hands apart.
The metal expanded under her touch, and the wondering Dodo easily slipped his foot out of it.
“Astounding!” the Dodo said, shaking his legs out.
“Where’s the Hatter?” Alice whispered.
“I don’t know. He ran a different direction than I. There was quite a flummoxing when the cards—”
“Is there anyone else locked up here?” Alice pressed, not wanting to get into a long Wonderlandy conversation while they were in danger of being discovered.
“No, just me. I was the only one they brought here,” the Dodo said, a little mournfully. “I insisted on parole—on meeting with the White Rabbit. Bill was with me at first, but the housekeeper helped him get away.”
Well, that made a certain amount of sense; he used to work here, of course. And poor old Bill certainly deserved a break after all he had been through.
Alice looked out the window. The guards were changing. She cursed herself for missing the advantage of the very ritualized moment that was taking up so much time.
“We’ll have to sneak out the front—immediately, I’m afraid. Come on.” Alice took the Dodo’s wing and led him as quietly as possible down the hall. The house, she couldn’t help noticing, was just the right size for her in her present form, but not proportionately; it was built for a rabbit’s movements and habits. Doors were fatter, rounder, and shorter. There were lovely paintings of carrots and dill artfully arranged on the lettuce-print wallpaper along with the usual long-eared silhouettes. Lovely little velvet King Louis chairs were more like tuffets for resting on with all (four) of your legs pulled up under you.
They passed a delicate set of curling wooden steps, and Alice could have sworn she heard a whimpering from upstairs; a sad, mournful sound much like the Mock Turtle had made.
“There’s another prisoner,” she whispered to the Dodo. “You go on ahead. I’ll meet you by the hedgerow just outside the gate.”
The Dodo saluted and Alice had the funny thought of replacing his long-lost wig with a captain’s hat.
She tiptoed up a flight of stairs that were honey-colored and thick and didn’t creak at all. The part of her that still liked dolls ached for a house like this. Every decoration was well thought out; care had been taken in each last detail. The tiny window on the stairwell hadn’t a speck of dust and the paint was
recent.
She remembered the bedroom where she had searched for the Rabbit’s gloves, and where she had grown too big and become stuck—that seemed to be the place where the sobbing was coming from. She stepped forward as quietly as she could and peeped around the doorframe.
It was the White Rabbit who sat there, weeping.
“Mary Ann,” he moaned over a pair of white gloves. “You didn’t deserve that. Oh, Mary Ann…”
Crying was a tricky business for the White Rabbit: tears rolled out of his eyes and then got caught up on his whiskers, sometimes flowing down them, causing them to droop and then spring up in an undignified fashion when the tears finally splashed to the floor. But sometimes they flowed back toward his face and matted down the fur there.
The gentlemanly little rabbit, still in the fancy waistcoat—now he also had an armband with a heart patch on it, and what looked like a tiny medal of valor—looked a damn mess.
“I should throttle you where you sit,” Alice found herself saying aloud, despite her surprise at his reaction to the girl’s unhappy fate.
The Rabbit looked up at her with the mindless surprise of a normal lagomorph: red eyes wide and dead, ears up, paws down. Just like one of his wild cousins right before it decides to bolt.
“I should have your skin for a muff,” she added, shocking herself but meaning every word as she advanced. Fury freed her from any fear of stupid card soldiers and consequences.
The White Rabbit seemed to regain his sentience; he settled back into a slump of despair.
“I would deserve it,” he murmured.
Alice blinked in surprise.
“I was only trying to do what was best. I was only trying to end this nonsense, this madness. The sooner it’s all over the better,” he said, waving a tired paw. But his voice had regained some of its irritating officiousness. “I didn’t think she would get involved. She only need have waited for the End of Time. I was speeding the Queen along. We already had so many toys…. The end is so close—”
“So many toys? You mean like dolls?” Alice interrupted. The Cheshire’s riddle…and the brush-child-thing at the Grunderound…Dolls and toys and more dolls! “What are you going on about, Rabbit? The Queen is destroying everything in Wonderland and taking all the toys for herself? Why?”
“She wants all the toys, the most toys, of course. What else would you expect from the Queen of Hearts?” he said miserably. “I am helping her…acquire them. Sometimes there is resistance.”
“What a terrible rabbit you are,” Alice said, wondering if these words had ever been said in English (or any language) before.
“Take the Dodo and go,” the White Rabbit said tonelessly, not paying much attention to her. He stroked the little white gloves. “I shall have to call the guards soon enough.”
Alice backed out of the doorway, a little shaken by his strange words and behavior. But before she left she saw that she had been right: there was indeed a fine black iron chain around his neck, on which hung a key with a heart-shaped bow on the end of its shank.
The Dodo, bless him, was right where she told him to be. It was strangely surprising.
“All right then,” Alice said, hunkering down in the hazel next to him. “Tell me what happened back at the Grunderound when I disappeared! Was anyone else captured? Was anyone hurt?”
“Oh, there were many people hurt,” the Dodo said mournfully. “Although perhaps rather fewer than could have been. The soldiers were very surprised by your sudden disappearance. So surprised, in fact, that they sort of marched into each other and fell into a terribly messy pile. Cards, you know. Terrifying in numbers, especially the higher suits, but a bit of a disaster at times.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Alice said with feeling. “I never meant to leave you, you know—I was pulled away. Just like last time, when I thought it was all a dream.”
“I know,” the Dodo said, a little sadly, looking up into her eyes. “You have a whole other world to worry about, besides our little Wonderland.”
“Well, I don’t know if…” Alice started to correct him about her importance in that other world, much less this one, and then decided it wasn’t worth the conversation right then. What a funny idea the creatures here had of her, though! It seemed like they could only think of Alice as a silly, useless girl who knew none of the rules of living here—or as some sort of replacement savior. Nothing in between. “What happened to the Hatter? And the Gryphon? And the Dormouse?”
“The Gryphon fought, raking his mighty claws at the enemy,” the Dodo said, eyes lighting up at the memory. “Gosh, he was glorious. I think he tore several cards clean in half. The Dormouse was still on the chandelier, I believe, when it fell. The Hatter—”
Alice’s heart clenched.
“The Hatter tried to get all the wounded and children to safety,” the Dodo said with a sigh. “I don’t know what happened finally, but he was leading a group to the exit. Had a dish and spoon riding on his shoulders last I saw.
“But I knew you would need help assembling your army, now that you’re our leader.”
“Indeed,” Alice said, kissing him above the beak. “Good, loyal Dodo. Thank you so much for your perhaps undeserved trust in me—but how did you know I would wind up here?”
The Dodo shrugged.
“You…Mary Ann…the White Rabbit. You’re all tangled.”
Alice sighed. Of course. Wonderland logic.
“I don’t think I have any of the skills the poor departed Mary Ann had for organizing Wonderland creatures and calling them to arms; it was utter chaos in the Grunderound just taking care of the wounded.”
“We are all very independently minded,” the Dodo said with a sniff. “When you identify as a Dodo, you are Dodo all the way. Auks just can’t understand things from your point of view. I mean, they can, better than, say, whales, but they still do not truly know what it is like to be a Dodo. We have our own special needs and issues.”
Alice rubbed her head. Perhaps this was what Coney was really afraid of—Kexford being overrun with a thousand different exotic ideas and votes. Caucus races, indeed. Still, it was a democracy; all viewpoints were supposed to be welcome.
“Except for the cards,” he added darkly. “They are all too easily organized into nasty packs.”
“Yes,” Alice said with a sigh. “If only we could harness that for good.”
Then she suddenly remembered: the picture of Mrs. Yao! The queen, dark and beautiful, bearing a club. A queen of clubs.
“Dodo! Tell me about the other suits—the Queen of Clubs, in particular.”
“Oh, she is a fierce and respectable ruler,” the Dodo said, preening his chest a little in thought. “She and the Queen of Hearts have come to blows a thousand times—border skirmishes—but they always manage to avoid a serious game of War in the end. It would be bloody indeed if they didn’t.”
“Do you think she would help us?”
The Dodo looked dubious. “The Queen of Hearts is conducting a campaign against her own people. Why would the Queen of Clubs get involved?”
“Because she’s a good card?” Alice suggested hopefully.
“Well, I don’t see much other choice,” the Dodo conceded. “And we don’t have the Hatter and his good sense to guide us. Since he lost his Nonsense, I mean; it really was a bit of a silver lining.”
“Hatter…? Good sense…?” Alice said wonderingly. Imagine a world where the Mad Hatter was considered a reasonable and wise fellow! But perhaps in his own way he had a keener idea of what worked and didn’t in Wonderland. “Dear old Dodo. Let us go find the Queen of Clubs, then.”
“Dance, dance!” the Dodo suddenly cried, leaping up and cavorting away without even looking back to see if she were coming.
“What! What are you doing? Have the guards found us?” Alice asked in fright, running after him.
But…it wasn’t proper running.
It was like Alice was running, but at the same time it was all too sleepy and dreamy to be runn
ing. She watched the shape of her legs under her voluminous skirt with something like wonder: they pumped and moved the way they should have had she been actually running in fright, but so slowly…like she was moving through treacle.
She looked around and the landscape seemed to lean forward a bit, objects closer to her blurred as if they really wanted her to run, to be caught up in her tailwind, to finish the reality that her feet were suggesting.
And yet she hadn’t moved an inch from her place.
“That’s no good!” the Dodo scolded as he bowed and did a pirouette. “DANCE!”
“But we’re not getting anywhere!” Alice complained. She risked a look behind her. A four and seven of hearts had just noticed the attempted escape and were reacting—very, very slowly.
The Dodo began flapping his left wing while clutching his chest with his right one. “Dance! Or we’re done for!” he panted.
Well, running wasn’t working and this was Wonderland, so why not dance?
Alice spun, feeling a little ridiculous, hand up as if an invisible partner were leading.
The Dodo’s footsteps beat in time.
One, two, if I were you
I’d pick up bricks and put ’em in the mix
A chair, a doe, an isinglass bowl,
Dance the Hob to pay for the toll
Three, four, dance till you’re sore
Waltz on nubs to the Queen of Clubs
A mile, a road, we won’t be slowed
Until we get to the Queen’s abode!
The Dodo was also spinning now, opposite her. She grabbed his wing tips and the two pirouetted along, faster and faster until the force of their spinning flung them apart and sent them tumbling down a hill.
Alice was laughing like a little girl, feet flying overhead, rolling harmlessly through warm, soft grass. This was Wonderland at its finest. Dancing from danger and potential death and winding up enjoying a perfect summer day from childhood. She sat up and looked around: of course the White Rabbit’s house was gone. The Dodo was carefully getting up and dusting himself off very punctiliously, picking prickly seed heads out of his jacket.