by Liz Braswell
“What’s that she’s got?”
“An egg? Is it her egg?”
“Can human girls lay eggs, too?”
“No, but they eat them!”
“Lord sakes! IS SHE GOING TO EAT THAT EGG?”
“What’s that on it?”
“Why, it’s an egg in the suit of Clubs!”
“She speaks for the birds!”
“I’ll follow that egg anywhere!”
“Down with the Queen of Hearts! Down with the Queen of Hearts!”
“Hooray for the Quack of Clubs!”
“FREEDOM!”
As they shouted and Alice held the egg, club side out, a crack appeared in its side.
The crack grew and grew like lightning over a field with a distant horizon, when you can see the whole bolt crackling from end to end. Its points divided and divided and became more cracks until the egg was riddled with them and the shell was more like a jigsaw puzzle than a solid surface.
Suddenly it exploded.
A white owl, adult, fully formed, complete with an accordion neck, took off directly into the sky as if winging its way to the sun. It hovered for a moment high up, sweeping its wings while scoping out the crowd and feeling the wind. Then it swooped away, off in the direction of the Unlikely.
The crowd oohed and aahed and gasped.
“So that’s how that works,” Alice observed, watching it go.
“It can’t be that easy…” she added, tearing her eyes from the sky and resettling them on the crowd. Birds were talking excitedly, arguing viciously, taking great gulps of lemonade, and affixing various pins to their feathers. Some of the brooches were of hearts, some clubs, some rabbits, some funny-looking question marks that looked like they were cut through with an exclamation point. Some, worn by the most decadent, old, or philosophical, showed an image of a clock with the minute hand approaching thirteen.
“Let’s go find the Dodo. We must be right behind him,” the Hatter said, but whether or not he was responding to her thought she couldn’t tell. “I’ll bet the Gryphon’s with him, too. They both have wings, you know.”
“But if the Queen of Clubs is being summoned, or told, by that bird thing, then she will be on her way very soon with her army. Directly to the Queen of Hearts’ castle, I presume, to wage war there. We should continue in that direction, spreading word and raising support and then helping the Queen of Clubs any way we can.”
“I was afraid you would say something like that,” the Hatter moaned.
The two (three with the Dormouse) quietly slipped out the back way of Ornithsiville.
“I very much would like to avoid the Forest of Forgetting,” Alice said. “We should go more directly across that checkered plain.”
“As you wish,” the Hatter sighed.
They drew away from the bird village and closer to the castle, taking Alice’s journey backward, and the landscape and environment began to change. Immediately, of course, not with the slow progression of colors and geography one might be used to in a world more like Angleland. And as she walked through this shifting landscape Alice realized she hadn’t asked the Hatter to lead, or even troubled about how to get there. All actions and signs—some quite literally—pointed to the Queen of Hearts. That was where the next, hopefully final, confrontation between everyone was to be. So of course Wonderland would take Alice there.
She wondered what it would have been like to grow up as Mary Ann, used to traveling by inevitability. It had taken three visits for Alice to get the hang of it.
The checkered plain came fast and quick but now it was dead and dusty. The red paint had completely coated and dried on the bushes and grass, killing the plants entirely and rendering them into bony, crimson blots on the landscape. The sky was dark with bloody red smoke and the air had a pungent thickness to it. Ugly embers danced in the upper reaches, around and down and only eventually out, like malevolent demons from books in Alice’s world. Like nothing at all from Wonderland.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” the Hatter said despite being unable to turn away.
Alice found herself filled with a sort dread that she had rarely experienced since she was a child: a fear of even greater terror to come, of the future punishment from the other parent after the first one has yelled, promising worse later.
She took the Hatter’s hand and he squeezed hers back, a little absently, but hard. They walked silently like a very grim Hansel and Gretel into the desolate landscape.
Far too soon they came upon the cause of such rank pollution.
Blocking out the sunlight and sending the land around them into shadow were giant piles of things smoldering and burning and releasing great oily red billows.
Covering her mouth with her hand and trying to breathe only through her nose, Alice approached the closest heap. She thought they would be toys—which, admittedly, didn’t make sense because the Queen had to actually have functioning ones to win (she assumed). But what sense was there in anything now in Heartland?
In fact the things on fire were everything but toys. Chairs, bicycles, teakettles, pencils, baby blankets, eyeglasses, plum puddings, lamp glass, bricks, pantaloons, cupboards, snuffboxes, policemen’s hats, loaves of day-old raisin bread, saddles, stoops and stairways, leather bags, bonnets, stamps from printing presses…everything and anything Alice could name was mounded into these giant, endless piles of burning rubbish.
The Hatter looked and poked at the pile interestedly; even the Dormouse stuck his head out and pointed at a silver teaspoon that shone a bit in the flames. The Hatter dutifully picked it out (wrapping his hand in his muff first) and handed it to his companion, who sighed in delight and promptly went back to sleep, cradling it for warmth.
Rushing around the base of these hills were giant ants pushing soiled red carts. Using some reason or logic or pattern known only to herself, each would reach into a cart, pick up an object—feelers moving about in the air as if receiving signals on what to do—and then fling it onto a particular bonfire.
Suddenly one of the smaller ants began gesticulating wildly with her feelers and arms.
I got one! I got one!
Alice put her hands to her temples, not meant to receive that kind of communication. It hurt. The Hatter pulled his hat all the way down over his head.
A dozen other ants rushed over to this crying one, their feelers flurrying.
The ant held up her find: a tiny doll missing its head.
Rubbish is it rubbish
Is it a toy
Is it a doll without a head a doll
Is it something to play with
It is if a brother popped the head off
Is it still a game?
No matter, look! the first ant said, triumphantly digging around her cart some more and holding up a tiny thing covered in hair. Here is the head! It is a doll, by any definition! A toy!
A toy a toy a toy! all the other ones joined in.
Clacking her mandibles with glee, the ant rushed away, holding the toy aloft.
Immediately the other ants clambered up the side of her cart and began methodically going through the rest of her stuff to see if there was more luck, if there were more toys.
“That’s very clever, I suppose,” Alice said, taking the Hatter and drawing the two of them back away from the uncomfortably large insects. “Using ants to sort through everything. Like the fairy tale about the princess spreading the sacks of grain out over grass and making a poor suitor try to find them all and refill the sacks—and some friendly ants doing the job for him.”
“Certainly, except the headless doll was horrible, and the giant ants are horrible, and all of this is horrible.”
The Hatter pointed. There was a slowly charring skeleton in one of the piles and Alice couldn’t say for certain whether it was a corpse or a model from a scholar’s laboratory.
The rubble shifted as something finally collapsed, too charred to hold weight any longer, causing the skeleton to turn slightly, as if it was lookin
g at Alice.
“Oh,” Alice said, spinning away and swallowing, trying not to throw up. But as shocked as she was, she was more worried about the Hatter, who looked grim and impassive. He was straightening out again, taller, with a smaller hat and head.
“Ever have a Flying Butterscotch?” she asked quickly.
“No, what’s a—”
Alice took out a sweet and lobbed it at his head. It hit the rim of his hat and fell down—right into his open mouth, which he readied just in time.
“To the castle!” Alice said brightly, popping another candy into her own mouth. She closed one eye and moved her hand as if to brush the burning pile away…and so it slid into the background improbably and unnoticeably, a trick of the eye made real.
“To the castle!” the Hatter agreed, sucking on the candy and taking her hand again and skipping. Alice was on the point of telling him not to skip with a sweet in his mouth, for he might choke—but wisely decided not to.
(It was good she had kept that packet of sweets. Just like someone had told her—who was it? Always keep a packet of sweets on you? One’s life might depend on it? She couldn’t quite remember….)
The ants took no notice of them, just as they wouldn’t in the real world unless a mischievous younger Alice had put an obstacle in their line of progress: a rock or a bit of honey, say. When the two companions made any effort at all to look at the carts or bits being sorted they both tried to keep their observations light. “That’s an unusually shaped ottoman” or “My aunt used to have an eggbeater like that.” Otherwise their progress was mostly silent amongst the rubbish heaps except for the clicking sound of the ants.
Then a strange feeling began to come over Alice. A creepy-crawly scared one—and oddly, it had nothing to do with the ants.
She spun around to regard the desolation behind her. It was like being at a fancy, crowded party and something was stepping on her dress. Or was about to.
“What are you doing?” the Hatter demanded the third time she stopped. “You’re as nervous as a tove pup in a blanderpatch.”
“I feel like we’re being followed,” Alice admitted, once again turning around and scanning the horizon. The Hatter looked with her, but all they could see were the mindless ants.
“There’s nothing behind us at all,” the Hatter said.
“That’s because your death is in front of you,” came a whispery dry voice.
Alice spun back around.
There stood a skeleton, closely resembling the skeleton from the burning pile of rubble before: there were char marks on his bones here and there. Perhaps it had been him. On a closer look he was strangely angular, with dead geodesic eyes and an upside-down trapezoid for a skull. Also he seemed…flat. Thinner than a card even when he curled around to draw his sword, an evil-looking half scissor. The hole where his nose would have been was the only part of him that was curved; it looked like an upside-down heart.
“The Card Cutter,” the Hatter whispered, his voice thick with fear.
“Hello,” Alice said with a little curtsy. “We’re just on our way through, if you don’t mind….”
“But I do mind,” the skeleton said, inching closer. Its flat and bony toes made tiny clink sounds against the ground. “I am the evener of odds. I make all games fair. I am the great equalizer. I wipe out cheating advantages. I am here for you.”
“Whatever for?” Alice demanded, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I never cheat. Much. Anymore. I’m an adult, not a child.”
“You are definitely trying to cheat, little Alice. You are bringing a whole new deck into this game. It’s not fair for the Hearts.”
“I beg your pardon!” Alice said. “Your Queen has all the weapons, all the soldiers, all the armies, all the power, all the toys—”
“Not all the toys, yet,” the skeleton interrupted. “Soon.”
“—all the roads and towns and prisons and jails and garrotes against the hapless folk of Heartland, and you accuse me of cheating because I want to even the odds? By bringing in an equally powerful ally?”
“She was not in the game at the beginning, when the rules were called,” the skeleton said, shifting his stance and grip on the scissor half.
“There was never any precise beginning to this madness, and no one ever called out the rules!”
“So you say.”
“It sounds to me like you are just rationalizing whatever reason you were sent after me,” Alice snapped. “Or you can only do as you are meant to, and the Queen of Hearts somehow twisted the words and rules around to make you think this is the right thing. When really—”
But whatever she was going to say next, probably some handy bit of Alice wisdom, was cut off as the Card Cutter suddenly and silently brought his scissor-scythe down at her head.
The Hatter yanked Alice out of the way.
But not quite out of the way.
For one seemingly endless, silent moment she saw a neat triangle of cloth break free from her trousers and drift to and fro toward the ground. A short lock of hair, no more than a comma of blond, followed. Already on the dirt was a scrap of Alice’s shoe leather, the precise color and shape of a trimmed nail that has fallen to the floor—but larger.
“ALICE!” the Hatter roared, pushing her away again.
Time restarted. The Card Cutter swung, the scissor half this time going snicker-snack despite the absence of its opposite twin.
Alice twirled out of the way hysterically, unsure what to do. There had only ever been one real fight between her and Mathilda, and that had involved hair pulling.
“Do something!” the Hatter hissed.
“Unfair—” Alice cried as the scissor half clanged down again on the road next to her, temporarily sticking itself between two cobbles. Without a grunt or a huff or any sound at all, the too-thin skeleton bent himself upon freeing it. Alice stumbled up and jabbed her hands in her pockets, but panicking fingers couldn’t manage to find the packet of sweets now.
So it really seemed like a good time to—
“Run!” she cried, grabbing the Hatter by the hand. No fighters, they. It was survival, not cowardice.
They barreled down the path around and past the skeleton; what little sense Alice kept made her choose to at least run away in the direction of their eventual destination. The Hatter’s legs were much shorter than hers now and he had a hard time trying to keep up—especially with one hand on his gigantic hat.
Although her own heartbeats and breath were loud and fear seemed to make a noise of its own, after a little while Alice couldn’t hear anything else at all. The only sounds in the world around her were things crackling and shifting in the burning piles of rubble. There was no hint of pursuit, there was no swish of the scissor half.
Alice was torn. On the one hand: Excitement! Had they really evaded their attacker so easily?
And on the other: Unease. Had he let them go because they were heading into the lion’s den, as it were? Closer to the castle?
Should they have danced away instead?
But her emotions were quickly settled by a discarded and dirty card blown by the wind; it arced overhead and drifted down in front of her.
The Card Cutter rose up, brandishing his scissor half triumphantly.
Alice and the Hatter stopped their forward momentum just in time.
“You cannot escape equity,” the skeleton said with a broad bony grin. “Fairness comes for everyone in the end; everyone becomes food for the worms, equally. This world is almost over. Consider yourselves the lucky forerunners into the next.”
Alice turned to run again.
“We cannot escape him,” the Hatter hissed madly, teeth chattering with fear. “He can go anywhere—appear anywhere. He cuts down cards wherever they are. He is unstoppable.”
“I’m not a card!” Alice cried, both to him and the skeleton.
The skeleton made a mocking little half bow. “Yet you look like you are trying to become a queen; you play in the Queens’ Games.”
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He suddenly lunged forward, twirling his weapon and bringing it horizontal this time, intending to cut the two friends in twain.
The Hatter and Alice ducked.
The top of his giant hat was lopped off.
“My hat!” the Hatter cried, grabbing it on either side of its brim. Alice pushed him out of the path of the skeleton’s riposte: having spun all the way around, swooping his weapon out like a scythe, he let it continue its momentum up and over his ivory shoulder only to come straight back down on top of the two.
“Alice!” the Dormouse cried, popping out the top of the Hatter’s sad hat. “The sweets! EAT THEM!”
Alice dug desperately into her pockets again—but was so distracted she wound up tripping over her own feet. She stumbled and fell into the dust and dried paint, hitting her head against the Hatter’s shoe.
She did manage to pull out a single candy, a licorice, and pop it in her mouth.
Her tongue recoiled from the hated taste. She forced herself to swallow.
Her view of the sky was cut off by a grinning skull: the skeleton took one strangely delicate-seeming foot and kicked the Hatter away from Alice. The poor man went flying.
The Card Cutter raised his scissor half into the air; it sparkled prettily, golden and sharp.
“You shut up like a telescope,” Alice whispered, holding out her hand and seeming to catch his skull between her thumb and finger. She squeezed them together like she was crushing his head.
There was a terrible sound that must have been bone on bone: grinding and squeaking and sandpaper grit like teeth forced to do something they shouldn’t.
Whether the skull became small and fell off its neck, rendering the skeleton deceased; or whether it stayed on but the whole thing was such a drastic and sudden change that the skeleton couldn’t cope; or whether whatever it had for a brain or soul shrank into uselessness along with its cranial protection, Alice never found out.
Its arms were still moving, caught in the middle of its last blow, and the scissor half came down squarely into her Heart.
“Alice!” the Hatter cried.
“It’s funny,” she thought, looking at the scissor half that stuck up out of whatever you called the part of your body that was sort of between the ribs. The fleshy, lumpy, beating bit.