THE VERY FIRST thing Olive did was look behind her. There was dear, familiar, batty old Fuss Antonym’s wall—but it was no longer dear or familiar at all, and quite a bit battier. Instead of storm-slashed whitewash, the house sported a shimmering blackwash, roofed with overturned tea-saucers, and crawling with a sort of luminous ivy peppered with great, blowy hibiscus flowers in a hundred comic-book colours. She had come through the middle window in a row of three. On the other side of the window, she could still see the parlour, the mustard-coloured chair, the painting of the shepherdess and the black sheep, the peeling moulding, the chilled grey afternoon peeking in past the curtains on the ordinary wall opposite. All right, yes, fine, Olive told herself, half-terrified, half-irritated. This sort of thing happens when you’ve gone mad. It’s nothing to get tizzy over. You’ve sniffed too much silver polish, that’s all. Might as well enjoy it! The other side of the looking glass was a window, and the other side of the house was a deep night, and a deep summer, and a deep forest, deep and hot and sticky and bright.
Olive’s knees abandoned her. She tumbled down onto a new, savage, harlequin earth. She was going to have a tizzy, after all. For God’s sake, Olive! She plunged her knuckles into the alien ground. Even the soil sparkled. Hot mud squelched between her fingers, streaked with glittering grime like liquefied opals. An infinite jungley tangle spread out before her, and it simply refused to not be there, no matter how Olive tried to make it stop being there. A path tumbled down the hillocks and shallows, away into rose-jet shadows and emerald-coal mists. Delicate wood-mushrooms curled up everywhere like flowers in a busy garden: chartreuse chanterelles, fuchsia toadstools, azure puffballs.
Something was moving down there, down the path, between the mushrooms and the ferns and the trees no prim Latin taxonomy could pin down. Something pale. Something rather loud. And, just possibly, not one something alone, but three somethings together. There is nothing for a tizzy like a something, and before she could tell herself sensibly to stay close to home, no matter how odd and unhomelike home had suddenly become, Olive was off down the path and through the garden of night fungus, chasing three hard, pale, loud voices through the dark.
“You’re such an awful brat,” growled something just ahead. “I don’t know why we trouble ourselves with you at all.”
“And deadly boring, to ice the cake,” sniffed something else. “Why even tell a riddle if you don’t have any earthly intention of answering it for anybody? It’s not sporting, that’s what.”
“I think it’s jolly sporting,” crowed a third something. “For me.”
“A raven isn’t like a writing desk. You can smirk all you like, but that’s the truth and I hate you. It just isn’t, in any sort of way that makes sense—” the second something spluttered.
“The farthing you go for sense, the furthing you are from the pound,” the third something said loftily.
“Do shut up,” snarled the first something.
Olive rounded a bank of birch stumps and mauve moss wriggling in such a way that she absolutely did not want to look any closer—and yet she did, for that was a something, too. The moss wasn’t wriggling at all, rather, hundreds of silkworms wriggled while they feasted on it. Only these were actually silkworms—not ugly blind little scraps of beef suet, but creatures made up entirely of rich, embroidered silk brocade, fat as a rich lady, writhing greedily over the bank. Olive shuddered, and in her shuddering, nearly toppled over the somethings she’d been after.
In a clearing in the wood stood three hacked-off marble capitals, the sort meant to crown pillars in a grand bank or Hungarian cathedral. Her capitals. The very ones that hung so stupidly and dearly on her parlour wall. Only these were hopping about on their own recognizance, as if they were really and truly the wolf, hare, and raven that had been carved into their fine stone blocks.
The wolf’s head, surrounded by carved fern-heads and flowers, the very one that had snarled within the looking glass and snoozed without, looked Olive up and down. The hare wriggled her veiny marble nose. The raven fluffed his sculpted feathers.
“Bloody tourists,” the wolf snipped.
ALICE WATCHES ANOTHER couple without expression. The man cuts the woman’s meat for her. The woman stares into the distance while he saws away silently at her pork. A repeating face, turned away, a woman watching a woman watching nothing. Staring and sighing and gnawing, the great human trinity. Peter has a strange and horrible instinct to lean over the table, the salads, the beer, the scotch, the candles, the world, their whole useless strained, copyedited lives and kiss Alice. To make himself cheap, as Wendy did in that cruel first scene in the nursery. He has always kissed first in his life. Always tried to redeem that little viciousness in the other Peter, whose heart was an acorn and whose kiss was a jest. She is so much older than he, but Peter loves older women, since he was hardly yet a man. Guiltily, and to great sorrow, but who could ask more of the most famous motherless boy in all of history?
He doesn’t do it. Of course he doesn’t. He, too, is of a certain era, and that era does not clear dining tables for the madness of love.
“At least your man stayed to look after you,” Alice says finally, without turning her face back to his. “It’s a kindly vampire who tucks you in and puts out the milk by your bed once he’s drunk his fill of your life.”
Her lips are red with beet-blood. He supposes his must be as well. Peter orders a second scotch.
“Are you angry, Alice? Do you hate him? I can’t think whether I should feel better or worse if you hate him. I can’t think whether I hate mine or not. I can’t think whether he is mine. I am his, that’s for certain. His, forever. A shadow that’s slipped off and roams the streets hoping to be mistaken for a human being. For a while I was so flamingly angry I thought I’d char.”
“Not angry… angry isn’t the word. Perhaps there isn’t a word. Charles came back to see me once, after that summer. I was a little older. Eleven or twelve. A little was enough. He looked at me like a stranger. Like any other young woman—a slight distaste, a tremor of existential threat, a very little current of fear. He could hardly meet my eye while I poured the tea. Like a robber returning to the scene of the crime.” She stopped watching the other woman and turned her blue eyes back to Peter. Their cold, triumphant light filled him up like a well. “He came to my window and saw that I’ d grown old and he wanted nothing more to do with me.”
“YOU’RE GOING TO spoil it,” snapped the hare. “Oh, I know she’s going to spoil it, it always gets spoiled, just when we’re about to have it out at last.”
“I won’t spoil anything, I promise,” Olive whispered, quite out of breath.
“You can hardly help it,” sighed the wolf’s-head capital. “Any more than milk can help spoiling outside the icebox.”
“Raven was finally about to tell us how he’s like a writing-desk when you came bollocking through! I’ve been waiting eons! There’s no sense to it, you know. We’ve said a hundred answers and none of them are at all good. But he won’t say, because he’s a stupid wart. I’d advise you to tread more quietly, young lady, if you don’t want to alert the authorities.”