There is no one beside him. His arm is empty.
“Alice?” Peter calls into the darkness. But no answer comes.
OLIVE STOOD ON the stage of the Tumtum Club in the brash glare of the spotlight. She could barely make out all the glittering scales and claws and furs and shining eyeballs of the Looking Glass Creatures in the audience.
“Go on,” hissed the marble raven. “I’m not doing this alone. You do your bit, then I’ll do mine. Mine’s better, obviously, so I’ll close.”
“My bit? I haven’t got a bit! I didn’t even sing in the school concert!”
“Do something! You’re sure to, if you stand there long enough!”
Olive felt like her heart was dribbling out of her mouth. Everyone just kept looking at her. No one had ever looked at her for so long. Certainly not Father Dear or Darling Mother who ignored her benignly, not Little George who was more interested in painting the sheep, not the Other One, who seemed never to notice her until they collided in the hall. She could hardly bear it. What could she possibly do to impress these aliens out of her own bookshelf? In the book, Alice always had something clever to say, some bit of wordplay or a really swell pun. Olive could never be an Alice. She wasn’t quick enough. She wasn’t endearing enough. She wasn’t anyone enough.
Really, she only had one choice. She’d only ever practiced one thing long enough to get really good at it.
“It’s… ahem… it’s dreadful here,” Olive complained. Her voice shook. Everyone liked the pig screaming about its mother. Would they understand her talent? “Even the toadstools and the cocktails are depressed. There’s only one pub and you can’t even play darts here. Alice got to meet a Unicorn and dance with Dodos and learn something about herself on her holiday.” A great gasp ripped through the crowd. A tiger lily burst into tears. The White Queen looked like she might faint.
“It’s not allowed!” the chess piece whispered. The cat grinned and began, slowly, to disappear.
Olive pressed on. “But what do I get? The saddest country I’ve ever seen! If any of you so much as breathe wrong, the government passes out from the scandal of it. I can’t even pronounce half of the stuff the Jabberwock says! A more cramped and dreary place I’ve never dreamed of. It’s clear no one ever planned nor built Wonderland so much as as piled it up and gave up on it several times. Somebody obviously thought there was nothing so splendid in the world as Victorian allegory and crammed it in anywhere it would fit, and rather a lot of places it wouldn’t. The martinis aren’t even close to dry. How do you even have electricity? And the local politics are appalling, I’ll tell you that for free. Stuff all Queens, I say! Except Elizabeth, she’s all right.”
Olive bowed, then curtseyed, then settled on something halfway between. A smattering of uncertain applause started up, growing stronger as the Looking Glass Creatures recovered from their shock. The smattering became a thundering, became a roar.
The raven hopped up into the spotlight to soak up a bit of adoration for himself. He coughed and shook his stone feathers. The audience quieted, leaned forward, eager, ready for more—so ready they did not hear the thumping outside, or the terrified squeak of the Dormouse in his teapot armour.
“How,” said the marble corvid, “is a raven like a writing desk?”
“It’s a raid!” a Dodo shrieked from the back of the Tumtum Club.
The club fell apart into madness as playing cards flooded in from all sides, grabbing at the collars of egg and man alike, shouting orders, taking down names. Looking Glass Creatures bolted, down rabbit holes and up through the mossy rafters, behind the posters advertising THE CHESHIRE CIRCUS and MISS MARY ANN SINGS THE BLUES. Olive froze. She saw the turtle who’d sung so beautifully being dragged off by a pair of deuces. A Knave of Clubs swung his rifle into the scaly ankle of Edward, the poor Jabberwock, who roared in anguish. Tears shone on Olive’s cheeks in the footlights. But she couldn’t move. The sound of the raid slashed at her ears horribly.
“We both devour humans, piece by piece,” the raven finished his riddle into the din, but no one heard him.
Someone gripped Olive’s arm.
“Come,” said the White Queen. “I’ll take you with a pleasure. Twopence a week, and always jam to-day.”
“Come where?”
“Where you were always going, where you have already been. Where we are already friends, where we have already fought long and hard together, where we have sat upon the field of battle in one another’s arms and looked out over a free Wonderland. Where everything is as it was before the war, before our world split in two, before the Other One, before anything hurt.”
“Is that really what’s going to happen?”
“No. It’s impossible. But I believe it anyway. It’s the only way I can bear to face breakfast.”
Olive glanced offstage. There was a flash of light there, something reflecting in all the flotsam of the theatre. A pane of glass from some lonely window. And for a moment, Olive thought she could see, on the other side of the glass, Darling Mother in the parlour, asleep with Little George in her arms, a nearly empty bottle of gin on the end table and rain still pouring down outside. The shadows of the raindrops looked like black weeping on her mother’s face. Everything as it was. Before. Before anything hurt. Could such a thing ever be?
She took the White Queen’s white hand. They ran together through the wings and out through two mossy hidden doors back beyond the reach of the footlights. The two of them burst into the glen, into a river of folk running away from the Tumtum Club and into the Looking Glass World, running slow, and thus, streaming along so fast they could never be caught.
Olive looked back over her shoulder at the great skeleton covered in moss and flowers and briars and vines. She hadn’t seen it when she came in. The glow-worms had dazzled her. The whole world had dazzled her. “We loved her so,” the White Queen said, not in the least out of breath as they ran on and on into the wood. “She came back, and she ate a hundred mushrooms so she could grow big enough to protect us. I was there when she died, hardly bigger than a pearl in her hand. She was so old—I hardly remember ever being so old! Living backwards makes it terribly easy to forget. She smiled and said: oh my gracious! and closed her eyes. And of course the moment she did, the Red Queen called her pawns to arms—but for a moment, when she was huge and high and here, for one tiny minute in all the world, almost everyone was happy. We loved her so; we never wanted to be parted from her. We wanted her to be with us forever. And she is.”
The giant’s skeleton was wearing a heavy iron crown, and the crown had two words lovingly etched all the way round it:
Badgirl,
the Deadman, and
the Wheel
of Fortune
THE DEADMAN ALWAYS wore red when he came calling. Not all over red. Just a flash, like Mars in the night time. A coat, a long scarf, socks, a leather belt. An old sucked-dry rose in his buttonhole. A woolen cap with two little holes in it like bite marks. A fake ruby chip in his ear. One time, he wore lipstick and I cried in my hiding place. I always cried when the Deadman came, but that time I cried right away and I didn’t stop. Real quiet with my hands over my mouth. I can be a little black cat when I want, so he didn’t hear.