Alice Falls Again, page 5
Alice thrust her hand into her dress pocket and moved the three sweets and feather between her fingers. For a moment she wondered why she had a feather with her. When she remembered, her heart sank at the memory of having to leave Jack Door behind. Was she right to leave him?
The path was slightly higher than the land either side, which meant that the waters of the marshland didn’t encroach on her trail. This was fortunate, as the pools looked as thick and dark as oil, blood even. There were dozens perhaps hundreds of puddles and ponds on either side of the path. None of them were larger than a school playground but they looked deep, as if they could play home to unspeakable things. More than once, Alice thought she saw ripples on the surface of a nearby pond and hastened on.
As the ground was solid, Alice covered far more of it than when she had trudged through the forest snow. The gloom and disease that afflicted the land, however, remained unchanged.
At one point, off to her left in the distance, she saw tall, thin black creatures, which used long, spindly legs and arms to wade through the waters and catch snake-like fish. Their elongated fingers ended in cruel barbs, which made sure the eels, once caught, could not escape. She hid behind a rock and watched them pass. The name of the Underground station Ealing sprang to mind and, shuddering at the thought these creatures might inhabit the sewers of London, she named the creatures Eelers.
Jack Door would of have protected her, of that she was sure. Her heart sank again when she realised she could no longer conjure up the image of his face in her mind’s eye. She began to wonder where she was trying to get to and what the hurry was. She couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything else except the fetid air and heaviness in her soul.
On she went, deeper into the mud flats. Her legs were aching, her stomach made noises and she badly needed a bath. She had never been this tired or hungry or dirty before. This was new territory for her in more ways than one. Her step had slowed to a snail’s pace as she had no reason to make an effort. She didn’t even know why she had been hiding from the Eelers. Intuitively, seeking some kind of comfort, her fingers touched the feather in her pocket. She could not recall how it had got there but she felt its softness, warmth and power. It was the only thing left that mattered to her. There was something about it that forced her to put one foot in front of another. To keep going.
Initially as just an inkling, then a certainty, Alice detected a slight breeze in the air, blowing from the direction she was walking in. It was warm and carried more of the same rank odour of the marshland. At least she wasn’t cold … she stopped herself from completing the sentence, but she didn’t know why.
The warm breeze grew in strength and the mist began to clear. As the land revealed itself, it gave Alice no reason for hope. The marshland simply duplicated itself as far as the eye could see. The colourless landscape merged into a sky of dull grey with no horizon. This was no sky of menacing storm clouds, no drama here, but an impossibly vast dome of sullen grey, as forsaken as the land beneath it.
Another group of Eelers strode slowly along in the distance, their black nets bulging with pond life. Alice stood still but didn’t bother to hide. Once they were out of sight, she continued, with the feather cradled in her hand.
Gradually, the breeze grew into a wind, warm and humid, then into gusts, fierce enough to throw dust into Alice’s eyes. Its ghostly howl moaned across the moor. Alice hoped it was the wind and not the calls of creatures rising from the dark pools, though she didn’t know why. She bent her head and shielded her eyes to make sure she could see well enough to stay on the path. A few paces on, Alice found herself having to push with her legs and body against what was now a gale, in order to make progress. Grit blasted her arms and legs like a thousand wasp stings. The moaning had risen to a howl, making it even more like the cries of a crazed beast. Out of the corner of her eye, Alice spied a group of rocks. Drawing on the stamina and resolve that the feather seemed to give her, she decided that she needed to get out of this sandstorm and take shelter for a while.
Against her better judgment, she stepped off the path towards an outcrop of rocks, perilously close to a dark pool. In the same instant, the wind vanished as though it had never been there. All was still and tranquil. The air was still rank and warm, and the marshland spread out around her in every direction. But the wind had gone. She looked back to the path, which appeared peaceful and untroubled by the storm she had encountered not a minute before. However, when Alice extended her arm across the edge of the path, she again felt the full force of the wind and the countless pin-pricks of grit against her skin.
She was so mystified by the phenomenon that at first, she didn’t notice a faint ringing sound. Once she did, the noise instantly reminded her of a telephone on a train, and how angry it had been at not being answered right away. How strange, she thought, I’d forgotten all about the river, the train and that telephone. Alice searched feverishly among the rocks to find out where the ringing was coming from. Sure enough, wedged in a crevice between two large stones was a black telephone, holding the receiver in its hands, pink in the face and not looking at all happy.
Alice quickly bent down and lifted the receiver, making sure she held it the right way round this time. The telephone spoke up, its face slowly returned to the normal white:
“Much better. You answered faster this time. However, you’ve no idea how long I’ve been following this path, ringing my hands and waiting for you to answer.”
“I’m awfully sorry. But I had no idea you were there. Why didn’t you step onto the path and let me know?”
“With all that wind? You wouldn’t have heard or seen me. In any case, whoever heard of someone answering a telephone in the middle of the road! That’s dangerous. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Whoever heard of a telephone in a train on a river!” retorted Alice and faced the other way.
“My, you do have a temper. I should say at this point that I’m a different telephone to the one you met on the river.”
Alice turned around. “But you look exactly the same.”
Judging by the sudden redness of the telephone’s face, Alice realised she had offended it. Perhaps she had been a little tactless. After all, don’t all kettles look the same? Bicycles too. Tigers, bananas and safety pins for that matter. The list is endless. Why, perhaps the telephone thinks all people look the same, with two eyes, one nose and one mouth always in the same place.
“I do apologise,” said Alice, suspecting that she had been doing rather a lot of this since arriving in Wonderland, “but if you aren’t the same telephone, how do you know about my exchange with the other one?”
The telephone calmed down and rearranged its digits into a smug expression.
“I’m rather well connected. Especially when it comes to exchanges.”
“I am truly sorry that you’ve had to walk so far,” said Alice after a short pause.
“Not to worry, it’s a long-distance call anyway.” The telephone turned its feet inward so Alice could catch a glimpse of its running shoes.
Alice remembered the telephone message that she had received on the train. “Do you have another message for me from the Cheshire Cat?” she asked.
“Better than that. I have a call waiting from him. Please hold.”
There was a whir and a click and the digits on the telephone’s face moved to appear as though the telephone were closing its eyes.
“Hello, Alice? Is that you?” The voice on the other end sounded vaguely familiar.
“Yes, is that you?”
“Who?”
“The Cheshire Cat?”
“Yes, it’s me. Thank goodness. For a moment I thought you were going to tell me I was someone else. As you may remember, I’m rarely my whole self at the best of times. At worst, in theory, I could become somebody totally different.”
Alice didn’t know what to say to this and suspected that anything further she might say would only lead to more confusion. So she kept quiet.
“Can we start again?” asked the Cheshire Cat at length. “How are you doing, Alice?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid.” At that she burst into tears. She tried to relate recent events but she had difficulty in recalling much at all. She remembered the river and the train and something about animals but that was about it. She was overwhelmed and now suddenly having someone to talk to was simply too much. She sobbed as she struggled to describe the Winter Forest.
“I’m sorry it’s been so tough for you,” said the Cheshire Cat. “I wish I were there to help you in person, so to say. Even a part of me. Unfortunately, I’m somewhere else.”
“Where are you exactly?”
“I haven’t the foggiest. It’s quite dark in here and cramped and smells of cupboards. I’d send you a photograph but it’s too dim to develop one let alone take one.”
“So you can’t see anything but darkness?”
“I can’t even see that. Though I know it’s here and it’s stopping me see other things.”
“It sounds a bit scary. I’m being rather selfish talking about my troubles all the time when you appear to have enough of your own.”
“Poppycock. A trouble shared is a trouble halved. Now we’ve shared our troubles, we have … erm…”
“The same number of troubles we started with?”
“Ah yes, I knew there was a catch somewhere. The point is, I telephoned you to tell you that things are going to get better from now on. I figured that coming back to Wonderland might be disorientating for you. I’m sure you’re wondering why everything’s so different from last time; the creatures, the places, even the weather.”
“But that’s just it. I can’t remember much about anything. Not even how I got here.”
“Oh. Do you remember your parents and home? Dinah, your cat? Going to college?”
Blurred images of home drifted across Alice’s mind as though it were itself a wilderness. As if from a distant half-forgotten dream. Something wasn’t right at home. Alice realised she had to get back there.
“Now you’re in Wonderland. You came down the waterfall,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“But why am I here?”
“My guess is that we need you. Things have been getting steadily worse here. That’s probably why you’ve returned to us!”
“But what am I supposed to do here?
“I’m not sure. What do you want to do? Everyone needs a purpose in life. Or was it a porpoise?”
Alice carefully considered her answer. “Right now, I think I want to get back home, wherever that is.”
“Well, that sounds a splendid place to start. Why don’t you start from there?”
“How can I start from home if I can’t get back there in the first place? I can’t even remember what it looks like.”
“I mean why don’t you start with that goal – to reach home?”
“Oh I see.” The Cheshire Cat’s advice made sense. “That’s a good idea, yes. Thank you. I have a goal. But I still don’t know where to start.”
“Let me think. Well, if I were you, if one wants to go back somewhere, one should retrace one’s steps from whence one came. That would seem the shortest way back, don’t you agree?”
It made some odd kind of sense but Alice also sensed there was a flaw to the Cheshire Cat’s thinking. If she wasn’t mistaken, there usually was. She had now remembered enough about the wasteland and the cold forest to know that she couldn’t face going that way back. And if there was a waterfall, how could she scale it without wings? She told the Cheshire Cat as much.
“In that case, you only have one alternative but to go forwards. They say that the longest way round is the shortest way home.”
“I’m not getting back onto that path again. No way! I shall die!” sobbed Alice.
“Why do you need to you return to the path? Why not walk beside the path where it’s warm and dry and there’s no wind?”
“Can I do that?”
The silence on the other end said plenty. It said, for a college student, you are not very bright. It begged the question, why do you not think for yourself?
“What do your senses tell you, Alice?” said the Cheshire Cat, breaking the silence.
“Which one? I have five, you know; sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.”
“You have a good many more than that, you know. How about your sense of balance, or sense of distance? Or sense of meaning or decorum? Or sense of danger? You’ll need to start using all your senses to survive in Wonderland. Courage now, Alice. Head for the Halfway House. It’s not far away. And please call me Cheshire. Most of my friends do and we are, after all, very old friends.
“Just one thing before you go. I suspect something dark has come to Wonderland. I think it may have locked me in this wardrobe. It’s bringing about dreadful changes; extreme weather conditions, a sickness in the land, unkind behaviour in the people. I suspect that finding your way back home has something to do with helping us rid Wonderland of this malevolence. Good luck, Alice. And be careful. I have to go now and try to open this cupboard door. As long as it’s not locked, I should be out in no time. Let’s talk again soon.”
There was a loud click on the line.
“That’s it,” said the telephone. “He’s gone.”
“I see. Well, thank you again for making it possible for me to talk to him.”
“It’s funny,” said the telephone, “we machines would have the capability to revolutionise your lives, but here we are passing mundane messages back and forth. Imagine if everyone had a telephone. People wouldn’t need to think for themselves.”
“Which would not be a good thing,” said Alice.
With that, the telephone shuddered and went dead.
Alice didn’t have as much time to digest the Cheshire Cat’s words as she would have liked because she noticed a small package lying next to the telephone. It hadn’t been there before the call. It was cube-shaped, wrapped in greaseproof paper and held together with a blue ribbon tied up in a bow. On the side, it said “EAT ME”. She opened the gift (any package tied up so prettily was sure to be a present) and found four rounds of cheese and pickle sandwiches. Despite the puzzle as to how the package had appeared, she was sure it was from Cheshire and posed no danger. And she was very hungry. Perhaps if he was able to send advice and best wishes over the telephone, he could also send her sandwiches. Applying a little of Cheshire’s own brand of logic, Alice found herself dwelling less on the question of how the food parcel had arrived and whether it was safe to eat or not, and more on the question of why her benefactor had opted to send her Cheddar cheese as opposed to Cheshire.
Encouraged by the Cheshire Cat’s words and his food for thought, Alice began walking alongside the path and eating at the same time. The sandwiches were delicious. She walked close to the path and made sure she stayed well away from the dark pools.
Her spirits rose further when not too far ahead in the distance, she saw what looked like a cottage. She judged that it would take about half an hour at a swift walking pace to get to there. She hadn’t seen the house earlier but that was not surprising since visibility in the storm had been poor and she hadn’t been able to see more than two feet in front of her. Now, with her destination in sight, no wind, a weak but nevertheless warm sun seeping through the mist and food in her stomach, Alice felt happier than she had for a long time. She still didn’t have all her memory back but she knew that she had to keep going forward. The feather had helped her through the worst part.
Half an hour later, the cottage seemed no nearer. The moor evidently created optical illusions by making things appear closer than they really were. An hour went by and Alice was relieved to make out more details in the house. It was a simple one-storey white cottage with two windows and a door on the front wall. A wisp of grey smoke rose into the air from a brick chimney.
After another hour, Alice was literally a stone’s throw away, not that she would toss a stone at a house, whether it were made of glass or not. She could now see that the roof was thatched and the walls whitewashed. A higgledy-piggledy white wooden fence ran round the house. It would have been an idyllic scene if it weren’t for the fact that the windows and door of the house were just holes in the wall. Looking again at the doorway, Alice saw what appeared to be a young girl standing there. The girl waved and Alice waved back as, after all, this was the first real human being she had seen since she had arrived in Wonderland. Alice was relieved to find that she could now remember most things about her family and home, the animals she had met on the train and events in Wonderland. Unknown to her, what she hadn’t recalled was anything to do with Jack Door.
It took Alice ten times longer than it should have done to cover just half the distance to the house. She was very frustrated and a little scared as something unnatural was at work.
“More unnatural than being shrunk to the size of an insect and sharing a train carriage with talking beasts?” said Alice out loud to make her argument more convincing. When put like that it did sound very convincing but didn’t do much to allay her fears. After what seemed an eternity, Alice arrived at the picket fence.
“Hello!” cried the girl. She was slightly younger than Alice with long black hair full of large curls. Red ribbons held it back from a round pretty face with rosy cheeks. A black bodice covered a white blouse, below which white petticoats billowed out like a waterfall. White ankle socks and shiny red shoes completed the uncanny picture that this girl had just stepped out of one of Alice’s old fairy tale books.
“Hello, I’m Mary,” she shouted again.
“Hello. I’m Alice. You won’t believe how relieved I am to see you!”
“Likewise. Come to the house. But take your time. Getting here may not go as fast as you’d like. We can talk on the way.”
It was a strange thing to say given that the two girls appeared to be no more than two dozen paces apart. But she was right about how long it took to cross the small garden. No matter how many or how large steps Alice took over the crazy paving, she covered no more ground than a snail would. Putting in an extra effort to go faster only succeeded in making Alice tired and cross.
