Once Upon a Blade, page 22
It was strange. This was the first house she’d been in since being sent to the asylum. From the corners of her eyes she could see ghosts, echoes of happier times past, little girls sliding down banisters for fun and running to greet their fathers at the door. One such ghost ran right through her middle as she stood at the door of Doctor Gordan’s study, where she waited for an answer to her knock.
“Come in.”
If the bathroom had been a stomach, Doctor Gordan’s study was in the heart of the beast. It was all dark wood paneling and neatly arranged bookcases, the walls expanding and contracting with each dim beat that thundered in Alice’s ears—how he could focus in here with that din, Alice couldn’t fathom.
“Ah, Alice. Please sit,” said the Doctor with hardly a glance up from his paper and pen.
She took a step forward and felt her toes squelch. There was a puddle of black ichor on the floor, with more scattered around the room, and rivers slowly oozing down the moving walls. A house, of course, wouldn’t bleed red. Still, it was rather unpleasant when it stuck to her stockings on her way across the room to the chair the Doctor had indicated.
She sat. The Doctor’s desk was in front of a large window, the pale light rendering him a faceless silhouette in front of her.
Doctor Gordan finished his sentence and signed at the bottom of the page with a flourish. Then he set whatever it was to the side and picked up the same notebook he’d had in the carriage.
“Now that we’re settled, we can get some real work done. Where were we … ah yes, Wonderland. When did you first go there?”
Alice chewed on the inside of her cheek as she tried to remember. To her it had felt like her entire life, but that couldn’t be right.
“I think I was four,” she said when the Doctor started tapping his pen impatiently. “I went to a marvelous tea party with the Hare and the Dormouse and the Hatter.”
“And these are characters of yours?”
“You could call them that,” Alice said, squirming uncomfortably in her seat. Once she had called them her friends, but nothing had been the same since the shadows.
“Why don’t we start at the beginning?”
So, feeling like a butterfly pinned in a display case, Alice recounted the day to the best of her memory. Her mother, a faceless figure in wide skirts, had taken Alice along when she went to a garden party. Alice had chased a rabbit wearing a waistcoat to its hole and fallen down into the earth, where she found herself at a table so long it spiraled up into the air, and the Hatter and the Hare and the Dormouse had to run up and slide down it when they switched seats. And Alice had laughed and laughed, clapping her little hands.
What she didn’t mention was how she’d already seen the waistcoat-ed rabbit in her dreams long before she fell into the rabbit hole. The good Doctor hadn’t asked about dreams, after all.
“And how did you return from Wonderland?”
That gave Alice pause. She swung one of her legs, her foot grazing the surface of the ichor pool that had formed under her chair.
“I don’t remember.”
Doctor Gordan frowned fiercely at her. Alice blinked, and when she opened her eyes he had a shadow of his own draped over his shoulders. A shadow with familiar yellow eyes and bright white teeth.
“Be careful, Alice,” the cat cooed. His shape was cloudy and black, scratchy around the edges like an ink drawing, and his teeth were blunt and human, with only two sharp fangs at the front. “The sun casts its shadows everywhere.” His tail grazed the Doctor’s cheek, but he didn’t react to the touch as he kept talking, saying words Alice didn’t hear.
She huffed to herself. The cat was never as helpful as he thought he was.
“Alice.”
She jolted, eyes snapping back to Doctor Gordan, whose gaze was running her through like frustrated daggers. The cat smirked one last time and vanished in a cloud of black that lingered like ink in water.
Doctor Gordan didn’t say anything at first. He just regarded her with narrowed eyes for a long moment. Then he scribbled something in his notebook, set his pen down, and opened a drawer in his desk.
“Do you know how to write?”
“Somewhat,” Alice answered. It had been years—she wasn’t allowed near pens after the fit several years ago when she’d plunged one such implement into her own wrist. That’s what they told her, at least, and she had the scar to prove it, but she remembered it quite differently: someone had asked her to write something down, something about her old house and her family, and a strange buzzing drone had filled her ears. The light changed, growing brighter, and when she blinked the sunspots away she was in Wonderland, stabbing a beehive with the intent of killing the insects that buzzed under her skin whenever someone asked her about that night.
“Good enough.” From the drawer, the Doctor produced another notebook and a second pen. “I want you to write down everything you can remember about Wonderland.” He slid the notebook across the table. Alice took it and the pen, resting them in her lap as she slowly dragged her fingers over the leather of the cover. It was identical to the one the Doctor was using—how many of these did he have?
“Before the shadows or … after?”
Doctor Gordan tilted his head thoughtfully.
“They’re very different places,” Alice tacked on.
“Both,” said the Doctor, and before Alice could say anything else, he rang a little bell that was sitting on his desk. A moment later the study door opened.
“Maryanne, will you please show Alice to her room?”
There was a barely audible, “Yes, sir,” and with another pointed look from the Doctor, Alice stood up, shuddering as the ichor flowed over her toes. As she turned towards the door, she caught an ever-so-slight glint of a yellow eye, winking at her.
The red-headed serving girl led her back upstairs. The girl was coiled tighter than the springs that the Hatter wore down his back, but who exactly she was scared of Alice couldn’t tell. She kept her hands clasped tightly in front of her, huddling in like she didn’t dare to touch the walls—perhaps she was frightened of the house-beast too.
“This will be your room,” said Maryanne when they reached the door at the end of the hall.
It wasn’t much: a small bed, a dresser, and a whitewashed desk with a matching chair and oil lamp. “There are some more dresses in the drawers for you.”
Alice stepped inside. “Much nicer than the asylum,” she said with a smile in Maryanne’s direction.
The other girl didn’t smile back, but her eyes did lift from the floor. She took a short breath, as though steeling herself, then asked softly, “Which asylum were you from?”
Alice’s eyebrows rose. Not the question she was expecting, but what was the harm in answering? “Saint Margaret’s.”
Maryanne nodded. After a moment’s contemplation: “My mother died in an asylum. Humphrey’s.” Then, before Alice could answer, she looked back at the floor and muttered, “I have to help fix dinner.” She quickly fled, closing the door behind her.
What a strange girl.
Alice shrugged it off. She sat down at the desk, opened the notebook to its first blank page, and picked up the pen. Then she stopped, rolling the wooden body of the pen between her fingertips.
Where should she start? She didn’t remember much of her old Wonderland. Sometimes that version felt like a dream, and the Wonderland she had now was how it had always been. But that wasn’t true, she knew it. She didn’t remember that night, but the shadows were there. They crawled in through her eyes and bled through the earth and air and water, thick and black like the ichor that dripped down the study walls a few minutes ago, and she’d felt it as Wonderland began to twist.
She remembered all of that, but she couldn’t remember what had really happened to her parents.
A shudder went down her spine. This wasn’t what she was here for. The only thing the Doctor cared about was Wonderland. As far as anyone else was concerned, the deaths of her family were already solved. It didn’t matter.
At a loss for what else to do, she simply wrote ‘Wonderland’ at the top of the page. The letters were shaky and awkward, but legible enough, she hoped. Then she sat there another moment—there was so much to Wonderland, where should she begin? More importantly, what did the Doctor most want to read? She’d tried explaining Wonderland to so many doctors at the asylum, but none of them really cared about the specifics, they just wanted to know how many leeches they needed to stick to her this time around. Perhaps she should start with the things she saw outside of Wonderland …
Alice blinked. There was a pawprint on the page that hadn’t been there before. The ink spread through the fibers of the paper like tree roots searching out water, saturating it with black, growing from edge to edge. Alice stared into the ink, waiting patiently until the page was entirely black.
She let herself fall into it.
She fell through a void, surrounded by spirals of parchment and scrolls, past waterfalls of ink that seemed to have no source or end, through flocks of flying quills. One of them pecked impishly at her arm and drew a dot of blood as she plummeted ever downwards.
She wasn’t afraid. She knew that eventually—ah, yes, here it was. Her descent slowed of its own accord. Alice leaned back until she was falling vertically, and the skirt of her borrowed dress poofed up around her waist like an umbrella. It made her heart warm; she hadn’t had a proper fall in a long time. During her fits she skipped the whole ritual and went right to somewhere else. This was much gentler, and the dress reminded her of when she used to visit as a little girl, as the asylum shifts had been too loose and shapeless to make the skirt poof out like this.
Eventually her bare toes brushed ground. Or rather they brushed rough parchment, as though landing on a page. At her touch, ink billowed out, ripples on the surface of a pond, and drawn ink shapes sprouted all around her: trees, shrubs, flat little tufts of grass, and a waterfall that she could somehow still hear despite the water being stationary.
Alice giggled to herself as she settled her feet. Stationary. The Hatter would like that one.
“Something you find amusing, Alice?” The purring voice came from behind her. She turned to find the cat, sprawled out on a rock like an ink-blot with only the faintest suggestion of a proper shape.
“Just a silly joke,” she responded.
“All jokes are silly,” countered the cat. “That’s what makes them jokes.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “I haven’t missed your needling.”
The cat blinked his yellow eyes at her and slowly revealed his wide grin, still pearly white even when the whole world was yellow parchment and his body was black ink.
“Just a bit of fun. You know the twins are much worse than I.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.” A pause, then: “When you spoke to me in the study, about shadows, what did you mean?”
“I would think it was obvious.” The cat stood and bowed into a stretch, yawning and showing off his two sharpest teeth. “The sun casts shadows everywhere, not only in one house in London.”
Suddenly her throat felt tight. “You think there are shadows in the Doctor’s house, then?”
“Certainly. A beast can devour its prey, but nothing can digest a shadow, as you know all too well.”
Alice folded her arms across her chest. Looking into the inked shadows of the parchment trees now came with the icy touch of dread down her spine, and her doubts from earlier returned with all of their cavalry.
“Cheshire, do you know what happened the night the shadows came?”
The cat, who had been busily licking his paw, stopped and flicked his ears back. “The shadows came. That is what happened.”
“That can’t be all of it,” Alice argued back. “The sun can’t make shadows on its own. What cast these ones?”
His tail thrashed. “You should be more careful, Alice,” he hissed with an arch to his back. “The shadows are short here, but they can grow long.” As if to prove his point, one of the tree shadows suddenly stretched across the page of the ground towards them, ending in a threatening sharp edge by the cat’s rock.
“Why don’t they want me to know?”
“Some things are not worth knowing.”
Lord forgive her, Alice stamped her bare foot like a child. “Should I not be the one who decides what is worth knowing? They’re my memories. What gives them the right to keep them?”
Before the cat could respond, the shadows began to grow deeper, longer, and when Alice looked to the sky, she found the parchment sun slowly being filled with ink.
“You’re out of time,” said the cat. The shadow crept across his body, leaving only his eyes, blinking yellow in the dark. “But if you insist on suffering, I will find you again. You made this choice. Don’t be late.”
Alice jolted back into her body still sitting at the desk, her hands covered in ink, a full page of writing in the book before her, and a small dot of blood on her arm.
***
Alice was served supper in her room, which she was perfectly content with. She certainly didn’t remember her table manners, and the way she devoured the food after years of asylum fare would’ve caused a polite lady to faint.
Her favorite part was the bread and butter. Oh, how she had missed butter.
That night she lay awake, watching bread-and-butterflies flit around her small room, waiting for the cat to make an appearance. The house-beast shifted, creaked, and growled as the hours passed. It still didn’t like her.
Eventually she could keep herself awake no longer. Her eyes fell closed, and she slept.
Bang bang bang. “Time to wake up, missy!”
The Duchess is feeling shrill this morning.
“There won’t be any lying about in my house, you hear me?”
This time she was summoned to the kitchen to eat her breakfast. She went, wearing another worn dress from the dresser, this one in a yellow that had probably once been cheery before all the fading.
The color felt out of place in the sooty kitchen. The cook was already hard at work snapping at Maryanne and preparing the Doctor’s breakfast. Alice was handed a plate with toast and jam, which she ate eagerly. The jam was sweet and sharp and tangy, a fruit that she couldn’t quite discern.
The Doctor took his breakfast in the dining room, during which Alice was ushered upstairs to make her bed, then she returned to the study and sat in the same chair as the day before. The ichor pool underneath had grown; she now had to keep her feet pressed against the legs of her chair to keep them from sinking into the muck.
Doctor Gordan took his time going over what Alice had written the day before. She had already read it, worried that she had subconsciously transposed her conversation with the cat, but that wasn’t what was on the page. Instead the words described her first true fall into Wonderland at the garden party. The Doctor scribbled a few notes in his own notebook, then began the questions.
Dozens and dozens of questions. How many times had she been to Wonderland? (Too many times to count.) When did she usually go there? (When she was upset, overwhelmed, in pain.) Did she only hallucinate when she was in Wonderland? (No.) What kinds of things did she see when she wasn’t there? (All kinds of things, like the house-beast. That one got her a vexed frown and more scribbles in the Doctor’s book.) Did she choose where in Wonderland she appeared? (No.) Were any of the creatures or things there threatening? (Yes.)
He didn’t ask about the shadows, which Alice found more vexing than she cared to admit. For her there were two Wonderlands: before and after.
Before was a lovely place. Strange and frustrating to understand, but beautiful, and it never stepped outside of its own bounds, leaving her waking world untouched.
After was dark and dangerous. Beautiful in some places, but in a way that made her stomach drop. The shadows leaked out of it, slithering out into London, staining everything they touched. The first morning she woke up in the asylum it was to a ceiling full of knives dripping blood onto her face and her hair and the dirty sheets.
But Doctor Gordan didn’t seem interested in the differences or the causes thereof. He muttered words to himself as he wrote his notes: hallucinations, delusions, dissociation, hysterical fits. All words Alice had heard before. Most of them didn’t mean much to her. They were just words, stuck to her like signposts, things other people used to navigate her like she was a twisting, rocky road.
Eventually, as the clock in the hall struck eleven, the Doctor closed his notebook. “We’ll do our first experiment this afternoon,” he announced. “I want to ascertain whether your dissociation can be triggered deliberately.”
“You want to send me to Wonderland on purpose,” she translated, and he nodded.
“Precisely.”
That was … hm. On the one hand, it was worrisome—who knew where or with what she would end up without Wonderland choosing to pull her in? On the other, maybe it would make the cat cooperate in a more timely manner.
She found herself nodding. “Very well, Doctor.”
Doctor Gordan gave her a sharp grin. “As if you have a choice, Alice.”
***
For all his talk of experiments and new treatments, the one he chose first was one Alice had endured many times before: hot water.
After lunch she was brought back to the house-beast’s small stomach, escorted by the agent of digestion herself, the Duchess. She turned on the tap for another bath, and Alice stood still as instructed, staring at the mirror. This time no shadows or other Alices appeared. There was only her, frowning at her reflection until steam clouded the glass too much for her to see.
“As the Doctor ordered,” said the Duchess, drying her hands on her apron. “Piping hot. In you get, you little wastrel.”
Alice, having already shed her dress in the growing heat and humidity of the room, stepped into the tub and winced. The water was indeed piping hot, too hot to be comfortable, stinging her skin everywhere it touched, but she made herself submerge anyway. It wasn’t the first time she’d had a hot water treatment.
“Now stay there. If you get out, I’ll give you a whipping.” The Duchess snapped a towel for emphasis, then swept out of the door. Alice heard the lock click behind her.
