Alice (17 page)

It sounded like a promise to Alice, and a warning about the other Rabbit.

There must have been guards posted once; otherwise curious folk might wander in, and that didn’t seem the sort of thing the Walrus would approve. Any watchers were likely mixed in with the Jabberwocky’s other victims. Just inside the door was a slanting hill dug into the dirt, and below a cave like the one Alice and Hatcher had taken from the Caterpillar’s to the Walrus’. The girls rushed down the ramp, whooping with joy.

Pipkin sniffed, and beat the ground with his back legs. “Can’t you smell it?”

Alice copied him. There was the damp mustiness that she associated with being underground, and the stale wood of the shack. “The cave?”

Pipkin shook his head. “Open fields, and flowers and trees and butterflies and rain.”

Alice remembered the dream she’d once had, of a cottage by the lake and someone bringing her tea, and thought that might be a home for her and Hatcher. She longed suddenly to go with Pipkin too.

“I’d best follow them before they get off too far on their own,” Pipkin said. He nudged Alice with his nose, and she smiled, and he disappeared down the tunnel.

Hatcher took Alice’s hand. “We can’t go.”

“I know,” she said. Her future didn’t have butterflies and flowers and rain followed by sunshine. Her future slogged through a river of blood to find the well from which it sprung.

She buried her head in Hatcher’s shoulder, ashamed of the tears pricking in her eyes. She couldn’t run away now, and let everyone in the Old City fall beneath the Jabberwock’s wrath. And if the monster found the blade, its rage would only spread until there was no safe place, not even in a cottage by a clear blue lake.

So she and Hatcher left the tunnel behind, and followed not the white rabbit but the red river. There were no other crumbs for them, as they had to find Alice’s Rabbit but had no notion of how to do it. Anyone who might have told them about the Rabbit’s place was dead.

“Hatcher,” Alice said. “Everyone calls you the Hatcher of Heathtown.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s where I lived before, with Hattie and Jenny.”

“Could you find it again?” Alice asked. “You said before you followed a map in your head from Bess’ place.”

Hatcher glanced about. “I don’t see anything familiar. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. Though it’s not easy to tell with all this.”

He gestured at the massacre around them, which only increased in number as they followed in the Jabberwocky’s wake. Alice noticed that several of the buildings had holes torn in the front, as if the creature had broken through the walls to get at those cowering inside.

“But if you do see something familiar,” Alice persisted. “You could find Heathtown.”

“And then find my way to the Rabbit’s from there,” Hatcher said, understanding.

“Yes,” she said, and then put her hand on his shoulder. “Though I’m sorry to have to take you back to that place.”

A muscle flexed in his jaw. “You’ll have to go back to the Rabbit’s, won’t you? If you can face that, then I can face this.”

It wasn’t quite the same, Alice thought. She still didn’t remember all of what happened and she suspected that, thanks to the Caterpillar, Hatcher remembered everything. It was broken and mixed with other things in his mind, but it was all there. It was easier for Alice, or at least it would be until her memory returned completely.

Perhaps then she would be afraid. A strange thing had happened in the presence of the Walrus, though. She’d felt very frightened, especially after she remembered what he’d intended to do to her, after she saw his gloved hands and remembered those hands forcing her to eat cake that made her sick and dizzy.

When she’d seen Pipkin being whipped, her fear had disappeared, and it had never properly returned. She was not stronger than the Walrus. He could overpower her easily. She didn’t even know what to do with the magic she possessed. But she had not been afraid.

In not being afraid she had frightened
him
, because a girl who was not afraid was a girl who might harm him. And Alice was the girl who had escaped the Rabbit. She must remember that when she saw him again. Alice had escaped. Cheshire and the Caterpillar had talked of the Rabbit’s mark on her, but she had marked him too. She had made sure he wouldn’t forget her.

(
Rabbits don’t forget
) The night seemed to go on and on, and Alice thought the sun might never rise again now that the Jabberwock raged through the Old City. Rats emerged from the dark places, feasting on those in the street. After meeting Nicodemus she did not begrudge them the meal. They needed to survive too.

She was not tired from the walk, as she expected she might be, but her stomach growled.

“I heard that,” Hatcher said. “Why didn’t you say something before?”

“I’m ashamed to be hungry,” she admitted. “It doesn’t seem right.”

“They’re dead, Alice,” Hatcher said. “We are still living, and we wish to remain so.”

They found the remains of a greengrocer’s, food scattered out into the street. Inside there were some fruits and breads on the shelves that appeared untouched. Alice hungrily wolfed down half a loaf of bread, facing the wall the entire time so the sight of the dead did not stop her from eating. Hatcher was right. They were alive, and they needed to do what they must.

All around them were not only bodies but also the crushed remains of lives. The furniture lovingly owned, smashed to bits. The dress saved for, pennies put aside until a girl could triumphantly walk into a shop and point to the one in the window, ripped to shreds on her broken body. The shop windows shattered, the carts overturned. It made Alice realize how much of life was full of empty stuff, objects longed for because the hope of them made your small life seem bigger, better, brighter.

Alice had that once—the happy home, the pretty dresses, all the good things to eat that she wanted. But it wasn’t enough. She’d wanted danger and darkness, just a taste, and in an instant everything she had was swept away forever. She thought that any of these girls, these sad dead girls, would have been happy to have Alice’s life before the Rabbit.

They reached a place where four large streets intersected like a cross, and there was a square in the center. The trail of bodies continued ahead of them, but the streets to the right and left were clear. There was no movement in either direction, though, and Alice assumed that anyone with sense had gone inside and bolted their doors.

“Which way?” Alice asked.

Hatcher spun in a circle, concentrating hard. “It seems like I’ve been here. The square. Something about it.”

“Did you bring Jenny here on Giving Day?” Alice asked.

“There’s no Giving Day in the Old City,” Hatcher said. “The ministers wouldn’t waste pennies on the rabble.”

Alice fell silent, chastened yet again by the differences between them. Their lives had been so different before the hospital. Without tragedy they would never have crossed paths at all. Should she be happy that they had found each other, or sad at the choices that led them there?

“That way,” Hatcher said finally, his face triumphant. “Heathtown is that way.”

Alice was relieved that their path diverged from the trail of bodies. Their boots left bloody marks behind for some time, their passage apparent to anyone. They could only hope that no one was following them.

Everyone who might have reason to is dead,
Alice reasoned.
Or is ahead, not behind.

The empty street was nearly as eerie as the one filled with the remains of the dead. This was a creature worse than any criminal, gang or boss. There were accepted norms of behavior for those types. Unrestrained massacre was not one of them.

The sky lightened to a light violet color, not committing to blue. Alice could not see the sun, which hovered just below the line of one-story shanties that comprised Heathtown. Hatcher was silent, lost in his memories, and Alice was afraid to speak, to break the hush that blanketed the City.

Hatcher stopped walking. “We’re here.”

CHAPTER
17

He pointed to one of the shanties. It looked no different from the others to Alice, except perhaps a bit more run-down. The single window was boarded. No smoke emitted from the small chimney in back as it did from some of the others.

Hatcher walked to the door.

“What if somebody lives there now?” Alice said.

She didn’t like the look on his face. He was like a man in a trance, gone to some time far away from the one they were in, seeing things that weren’t there anymore.

“Nobody would live here,” he said softly. “It’s a haunted place. Can’t you feel it? Her ghost always waits for me.”

He pushed the door open and went inside. Alice quickly glanced up and down the street, then followed.

Inside were a few broken sticks of furniture, and the evidence of fires recently set in the small fireplace—likely young boys using the shanty as a place to smoke cigarettes and drink stolen ale and tell each other stories of the murderer who used to live here.

Hatcher paused in the center of the room, turning in a slow circle. The wood floor under his feet had a few rusty stains on it, stains that might have been the last remains of one bloody night.

“She used to spin cloth there. She was terrible at it. She wasn’t a very good cook either, but we managed. I ate burnt toast every day and told her it was delicious. She kept the house very clean, took pride in the way things shone and gleamed because she’d never had anything of her own before. And our bed was there, behind a curtain. I liked to watch her in the early morning, watching her breath rise and fall and know that she was mine. Then she would open those blue eyes and smile, soft and sleepy, and she would love me. She loved me. She loved me, and I failed her.”

He fell to his knees then, and wept. Alice didn’t know what to do. She felt she shouldn’t intrude here, where Hattie’s ghost lingered, where he stopped being Nicholas and became Hatcher instead.

She realized that part of her was a bit envious of Hatcher. Yes, he had lost his love and his child in the most terrible way possible. But he had known happiness too. He had lived as an adult in the adult world, and Alice had never had that.

You might have it someday, with him,
she thought.

Yes, she might. They might someday live in a cottage by a lake, away from the fog and the blood and all the Magicians. They might, but there was a long road before them.

Alice waited, and after a time Hatcher stood.

“I’m ready now,” he said.

When he faced her again she knew Nicholas was gone forever. He’d said good-bye to that man here, and to Hattie, and to the last threads that tethered him to his old life. He was Hatcher, now and forever.

“I know where to find the Rabbit,” he said.

They left the shanty and returned to the street. Alice might have imagined it, but she thought there was a cool breeze around her neck as they departed. She felt a pulse of warmth on her chest, and realized the rose pendant that Bess had given her was glowing.

“I forgot about this,” Alice said.

“Bess gave you that for a reason.”

“I think it must have to do with magic,” Alice said. “I don’t feel any different, though, now that I know I’m a Magician. I don’t feel as though I have lots of powers that could come out of my fingertips.”

She thought of the wish-granting jinni in the stories of the desert, and all the wonders he could create. Could she do something like that?
A wish has power.

According to Hatcher she had set the roses on fire in Cheshire’s maze. She’d been terrified, had only wanted to escape the strangling roses. Could she do such a thing again?

“I wonder if Cheshire would teach you how to use your magic,” Hatcher said.

“I don’t want lessons from Cheshire,” Alice said firmly. She did not want anything from Cheshire. Despite his occasional assistance, she did not like him.

“You need a guide, someone who can help you with your power, and the only Magicians we know are the Caterpillar, Cheshire and the Rabbit.”

“There are more out there, somewhere,” Alice said. “They were driven from the City, but they live. The Caterpillar said we recognize our own. When we leave the City we’re sure to encounter some.”

She did not say that she was a little afraid of being a Magician, and what she might discover inside. The two most difficult tasks were before them now, and she did not wish to be distracted.

Though magic might be helpful,
she thought.

It might be, but then, it might not be. The Jabberwocky was the essence of the most evil Magician who had ever lived. The other Magicians in the City were horrible men. Perhaps magic only corrupted. Alice did not want that. She was only just discovering who she was, and she wished to stay Alice.

The shanties of Heathtown gradually gave way to the taller buildings they’d seen in the rest of the City. Hatcher moved like a hunter now, a creature on the scent of prey. He did not hesitate. He knew where the Rabbit was, and Hatcher would drive him into the ground.

Alice was not afraid. She felt she ought to be, that it might keep her alive. She simply couldn’t feel afraid. They had seen so much already. All the horror and blood and monsters and fear crystallized to a fine thin shard inside her, harder than diamonds. What was one more monster in the face of so many?

“Hatcher,” Alice said. “Had you thought about what we’ve done? Killing the Caterpillar and the Walrus?”

“We didn’t kill the Walrus,” Hatcher said.

“We helped. At any rate, that is not the point. The point is that we’ve made empty places where men of power used to be. What will happen now?”

“Someone will take their place,” Hatcher said. “Likely more than one person for each territory. The Caterpillar and the Walrus were strong men with large chunks of the City in their pockets.”

“Will it be better under someone new?” Alice asked.

She hoped so. She hoped that she had not killed the Caterpillar only to have an identical man spring from the same place, like in the story where the hero kept cutting the heads off a monster only to have more emerge.

“Maybe,” Hatcher said. “No matter who is in charge, the people of the City will go on living as best they can. They have no other choice.”

This was true, Alice reflected. People like Nell and Harry, and even poor stupid Dolly. They built something in the City—a tavern, a bookshop, a potato cart—and they worked at it day after day because they hoped. They saw all the misery around them. They knew the risks they took just in climbing from their beds each day. But they still hoped—hoped for success, happiness, a better future. There was no other choice. If they tried to escape the Old City, they would be caught by the soldiers who patrolled the New City and sent back. No one was allowed to leave. No one.

“Why can’t we leave the City, Hatcher?” Alice asked.

“Because the ministers and the bosses need someone to use, to keep down,” Hatcher said. “Do you think anyone would choose to stay here?”

“No,” Alice said. “I don’t think they would.”

“So all the big men would be sitting in their houses, with no money to count and no one to kick,” Hatcher said. “Do you know what they’d do then? They’d go out and find another city, and this time they’d make sure everyone stayed. They would find a way. Men like that need someone’s neck under their boot or they don’t feel right about themselves.”

“I hope it’s beautiful outside,” Alice said. “Outside the City, I mean.”

She was thinking of the girls who’d escaped with Pipkin, and hoped that they ran in the grass with bare feet, laughing in the sun. She wanted a promise of joy for someone, even if she could not have it for herself.

There was some activity on the streets now, not like it would be on a normal day (
a no-Jabberwocky day
) but Alice and Hatcher did pass the occasional person going about furtive business. No one respectable would be about. Alice wondered where the Jabberwocky was now, and what the City leaders would do if the monster slaughtered every living soul.

“Escape in their airship, most likely,” Alice muttered.

When she was a child she’d thought the ministers the most wonderful people in the world. Giving Day proved that. They gave these lovely gifts to all the children of the City, and patted those children on the head and told them they would grow up to be good citizens. Alice had not realized that they were only interested in clean, wealthy children from the New City. She had not realized that men in power were only interested in power and not good deeds. She’d learned much since escaping from the hospital. Sometimes she wished she could unlearn it. There was comfort in ignorance, in thinking the world a certain way and not knowing any different.

Hatcher did not hear her speak, or didn’t care to find out what that statement meant. He was driven by purpose, and that purpose did not include Alice’s meandering thoughts.

Then, suddenly, they were there.

After all the years of dreaming of him, of waking to escape the memories, of hoping that he was only something she imagined, she had returned to the place where it all began.

It was not very impressive.

There was not even a structure aboveground, only a flat, dirtcovered lot. Before it was a stone staircase that led down from the street to a door flanked by two men with no nonsense in their eyes. They made no movement indicating they cared about the presence of Alice and Hatcher near the top of the steps, but Alice was certain they had been noted.

“Of course. A rabbit would want a warren underground,” Alice said.

“It is a warren, if I remember it right,” Hatcher said. “Lots of hallways, little rooms, places to get lost in.”

“Yes, it is like that,” Alice said, and her eyes widened. “I remembered. Hatcher, I remember running though the hallways, bumping into people, men who tried to grab me, but I kept going because they couldn’t hold me. They were so surprised.”

“Why were they surprised?” Hatcher said.

Alice closed her eyes tight. She felt her old body again, that sixteen-year-old girl. Her legs hurt, and in between her legs, and she could hardly hold a breath in her lungs. Her cheek bled. She felt the hot wet fall of it on her neck and shoulder and breast. Her dress was torn and flapped against her legs, and her feet were bare but in her hand she gripped a knife, the knife he had so carelessly left to one side. On the end of the knife was a blue-green eye.

“I had his eye,” she said, opening her own eyes again. “It shocked people, even the hard soldiers, and I had so much blood on me they weren’t to know that it was almost all mine. He has men loyal to him. Not like the Walrus. Not men who only want money or the chance to do violence. Men who love him, though I don’t understand why.”

“They loved him, so they ran to him. That saved you,” Hatcher said. “They wanted to know if he lived.”

“There was a lot of blood on my hand, and on the knife,” Alice said slowly. “The knife was his. He always carried it. As soon as they saw it, they thought he was dead.”

His neck was arched back in his pleasure, and his eyes were closed. Her fingers closed around the hilt of the knife and arched around and she stabbed him in the back, over and over, and something hard and tough ripped under the blade. He opened his eyes, screaming, and she plunged the knife into the left one and pulled hard. There was blood all over, and he was still on top of her. She kicked and bucked until he was off, rolling on the mattress and holding his hand over his eye. He had another knife in his boot—he still wore his boots—and he slashed at her face as she rolled away onto the floor. She scrambled to her feet, holding the knife in her hand, afraid to let it go, and he was screaming after her. Everyone was running toward him, and she ran away. Hands tried to hold her but there was blood everywhere and she was slippery with it. She kept running and running, turning and ducking and twisting, and then somehow she was out in the street and they weren’t following. She ran and ran and ran, and anyone who saw her turned away, for her face was wild and she was coated with blood and she was holding a knife with an eye on the end of it. She ran until she couldn’t run anymore, until she was almost to the edge of the New City, and she dropped the Rabbit’s knife into the river. The water curdled and steamed around it, so poisonous that it melted the blade and the hilt and the eye, and then it was gone, and Alice lay down by the river and slept.

“You remember it all now,” Hatcher said, and it wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” she said. She was beyond weeping for the child she once was. “It is, more or less, what you would expect. Except for the part where I escaped. Nobody expected that.”

The door at the bottom of the steps opened and a woman emerged. She spoke quietly to the soldiers, who disappeared inside. She was not the sort of woman Alice imagined seeing in a place like this. The girls who danced for hooting patrons in the Caterpillar’s lair—that was the kind of woman she expected.

This woman was hunched with age or care, and her hair was the color of Hatcher’s eyes, grey like iron. She wore a grey shawl over a grey dress, and walked in tiny steps. Altogether she gave the impression of an oversized mouse, and when she lifted her gaze to Alice, her eyes glittered out of a narrow lined face.

“Dor?” Alice said.

Of all the things she’d seen, this shocked her the most. Her friend, her young and pretty friend, was gone forever. They were both twenty-six, but Dor looked like a careworn grandmother. Her hands were knotted with protruding blue veins.

“He said you would come back. He’s been waiting. This morning he woke and he told me that today was the day his Alice would return,” Dor said. Her voice was just as ancient as the rest of her, and bitter. “Always his Alice, you are, despite what you did to him.”

Alice walked slowly down the steps. She’d lost her cap and her jacket, and the little knife she carried was visible in the rope looped around her waist. She looked like what she was—a very tall girl with a scar on her face and short hair, not disguised as a boy anymore. She towered above Dor, whose eyes flashed as she glared up at her old friend.