Mad About the Hatter (6 page)

Hatter knew those other prints, and cursed aloud when he saw them.

The Ants, it seemed, had captured Boy Alice.

He looked around again, stepping gingerly so he wouldn’t inadvertently smash the Ants’ Hill and Boy Alice with it. There, a foot or so away, seemed the likely culprit. An Anthill rose like a pimple from the black dirt.

He bent down again and peered closely at the Anthill. A few remaining ants disappeared down the hole at its center.

Red Ants, to be precise, which drew another curse from Hatter’s lips. Of course it would have to be Red Ants. They were by far more vicious and bloodthirsty than any other group of Ants, marching in well-trained, regimented armies, and ruled by a fierce and cruel Red Queen Ant.

Hatter faced yet another choice: go back to the Non-Ant Red Queen and tell her the Ant Red Queen had Boy Alice in her Hill, and he was as good as dead, or get small and go into the Red Anthill and attempt to rescue him.

The first scenario would no doubt result in Hatter’s head rolling from the Executioner’s Block since the Queen would likely place the blame for the Ants eating Boy Alice fully at Hatter’s feet. The second would probably see him eaten and shat out as a Red Ant turdball.

While neither option was particularly appealing, he admitted he might stand at least a miniscule chance of surviving if he chose the second.

Rolling his eyes heavenward and uttering a half-remembered prayer from his childhood, Hatter turned back toward Caterpillar’s mushroom and prepared to get small.

H
ENRY
INSTINCTIVELY
drew in a deep, ragged breath when he realized there was nothing under his feet but air. Whether it was in anticipation of a hard landing or a scream, he didn’t know. In either case he’d expected to hit bottom soon after tumbling off the edge of the caterpillar’s mushroom, but instead, continued to free fall, the air rushing past his ears in a roar.

Was the caterpillar’s mushroom situated on the edge of a cliff? Henry didn’t think so, but it seemed the only rational explanation. Perhaps the caterpillar had some sort of secret trapdoor installed at the base of the mushroom stalk through which Henry now fell. It was unlikely, but really, had anything been logical since he’d awakened?

As he fell, he realized something strange. Although he’d considered the flowers and leaves of the caterpillar’s lair huge before, now they seemed enormous, as if a giant grew them in a Titan’s garden. Cabbage roses were bigger than the actual heads of cabbage. They seemed to grow even larger as he fell. Now they were bigger than armchairs, bigger than houses! How could that be? It was strange indeed, and he pondered the possibility as he continued to drop.

It took him quite a while to conclude that, contrary to what he originally thought, the leaves and flowers of the plants enclosing the caterpillar’s large mushroom had not grown to impossible, gigantic sizes, but instead, he had shrunk to the size of a largish dust mite.

This was not a conclusion he came to easily. Indeed, an internalized argument on the subject warred within him for a while. No man, least of all Henry, would want to admit he was small, would he? Small intimated weak, puny, frail, and helpless… at least, that’s what Henry’s father would say. What would his father, who could barely abide Henry now, think of him if Henry had shrunk?

No, he wouldn’t believe it. Not ever. He hadn’t gotten smaller. As far as he was concerned, he was the same healthy, normal size he’d always been. It must be that everything else had swelled to unbelievable proportions.

As he fell, though, a curious thing happened. He began to question why size should matter so much to him. He had friends who were shorter than he was, and others who were taller. Some people he knew were thinner than he, some fatter. They were all good quality, solid people, generous and dependable. Their physical size certainly had nothing to do with the size of their hearts.

Was it, then, as his father believed? That size alone made one superior? Of course not. He had one friend, Marcus, who barely reached Henry’s shoulder, yet held a black belt in tae kwon do, and could easily knock Henry on his butt. Another friend, Mallory Ames, was petite and frail, yet possessed a mind so sharply brilliant that she’d graduated a full two years ahead of the rest of their circle of friends and was already well on her way to earning her university degree.

Henry’s father believed big was better in all things. Of course, being drunk most of the time, his father said many things that were more lie than truth. Things Henry already suspected were rubbish, like his father’s belief that the color of one’s skin, or where one went to school, or how much money one’s family had, or who one loved, made a person better or less than the next. Maybe it was time Henry reexamined more of his convictions instead of blindly believing whatever his father told him.

The truth in this case, he realized, was that the size of the body didn’t matter much in the scheme of things. It was the size of the spirit, the depth of the heart, and the power of the mind that counted more than inches of bone and pounds of flesh. His friends were worth more than gold to him, regardless of their size, color, or background.

The argument was irrefutable and seemed to settle the matter of whom or what had grown or shrunk. For some strange reason, in some bizarre way, he’d grown much, much smaller. To him, this was a newly sized planet where there were bumblebees the size of helicopters and ants the size of Clydesdales, but he knew that, whatever his size, he would adapt. Heroically, largely, and seamlessly adapt, because within his chest beat the heart of a giant.

At least, that was what he hoped was true.

One problem posed by shrinking occurred to him. While he was grateful the clothes he was wearing had shrunk with him, he realized that if he remained tiny, he’d need an entirely new wardrobe when he finally got home again. Nothing hanging in his closet would fit him anymore. The proposition of replacing all his shirts, jackets, pants, jeans, and underwear was an expensive one—even if he could find largish dust mite-sized ready-to-wear, and didn’t need to have it all custom-made—but that still wasn’t his most immediate problem.

The fall was, because it didn’t seem to want to ever end. Could a person fall forever? How long before he died from thirst or starvation, and only his bones continued their downward plummet?

He screwed his eyes closed tight as he plunged toward the earth, worried that when he finally hit bottom he’d shatter into a million pieces like a fine crystal decanter dropped onto a tile floor. Therefore, the first bounce took him quite by surprise.

One moment he was falling, the next he’d bounced off a leaf as if it were a trampoline, and somersaulted through the air. He landed on another leaf and bounced off that one too. After a few more involuntary bounces, he began to enjoy himself, springing from one leaf to another with surprisingly good aim.

He bounced a few more times, aiming for a lower leaf each time, until he felt confident he was close enough to the ground to jump to it without hurting himself. His luck held out—a mulch of last year’s fallen leaves covered the hard earth. It was surprisingly soft and cushioned his landing.

Henry paused for a moment, hands on his knees, breathing hard, his senses overwhelmed as he took in his new surroundings. Everything seemed overly brilliant and fragrant—the green of the grass, the brown of the dirt, the yellows, reds, and oranges of fallen leaves, and the elemental smells of earth and vegetation. It was incredibly lovely, sweet, and unsophisticated, and made him smile despite his circumstances.

This was a brand new world for him, a place where everything was giant-sized. All too soon, he realized that meant giant-sized trouble as well. He had shrunk to roughly the same size as a period at the end of a sentence, and no matter how strong his heart, or indomitable his will, or sharp his mind, that meant his life could be in danger merely because his body was so very, very small.

Just a stone’s throw away from where he stood, a spider the size of a small car dangled from a web as thick as bridge’s cable. The arachnid’s multiple red eyes watched him carefully, patiently, as if the creature was certain Henry would, sooner or later, invite himself into its web for lunch.

An anthill rose like a small mountain in the distance. He could see the worker ants trundling up and down the sides, carrying leaves and other bits of vegetable matter in their incredibly strong mandibles, and could almost picture them carting him inside it, presenting him to their queen as some sort of delicacy.

Far above his head, birds the size of bomber planes zoomed between the trees, no doubt searching the ground for choice little morsels like him to scoop up with their sharp talons.

Nearby, glimpsed through the towering blades of grass, slithered a golden brown, sinuous shape that looked to him as if it were nearly two stories tall. He could hear the rattle its tail made thrumming in his bones like thunder, and froze, hunkered against a root until he was sure it was gone.

Even otherwise innocuous creatures, those that ordinarily didn’t sting or bite or peck, could be deadly to him in his current size. A butterfly settled on a nearby blade of grass and fluttered wings as big as circus tent flaps. The breeze they stirred nearly knocked him off his feet.

A frog the size of a tank nearly gave him a heart attack by jumping over him, landing with a thud that made the earth under Henry’s feet tremble, and snatching a biplane-sized dragonfly out of the air with its incredibly long, red tongue.

Henry quickly realized this was a life-or-death situation, and he was at a distinct disadvantage over the local fauna. He had no weapons, no fangs, venom, claws, or pincers. He couldn’t fly away, or burrow beneath the dirt to escape predators, or cleverly change his color to blend in with the background.

As he stood there in a forest of grass blades and oversized, monstrous insects, for the first time he seriously considered the possibility he wasn’t engaged in some sort of drugged fantasy brought on by whatever was in the cup Alice gave him the night before, but rather wide awake and perfectly sane.

If he was, it could mean only one thing: he was in deep, deep shit.

A sound caught his ear, and he cocked his head, listening. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp. He realized it was the sound of many feet marching, like an army on the move. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp. And it was getting closer.

Twisting around, he felt panic clawing at his throat as he scanned the immediate area, looking for a potential hiding place. He was small—tiny, really. He should be able to hide just about anywhere, right?

Wrong.

The area around him, while thick with tall slender blades of grass and many hip-high pebbles, provided as much scant cover as a forest of palm trees might in the world he’d left behind, had palm trees actually grown in a forest, which he doubted.

In other words, little to none.

Finally, he spotted a huge, desiccated nut lying on the ground. The size of a large boulder, the nut’s blackened, cracked shell might provide a place for him to hide. He hurried over and ducked behind it. His luck seemed to hold. It proved to be only half a shell, cracked open and the nutmeat eaten long ago by some creature, the empty half shell discarded. He curled up in the empty space left by the missing nutmeat, hoping the shell would provide enough cover to protect him from whatever was marching his way.

Tramp. Tramp. Tramp.

The sound was closer now. Tremors rippled in the ground under the shell. He could hear odd clicking sounds in addition to the tramping of many feet. It sounded like an entire army was on the march.

Curiosity reared its ugly head, and completely ignoring the old adage about it killing cats, forced him to set aside his fear for a moment and peek out from behind the nutshell.

Ants.

Humongous red ants, each as big as a city bus, had gathered near the nut, standing in a straight, regimented line that stretched as far as he could see. Their massive mandibles clicked while bullwhip-like antennae waved in the air.

His fear, so recently shunted aside by his curiosity, elbowed its way back to the forefront of his consciousness like a fourth-grade bully through a crowd of kindergarteners, freezing the breath in his lungs. Unfortunately, his breath didn’t stay frozen. It thawed rapidly, flowing like a river past his lips in the form of a high-pitched, ragged scream.

Every pair of mandibles ceased clicking, and every pair of antennae swiveled in his direction. Henry ducked back into the shell’s hollow, his hands clamped over his traitorous mouth, hoping the ants’ antennae weren’t sensitive enough to hear the thumping of his heart.

The next thing he knew, he felt the shell holding him rise into the air. Looking down over the edge of the shell, he saw that an ant had clamped its mandibles around it and was carrying it—and him—off.

To his surprise, the ant carried him through the thick vegetation comprising the walls of the caterpillar’s lair—he and the ants were so small, the thorns did not pose a danger to them. They walked right under them without so much as a scratch.

Now what was he going to do? It was a long, long way down. He couldn’t jump, not if he didn’t want to risk breaking a leg or getting mashed under the ants’ marching feet. Nor did he want to alert the ants to his presence inside the shell. They might decide he’d do nicely for a quick on-the-road snack. His only choice seemed to be to wait until, hopefully, the ant set the shell down and he could make his escape.

The ant carried him for what seemed to him to be a long time, and he was almost lulled to sleep by the even sway of the ant’s gait. Then the world suddenly tipped at a sharp angle, and he slid a short way before his feet hit the opposite side of the shell. Peeking over the side again, he realized the ant was descending into a tunnel of some sort.

No, not a tunnel.

A hill. An anthill.

Oh, man. And he’d thought he’d been in trouble before.