Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (3 page)

Alice's screams echoed as she tumbled head over heels down the enormous, dark hole. Her hands reached out, searching for something to stop her fall, and she realized that the walls around her were lined with odd things . . . things you would never expect to find in a rabbit hole. Hanging on the dirt walls were crooked paintings, ancient maps, cracked mirrors, demonic masks, and bookshelves crowded with bizarre paraphernalia.

She grabbed the first thing her hand touched and found herself holding an empty jam jar. Frustrated and terrified, she let that go and grabbed for something else—a crystal ball. Growing frantic, she scrabbled through object after peculiar object, finding herself holding books, more jam jars, a badger claw, a monkey's hand, and finally a human skull. With another shriek, she flung this last terrible thing away from her and kept falling, down and down and down into deeper darkness, where there was no longer anything to hold on to.

Still she fell, as day passed into night, down and down, still falling.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Alice landed on a hard wooden floor, smacking her head as she hit the ground.

“Ah!” she cried in pain as the wind was knocked out of her. She gasped for air for a moment, then sat up, rubbing the bump on her head.

She was in a circular hall with closed doors all around her. There was something strangely familiar about it, although she couldn't imagine when she would have been in a round room at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

Alice got to her feet and tried one of the doors, but it was locked. She tried the next—and the next— but they were all locked. What was the use of so many doors if you couldn't go through any of them?

Finally she took a step back and glanced around the hall. That's when she noticed a three-legged glass table nearby. Had that been there before? She didn't understand how she could have missed it.

There was a tiny gold key sitting on top of the glass tabletop. Alice picked it up and tried it in a couple of the doors, but it was far too small. She paused and studied the key for a moment, then glanced around at all the doors in the hall, wondering if any of them were small enough for this key.

She spotted a thick velvet curtain between two of the doors and swept it aside, revealing a door much smaller than the others. It was only about two feet high and quite narrow, with a pattern of vines carved into the wood.

Alice crouched to fit the tiny key into the lock of the little door. It fit perfectly. The small door swung open, and she ducked her head to look through to the other side.

It was difficult to see much, but she could tell that beyond the door was a garden with a fountain in the center. She got down on her stomach and tried to squeeze through the doorway, but her shoulders got stuck in the frame, and no matter how she wriggled, she couldn't go through.

With a sigh, she wriggled back into the hall and shut the door again. Stumped, she climbed to her feet and went to put the key back on the table. But to her surprise, there was now a bottle sitting on the glass top of the table. She was
sure
it hadn't been there before. Alice looked around curiously.

The hall looked deserted. Alice squinted at the bottle. A tiny white label around its neck said: drink me. Yes, that sounds like a great idea, Alice thought. Follow the mysterious instructions of someone you can't see. Drink a mystery potion. What could go wrong?

She removed the top, sniffed the contents of the bottle, and recoiled. It didn't smell appetizing.

Alice looked around the room again. On the other hand, she didn't have a lot of choices. She shrugged. “It's only a dream,” she said aloud to herself. A familiar dream . . . although she couldn't remember falling asleep. Maybe in the meadow? Or in the woods on the way to the gazebo? It was all so muddled now. But this had to be a dream. There was nothing real about it. And if it was a dream, then what could happen to her?

Alice poured some of the drink into her mouth, shuddered, and coughed, gagging at the taste. Apparently things could still taste horrible, even in dreams.

She replaced the bottle top and suddenly noticed that the table was getting larger. She frowned at it.

It took her another few moments to realize that the table wasn't growing. She held out her pale hands and stared at them in shock as she got smaller and smaller and smaller. Finally she was two feet tall, surrounded by a puddle of her now-oversize clothes.

Well, that raises some new problems . . . but at least it also solves one, she thought
.
Wrapping her skirts around her arms to lift them out of the way, Alice flounced over to the small door and tried to open it.

She groaned in dismay. It was locked again! And of course she'd left the key on top of the table. She turned and gazed up at it through the glass tabletop. The key glittered in the dim light, mocking her from far out of reach.

What Alice didn't know was that at that very moment, she was being watched.

A round eye blinked at her through a keyhole.

“You'd think she would remember this from the first time,” muttered the eye's owner.

There was a flutter of feathers and some jostling, and a new, smaller eye, this one rimmed in brown fur, replaced the first one at the keyhole. “You've brought the wrong Alice,” said this new watcher.

“She's the right one.” said another voice behind them, indignantly. “I'm certain of it.”

The second eye blinked dubiously.

Alice was now trying to climb the table leg, but she kept getting tangled in her too-big clothes and sliding down. She was starting to think this was impossible. She'd never get back to that key. She'd be stuck, tiny and trapped and tormented by the key just out of reach, until she wasted away and died.

Then she noticed a small box under the table. Now
that
hadn't been there before, either! Alice whirled around and glared at the doors of the hall.

Exasperated, Alice opened the box. Inside was a beautiful little cake with the words eat me written on it in ornate pink icing. It was almost too pretty to eat, but again, she didn't have much choice. She considered the cake, then looked up at the key, high above her on the table. It was worth a shot. Of course, she might disappear altogether, but then she'd just wake up from the dream, and that would be all right, too.

Alice took a tiny bite of the cake, and then another.

WHOOSH!

Suddenly she shot upward. She grew and grew at an alarming rate. She reached her normal size, where her clothes fit again . . . and then kept growing. Buttons popped, seams began to strain, and her skirt got shorter—Alice couldn't help thinking how scandalized Lady Ascot would be at the sight of her bare ankles. But then she was distracted by the feeling of her head bumping against the ceiling. What if she kept growing until she filled the whole hall? What would happen then?

To her relief, that was where she stopped. Towering over the table, she bent far down and picked up the small key. It looked no bigger than an eyelash in her giant hand. She sidled across the room, crouched, and put the key into the small door's lock.

“She's the wrong Alice,” said the second voice definitively.

“Give her a chance,” the third voice insisted.

Alice giggled a little at the thought of trying to fit through the door at her current enormous size. She sat down with the bottle in one hand and the cake in the other. Sipping from one and then nibbling from the other, she managed to shrink and grow and shrink herself down to the perfect size for the door, about two feet tall. Of course, now her clothes were far too big again, but she'd solved one problem. Dragging her skirts behind her, she ran to the door, unlocked it, and stepped through.

The world Alice stepped into was strange and beautiful and unexpected, like a garden glimpsed in a mirror from far away. For some reason she had expected it to be full of flowers— talking flowers with silly personalities. But this garden was brown and tangled instead. Stone statues littered the walkways, many of them broken and overgrown with dead vines. The fountain no longer glittered with sun-speckled water. It was still and empty, covered in a creeping greenish-brown moss.

“
HAAACHOOOOOORRRRRW!
” Something bellow-sneezed behind her. Alice whirled around and saw a green pig dash past, its emerald hooves clattering on the dusty gravel paths. She blinked at its curly, brilliant green tail as it vanished behind a long hedge.

Her eyes fell on a row of flowers, and she jumped. They
did
have human faces—how had she known they would? But these were not the ones she'd expected somehow. These faces were gaunt and haunted, as if the flowers were starving. Their eyes stared blankly past her, and their petals hung limp, with pale, washed-out colors barely visible against the brown and gray backdrop. None of them spoke to her, although a couple let their gaze travel slowly across her face, then drift back down to the ground.

Now that Alice was paying closer attention, she could see living things moving all around her. Up in the air, dragonflies the size of horses were doing battle with horseflies the size of dragons and gnats that were bigger than any animal she'd ever seen.

They swooped and zoomed toward one another, stinging and buzzing angrily. The weak sun, hidden by a haze of gray clouds, barely illuminated the blue-green bodies of the dragonflies and the iridescent wings of all the battling insects.

Alice jumped again as another creature stalked past her—a shabby, thin bird on legs as tall and thin as the stilts little boys played with in the alleys outside her London home. She saw more birds that looked much the same: shoulders hunched, drab feathers falling out, knobbly legs that looked too skinny to support even the bird's thin frame.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Alice muttered. This place was familiar and yet . . . somehow not. It seemed . . . sadder than she had imagined.

“I told you she's the right Alice,” a voice said triumphantly.

Alice whirled around. A cluster of the oddest creatures stood behind her, all of them staring at her intently. The speaker was the White Rabbit, who stood with his front paws neatly tucked into his waistcoat. His long ears and wiggly nose twitched as he studied her.

She was getting an equally intense look from the large bird next to the White Rabbit—a dodo bird, if she was not mistaken. He was peering at her through a pair of eyeglasses and leaning on a walking stick.

The rest of the party consisted of one young dormouse in breeches and a pair of very round boys with their arms thrown over each other's shoulders. Words were embroidered on their stiffly starched white collars. One said dee and the other said dum.

“I am not convinced,” said the Dormouse, shifting back and forth on her paws.

The White Rabbit threw up his hands. “How is that for gratitude!” he cried. “I've been up there for weeks trailing one Alice after the next! I was almost
eaten
by other animals! Can you imagine?

They go about entirely unclothed and they do their . . .
shukm . . .
in public.” A full-body shudder rippled through his white fur. “I had to avert my eyes.” He touched one paw to his forehead dramatically.

“She doesn't look anything like herself,” one of the flowers suddenly offered. A few of the other flowers with human faces perked up a little and squinted at Alice, who felt rather like a specimen under a microscope at this point.

“That's because she's the wrong Alice,” the Dormouse said again.

The pair of boys spoke up.

“And if she was, she might be,” said the one with Dee on his collar.

“But if she isn't, she ain't,” said Dum.

“But if she were so, she would be.”

“But she isn't. No-how.”

They both shook their round, moonlike faces solemnly.

Alice put her hands on her hips. “How can I be the ‘wrong Alice' when it's
my
dream?” she demanded. “And who are
you
, if I may ask?”

One of the round boys seized her hand. “Oh, I'm Tweedledee, and he's Tweedledum,” he rattled off quickly.

“Contrariwise,” the other piped up, “I'm Tweedledum—he's Tweedledee.”

Which didn't give her much of an answer, really.

The Dodo cleared his throat. “We should consult Absolem.”

The others all nodded. Even the talking flower's head bobbed up and down. “Exactly,” said the flower. “Absolem will know who she is.”

Tweedledee offered Alice his arm. “I'll escort you,” he offered.

Just as she was about to take it, Tweedledum suddenly seized her elbow and yanked her away. “Hey, it's not being your turn! So unfair!” he insisted.

Tweedledee grabbed her other arm and tried to tug her back to him. “Hey, leave off!” he yelled.

“Let go!” bellowed the other.

Alice thought she might split in two in a minute. She wriggled free and jumped away. “Are they always this way?” she asked the rabbit.

“Family trait,” the White Rabbit answered. “You can both escort her,” he said firmly to the Tweedles.

Shooting daggers at each other with their eyes, Tweedledee and Tweedledum each took one of Alice's arms and led her forward. The Dormouse, the Dodo, and the White Rabbit followed close behind.

As they walked through the overgrown garden, Alice could hear the talking flowers whispering about her whenever they passed by.

“It can't be her,” murmured a glum-looking daisy.

“She looks nothing like Alice,” agreed a drooping tiger lily.

“She is not even wearing the right dress,” complained one of the violets.

Alice peered at the tiger lily as they hurried by. It couldn't look familiar . . . how silly! All tiger lilies looked the same, surely. And yet there was something about this one, as if they'd met before. How peculiar this dream was getting!

“Who is this Absolem?” Alice asked her companions. She couldn't remember dreaming about an “Absolem” before.

“He's wise,” said the White Rabbit. “He's absolute.”

“He's Absolem,” the Tweedles added in unison, as if that should answer the question. Alice realized she wasn't going to get much more useful information out of them. She'd have to wait until they reached this wise old Absolem.

She blinked, then blinked again. The garden path sloped down a little hill, and slowly—so slowly that at first she hadn't noticed it—they were surrounded by a strange mist. Through the mist she could see that they were wandering into a tall forest, but the trees were not by any means ordinary. Their trunks were fat and pale, and when Alice looked up to find branches, she saw instead a flat brownish gray canopy extending out from the top of the trunk in an unbroken, round circle.

“Oh!” she gasped softly. They weren't trees . . . they were mushrooms! She was standing in a forest of tall mushrooms, many of them towering high above her head. The earth was spongy and squishy and dark under her shoes.

“Who are you?” intoned a deep voice.

Alice's eyes traveled up the nearest trunk—up and up and up to where the mist was rising in a steady plume. It wasn't an ordinary mist. It was the smoke from a hookah. And that hookah was currently being smoked by a very large blue caterpillar.

A shiver danced across Alice's skin. She
did
remember something about a blue caterpillar. But before she could fit the pieces of her memory together, the White Rabbit pushed her toward the mushroom.

“Um,” Alice stammered. “Absolem?”

The Caterpillar writhed a little, looking displeased. “You're not Absolem,” it pointed out. “
I'm
Absolem. The question is . . . who are YOU?”

He inhaled deeply, then puffed a series of smoke rings in her face. Alice coughed and tried to wave the smoke away.

“Alice,” she answered when she could breathe again.

“We shall see,” the Caterpillar responded skeptically.

“What do you mean by that?” Alice demanded. All this nonsense about being the wrong Alice was starting to annoy her. “I ought to know who I am!”

“Yes, you ought,” said the Caterpillar with a disapproving look. “Stupid girl. Unroll the Oraculum,” he added commandingly.

The White Rabbit hopped over to a nearby toadstool, only as high as Alice's shoulders. He bounced up on his strong back paws and grabbed the ancient parchment lying rolled up on top of it. With a dramatic flourish, he unrolled it.

“The Oraculum,” he announced. “Being a Calendrical Compendium of Underland.”

Alice peered over his shoulder. It was the oddest scroll. It looked nothing like her neat schoolbooks with their even rows of dates and boring historical facts. But it was clearly a timeline, with important events marked for each day. Every day had a title, but every day also had an odd little illustration next to it . . . and some of them were moving!

“It's a calendar,” Alice guessed.

“Compendium,” the Caterpillar corrected her.

“It tells of each and every day since the Beginning.”

“Today is Griblig Day in the time of the Red Queen,” explained the White Rabbit. He pointed with one paw at the illustration for “Griblig Day.”

To Alice's surprise, the illustration showed her, the White Rabbit, and all the others peering at the Oraculum—exactly the way they were peering at it that very moment!

Well, that's odd, she thought. More than odd, it's curious. And it makes me curious. How did the parchment know what was going to happen before it happened?

“Show her the Frabjous Day,” said the Caterpillar. Its long blue coils rippled as it went back to smoking the hookah.

The White Rabbit flipped ahead in the scroll, turning the rolls on either side to advance into the future. Tweedledee was too impatient to wait. He was dancing on his small round feet.

“Oh yeah, Frabjous being the day you slay the Jabberwocky,” he told Alice.

“Sorry?” she said. “Slay a . . . what?”

He pointed at the Oraculum, and Alice turned slowly to see the illustration on “Frabjous Day.” It was one of the moving pictures—unfortunately, since the thing moving in it was one of the most horrible creatures Alice had ever seen. It was as tall as a giraffe with reptilian wings, scales, long sharp claws, a pronged tail, and a vest. Not to mention its enormous gnashing teeth and wide, flaming eyes.

In the picture, the Jabberwocky hissed furiously at a female knight with long blond hair, wearing chain mail, and carrying a shining sword. They fought, blade clashing against claws and scales, and the Jabberwocky shrieked with anger.

Tweedledum's pudgy finger poked into her view, tapping the illustration of the knight. “Oh, yeah, that being you there with the Vorpal Sword.”

“No other swords can kill the Jabberwocky,” said Tweedledee. “No-how.”

“If it ain't Vorpal, he ain't dead,” said Tweedledum.

Alice stared at the image, transfixed. That
couldn't
be her. She'd never worn chain mail in her life! Let alone lifted a sword! She couldn't even imagine battling a giant monster like that!

The knight in the picture swung her sword, turning her face toward the readers of the scroll. Alice gasped.

It
was
her. Most unmistakably. And she had bloodlust in her eyes.