Unhinged: 2 (45 page)

“I told ye, that day ye trespassed on me hallowed ground, that I would make confetti of ye. Be glad I’m stopping at this.” She stabs my wing with the cue, then drops it next to me as I curl up in agony. “Since ye gathered my runaway souls and brought Red back to my keep, I’ve decided to let ye live. Yer mortal dreamer and yer mother … that’s all I need for restitution. Ye may consider yer debts paid.”

I struggle to move.
No. Please don’t take them.
My chest swells with the plea, voice trapped inside, banging around like a caged bird.

She sends a web into the air and lifts away, obscured and lethal in the darkness. She flashes in and out of my vision, so high she’s virtually impossible to spot.

Red’s wicked cackle booms through the cavelike expanse, and I wrench my neck to check out the arcade door. Her floral form is taller than Morpheus now. The toys must’ve helped her escape my binds. She uses her snaky arms to propel herself along, lifting her pot and swinging it, reminding me of an orangutan. One of her extra limbs slinks out to catch Jeb. Morpheus encases Red in his blue magic as if in hopes of controlling her like he did the undead toys, but she’s too powerful, and she captures him, as well.

I cry out, sound finally ripping from my throat.

Resolved to help, I wrestle against the agonizing spasms in my back and wing and almost stand but drop down to my stomach again as a prickly hot rush pierces through my vertebrae. Is this how it felt for all those bugs I used to stick with pins?

I whimper—a sorry excuse for a queen, for a daughter, for a girlfriend and a friend. Icy hot spasms travel from my torn wing to every nerve center, shuddering through me in a shock wave. I shiver, my muscles jerking. Water squishes all around me, making me even colder.

My mind numbs. I’m being sucked into unconsciousness, like when the mud swallowed me days ago in my dream. I remember Morpheus’s voice as I was being pulled down. How he told me to find a way out, that I wasn’t alone. And when I reached out to the bugs, I was rescued.

When we arrived at Underland, the insects promised their loyalty and their aid.
Call us,
they said. So that’s what I do now … I reach for them in my mind, beg them to reawaken the wraiths, because that’s the only way to salvage the human realm.

There’s a whisper of affirmation, barely audible under the loud music, as if bug scouts have been waiting inside Underland for my signal all along. Relief floods me. The ants will fix it. The wraiths will come and take everything back that belongs in Wonderland.

A bitter realization hits. They’ll capture Morpheus, too. He’ll be swept into Wonderland alongside Red. He’ll still be in danger.

“Oh, no,” I mumble and drag myself to a crawling position, shutting out the pain.

High overhead, Sister Two swings stealthily toward Mom’s hovering form.

“Mom!” I yell, but the spidery gardener shoves her off balance before Mom sees her.

Mom plummets toward the pile of haunted toys in the skate bowl, her dress a beautiful cascade of luminous pink against her purplish black silhouette. The crazed toys descend on her.

“Get off of her!” I scream.

A cacophony of wretched, wailing screams drifts from the dance floor, louder than my voice, louder than the static now playing over the intercom. Through the white trees, a portal has opened in one of the mirrors on the wall, and it glows against the darkness. Black oily sludge oozes from the rabbit hole, seeping into our realm. In a blink, they split into phantoms, siphoning into the air like smoke.

They race over me and sniff, their wails splintering through my bones, shaking my wings. They leave their oily marks behind as I cry out and push forward, toward Mom piled under the undead toys. I can’t let the wraiths think she’s one of them. But Jeb and Morpheus need my help, too.

I make the mistake of looking toward the arcade. Red still has the guys wrapped within her leafy arms as Sister Two faces her down. Red uses her extra vines to drag herself toward the tulgey wood, and Sister Two skitters after them—a spider chasing a flower, just like in my mosaic. I gasp, realizing before it happens what Red’s planning to do. Just as Sister Two casts out a net of web to catch Jeb, her prized soul, Red dives into a tulgey tree’s yawning mouth, taking Jeb and Morpheus with her.

They’re gone.

I drop to my stomach, propped on my elbows, slammed with disbelief. Fighting back tears, I stare and wait. “Please don’t come out again … please don’t,” I mumble, unable to fathom a world
where Morpheus and Jeb are twisted and mutated like the looking-glass rejects.

Seconds pass by as long as hours. I clench my eyes closed, fighting against looking. On the inside of my lids I see their faces looming, nightmarishly deformed.

I struggle to breathe.

Driven by the screeches of the wraiths, I open my eyes and exhale. The tree’s mouth has stayed closed. Jeb, Morpheus, and Red are nowhere to be seen. But dread nips at the heels of my relief. Both of them have been accepted at the gate, which means they’re trapped in AnyElsewhere along with thousands of Wonderland criminals.

The wraiths dip and rise overhead, the air so thick with them it’s like a swarm of giant locusts. I can’t undo the horror of Jeb and Mopheus’s fate. I resolve to help them later, promising myself there’s a way—somehow.

For now, my mom’s still in danger.

Heartsick, I creep toward the skate bowl’s edge, unable to see her for all the toys clambering inside. Plucking up the cue she dropped in her fall, I poke at the restless souls. They snarl and part, revealing Mom. Her dress is torn and her mask askew, but she’s conscious. She shoves aside the toys clawing at her and reaches up to catch the stick. Her weight tugs my shoulder, and I grit my teeth against the ripping sensation in my back.

An instant before her hands grip the skate bowl’s edge, she’s caught in a funnel of wailing wraiths swirling around us, sending bloodcurdling screeches and harsh, cold wind over me.

“Stop!” I scream, arms covering my head for protection. “She belongs here!” They ignore me and touch down, funneling into the bowl. I force myself to stand against the agonizing pain.

“Take me, too!” I plead.

The twisting, wailing cloud sucks up everything but me: the glowing tulgey trees, the undead toys holding on to Mom, Sister Two and her spinnerets. I limp toward the mirrored wall as the cyclone filters through the portal, leaving only oily streaks behind.

Hoping to dive inside the glass before the portal closes, I throw myself into the mirror, but it’s too late. I slam the glass just as it’s closing, and the mirror cracks, slicing me, cold and unyielding. All I can do is bleed and watch the nightmare I conjured play out through the broken reflections.

The wraiths siphon down into Wonderland with their plunder, and the rabbit hole implodes upon itself, as if the impact of the entry was too violent. Nothing remains but overturned dirt and a broken sundial fountain.

No way in. Ever again.

Other than my nurse and me, the courtyard is deserted. I’m seated at one of the black cast-iron bistro tables on a cement courtyard that has been stamped to look like cobblestone.

The legs of the furniture are drilled into the ground in case an out-of-control patient should try to throw a chair in a fit of rage. A black and red polka-dotted parasol sprouts up from the center of the table like a giant mushroom and shades half of my face. Silver teacups and saucers glisten atop placements. Two settings: one for me and one for Dad.

I’m here because I’ve lost my head. My mind is unhinged. That’s what the doctors say.

Dad believes them. Why wouldn’t he? The police have proof. The vandalized state of Underland is just like what he saw at home
in my room, at Butterfly Threads, and in the school gymnasium. There’s blood that matches Mom’s DNA on the tablecloth from the buffet table, along with my blood on Jeb’s shirt that they found in my backpack in the garage.

Jeb and Mom have been missing for a month. I’m not so much a suspect as a victim. Of a cult, maybe. Or a gang. It could be sacrificial, or brainwashed violence. But I must’ve had help. After all, how could one small girl wreak so much havoc on her own?

They can’t get me to talk about it. When they ask, I become rabid, like a wild animal—or a netherling unleashed.

When the firemen first found me among the debris at Underland, I was broken—beyond the crippled wing I’d already absorbed back into my skin, beyond the gashes in my skin from the mirror’s glass. I couldn’t talk at all. I could only scream and cry.

Dad refused to let the asylum workers sedate me, and I love him for that. Since I couldn’t be drugged into submission, they brought me to a padded room to ensure I wouldn’t hurt myself. I hunkered in the corner for a week, limp and exhausted, surrounded by nothing but endless white. White like the tulgey trees that haunted my nightmares. I tormented myself with the mosaics and how each one played out that fated night.

There were never three fighting queens. There were only two: Red and me—the two halves of myself I struggled so hard to keep separate. Red was eaten alive by some vile creature—the tulgey—leaving my netherling side standing amid a storm of magic and chaos, and my human side wrapped up in something white, like web—my nemesis, the straitjacket.

Now those darkest nights have passed. The two sides of me are united as one. I’m letting the magic out again, privately, subtly,
deliberately, to soothe the hollow ache in my heart. My right wing is still damaged, but by stretching it each day, it’s piecing itself back together, bit by bit.

Claustrophobia no longer has any power over me. I’ve learned to manipulate the straitjacket’s Velcro closures. Rip them open with just a thought. Once my arms are free, I cover the surveillance camera over the door with the jacket, release my wings, and dance around the pillowed floor, half-naked, imagining I’m back in Wonderland, in Sister One’s cushioned cottage, eating sugar cookies and playing chess with an egg-shaped man named Humphrey. By the time the asylum employees realize my camera isn’t working, I’ve already absorbed my wings and am bound by the Velcro and cotton again, slumped in the corner, silent and unresponsive.

I sneak out of my room at night, when all is still and silent. And I watch the humans sleeping, study their vulnerabilities, and savor the fact that I will never be helpless like them again.

I
am
mad, and I embrace it. Madness is part of my heritage. The part that led me to Wonderland and earned me the crown. The part that will lead me to face Red one final time, until only one of us is left.

Until then, I’m a queen with no way back to my kingdom, which bleeds for me. My two faithful and beloved knights, Jeb and Morpheus, are trapped in AnyElsewhere—the looking-glass world, the land of the exiled and the gruesome. And my mom is alone in Wonderland, at the mercy of Sister Two. That’s unacceptable. I didn’t get her back just to lose her again.

The rabbit hole has collapsed, and my key is melded to a nugget of worthless metal. But I have another key—a
living
key—that can
open the way into AnyElsewhere through the mirrors of this world. And now I have the tickets to trade for it.

Last night I crept into Mom’s old room after lockdown, longing to see it while it was empty between patients.

In the shadows, a soft, strange glow radiated from behind the picture of geraniums on the wall, detectable only to someone who’d learned to find light in the darkness.

The same picture hangs in every room, but the flowers on this one glimmered—neon green, orange, and pink petals. Following a hunch, I moved the frame aside to find the painting had been rubbed to paper-thinness behind the petals. Even more mysterious, there was a fist-size hole dug into the plaster wall, filled with soil and flourishing ultraviolet fungi.

Mom was harvesting mushrooms from Wonderland while she was a prisoner here. When she told me netherlings always have an escape plan, she meant it.

I sat on the bed for some time after, mushrooms in hand, wondering how often she used them to get out when she needed an escape. It eased my mind to know she’d had that chance, and even more, that she'd passed it on to me.

“Hey, Allie.” Dad’s arrival shakes me back to today. I inhale the outdoor air, feeling a resurgence of energy. The half of my face in the sun is hot, so I scoot further into the umbrella’s shade.

“Hi.” I offer him that much, then return to my conversation with the two monarch butterflies fluttering around the flowers on the table. They tell me to hurry, because London’s a long way for them to fly and daylight is preferable.

Dad watches me with the bugs, tired and defeated. “Allie,
sweetie, try to stay focused, okay? It’s important. We need to find your mother and Jeb. They’re in danger.”

Yes, they are, Dad. More than you know.

“If you’ll send away the nurse,” I offer in a demented, singsong voice, “I’ll tell you everything I remember.” I scoop Salisbury steak from my teacup and spoon the salty, meaty bite into my mouth, letting the gravy drip down my chin. It’s the only way I’ll eat now, with teacups and saucers. And I dress like Alice every day. I know how to emulate crazy. I learned from the master.