I try to tell myself I'm wrapped in a snuggly blanket, but my brain's not buying it. When we finally come to a stop, my wings ache and my back and tailbone throb from the uneven terrain we bulldozed on the way here.
I breathe quietly as a strange argument takes place over me.
"Stupidesses! Stupid, stupid! She usn't smellum deadish!"
"But she lookum deadses. She lookum it!"
Bad news is, they've figured out I'm alive. Worse news, I can't be sure about them. Their decomposing stench burns my throat. They don't sound very big. Maybe they're pygmy zombies.
I creep myself out with that thought and have to suppress a whimper.
The ropes loosen around my ankles. They'll have me out of my winged cocoon soon. Then I'll have to face whatever they are. Nervous anticipation makes my pulse jump.
"Usses are only to brung the deadses. Twids usn't approve of 'stakes being missed," one of the creatures says shrilly.
"Missing 'stakes aren't the worsest of our oblems-prob."
"Eps and yesses. Mistakens usn't our aults, f's or any other. Sister One asks usses to brung her here."
"Asks or notses, Sister Two will hang usses by our necks! No iving-lees are to be brunged. No breathers or talkeresses. None, none, none!"
Their language is a mix between pig latin and utter nonsense. The best I can tell, they work for the Twid Sisters as the gatherers of dead things. They're worried Sister Two won't be pleased that something living has been brought onto the hallowed grounds. Sounds like she might hang them for that mistake. If they think on it long enough, they might decide to make me dead to save themselves.
I clench my teeth to stave off a stab of fear. Maybe Sister One won't let them hurt me, since she assigned them my capture. Which raises a new question: Why did she want me here?
A distant thrum of thunder rolls through my bones. I force myself to breathe, inhaling the scent of moist earth over the stench of my captors. The cemetery must be watertight, because rain's hitting what sounds like leaves overhead, but I'm not getting wet.
What if Jeb is in the middle of the storm? What if he gets caught in a mudslide?
I've got to get back to him. I can use the rope around my ankles as an extension to the chain.
My captors are still arguing about what to do with me, and the reality hits that no one's going to come to my rescue here. It's up to me to save myself.
Insecurity sinks its teeth in, vicious and biting.
But wait. I'm no stranger to this world—I'm acquainted with its secrets. Maybe that was only in my dreams, but I still learned things that have saved me more than once on this journey. I'm not the helpless and vulnerable little girl I was when I used to play here.
I'm not even the same girl I was when I arrived in the rabbit hole with Jeb. I'm stronger.
For one, I have wings now; and, as I've seen with Morpheus, they can be used for more than just flying. They can be weapons and shields.
Hoping for the benefit of surprise, I thrash my legs where the ropes are loose. The creatures ricochet off my bucking shins, no heavier than guinea pigs.
They scream as I shift to my side and the chain jingles to the ground. I unlatch it from my belt and my wings snap open. Gasping air into my lungs, I kick out my legs and roll to my feet, keeping a brave front in case the creatures are like dogs and can smell fear. I even manage a decent roar while I balance my weight against the new appendages.
The creatures scurry around my feet, hissing. They're wearing tiny miner's caps, and the lights bob all around like reflections from a disco ball, disorienting me.
I immediately recognize them from the Wonderland website. They're like the paintings of pixies trapped in cages, crying silver tears—gruesome yet fascinating.
Their long tails and primate faces remind me of spider monkeys, except for their hairless hides. Silver slime oozes from their bald skin, the origin of the noxious scent I've been gagging on. Their bulbous eyes are silver, too, with no pupils or irises, so they glimmer like wet coins—almost glaring, even in the dim light.
Oily droplets trail their footsteps. A glance at my feet reveals the same silvery slick residue around my boots. They must have used their tails to drag me here, not ropes, which means I'll need to find another way to make a cable for Jeb.
A few of the pixies pause at my feet and look from the chain to me, debating whether it's worth the effort to bind me again. I pick up the links, then swoop my wings low to bowl the creatures over, stomping my feet for good measure. The pixies squirm into some hedges where the others have already hidden.
Whimpers shake the leaves, along with flashes of light from their caps. The creatures sound more scared than I feel.
I'm in a covered garden, dark and musty. Over to my left, I spot a smattering of glittery items—from bracelets and necklaces to unset jewels—and a pile of bones along with several reels the size of bicycle tires filled with gold, shimmery thread. I'm reminded of the creepy staircase Jeb and I climbed down to get into the heart of Wonderland; it could've been built from these materials. Maybe the jewelry is the pixies' payment for their creations.
I pick up a reel of gold and tug on the thread. Though it looks elegant and fragile, it's deceptively strong, like telephone cord. Strong enough to hold Jeb's weight.
As I loop the chain through the hole in the middle of the reel to fashion a sling, a few of the pixies scurry out to drag the remaining reels, bones, and jewelry into their hiding places, hissing at me.
I size them up, searching my memory for anything Morpheus taught me about them, trying to assess if they're a threat. I remember a sketch he drew. How his long, elegant fingers pointed to their likenesses. He said they're docile and shy and love anything that glitters. Like snakes, they shed their skin when they grow, but, unlike snakes', their skin decomposes in greasy patches before falling off, giving them a unique rapport with the dead. In fact, they feel more at home with corpses than living things.
I'm nothing but a novelty to them. They have no reason to hurt me. The staccato beat of my heart slows.
I turn on my heel, looking for an exit. The wings tangle under my boots, causing me to step all over them. Twinges of pain shoot through my spine and shoulders, proof the appendages are attached to my skeleton.
A few wayward giggles shake the bushes and I glare at my invisible audience while freeing myself. My wings can't stretch all the way up, due to the low-hanging thorny vines and briars of the roof.
I pull a wing over my right shoulder to make sure I didn't hurt it. Contact with the veinlike cross sections sends pulses through my back. It's like touching sunlight and webs. Warm, ethereal, but not sticky… fine-spun.
I'm struck by how something so delicate can give me such a sense of power. My wings are not black like Morpheus's. They're closer to white frosted glass with spots of glittery jewels that blink every color of the rainbow like the jewels under his eyes. The pattern reminds me of butterflies.
Butterfly. Ironic, that all these years Dad has called me that. Now I really am one. A trapped butterfly.
I look around again. The air down here is motionless and clammy. Judging from the sharp-cornered hedges, I'm smack in the middle of a garden labyrinth worthy of any gothic suspense novel. There are three openings branching off from here. One of them is my escape route.
Rain slams harder on the leaves overhead. I have to hurry.
Slinging the chain and reel over my shoulder and underneath my wing, I jingle a warning to the pixies for good measure—I won't go down without a fight—then choose the opening on my right, where a soft glow radiates. I weave my way through the maze, stopping to work the chain free from underbrush each time it gets snagged.
Soon the path branches off again, this time to five options—all equally bright. I take the opening in the middle and keep moving.
Ten steps in, and I plunge through an archway, ending up where I first started. The pixies have crawled out of hiding. Their miner's caps bounce light all around as they snicker. I glare at them and they scrabble back to the hedges, leaving oily tracks behind.
Maybe it's time to bargain for some answers.
Taking off my belt, I wave it in front of the hedges so the dim light catches the rubies. "I'll give this to whoever shows me the way out of the maze."
Murmurs erupt, but no one volunteers. I plop to my knees and part the leaves at the base of the closest hedge. A set of reflective eyes peers back from the depths. The light on the creature's cap is turned off.
"Hi." I amp up the charm, trying to be diplomatic like I was with the ferret creature at Morpheus's banquet. It's not easy when the subject smells like rotting meat. I thread the belt through the leaves, letting the pixie see the jewels up close. "Pretty, right?"
It yanks the belt out of my hand and dons the accessory like a scarf. Petting the sparkly rubies, it purrs.
"Do you know why Sister One wants me here?" I ask.
The pixie blinks its long lashes demurely. Its eyelids are vertical, closing side to side like stage curtains before snapping open again. Just plain freaky.
"Usses usn't know," it murmurs.
"Okay." I can buy that. "But Sister Two doesn't want me here, right?"
The creature shudders in answer.
"Then help me get out, and the big bad sister will never know. You won't get strung up that way. Make sense?"
The pixie nods. "Uses the ee-kay, sparkly talkeress," it whispers before withdrawing deeper into the leaves.
"The key?" I ask aloud. He can't mean the one Jeb left in the rabbit hole door. But what other key is there?
In my dream, Morpheus called my birthmark a key when he showed me how to open the diamond tree.
I shove my wings out of the way to sit down, peel off both my boots, and wiggle my toes, rubbing the swollen arches of my feet. I've been wearing platforms for way too long. Two days straight now. Is that right?
I can't remember.
Frowning, I roll up the leggings on my left leg until I see the birthmark. I'm reminded of how my skin reacted to Jeb's touch when he caressed my ankle in the living room. And then how it felt in that moment Morpheus pressed his flesh to mine to heal me.
Jeb is stable, strong, and genuine—my knight in shining armor. Morpheus is selfish, unreliable, and transcendent—chaos incarnate. Impossible to compare.
Yet here I am, all of those things. Both light and dark at the same time. If I were to give in to one side of me, would that mean I'd have to give up the other? My heart aches at the possibility. Somehow I feel like I need both to be complete.
I study the birthmark and shut down any other thoughts. It's possible that this is a map of the maze I'm in. The pigmentation follows a continuous right curve and winds into itself. Assuming I'm in the very middle of the maze, I'll need to take left turns to get out again.
Unless I'm looking at the thing upside down.
Disorientation makes my head spin. The feeling of being trapped constricts my chest again. I stand, holding my boots by their laces in one hand and the chain and reel in the other. If I just keep going left, I'll end up somewhere eventually. I hope…
"You guys coming?" I ask the pixies. As strange as they are, their company comforts me. Leaves rattle from behind when I start through the left opening. I step wide to avoid prickly patches in the ground cover. My companions follow in my footsteps, little lights bobbing, and I imagine how comical our caravan must look. If Jeb were here, he'd come up with some funny nickname for the pixies.
My smile at the thought is bittersweet. Just be okay, Jeb. I'm coming.
It's too quiet with only the rain pattering above us, and I consider talking to my pixie companions, maybe even the hedges. Silence isn't all I once thought it would be. Throughout most of my adolescent life, I tried to shut out the bugs and plants, longing to fit in. But I'm starting to think I might need those other voices in order to fit into my own skin. In order to be myself.
I feel the same way about my wings…
I flew.
I. Flew.
I wasn't afraid. I was in control, strong, free. Alive.
As if in response to my thoughts, my left wing droops down and butts me in the head. I push it behind me, then spin on my heel to walk backward, studying my companions. "Why is it the longer I'm here, the more I feel like I belong?" I ask them.
They slow their steps but don't answer. The one wearing the belt as a scarf smiles a gruesome smile, and thirty-some other pairs of metallic eyes glitter back curiously beneath their caps.
Morpheus's remark about Alice's lost childhood niggles like a dripping faucet in my head. Two things don't add up: Alice's claim that she'd been held captive in a cage for all those years, and the missing birthmark when she was an old woman. Morpheus is hiding something. If only I had time to stop and reason it out.
A distant thrum of thunder spins me around again. I've lost count of how many leftward turns my entourage and I have taken, but this path seems longer than any other. I stop at an archway—the tallest and brightest I've seen. It has to be the way out.
The pixies' mining lights disappear into the hedges. It doesn't matter if they come or not. Nothing's stopping me from leaving this place.
My determination falters the minute I step through the archway. The boots, chain, and reel slip out of my hands, clunking to the path beneath me.
A tunnel of massive webs curves ahead, heavy with dots of amber light.
Once, in Pleasance, after a summer storm, I found a spiderweb in a tree with rows upon rows of dewdrops on every radial. The sun sliced through a cloud and lit the droplets as if they were on fire. It was amazing, water… on fire.
That's what this looks like—magnified by the thousands. But these are not dewdrops clinging to the giant cobweb. These are roses: crystalline and cabbage-size. Their scent is different from the roses' back home. It's spicy with a hint of scorched fermentation, like autumn leaves.
I step deeper within. The lights pulse like a heartbeat, hypnotic. Another roll of thunder quakes overhead. Fog drifts along the ground—a carpet of mist spooky enough for a horror movie.
I inch closer, captivated by the electric fluctuations in the center of each glassy rose. Awareness surges through me, that same knowing that hit when I sprouted wings. The light inside these flowers is the residue of life. This is the garden where Sister One plants and tends spirits. And I'm standing smack in the midst of Wonderland's dearly departed.
The ground is hallowed here. No wonder the pixies didn't follow me. Unnerved, I back up.
"Do not fear. Come closer, fair child. I have what you seek." The whisper stops me in my tracks.
"Chessie?" I mutter. There's no way the quest could be this easy.
"You'll not find that treacherous creature in this web. But I can serve you better than he."
The voice is coming from one of the roses. A red swirl gilds its transparent petals, reminding me of stained glass. I bend low and part the bloom's center, expecting a hard, slick surface. Instead, my fingertips meet a soft velveteen fuzz, an incandescent fur that coats the petals like a fiber-optic novelty.
As if responding to my touch, the light brightens, then takes on the shape of a face, eerily lifelike, just like the cameos of white smoke Morpheus blew from his hookah.
"He found you at last," the face whispers, "bearer of my pin." A scowl stretches her features. "I assumed your hair would be red… well, no matter. We can amend the color. You will do beautifully."
I touch the ruby hairpin, words frozen on my tongue. The woman's tattooed eyes look like mine, and I recognize her vaguely but can't place her. Before I can draw back from the petals, the light separates from the bloom then shoots into my fingers on a shock wave. A fizzy sensation jitters through my veins and illuminates them beneath the skin on the back of my hands so they appear green—like chlorophyll. My veins sprout leaves at every turn, making them look more like vines than channels of blood.
Then, just as quickly as they brightened, my veins blend once more into my flesh, as though nothing happened.
I could have imagined it. One thing I didn't imagine, though, was the sense of intrusion. For a minute, someone else shared my body.
With a snap, the rose cracks and withers beneath my hand.
The minute the rose dies, the thousands of surrounding blooms shake on their webbed trellises, all whispering at once.
The cacophony surges through my eardrums. I clutch my ears.
Their murmurs rise to a harrowing screech, as if someone has taken a cello's bow and scratched it across a chalkboard—back and forth, again and again—feeding the vibrations through subwoofers turned full blast in my brain. I fall to my knees, screaming.
"You've gained a square." A woman's singsong voice cuts through the chaos. As she scurries by, a rustle of skirts touches my sleeve.
Her long, pale fingers tug on the web that surrounds the shattered rose, playing the anchor lines with the mastery of a harpist. The other blossoms—still trembling and murmuring—grow quieter until their whispers are tolerable again.
I look up into her face, eyes sky-bright blue and lips the lavender of November dusk. Her skin is so translucent, she's like a drawing on a piece of tracing paper—shimmery and gauzy, with hair the color of pencil shavings. A red and white striped dress, fitted at the bodice like a candy striper's uniform but with a long, flowing hoop skirt, gives the illusion she's from the Regency era.
I stand, shaky, and back away. She follows. The lacy hem of her skirt kicks up and sweeps fog from around her feet. If she had ankles and shins, they'd be showing. Instead, eight jointed limbs, black and shiny like a spider's, glide underneath. It's as if someone took her torso and snapped it into place atop the thorax of a black widow.
I swallow a groan. The hoop skirt must hide a globule abdomen along with the spinnerets used to make this tunnel of web. I suppress the urge to run for my life. Wouldn't do any good. The roof's too low for me to use my wings, and there's no way I can outrun that many legs.
"Sister One?" I croak, surprised I can get anything out of my compressed voice box.
"How do you do?" She offers an open palm for a shake. I can't bring myself to reciprocate, for fear she'll spin me up and tuck me away for a late-night snack.
Her hand drops. "You gained a square but lost the queen." She grows taller in one smooth motion, as if raised up on a mechanical platform. "That was not in my bargain with Morpheus." Her hands settle on her waist.
"Morpheus?" Suspicion defeats horror. He's the reason she had me dragged here? Was it to ensure I'd find Chessie's head? But he said she was holding a grudge, so why is she helping him?
"Have you stolen the queen? Or is she on the loose?" Sister One's blue eyes glimmer, her feathery black lashes narrowing.
"Um." I shoot a sideways glance at the rose I ruined, now splintered like the mirror in my room. And then it hits me why the smoky white silhouette looked familiar. "That was Queen Red!" The netherling who cursed my family. "I didn't know she was dead…"
"Yes, was." Sister One leans down to wave a finger at my nose. "And this was not part of the bargain."
The roses on the web start to shake again, more volatile this time. The movement rocks my equilibrium, as if I'm spinning inside some carnival ride. Sister One holds out her palms to me.
"You woke them! You must help me lull them back to sleep!" She starts to sing a familiar tune… not Morpheus's lullaby but something else from my childhood.
"Ring around the rosy…"
Her eight feet tap to the rhythm, waiting for a dance partner. Trying not to think about the spinnerets beneath her skirt, I take her hands. Her skin is smooth and smells of sunlight and dust.
Soon we're whirling in a circle like children. One scene in Lewis Carroll's version of Wonderland comes to mind… when Tweedledee and Tweedledum danced with Alice to the tune of "Here We Go 'round the Mulberry Bush."
But Sister One is partial to the rosy song—for obvious reasons. Though it's a different version than I heard growing up:
Ring-a-ring-a-roses / The body decomposes.
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush! / You'll all tumble down.
Down, down, into the deep / Give the Twids our souls to keep.
Silent slumber on a web / Ne'er to raise a restless head.
If we wake the First will come / And sing us back to sleep as one.
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush! / We're all slumbered down.
We turn in dizzy circles beneath the bouncing web. I lift my chin and laugh, actually starting to enjoy the clamor around me. It's so freeing, my wings whirling like clouds, soft and silky when they bat my head and shoulders. We spin and spin and spin until finally the roses stop their uproar and join our chant. Sister One releases me to face her spirit charges. I lean my elbows on my knees and catch my breath.
The flowers' voices converge to finish the final verse. Sister One leads them, her arms raised and snapping in time like a band conductor:
If we fail to find our rest / Sister Two will raid our nest.
She'll make us live as broken toys / Discarded by the girls and boys;
And there will no more slumber be / For we'll be locked in misery.
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush! / We'll all tumble down.
At the end, stillness falls over the garden. The only sound is the swish of grass slapping Sister One's sticklike legs as she moves about the web to tuck the flowers into the clingy gauze.
Euphoria fades as I'm taken back to a time when Alison would tuck my blankets around me and kiss my head good night… moments before I'd drift off to sleep to meet Morpheus. The memory swirls to a blur, like food coloring dropped into water.
I can't remember how long I've been here… minutes, days, weeks?
I have to find Jeb.
Sprinting for the archway, my bare feet crush the grass with each step.
"Wait!" Sister One screams from the tunnel's far end. "You must get the smile I stole for you!"
Ducking my head, I leap over the chain and rope I dropped earlier and keep going. Fear has taken up residence inside my heart, and I don't know how to send it packing.
Skirts rustle behind me as the spider gives chase.
I skid onto a pathway and pick up speed. My lungs ache from panting. The drag of my wings slows me down. I reach behind and draw them around me like a shawl.
Coming to the only archway left, I plunge through. One look around, and I fall to my knees.
Just like in the Alice nightmare… I'm as good as dead.
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