Chapter I
I
“Follow the music,” said the bouncer, like the world’s most unhelpful white rabbit, and now here’s Alice, stuck in Wonderland.
She has no idea what he meant, or why everyone in America has to speak in fucking riddles instead of just telling her what she needs to know.
Follow the music, like it’s a sign post, a street name, like there aren’t a thousand overlapping sources of sound in a city like Boston.
Songs spilling out of every bar, and every car, and every pair of headphones.
Lyrics fighting for space with every other kind of noise, the grumble of traffic, and below that the grate and hush of the T, and over the top, talk radio spilling from cracked windows, and laughter from restaurants and the din of the sports games on the televisions and the hush of tires on damp streets and the rustle of dead and dying leaves and a hundred other sounds converging on her, smothering any one track that might otherwise stand out as music.
Alice walks, and listens, or at least she tries—straining to pick the sounds apart, tease some singular song from the many tangled threads, but how is she supposed to make out a melody, to find the song she is supposed to follow, when there are a hundred channels playing in her ears? How is she supposed to—
Alice’s legs lurch to a stop.
Because she hears it.
Something that definitely qualifies as music.
There and then gone, but Alice is listening now, really listening.
She stands perfectly still and inclines her head, and as she does, the sounds shuffle in her ears, some getting brighter and others falling back until she catches the faint timbre of an organ playing, the lifting voices of a choir.
She closes her eyes and turns slowly, until she can make out the direction of the melody.
Follow the music, he’d said, so that’s what Alice does. She follows it, down two blocks and over one, the high sweet sound getting stronger, clearer, with every step until she finds herself in front of a church.
The door is ajar, warm light spilling down the stairs.
One minute she’s standing there in the narrow pool of lamplight and the next she finds herself wading through it, climbing the steps, and the next her hand is on the wood and the door’s groaning open.
Her boot scuffs the threshold but there she hesitates, recalling something about damned bodies being unable to enter the house of God, and she’s suddenly afraid that if she tries to step inside, she’ll be expelled by the crosses on the wall, or lit ablaze by some force’s holy wrath, driven back into the dark.
But then her foot lands, and the floor is just a floor, and the crosses leave no mark, and she’s standing well within the house of God, untouched, unharmed.
So much for common lore.
Alice puts another mental tally in her column as she slips into an empty pew and listens to the choir sing.
Thinks about all the Sunday mornings her family spent in church, less out of faith and more because it was the thing to do, everybody moving through the motions, and even though Alice never got caught up in the sermons, she always loved the songs.
The way music filled the hall, bouncing off the glass and stone, liked the fact that their family sat together, and all the memories she has of those moments are nice ones, which is probably why they didn’t stick.
Only one comes back to Alice.
Her head on Catty’s shoulder, her sister tracing secret words onto her palm with a chipped blue fingernail, bitten to the quick. Promise . Always . You and me .
Now, Alice sits alone and listens as the choir ends. She has figured out that this isn’t the song she was supposed to follow, the place she was meant to find, but it’s still hard to make herself stand up. To leave the wooden pew and the memory behind.
But she can’t stop now.
She has to find the music.
As the priest glides up to the lectern, Alice rises and slips down an outer aisle, and out a side door, into a little garden that runs along the church.
A handful of squat stones crowd the path, and she notices the graves only as her boots cross from paving stones to grass, and her entire body buckles.
Alice gasps as she goes down and at first she thinks she must have tripped over some rock or root, but when she tries to stand again, she can’t.
It’s not a spasm, or a cramp, but the pins-and-needles of legs gone suddenly to sleep, of laughing so hard your limbs go weak.
But her body isn’t sleeping, and nothing about this is funny.
She is on her hands and knees, trying and failing to get up, fingers sinking into the grass, and she watches in horror as a gray pallor creeps across her skin, like something vital is leeching out of her.
And she is terrified.
The fear she should have felt but didn’t, not when she came to in the shower, not when the driver struggled beneath her, not when she saw the fangs in the mirror and couldn’t find her pulse—every ounce of it hits her now, with crushing force.
Alice tells her body to get up, but it refuses, seems to sink a little deeper into the ground, and panic flares like light behind her eyes, and her head swims, and she can’t breathe.
Her lungs have clamped shut, and for the first time she feels the absence of the air in her chest, the lack of blood in her heart, a need she can’t fulfill.
She is a body in distress, and then on top of it comes the same fluish haze she felt standing in the sun, but this is worse, because then, every inch of her said to get away, into the safety of the nearest dark, and here, only half of her is fighting.
The other half is already giving up. It’s dying.
A cold hand on her face, telling her to stop, to lie down, to lay her cheek against the soil and let it take her.
It washes over her, begins smothering the panic—a fog too heavy to see or think through, and would it be so bad? The ground is soft and cool beneath her, welcome as a bed, and Alice has never been so tired.
Get up, get up, says a singsong voice in her head, the same one Catty would use right before she tore the blankets off and dragged Alice by the ankle out of bed. But there is no blanket now. There is no bed. And yet—
Get up, Bones. Catty’s voice, louder now inside her skull.
Alice drags her eyes open. Her vision slides in and out of focus, then holds just long enough for her to see the little garden gate, the street beyond. It’s not far, this little cemetery no more than a narrow strip in the shadow of the church.
Alice locks all her focus onto that gate.
She gathers the last of her strength, and reaches for the nearest tombstone, using it to lever herself up, forcing herself away from the ground.
She shuffles, stumbles, makes it from the grass onto the nearest paving stone, which seems to rock beneath her like a too-small raft, the deep, dark water sloshing to every side, threatening to tip her over, turn her back.
But she is up, on her feet, and somehow, she lurches toward the gate.
Legs buckling a little with every step, until at last, at last, her hands meet the metal.
It’s old, and rusted, and groans under her weight, before the gate finally scrapes open, and Alice is out.
She is free.
She makes it to the curb and doubles over, retching into the gutter. Nothing comes up, but her lungs suddenly inflate, her heart gives a single stubborn beat, and she watches the color, what little there is, slide over her hands and up her wrists.
Alice looks back at the pretty little garden with its headstones, and thinks, What the ever-loving fuck was that? Puts a point squarely in the enemy column, because apparently the sun won’t do her in, but the burying ground will.
Fuck this, she thinks, and then because that doesn’t help, she says the words aloud.
“ FUCK ALL OF THIS! ” she shouts.
Across the street an older woman frowns in disapproval as she totters by, and for once, Alice doesn’t fucking care.
Her nerves are jangling and she can’t find the music she’s supposed to follow, and if she had a bat right then she’d take it to every post and pole on this street.
But she doesn’t, so she turns and kicks the nearest trash can as hard as she can.
It buckles beneath the force, and Alice stares at the damage, feels a laugh rising in her chest, the kind that’s more hiccup than humor, a sad, overwhelmed sound.
She slumps onto the nearest bench and folds forward until her forehead rests against her knees. Thinks about calling it a night, going back to the dorm, but then what? Rinse, repeat? And the thought of repeating this day is enough to keep her pinned in place.
Alice sits there for five minutes, maybe ten, and as the fear retreats, the anger settles, the night steadies, bending around her like she’s a rock in a pond. The air ripples, carrying a hundred scents, and feelings, and sounds.
Slowly, she cocks her head and tries to listen.
It’s like turning on a faucet, again the noise comes rushing in, but this time she doesn’t fight the tide, tries instead to let the noises mingle and wash over her, to float instead of drowning.
Alice listens, hearing everything and nothing and then—
Something.
At first, she thinks it’s a trick of her senses, a string of music conjured by her desperate overloading mind, but the longer she listens, the more certain she is that it’s real. Not a beat, or a ballad, but the bell-like tinkle of piano keys, a melody at odds with the sounds of the city. A song.
Hope stirs, stubbornly, inside her.
And Alice gets to her feet once more.