Chapter 48
LUCY
Icome to slowly, and the world is… wrong. I’m sitting down, but I tip with the earth as it tilts on its axis a few degrees, swallowing back bile to keep my stomach from churning and all that tart from coming back up.
The tart… something about the cherry tart.
It was delicious—
No. No. It was something else…
My eyes are closed as I try to remember, but touch and temperature come back before memory.
Cold stone presses against my hip, and something scratchy bites into my wrists like little bugs. My head pounds like a sledgehammer to the side of my skull.
I blink hard, once, twice, trying to make sense of the shapes moving beyond the wall I’m slumped against, but the shapes won’t hold still.
They breathe. They shift. They whirl and rearrange themselves every time I look away.
And when I squint, my vision is warped at the edges, like I’m looking at a real life fairytale through a fisheye lens.
What the heck?
I’m surrounded by ruins. A castle, maybe? Its crumbling stone walls are ancient and smooth, round from exposure where I’m sure they used to be sharply cut blocks. They don’t connect at any corner, and look more like paneled folding walls than what might’ve once been a building.
Maybe it was a church? The name of one flits around my mind like a gnat, but I can’t catch it and give up, taking in the rest of my surroundings.
There’s no ceiling, only navy-black sky and an oak tree canopy where Spanish moss hangs in long, frilly curtains. The moon slices in and out of the clouds and branches overhead, painting everything in silvery blue, black, and bone-white.
Oh, there’s a graveyard, so it’s definitely an old church.
Headstones stand upright like crooked teeth, some toppled and cracked iboat to n half, others sunk past their names in the sandy earth and patchy, brittle grass.
They stretch on forever and never all directions, even the church itself, almost as if the congregation left, only to come back to bury their dead, not caring that they were gathering bodies where they used to gather to praise.
Didn’t an island do this? The buried their own off-island… I think I remember that from somewhere.
The ground is lumpy and uneven, and every shift of my legs grinds sand and grit into my skin. When I try to move my arms, rough, fraying rope bites sharply into my wrists like bugs. My hands are pinned behind me, knotted to something solid in between. I crane my neck.
Oh my God. It’s a headstone, a small one. A cracked stone lamb sits resolutely on the top, and my chest squeezes. I’m tied to a child’s headstone.
That bile burns my throat again and I swallow, filing the headstone under “use it” rather than “lose it,” and focus on the knots keeping me trapped.
Wait, was I wearing this before? My dress is blue.
I look down as I stretch and twist, then frown.
Was I wearing this before?
The blue dress is modest with a white apron tied at the waist and a skirt that fans over the sandy ground. It encompasses my legs folded under me and is soft as loungewear against my skin. I don’t remember putting this on. I don’t think I even own anything this color besides my Alice costume.
Alice. You’re Alice.
Something groans to my left, and I turn too abruptly. The motion sends the ruins tilting and me with them, though I don’t think I actually move. My vision swims, and gravestones rearrange themselves like a kaleidoscope before settling back down to their original places.
I blink and focus, finding a woman with a ginormous head—like oh my God, huge. Twice the size it should be, chin jutting forward like the bulbous bow of a ship, her features exaggerated and grotesque, pulled like saltwater taffy in all the wrong directions and wearing an elaborate red headdress.
My jaw drops, because I’ve seen her before, in a painting called The Ugly Duchess in my illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Except now the Duchess is bound at the wrists by rope like I am and anchored to her own headstone.
Her expression cycles between rage and anguish, but even bound and bleeding, she carries herself with a battered, imperious authority that dares the world to look away.
Wait, she’s bleeding?
I blink, then gasp. “Duchy?”
The Ugly Duchess vanishes, leaving my friend beside me in the same position. Her head lolls forward, dark red curls stuck to her cheek with dried blood. Her jaw is swollen purple, and there’s a line of crusted crimson running from her temple to her chin.
Her eyes crack open, squinting in the firelight that flickers from somewhere beyond the ruined walls.
I blink. She’s the Duchess again. Huge and horrible and homely. And sorry.
I blink. She’s back to Duchy, now small and beaten, looking at me with mascara-tracked sorrow on her face.
Both. She’s both. How does the one even exist, and how do both exist in one at all?
She looks at me, then past me at the shapes moving in the dark, then back.
I think I open my mouth to ask her how she’s doing, but she shakes her head.
“Don’t bother,” she rasps, her voice thick and ragged.
“Don’t bother with what?” I ask, my voice comes out wrong, slurred and like I’m speaking around cotton.
“Don’t bother screaming. We already tried that. They don’t care.” She turns her face, and I see the full ugly welt blooming across her cheekbone. “It just makes them laugh.”
“We…” I lick my lips and swallow past my dry throat. “We screamed?”
She snorts, flickering into the Duchess again, then winces, flickering back and staying my Duchy as she forces a shaky grin.
“Yeah, girl. We have matching concussions, it seems too.”I shake my head. “I… I don’t remember any of it.”
She grimaces, blinking back to the Duchess, and her voice is contrite and mocking at the same time.
“That’s my fault. It seems I used too much Pining and not enough at the same time.
It might’ve been better just to knock you out.
You’ll hallucinate for a little while.” She huffs.
“All those allergy meds we’ve got inside us, but they never did quite work as well as we wanted, huh? ”
The Hatter’s worked for him, I say.
In my head though… I think? Not out loud. Not when Duchy’s the Duchess and full of too much muchness.
A fire burns in an old, dented bait barrel a few yards off, soot-blackened from that purpose.
Two figures huddle near it, boots scraping against loose gravel and scattered shells.
Their voices rise and fall in rough argument.
I try to gather what they’re talking about—money and speedboats and who should get to…
something. But my mind gets jumbled when I see what’s talking.
The first one is a beast, shaggy and twice as big as the Duchess’s twice too big muchness.
His fur hangs low to the ground, matted and in clumps that billow with every lumbering step.
Its jaw unhinges and re-hinges as it talks, snapping at the air, and when it turns toward the firelight, the teeth go on for rows.
Too, too many of them, all sharp needles and deadly.
The Bandersnatch—because that’s the only thing the nightmare could be—moves fast, crossing ground in a blur, but his piercing ice-blue eyes catch the moon, totally soulless, and it’s wearing… a black coat and brown hair?
His roar comes in a deep mountain accent as he laughs at the dragon across from him. A real, live, freaking dragon.
He has to duck under tree branches as it gathers wood to toss into the fire, and squeezes through what once was a doorway, his shoulders almost too broad to enter.
His scales are pale and iridescent in the firelight.
Flashes of red streaks paint his claws and scratches down his long neck.
His tail drags the ground, and his black eyes, reflecting two points of hot orange light within, are sunk deep in a face of shadow as it looks on, sweeping the ruins without blinking.
He opens his mouth to speak with jaws that could take a person’s arm off, and sand puffs under his heavy steps.
He paces circles around the barrel now, muttering curses as his claws mess with the scratches on his neck.
“You got him good,” the Duch—no, Duchy again now, says. “Those scratches? He’ll be feeling those for weeks.” She grins. “I wonder if anyone bet on you making him bleed.”
I frown as the Jabberwocky glares at me, and shiver as his tongue slithers in a hiss between his lips before going back to whatever the Bandersnatch says back.
“I wish I remembered that, at least,” I mutter.
Near the back wall, a gray rat hunches over the glow of a phone screen.
His beady eyes dart between the screen and the two creatures by the fire, his long nose twitching, paws scrolling with frantic energy.
Every few seconds he squeaks about numbers under his breath, something about a spread and percentages, then taps the screen with sharp, anxious little jabs.
I swear I’ve seen the gold chain he’s wearing before, and his posture makes him look like the letter “C.” He radiates unearned authority, and every now and then glances at the unblinking red eyes glaring down at us from various branches and broken, roofless eaves.
He does it now and holds up in ten fingers.
“What’s he doing?” I sound like a drunk chipmunk.
Duchy tests her ropes and mutters herself into the Duchess. “They’re waiting for their boat to come.”
“Don’t they have a boat?”
“Yeah, but apparently, all this shit is a game to them. They turned kidnapping the two of us into something they could bet on. There’s a whole dark-web gambling ring going on.
We’re the entertainment.” She nods up to the nearest red eye.
“Those are tracking everything. People are placing bets and submitting them right now. Including them.”