Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Seventeen
“Rainy?” Duke asked, his voice rousing me from my reverie. “Do you see what I see?”
“Yes,” I whispered, clutching Duke’s hand with scared and sweating palms. “That is the Cheshire Cat. He’s disappearing. Let him disappear please.”
“How is this a book for children?” he whispered back.
“I’m sure it’s a very nice cat.”
Duke said, “I am not. At all. Can we run away? Quickly?”
The smile still hung above the tree branch like a crescent moon by day. And then, softly, somewhere, we heard a cat chuckling.
“Yes,” I said.
We took off running. A path lay ahead, half in light and half in shadow. Every step took us from the darkness into the light, like we were climbing a ladder.
The worn footpath led us out of the woods and up a gently sloping hill.
“Can I say something, darling?” Duke asked.
“Of course. Anything.”
“I also hate Wonderland.”
“Pops brought me here on one of his missions years ago. I swore then I’d never come back. It’s even weirder than I remember,” I said. “And that’s saying something.”
“When you’re a child,” Duke said, “a talking cat is a sweet little fantasy. When you are an adult, a talking cat is a waking nightmare. And that sharp-toothed grin floating in midair and nothing attached to it? And it was laughing at us? I’ll take Al Capone over that any day.”
“In its defense,” I said, because Book Witches are always defending books, “the book has inspired some amazing art and music and movies and theme park rides and other writers and—”
Duke glanced back at the woods where we’d seen the grinning nothing.
“Not worth it,” he said.
“Aw, Chicago, I’m so sorry,” I teased. “Do you need a hug?”
“I’ll take a kiss and a hug. And an apology from Lewis Carroll. And a few sessions with Dr. Freud. And a stiff drink.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, rose on my tiptoes, and kissed him lightly on the cheek before pulling away.
“That’s all?” he asked. “I didn’t even get my drink.”
“You do not want to drink anything in this story. You’ll end up ten inches tall.”
“Right, of course. Now what?”
After surveying the area, I got my bearings. “We need to head up that hill.”
“What fresh horrors await us there?”
“That should be where the March Hare’s house is,” I said. “Can you handle it?”
“For you, yes. Only you.”
“All right, this way.”
We followed a path that passed through a small garden. Daffodils and daisies, all nice and normal. I decided not to remind Duke that the flowers could likely talk too.
“This is better,” he said, taking a deep breath.
“This…this is my childhood. Summers in the country with my grandparents. Long before the War. Before I even knew there was such a thing as war. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was with the real world when you brought me into it the first time, and I discovered the Great War wasn’t merely something awful that had happened in my books. ”
“Unfortunately not,” I said.
He turned his face from the sun and met my eyes. “Do you ever wish you could stay here?”
“In Wonderland? No, it’s terrifying. Giant talking animals are only cute in theory—”
“Not Wonderland, of course. I mean…in a book? Do you ever wish you could stay in a story? Hop in like we have, but never hop out?”
“Like one of your books?” I teased. “That’s what got us into trouble last time.”
“Not mine,” he said. “A book without wars. Without suffering. A book with sunlit meadows and no darkness?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But I can’t think of a single book worth reading where nothing bad happens. Even in Wonderland, a mad queen threatens to chop off heads every other page.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Duke said. “It seems different in books somehow. In stories the suffering leads somewhere, it means something. Remember when you took me to meet your friend Edmond Dantès?”
“I wouldn’t say the Count of Monte Cristo and I are friends,” I said. “But only because I’m afraid of him.”
The year Duke and I were together, he tagged along with me on my mission to get a Burner out of French author Alexandre Dumas’s masterpiece of revenge, The Count of Monte Cristo. For the Burner’s own sake, actually. Anyone who’s read the book knows you do not want to get on the Count’s bad side.
“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” Duke said. “My point is the Count spends ten years in a hellish prison, escapes, finds a massive treasure, and gets poetic revenge on his betrayers. In the real world, a man who spends years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit gets…what?”
“Traumatized,” I said.
“Precisely. In your world, suffering means nothing. Nothing good comes from it,” Duke said. “One thing fiction has over real life.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“Of course good things come from suffering in the real world. You know what good comes out of suffering?”
“What?” he asked, clearly skeptical.
“Stories,” I said. “Art. Songs. The Duke of Chicago books. That’s the good that comes from suffering. Years before we met, you were helping me get through the loneliest days of my life. Doesn’t that mean something?”
He raised his hand to my face and stroked my cheek. “I’d kiss you for the next ten hours, but I think I’ve spotted a house with rabbit ears.”
—
When Duke said the house had rabbit ears, he wasn’t referring to a television antenna or anything so logical or normal. No, the enormous house had a thatched roof, and the thatching had been stacked to resemble two large actual rabbit ears.
“Mad as a March Hare,” I said, staring at the bizarre dwelling.
“Let’s hope he’s in a good mood today,” Duke said.
We found our way to the front of the house, where a long table under a tree was laid out for a tea party. There were seats for a dozen people—or whatever you wanted to call the citizens of Wonderland—but I saw no guests at all. Not even the Mad Hatter or the March Hare. The table was empty.
“That can’t be right,” I said, leaning close to Duke. “The mad tea party never ends.”
“Never?”
“The Mad Hatter’s watch is broken, stuck at six o’clock, forever teatime.”
“That is entirely too much tea even for me,” Duke concluded.
“Yeah, well, welcome to Wonderland,” I said with a shrug.
Together we approached the tea table. Carefully I lifted the tablecloth on the off chance the partygoers had passed out from too much mad revelry. Nothing under there but the abandoned chairs and the soft green grass.
“Anything?” Duke asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “And no one.” We met eyes across the table. “The tea party that never ends has ended. Makes no sense. I mean, even less sense than Wonderland usually does.”
“Did a Burner do this?” Duke asked.
“Maybe. But this feels different. I’ve been in stories where Burners have tried this. In one book they succeeded. It’s not like this. It’s not empty. Not…blank.”
“What is it like?”
“They left the bodies for the Witches to find.”
“Rainy…” Duke said. “You never told me that.”
“Why would I? The history books say Charles Dickens didn’t finish his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. He did though. The reason everyone thinks it’s unfinished is because the Burners got to it before we did.”
“This isn’t the Burners then?”
“I don’t believe so. This feels like…a set. A theater set but no actors.”
Duke walked along the tea table. It was a disaster. Empty cups. Empty pots. Plates covered in crumbs and jam.
And there in the middle of the table, at the only place with a clean plate and cup, a name card.
“Seems you were expected, love,” Duke said.
In swooping cursive, the place card read Rainy March.
“A woman’s handwriting,” Duke said. “Let’s hope it wasn’t a trap.”
“Should I sit down?” I asked, picking up the card.
“No, let me,” he said.
“Duke—”
“Rainy, I am the detective here. Let me detect.”
“Please be very careful.”
He pulled out the chair and sat down. Nothing happened.
“Now what?” he said, speaking to himself.
“Listen to me,” I said.
“I always do, love.”
“Look,” I said and held out the place card to him. On the front was my name. On the back in that same handwriting it read Listen to me.
“Listen to what?” Duke asked.
“In the book, Alice finds food and bottles that say ‘Eat me’ and ‘Drink me.’ This one says, ‘Listen to me.’ So there has to be something to listen to. Try the teapot?”
“The teapot? You want me to listen to…a teapot? Darling, have you gone mad? I’m ready and willing to pinch you if I must. Even if I don’t, I’m willing—”
“Let me try,” I said. But Duke held up his hand to stop me.
“I feel absolutely mad doing this,” he said, “but I suppose that’s the point.” He put the spout to his ear. His eyes suddenly widened.
“What did it say?” I asked.
“You listen,” he said.
He passed me the teapot, and I put it to my ear.
This is what happens when you spend more than five minutes in Wonderland. You’ll put teapots to your ear to listen for secret messages. And sometimes you’ll hear them.
A voice, like the whooshing echo from a seashell, whispered to me, “Wrong March Hare…”
“Wrong March Hare?” I repeated, then took the lid off the teapot and shouted into it. “What do you mean, ‘Wrong March Hare’? There’s only one March Hare in literature, and he’s supposed to be hare! I mean, here !”
No answer.
“It is an English teapot,” Duke said delicately, as if speaking to someone defusing a bomb. “Perhaps try using your manners. If you have any?”
Infuriated but also desperate, I put the spout to my lips and said with feigned politeness, “Ever so sorry for losing my temper, but could you please elaborate, my dear teapot? If it’s not this March Hare, pray tell, what March Hare is it?”
“Not sure that was much better,” Duke muttered.
Ignoring him, I put the spout back to my ear like we were playing telephone.
The teapot replied, “The answer is staring you in the face…”
“What the heck’s that supposed to mean?” I shouted back into the lid.
But the teapot started to make a strange sound, a low, faintly annoying, yet instantly recognizable, buzzing.
A dial tone. A teapot had hung up on me.
“Tea is the worst hot beverage!” I said, which wasn’t true but it felt good to shout.
“An infuriating piece of crockery,” Duke said, nodding.
“Did I mention I hated Wonderland?”