Chapter 1 - Through the Looking Glass She'll Come
Unusually, for England, the sun was shining brightly over the gardens of the big, old house. As the sunlight hit them, the trees were lit up like gilded candlesticks, which swayed in the slight breeze. It was turning into a golden afternoon. Inside the house, the sun did not penetrate the windows through the heavy velvet curtains, and in one panelled corridor Alice watched the tops of the trees swaying against the blue sky through a crack in those curtains.
“Please keep up, Alice,” Mrs Edwards called down the corridor, and receiving no answer opened the door at the end of the corridor and held it open, “Alice, we don’t have all day.”
“I’ll catch up, Miss,” Alice said, sparing her teacher a glance before looking back at the glass, which was so old that everything viewed through it seemed to ripple slightly, like a circus mirror. Mrs Edwards hovered in the doorway for a few more seconds, before sighing audibly and walking through it to catch up with the rest of the class. Alice looked away from the window again as the door clicked shut and she let the curtain fall back to cover the window again. Along with the rest of her history class, Alice was on a tour of the old Liddell House in Oxford, an old estate from the 1860’s, or possibly earlier. The many rooms, with intricate décor and delicate objects cluttering the space were, unsurprisingly, not overly interesting to a sixteen-year-old girl. Alice was the kind of girl who was distracted by the dust motes floating in a ray of sunlight; the same cannot be said for faded oil paintings of snooty looking woman, and proud men in military attire. Alice tended to stay at the back of the classroom, and her quiet nature meant that people often forgot that she was there at all. Today, she was using this to her advantage, by gradually falling further and further behind her classmates as the tour progressed, until now where she was left to explore without explanations on the tedious backstory of every piece of furniture.
Footsteps could be heard making their way towards the door at the end of the corridor, and Alice quickly slipped into the nearest room, letting the door almost shut behind her. Through the small gap that was left, Alice watched as a woman appeared in the corridor, dressed in the awful imitation costumes that all the tour guides in the Liddell House wore. She swished down the corridor, mauve skirts brushing along the floorboards as she consulted the clipboard grasped in her hands. Once she had passed through the opposite end of the corridor Alice relaxed, and turned towards the room she had taken refuge in. the walls were covered in heavily patterned and embellished wallpaper, and there were several puffed up, embroidered armchairs set up near a fireplace. The room was not set up like the others, which were meant to represent the house as it had once been. This seemed to be a storage room for several pieces that did not fit in elsewhere in the house, and Alice took in several spindly side tables, a few paintings stacked against the wall and a cabinet, on top of which was a collection of a variety of objects; vases, what looked like some silverware and a few stuffed animals. Alice moved around the armchairs to get a better look, sliding her backpack off of her back and resting it on one of the chairs.
The stuffed animal’s eyes glinted in the dim light of the room, and Alice’s hovered over the back of a strange looking bird, unsure of whether she wished to touch its shiny feathers. Next to the bird was a small white rabbit, which, unlike the other animals, which all looked moth eaten and dusty, was clean. Its long ears were lying flat against its back, and Alice’s finger smoothed over them before she could give it another thought. The way its fur moved under her finger made it almost appear that the rabbit had twitched. Enchanted by the snowy fur Alice found herself picking up the rabbit, her hand wrapping around its ribcage.
Its ribcage, through which, she could feel a heart fluttering.
This rabbit was very much still alive.
Alice tried very hard not to drop the rabbit in surprise, but her grip loosened enough that the rabbit was able to wriggle out her grasp and jumped from her hands.
“Hey!” Alice cried, as the white shape scrambled across the floor and disappeared through the gap in the open door. She quickly followed the rabbit out of the door and ran after it down the corridor. Her clumpy school shoes made too much noise on the wooden floors and stopping for a second she kicked them off and carried them as she ran in her stockinged feet, shoes swinging from the fingers of her hands. Alice followed the white blur, always a room ahead of her, through the rooms of the house, up creaking stairs and through elaborate drawing rooms. Thankfully she managed to avoid any tour groups, and it was only at the top of a flight of stairs, when a door blocked her path, that she stopped and was able to take in her surroundings. The door looked newer than the rest of the building, and had a paper notice tacked up warning the public that past this point was accessible by staff only. Alice rattled the handle, peering at the gap beneath the door that the rabbit had scrambled under. To her surprise the door swung open and she stumbled through into the space beyond. She found herself in a mostly empty attic space. Alice squinted into the dim light at the exposed beams that she could only just begin to see, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She peered forward, trying to ascertain what sort of room she had stepped into. The attic appeared empty.
“How strange, that they would use a perfectly good room downstairs for storage and overlook this space,” Alice wondered aloud.
Then, through the dark of the room Alice saw a white object move quickly and then disappear. The rabbit. Alice took another step forward, towards where the rabbit had gone. Her foot never hit the floor.
Alice’s foot met only empty space, and she had already leant too far forward to avoid continuing with the step. She found herself falling down into pitch darkness. Alice screwed up her eyes, bracing herself in readiness for the crash through the ceiling of one of the beautifully decorated rooms below her. She found herself hoping that she would land on one of the padded couches she had seen earlier on the tour. Then she realised how much trouble she was going to be in. She didn’t get enough pocket money in a year to cover the costs of these damages.
It was only at this point when she realised that she had had a rather long time to think about this.
There surely couldn’t be so much space between the attic and the rooms below. Alice’s blonde hair was streaming up about her head as she kept falling. She had let go of her school shoes and they had disappeared from sight in the void that she found herself falling through.
Eventually, and out of nowhere, the ground rushed up to meet her and she crumpled into it. Alice slowly opened her eyes, expecting to see the disapproving faces of a tour guide and her teacher, but found only an empty room. It wasn’t a room from the Liddell House, Alice was sure of that. This was octagonal, with dark walls that seemed to be covered in even darker velvet curtains. She slowly climbed to her feet, and found that she was not in any pain. She looked up towards the ceiling, and saw a low ceiling that couldn’t possibly the distant that she had fallen.
“Maybe this is just a dream,” Alice said, peering up at the ceiling, “I probably just fell asleep on that old armchair.”
Usually, realising that she was dreaming was enough to wake herself up, so Alice walked around the room for a while, running her hands over the curtains. Curiosity overcame her, and she twitched one of the curtains to one side. Behind it was a door. It reached right up to the ceiling, and the door handle was placed so far up the door that one would need a step-ladder to reach.
“How completely useless,” Alice said, and stepped towards the next curtain. It too had a door behind it, though this one was curiously round in shape, with a round pane of glass set into the centre of it. Alice stood on her tiptoes to peer through the glass, but behind it she could see nothing but shadows. Alice flung aside the next curtain, sending clouds of dust hurtling up her nose, expecting to see another useless door. Instead, she was faced with herself. Alice gasped and stumbled backwards. The other Alice mimicked her, and she came to the realisation that she was looking into a mirror. After a moment she became aware that the landscape behind the other Alice was not the room that she herself stood in. The other Alice’s feet disappeared into a bed of flowers, the bright petals leaving trails of yellow pollen all over her white socks. Behind her she could make out a row of twisting trees, and an expanse of grass.
“How completely...” Alice started to say, but stopped, because she could not find a word to describe exactly what it was that she was thinking. It was then that Alice noticed that the mirror was also a door. There was a mirrored door handle protruding from halfway down the door. She turned it, but the door would not open. She shook the door, but it didn’t give. What she did notice was that another section of the door was moving. She knelt down onto the floor and ran her hand over the mirrored surface, watching out of the corner of her eye as the other Alice did the same, though her knees were buried in flowers and not a hard concrete floor. As she looked at her own face in the mirror Alice noticed a line bisecting her face, and she ran her finger along the line. There was another door within the bigger door. Alice scrabbled at the edge of the door, until her fingernails found a groove and she was able to pry open the door.
Behind the door was the garden that she could see behind herself in the mirror. The colours were almost blinding, like a child’s television show, everything was brightly coloured and shining and new. The grass was greener that she had ever seen before and the air was filled with the smell of the flowers that surrounded her face as she stuck her head through the small door. Alice tried to crawl through the door, but her shoulders would not fit through the too small gap, however hard she tried to force them. Alice reluctantly pulled herself back into the room full of peculiar doors. She rocked back onto the floor, sitting cross-legged so that she could look through the smaller door at the beautiful garden beyond. She looked up at the door handle above her, and saw a dark shadow just underneath it. It was a keyhole.
“Now, if only there was a key,” Alice muttered to herself, as she pulled herself to her feet. She peered through the keyhole, and could just make out the tops of trees through the tiny gap. And the gap really was very tiny; the key that would fit it would have to be extremely tiny. After a moment Alice pulled one of the hairgrips out of her hair, letting it cascade around her shoulders. She held up the little piece of metal, and tried to judge how close a fit to the keyhole it would be. She slid the hairgrip into the hole, and twisted it around. She felt very little resistance, and therefore was surprised when there was a very small, but audible click. She stopped turning the hairgrip and pulled it out of the door. As she pulled the door began to swing open a little bit. Alice took hold of the shiny doorknob and slowly pulled open the door. There before her was the beautiful, technicolor garden. Alice stuck the hairgrip into the pocket of her white school shirt and stepped forward into the garden.
As she stepped forward she had the strangest sensation that she was walking through a wall of water. A cool sensation ran through her like a knife. And then, she was in the garden.
But this was not the garden that she had seen through the mirror.
It was as though she had stepped through a filter, or a looking glass. The garden was the opposite of how it had appeared through the door. The colours had passed through the other end of the spectrum, dulling to the point of becoming slightly grey scale, or black and white. Alice wrapped her arms around herself, as a crisp wind bit at her arms, bare in her short-sleeved shirt. She whirled around, meaning to step back into the other room and try another door.
There was no door.
The flowerbed simply continued as though nothing had ever broken apart the air.
“No, no, no,” Alice said in disbelief, running back through the flowers, flailing her arms against the air, hoping to find some resistance that would reveal the air. Every time she swung her arm, it fell harmlessly through the air.
“No, no, this is ridiculous,” Alice said, finally giving up on finding the door. She slowly sank to the ground, and sat down in the dry earth.
“Excuse me!” said voice, making Alice jump to her feet. There was no visible speaker, and she spun around, her feet tangling in the flowers that were all shades of grey and white.
“Excuse me! Could you stop doing that?” the voice shouted. It was a shrill, voice that sent shivers running down Alice’s spine.
“Hello?” Alice said, turning around once again, but still not seeing anything with the power to speak to her.
“I asked you to stop doing that!” the voice said again, disapprovingly.
“She did,” another voice joined her, “I heard her say so.”
Alice spun around in confusion.
“Maybe she doesn’t understand what you’re saying,” a third voice added.
“Very stupid that would make her,” said the second voice again.
After that, a chorus of other voices began to make their own opinions heard, and the individual voices were lost in a sea of shouted comments. Alice wanted to back away, but she didn’t know which way to go, as she still could not locate a source of the voice. Maybe I’m just going mad, she thought to herself.
“Excuse me!” the first voice shouted over the others, “DO – YOU – UNDERSTAND - ME?”
“Yes?” Alice said, turning around once again, as the voice always seemed to be permanently just behind her.
“Well, if you understand me, STOP MOVING,” the voice shouted sternly.
Alice obliged and froze; the voice reminded her horrible of her great aunt who was the kind of woman who still believed that children should be seen and not heard.
“Now was that so hard?” the voice continued, like it had just taught Alice a new trick.
“Where are you?” Alice asked.
“She can’t see us!” one of the other voices piped up incredulously, but quickly shut up, as though someone had slapped their hands over their mouth.
“Of course you can’t see us when you’re all the way up there!” the voice said, as though it was the most obvious thing of all, “Why on earth did you grow so tall?”
Alice slowly crouched down, until she was amongst the flowers. She still couldn’t see anyone, and she pushed aside one flower, screwing up her nose at the smell it gave off; like rotting petals.
”Excuse me!” an insulted voice, said, “you don’t have to be so rough!”
Alice froze, as realisation slowly struck. She allowed the flower to move back into its original position, and though she was expecting it, gasped in shock as she saw the petals rearrange themselves into a face.
“Oh my goodness,” Alice cried, “You have a face!”
“Of course I have a face!” the flower said in surprise, “what has happened to yours though?”
Alice put a hand up to her cheek, but felt only her normal smooth skin.
“Nothing has happened to my face,” she said.
“But you’re petals have fallen off dear,” the flower said sympathetically, ruffling its own petals as it to demonstrate, “it must be because you grew too tall.”
“I never had petals on my –“ Alice started to explain.
“Of course it’s because you grew too tall,” the first voice that Alice had heard shouted over the top of her explanation, “Delilah, please wont you lean a little to your left, I want to see her face.”
The flower that must be Delilah obliged and twisted her stem out of the way of the bossy voice behind her. The bossy voiced flower leant forward, stretching her leaves towards Alice. Her petals were a snow white, with dark black lines spiralling through them like veins.
“Yes,” the voice said after a moment’s deliberation, “you’ve definitely grown far too tall.”
“I haven’t grown too tall,” Alice, said, in exasperation, “I’m actually quite short for my age.”
“No, no,” the flower said, “you’re definitely too tall. It is quite dangerous to be so tall.”
“Yes,” Delilah added, “what with the wind and all.”
“Wind isn’t going to do anything to me,” Alice said, “I’m not a flower, I don’t have petals, and I’m not too tall!”
The bossy flower paid her absolutely no attention and whispered to the flower next to her, which in turn whispered to the flowers around it. Soon the flowerbed sounded like a river running over rocks, as the whispers carried around Alice.
“We have decided,” the bossy flower said after a minute, “that you need to be grown down again.”
“I can’t grow down!” Alice cried, “I’m not a flower!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the flower said over the top of her, “I can help you grow to a more respectable size.”
Before Alice could try to explain again exactly why she couldn’t grow down, the flowers all leant towards her, their petals brushing over her arms and legs and face. Instead of the usual velvet feel of flower petals, the flowers felt more like scratchy paper against her skin, as though the flowers had been folded out of newspaper. The flowers in her face seemed to grow and take up her whole vision. She felt long leaves snaking over her skin and Alice tried to bat them away, but found that the flowers were suddenly towering over her head.
“See,” the bossy flower said, her voice now much louder than before, “I told you that you could grow back down.”
Alice looked up to see that the flower petals with black veins were now far beyond her reach, even if she were to jump. Out of the leaves next to her a gigantic ladybird hurtled across the dry earth, its red shell a sudden shock of colour in the dull landscape. It was then Alice realised that it was not the flowers that had grown, but rather she who had shrunk.
“Hey!” Alice shouted, jumping up to catch hold of one of the leaves above her and pulled it, “hello?”
“Yes, dear?” the kinder flower, Delilah turned her head to look down at the tiny Alice.
“Whatever you just did, undo it!” Alice cried, “Grow me back up again!”
“Oh we couldn’t possibly do that, dear,” Delilah, said, kindly patting Alice’s blonde head with one of her leaves.
“But you must!” Alice implored, “This is a ridiculous height to be!”
“It’s a much more respectable height,” Delilah said, and then turned her face back towards the dull grey sky, leaving Alice standing under a canopy of flower heads.
“Maybe one of the others will undo whatever silly trick this is,” Alice said to herself, and started to walk away from Delilah and the bossy flower. None of the other flowers paid the slightest bit of attention to Alice, they only laughed at her attempts to get their attention. Alice felt tears springing hotly to her eyes as the air above her head filled with the sniggers of the flowers.
She said down onto the earth and crossed her arms across her chest.
“This is nothing worth crying about,” Alice told herself firmly, “it’s just a dream and when I wake up this will seem like the most ridiculous dream.”
Alice sat on the ground for quite a long time, long enough that she began to feel quite tired and her eyes kept almost closing. She lay down on her side, resting her head on her arms. She had almost fallen asleep when she heard a snuffling noise behind her. The snuffling grew louder, and Alice kept very still, imagining all kind of creatures, which could be making a similar noises. None of them were something that she wished to meet face to face when she was two inches tall. Something nuzzled into her back and Alice jumped, turning around and scrambling away from the towering creature behind her. In front of her was a huge white face. Two long white ears twitched, brushing against the flower heads about them. Alice couldn’t help but smile bewilderedly as the little pink nose in front of her wriggled, sniffing the air in front of it.
It was the white rabbit from the Liddell House.
The Rabbit shuffled forward under the flower heads until its nose was so close to Alice’s face that its whiskers brushed against her face. Alice laughed and stepped out of their way. She stroked the soft fur above the rabbit’s nose. She sighed.
“Well, at least I’ve found the rabbit,” she said, feeling slightly hysterical, “Not that that helps me at all.”
“Thank you very much, that means an awful lot, especially seeing as I had to fight my way through these awful flowers to reach you!”
Alice looked at the Rabbit in surprise and opened her mouth as if to say something, but then stopped.
“And, if I am going to be picky, I found you,” the rabbit continued, shaking out its ears.
“You know, I’m not even surprised that you can speak,” Alice said, and patted the rabbit on its head, and sat back down on the ground, “I don’t think that anything could surprise me anymore.”
The Rabbit chuckled, turning his head so that he could look at Alice with one big brown eye, “Once children grow up, they think that nothing can surprise them anymore, but if you need surprising, you definitely come to the right place.”
And with that, the white Rabbit hooked his teeth into the collar of Alice’s shirt and lifted her to her feet.
“Get on my back,” he said, crouching down towards the ground, and looking at Alice expectantly.
“What?” Alice asked, “But why would do that? I’m going to sit right here until I wake up.”
“Wake up from what?” the Rabbit asked, “You can only wake up if you’re already asleep.”
Alice couldn’t take anymore arguing, the flowers had quite taken it out of her, and so she clung on to the Rabbit’s silky fur and hoisted herself onto his back. It was difficult, because the fur was so slippery and soft beneath her, but she found that by bunching clumps of fur between her fingers she was able to get a grip strong enough to pull herself onto his back. She settled into the white fur, her legs gripping the Rabbit around its neck.
“Where are we going, Rabbit?” Alice asked.
“No one really knows where they’re going, do they Alice?” the Rabbit said, as it shook out its ears.
“Does everyone here speak in riddles?”
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Fair enough,” Alice said, gripping his fur tightly as he began to move forward.
“But for now,” the Rabbit said, “we are getting as far away from those blasted flowers as we can.”
Alice couldn’t help but to smile.
Once they were out of the flowerbed, which seemed to quite abruptly end, Alice and the rabbit found themselves in the middle of a vast expanse of grass. Alice couldn’t be certain if the grass looked green only because she expected it to, or because it was. The Rabbit had been very calm thus far, but when faced with this expanse of open grass, he suddenly seemed slightly agitated.
“Alice, will you please lie down along my back, and hang on quite tightly, I am going to run as quickly as I can across the field,” the Rabbit hissed out of the corner of his mouth.
Alice barely had time to ask why before the Rabbit began to leap across the field. If she had not already been holding on so tightly she surely would have been flung off of his back and landed somewhere in the grass. She was sure that she must be imagining the way that the world seemed to be blurring around them, because there was no way that the Rabbit could possibly be going so fast, but then all too soon the row of trees that had been looming in the distance was very suddenly looming right over their heads, and the rabbit had stopped moving. Alice swept back her hair, which had been blown all over the place in the wind, and looked back, over the grass field behind them. The possibly-green grass seemed to stretch on endlessly, like a see of waving fronds. Alice slid from the rabbit’s back, and landed amongst the grass, which grew sparsely beneath the shadow of the trees.
“What was that all about?” Alice asked, turning on the Rabbit, which had risen up to perch on his hind legs. His nose was twitching at the air.
“Sssh,” the Rabbit hissed, batting a paw in Alice’s direction.
“Don’t ‘ssshhh’ me,” Alice said, putting her hands on her hips.
“SSSH!” The Rabbit hissed again, placing his paw over Alice’s mouth. She struggled against it, until finally the rabbit removed it and looked sternly at her. Alice didn’t know how a rabbit could look stern, but this one made it work.
“What was that for?” Alice cried, the moment that she could breathe. She pulled a few hairs out of her mouth and coughed.
“I thought I could hear something,” the Rabbit whispered, “And maybe it would be best, Alice, if you kept your voice down. These woods are no less friendly than the flowers.”
“What do you mean?” Alice said, lowering her voice.
“What you saw through the first mirror, what I presume you saw,” the Rabbit said, looking at Alice for confirmation, “was a beautiful place.” Alice nodded in agreement.
“That was what this place looked like before,” the Rabbit said.
“Before what?” Alice asked, expectantly.
“Before the Red Queen!” a voice shouted out from behind them. Alice jumped and backed up against the rabbit. The shade thrown by the gnarled trees around them provided whoever had spoken with adequate cover to remain hidden from eyesight. Alice could feel the Rabbit quivering behind her.
“Where are you?” she shouted, sounding braver than she felt.
“I’m right over here,” the voice said again, from directly in front of them. Alice took a step away from the Rabbit, and peered into the gloom.
“Well, show yourself then,” she called.
“How do I know I can trust you?” the voice shouted back.
“How do we know that we can trust you?” Alice replied.
“Fair enough,” the voice said, and a strange faint clanking sound that began to move towards them. Alice stepped back towards the Rabbit again, until her back was pressed against his warm side.
Out of the gloom a figure began to emerge, a figure dressed in strange white armour, from which the clanking noise echoed. It looked like a knight straight out of the pages of one of Alice’s history books, although he was no taller than she was. He stepped forward, and bowed at the waist.
“The White Knight ma’am, at your service,” the Knight said, losing his splendour a little as his visor clanged shut over his eyes, “As long as, that it, your service is not with the Red Queen?” he continued, pushing his visor back up.
His eyes through the gap in his helmet were a startling blue, and Alice realised that he probably wasn’t much older than herself.
Behind Alice the Rabbit puffed out his chest indignantly.
“In service with the Red Queen?” the Rabbit huffed, “How dare you suggest such a thing.”
“I did not mean to insult you, kind sir,” the Knight said immediately, “But these days, who can you trust?”
“Very true,” the rabbit said gravely, lowering himself to the ground on all fours.
Alice looked at the pair bewildered. What had, at first, seemed like a fairy tale had turned into an old war movie, where nobody trusted anybody who wasn’t clearly displaying their colours.
“I see you too had a run in with the flowers, miss,” the Knight said, referring to their diminutive stature.
“I did, and my name is Alice,” Alice said, taking the Knight’s outstretched hand and shaking it.
“I see by your garb, Knight, that you are one of the White Queen’s?” the Rabbit continued, referring to the bright whiteness of his armour.
“Yes,” the Knight said, taking a clumsy step backwards, and readjusting his breastplate, “Though it is hard to be in someone’s service when she is not around.”
The Rabbit and the Knight shared a long silent look, as though they had a mutual friend who had died, or something.
“Who’s the White Queen?” Alice asked, breaking the silence, “And while we’re on the topic, who’s the Red Queen?”
“How can you not know the story of the Queens?” the Knight asked, turning to Alice. Then he seemed to see her as if for the first time. He took in her white shirt, short black skirt and long white socks, which were evidently not something that he saw every day.
“You’re not from Underland are you?” he said, slowly, and with growing amazement.
“No,” Alice said, “I’m presuming this is Underland, in which case, no I’m not from here.”
The White Knight looked over at the Rabbit with wide eyes.
“But if you’re not from Underland, then how did you get here?” he said, turning on Alice.
“I came through a door, or I suppose a mirror to be more precise.”
“Through a Looking Glass she’ll come,” the Knight recited, his eyes locked onto Alice, “Oh this is a wonderful thing!” he cried, leaping around in a circle until his visor crashed down over his eyes once again.
“What’s so wonderful about me not being from Underland?” Alice asked, tapping her foot against the ground.
“Because!” the Knight said, dancing over to her and grabbing both of her hands, “it means that you can stop the Red Queen!”
“Why do I have stop the Red Queen?” Alice said, “I don’t even know who she is.”
“Of course, of course,” the Knight said, as Alice pulled her hands out of his, “Sit down, this might be a long story.”
Alice allowed the knight to pull her to ground, where she smoothed her skirt over her legs and looke d expectantly at the Knight. The White Knight appeared to be rather uncomfortable in his armour and had trouble finding a position that was comfortable to sit it. Alice endured a few minutes of him clanking and shuffling around before he found an acceptable position.
“Okay, well this is Underland,” the Knight began, looking around the dank forest and monochrome sky, “It used to be filled with colour and laughter but that was many years ago. I wasn’t even alive during that time, but my mother always used to tell me the stories.”
“You’re a child of Underland then,” the Rabbit sighed, looking at the Knight with kinder eyes, “This used to be called Wonderland, you know Alice, now it’s only Underland, the Wonder has long since fled.”
“Yes,” the Knight said, “Underland born and bred, but I have always dreamed of Wonderland, as it once was.”
“Underland, Wonderland, got it,” Alice said impatiently, “Why am I so important?”
“Well, back when Underland was Wonderland, everything was good and the laws were fair and just. This was because the White Queen had won the Hundred Years, and she ruled Wonderland in a way where all people were equal. The Hundred Years is a game, which is only played once every One Hundred Years. No one really knows the rules except for the Queens, who can make any move wherever and whenever they want. Us other pieces are bound to rules that we aren’t even aware of. Whoever wins the game, wins Wonderland. For hundreds of years the White Queen always won, because everyone helped her along the way for she was good and just.”
“But then,” the Rabbit interrupted, “One hundred years ago, the Red Queen won the Hundred Years.”
“She only won because she cheated,” The Knight spat through his visor.
“Yes,” the Rabbit said gravely, “the Queen cheated her way to victory, but the Jabbawockee knows not of her cheating, and sees only who won.”
“And that is why we have Underland,” the Knight finished, “A land of cold and inequality. The Red Queen leeched the colour out of Wonderland, and took all that was good for herself. Poverty and hunger have spread through the land and we can’t do anything about it.”
“Whyever not?” Alice asked, “Why can’t you all rise up in a revolution, storm the castle, take down the Queen?”
“Oh Alice,” the Rabbit said, “If only this world was that simple.”
“I told you that there are rules that we do not understand,” the Knight said, “one of them is that the ruling Queen cannot be overruled. She possesses the most important and powerful magic of all, the Imagination.”
“The Imagination?” Alice laughed, “but everyone has an imagination!”
“Not in Underland, Alice,” the Rabbit said.
“How can you not have an imagination?” Alice said, looking between the two of them sceptically.
“It’s the power of the Queen, and the Queen alone.” The Knight said solemnly, “The White Queen used her power to share the Imagination between us all, allowing everyone to partake in creation and how Wonderland would grow and prevail. The Red Queen takes the Imagination for herself, meaning that she has power over us all.”
“Over all but you, Alice,” said the Rabbit, looking down at her, “You alone possess imagination, because you are not bound by the rules of Underland.”
“So, I’m the only one who can stop her?” Alice said slowly, “Is this what you meant? That I am supposed to be your saviour, the one to stop the tyrant leader?”
“Yes!” The Knight said, taking her hands once again and pulling her to her feet, a huge smile covering his face.
“That is ridiculous!” Alice said, shaking her hands free, “I’m just an ordinary girl from London, I can’t save a country.”
“But Alice,” the Knight said sadly, “you’re the only one who can.”
“There is a poem, from a very long ago, that speaks of a girl who arrives through the Looking Glass and will checkmate the Queen and restore colour to Wonderland,” the Rabbit said, “and you are the only person in one hundred years who has found their way into Underland.”
“The Game is going to start in two days,” The Knight cried, “The Hundred Years will begin and you can stop the Red Queen. All you have to do is win the Game.”
“I thought that the White Queen is supposed to win?”
“Ideally, yes, the White Queen should face the Red,” the Rabbit said, “But after the Red Queen won the Hundred Years the White Queen disappeared. She may have been imprisoned by the Red Queen, or have gone into hiding, but no one has seen or heard of her in one hundred years.
Someone has to face the Red Queen in the Game, Alice, or the Red Queen will win again and we will lose our chance to win back Wonderland, as it once was.”
“Say I was to play,” Alice said quietly, “How would I know what to do? You said that only the Queens know the rules.”
“That is the only problem,” the Knight said slowly, his shoulders sinking. There was a long period of silence.
“Wait,” Alice said, looking around at the Rabbit and the Knight.
“Yes?” the two said together.
“Surely there must someone else who knows the rules, if only the Queens knew the rules they could make them up and the games would be unfair. There had to be some sort of mediator, right?”
“Well, there’s the Jabbawockee, who decides who wins,” the Knight began warily.
“Perfect,” Alice said, “so where do we find the Jabbawockee?”
“No, no,” the Knight said, immediately, “no one knows where the Jabbawockee is, and no one wants to know. No one goes looking for the Jabbawockee unless they have a very real suicide wish.”
“Okay, so no Jabbawockee,” Alice said, seeing the sudden paleness of the White Knight’s face and the way that the Rabbit kept glancing warily from side to side, “but surely there was someone else?”
The Knight looked at the Rabbit, his face screwed up in thought, as though remembering was difficult for him.
“Rabbit,” he said, “do you remember anything from the stories? My mother told me them so long ago I can barely remember a thing.”
“That’s not your memory being terrible, Knight, it’s the Red Queen. The lack of Imagination diminishes mind power in general. I only regain what I know because of the last dregs of Imagination left over from the White Queen,” the Rabbit said sadly. Alice noticed that he kept his ears permanently on alert, and they twitched like antennas on top of his head.
“I don’t recall a mediator in the stories, it wouldn’t have made for much of a good story I presume,” he concluded.
“So we have nothing,” Alice said, sitting down again and resting her head on her knees. The White Knight joined her, flinging himself down onto the ground in an ear splitting clatter of metal on metal.
“I hadn’t finished,” the Rabbit continued, his eyes twinkling in the rabbit-form of a smile. Alice and the Knight looked up, neither daring to say anything.
“What you didn’t let me explain is that in Wonderland, I was in the service of the White Queen. I still am, of course, but I was by the Queen’s side every day of the Hundred Years.”
“You are The Rabbit?” the Knight asked incredulously, “The Rabbit who helped the White Queen around Wonderland?”
“Yes,” the Rabbit said, and Alice suspected that he was secretly extremely flattered that people still told his story.
“I indeed helped the Queen around,” the Rabbit continued, “Rabbits traditionally build warrens; a network of tunnels which interconnect and can transverse across vast areas of space. What the Queen gave me the Imagination to create a warren that did not only go underground, but could go over ground. The network did not have to simply conform to the real world problems like space, time and obstructions. I could create a rabbit hole to another part of Wonderland simply by wishing it to be.
Therefore I travelled with the White Queen, to aid her in travel around Wonderland.”
“Why didn’t the Queen just use the power for herself?” Alice wondered aloud, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you, I just wondered.”
“Alice, the reason that she didn’t simply use the idea herself is what makes the White Queen better than the Red Queen; she shared the burden on Imagination. She gave me a part of it and therefore the Imagination grew in a way that would not have been possible if only one person retained all the power. The two of us worked together to build and develop this portion of the Imagination. It is something that I still miss today.”
There was a long moment of silence, before the Knight clanked his armoured knees together by accident, which seemed to bring the Rabbit out of his reverie.
“Anyway,” the Rabbit continued, “what I was going to say was that, while I was in the service of the White Queen, I had to accompany her on her royal visits and excursions. In the year leading up to the last Hundred Years she made many visits to one specific place, hoping for some answers to questions that I did not know.”
“Where was it?” Alice asked, “This is something! Wherever she went will have some clue to what the Game involved, surely.”
“I hope so Alice,” the Rabbit said, “I was never allowed inside, so I cannot tell you what to expect. What we also have to hope is that the Red Queen does not know about this place too.”
“Well then we’ll just have to hope,” Alice said, hoping that she sounding more optimistic than she felt. She wasn’t even sure that really knew what was going on.
“How do we get there again?” the Knight asked a while later, as they made their way through the dark forest, which seemed eerily quiet and empty.
“We will have to make it out of the forest before I can be sure of the direction we need to go in,” the Rabbit said, his nose twitching at the still air. He stopped suddenly as a large tree blocked their path, and sniffed the air. He spun them around almost in full circle before leading them to the left of the tree.
“What I would give for Imagination now,” he sighed sadly.
“I wouldn’t say that too loudly Rabbit,” The Knight said, glancing behind them at the rows of trees, “You never know when an agent of the Red Queen is listening, and if they don’t like what they hear...”
He let the rest of his sentence trail off and Alice felt a chill slide down her spine. She began to look at the empty woods around them with more caution. Every gnarl in the black bark of the trees began to look as though it had eyes, and every twig snapping beneath their feet became a cause for alarm.
They walked in silence for a long time, the dark trees seemed to steal away their breath and dry out their conversation. Alice’s feet began to hurt because of her lack of shoes and she had ripped a hole in the bottom of one of her socks, so that every stone she stepped on bit right into her foot. She tried not to complain about how tired she felt, as the others did not seem to notice how long they had be walking for. In fact, Alice began to notice; it was as though time did not really pass noticeably at all. Though many hours had passed since she had arrived in Underland, no evidence of time passing had become apparent. The sky remained the same greyish white and the light, that had no visible source, had not changed. Their shadows had not grown longer as the day had progressed, nor the air become hotter or colder. It was as though the time in Underland was frozen.
Eventually, though Alice felt no conceivable difference, the Rabbit told them that they were nearing the end of the forest and soon enough the spaces between the trees around them seemed to widen, as though showing them the way out. The trio sped up as they began to see more light streaming down from above as the trees thinned, and soon the trees fell away and they found themselves standing out in the open once again. They stood just outside the rows of trees and looked at the sight before them. Alice noticed that unlike the rugged ground beneath their feet the grass in front of them was manicured and smooth. The almost-green carpet of grass spread out before them, and it looked almost fake, Alice thought, as she regarded the blades of grass all cut to exactly the same height.
“Come on,” she said, taking a step forward, “you said that it was this way right?”
The Rabbit nodded, but looked increasingly wary as they began to cross the perfectly trimmed grass. They had only been walking a little while before suddenly, as though it had grown straight out of the ground, a huge white picket fence blocked their path. Set into the fence was a white gate.
“Oh dear,” said the Rabbit, taking a step back, “I was hoping to avoid this bit.”
