Ensnared (Splintered, #3)(56)
The moment I turn to go, the remaining globes drop down, insisting I look inside. An uneasy tremor quakes through me with each glimpse. One is an image of Queen Red’s mother when Red was young; there are also moments between Red and both her parents—drinking tea, laughing . . . planting flowers; and Red dancing with her father as her mother claps from a distance.
These are all things Jeb can’t possibly know. Things only Red would know.
Before I can piece together what that means, an image of Charles Dodgson takes shape inside a globe that’s floating away. I stretch up to grab it.
He’s walking on a flower-strewn path alongside an older, distinguished gentleman. As they stroll beneath some shady trees, the older man’s appearance shifts and I see—so clearly—Red wearing the professor’s imprint. Just like Hubert said, at the inn.
My heartbeat thunders.
Charles carries a journal filled with handwritten equations and longitude/latitude directions. Together, Charles and Red’s professor-imprint step through some shrubbery, coming to stop at the little-boy sundial statue—the gateway to the rabbit hole—that once hid Wonderland’s entrance before I destroyed everything.
The image goes dark. I’m about to release the globe when it lights up once more to another scene and a group of people having a picnic. Several children, a mother and a father, and Charles. Alice Liddell’s face comes into view. She looks just like the seven-year-old in the picture Mom had hidden in Dad’s recliner. This family must be hers . . . the Liddells, close friends with Charles.
Alice’s face is alight with excitement as she scampers alone through a haze of vintage spectators. Scones, teacups on lace doilies, and parasols abound. She circles a familiar set of shrubs. Eyes wide with wonder, she stands head-to-head with the sundial statue. It’s been pushed aside, exposing the hole underneath.
Two fuzzy white ears appear from within, and a bunny face complete with wriggling nose and endearing whiskers comes into view. Alice gapes as the bunny motions with a pink, padded paw for her to follow. What she doesn’t see is the shift of the imprint, and Rabid White’s bony hand, old man’s face, and white antlers.
The white rabbit disappears back into the hole. Looking around her, Alice hesitates. But the curious light in her eyes burns brighter than her fear, and she plunges in. Queen Red creeps from behind a rosebush and coaxes the sundial statue back into place over the hole, locking it. She’s gone before Charles and Alice’s father appear, looking for the missing child.
Neither one knows there’s a hole beneath the statue, apparent by the bewilderment on their faces. Charles had found the gateway, but never figured out how to open it.
I know the rest of the tale by heart: Alice was missing for days. Then later, after she returned, Charles, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, wrote her story out on paper. But it wasn’t Alice who returned at all. It was Red.
The globe goes dark again and I release it.
I stand in place, numb.
All this time I thought Alice accidentally stumbled into Wonderland. But Red planted the possibility of the nether-realm in Charles Dodgson’s mind as his colleague. When Charles found the sundial statue and nothing more, he figured his calculations were wrong. So instead, the tale blossomed to fiction within his storyteller’s imagination. He filled Alice and her siblings’ heads with fanciful notions and fairy-tale enticements, made the mistake of mentioning the statue, even took the family to see it during a picnic, never realizing the repercussions.
Red wanted Alice to go down the rabbit hole. She arranged for it.
An uncomfortable warmth niggles in my skull—my netherling intuition waking . . . nudging. Either because Red’s spirit once shared my body, or because her memories are still on the back burner of my mind, I know that this epiphany is fact, not speculation.
Hubert said Red wanted to improve the netherling lineage. That she thought the humans were better somehow.
What makes human children better? Why does Sister Two steal them and string them up in the garden of souls?
Dreams and imagination . . .
The diary wriggles at my neck, further validation. The forgotten memories on these pages shaped Red’s motivations long before she chose to forget them. But the problem is, she did choose to forget. She forgot why she wanted to bring dreams into Wonderland.
“I’ll bring dreams to our kind, Father. They’ll be in abundance everywhere, not just in the cemetery. One day, I’ll free the spirits, so they can sleep inside our gardens, brushing our windows at night, and bumping against our feet in the day. I’ll bring imagination to our world so everyone might always be with those they treasure.”
The only things Red remembered after killing her memories were that she wanted to bring dreams to the nether-realm, and she wanted power and revenge. Somehow, they became one in her mind. After her husband betrayed her, she had nothing to lose by playing the part of a careless queen, to have herself banished from the kingdom so no one would notice when she disappeared into the human realm.
She trapped a human child in Wonderland and wore her imprint as camouflage so she could breed with a mortal and bring back halfling heirs. Those descendants were supposed to introduce dreams and imagination into the netherling world. But how was setting Wonderland to rights supposed to satisfy her need for revenge and power?
My head feels foggy and bloated. I’m still missing something. A crucial part of her plan.