Splintered (Splintered, #1)(21)
He keeps a Swiss Army knife on the side table for opening mail. I flip the scissor attachment out, then snip all the daisies in half and gouge out the holes beneath. Batting snows around me.
Soon, I’m sitting at the foot of the recliner with a small trove of Wonderland-related objects: an antique hair clip—more like a bobby pin, actually—with a ruby teardrop attached to its bent end; a feather quill; and a Victorian fan made of white lace and matching gloves scented with talcum and black pepper. I suppress a sneeze and push aside two snapshots of my great-great-great-grandmother Alice in favor of the small book I also found.
I stroke the tattered paperback’s cover and study the title: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Across the word Alice, Alison’s name is scrawled in red marker.
She wanted me to find these “treasures.” Something here is supposed to discourage me from going to the rabbit hole. Instead, I’m convinced these things can help fix Alison, help me break the Liddell curse for good.
Tucked within the novel’s front cover is a tourism brochure for the Thames sundial trail in London. On it is a statue of a child balancing a sundial on his head. I sit back in disbelief. It’s the one I saw earlier in my mind, the one the children were playing beside. Alison must have looked for the rabbit hole when she was younger; she must have traveled to London on her search. Where else could these keepsakes have come from? More important, what made her stop looking?
The statue is dated 1731—long before Alice Liddell’s birth—so it would’ve been in place when my great-great-great-grandmother was little, which means she could’ve fallen into the hole beneath it.
I now have an address, but according to the brochure, there’s no public access to the grounds. Tourists are only allowed to look at the sundial statue from behind iron railings. Even once I get there, I’ll need a miracle to sneak in and explore the sundial up close.
I slide the brochure back into place in the book, skimming the story I know so well. It’s full of black-and-white sketches. There are a few dog-eared pages and some excerpts underlined: the Walrus and the Carpenter poem, Alice’s tears causing a flood, the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
Alison’s handwriting fills the margins, notes and comments in different colors of ink. I touch them all, saddened we never sat down together—book in hand—so she could explain what everything means.
Most of her additions have blurred, as if the pages got wet. I stop at the illustrations of the Queen and King of Hearts, where she wrote: Queen and King Red—here’s where it started. And here it will end …
Lightning flashes under the drapes.
After the last page of the story, there’s an additional twenty or more pages, hand-glued into place. On each, someone scribbled sketches similar to the mutated Wonderland characters on the moth website: the skeletal white rabbit, vicious flowers with bloodied teeth, even a different rendition of Queen Red—a fine-boned beauty with bright red hair, black designs inked around her eyes, and gauzy wings.
The sketches trigger another vision of the children, more powerful than the one I experienced earlier, because my eyes don’t even close. My living room fades and I’m in a meadow somewhere, breathing in the scent of spring. Dappled sunlight blinks around me, keeping time with tree branches rocking in the breeze. The landscape is weirdly fluorescent.
The girl—who looks to be five—wears a frilly red pajama top with long, puffy sleeves and matching pants that cover her ankles. She sits on a grassy knoll beside the boy, who can’t be more than eight. They both have their backs to me.
Black wings drape behind the boy like a cloak, matching his velvet pants and silky shirt. He tilts sideways, so I catch his profile, but his face stays hidden beneath a curtain of glowing blue hair as he uses a needle to thread dead moths along a string—making the gruesome equivalent of a popcorn garland.
His feet—snug inside black hiking boots—are propped on a set of sketches, the same ones glued inside Alison’s Wonderland book.
“There.” His young, soft voice rustles like feathers on the wind. Without looking up, he points to the picture of Queen Red with his needle. The line of dead moths trails it, flapping with the movement. “Tell me her secrets.”
The girl wriggles her bare feet, pink toenails glistening in the soft light. “I’m tired of being in Wonderland,” she mumbles in a milky voice of innocence. “I want to go home. I’m sleepy.”
“So am I. Perhaps if you didn’t fight me in the air during flying lessons,” he says, a cockney accent becoming apparent, “we’d both feel the better for it.”
“It makes my tummy kick when we get so high.” She yawns. “Isn’t it bedtime yet? I’m getting cold.”
Shaking his head, the boy prods the picture once more. “First, their secrets. Then I’ll take you back to your warm bed.”
The girl sighs and captures one of his wings, winding herself up in it. Warmth and comfort surge through me, mirroring what she must feel. She burrows into the satiny tunnel, wrapped up in the scent of him—licorice and honey.
“Wake me when it’s time to leave,” she says, her voice muffled.
Eyes still hidden behind his wild hair, he laughs. His lips are well shaped and dark against his pale skin, his straight teeth shiny and white. “Sneakie-deakie, trixie-luv.” He tugs his wing free, leaving her cold and pouting.