Red Queen (21 page)

“What do you know of it?” the goblin spat. “I can do things for the Queen that no other can.”

“What, illusions?” Alice said. “I haven't met a Magician yet that couldn't make illusions.”

Except yourself, but never mind that.

“You can't have met any other Magicians,” the goblin insisted. “You came from the City and there are none there.”

“Did your Queen tell you that?” Alice asked. And if she had
told the goblin that, was it because she believed it herself or because she wanted him to believe it?

The goblin looked hesitant, just for a moment. “
She
knows everything. I am loyal to my Queen and you cannot fool me. If you're a Magician you can't have come from the City, and if you're from the City you're not a Magician.”

“Unless your Queen lied to you,” Alice said.

“
She
does not lie to me,” the goblin said. “She does not; she would not; she will not. I serve her and in return she lets me have my lovelies, oh, yes, my lovelies.”

The goblin rubbed his hideous hands together. “As soon as I saw you, I knew I must have you for my collection.
She
wanted that man for her own too, and so we each took one, you for me and him for her.”

“She seems to have done a faster job of it,” Alice said bitterly, thinking of the way Hatcher had disappeared into the forest and never returned to her.

The goblin grinned, and it was a horrible mockery of a smile, one that showed the blackened remains of his teeth and no joy. “He was weak and my Queen is powerful. You are much more difficult to catch, my Alice, and that makes the prize all the sweeter.”

“I am not a prize,” Alice said. Really, why did she feel like she had to say this over and over? Why did every man she encountered want to put her in a box and keep her there? Her eyes lighted on her pack, and she remembered what was in there. The knife. The huge hunter's knife that Brynja had given her. It was in the pack.

But the pack was closer to the goblin than Alice. Even if she grabbed it, would she have time to open the bag and take out the knife?

“You say you are not a prize. You say you do not belong to me, and yet you are here,” the goblin said. “This is where I keep all the things that are mine.”

“Why not kill me, then, and take my head?” Alice asked.

“So eager, so eager,” the goblin said. “But that is not how we play the game here. You must accept my love before you become part of my collection.”

It was as Alice had thought, then. She must capitulate, or break a rule; otherwise they could not touch her.

“And all of these women accepted you?” Alice said.

She slid her foot a few scant inches in the direction of the pack and waited to see if the goblin would notice. He did not appear to. He gazed around the room at his collection of heads, and his look of bliss repulsed her.

“Yes, yes, they all said yes in the end.”

“Though not always to you,” Alice said, thinking of the false Nicholas/Hatcher.

“What is a mask?” the goblin said, his sibilant voice dreamy and full of remembrance. “What lover does not wear a mask when he is courting? What lover does not lie and say sweet words when what he wants from his beloved is not sweet at all?”

Alice slid closer to the pack while the goblin spoke. It was just possible, she thought, to dive for it and yank out the knife before the goblin caught on. She drew in a steadying breath.
Now that she had a plan, even a not-very-good one, she felt calmer. She was at least attempting to master her own fate.

“I shouldn't bother if I were you,” the goblin said.

“Shouldn't bother what?” Alice asked, all innocence.

“Shouldn't bother leaping about and looking for the knife,” the goblin said, and Brynja's gift appeared in his hand.

Alice wondered if the goblin could read her thoughts like the Caterpillar. She imagined a field of clouds in front of her mind, a trick she'd used to disguise her thoughts from that other Magician.

“Oh, I can't look into your mind,” the goblin said, and sounded richly amused. “But your face shows your intentions plain as day. And I have already swum among your thoughts and wishes, Alice, and your man's too. He dreams of blood, that one.”

Tell me something I don't know,
Alice thought, and that thought was so incongruous that it startled a laugh from her. The goblin looked at her oddly, and Alice remembered where she was and what he wanted to do to her.

“How can you see our dreams if you can't read our minds?” Alice asked.

“You slept in the Queen's village, and in the Queen's forest. Your dreams go walking in the night and she knows how to walk with them. This is how she can see into your heart, how she lures you with your fondest desire.” The goblin frowned at Alice, tapping the flat side of the knife in the opposite hand. “I thought you wanted a normal life and garden parties and a respectable
man. But I seem to have made a mistake. You do not wish for a quiet respectable life. You had one of those and you ran from it, ran to a life of blood and death. So that must be—it has to be—what you really want. Your man dreams of blood, of the wet slice of blade in flesh, and you curl yourself about him in the night, so you must dream the same dream, or wish you did. And once I give that to you, then you will love me.”

The cavern walls slid away then, melting like wax in a fire. All the heads on the wall slipped and screamed, their smiling mouths shaped instead in matching Os of despair, their eyes wide and fearful.

Get out, get away, before you become one of us,
they called to Alice.
Get out, get away!

The floor shifted beneath her, no longer the hard rock of the cavern but something wet and sticky and soft, like muscle flayed open by a sharp, sharp knife.

All around her the walls ran red and the air was filled with the cries of lost girls. The goblin stalked toward her, the knife that was supposed to defend her in his hand, and it wasn't his hand but Hatcher's.

It wasn't the goblin's face either but Hatcher's face, the stretched-out nose and chin morphed into Hatcher's beautiful, wild planes of angle and bone, the black doll's eyes turned into Hatcher's grey ones.

“Alice, come to me,” he said in Hatcher's voice.

This was somehow more terrible than anything the goblin
had done thus far. He was her Hatcher, the madman who loved her. This was not some false, idealized dream of what Hatcher might have been. The goblin took the face of the man she knew, the man she loved, the man she was trying to save.

“Alice, come to me; let me kiss you and love you and tear you to pieces,” he said with Hatcher's voice and Hatcher's mouth and Hatcher's hands holding that long, wicked blade.

She could run. Yes, she could run, and the goblin would likely enjoy that. He would chase her and croon at her and laugh all the while. It would not, however, change her circumstances. Alice could see no obvious exit out of the cave, so she was trapped until she had time to pick through the goblin's illusions. The goblin with Hatcher's face held her knife.

But what if he didn't? What if I just . . . wished?

It could work. She would have to be very careful and very patient and take him by surprise, just like with the Jabberwocky.

Alice stood motionless and tried to look scared. It wasn't difficult. She
was
scared. She was terrified deep in her bones that she would not escape.

There had been worse in Alice's life to be sure, but this was a cage of a different kind. In the Rabbit's warren there had been no illusions, only her will to live free against the Rabbit's will to keep her there.

Here the goblin could change himself over and over until Alice was too exhausted to remember who she was and why she was here, and then she would be lost. So she must stand and find courage she did not have.

Alice blinked and the false Hatcher was before her, only a few inches separating their faces.

“Alice,” he cooed, “let me love you; let me rip you.”

He reached for her face with the knife, the edge aiming for her unscarred cheek. She saw the blade move in slow motion, watched it until it was almost nothing but a winking flash out of the corner of her eye.

Then she thought,
Right, I'll take that.

The incredible thing about magic was how easy it was once you more or less knew what you were doing, Alice considered. The handle was in her grip and she slashed right across the false Hatcher's neck with all the force she could muster and all the anger and fear in her heart.

The neck separated like a smiling mouth and the Hatcher mask broke apart. The bloodstained walls shivered all over and the goblin clutched both his hands, his grotesquely long monster's hands, at his throat but there was no stopping the flow of black liquid that oozed out. Dark clots of blood clustered at his mouth and nose and dripped out of his eyes, and all around them the headless girls made a noise that sounded like a strange kind of joyful singing.

The goblin gurgled, his mouth working like he was trying to talk, trying to call out for help.
Trying to call his Queen,
Alice thought,
but I don't think she will trouble about him now. She doesn't seem the sort to dwell on a lost soldier, even one as loyal as this.

His eyes were fearful now, staring at Alice, and mixed with
the fear was a kind of patent disbelief that she found she could easily read.

“How could this girl, this nothing, this lovely for my wall defeat me? And why is my Queen not here now punishing her for this? And why did SHE not tell me that this one was a Magician?”

The goblin staggered away from her, and Alice was reminded of something Hatcher had told her once, about finishing them off so they didn't come back for you later.

She was loath to touch the goblin again, loath to use the knife that cut so easily. Alice feared all the blood on her hands was turning her into a monster, but she must do this.

Pretend you're Hatcher,
she thought, and strangely that did make it seem easier, for Hatcher was a virtuoso musician and his instrument was a sharp edge. When he moved to murder, his body would arc and spin like a dancer, always knowing exactly what end would occur.

Alice stepped nearer, almost into the goblin's arms, and put that knife where the thing's heart ought to be.

He cried out then, and all the heads on the shelves joined in, a horrible high-pitched screaming that made Alice cover her ears. She backed away, trying to escape the sound that seemed to drive deep inside her ear like a long shiny needle, but there was no escape from it, for it filled up all the empty space in the air.

The cavern shook and rumbled like there was an earthquake deep in the mountain, and the walls peeled downward, taking
the heads with them. The girls, all the goblin's lovelies, rolled right up inside the cavern like they were rolling up inside a carpet prepared for moving.

A circular chasm opened up at the goblin's feet and he fell inside, his face still set in that rigor of disbelief. Alice could hardly believe that was it, that the nightmare who'd haunted her almost since they entered the wood had simply fallen away into a dark hole.

The cave was falling into the chasm now too, everything swirling like the water at the bottom of a bathtub. Alice glanced around helplessly for a sign, for anything that would show her how to get out before she too was sucked into the swirling vortex at the center of the room.

The door, the door. I came in through a door so I must be able to go out again.

As the cave walls disappeared they revealed exposed beams and brick, the way a house might look when it is not finished yet. The wall behind Alice bumped into her legs as it rolled up toward the hole that sucked in the goblin.

For a terrible moment she felt the momentum of the rolling cavern move her toward the abyss, that endless fall where she would be trapped with the goblin forever.

Then she was knocked backward over the tube just as one would fall over a spinning log. Her body slammed into a dirt floor and clouds of dust puffed up all around her, making her cough. Alice sat up just in time to see the remains of the goblin's
lair pulled into the hole. Then the hole closed, followed by an audible “pop,” almost like the sound Alice heard when she'd broken the string that connected her to Cheshire.

Or thought I'd broken it, at any rate,
Alice thought. The little Magician did seem to cling to her somehow, like a cobweb tangled in her hair.

It was interesting, she reflected, that the goblin's cave had collapsed the way the Caterpillar's crazed Butterflies had when Alice killed him. Was it Alice, or was it that Magicians were tied so closely to the place they lived? And if so, what did that make her?

A Magician without a home,
she thought, one that wouldn't cause a ripple in the world if she died. Who would even miss her? Her parents, no doubt, thought she'd died in the hospital fire and were likely relieved in that knowledge. After Alice returned from the Old City, she'd never been anything but an unwanted burden to them.

Hatcher was a wolf who'd probably forgotten he'd ever been human, tied now to the White Queen. If the goblin had added Alice to his collection, no one would know and no one would care. That was a disheartening thought, one that made Alice wonder why she bothered to move forward and fight at all.

Because you must live, Alice.

It didn't feel like living. She'd just killed a horrible nightmare and she'd done it all on her own, without any help from Cheshire or Hatcher or anyone.

“I won,” Alice said to the empty room.

It didn't feel like winning either. It felt like surviving. Alice was tired of surviving, tired of magic and quests and blood. She wanted to live, really live, the way ordinary people did.

Like Brynja and the other folk of that village at that bottom of the mountain? Is that living, to have your children stolen because of the caprice of a witch?