Red Queen (7 page)

All the elements of a story are here,
Alice thought. The enchanted village, the mysterious creatures in the night. Yet there was something not quite right, some element that didn't result in the usually expected end.

Alice and Hatcher had escaped without a struggle, without a confrontation of any kind. If Alice's dream were true, then the reason for this was because she'd insisted they pay for anything they took from the shops.

Somehow, though, she didn't think it was that simple. Why place a trap—Alice was fairly certain now that was the purpose of the village—and then allow fish to swim out of the net instead of closing it?

“And why did we never see what was causing that light in the desert?” Alice muttered as they packed up their things and started again.

“What was that?” Hatcher asked.

“Nothing,” Alice said. No need to trouble Hatcher with her unsubstantiated worries.

The trees were thicker ahead, and the stream veered away from the easterly course Alice and Hatcher followed.

Hatcher paused as they entered the woods, peering at the ground. “There's a deer track here. We can follow this for a while.”

“How do you know so much about these things?” Alice asked
suspiciously. “About deer trails and fishing and so on. You've never left the City in your life.”

Hatcher shrugged. “I don't know. I just know. The knowledge is there when I need it, like when we escaped the hospital and were trying to find Bess.”

“That, at least, made sense,” Alice said. “You'd been there before. You were only following your nose, so to speak. But this . . .”

“Maybe there's more to being a Seer than just seeing the future,” Hatcher said. “Maybe I can call on some other power.”

Or maybe,
Alice thought, her eyes narrowed,
someone is helping you. Someone who was forced out of my head but made no promise to stay out of yours.

She did not say this aloud. She had no proof of Cheshire's interference, although the relative ease with which they had passed through the desert only increased her suspicion. Cheshire liked to set and clear the chessboard according to his own whims. If it suited him to steer them away from the mysterious light in the desert, then Cheshire would not be above using Hatcher as his tool to do so.

And Hatcher had so much noise in his head that he wouldn't necessarily notice the presence of another. She would watch him carefully and see whether she could find any trace of Cheshire in his manner.

Hatcher moved along, confident and sure-footed, into the forest, seeming to know precisely where he was going. As for Alice, her unease grew as the trees thickened.

She'd never spent any real time in the woods. The avenues in the City were lined with carefully trimmed branches and rigidly spaced trunks providing the exact amount of shade for strolling nursemaids that pushed prams at midday.

There was a large open park near Alice's childhood home, but even there the trees were scant, planted here and there in a field of well-kept grass. There was nowhere in the City where the trees pushed close, snagging one's clothes, thickening the air with the scent of bark and leaves decomposing underfoot. It seemed a wholly alien world to Alice, and not one she was certain she liked.

“It's so quiet,” she said, and though her voice was barely above a whisper it seemed to fill in the empty space left between the breathing of the trees.

The quiet was oppressive. It gave her a sense that the forest lurked, waiting for its chance to do . . . Well, Alice wasn't certain what a forest
could
do, but it didn't give her a pleasant feeling. She felt she might never see the sky or the sun again. The only roof visible was the arcing canopy of trees twining their arms about one another in an eternal embrace above their heads.

“Yes,” Hatcher said, and his voice was even lower than hers, so faint it was barely distinguishable from the exhalation of his breath. “No birds, no squirrels, not a sign of the deer whose trail we follow.”

Of course now that it was mentioned, Alice noted the lack of twittering and scampering and scurrying, the sorts of sounds
you might expect in a forest even if you had never been in one before. But nothing moved except themselves.

“What does it mean?” Alice asked.

“It means,” Hatcher said, and suddenly his axe was in his hand, “that there is a hunter about, and the hunted things have tucked out of sight.”

“But not us,” Alice said, looking around. The shadows were thicker, more sinister, shifting into shapes that may or may not actually be there. “What if we're what it's hunting?”

“I'm certain we are,” Hatcher said, his eyes gleaming.

She knew he longed for this, the tension of the hunt, the aching silence before the thrill of blood and mayhem. Alice might understand Hatcher, but she would never understand that need. She fought only when necessary, only when she had to defend her life—or his. She would never revel in the melting of flesh beneath her blade.
(Except the Caterpillar's flesh.)

Well, that was different, wasn't it? He was keeping those girls captive for his own amusement.

It was sort of funny, Alice mused. She'd thought when she left the City behind she would also leave all the horrors, shed them like that snake sliding out of its old skin that she longed to be. Instead they returned to her over and over, sleeping and waking—the Caterpillar, the Walrus, Cheshire, the Rabbit, and the girls they used and broke, the girls taken screaming from their streets and homes. Girls like Alice was, once.

“Alice,” Hatcher said.

It was only then she noticed that he'd kept going while she'd stopped, gazing into the hole of her past instead of looking for peril in the present. She hurried to his side.

“You'll be in someone's stew pot before long if you don't keep a sharp eye about,” Hatcher said.

Alice nodded, knowing it was true, but also knowing it was as hard for her to stop it as Hatcher's bloodlust. Sometimes the lure of thought and memory was too much for her, a tug that compelled her away from the world and into her own head. It came, she supposed, from all the years in the hospital, with only her own brain for company aside from Hatcher's voice through the mouse hole.

Though she did have a vague memory of her mother's voice, sharp and impatient: “Straighten up and stop dreaming, Alice!”

Yes, she'd been a dreamy child, and the experience of her life had not removed that impulse. Despite the danger that unraveled before them at every turn, Alice seemed unable to keep her mind on what she was doing.

Several minutes passed as Alice and Hatcher walked shoulder to shoulder in the woods. Alice felt the coiled tension pouring off Hatcher. The woods, however, kept their secrets, and she wondered if this was simply a quiet place with no animals. It didn't have to mean anything sinister because they didn't see any scampering rodents.
(But no birds? Not even the buzz of insects? Nothing?)

Then she heard it.

It was such a small noise it could almost be dismissed as the
rustle of leaves in the wind. Except there was no wind. The air was heavy and still, and Hatcher stopped moving, holding up his hand so Alice would do the same.

His grey eyes were hard and alert, and his facial muscles moved ever so slightly, just enough for Alice to receive the message.
Behind us.

She'd always been dreamy, but she'd also always been curious, which was why she turned around to look before Hatcher was ready to strike. She gasped, her scream of horror swallowed in shock. There was a thing, a thing she could never have imagined, and it was much nearer than it should have been.

It was directly behind her, long fingers extended and about to brush the place where her nape had been a moment before. Its face was hideously distended, as if the whole skull had been pressed between two blocks and then a child had pulled the nose out long and the chin down to the chest.

Its limbs, too, were unnaturally elongated, though its whole body was drawn into a crouch that put its face at Alice's eyes. The skin was a mottled green, covered all over by some shiny yellowish substance that oozed. It wore a kind of jerkin composed of patches of skin sewn together, and Alice thought some of those patches looked like human skin.

All this she registered in an instant, and then the smell of it, the reek of decay and death, reached her nostrils and she choked, staggering out of the reach of those long, grasping fingers.

It hissed at her, took a step forward on its oversized feet and reached again. Hatcher spun, swinging the axe so hard and fast
Alice felt the brush of air as the blade whistled past her. She squeezed her eyes shut, anticipating the hot splatter of blood splashing over her, the final agonized cry of the thing that had stalked them through the woods.

It did not come.

Alice opened her eyes again to find Hatcher staring in bewilderment at the empty space where the creature had been.

“Where did it go?” She could not disguise her astonishment.

Hatcher never missed. It was a truth as reliable as the rising of the sun and the blue of her eyes. Hatcher never missed once he'd unsheathed his axe and moved with intention. And yet, somehow, he had.

“It disappeared,” he said, then shook his head. “No, that's not exactly right. It sort of . . . stuttered, I suppose, in front of me and then I didn't see it anymore.”

The image of the creature was burned in Alice's eyes, so that it was almost as if the thing stood before her still, fingers grasping for her face now instead of her neck.

“Was it real, do you think?” Her heart pounded in her chest, and she could hear how breathless and fluttery her voice was.

The encounter disturbed her greatly, much more than she would have thought possible given all the horror she had already seen. It would have been a comfort to have the bloodied corpse of the monster at their feet. Then at least Alice would know for certain that it
had
happened.

Hatcher sniffed the air. “It smelled real enough. I can still smell it.”

“If it was real, what is it? What does it want with us?” Again she was surprised by the intensity of her fear. It looked like something from a childhood tale, a thing that crept out from under the bed in the darkness, a thing that reached its thin, creeping arms over the bed to snatch little girls from their blankets before they had a chance to scream. It looked like a—

“Goblin,” Alice said, remembering a maid called Liesl who'd come from the forest in the high mountains, a long way from the City.

She'd told Alice stories of goblins and of witches with candy houses that lured children, of girls who chopped their feet in two to fit inside a glass slipper.

They were not, Alice reflected, very nice stories, although Liesl claimed they were told to children.

“What's a goblin?” Hatcher asked.

“Something that's not supposed to exist,” Alice murmured.

The thing that had been there a moment before still did not seem real. It was easy to accept the presence of magic in the world, and that animals could talk if you knew how to listen to them, and even the idea of a mermaid. It was easy to accept the pleasant and nice things (
although magic isn't always used for pleasant and nice things, is it?
), but monsters, especially ones from children's stories, were somehow more difficult to grasp.

Her mind wanted to slide away from the reality of the goblin, to deny that her eyes had seen what they had seen, to pretend her nose had not smelled what it smelled, to forget the almost-touch of long fingers reaching for her neck.

Alice shook her head, telling herself to stop being foolish. She'd faced and defeated the Jabberwocky—

(Alice)

—and surely this hob would be nothing compared to that.

(I'm still here, Alice.)

There might have been a dark laugh emerging from the roll of dirty clothing at the very bottom of her pack, but Alice refused to hear it.

Hatcher crouched to the ground, inspecting the place where the creature had stood. Alice saw no obvious sign of its presence, nor of the way it had retreated. She remembered her brief glimpse of its long, oversized feet and the protruding blackened toenails. There ought to be footprints or some other kind of mark in the ground from those appendages. But there was nothing. Alice saw Hatcher glance around, then stand and scrub his face in frustration.

“I don't know what a goblin is, but it sure disappeared bloody quick,” Hatcher said. “If both of us hadn't seen it I would say we hadn't seen it.”

He slapped the blunt end of his axe in the palm of his left hand, his eyes searching around the forest. Alice could see the longing in his eyes, the desire to hunt the thing that had slipped away from his blade.

“Come on, Hatch,” she said, with a certainty she did not feel. “If it appears again you can have another go.”

She knew he wouldn't move unless she did, because he
wouldn't let her walk through the woods unprotected. So she did the thing she did not want to do. She held her chin high and pretended she didn't feel like a scurrying mouse, like she didn't want to find the nearest hole and dive into it. She pretended that her heart wasn't a faint little flutter in her chest, trying to make itself small and unnoticeable. She pretended she wasn't terrified to look back over her shoulder and see not the carved bones of Hatcher's face but the distorted ones of the goblin. She pretended, and she led the way.

A moment later Hatcher fell in step beside her and patted her shoulder. “I'll get it next time. You don't have to worry.”

“I'm not worried,” Alice said. But she was. Because Hatcher never missed, and this time he had.

They trudged along, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Alice noted the return of birds and chipmunks and little noises from the brush. She even saw a flash of antlers through the trees. Another time she might have pointed in amazement at the sight of a wild deer, but not now.