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“Of course, the past is particularly nice this time of year,” the wolf grinned.
“No! All we’ve got is the present, and not a very pleasant one at that.” The raven snapped at a passing glow-worm. “Rather cheap, honestly. I’m only warning you so you won’t be disappointed.”
“Oh, stop trying to impress her! You haven’t got the goods. Admit it!” The wolf howled from within his thicket of carved Corinthian leaves. “You just made up that bit of humbug because it sounded clever and shiny and it alliterated you never had the tawdriest idea of how to solve it. Confess! Perjury! Pretension! Petty thief of my intellectual energies! Hornswoggler! ”
“I have got the goods, and the bads, and the amorals, too! But if I’m to give up my present, after all this time, we must have a proper party for it! You lot have abused me so long that just handing it over in the woods like a highwayman won’t do—no sir, no madam, no how nor hence nor hie-way! I will have a To-Do! I will have balloons and buttercream and brandy and bomb shelters! And one good trombone, at minimum!”
The marble hare rocked from one side of its flat column-base to the other in sculptural excitement. “Shall we, shan’t we, shall we, shan’t we, shall we join the dance?”
The three capitals leapt off down the forest path, bouncing and hopping like three drops of oil on a hot pan. Olive raced after them, ducking moonlit branches and drooping vines clotted with butterflies that seemed, somehow, to have tiny slices of bread for wings. But no matter how Olive ran, she seemed only to go slower, the wood around her only to close in thicker and deeper, darker and closer, until she could hardly move at all, and had lost sight entirely of the talking capitals. At last, she found herself standing quite still in a little glen, staring up at the starry sky and
the starry leaves and the starry massive skeleton sheathed in moss so thick it could keep out the cold of a thousand winters. Tiger lilies and violets and dahlias and peonies grew wild in the skeleton’s teeming green ribcage, its soft, blooming mouth, its sightless eye sockets. It lay sprawled on the forest floor propped up against a tree as vast as time, arms limp, legs bent at the knee. A galaxy of green and ultraviolet glow-worms ringed the giant’s dead green head like a crown, and the crown spelled out words in flickering, sparkling letters:
THE TUMTUM CLUB
No thought of Me Shall Find a Place
A violinist, a cellist, and an oboist begin to set up their music stands in the corner of the Stork Club. They are nice young men, in nice new suits, with nice fresh haircuts and shaves. The violinist rubs his bow with resin as though he is sharpening a sword.
“I always felt…Alice…I always felt I was two people. Two Peters. Myself, and him. The Other One. And the Other was always the better version. Younger, handsomer, jollier, bolder. Of course he was. I had to bumble through every day knocking things over and breaking my head open. But the Other One…he got to try over and over again until he got it right. Until he was perfect. Dreamed, planned, written, re-written, re-rewritten, edited, crossed-out, tidied up, nipped and cut and shaped and moved through the plot with a minimum of trouble. Nothing I could ever say could be as clever as the Other One’s quipping. How could it be? Everything I say is a dreadful cliché, because I am alive and human, and live humans are not made out of dust and God’s breath, no matter what anyone says. They’re made out of clichés. So there are two of me—what a unique observation for a muse to make! No, no, it isn’t, it can’t be, because I only said it once, I didn’t get to decide it was rubbish and go back, erase it, add a metaphor or a bit of meta-fiction or a dash of theatricality. So I just say it and it’s terrible, it’s nothing. But the Other One would be delighted with two Peters, you know. What adventures they would have together. Nothing for mischief like a twin.”
Alice’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Peter…I’m not sure I follow, dear.”
“Yes, well, no one does. I don’t, when it comes down to it. If you don’t mind a confession before the main course…I…I went…well, all this about two Peters and suchlike…wound me up in a sanatorium. For a while. Not long. But…well, yes. Er.” He finished lamely, flushing in shame—shame, and the peculiar excitement of sharing a secret one absolutely knows is unwelcome and untoward.
“Oh, Peter!”
“Oh, Peter, indeed. It’s such a funny thing. Nothing in the world so much like Neverland as a sanatorium. The food isn’t really food, no one’s got a mother, there’s a great frightening man in a waistcoat who harries you night and day, and you keep fighting the same battles over and over, round and round in circles, forgetting that you ever fought the minute it’s over and the next one begins. All of us lost boys in that awful lagoon, dressed as animals, wailing for home.”
She puts her hand on his. The tableware shifts beneath their fingers.
“Did you ever feel…like that? Like there were two Alices?” he whispers.
Alice laughs wanly. “Good heavens, no. There is only one Alice, and I am her. He only…took a photograph. One great, gorgeous photograph, where the sitting lasted all my life, and he sold that picture to the world.”
Cinders All A-Glow
Olive found that, if she walked very, very slowly, as though she were dragging her feet on the way to some unpleasant chore, she could speed along quite gaily through the shadowy glen. It hardly took a moment of glum shuffling before she stood at a tapering, rather church-like door wedged into the giant’s skeleton, just where its briary ribcage came to a Pythagorean point. It certainly was a door, though rather absurdly done. It made her think of all the overdecorated, slapdash rooms of Fuss Antonym, thrown up without reason or sense, for the door was spackled together out of pocket watch parts and butter and breadcrumbs and jam, and she felt entirely sure that if she were to knock, it would all come oozing, clattering apart and she should be billed for the damage.
“Hullo?” Olive called instead, for she had forgotten her pocketbook on the other side of the looking glass.
A slab of cold butter bristling with minute-hands like a greasy hedgehog slid aside. Two beady black rodent eyes peered down at her.
“Password,” the Doorman whispered.
“Well, I certainly don’t know!” Olive sputtered.
Oh, bad form, Olive! she cursed herself. Haven’t you ever read a spy novel? You’re meant to say something extra mysterious, in a commanding and knowledgeable voice, so that the doorman will say to himself, “Anyone that commanding and knowledgeable has to be on the up and up, so it stands to reason the password’s changed, or I’ve forgotten it, or I’m being tested by management, but any way it cuts, it’s me who’s at fault and not this fine upstanding member of our society.” Now, come on, do it, and you won’t have to feel embarrassed when you think back on this later when you’ve gone un-mad.
Olive stood on her tiptoes and stared commandingly into those black rodent eyes. Something extra mysterious. Something knowledgeable. Preferably something mad. Like a chicken in spectacles and a powdered wig.
“Eglwysbach,” she said slowly and stoically, fitting her mouth around the word as perfectly as possible, even tossing in a proper guttural cough on the end.
The eyes on the other side of the buttered watch-parts blinked uncertainly.
“Er. That doesn’t sound right. But it doesn’t sound wrong. It sounds passwordy. Am I asleep?” the Doorman whispered.
“We both are, most likely,” Olive laughed.
