Unbirthday Read online

  “This is truly astounding!” Alice said in awe. “The camera somehow sees through the real world and channels Wonderland through its lens instead!”

  There were of course crackpots who used new photographic technology to claim they could capture ghosts or fairies or the auras of people, “scientifically”: with chemicals and light and mirrors. This was obviously not that. Alice had complete control over her equipment, the process, and the plates. And there was nothing hazy, indistinct, or unbelievable about these images.

  The tree in the last photo turned out to be a flower.

  A swaying flower the size of a house (or perhaps the camera and artist were shrunk small) with lips at the end of her petals. Alice wasn’t even sure what kind of flower it was; certainly nothing as easily identifiable as a rose or a jonquil. Even a rose or jonquil with eyes.

  “Oh, I bet she can sing!” Alice cried. “This is fantastic! My dreams were all real! Here they are right before my eyes!”

  But why had they chosen to make themselves known now? Why couldn’t anyone else see them? And if it was all real, where had Wonderland been for the past eleven years? Alice hadn’t found a single hint or peep of it—and she had been looking ever so hard! She had dozens of photos of cherubic children and many interesting personalities from around town, several years’ worth at least. Also walls and flowers and designs in the cobbles and a few even at the beach—and up until today all the pictures resembled their subjects.

  “Best not to question the magic,” Alice decided. Whenever she had questioned anything in Wonderland from her last…visit…she had never received a straight answer; sometimes people became even ruder to her as a result of her asking.

  So: the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, a spectaclebird, and a singing flower. Every single one of her plates was a glimpse into Wonderland.

  “Is it a world that mirrors ours? Hidden somehow? I wonder if everyone—if everything has a double, like a reflection,” Alice said thoughtfully. “Curiouser and curiouser!”

  Well, there was really only one way to find out.

  She repacked her camera bag and checked her film—there were four dry plates left. Only four! Time to order or make more.

  Dinah, who had quite profitably spent the morning on the end of Alice’s bed and hadn’t moved an inch since, watched her mistress with one lazy half-open eye.

  “Dinah! Of course you! I’ll bet you’re the Cheshire!” Alice cried, nuzzling her nose into that of the grande dame. Then she carefully set up the camera to take a long, slow shot of the cat because the room was dusky. She needn’t have worried, however; the old kitty fell asleep, or pretended to, and didn’t move a muscle until she was done.

  Or after, either.

  Alice then carefully changed film and ran downstairs and was on her way out the door again—before she remembered her hat.

  “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” she swore cheerfully, going into the parlor where she had left it. Once there she saw that Headstrewth and Coney were taking their goodbyes formally at the front door. Mathilda had her own hat on, and a shawl; perhaps she was going to escort Mr. Headstrewth into town.

  “Saved by a hat,” Alice said with a deep breath of gratitude, touching it to her head reverently. Such a thing seemed like perfect Wonderland nonsense, too. She tiptoed back the way she came and left out the kitchen door instead.

  With only three plates remaining, Alice had to choose her subjects very carefully. She tried to find Mr. Katz—just for laughs, just to take his portrait, mind you—but none of the boys and girls at the Square had seen him since that morning. So she took one of Adina instead. Then she made Aunt Vivian pose, despite her aunt’s weak protests of lethargy—and that she had done one already. Vivian seemed, however, to find the energy to fetch a turban with a long feather and a cape of gold and donned both. She draped herself across a cushy couch, and held an incense burner in each hand like some sort of unknown tarot card.

  And then…Who for the last plate?

  Alice knew even before she picked up the camera. In the back of her mind she had known all along.

  She carefully set it on a table, aiming it at the opposite wall. Then she took one of her aunt’s ivory-handled walking sticks, stood very still in front of the wall, and set the camera off by stretching her arm and lightly tapping the shutter button with the tip of the cane.

  Her first—her only—self-portrait.

  Developing the film was agony.

  Her hands shook. She wanted to get it done quickly but had to be extra careful. It took too long. She wanted it to be perfect. She wanted…

  She made herself leave the darkroom and take a walk while the plates dried. She would not look at them when they were imperfect and wet, encouraging wild speculations and guesses. She nibbled on a couple of cucumber sandwiches and a slice of cold Welsh rarebit (the cheese had solidified and was a little chewy, just the way she liked it). She wondered what a picture of it would result in: a plate of iced biscuits with the power to cause sudden growth? Or did some real-world things remain just that—things in the real world?

  Finally, unable to delay any longer and driven mad by her own thoughts, Alice ran back and looked at the plates against the sitting room window.

  Dinah was…Dinah. Just a cat.

  Alice bit her lip in disappointment. She’d felt certain Dinah would turn out to be her beloved Cheshire, the strange smiling beast who sometimes helped, sometimes hindered her travels in Wonderland. The kitty before her looked just as normal and sleepy and grumpy as she always did; no hint of a smile at all.

  Well, that answered that question: some objects or people (or cats) were this world things alone, without doubles in Wonderland.

  Unless…

  What if the magical moment was over? What if Alice was back to taking pictures of real, normal things now—things that remained real, normal things?

  She flipped quickly to the next plate.

  All her worries were immediately dispelled when she saw what was there: Adina was a bird with a delicate neck and a mirror for a face. Without eyes it was hard to tell what she was thinking or feeling, but there was no trace of happiness around the beak. Her head was tilted, regarding the viewer a trifle too intently considering that there was nothing where its face should have been but a ghostly reflection of the camera itself.

  Alice hurriedly put that one aside.

  She looked at the next and couldn’t at first remember who or what it was originally; all elements of the real world were pushed to the edges or erased entirely. The creature who starred in the portrait was large and segmented—and not a little terrifying—until she suddenly remembered who it was.

  The Caterpillar reclined languidly on his giant mushroom top, clouds of vapor twirling around his uppermost appendages in thick, almost recognizable shapes. Alice was torn between delight and annoyance. He had the same unhelpful, obnoxious smile on his face as when she had first met him. Very disagreeable.

  On the other hand, he was really there, resplendent in detail down to his nose and little golden slippers.

  “Oh my goodness! He’s Aunt Vivian!” she suddenly realized. His short arms were spread the way Vivian’s long ones had been, to either side, and the mushroom top was almost like a couch. Alice giggled, putting a hand to her mouth despite being the only one there. “I had no idea you were so polypedal in your soul, Auntie Viv.”

  Then, knowing who was left, she slowly pulled out the last plate.

  And immediately grew cold.

  She had no preconceptions, no idea what to expect; visions of bright-colored creatures and toddling oysters of course flickered through her mind as possibilities, but all she really thought she would see was…Alice. She was the only Alice in all of Wonderland, as far as she could tell. Alice in the real world and Alice over there.

  But…this…

  This other Alice, this Wonderland Alice, on the other side of the glass, was someone very different.

  She had dark hair, for one; stringy, long, unke
mpt. The rest of her features were hard to distinguish because a thick, ratty white blindfold was tied around her head. Streaked and streaming down her cheeks from beneath it was thick black blood. Her lips were cracked and also bleeding, her bare neck and shoulders smudged with dirt.

  Alice swallowed. She had never seen anything like it. Even at the theater the blood was bright red and flowed easily and didn’t cake up so. This was not a tableau; this was not fake blood. It was all too real—like something out of a scene of war, of a horror story, of a nightmare worse than any Alice ever had.

  And then the picture moved.

  Suddenly the other Alice was either screaming or grinning—impossible to tell which with her teeth outlined in more blood, her lips pulled away from them. She was holding up a banner that was delicately penned despite the poverty of her apparent surroundings.

  MERRY UNBIRTHDAY

  Alice almost dropped the plate.

  The image didn’t move again.

  She was frozen, that other girl, screaming or grinning eternally with her hideous missive.

  Alice’s heart thudded loudly within its double cage of ribs and corset. The house around her was silent and the light didn’t change, but somehow she felt that everything had shifted when she wasn’t looking. Opposite versions of the same emotion pulled in her belly: fear that the house had transformed into an expected nightmarish or Wonderlandy version of itself—and fear that it hadn’t. She looked around.

  It hadn’t.

  On the walls the pictures were all the same, on the floor the rugs were the same, the furniture…everything the same, same, same.

  “Merry Unbirthday,” Alice breathed.

  In spite of the hideousness of the image as a whole, it was obvious the reason for it—perhaps the reason for all of the Wonderland images—was this written message. A message for her, real-world Alice, from this wretched counterpart. Who was she, exactly? Alice closed her eyes and tried to remember. Who looked like her, even a little, from the other world?

  She recalled something about the White Rabbit, the one who had started everything. He never let her catch him. And he didn’t even seem to see Alice as a distinct human being: he always confused her with someone named Mary Ann. That girl seemed to be his servant, and responsible for the white gloves he was constantly missing.

  Was this she? Was this Mary Ann?

  Alice ran a finger along the bottom of the picture, the edge of the banner, thinking about Unbirthdays. The Mad Hatter had said that she had only one birthday a year, so that left three hundred and sixty-four other days to celebrate Unbirthdays.

  But what has that to do with anything? Alice wondered. It wasn’t the Mad Hatter greeting her, nor anyone else from the tea party. This was someone she didn’t know, and no tea was involved, and it certainly didn’t look merry. It was a mystery.

  “Or a puzzle, rather,” she said thoughtfully.

  Weren’t there puzzles in Wonderland? Getting yourself the right size to fit through a door, eating or drinking the right thing for the intended effect?

  Alice knelt on the ground in front of the sofa and took out all the photographs, laying them carefully next to each other on the soft velvet surface like a very slow game of solitaire.

  All the Wonderland residents looked upset. Nervous. Scared. The birds looked particularly spooked. It was a little hard to tell with the Hatter, because he wasn’t even looking at the camera—but why wasn’t he? The flower seemed as if it was ducking its head, trying not to be seen. And the Caterpillar didn’t look as smug as Alice initially thought; she had been rewriting the image with her own memories. His eyes weren’t haughty; they were sad, and old. And wait….

  She squinted at the clouds around his head and hands. The almost recognizable shapes. There was something very odd about them…. If she had a decent projector or enlarger she could have had a better look, but that was one piece of equipment her aunt hadn’t acquired yet (and Alice, always a good girl, didn’t like to push). She jumped up and ran to her aunt’s secretary and dug around its drawers and compartments frantically. Somewhere Vivian had a beautiful magnifying glass with a rosewood handle and cabochons of jet set around the outside—but it wasn’t there. The closest thing Alice could find was an old monocle left by one of her aunt’s more dapper friends.

  So she dutifully put it on as best she could.

  It was actually quite astonishing how well it worked!

  Hazy shapes resolved themselves into letters, as they had when the Caterpillar had been teasing her so mercilessly. She could almost hear his voice again.

  H E L P

  U S

  The clouds seemed to swirl; Alice couldn’t tell if it was the magic of the Wonderland pictures or just her eyes tearing up from the use of the monocle.

  “Unbirthday…” she murmured. “Help us….”

  She rubbed her head and scratched her eyebrow above the monocle. Help them what?

  Sitting back on the floor, she looked out the window at the sky and the day as if to find an answer there. The afternoon was developing into a luxuriously warm and sleepy early-summer hug. While she was in a darkened, smoky room worried about creatures she had thought were just from a dream, there was probably a girl out there in the park happily weaving a daisy chain into a crown. Just like Alice had when she…

  “Oh!” she suddenly cried. “It was a day very much like this when I fell asleep and dreamed of Wonderland!”

  She went to her satchel and fumbled around until she found the journal in which she kept her film and exposure observations. It was a slim leather-bound notebook printed with all sorts of useful information in the front, including a nearly perpetual twenty-year calendar (as well as recipes for homemade salves and lotions). The tiny numbers on the mostly decorative calendar were nearly impossible to decipher. Once again the monocle proved its use.

  “I do believe it was May when I went to the park with Mathilda for my lessons, years ago. Early May. It was a Thursday. I remember that clearly because I wanted to tell Mother and Father all of what I dreamed, the adventures that had happened to me, but they had gone to dine with the Ruthersfords as they did every Thursday. So I had tea in the nursery and had to tell Mrs. Anderbee about it instead, the poor dear. And Dinah, too.” She squinted and finally found the date. “Oh, my stars! It was today! Exactly today! Eleven years ago!”

  She wrinkled her nose—a habit both her sister and her mother tried to break her of, but Alice swore it helped her think, like calisthenics for her brain.

  “Eleven…that’s a prime number, and a strange anniversary. Why didn’t they come to me at ten, or five? That would have been far more traditional. But of course…this is Wonderland we’re talking about.”

  She regarded all her old acquaintances laid out like cards. They looked back at her, scared and miserable. And the Queen of Hearts looked insane and triumphant.

  Alice shuddered, remembering how terrifying the tiny little woman had been. Despite her size and ridiculous behavior—really, quite unacceptable and inappropriate behavior in any adult, much less a member of royalty—she was terrifying. Because whatever she said actually happened if her kinder, gentler husband king wasn’t around to stop it. Her servants and card soldiers did whatever she asked. Everyone trembled in fear when she approached.

  “Something is happening in Wonderland, something bad. That is why they are seeking me now. And it’s to do with the Queen of Hearts,” Alice said slowly. “And it is so very bad that they need my help. The—other—me seems to be quite…indisposed. They’re coming all the way to the real world to fetch me.”

  To fetch Alice, the little Alice who had been chased and mocked in Wonderland, the girl who had tried and cried, who sang with the locals but was never really accepted as one of them. Who thought about them for years after she woke, and then slowly forgot them.

  They remembered her, apparently, and thought she could do something.

  I must save them, she decided. She squared her jaw. I must somehow go to Wonder
land. I will…find the rabbit hole again, or the rabbit, or someone else strange and furry to chase.

  She would return to the park. That was the first thing to do. She would find the tree she had climbed while her sister droned on and on from that terribly boring book without any pictures.

  Of course she was an adult now, and without a chaperone, so things might need to be done a little differently. She grabbed her aunt’s golden cape from a chair and stuffed it into her satchel for spreading on the ground, as if she were just there for a solo picnic. And maybe she would pack a few snacks, both to make it more believable and also to fortify herself for the quest.

  “Well! That’s different!”

  Her aunt was suddenly standing in the doorway of the drawing room, an accusing finger leveled squarely at her niece.

  Alice jumped, knocked out of her thoughts and strangely scared that she and Wonderland had been discovered. Did her aunt suspect something odd was afoot? Did she notice anything was amiss with Alice?

  Was she upset about Alice borrowing the cape?

  “The monocle,” her aunt said, shaking her finger at it. “I love it. A monocle on a girl. Absolutely subverting the whole masculine dandy gestalt. Oh my, you may start a trend. I wonder if I have another one….”

  And with that she spun on her heel, and the forgotten monocle dropped ironically out of Alice’s eye, dangling on its long black velvet riband.

  Alice betook herself to the park posthaste.

  But the memory of the sunny day, that golden afternoon on which she first glided to Wonderland, was not as precise, detailed, or complete as she hoped. There had been the smell of moisture and sweetness of sun-loving flowers, the floating of insects and dust in the heavy yellow light, the drowsy feeling of all the earth taking her children into warm, comforting arms. There had been the drifting river, the bending reeds, the trees and the grass, her sister, the boring book, the rabbit.