There's an illustration to go with this chapter. You'll find the link in my profile, I think you'll really like it!

Once I cut my hand
But the wound was not part of me
Now I'm a man
There's a wound at the heart of me

The Apples in Stereo, "Stream Running Over"

In the morning Alice found him waiting for her down in the kitchen, pacing carefully, as though to be sure of his burgeoning lucidity. He turned to regard her, there motionless on the bottom step, and she took her hand from the staircase wall to run her thumb over her knuckles, unsure of what to say. They both stood in an awkward silence for nearly more than a minute, which is much longer than it sounds, even though neither of them was counting. He took a breath and sighed, beginning to pace again.

"Sit down," he said in a low voice, and she did, but did not take her eyes away from his rumpled figure, which kept apace, back and forth, back and forth, until she began to rise—"No, do—do sit." He came and sat too, as though to cement the request, across from her with the light coming through the window over her shoulder, gazing off into space. The deep plum lines were a bit red in patches, and he held a sad, drawn mien she did not like to dwell upon. He took a breath to speak, but was silent. Alice continued to wait, watching in increasing frustration the starts of phrases working their way out of him across his face, but passing only and never reaching her.

"Do you want something to drink?"

He shook his head no in a distracted state, and Alice wondered if he had forgotten why they were there. Finally, he turned to her, and put both his hands palm down on the table between them.

"I don't—" said the Hatter, and looked from his hands to her. "I don't tell secrets very often, for I am very bad at it; as a consequence I... have a great many stacked up but little experience to communicate them, and so you may stop me if... if this is not to your satisfaction." His voice was so soft and detached, almost glazed; it was the longest speech he had made to her in some time.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," she urged, but looked at him anyway and bit her lip.

"No, it's—" and he trailed off. Alice sat motionless, letting this wash over her and looking into the pale eyes that were not looking at her.

"It isn't for me, I know," she said, folding her hands beneath her knees. "But I couldn't help it, and I am sorry for that." He gave that odd reflexive smile that was no smile at all, like a tic, and said,

"You can't help your curiosity any more than I can help being a bit… flattered by it."

Alice couldn't think of a response to that, and he took it as a sign of assent before slowly plucking at his fingertips, sliding off and setting his gloves aside; finally he held out his bare palms between them.

And there they were. His very hands.

The Hatter kept them lightly skimmed above the tabletop; the knuckles twitched slightly in the silence.

Hands are such useful reflections of their owners. From them we decipher attributes of gender, we praise and accuse the bearers of reverence or neglect, assign personality traits, guess as to one's profession, and even speculate upon the future. We may look at a pair of petite hands, powdery and smooth like a tea cake, and name their owner a coddling young lady. Another pair with veins like rivulets straining between ligaments and bones may belong to a strapping farmhand, tools to bale hay and chop firewood. Alice stared at the hands before her for a rather long pause, during which the man attached to them began to fidget and grow awkward.

"Is it strange to see them? I never look at them. Well, and... now you know... But… I confess I cannot tell your reaction when you are so still like this." He was waiting somewhat anxiously for her assessment, and Alice waited a few breaths to tell him.

"They are—" But she could not finish, and he took it as loathing, hid them in fists, curled them back in toward himself, and she reached for them, but they sunk past the table's edge. "Let me see them," she went on in an even voice.

He replied, "Do they frighten you?"

Alice looked him directly in the eye and said, "No; should they?" The Hatter lifted them as the fingers began to knock and turn again, quivering and hooking at the joints, his expression divorced from their alien flux.

"You take yourself as a prudent and reasonable young woman—I suppose you ought to be afraid, but then again I suppose you mightn't be, as many things as you have seen in this world."

Alice rose and stepped around the table to sit nearer; the fingers uncurled and began to relax, but his shoulders went tense.

"Why should I be afraid of them?" she murmured, a tight feeling in her chest making her sit very straight. He blinked, but Alice was sure of her opinion.

In the dark of midnight she had known only that they made secret signs and gestures at her, their general nature unknowable beyond that; here in the daylight over her shoulder she might have recanted to say that they were a most startling set of fingers—though quite elegantly structured. True, they were articulate things, proportioned with the perfect scale of flesh, not too much knuckle or vein visible, the fingers not tapered, but square and shaped. Strikingly... beautiful was not the word. She wanted to say they had been crafted like a statue's, that they bore witness to the intelligence and goodness of their owner. She had never seen a finer set. The girl put her own on the table: newly working hands, yes, although she fancied they retained some small characteristic of being clean, delicate and well-attended, belonging to a young lady of privilege and good family. But here, next to his, her fingers seemed almost crooked and dark.

This was curious indeed, for young men, even the most careful wearers of gloves, do not go through life quite so particularly. There is some pride in having just a bit of wear, to prove that one has interests and pursuits. His fingers were very still now, nearly wrong in their frozen state; he was staring at them from behind quite intently. Slowly he turned his palms down and out of view, trusting them just enough, and then she could really see it. Palms have no freckles, but with the backs turned up, his coloring took on a distinct quality that made Alice feel rather cold where she was.

How strange the ends of those fingers, appearing before her bloodless and lost to sensitivity-not a morbid blue pallor but an unnatural, frightening white.

Skeletal, but fleshed and living, Alice wondered if they were rimy to the touch. Perhaps once he had dipped his fingers into a pot of white paint and never scrubbed it off; such a very great uneven contrast. And this was most obvious at about his second knuckle, where guttate droplets of fleshtone began appearing, mixed with the usual darker spots, until at the top of his hand proper the color seemed to have awoken, and remembered itself in full. It could have been dissolution of the pigments, nothing more than an imperfection. She reached for them, but they crawled back along the table again with a curious shudder, curling in on themselves, and she sat astonished at their self-start caution.

There was something primally startling in that, something in the juxtaposition between how they looked and what they did, that fine shape and the color that made her feel as though her stomach would jump if she glanced away for too long and then back again, as though looking on them for the first time. The Hatter had a look of the observer with an encroaching anxious horror at its edges, and Alice saw that it wasn't him, their deliberate fidgeting was remote and he was attached at their edges, no control over where they would go or what they would turn to look at, but there was no way fingers could see things without eyes, or at least she thought that was the case, when suddenly he clamped one hand with the other so hard that she heard his knuckle crack and watched his palms slowly turn red with the pressure.

Alice hesitated, and then said, "Can you put them back? I only want to look at them." He let go of them, ostensibly now tamed, and in an effort to be soothing Alice drew her fingertips over his to lightly brush out their methodical turning and flexing—coaxing them to relax, feeling out the natural creases; they lay back and his shoulders dropped. He breathed in, but she kept her eyes down.

"Does that hurt?"

"No," he said, very quietly, looking at her from the side; she could see him out the corner of her eye.

"How are you like this, the freckles are gone, and the color—" And then she realized what he had meant, and ran her thumb over the last pad of flesh, wondering how long it had been since he had felt someone else's fingers, how long they'd been covered up. "You are an oddity, your fingerprints are so faint I can't even feel them." Alice turned them gingerly into the light, dipping her head closer to see that they had been stripped clean away, or were never there to begin with; she couldn't quite tell. Who is a man without fingerprints? she thought. Where does his identity lie when his hands are blank, and his mind plays tricks and games with him? Where is he bound up when he is uncertain of the loyalties of his self?

The slack fingers curled and swayed more smoothly, wakening in a stroke beneath hers; Alice felt the distinct drag of flesh, thin and hazy and hot.

"Well," she straightened back up and breathed deep, "I daresay they are curious, but they quite suit you." But she regretted the offhand remark instantly, for the Hatter sighed one of those sighs that only emerge from a man in deep existential crisis, looking at her so miserably, with great concern, as though she didn't fully appreciation the revelation of damning new evidence. "They aren't ugly, you know," continued Alice in a low voice. But he kept looking down into them. "Is there something else?"

The Hatter stretched out one finger and briefly pressed it to her open hand, then pulled away, almost too fast, gauging her reaction.

"Did you feel that?"

She had.

"I did." Alice squinted at him. "Did you?" He was swirling the pad of his thumb against his forefinger experimentally.

"Maybe it—" He leaned on his elbow to gaze at her, inscrutable. "Isn't that uncomfortable?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it doesn't hurt, it doesn't burn you."

"Burn me? Why should it burn me—" and here she nearly said how on earth, only she stopped, thinking better of it. She lightly brushed her hand against the one again and murmured, "They are quite warm, but you've had them covered for so long."

The Hatter did not remark on that, but looked at her sidelong, and continued the swirling motion.

Alice sat back against the chair, and as she looked over the ivory-solid fingers, considered the fact that he had been purposeful and calculating in this concealment. It had had such an unassuming, artless air that she was now halfway toward feeling ashamed of her own incuriosity about his behavior.

"Interesting," she heard him mutter. "I suppose," the Hatter said now, "I suppose, if I'm telling secrets, I ought to try to be thorough about it." He palmed the dark table, swiped its surface and leaned forward to inspect it, eyebrows entilded, but Alice did not see what he saw there.

"Sit over there again," he went on, croaking. "Don't touch the table." Now he hovered both hands just over the flat surface, slowly rested them there, setting each finger down in an unbroken pianoplayer gesture, and then his expression went blank as though he were not there at all, but somewhere away, not even across the room, but far behind him, over his own shoulder.

It began soft and low in deep thrum, and when Alice realized that she was feeling it, she pressed her fists into her lap and kept them there, leaning hard away from the table's edge. Those hands were still, but the wood began to shift beneath him, increasing its tremble, trying to get away, frantic. The crockery hanging from the wall and in the cupboard began a high-pitched clingering that rattled the door and floorboards, the bands of energy shuddering the whole cottage. Alice jumped upon hearing a door slam back on its hinges upstairs, nearly turned toward the groans from the stairs that squeaked like stripped nails, but kept her clenched pressure centered and her eyes on the Hatter.

The Hatter was there but not there, concentrating and mindlessly idle, and if he had turned a bit whiter or if the sunlight on him glowed a bit brighter, she would not have been surprised at all.

Out, this jagged vigor of energy radiated in an invisible ring, under and up and out. Alice twisted in the chair and clenched her fingers until the color drained; this broad flashing stroke was enough to make the whole room feel like a train was passing by on tracks built up the walls and over the roofline. Part of her wanted him to stop making so much noise and chaos, the rest of her wanted to see it all, see how far he could take it, watch for the end and see if there was an edge. Something was pounding on the front door, someone couldn't open it and get in for the latch bolted fast, but there was no one there.

It resonated right through her, vibrating in her bones, doubling over, oscillating back on itself. The cups and plates and the oil lamp and the curtains all juttered, then turned and heaved for the floor, smashing and cracking. She could see thin floats of ceramic powder in the wake of this thing. The table under them shied and reared, the oil lamp frolicked; in her mind, Alice leapt out yards to snatch the plates and the cups from freefall, and her hand nearly went for them on its own, threw the frenetic invisible arc back, but it was the oil lamp that truly caught her up—she jerked for the brass ring and walloped it down. She slapped her arm, elbow to wrist to fingertips onto the weltering table to stop its glassy twitching walk, the Hatter finally jolting out of his chair, pulling up his hands for the instant silent stillness, black streaks seared deep into the woodgrain.

There was a sour taste in the air along with the fat curls of smoke rising from the table, but the oil lamp was cracked windward of the Hatter and smoking itself out too, for all of her flash to salvage it.

"Mother of God," whispered Alice, sounding like a shout. He was shaking with every breath, shoulders rising, hands still up at gunpoint, his composure somewhere between sudden startlement and age-weary dismay at seeing the thick char marks and foamy grey splits crumbling the surface. She looked around; Alice could hear clods of snow sliding off the roof to land with a muffled piff somewhere outside. The wreckage inside was not so bad as all the clanging and rumbling had made it seem, but several of the dishes were in pieces, while the boiler in the fireplace had dislodged itself just a bit from the pipe.

The lamp zipped and sizzicked before sputtering out. He hooked one finger delicately round the handle and flicked it toward himself, slid off the hood, and pinched the wick between his fingertips. With a twist and a pluck, his hand came away and he set the crackling glass back over a healthy bright flame. Her eyes went very large at that, and he said,

"I could've incinerated the house, and you're impressed by a lamp." She breathed in and out a few times while he took a seat and inspected a fingernail, morose. Alice tried, in this moment of drifting silence, to think of something to say to him. It was to her as though it hadn't quite happened, or she'd read it as a passage in a book, or heard about it secondhand, for it wasn't a very real thing at all, hadn't wriggled its way into her senses entirely. It arrested her from a very long way away, and she let the blank stillness sit with her before she understood that she had felt something, she just hadn't quite let it in yet.

What he had done was thrilling, and it felt exciting to see something strange and impossible once more, especially something that he'd been hiding in plain sight through all their tea partying and other sprees. It was refreshing, invigorating, and this bloomed at the nape of her neck, stirred her. Alice felt her own animus awakening and shaking off the dust that had gathered with the ice, and thus inspired, was growing animated. She frothed an electric sense of terribly daring importance, of his letting her in on a delicious secret in the mechanics of the world, and of herself expanding in every little way.

"Come on," she said, and seized his wrist, launched them both at the stairs. He managed to scoop his gloves from the edge of the table, and they were clomping their way up when he fretted in a squirrelly way, holding his arms out at odd angles while he wrestled with the fingers,

"What are we doing? Where are we going?"

And Alice didn't even stop to let the fullness of triumph in her voice crown the moment,

"We're rejoining civilization."

She bundled him off to have a bath—"And I'm putting out the fire; you've got that well in hand, I think"—before she bustled to sweep and gather and collect and organize and not think at all, but stoke the sparkling effervescent haze that was making her chest warm, thumping sweet and clean. The girl had put the tie to a cloth parcel of cheese and cured beef and was just fluffing the last of the bedcushions by the time she heard him sloshing about, and when the door to the bath flew open and he appeared in the dressing gown, flush pink under his hair, Alice felt even more cheerful than she had before.

He opened his mouth and in an exasperated way was about to say "Where's—" but he stared off into space very hard before finishing the thought, looking so peculiarly as though there was someone standing behind her. Alice threw the pillow toward the headboard with a flourish and looked over her shoulder.

"What?"

He flashed a palm at her, squinting and looking first at the ceiling and then all around; he turned and began to track whatever had accosted him so with mistrust, as if he could see firefly spies on the ceiling. It wasn't until Alice found herself being jerked into the bathroom wardrobe that she began to suspect that something might actually be suspect; despite the frequency of their earlier conferences inside narrow and dark passageways, there had until now been no reason to hide inside of their own hideout.

There was a muffled scuffling downstairs, and the kitchen door opened.

Footsteps, slow and distinct, hammered back and forth across the floorboards below several times, and while in any other situation this might have caused her a great deal of panic, the truth was that Alice could not concentrate. Squeezed together in the wardrobe between shrouding layers of cloth and canvas, there was no room for two people, let alone hysteria, and so with her face up against where his dressing gown had just begun to split open, she felt two things in a precise order. The first, and most immediately noticeable, was that his heart was beating so hard that it made her cheek full vibrate and twinge. Secondary to all this was that the Hatter still damp from the bath and therefore quite warm, which combined with his bouncing pulse (which was regulating at odds with the footsteps-approaching-up-the-staircase, sounding for all as though he had two heartbeats) made her realize something in a larger sense, and that was that she could feel the curve of his collarbone, and the faint scratch of hair on his chest, and then the bathroom door opened.

Alice mashed her eyes shut and bit her lip, for his arms were wrapped around her so unyieldingly that her lungs started in a jolt, which only made him crush harder, and in those painful moments passing, Alice's pulse began to throb and wash in her ears, making him hotter and louder against her. How soon were the echoes she could hear in him, up through the feet in the wardrobe? She tried not to breathe, not to blink, not to twitch the smallest bits of herself lest he shudder. He had the slightest concave dip in his chest, and there had been in a similar kind of curve at the very top of his lip, and he smelled of lemons and sea air even though neither of those things was anywhere nearby. She tried to remember what a river smelled like and only got the memory of the word Cherwell in someone else's voice, on someone else's lips, and he had been so deft, rolling his mouth across hers, plucking, and then Alice blinked because the Hatter let go of her, shifting her into the back, bending quietly forward and listening.

Silence, and her blood felt potent, overpowering to be back in her everywhere, new and weak in turn. She could still feel him, waiting out his insurance ahead, and Alice felt desperately thirsty and any number of other things, until at last the kitchen door opened and closed again. He gave it another minute and a half, slowly easing the cupboard doors forth, pressing into the hinges to keep them from squeaking. He was distracted and focused by the call of the room beyond and not at all by the numb buzzing she could feel prickling at her arms, which concerned her until she had the stupid idea that he hadn't felt it, yet it had been tremendous, and when they were standing in the middle of the room, the Hatter whispered,

"You're right, we need to leave."

Shifting back and forth on the landing in her woolen skirts and overcloak, Alice tried not to set off any squeaking, careful of descending into the kitchen alone. Here at the top of the stairs she could just see the table legs stumped, but not the surface where surely—surely—whoever had come in had seen the burn marks; she was impatient for him to finish dressing. He appeared, overcoat collar upturned, and took the parcel from her to fumble something else at her: Alice unrumpled the rough knitted mittens from the wool she'd been steadily ripping and vengefully shredding over her extended frustration. He had done the best he could with it; they were something, which was more than nothing, even though the cuffs weren't quite the same length, and the girl let them rest on her upturned palms a moment, mulling on the word when. Thus beholden and begloved, she did not look him in the face the whole way down the stairs or even outdoors, tacking hard against the other set of purpling footprints in the snow.

"No." The Hatter paused, already dusted in balled clumps of white up to his ankles, facing the vale.

"What d'you mean? It's this way best," she heard him say. Alice took great strides in her usual direction. "But there's people," yet she would be off for the barn, and he had no choice but to follow, because she had the cloth packet with food in hand again.

There was no movement at the nearest window in the farmhouse, but still Alice only opened the barn door enough for her shoulders, and the Hatter shrugged himself in to the warm snuffly barn smells and sounds.

"Well, that's good, then," her favorite cow's answer was easy, "Every girl needs an adventure, yes."

"But you'll be alright?" Alice spoke softly, smoothing the curls over the flat spot between the old girl's eyes. "They aren't terribly responsible people," and they both rolled their eyes a bit, "I don't want you to be in any trouble."

"Oh, dear," said the cow, and Alice could hear someone else smacking away at a clump of hay in broad amusement. "Dear me, girlie, we've all been here much longer than you've been here, and we'll be here long after, too. We get by in our way—that's how it is."

"You're sure?"

"Oh my yes," said another plump bovine voice.

"They forget us, but then, they've already forgotten you, too. We like it better anyway—they aren't natural conversationalists, not like you."

The cat landed on its trim little toes to sidle round the Hatter, eyeing him while he merely gazed with polite interest.

"So," it began in a voice full of insinuation. "You're off, then. Where are you going?"

"Somewhere else."

"Are you taking the train?" somebody interrupted. "Past the scratchy trees, there's a train, that's where I came from, the people talk about it when they come in for the season. It's a nice one, it's got loads of hay." The cat glanced over its haunch and said,

"Lean down, won't you? Not you—" this to the Hatter, who hadn't moved at all but looked as though he might dutifully oblige, and the cat's coat was warm and its purr a rattlebox cascade while it murmured something only for Alice.

She only nodded, looked around for one last time. The barn looked a stranger now with only a bit of light in the door and shadows she never usually saw. Alice rubbed behind the cow's ears and said, "You be good."

It was orange outside, just starting a bit off in the horizon, and Alice watched for shadows of footprints while the Hatter trailed her three behind even with his big wide steps, swiping his gaze to and fro. Walking faster made it harder to think, and when she was fizzy with a sudden homesickness there under the tilted ripening sky, Alice leaned into the still air and fought the drifts, a few tears sharpening on her cheeks.

The main problem with the train was obvious, and that was that it wasn't there. There was a railway, whoever had spoken of it was true, but it wasn't there, and the problem with being on the lam and having come very close to being discovered by somebody was that one really couldn't la-dee-da about in the open wearing a dark cloak, for it hadn't much for blending in, and that was sort of the point of winter anyway. Feeling thus keenly a sense of leadership and renewed purpose, Alice maneuvered them among a stand of trees not much bigger around than she was, and watched for signs below. As soon as she could see the grey trilling puffs, Alice trenched in, ready to run, but hesitated just enough.

"What if it's too fast?"

She turned to catch his tree-shadowed profile, his expression at the end of a resolution.

"It's not; if we run, it's not."

He made the decision, grabbed it from her, grabbed her hand, and went.

It was a slow, ponderously-clicking train, and standing on a hilltop or even a platform she would have shrugged her shoulders at a silly notion of trying to catch one, but here near its roiling metal innards, the car flats higher than her forehead, it was an intimidating thought. Round the bend it swung and droned, no passenger bays or lovely diners with observation roofs but clack after clack of rust-shaded freight flowing on past. His head was going with them one by one, as though gesturing them on, when he suddenly chose and leaped, and then he was fifteen feet in front of her. He leaned out and forward. Alice ran, hating it for outstripping her so handily, the sludging thing, ripping the air out of her; she flung with a haphazard feebleness the tied-off bundle past his outstretched arm and reached, fell back, reached, hiked her skirts, reached, touched his fingertips, he leaned just as she flagged again, she looked right into his face and all those freckles and then he was damn near pulling her wrist out of her.

Winded, she hit the deck of the boxcar bearing down on her left shoulder, pitched slightly along with the Hatter side by side. He stood and swayed, heaved on the gate, Alice bleeding energy, flat against the cold flooring. She skinned her palm, stumbled a few feet and flumped backward into a pile of hay, borne up, passive. The Hatter dropped the found parcel by her hand and bowed in too, the itchiest of berths. Now there was this, and he was quiescent, gently curling in all over, white gloves normal. Now they were calmed with the rest of him, and the Hatter looked almost as he had beneath a tree in the break of summer, waxing retrograde. Alice realized that she had forgotten to know anything concrete about his hands, but she couldn't do anything about it now, she lay there too confounded and drained of mania, too lacking in curiosity.

As she went this way and that, rocking with the boxcar rack, she was a bit of everything and a lot of nobody just then.