The Count is based on George Sanders as he played Mr. Favell in the 1940 movie Rebecca. You might recognize his voice from a famous Disney movie.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting-grounds. He will hunt among these hills during the next moon, so he has told me.
Rudyard Kipling
Now that she was in his house--for though her name was on the title and deed and legally the place was erstwhile the Hatter's, she firmly believed it was still his--Alice trod very carefully, for she was feeling uncertain about all this. It wasn't that she didn't feel proper or polite going through his things, for surely the Hatter would understand--wherever he was--that it was quite necessary for her to search his house, as his eponymous hat was nowhere to be found upon her first cursory turn about the four walls.
Mostly she was afraid that she would be disappointed, that somehow he would turn out to be badly represented by the things he kept in his private sphere, and she would find rooms full of banality, normal things that normal people have in normal houses. What leftover part of Alice that was not concerned with this fear was concerned that he was gone and had no say over what she could do, and so she tried carefully to preserve it, that sleeping notion that all would be restored to his watch and power in time.
Alice was pleased with her own room, glad for its comfort and amused, though slightly baffled, at the gowns the armoire produced for her--they were her usual cuts and shapes, but now with colors she would not have chosen given the chance; white stripes on teal, pink stripes on black. It did like stripes, she couldn't find a solid colored dress in the whole affair until she opened the door very quickly about twenty times in a row and found (of course) red on purple and felt that the least it could do was not mock her like that. Regardless, she wore the striped frocks and decided upon looking in the mirror that she would blend in if she were compelled to go into town.
But she was not disappointed by his own possessions, no. The first go around the house was cursory, brief, an introductory phase (for Alice quite wondered if perhaps it knew her, or would behave in a different fashion if she did not comport herself as a young lady, albeit one who has just done an unthinkable thing by purchasing a house, and off its exiled owner--she was half afraid it would take offense and she would wake while being booted out in the middle of the night). Surely as she had believed before, the whole of the place was done up in an exceedingly exotic, though not extravagant, style.
Floor by floor, she began to know the place. Some doors opened at her touch; others remained frozen and locked. There was a small solarium on the ground floor that looked out over a fair lawn in the back. She fancied she could see wickets left over from a game long since abandoned, but found the tiled mosaics in the floor far more entertaining, for they depicted as if in a large stone tapestry the history of what she thought might be the Wonderland itself. There were kings and queens battling it out over territory lines, illustrious wars and uprooting change, with baked hams all round to celebrate afterward. What did strike her as most curious was that there was no beginning depicted--where did the place come from? What creation story stood in the background to influence these panels of history?
The kitchen proved to be oddly sparse, Alice thought, for it was an optical illusion of a room with hardly anything within but brass pipes. There was a sink, but the main feature were the little black and white tiles like a long, rectangular checkerboard. The door next to the empty larder was barred to her, probably leading to the cellar with all the pipes.
The upstairs corridors proved far more interesting. In one room on the first floor, there was a neat little study with a desk and a stack of design sketches and dimensions held under a fishbowl for a paperweight. She carefully eased through them, not wanting to get them out of whatever semblance of order he thought them in, strangely pleased to see texture in the lines and imagining the carbon stick between his fingers, twisting and gently pulling the image out, his working hands smoothing over the thick vellum, feeling it under bare fingertips as she did now. He did not plan to make bonnets anymore; she found a series of odd hats for gentlemen, with pinched tops, but most of the sketches were of his usual larger-than style.
Alice set the papers down carefully, not shuffling them, in an attempt to keep them fresh and unsmudged, and turned to find between the bookcase and the window an odd thing jutting halfway out of the wall. Or at least it seemed to come from the wall, and as she approached it, she realized it was a dark brassy globe, but only half of one.
It took her a moment to understand, but then it was clear that this was the Wonderland--for the word was stamped into the metal in blocked letters. How curious a feeling it was to realize that she was on another world!--not merely a flat, parallel version underneath her England, but an entirely new place with new features and its own borders. She had not thought it was its own planet, and Alice was suddenly quite frightened for herself.
The Wonderland could be described just so: imagine the "five" side of a die. There are four dots in a square, and a fifth in the middle of that. Now imagine that the dots are neighbor states, with one in the middle which touches all of the others. These states did not take up all of the globe's surface, but had clearly marked borders separating them from each other.
Such surprisingly generic names for a fantastical place. Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western--and "Capital" marked in the middle. Alice leaned in very close, but there were no specific place names for her to learn in an impromptu geography lesson that would have perhaps inspired her to inquire as to the Hatter's current location with a bit more finesse of whomever might humor her. She ran her fingers over the darkened metal, feeling mountains and seas, but a disconnect regardless. There was no spot marked "Here is where one goes in exile," or "This is where we put the bad ones," though she hadn't assumed that there would be. Alice pulled gently on it, tried to spin the hunk of brass, but it just rattled in the wall setting.
She wanted to know what was on the missing side of the globe, but then thought that perhaps she didn't.
It was on the second floor that she found the room full of maps and drawings and strange mechanical models, bird cages with no birds, dusty white plaster busts of people she did not recognize, and a very odd thing in the corner which she inspected most carefully, but could not understand at all beyond that it was a game, surely. It was a large flat rectangular box on legs, with a tall display board behind it, and all manner of mechanical gears inside the clear glass top. It sort of looked like a bagatelle. Buttons and knobs with springs on the sides, and colorful patterns with arrows and holes within. She regarded it quietly, alien to her, and tried to remember to ask the Hatter what it was one day.
The other rooms on that floor diverged between these spaces full of ideas and clean but oddly decorated guest bedrooms. There were no portraits in them, only landscapes that when viewed from across the room seemed bucolic and peaceful. When she approached them, though, she could see that the reapers in the fields had sowing scythes that blew steam and the cottage-in-the-woods scenes tended toward the absurd, just as in real life here. Picnics with giraffes in straw boater hats, queens riding panthers through a dunescape. What other decorations to be had were mostly confined to the tools and instruments she had found in the glass curio cabinet down in the great parlor.
She was greatly relieved to find that the other half of the second floor was dedicated to his collection of teapots--the dividing walls had been broken out for more room. Yes, there were ones shaped like octopi, and others with clockfaces in their bellies, and still others that had four spouts that she recognized from a long time ago. There was a teapot that sat on top of two stacked cups to form a little tower shaped like a man with a spout for a nose, and another that was all curved mirror and reflected the young lady back to herself, closer and further away at the same time. There were scores of them, set on shelves that lined the walls and created a maze for her to run, a private museum of the man's great passion in life.
Alice was not really startled until she reached the third floor, which was where she turned a knob on a door and realized she had found the master bedroom. She stood in the doorway for a moment before passing over and within. It was a corner room, with a horseshoe shaped bank of windows that suggested it would have been one of the circular turrents as viewed from the outside. But it was not that which clued her in to it being his private sleeping quarters--if indeed he slept at all--it was the pair of red and gold slippers under the side of the fourposter closest to her. She left the door open, and taking very great care not to touch or come near anything, moved around the bed to view the large and silent space. There was another door around the other side, and she briefly opened it to find a small white echoing room with a lionfoot bathtub in the very center.
It did not seem like his place of rest; none of it really did, it was so clear and tidied, out of a catalogue or set up as though it expected visitors. It was not the messy affair she had expected and hoped for in his daily chaos. There were no secrets to be found, certainly no answers, and no hat. She was back around at the foot of the bed when Alice stepped to open the large dark armoire, and then the room was very suddenly and very much his and his alone. It groaned at the door's opening and nearly popped, it was so full. Purple waistcoats, pinstriped trousers, a shining golden dressing gown, a dark blue velvet smoking jacket--here were the wild colors and swirling patterns she recognized with a small drop of melancholy now, but no green hat. Alice tried very hard, but it was difficult not to breathe in the smell of lemon and tea that came thickly off his clothes. She wondered vaguely if he was still wearing evening dress from that night now, wherever he was.
Alice pulled the door shut behind her, memorizing the pattern on the duvet, and stoically did not enter his bedroom again after that.
She took a turn about the fourth floor ballroom, which consumed the whole of that space, but did not stay long. It was one great dark hot room lined with mirrors, and she saw herself standing alone over and over again, and then retreated back down.
There was one other room she found of great interest, one she initially thought was locked until a sudden burst of wind from inside it caught the door and flung it open with a smash and a shudder against the wall. There was a tremendous sound of flapping, and she rushed at the desk to grab at the pieces of paper slipping away off the stack, pulling them out of the air. It was no good, the swinging doors leading out to the balcony were open, and she pushed them shut so that at last Alice was left with papers all over the floor, which she began to herd back together.
Curious materials. They were ship manifestos, weather reports, cargo inventories, and information about ocean currents.
Setting them back on the desk, Alice turned to look about her and saw that the room was, well, normal. It was very odd to go about a man's house getting used to clashing colors and the sort of decorations only a scientist could love; it was rather startling to walk back into something she would have expected to see in a proper English home, right there. It didn't have dark red walls with constellations mapped out, or sextants sitting on the bookshelves; it had rugs with patterns she could stand to look at without going walleyed, and a little table with a silver tea service that sat perfectly still and didn't jump up in euphoria to greet her. On the desk was a small model of a ship, and on the wall was a miniature ivory portrait of a man in military dress.
But the most curious thing of all had to be what was out the window, for when she went over to look out and down into the back lawn and see the remnants of the croquet game again, there was a harbor with ships' masts in its place, and a storm approaching in the distance. They all bobbed in the bay, and Alice actually went out onto the balcony, squinting her eyes to make sure this was happening. It was.
The Hatter too had a secret room that did not belong, and Alice was not sure how to feel about it. There was no way to get down to reach the ships below, and she went back inside to stare at the miniature carefully. The man painted there looked rather plain and normal, though his brass-covered lapel suggested that he was quite important, or at least that he liked shiny things and ribbons. She could not be sure; it was not within Alice's realm of knowledge whether a man was a general or a corporal.
The hat was not in this room, however mysterious it was, and Alice went down into the parlor to think and have a cup of tea off the steam service.
When she reached the Bureau again, the clerk was a different man, and she asked him to find her a certain key. The agency was experiencing an upswing in business that day and actually had other people milling about quietly--though it was still just as sleepy as ever. She was wondering how on earth the government kept the place running like this if no one came around when someone cleared their throat over her shoulder.
Alice turned and saw a flash of crimson hair, and stared into the eyes of a particular man of wealth and taste for the very first time.
"Please allow me to introduce myself," he said, giving carefully-mannered velvet lamplight to the words. "I am the Count." He was indeed the Count, dripping with disdain, rumbling with a methodical, luxurious drawl of an accent, lolling and rolling through every vowel as thought it gave him the greatest pleasure to hear the sound of his own deep, cultured voice.
She was quite startled to see his face, but managed to keep her surprise--she hoped--under a smooth mask, and did not shrink from the man. He really did have hair the brightest and deepest shade of red she had ever seen; so crimson it took on shades of orange and gold when the light hit it in certain spots. It was odd to look upon him from the other side. He was quite handsome, with a straight nose and deep eyelids, cheekbones suited perfectly toward a career in modeling for decorative sculptures of the Greek gods. There was something distinctly smug and happily arrogant in the way his mouth naturally smirked, however, and she was very glad to discover that she did not like him at all.
"How do you do," said Alice in a low and careful voice. She had to carefully think not to tell him her name; she was a polite girl, but it did not sit well to go about offering up her identity to enemies of her friends. He let the moment slip by.
"Well!" he said in an unsurprised voice, "You are a quiet little thing, aren't you? What is your name?"
"Lady," she said after a pause. She was looking at his profile, and upon her word, one of his eyebrows arched upward very far. He grinned just a bit, suddenly, jutted out his chin in satisfaction and leaned just so into the counter to look at her.
"Ah...!" He did not speak again for a moment, but stood watching her, and Alice felt very keenly that he was allowing the silence to encroach upon her awkwardly so that she would fill it with nervous idle chatter.
She gazed calmly at him instead of giving him her life story.
"Who gave you a title like that?"
"The Duchess did."
"Dutchy-Dutchy. Dear old girl."
Alice folded her hands on the counter.
"Do forgive me if I've interrupted anything." He was still smiling in that way and obviously did not give two figs about whether he was bothering her.
"I am only here on business, and I am waiting, so you have not interrupted me."
"So direct!" he said quietly, and then to her, "I hear you bought a house recently."
"That is correct."
"Mmm, yes, owner abandonment, was it? Pity, that. Quite forthright of the young lady to make such a bold purchase, but I suppose one must have a place to call one's own."
"I suppose so."
"And how do you like the old homestead? All settled in?"
"Yes," said Alice.
"Friends and friends and friends," he said quietly again.
She did not reply, and another clerk approached to ask if the gentleman needed something from the records.
"I can't be bothered with that, I have no time for that," was the red-haired man's lazily dismissive reply. But he kept his place and continued to look at her as though he expected her to speak again. There was nothing untoward about him but this almost invisible propensity for making her feel put upon and uncomfortable--he did not leer at her or stand in any other way than a gentleman would. But regardless of his preening figure, the Count cut a predatorial turn with the subtlest of flickers within his eye.
When the clerk she recognized returned with a small envelope containing the key, Alice thanked him quickly so that he would not go into an oral dissertation on what the thing went to, but before she could turn and go,
"Ah, you are leaving us, then?"
"I am, I have errands to run this afternoon."
"Indeed." And out he strolled. She thought on it, and was not afraid of the Count, but Alice waited in case that he had decided to linger outside, and even when she did see fit to go, she wandered slowly to ensure that he was not following her.
She found the shop after that, and tried the key. The bolt turned in the opposite direction than logically made sense--of course--and she got inside quick, shutting and bolting it once more. The place was still dark, good that no one could see her inside with all the shades pulled, and she was about to head into the back room of his workroom once more when she realized that there was a tall shop form where there had not been before.
And put atop it somewhat blendingly was a large green felt hat, missing its decorative crown band and price slip, looking for all purposes still in progress. She pulled it into her hands and went through the curtain and into the other room to look at it most seriously.
Yes, this was his hat, and he had, Alice rather thought, put it here with the intention that she should find it, for it did not seem that he often admitted customers to the place, and she would know that something about the room had changed, wouldn't she?
She went to the closet and had turned the knob, pulled the door just out of its frame.
"Oh, wrong one," she muttered, and opened the closet next to it, the one filled with ladies' hat boxes. She dropped the green top hat into a tall empty one and went briskly home, but kept a secret eye about her for any shadows or red shine.
What happened afterward took up the rest of the entire afternoon. She got home, closed the door behind her, and did not even have off her cape before she was making sure once more that the hat was his. Why had he wanted her to hang onto it so badly? Why hadn't he taken it with him? What was so important about it?
Alice frowned, a bit frustrated at having gone all over town like that, and turned the oddly-sized green top hat over in her hands, beginning to inspect the thing in earnest, wondering half-seriously if he kept instructions or even a teapot on the inside. She tilted it, upside down in her hands, closer to the afternoon window to look within and met with an ellipsis in her train of thought: the inside of the hat seemed to eat up all the light.
She moved directly to the glass pane and stared into the hole for fully thirty seconds before concluding that it was indeed rather inexplicable given the laws of--well, not the Wonderland, she thought with dry irony. Still she could not see to the far anterior of the hat. There was nothing for it, and so Alice stuck her hand tentatively into the darkness just past where the brim lay on the outside of the hat, and jerked it out again quickly. Her hand had disappeared. It was there and then it wasn't. Before she had really finished considering it, and remembering something she had seen him do a time before, Alice stuck her hand, and then her wrist, and her forearm and her elbow and her upper arm clear until her shoulder, far past where the top of the hat should have been, and could not help the massive intake of air her lungs reflexively took.
The hat went nowhere, into nothing. There was no other side. She dropped it numbly, and stood watching as it rolled in lazy half-circles back and forth on the dark wood floor, slowly righting itself like a penny possessed. It was probably two minutes of tensely starting at it, seeing for herself that it would sit perfectly still before she could pull together her faculties and reach for it and into it once more, wondering how on earth he could have pulled a teapot from it when--
Alice pulled her hand out again very sharply, and goggled, wide-eyed, at her fingers, wrapped neatly around the handle of a steaming little kettle of tea with a leaf pattern on the side.
When we are feeling quite lubricated and breezy with the world--especially after that second or third nicely chilled Harvey Wallbanger on the veranda--it has been said that Fate often takes the opportunity to sneak up behind us with a length of lead pipe. This was of course the case with Alice, who despite recent and understandably unsettling shocks to her system, was apparently up for another go round and was once more slightly unglued--by the appearance of something that had not been in her hand before. The girl stared at the teapot, and if the teapot had had eyes it would have stared back at her, but as it was, the thing simply smoked at her in reply. She set the unseeing thing on a low table nearby and held the hole-side of the hat before her eyes with both hands.
Alice again slid her hand very carefully forward, but when she pulled it out again there was nothing new. Was that all that had been inside, Alice asked herself, a teapot with a hideous pattern? She shook the hat gently, half-expecting the contents of a carpetbag to clatter out onto the floor, perhaps a lamp or a brolly or something. She had seen him pull hundreds of china pots and cups and saucers from various parts of his frock coat, but then there had been other items mysteriously appearing from nowhere. Letters, and bottles, and jelly candies, and a coach clock, and that cheese muffin she had been hungry for, of course, and a kite, and some half-eaten marmalade... had he got them all from inside his own hat? Surely he couldn't fit everything he had ever pulled out of the hat in the hat. She held it closer to her face and peered very hard.
There was, Alice vaguely thought, a bit of a lightly sucking updraft here, as though it were bigger on the inside. As if it were a portal to something else. She shoved her hand in very quickly this time, feeling and probing and finally flailing about in the darkness inside. She could only fit up to her arm within, but there was nothing as far as she could reach. She twisted her arm back around to where the sides should have been, and then back toward where her middle should have been, and her hand it just kept going. Nothing, nothing at all. It was so very like him to build an absurd hat like this, continued her inner monologue. Silly, ridiculous hats. Hats that go nowhere, hats with peacock feathers all over them--
If Alice had been a drawing or a character in a nickelodeon, there perhaps would have appeared over her head a character in punctuation which we call an asterisk, or in modern times maybe a lightbulb would suffice her very well. She tilted her chin to the side and let her eyes go very very wide in a guarded triumphant look. She did not want to let this particular revelation get away from her. The objet d'art in her hand, as you may have guessed, was a hideous amethyst beret with a long and wide fan of peacock feathers cascading down the back, now paused halfway between the end of the hat and the tips of her fingers.
And there it was.
It was another half hour before Alice looked up as from a trance and found herself surrounded by the following objects: yet another hemispherical anemometer; about forty-seven bubbling pipes of various sizes, lengths and colors; frosted biscuits; several pairs of spats; enough teapots and mismatched cup and saucer sets to cover the end table and several coffee tables besides; a tin of wax-paper-wrapped cheese muffins save one; a spanner with a tortoiseshell handle; large tubular rolled up parchments of odd technical drawings with strange shorthand labeling different parts of what looked like a giant capital T; a brass skeleton key (she wondered what warded lock this went to, but rather supposed it would not open anything as the bittings were all worn down to dull nubs, and it was not on a ring as his key to the trees in the forest had been); a whacking great taxodermied swordfish on a plaque with a baleful and accusatory stink in its eye;and lastly, a pair of soft fashionable driving gloves about the size of a man's hand.
Alice let this sink in for a moment, all these things that she had drawn from the inscrutable paradox inside the Hatter's hat. Now normally her reaction would have been to frown and let herself be confused, or to question and curse the Wonderland in futility, shaking her fist into the heavens and wondering aloud in very unladylike terms why she was allowed to be tormented in such ways. Instead Alice hiccuped twice, put the back of her hand over her mouth, and sank to the floor in a mad kind of giggling fit, marked several times by higher hysterical notes that she checked stiltingly and recovered before lowering again into breathlessness.
This really was rather remarkable--or amazing, or fantastical, if you like. Stranger than the fictions of flying scissors, talking lizards, caterpillars and hookahs were the blocky conundrums of the Hatter, and yet far more intriguing and like a riddle than the almost jejune nature of what oddities surrounded her. Deeper and deeper the spiral into the Hatter's psyche and secrets went, and onward Alice caromed as through the rabbit hole once more. As much as she had expected the place to be so like the former Wonderland of her childhood, Alice had been surprised that it seemed so much closer to normality--and then surprised once more when it turned out to be just as outre, if not more so. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat must be quite easy with this thing, she very nearly thought, picking a thin light strand of hair off the inner brim, and then remembered the strange blank look of nothing on the lawn when she had come back to the table and there was nothing, the presence of absence, no Hare, no reaction.
She thought very hard about the small rabbit in the jacket with the wide four-punch buttons and an avuncular attitude toward the china on the table, and eased her hand into the hat, purposefully keeping her mind away from an obvious kind of negativity. Alice pulled her hand out again and closed it into an empty fist.
Still kneeling, she leaned back on her heels and looked with a quiet despair about the darkening house that was not hers, and all the things she had pulled as if by prestidigitation. It was becoming far too much; she had wanted him so far away to avoid his distractions, and then closer because she did not understand, and farther away again so she could work alone, and the cycle had begun to repeat itself and would have repeated itself in an endless ticking track had he never been charged. The contention was like a wall in their looping orbit of one another--just as she had finally decided that his help was truly invaluable, off he was destined to some cold place apart from her reach and searching questions.
Alice looked down into the hat resting on her knees before folding her arms over the hole, dropping her forehead onto them and pressing her chin into the upside down brim. She took a very deep breath, and for the first time in a very long time, she cried, her plaintive voice remaining in those spiked upper notes of sharp private feeling, no hysterics or theatrical sobbing. Just the gasp and quiet sigh, followed by hot rivulets of tears, for she was very much ashamed that she longed for the presence of the man with the white hair more than she missed England and her family.