Lo, all the air is strange unto mine eyes,
Lo, all the stars are dead;
Only the moon appeareth overhead
As one that dies.

"Aubade," from The Book of Jade by David Park Barnitz

It's four o'clock and all's not well
in my private circle of Hell
I contemplate my navel hair
and slowly slide into despair

The Divine Comedy, "Through a Long and Sleepless Night"

In the dark room the woman watched the man working. His sleeves were rolled and he compulsively reached up with the crook of his elbow—for both his hands were busy—to brush away both imaginary sweat, very real and justified anxiety, and thirdly the hair out of his eyes. She remained silent as she could, putting her energy into quieting her pacing footsteps. Back and forth, back and forth, her neck was beginning to hurt from turning it to look at him from the other side of the room. She was so full of nervous tension that she was ringing, vibrating, just barely keeping herself from trembling, all the while twisting her hands into the fabric of her skirt. Not that the man would have noticed in the dark room, she could hardly see him as it were. He put the forceps into the metal pan with a swishing tinny clatter and leaned back on his heels for a moment.

"Well?" she whispered after a penetrative silence that told her nothing. "What do you think?" He was illuminated by the deep depths of the low flame, but she could only see his black silhouette, the light casting him into negative.

"I don't know," he said. "I wish I knew better than this—" She crossed her arms over her body, hugging herself and setting her mouth into a prim line that did not suit her, not really, anyway.

"It's an awfully inconvenient time for uncertainty." The man finally turned back from where he was crouching near the dim light to look at her—perhaps glare at her, she could not tell.

"Don't forget that you agreed to this," was his reply, and the woman felt her knuckles twinge with irritation.

"Upon the understanding that it would benefit us both, or at the very least, one of us."

"I never guaranteed anything, I can't guarantee anything," said the man, rising to cross the room and stand beside her, folding his arms. She looked up at him and through the deeply-lined shadows flickering over his brow, she could just discern a kind of sadness there, a burgeoning… regret, perhaps. And she felt a deep shot of worry strike her middle and pass through her spine, just once, leaving a sense of vacancy where it had been.

The man and the woman stared very hard at the spot in the room where the man had been working, watching the light flicker weirdly of its own way, and waited for the return.

The next day brought both the Cat and first snowfall. It hadn't been much of one, only a middling halfhearted dust, but it was there, and Alice hadn't been the one responsible for it. She had it in mind to ask the Cat about this, but right now she was standing on the roof looking down at something, both to look at it and to see how long it would be before the Cat would speak. She didn't know if he knew that she knew he was there, but he probably did, and so did she.

What she was looking at, up there on the strange wooden balcony or platform, an unfinished rooftop deck, if you will, was a building next to the main house. She hadn't known it was there; she had peeked out into the relatively sparse back garden through the conservatory window and not given the outside another thought in the face of all the capricious trinkets scattered throughout the house.

But the ring of keys she'd pulled from the hat had unlocked the closet off the main hallway, and this turned out to be a narrow columnar staircase with a thick rope dangling from somewhere upward, and she climbed it carefully to find herself above the treetops quite high, where it was very cold.

There once been kept pigeons or some other such bird on this roof at one point, but perhaps that was only a vague fancy of hers. Set at an angle beneath one of the walled eaves was a golf bag; he hadn't totally abandoned the place, it seemed, and her mouth sort of made a reflexive smile, but it came out rueful. She could imagine him standing here at the edge, looking out over the world from the highest vantage point possible, totally alone, thinking whatever strange elusive thoughts he did, and she could not pretend to know what they might be. Alice coughed once and the sound disappeared.

"This used to be much easier," she said to the Cat without acknowledging his presence or turning to see him. She knew he was there because she had seen his smile hanging in midair, masqueraded as a sliver of dimming sunlight off some stray piece of metal or a distortion from the clouds. There was a noise, a little silver bell ringing nearby, and slowly she looked up.

The sound came from a bird sitting on one of the scooping gray shingles, shivering and puffing out its feathers, turning its little bobbing head, apparently planning to take off in that direction, or perhaps the other. She had seen crows, and remembered the birds with pencils for heads and hearing of shaggy leggy borogroves like walking mopheads, but this was something new.

Alice regarded the thing passively for a moment. It was an odd little creature, with lengths of arrowing stripe across its scaly feet and a plumage pattern resembling overlapped circles. The oddest thing had to be its beady black eyes, though, stacked in a startling way, one above the other, and when it blinked they seemed to flash at her right out of the feathers rather than from some socket, deep and black, nearly invisible. It opened its beak and gave the high-pitched call again.

"It's a clockingbird," said the disembodied voice, and just before she turned, Alice watched the little thing tilt its head before it flapped expertly away.

"A what?" The Cat was sitting on one of the eaves nearby, ostensibly having recently come into focus. He seemed to be counting the rings in his tail, but was doing it by tracing a claw in a downward spiral pattern, like a barbershop pole.

"A clockingbird," he said again, and cleared his throat. "Usually their migratory patterns are so precise that you could set the time by them, but, uh—" and here he paused to brush the tip of his tail so all the fur ran concurrent—"It seems Winter is late."

"Aren't you supposed to be missing or disappeared or something?" The cold was making her fingers numb, and Alice was growing cross.

"Ohhhh, dear," he said. "Maybe, I can't remember sometimes," and lazily rolled onto his back, using his tail for a pillow. "What did you mean, it used to be much easier?" His voice came out so luxurious, a light fog leaving neat little footprints across her aural memory. Alice lifted her hands weakly and let them flop back down in a frustrated gesture.

"That building down there," she said. The Cat lifted an eyebrow but did not change his strange, serious expression, listening keenly and preening his fur. "I'm looking at it, I see it, it is clearly down there, and yet it's so…" Alice flexed her fingers and wrapped her arms around herself in the chill.

"Hmmm," said the Cat, and Alice watched him hold his arm out, the paw dangling at the end, before taking his other paw and running his claws through it, combing out the excess with the air of a butler attending his sacred task in the silver closet. He looked up at her and paused.

This building she was gazing down upon wasn't attached proper, and might have been a carriage house, but Alice was dumbly perplexed to find that she was not as interested in it as she might have been, or perhaps ought to have been. She hadn't really felt much of anything about the whole of the house; it seemed so very nondescript suddenly. Teapots and wood and floors and drapes and porcelain and stone fireplaces, they all just sat there like a queer dead weight, no matter what color they were or how outrageously they were arranged.

The Cat blinked silently, his arm still stuck out before him, and wiggled his nose. She had never seen him not grinning before, she didn't know he couldn't, and it wasn't a look she liked, for it gave him an almost comically imperious air, but threw all of his stranger features into a stronger view. It was as offputting as it would have been had Dinah climbed onto the piano, crossed her little legs, and begun knocking out a minuet. She caught her balance and looked back down onto the building's roof.

"Why did I come here?" said Alice, looking out over the forest, the sun having gone invisible between the pathetic cloudcover. The wind was picking up, and now she wished she had gone back for a shawl before letting herself climb the stairs. She didn't even remember what they looked like now.

"Why do you think you're here?" he said, very close by, and she turned to look, but then he'd jumped, and all at once she gasped and stood still; Alice was suddenly holding the Cheshire Cat in her arms not as one holds a child or a normal housecat, but as a heavy stack of books, or a water-filled vase. He was extremely warm, and his fur did not feel like fur, but rather… rubbery, flexible, in an unusual, pleasant way, as though it could not separate, though the hairs and whiskers across his face and head did have flecks of bunches suggesting hair. Alice had been correct in thinking he was rather fat, for he was also quite heavy.

"I thought it was because I was summoned."

"And?" She could feel his whole voice reverberate through his limbs and out his fur, and he was so bizarrely real, a plum and rose thing in her arms, talking to her with this perhaps annoyed expression.

"And… I'm needed to help bring back missing creatures. Investigate whatever is making them disappear."

"And?" He insisted, flicking his tail, which moved smoothly, thickly against her elbow.

"And… now the Mad Hatter needs me. I've got this house, I—" she looked back down at the detached building below. "He told me to look for a woman, I don't know what that means." He quirked an eyebrow and began to smile again, just a bit.

"Lots of… women around here. Do, uh, you believe him?"

"I don't think the circumstances of his instruction allowed for a farce or a lie."

"So you trust him."

"I don't see a reason not to, he was given orders from the crown to guide me."

"And does he?"

"He hasn't been terribly helpful, as far as my directive is concerned," she replied. "I suppose… I suppose there have been quite a few diversions and lay-bys in his company." She shifted her arms, and he twisted one of his whiskers, adjusting it. "It all seems like such a waste when I think about it carefully. And now both the Hatter and the Duchess depend upon my expedient action, while I'm… stuck. I'm stuck." And there it was. She felt awful.

The Cat shrugged, but did not move his paws from where he had settled into her arms. She was not quite as cross now, having turned to head into a bit of depression at her admission of failure, but at least he was warm and she was regaining feeling in her fingers.

"I want to go home," she said before thinking. It was true, in a sense, as though it would solve everything to simply walk out of the Wonderland.

"Then find the way out," he countered.

"But it's closed, and locked."

"Ohhh, the gate's locked?" Now the moony grin was there, at least on one half of him, and he gave her a sardonic look. "You poor thing."

"Well, there's no other way out, is there? I'm not so sure I remember where the rabbit hole was, or perhaps if that is the rabbit hole, transformed. And even if the Wonderland weren't blocking me in, I should feel terrible knowing there are people probably wondering where I am, if I will help."

"So?" he said dismissively.

"So? What do you mean, so?"

"So…" he looked at her again, penetratingly, "I can pull myself… in six directions, even though there are only four, but you, you aren't quite so capable, nor are you so flexible that you can split your tail. Especially now that you've gone and come back again. Again." His eyes were still brassy gold even in the diffuse light.

"That was a while ago," said Alice. The Cat held his whiskers out with one paw and drew the claws on his other across them to make a sound like a harp.

"You know, not everybody loses their pluck when age and maturity come breezing in and take over." He clucked his tongue. "Aren't they all just a pack of cards? Do houses have but doors?"

Alice sighed, and he shook his head at her, mock rueful.

"You'd make a terrible burglar, you know. Don't look too hard, you might go blind." And the Cat grinned full and briefly faded before he sprang lightly from her arms, only to reappear bone by bone along the edge of the roof, his stripes following his departure into the forest by dashes.

A roar in the distance, and Alice started and jerked her steps forward to peer out over the treetops, pushing to move in the cold. She listened, and the sound echoed over on itself again. Far away, so far that she almost couldn't see it, a line of thick white smoke went up from a carried point along the horizon, and she realized it was just a train. Alice tried to relax her shoulders, but they clenched involuntarily up here.

She moved down from the eave and skirted near the edge to reach the archway again before pausing. There was a rustling in the trees as the Cat landed his mark, and she went back downstairs.

It snowed clean the next night, and when Alice went out for a walk, she was very careful to try to stick to the brick path through the forest, but was resigned to the possibility of finding herself lost, for it was difficult to see where the walk had been laid, and the trees tended to part as though it went through them no matter where she looked.

She stood under a tree with a sign nailed to it and the letters "WAY OUT" written in the middle, but each of the four sides had an arrow pointing a different direction.

"Hello," said a voice, sounding surprised but not displeased.

Alice stopped and looked all around, adjusting her muffler, somewhat fearful that she had heard the word in her head, but no, someone was here with her, and it was not the Cat.

There, sitting on the edge of a brick-ledged well nearly hidden by a tree, sat one of the Duchess's royal circle. The black-haired girl with a red ribbon over her fringe smiled benevolently, her red- and blue-cloaked shoulder against a roof post as she glanced into the waters below her. She seemed unsurprised but gave a demure look to see Alice as the younger girl approached, and the princess's pretty red mouth and sparkling eyes gave the impression of someone who spent her days being fed cherries and nectar brought by wing and hoof of benevolent forest creatures.

"Something weighing on your mind?" said the pretty princess sweetly as Alice leaned over to see her dark reflection below. "You do look concerned."

"I seem to find myself at a strange crossroads," said Alice, looking up at the snowy branches with a sigh.

"Mm," said the princess in a sweet little melodic sound. "I heard about the Hatter—shame, really." Alice started and looked at her. She was laying out seeds in a little path for a brown titmouse that was cautiously hopping its way round the ledge toward her.

"What have you heard, exactly?" The princess dusted her hands together and looked up.

"That he's been shunned for treachery," she said in the same voice. Alice felt her shoulders slump a bit.

"What exactly has he done to earn such a mark, though?" she asked, almost to herself or the forest. A slushy pile of snow flumped from a tree branch above to the ground in soft reply.

"He's done... traitorous acts?" The fact that the princess's remark ended in a question mark gave Alice no reassurance that she could sly any information out of the girl.

"Have you ever seen any monsters in the forest?" replied Alice slowly. The girl sighed thoughtfully and folded her hands in her lap.

"What sort of monsters?"

"Something dangerous and awful. I'm inclined to think it's a terrible beast, but so many people are convinced it isn't the-" and here she trailed off and gestured meaningfully, not wanting to invoke another admonition for speaking aloud the name of the Jabberwock. The princess was apparently on the same page, for she nodded knowingly.

"In my experience, it's usually people who reveal themselves to be the monsters, not the creatures here." Alice was quiet, and the girl went on. "Sometimes they are closer than your own self and you would not know it."

Alice gave her a careful look, for her words were quite obviously weighted down with some secret significance. The princess looked at her bemusedly for a moment before replying,

"Oh! I don't mean you, of course, dear." Or perhaps they weren't.

"Well," said Alice after a pause, during which the princess took out another handful of seed from within her cloak, "Enjoy the snow, I'm sure the animals appreciate your charity." The girl looked up.

"Oh, goodbye, dear. Don't wander too far," she said kindly with a shake of her finger and a pretty smile.

Alice did, and whether it was unconsciously done or out of spite against the sweet-voiced princess, I cannot tell you, but know that she went quite far, for she was thinking hard on whether the Cat had refined, endorsed, or even commanded her desire to make her way back to England. And for a brief while, Alice indulged herself the notion of going back, though it was one of those incomplete fancies which comfort us so easily, where all our plans go smoothly and precisely as we imagine them. She was just picturing the orange blossoms on her sister's head in the narthex when Alice realized she was standing in front of a very large hole in the middle of the forest.

The girl found this to be of a concerning nature, but primarily it confused her, as it wasn't a hole in the ground, or a ragged break in the treeline, it was more of a… cave, or a tunnel of sorts, a large black circle, just… sort of hanging there. Well, the Wonderland willed what it would, she supposed. Alice thought back on the walk high atop the buttressed cliffs and seeing this hole from quite far away, and remembered, tottering slightly in the snow and feeling her cheeks burn, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the intrigue.

She wasn't supposed to go here, he had recommended against it, it being a "not nice" sort of place. But the tunnel interested her very greatly, especially as she walked to and then fro in front of it, there being a thin spot of light coming from within. Alice had stuck her arm into the hat after a brief hesitation; no monster had poked its head out and made off with an entree comprised of her limb. She looked around here at the quiet trees.

It was cool inside, warmer than the forest, but not so warm to be stifling, and it got warmer as she kept going, holding her arms out before her, nearly tripping in the darkness. It felt like there wasn't any ground beneath her at all in some places. She was surprised to get out into the open; there hadn't been a gradual increase of light, merely that dinner-plate sized point on the horizon, and then grass.

Loads of it, not poking up through snowbanks, but in long wild waves. From this end, the light was before her, not behind her, and she turned to see that it was indeed a cave, at least on this end. The rock was so dark and smooth, it still resembled a large hole rather than a structure. There were birds overhead, and green underfoot, and she pulled her hands from the muff, opened her cloak, and wandered forth, not intending to go too far lest she really lose her way.

She could hear a squeak, and a tap, as though against a plank or a board, nearby, and soon found a tended garden and indeed, a whole attached mess of wooden planks in the shape of a house.

Alice stepped closer to the frame of trees and pulled aside a large glossy breadth of bougainvillea in full bloom. Sitting in a chained bench swing on the rickety-looking porch of the beige little place—it was really more like a cabin, but its careful condition suggested consideration of ideas about how close cleanliness and godliness were—was a young man with orange hair and very round spectacles. Alice paused to view him carefully, as he was, in a glaringly obvious way, not of the Wonderland.

The young man was dressed plainly, neatly, but had an air about him that suggested he was perhaps an ordinary bank clerk, bookkeeper, or perhaps a doctor. His trousers were a plain color, his waistcoat was a subtle, muted pattern, and though his sleeves were rolled back, he seemed completely at his ease. She watched him pull a plain silver pocketwatch from a pocket and flick it open, no crumbs flying out or jam dripping onto his socks. And then quite suddenly he looked up, and right at her.

"Hi," he said in a strange accent. He lifted a hand in some sort of greeting before he stood politely, and Alice came out of the bushes to stand at the two steps leading up.

"How do you do," said Alice.

"I'm well, thanks." Alice blinked, for she had not gotten a response quite like that in some time. "That's an awfully heavy coat you have on, miss." She was still processing the fact that this young man seemed to have proper manners. There was a crackling tinkling sound when he lifted the clear glass of ice and mint sprig, sweltering its cool drops all over the porch, up to his mouth to sip what was left. She got a better view of him now, his light hair fixed into the loose, careless pompadour of a sometime academic, his pince-nez very close, the lenses small. It smelled like honeysuckle here. "Well," he continued at her silence, "Aren't you uh, warm in that? I could take it for you."

"I'm terribly sorry, I didn't mean to bother you," said Alice politely. He smiled a bit, and shook the glass again.

"Oh, you are absolutely no bother." He laughed a bit awkwardly. "It's a nice day, it's been so warm here lately, and anyway, we don't really get too many visitors. Emma will be glad to see you, she does enjoy her socializing, and a fresh face is worth a pound of gold to her. I'm Quentin, by the way." She waited, but he did not follow the prompt and ask her for her name, and so she had to tell him rather baldly. He simply nodded in response, a jerking motion not unlike what a horse before a cart would make upon passing down a familiar street.

"That's fine," said Quentin, looking at her. "That's fine."

"Ahhhh...!" he said, laughing congenially, "You really are a formidable opponent at this game. I'll point out, though, that because we are playing under Tarkington's Differential, and as we have elected to play indoors on a Tuesday in the pink of spring, Tudor Rules are in effect."

"Your timetable is off!" she replied, and he gave her a politely surprised look. "I believe spring rules only apply if the railway is under construction in a southern hemisphere."

He wrinkled his nose in critical judgment. "Well, I am sure we can find a happy medium, then, can't we? I'll open Kew Gardens since you so smartly blocked me from taking an Early Closing variant at Elephant and Castle. Push."

"Queen's Passage."

"King's Entry." The girl with corkscrew curls snorted so hard that she nearly inhaled her drink, and they took a moment to both laugh uproariously, indulgent in the brief bawdiness, hard enough that they had to right the tea-service again.

"Hmm," said his companion after a pause to nibble at the quiche and compose themselves. She thought a moment before a lambent light came into her eyes, and she spoke as though spurred toward divinity. "I accept, of course, the inbound player exclusion, but the Amendment to the Gorky Clause does allow me to slidearm at Hampton…" They both sat silent in awe, and then the girl looked at him, those glorious curls haloed by sunset. She looked into his eyes, and murmured, "Mornington Crescent in two."

It was a devastating move. Excrutiating. He nearly fell out of the wicker chaise lounge. But he gamely and heroically managed to remain upright, and slowly tapped his foot up and down.

By Gum, she was brilliant, and her perfect choice of move was difficult to breeze past. He reached down for a Princess cake, offering her one in turn. They both enjoyed the complex flavor, after all, and there was no reason to not be gentlemanly and sporting before he trounced her at this game.

"Very well. I must say, your choosing to bypass Aldwych, though certainly an assumed play," (and here they both tilted their heads back and chuckled, for no one is silly enough to go through Aldwych but complete idiots) "-is a shy move rather than a safe one. Indeed, even talking of such a move creates a switchlead on the Jubilee—you really are boxing yourself in by not playing that obvious F and O lateral loop..."

He blinked, and suddenly wondered where she'd gone, where the game had gone off to—he had a very good explanation to finish, but she wasn't there. It was just him. His fingers were drumming out an absent pattern against his knee—that was what had pulled him away, only now it was turning into a slightly different beat, with an emphasis on the third tap instead of the fourth, and he played it out a few times, fascinated by how everything began to blend together until the taps were hardly taps at all, more a sliding or a flexing, all at once.

Then he was clenching his fingers back into his palm; the glove was stretching painfully across the traitorous digits, but it stopped them from carving splits into the flesh. He pushed very hard so his fingers would stop tapping, stop distracting him. He let go, and fully felt the keenness of the exhaustion again.

The Hatter looked around the room and searched for the long rectangle of gray, only just visible, perhaps because of clouds tonight, and then waited with ebbing patience for his mind to go back again.