I kept a chain upon my door
that would shake the shame of Cain
into a blind submission
Yoko Kanno
Alice found herself forcing open several doors in the two weeks prior to what the Hatter would, in later better days, refer to with some detachment as his abulia. One of these was less immediate in its significance, but it came first, and so I shall tell you of all this chronologically.
She dreamt of him that night after the tunnel in the woods, not in some romantic moonlit walk or gazing at one another dancing at a ball, but walking through the forest, silently, striding ahead of her, and she hadn't thought to question him at all. He was so urgent, speechless, that she wondered if he even knew she was there. Halted at the edge of the treeline, he turned, looked at her, the low-lying brushland out over his shoulder. His face was vague and hazy in this dream, Alice not really looking at him, but at the clodding land and his vest, and everything else, and her mind couldn't reckon with his profile, as though she was beginning to forget the pattern of freckles or the shape of his nose, the widow's peak at the front of his messy hair. She couldn't quite remember what he looked like, she couldn't fill him in.
Alice was frankly concerned about this when she awoke; determined, dressed in a dusty pink frock with tiny grey stripes and over that her cloak, was outside with her arms folded, breathing steam, gazing at the building which she had vantaged from the roof earlier. It was more like a remise or a rather large gardening shed from this level, and the windows were a filthy smeared yellow, never having seen a clean cloth in their existence. The large double carriage doors would not open, but it was with an unperturbed air that Alice crossed over and tried the side door, and stepped inside while it chattered from her unladylike heave at it.
This first event smelled not of horse tack but of something heavier than kitchen grease and a thick layer of dust—confirmed by the large brown sack canvas covering a huge something consuming the building. It hadn't been touched in a while, and Alice undid a lash, lifted the canvas before she had the presence of mind to take a breath, doubled over coughing now with the great thing exposed while her eyes watered, moments slipping before she got the chance to actually see it.
She did, suddenly dropped the end of the cloth and set to coughing again, this time going near one of the windows to get out of the path of the rolling wave of dust. Startling great thing. A large bug-like expression, two huge eyes that made her arm jump, involuntary. But it wasn't alive. She carefully lifted it again, peeling up the corner. It was sort of a... sleigh, perhaps, with these sloping curves on what might have been wheels rather than slick blades. It would have been rather pretty in better light, the cream paneled body, brass curliqued trim, smoothly polished brown knobs and brass dials and such cheerful red leather upholstery, seats for two. Alice lowered the dustcloth with experienced caution now and went back into the house for a cup of tea to think about this.
The Hatter's many mechanical proclivities, unusual for a tradesman, she had before chalked up to the baseline strangeness of the Wonderland. But now, deconstructing his lamps and pipes and amateur structural engineering and clocks, Alice wondered why he bothered still with the hats at all. Wouldn't a steam-engine service in every house command a fine fortune? Why keep these things to himself?
The second thing which led to a long chain of consequences in this line of the story was, in truth, a sequence of events in and of itself. Recall the hammer strung upon Alice's wrist, the little charm there, as she paces to and fro in the severe black and white kitchen, swinging with her steps, reflecting weak little rays of light onto the tiling and the wallpaper. Visualize now Alice quite forgetting herself, caught up in remembering the night of the ball and the Hatter, his sleeves rolled up, twisting together the little wire cages, so detached that she turns too fast, lets slip the cup from the saucer, and out and down it goes.
Do you have it in your mind, her jolted irritation? The strange filtering of emotions, whether to mind it, to offer to pay for a replacement—if he returns, if it even matters, such a small thing? The way she lets her arms flop to her sides and sighs, goes for it where it has dashed against the baseboard, putting her hand out against the wall for support to reach down to the halves of the cup?
The hammer smacked against the cellar door, sparkling clinquant though Alice didn't notice, and she might not have noticed the door stiffly ajar, unyielding, had not the saucer slid forward so that her fingers grasped around it and then wedged into the jamb.
Again, the door rattled after she had squeaked, forced it hard this time, rubbing her shoulder, and she was staring down into an entirely black space. Alice put the balls of her feet on the edge of the step and tilted back her head to stare directly upward, imagining quite far above her the great bleak roof, piecing together a map of how many floors this house could possibly have.
She went for a candle.
Delayed again her view of this new thing when Alice reached the bottom of the stairs, instead her hand lighting the lamp on the wall and bringing it to a soft glow before turning. And well she did, for as soon as the candle was out and the gas was up, she dropped the pillar and let her mouth go slightly open.
A cellar, no. Where the Hatter had been hiding his self, yes.
It can be a difficult thing to describe the physical manifestation of the inside of someone's head, but the first thing Alice knew was that this was what she had been expecting upon her first admittance to such a tremendous place, so much concentrated information pouring itself out in a still life waterfall. This room, this cave of bookshelves, filled in with tomes stacked to trapezoids and wherever else they would fit, these broad tables bent into gentle u-shapes from the weight of maps and papers and stacks and paint cans and wires and clockfaces and an orrery and decapitated faceless wooden head hat forms and white busts of ancient bearded men. This L-bend pipe randomly dropped from the ceiling very inconveniently, hovering in the middle of the room, that threadworn chartreuse velvet wingback chair with a polka-dotted ottoman before it.
Tracks suspended from the low ceiling, snaking in and out of curves, a little toy steam locomotive sleeping frozen over the wall where the curling edges of blueprints overlapped one another into incomprehensibility. Hat sketches with them tilted this way and that, unnecessary views of their dark insides, Greek symbols and numbers, a wild menagerie of ideas all thrown together until they stuck, a sudden thrust of knowledge and ideas all uncontrollable, coming out at once, perhaps spidering together connecting, perhaps all dead ends.
He was obviously quite clever to the point of perhaps genius; she cast an eye about to search for a diploma upon the wall, but then he seemed more like the experiential scholar, carving his own education out of life itself rather than absorbing it through a mortar board. It was curious, for he did seem rather proficient at physics from all the jotted notes and scraps of paper tossed about in equal measure with form patterns and designs—she gently moved a stack of papers and found fabric samples and a kitchen whisk with a large gear wheel attached to its side. Alice wrinkled her nose and tried her best to replace things where they'd been.
Other people's disorganized spaces were the effects of spoliation, making them seem unreliable, warning off anyone with good sense; this room had the effect of making the Hatter a rather fascinating sort of person, full of secrets and stand-offish mystery, not that she didn't already think it of him. But it was a smacking great mess, almost as though he had been hiding down here, or had just left, just to go upstairs for something a bit ago. It was so evidentiary, so full of him, even a left-foot aqua and white spectator shoe shoved beneath the leg of a wobbly end table holding up a glass decanter he might have once used as an aquarium—either that or he had let the tea grow into a freshwater forest. Alice removed it gently and substituted a book, massaged the shape back into the shoe.
The girl might have gone back up the stairs after observing this and inspecting the large green and blue and brown blob he had painted—rightly guessing it to be a map similar to the globe upstairs, though the ceiling was not a large enough canvas for this project—had she not passed the chair once more, and seen what gathered in folds and piled in its depths.
She brought up the dark green felt work coat, and held it out, watched the sleeves settle into gravity, one cuff up, the other full out. A front pocket lipped out at her, she drew the fabric over her arm to reach into it and found an upside down tea cup—of course—which she held up, juggling the coat so that it sort of rumpled under her chin, and it smelled, wafting, like a perfect pot of tea, no sugar, no lemon, no cream, just precision timing and the peak of sharp flavor.
Now advancing toward the slightly less laden table to find a ladder upon which was hung a pair of welding goggles, their lenses dark. Looking into them she could see her reflection, but on the wall behind them was a mark that made her lungs hurt quite a lot, and very sudden too, and she stayed still for a moment to quell the sensation. Alice set the goggles on a stack of books nearly up to her waist and on impulse and without contemplation pressed her hand into the mark, brushing it to feel the physical change on the plaster.
His gloveless left handprint in bright royal blue ink or paint, whichver it were, he had reached for the wall, his long fingers outfanned, such a brief moment that there was a hole in his palm, fingers floating, detached, ever so smeared, no fingerprints. He could have easily hooked his fingertips over hers if he'd been here, her little hand filling in the gaps, making it all whole. Alice slid her hand down, listening to herself breathing, and took a step back. There was no melancholia, no depression in the dove grey vagaries she had been living through over the last few weeks, merely a strange distant twisting sensation.
Oh God, and there it was. She tripped over it, this expectation she'd been perched before just so. He was real; the understanding glow was still soft, but she was beginning to see it, his realness, his absent existence. Keeping it at arm's length had been managable with objects, with coats and shoes, and things out of his head; things lost their meaning as soon as he was gone but this, this. Here he was, as if to say I was here and I am here, and she felt like crying, only she didn't.
Alice folded her hands lest she grow too ashamed of herself and really was now about to go back up the stairs before nearly walking straight into the truly inconvenient piece of plumbing, which, now that she trailed it, led straight through another doorway and into a dark corridor running under the house.
Following it a few steps was easy enough, for the light was still good, and the pipe turned to go back up into the ceiling once more, but after that, it was very dark; the corridor kept going, a squeezy little tunnel to somewhere.
Alice went for the candle again.
Not a frightening tread by any means, despite the tangled running mass of steam pipes overhead, as he'd laid down a rather reassuring rug with gold and red swirls. But a long one, indeed, for Alice kept walking until she could hardly see the pinprick of light over her shoulder from the cellar studio anymore. Surely by now she was past the edge of the house, the edge of the forest, for no one's house was nearly this long, but then the floor began slanting up as though a ramp. When Alice came out into the room at the end of the tunnel, she hardly had the rug beneath her feet in mind, but the question of how he had got so much of it laid down in that infinite, unbroken pattern is a question I should like to have answered out of idle curiosity.
But it is understandable that Alice would be occupied with the contents of this new room, perhaps more a hall, for it had stone ceilings and walls, filled with a dripping echo and intermittent rumbling sounds from far away. There were two short set of steps on either side leading up to doors punched out of the middle of the wall, but in the very center of it was a brown mass of dustcovered sundries. Only now was Alice conscious of thready dipping fear in her stomach, holding the candle high, as though rats and snakes and spiders and all manner of things could start crawling out of the boxes and canvas-cloth shapes. No gas lamp here, merely a sconce, but Alice eschewed it and minded to keep the candle aflame in her hand.
She started with a reassuring boxy-shaped thing, pulled the cover off it to find, much to her innate horror, that it was a large golden sarcophagus belonging far better behind glass and among shushing curators, inlaid with painted blues, the kohl-rimmed face staring up. The cover went back onto it, and she tried to make certain not to turn her back on it in case something inside came to life and got ideas about how delicious was she. A neat stack against the wall near one of the stairsteps seemed less terrifying, and she gingerly brought away the cover. At first it just seemed a large brown square, but Alice set the candle on the stoop and made to observe; they weren't the torching pastorals currently on the walls of the house.
And studied the next, and studied the next after that, growing more wide-eyed as she flipped through them. Formal paintings, portraits, of stoic men all with rather large noses and their freckles downplayed sotto voce by the forgiving artist. Here lapels, there smart uniform dress, medallions pinned, a waxed moustache in the mix, but all with that nose, those eyes.
People do not keep storage rooms filled with portraits for no reason, even if they generally lack a good sense of reason themselves. These were no famed collectibles, no art worth preserving for the salvation of some lost period in military portraits—here consigned to posterity were the Hatter's family members. Alice felt sure of this, and flipped through them again, and then again.
Not a single woman, nor any labels like "Great-Uncle Rockmeteller" or "Rear Quartermaster of the H.M.S. Calcutta" to give her any clue, for all the little metallic plates at the bottom were blank, scratched off. Surely not all could be brothers; there was enough variation and age among them that perhaps they were offshoots, distant relations well remembered. The last one in the stack was facing the wall, larger than the rest, and she took it out, nearly falling over trying to turn it.
Familiar, this particular man in the portrait, and it took her several minutes of squinting before she knew him—it was the man in the ivory painting in the odd room upstairs, only here he was illustrious, grander, his lapels and festoons bigger and clearer, epaulettes stacking him tall and high. He had aged; it was easy to distinguish rank. A hero, broad admiral's hat and chelengk, bright stars upon him, staring off to the side with a visible protrusion of profile. Alice studied his countenance another moment. A brave but severe, distant sort, his hand tucked into the breast of his coat. Here visaged the peak of a career, beginnings of the end: retirement into the annals of glory, a reward. Stern, looking to the left to ward off nemeses. A patriarchal nose. She shoved the paintings back against the wall with a loud clack and stood still a moment.
Alice had no proof, but she gauged her high suspicion to be that this was the man's father, evidence sight unseen. The Hatter's father, a Naval officer. Haberdashery not running in the family. A severe man, a critical man, a man impossible to live up—no, stop, stop, stop. Just stop. Fearful of starting up some speculative far-flung fiction sprung from the lusher forests of her own imagination, she toed about, inspecting other boxes of books, of toolboxes, an anvil over in the corner, but nothing else here quite took her fancy, nor found her casting her gaze upon it again like the stack of portraits, at least until she began to wonder what was behind these doors.
The one near the paintings had a polished handle and an oiled lock, inviting her to try the keys until it opened at will; rather a nice change from so rude the doors previous. It glided open, and she was looking into a short closet, before there was another door. Stepping up, Alice tried that one too—and found what she should have been expecting, given the circumstances, and that was indeed the back workroom of the Hatter's shop. Everything interconnected; how nice to avoid a rainy day. But here in mind Alice thought; she was among the buildings in the capital, to be sure—where did the other door go? The Hare's map of the capital had long escaped her, but recollections of government buildings and a stationer's came to her.
Ah, now this door, this other one—this was the hardest of all. No key would fit, no pressing her weight into it would budge, no coaxing it to open, no shaking and rattling, no final petulant kick and then hopping wince of pain would induce it. In fact, it probably would have laughed rather gaily at that last part.
Of course this made Alice want ever so badly to know what it was in there; she was not one to practically bust a toe and so easily lift a white flag over her own curiosity; slowed, perhaps, limping, maybe, but a renewed vim saw her stand up straight. She put her fists into her hips, but the chain caught on her wrist and she spent a moment untangling the hammer, then held it up to look at it. Well, last resorts and cries of eureka usually came roundabout. It was all on a lark and to relieve her frustration: Alice pinched the handle between her fingers and gave the tarnished handle a little smack, but then unbent and looked at it, turning it and going to the light.
Was her little finger getting shorter? She could have sworn the thing was only to the end of her littlest nail, and now it was easily from the tip of her middle finger to the center of her palm. Heavier, too. She was inspecting it, going back toward the stairs, arm out to turn the handle, and went crashing right through the open door, the candle getting a better landing than her elbow.
Alice lay on her stomach, blinking at this new development, pulled up her arm to look at the hammer again.
"Well well," she told it. "Aren't you an interesting little jobbie." Pushed up with a sigh, the little yacht known as the H.M.S. Alice and all its painted sails and bustles righted, and stood looking about at about the largest hall she'd ever been in. The ceiling went far, far above, and she could see spindly buttresses and terrific lengths of paning to create a vast glass ceiling, but it was mostly obscured by everything in the room.
It was the museum, and quite defunct it was, being absolutely frigid owing to a broken window up along the wall. She held high the candle, but it only went so far; there were blobby dark shapes in the pathetic clouded light and not much else. Perhaps that was a zeppelin, over there a tremendous shell-shaped vehicle? How would horses pull something that large? So many dark shaded spiky things with the strong scent of metal and oil and dust. Racks of guns she could see, so these were war machines, no doubt, but she never got a better look; through came a gust of wind by the burst glass, and there went the candle.
Holding quite still to avoid the breath of panic putting its lips just so to the nape of her neck, the better to startle her with, Alice turned to face the door she had bumbled into, the light grey but still there, and saw with some interest waxing her fear a small blue light, paces away. Beneath a drooping tarp half-slid off a box of munitions was a little glass apothecary jar, and in this jar was a blue flame, warm and flickering as Alice wrapped her hands around it.
She held it close to her, and had enough light now to see her way back through the tunnel and into the cellar and up the stairs and into the kitchen again, but Alice was preoccupied with the chatoyant light, her glance never passing over the odd pockmark that had appeared on the cellar door where the hammer had bumped it earlier, smooth and round, about the size of a golf ball, really.
Alice was not so very tired: the chalk-white afternoon had not quite faded into charcoal, and despite her long walk, she felt loose and free and easy, sliding her cloak back over her shoulders and slipping the jar—it was so sweet and cupped so gently in her palm, the little thing—into her handwarmer, traipsing out, breezing through the front door and down the walk. The brief consideration of stepping out onto the frozen river was blessedly replaced by her decision to try something she'd had in the back of her mind for a little while, stepping brightly into the tree portal and closing it behind her.
"Take me where I need to go," she said with verve, and waited in the silence. Tentative hand pushed out at the door again, and she stepped out into the most literal example of a winter Wonderland since Currier and Ives dreamed up some notion about lithographs or something. White everywhere, unbroken and unsullied white, no horizon, right up into the sky. She wrinkled her nose, caught a snowflake, turning all around and wishing she had a pair of dear little golden skates to fit onto her boots; what a pretty scene that would make. She stopped, not startled, but delighted, though the expression hadn't worked its way past the surprise.
There was a large carousel sitting in the middle of the forest, its horses still and silent, jolly pastel blues and pinks and yellows and greens and orange, like a gigantic petit four cake, all there for her to enjoy, all there from the bidden winking urging of the tree—go on, dear, go have some fun for once, she rather thought it sent a message. Up she jumped, and searching for the handle to turn it on, hear the calliope let off some steam, have her pick of the horses, and then there was suddenly someone standing there and Alice's whole middle pinched together and she jumped back against the centerpost of the ride, for the person standing there had been there before Alice had even come onto the scene, but was rather difficult to see, dressed as she was in a full-length white coat and with her pale hair and pale face, there was hardly a contrast against the snowy ground.
The Duchess lifted a carefully-smoothed eyebrow and asked Alice in her low, refined voice which betrayed no surprise upon see the girl there, "What an unexpected meeting; what are you doing out here all alone?"