Don't want to bother you, baby
But I'm bleeding too
Are you needing me like I'm needing you?
Even my shadow leaves me all alone at night
Guess I need to start to take my own advice
"Charity Case," Gnarls Barkley

I give myself very good advice
But I very seldom follow it
Alice in Wonderland, 1951

If there was anything at the taproot of the Hatter's recrudescence, surely it was Alice who held it in her hand, whether she knew it or not. Dragging the firewood from the outside alcove to the hearth was no task to relish, but she did this all for the hope of some future; uncertainty or not, she was determined to meet it, and only came to realize her perseverance once she had begun the work, for she had no plan in mind.

The hearth in the kitchen was where he had managed to stuff the table and rug before she had taken off—they seemed to have made a return to their posts in the meantime, albeit soot-streaked. She did not make unnecessary inquiries, and he offered no explanation. Indeed, the firewood was now her primary task, for though the fog was thin, it had an irritating way of obscuring things so that Alice wound up bonking her knee on the hutch: summarily she required a fire, and post-haste.

It was at this point Alice wished with fervor that she had a pair of gloves on hand. Walking to and from the farmhouse and the barn had been a chapped effort rewarded with the lamplight and warm flank on an amused bovine; the close of this venture would find her with more work in wood wanting a flame. Her fingernails had little crescents broken out of them from the slicing air and her hands trembling from tire as she brought in an armful—the stack had never been parceled into faggots. She stood now thinking just before the mantel, split among her choices. The main thing seemed to be to get it all safe inside before it was buried, but she hesitated whether to attempt starting a fire now and risk the weather. Her stomach yawned, and Alice let the planks clatter onto the grate before braving out once more.

There would be no work in the morning, and possibly for a few days hence; this was a vile storm. She had come up through the dale and managed to keep so solitary and focused a thought as to be uncowed, but now it was inescapable, the flakes getting in on her lashes and freezing against her eyelids. She waved it off, she spat it out, coughing, she tugged her locks over her ears, but the snow came from every side, even blew up from the ground, knocking her into desperation. Alice flailed like that for several minutes as though the locusts had descended, then managed to scoop up a pair of logs and make it indoors before she choked on the ice. And twice more she went, partly blinded but moving fast and rather sloppily to get it all done.

She made to set another armload onto the floor, but nearly dropped it when she found, to understandable surprise, the Hatter, his forehead set above the hearth, leaning his long frame, hands dangling, into the light coming now out of the dark cavern of a firebox, which was nearly as tall as he. Alice stood gazing into the flame for a moment. It never occurred to her to be struck by his work, interpret it as some gesture of kindness or benevolence. Alice was only engaged in the rapidity with which the fire had appeared while she was dashing about; it was no roaring furnace, of course, but it had caught, and actually seemed reassuring—stable, even. He turned his head, keeping his temple against the bricking, to look at her.

"This place has a steamer system," she heard him say, and she went over to see what he was on about. Indeed, there seemed to be, just left to the flames proper, a blacked iron thing with pipes going up into the chimney, not quite a stove. She turned to look at him with an expression, glimmering her old ways of exasperated confusion.

"Who puts a stove in a hearth? Why not have a coal range, an oven, a copper, even? Barking mad way to—" she rubbed at her eye and waved her hand at him, though he had not protested or defended the thing. "No, no, it isn't your fault, you didn't design it. How does it work?" she continued, bending down to view it better. It had a door, but no grate.

"Heats water," he said, plain as that, and went to sit down on a chair, looking pale but calm. Alice followed the pipes with her eyes, then turned round full to look at the ceiling.

"For the bathtub," she said in revelation. "The cooking's on a hearth, but there's heated water piped through the house for baths, I've never heard of such—" but suddenly remembered the sort of person who was living across the dale, and what she had told Alice earlier. She inspected the thing carefully, and still came up short. "But you'd have to carry the water from a river, that's so much more work." She just caught the slightest sound out of him—perhaps a very slight cough or clearing of his throat—and Alice turned to find the Hatter watching the snow drip in patches and pools from her cloak and skirts onto the rug, puddling at her boots. To this, she replied somewhat wryly, "All right, yes, thank you."

And so for this Alice found herself acting the Aquarius, though somewhat provincial, bearing fresh snow in a stone pickling crock to the potbelly 'til it seemed fit to burst. It was a juggling act; she meant to ask when was enough, but turned to find his having wandered off elsewhere. A bang followed by protracted clanging over her head seemed to indicate that he had found a way to occupy the rest of the evening. By now it was far long dark outside, and so Alice rested herself a bit before the flames, surrounded by the bark of her labors.

This was nice, though her repose was backed with anxious tension and a headache that bolted straight through one temple and out the other. Still, the drowsy warmth out of the grate and the occasional echo of water dripping upstairs did much to mitigate the sound of the wind. She turned to the chair but for a moment—her stomach had announced itself earlier, and was veering on the wrong side of petulant now. The larder had been left alone while she had been gone, she discovered with an eyebrow upturned, but she made something of the ham and sourdough, staying her hand with a sickened look from the butter the wife had so bumptiously slipped into the haversack. She had nearly managed to escape without reminder of all that churning, but sighed and set it into the cupboard regardless.

Properly slumberous, Alice fell at last into the rocker, tucking her cloak in around her from where it had hung to dry.

In the morning she found the fire dimmed slightly, but pale and dusty from having gone out it was not. Alice sat a moment yet, and couldn't remember having stoked it in the night. Turning to the window, she squinted in bright white, the snow and the sky all dazzling. She had awoken at an obscenely late hour, and wrestled her way out of the rocker to stand stiff before the hearth.

Finding the door on the room upstairs ajar, Alice did not heed her instinctive propriety, and entered. He was flopped back wrongways on the hideous four-poster, legs so far over the side that his toes skimmed the rag rug. She went to lean over him, mushing her knees into the side of the mattress. The Hatter was again in that all-consuming state of unconsciousness—she could never be sure if he was asleep or if he'd simply shut off for a while. At least he was breathing, but it was a dry, high-pitched rasp. The general scene was of someone who'd been too tired to make the effort to climb into rest properly but found himself there by accident instead. Alice pushed up on his chin to make his mouth close, but it popped back out with a smack and a gasp out of him, and he went on.

"Wake up," she insisted, and set her hand just below his shoulder. "It's late, aren't you hungry?" A bit like talking to her old dolly, right down to the loose arms, but then again not in the least, and she didn't at all want him to be this way. Alice couldn't decide whether to shake him; he was in a terrible way and she was doing her best at adopting a bit of… what word did she want, mansuetude, for after all, vinegar and honey &c. And the half-circles, which she couldn't quite resolve in her mind—insomniacs had dark smudges beneath their eyes, and he was an insomniac when he was pleasant, but when he slept (or did whatever this was) they marred his face. The Idle Place kept its charges in stasis—perhaps now he was leveling off the effects. She let the mattress creak slightly at the angle beneath her, drawing one knee up; he had managed to secure the slightest wedge of peace when there was a great white drought on, and here she was, trying to snatch it out from him.

Alice hesitated in hovering over him, thinking that perhaps she ought to let him rest, that perhaps it was not so very important that he be coaxed back into routine or schedule or however he directed himself on a daily basis. And in her delay to speak again, the Hatter opened his eyes, clear and focused as if he'd been awake the whole time, avoiding her—but his expression betrayed nothing. She realized her hand was still on him, and her hair was falling from the bun to drape low near him; she could feel his pulse, distant and vague but reverberating as through a drumhead.

They looked at each other like that, and he seemed to be waiting for direction, she realized.

"Come on, it's light out, and you can wash your hair," Alice said finally, the word from above. She wanted to say, "I don't know why you didn't before," but instead went downstairs with such finality that he could not help but follow.

She boiled the water in the cast-iron this time, and set it next on the washboard next to the square tin tub. Having put the gnarled lump of soap into his hand, Alice made to stoke the fire, but was given pause by the look on his face. He turned the thing over, observing it coolly with an anthropologist's gaze, dropped it back into her hand, and promptly dragged over one of the straightbacked chairs from the table.

"Wait, what are we doing," she protested in a flat voice as he went for the stairs, and had to bite her tongue from declaring that she wasn't his mother, or a nurse, either. He returned bearing the cushions from her sofa, and stacked them atop the seat, then himself on those, and sat back, mild and expectant. Alice stood exactly where she was and looked him in the eye with a petulant air.

There was silence for a few moments, and he began to look the slightest bit fidgety.

"I don't want water on my face," he said, but she wasn't certain whether he meant this as a justification, or an admonition.

"You can't stick your head in there yourself?"

"I have got," he said in the voice of someone who is expending utmost patience, "A devil of a headache. If you would be so kind."

"Have you caught cold?" She put her hand on the edge of the tub and got a tankard off a hook. He closed his eyes and said,

"No," but it was in that deep, forward nasal that comes upon those with an affliction in the sinuses.

Alice sighed. "Flatten your neckband," and she half-expected some smug look of victory to come over him, but it did not.

With the warmth of his neck there stacked gently along the flour sack-covered edge, she leaned him back toward the basin, rolled her sleeves, and pulled some of the water into the mug. It was still just a bit too warm, but she ran it in tandem with her hand over the line where the white in his hair met the freckles in his flesh, banking it away from his eyes and collar, and she nearly gasped.

She had expected to see the dim white turned to sopping grey, as we do, and found instead fishscale slips between her fingers. Flashing, shining, his hair was bolted through with bits of it, full tilt of strange new mirror. On her introspective pause to look more closely, interrupting his commune with the warm water, he slitted his eyes a bit to see her.

"It turned silver," she said quietly, staring at it very hard.

"Does that," mumbled he in a flat voice, absent that familiar tone of clownishness. He shrugged his shoulders together, more an effort to keep warm than to dismiss her surprise, and closed his eyes again. Alice kept pouring, and kept pouring, watching it go into tiny shooting variations, not existing merely as one great glister effect, but a hundred thousand tinsels, all in straight silver. She scrubbed efficiently, careful to see another transformation, but it merely lathered and nothing more. Alice felt rather self-conscious with her fingers knuckle-deep in his hair, glad he seemed keen to remain distant with his eyes closed—but soon the silver was obscured.

Over the sink and through the window, Alice's gaze went to play in the bright yard. The day was clearer, with thick bubbles of opaque clouds against the deepest, richest blue, so saturated that it flirted with purple at the edges of the horizon. Puffy white bounded past, rushing, never straying to cap the view or hide the sky for too long. The storm had set the snow high and wide, twinkling at her in broad daylight, landed with smooth perfection in mounds and waves. It reminded her of her mother baking, of the way she leveled flour off the measuring cup with a knife, back and forth until it ran smooth, a seamless flow of white. Out there somewhere was a door home; out there were ever so many people, some she knew, and some she wondered about. She followed the drifts with her eyes, past the trees, past the hills, and squinted, fancying a plume of smoke on the horizon.

The Hatter opened his eyes and looked up: Alice was lost, deep in thought or memory, and had put her elbows on the edge of the tub to lean over in dreamy abstraction while her fingers slowed from their mechanical flexing to wind mindless avenues and swirls into the locks. His back ached in this contortion and he was about to get her attention right up until the moment her thumbs found the gap of flesh just behind his ears and she cradled his head in her hands, fingers splayed. Such ponderous and yet such absent-minded stroking; even in his vacant state, he half-wondered where her thoughts dallied. Down at his base, she pushed and slid up toward his crown, faded, and repeated. Down from the bottom, and up, slow and meditative, pausing for a brief moment to circle his temples—he found himself drifting in time to whatever tide she was calculating with this idle massage, and then something inside him opened up and he could breathe so much more easily, for just a moment. Had he the self-possession, he might have leaned and tilted his head to push her efforts in on themselves. As it was, gravity set its fingertip at the center of his forehead and pressed gently, weighting him back into the cushions so that all he could hear was the sound the lather made between her fingers. She piled it all together and cupped her hand over it, running back and forth, her thumb brushing the widow's peak; her hands were light and firm paradoxes.

Alice only came to when her neck went stiff, then inspected her work so far, deemed it a sufficient exercise in familiarity, and rinsed.

When she was done, he sat up and leaned far forward, almost to put his head between his knees. But he took the towel from her and scrubbed it over his locks. When he sat up, a bit pink in the face, his hair was dull and then white again, and he opened his mouth to gasp and sigh for a breath. The Hatter stood and began to move deliberately, as though he would go back upstairs. Alice was not so surprised by its odd coloring that she would forget her curiosity to see how he did it up, how he got it to stay stuck in that half-waved, half-curled way at the back of his head. Rather she reached for the comb.

"Don't you want to untangle it?" she asked, and he paused in the doorway to give her a strange look that actually had a bit of amusement just detectable.

"Probably break the comb," was his reply.

"Wait," she called to him, and opened the hutch while she dried her hands. Ham and bread. And a dollop of butter, if only so she didn't have to look at it anymore. It was a sparse spread, but it was the best she could do given the circumstances. He gazed down at it for a moment, still pink and possibly a bit dizzy, the way he was blinking in bemusement, and the Hatter said,

"Oh," in a quiet grateful sort of way, and disappeared.

She tapped at the logs and set the cast-iron to dry, and then Alice positioned herself at the table to begin going through the haversack, with all the things the farmer's wife had given her. This had included her sundry array of payments, some scratchy wool and a quintet of needles (she had hinted massively at wanting for a pair of gloves), the little bottle, and finally the silver hammer and clear jar with the blue light inside. Setting these all in a row upon the table, she turned the phial of Drink-Me between her fingers, watching the syrupy liquid, a deep reddish-brown, tilt back and forth. Alice frowned, for she couldn't remember the stuff being quite this color—clear, perhaps, from the vague annals of memory—but then, the label had said Officinal, and the woman had given it to her for complaining of a toothache, of all things.

"Hmm," she said, and set it aside. The blue light casting out of the glass was practically roiling. Pressing her hand along its side to pick it up had the curious effect of causing it to mimic her; it shifted into a deeper azure where her flesh met the glass and squeezed in close, straining with color. Alice tested the lid as she had before and out it easily came with a soft crackling plug, to her surprise. She leaned in close and tilted the glass toward her; the blue light was really more of a gas, now slowly winding its way out of the jar to hang smoky blue trails midair. This thing, this mass, had no drive to dissipate, remaining instead a hazy flickering presence until she reached out and drew her finger through it, breaking a ring. Alice raised her eyebrows and waved her whole hand through it, fingers outstretched as though to paw over harpstrings. The cloud tilted and swayed in response; it looked like a luminescent gas, but it felt curious, heavy, almost liquid. She looked down at her dry hand, and back up to find the thing attracted back to itself, reforming into a soft small glow, righting and aligning with her.

She stared into it, and she half-fancied that it stared back into her, but before she could get too close once more, there was a splashing sound from upstairs; she looked up at the ceiling and remembered the Hatter upstairs. Alice held the little apothecary jar in her palms and considered how to corral the now-rising cloud back into its container—she waved her arm within its entirety, making a gesture inside, and it flowed with an almost inquisitive bent back down into the glass, where she capped it to save for another day.

It had been a while since she had watched the man with the white hair disappear to the upper realms, and Alice began to wonder if he had finally managed to fall asleep, or perhaps drown. With brisk virtue she made her way to the top of the stairs, and knocked at the dark door on the left.

"You all right?" It was a moment before he answered her in a low voice, echoing slightly.

"Yes." She hesitated here.

"Do you want me to light another fire?"

"No."

Alice sighed, twisting her fingers together with her apron, and retreated down the stairs. She wasn't in a hurry to meddle with him much more until long after it grew dark, and only when the fire sank dim did she climb the stairs and push open the bedroom door again. He was still wrongways on the bed with his mouth popped open, and she crossed to the other side of the frame with a sigh to pull his shoulders up to the head, coming back around to deposit his legs where they belonged. Of course he would sleep the opposite direction of what proper people did, she thought, and adjusted him toward the vicinity of the pillows. She came to sit near his elbow and watched him for a moment, still wary that perhaps there was a very slight chance he was awake, but she did not have the impression this time that he might have opened his eyes and laughed at her folly.

Very slowly she leaned forward and with a smooth rolling motion, placed her hand just under his shoulder, where she could feel something far off, but she moved away again, feeling a keen sense of embarrassment.

The snow was still too high to move about the countryside with any ease, which was lucky, because Alice slept late again, and once more she found the fire in the hearth refreshed. It must have been several hours since he had heated the boiler, though; the firewood had rifts and cracks along the side from drying. She looked about the room and thought carefully on how much of the stuff would be required to sustain them were the snow to remain. It was not a heartening calculation, and she traipsed up to knock upon the door.

"Yeah?" he called, and she thought perhaps she detected a touch of brightness in his voice, a slight change.

"Is it getting cold in there?" Alice frowned, it was odd for a body to spend so much time bathing—wasteful, excessive.

"It's fine," he said easily, "You can come in if you want."

"Are you decent?"

"Of course."

The door eased open rather slowly, and Alice arrived at one of those rare scenes that she only ever seemed to find in the Wonderland. He was still in the bath, but there were two things which stopped her from slamming the door shut again. The first was that the room was steamy and warm, warmer even than downstairs by the fire, a strange feat, but a marvelous and immediately intriguing one as well. No wonder he stayed up here. She had heard of northerners and their restorative saunas—even the window was fogged over, and she stepped into the heat, latching the door behind her to lean against it, reveling in warmth at last. To go out into the snow after this would be a crime. The second thing she noticed after a moment was the large sheet draped across the tub, its edge nearly up to the occupant's chin. The Hatter in the bathtub was about as scandalous as watching someone in a covered push chair be wheeled down the sidewalk for an airing.

He looked at her, almost sanguine.

"Excuse me," said Alice, and disappeared through the steam and out the door. She reappeared a short while later with things bunched in her hands, and stood awkwardly with her back against the door again.

"There's a seat in the window," he said, nearly cheerful, and she set the cushion on the wooden panel to take up her needles and yarn, her back to him. They both sat in the heat and comfortable silence, and for the first time in a while, Alice's shoulders relaxed and her hair curled just a bit at the edges.

It was later, the next day or after, perhaps, and she was kneeling on the floor, the large ugly cushion beneath her, the wooden cabinet with the copper bathtub close by, giving off enormous waves of warmth.

"You spend more time in the bath than Marat did," she said quietly through the pin in her mouth, but in truth she was glad he did. Now Alice was mending her apron, for it was the only one she could find and it had grown quite worn at the hem. She had given up on the needles with no small frustration—the things had collapsed obstinately every time she had balanced them together in a frame, and she had nearly snapped them into halves for kindling. He shifted about and turned his head to look at her, the water making comfortable sloshing sounds.

"Are you supposed to be Charlotte Corday?" he said, his voice quiet even in the porcelain echo. "You dress like her."

"I take what the armoires give me."

"All white stripes on black?" He paused musingly for a moment. "Break them down and burn them." She was about to let this pass before Alice realized what a perfectly good idea that was, and half-smiled. She stitched on for a moment, and then wavered, trying to come up with how best to pose the question on her mind.

"What's wrong?"

There was a long pause, and Alice regretted it. The Hatter, for his part, seemed content to let the silence lapse while she parked her needle through a stitch to hold it there.

He turned his chin, and spoke so softly the words were nearly mired in the humidity.

"What do you think?"

Alice sat back so they faced each other and looked at him, really, for the first time in a while. He kept very still, with only the steam coming up near his face, and the occasional drip breaking the echoing silence. He just looked at her, not trying to get her to realize anything, but simply open to her observations, waiting for her to make some connection on her own, and he properly put his trust in her, for Alice was, after all, a clever girl, one to figure things out. He wasn't tired at all—the plum dark curves weren't signs of exhaustion, for he had been gorging on rest to the point of distention or sickness, and she had taken great care to put him back together; yet there was a piece out of order, not missing per se, but offset, out of order even in his out-of-orderedness. And then she did see it, right there, it was so obvious.

The girl sat forward on her knees, the cushion still beneath her, and smoothed her dry palms against the edges of his face. He didn't flinch, not even she began to invert her wrists so that her fingers lay along his brow and her upside down thumbs were parallel to his nose.

"Close your eyes," she said very quietly, and he did, but then a small worried line began to crease between his eyebrows. Alice shut her eyes as well and pressed, feeling and searching for it, or at least the start of it, pushed her thumbs toward each other with the bridge of his nose caught between them, squeezed hard, one of them sighing from it but she wasn't certain who, him or her, her front teeth mashing, forcing it, the pressure turning her knuckles hot.

There was a crackling snap: a pair of staccatos followed by a sick sound.

She felt his whole being, his whole essence, tense in a tight wind before he jerked away from her as if he couldn't help it, his nerves completing the action before the thought of it came, the water bending up in waves to smack the sides of the bathing tub in violent response. He doubled over into the cloth, his hands at his face, and she couldn't look at him, the way he curved into and on himself, a horrible silence coming out of him but for the echoing of the bathwater. She hadn't meant to hurt him so badly, only to fix him and get him back, and Alice bent over her own knees again, sinking to the floor, squeezing every part of herself shut and together until she heard a very great sloshing and fast footsteps, and then a door somewhere closed too hastily.

The little blonde form uncrumpled itself after a moment, and breathing deeply, gasping and sobbing without a single tear, she looked up to find a diluting watercolor of where his bloodstained palm had grabbed the side of the tub, and a splattering of red at the edge of the cloth. Alice stood, pushing past the tremor in her knees, her legs numb and uncertain from kneeling too long, and watched the print slowly turn gradient and finally pull and fade from the porcelain into the rocking waters. She turned in a careful and controlled motion and placed one foot in front of the other next to each of the glistening splotches that he had barely recorded in his haste, deliberate and slow, until she reached the closed bedroom door.

In her heart of hearts, she would have been shocked, but still relieved, to hear some sound from within, but there was nothing, no sobs of agony or pained groans; the paling silence in the bedchamber beyond kept her hand lightly trained over the flat of the door and away from the knob. Alice stepped back and went downstairs with her arms over her middle, feeling sick. She rushed for a spoon, flipping it end over end in her trembling haste, and went for the bottle of Drink-Me to bear it back upstairs, but bolted against the table, and shook its lading. The tin of beeswax smacked against the floorboards, and she just looked up to see the apothecary jar tilt off-balance, seesawing at the edge, the blue light pulsing wildly.

Her arm flashed out and the girl grabbed for it, but it flinched just out of her reach and hit the floorboards with a single smack, no rebound or bounce. Alice bent with a dread in her middle and found that indeed, it was ruined, burst into chunks and shards. Suddenly the light grew, expanded, wheeled up in front of her like a plague of locusts awoken from the fields to be whipped into a curse; it filled the room and stretched to the ceiling, it it flapped against the curtains and clouded the windows, and Alice breathed it in, coughing and choking all the way down to the floor.

She was going to vomit. Alice turned her head ever so slightly and the entire room rendered itself at impossible angles, as though being sucked, from her perspective, into a distorting vortex. She was definitely going to vomit. This pain was reminiscent of something, and she fancied she had experienced something like it in the past, but this was somehow worse, a thick heaving, something that cleaved into the low end of her back and burned her inner thighs. Something was happening, and she was going to be mad with the agony by the passing of the next second, but Alice clenched her teeth together, gasping at the same time, and tried to uncloud the blur in her vision. There was something thundering nearby, and she arched her back to see over her own forehead—for she was on the floor somehow—but her own insides betrayed her again and she had a very clear image behind her eyelids of a bright circle, a flaming hoop with no end. She knew what all of this was, and she hated it, she despised the despairing fear that waited in the shadows for an inevitability. Alice wondered stupidly what delusion felt like—perhaps freedom—and she curled her toes under so hard that surely they were going to break, snap clean and dangle numbly from her.

When she opened her eyes again, she was on the rotting gold sofa in the kitchen, lying on her back. The sofa didn't belong here. Her toes ached. The sound from earlier was tempered now, but ceaseless, and she lifted her head, the room back to its usual proportions. The Hatter was standing at the sink with his back to her, and Alice hesitated before trying out her legs experimentally and rising. She crept toward him slowly, thinking of what she could possibly say, but paused just shy of him. The man stood with his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, working feverishly.

"Are you all right?"

"Hmm?" he turned his head just slightly, and she could only see the underside of his chin. His voice was one of anxious fixation with his task, as though he had only now recognized her presence in the room—although she was certain he had been here before. Alice nearly spoke again, but as she got closer, she forgot what she was going to say. He was holding a rough-looking brush, scrubbing it obsessively over his bare hands before slopping it into the pan of scalding water, scouring desperately, the sound being a loud rasp raking into his poor flesh, over and over. She could barely see his hands through the clouds of steam, but his forearms had turned bright red from the relentless scraping and heat.

"You're going to hurt yourself doing that so hard," she said, and ignoring her, he replied,

"It's in the cupboard."

"What?"

"What you're looking for, it's in the cupboard." Alice turned her neck to look at the thing in the corner. It could have risen out of the floorboards beneath a spotlight; there was no avoiding it, it seemed white and shining even in the darkness, though the blackened wood was shadowed. She went to it, every plank creaking with her step forward, and unlatched it to ease open the squealing door. The bundle of cloth was perhaps a cooling pie or loaf of bread, but felt heavier, maybe even a cake out of the oven. But there was no light in the hearth, no scent in the air. Alice brought it in her arms to stand beneath the white in the window and unfold each corner, peeling back the layers to see what had emerged.

At first she was surprised, and shifted it to the crook of her arm, thinking perhaps she'd made a mistake, or that she held it backwards. It was a soft and sweet porcelain baby doll—the still, silent little form had chubby arms and bowed legs with knobbly knees, its fingers and toes all curled up into tiny fists, but as she lifted the cloth at its head, she felt the searing thrill of something pinching between her shoulder blades before sliding down her spine.

The moppet had no face. It had a head, of course, and upon that were the smooth depressions where eyes might have gone, and a little mound suggesting a nose, but no distinguishing features—it was only the beginning of something, or maybe a prototype. She could have blinked and put it back where she had found it, sad to see that it had never been finished for love and play, only she held it closer to the light and frowned, for there was something strange about it. And then she saw what it was. Its limbs began to twitch and its fingers unfurl, the featureless head turning this way and that, sightless, mindless jerking, writhing like a strange lizard there in her arms.

It was alive, and Alice screamed.