Page 5 of Wondrous

“Do remember to air out your shoes at night,” the Hatter said in a querulous voice. “I’ve put extra socks in your cart—wet feet are the worst thing in the world on a long journey!”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, not minding that the Hatter had, in all likelihood, given me an uneven number of socks, and all in mismatched garish patterns.

“Don’t step on the mome raths,” he went on. “Don’t walk under jubjub birds—they have no manners whatsoever—and don’t fall into any hollows. And whatever you do, don’t do it without having a cup of tea first!”

I paused—I’d only been half listening. “Hollows?”

The Hatter nodded, wiping his eyes. “The White Rabbit said there’s a big one by my lake now. He nearly fell in himself!”

I frowned. The lake the Hatter’s stream emptied into—which we all called the Hatter’s lake, though it was many miles from Hare’s cottage—didn’t have any hollows near it. A hollow was a sort of valley, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a very nice word for a valley, though, and this must have been why I felt a little shiver go through me.

“What did he mean?”

“I don’t know,” the Hatter said. He removed his handkerchief and blew into it. “He went rushing off before I could ask. Oh, and Alice, don’t pick any flowers—you’re already on their bad side, you know.”

“I won’t,” I said, smiling at his concern. I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere if I waited for the Hatter to bluster himself to exhaustion, so I gave him one last wave and snapped the reins. “Goodbye!” I called. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

The cart went trundling along the path, the Hatter still shouting advice after me. A chill settled into the air as the boughs closed over my head. I turned to wave at the Hatter, but this provided less comfort than I thought it would, as he and the garden gradually disappeared behind the leaves and layers of tree shadow, as if the forest were a door that was slowly swinging shut.

I handled the reins gingerly, trying not to pull them too hard. The Hatter had once had a strange antlered horse to pull his cart, but the horse had run off last year, and since then the cart had been pulled by—nothing.

Well, it was pulled by something. But it was a something that couldn’t be seen or heard, apart from the faintest of scratching noises on the path. Clearly it was an entity of some sort, because the cart moved more quickly in rainy weather. Once the Hatter had declared, without either alarm or displeasure, that his old horse must have died somewhere in the forest, and its ghost, not knowing what else to do with itself, had simply returned to its former employment. I had another theory, though.

“Cat?” I murmured.

No response came from the invisible creature pulling the cart. It was something of a relief—I didn’t want it to be the Cheshire Cat and often tried to convince myself of the foolishness of my theory. After all, it seemed highly out of character, not to mention physically improbable. And yet the Cat did love his tricks and games.

The Cat made me nervous in a way no other Wonderland creature did. It wasn’t just his overlarge mouth stretched wide to reveal his overlarge teeth—which were also very sharp—nor his habit of following me about in a way that I did not think was predatory, though I couldn’t think of any other explanation for it. No, my dislike of him had been settled when he had tried to catch the poor Dormouse for his dinner.

Now, I wasn’t certain this had been his plan. But I’d seen Dinah catch enough mice to distrust the Cheshire Cat on principle and wonder why he made it a habit to lurk in the forest around the Hare’s house. One day, after one of the Hatter’s tea parties, I had taken the dishes down to the stream to wash, leaving the Dormouse asleep in his favorite teapot. Upon my return, I’d been greeted by the frightening sight of the Cat crouched low on the table barely a cat’s length from the slumbering Dormouse, his rear end wiggling. I had leapt forward with a cry, causing the Cat to start and the Dormouse to wake with a noisy snort. The Cat had claimed he had only been after a scone, which had admittedly been placed directly beside the Dormouse’s teapot; yet while I could accept that a cat of Wonderland might have an interest in scones, I couldn’t quite believe that he would bother stalking one.

I put the Cheshire Cat out of my mind and focused on the journey ahead. We followed the Streamview Path initially—which, like all paths in Wonderland, was a nonsensical thing, following the stream and then cutting back and forth across it. I could see the path at the bottom of the water and wondered with a shiver if I might also find the bones of drowned travelers alongside the moss and algae.

I hoped we might meet some customers for the Traveling Tea Shop, but midday came and went and I saw only birds, none of whom answered when I greeted them. Some Wonderland birds could talk, and others could not; oftentimes it was impossible to tell the difference between a regular bird and one who was merely an introvert.

We stopped to take lunch on a sandy beach by a bend in the stream, where there was a standing mirror, half covered in ivy. It was weathered and cracked, though I could still make out my blurry reflection. It was one of the strange facts of Wonderland that every once in a while you would come across a mirror in some out-of-the-way place, like a trinket washed up on a beach. I liked them, because they reminded me of the second time I’d visited Wonderland, though I’d never seen anything other than my own reflection in them.

I decided that I should make a replacement for the yellow teacup. I considered trying to replicate the magic before realizing that relaxation was not really what my journey needed.

I would make a teacup for bravery.

Or try to, at any rate. I scooped up a handful of clay—I had found that a round ball the size of my palm was the perfect amount for a teacup—and set to work.

The Hatter had taught me to make teacups when I was just twelve years old. He had done so haphazardly, and with many irrelevant tangents, so at first I hadn’t been certain if the Hatter himself was a magician and was teaching me to be like him. It eventually became clear, though, that the magic wasn’t in the Hatter but the clay—or possibly the stream that flowed over it. Magic seemed woven into the clay in the same way it was woven into Wonderland’s mushrooms. Just as anyone could grow larger or smaller if they knew which side of the mushroom to bite into, anyone could make enchanted teacups if they knew how to talk to the clay.

The Hatter did not have a potter’s wheel and had taught me to make teacups by pinching them into shape. I began by carefully hollowing out the middle, then turned the cup round and round as I pinched it. I knew that, if I kept at it, the cup would eventually become as smooth as teacups sold on the London high streets. It never seemed like it would, and I was always on the threshold of giving up when it happened: Between one pinch and another, the rim would grow smooth. Another pinch, pinch, and the walls of the cup were even and shapely.

I leaned back to admire my work, smoothing out the last of the imperfections with a little water. As I did, I talked to the teacup. “You are very brave!” I told it. “So brave that you can walk into a dark forest without shaking and face down bandersnatches and jabberwocks and who knows what else.”

It wasn’t necessary to speak out loud. Simply concentrating on the spell you wanted to put into the teacup while you worked the clay was usually enough. But I had found that talking to the teacups as if they were people was the best way of getting the magic to listen to me. And if sometimes I felt as if I were talking to myself, and felt a bit silly after, well, perhaps that helped the magic work, too. They were Wonderland teacups, after all.

I painted it with a simple pattern of stars and a crescent moon—I was glad I’d grabbed my paints that morning!—then set the finished teacup beside me in the cart to dry. I gathered up the hedgehogs, who had been rustling around in the grass for slugs.

“Come, come, we can’t wait around all day,” I admonished Hedgewitch, who squeaked at me in protest and bit my thumb—she had been hiding ineffectively under a mushroom cap, her well-fed bottom sticking out. “I must find at least one customer, or I’ll feel like a failure.”

It was something I’d worried about more than I wanted to admit. If nobody visited the shop, it would feel like Wonderland itself had rejected me.

Just as I was about to set off again, there was a rustling in the bushes to my left. I whirled around, but nothing was there, just the drifting fronds of a willow tree, which in Wonderland came in colors ranging from eggshell to lavender. I told myself I had been imagining things.