There came a low, terrified moan from what she thought must be Bill, whoever he was. Something was sent clumsily up the ladder.
‘Oh! So Bill’s got to come down the chimney, has he?’ said Alice to herself. ‘Why, they seem to put everything upon Bill! I wouldn’t be in Bill’s place for a good deaclass="underline" this fireplace is narrow, to be sure; but I think I can kick a little!’
She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and waited till she heard a little animal (she couldn’t guess of what sort it was) scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close above her. There came an altogether close smell of something that had been left in the sun too long, something overly ripe, fleshy and dead: then, saying to herself ‘This is Bill,’ she gave one sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.
The first thing she heard was a general chorus of ‘There goes Bill!’ then the Rat’s voice along— ‘Catch him, you by the hedge!’ then silence, and then another confusion of voices— ‘Hold up his head—How was it, old fellow? What happened to you? Tell us all about it!’
Last came a little moaning voice and some very unpleasant curses from the others. ‘Hold off, hold off! Don’t let him bite you!’ (‘That’s Bill,’ thought Alice,)
The body digger replied for the dead Bill. ‘All I know is something sprung him like a Jack-in-the-box, and up he goes like a sky-rocket!’
‘So he did, old fellow!’ said the others.
‘We must burn the house down!’ said the Rat’s voice; and Alice called out as loud as she could, ‘If you do, I’ll eat you!’
There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to herself, ‘I wonder what they will do next! If they had any sense, they’d take the roof off.’ After a minute or two, they began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rat say, ‘A barrowful will do, to begin with.’
‘A barrowful of what?’ thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face. ‘I’ll put a stop to this,’ she said to herself, and shouted out, ‘You’d better not do that again!’ which produced another dead silence.
Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. ‘If I eat one of these cakes,’ she thought, ‘it’s sure to make some change in my size; and as it can’t possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I suppose.’
And although what she really wanted was a nice tasty hunk of red meat, she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and found quite a crowd of little animals and birds waiting outside. The poor little dead Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held down by two guinea-pigs, who were trying to avoid his snapping teeth.
‘We must get a collar for poor dead Bill,’ said the Black Rat.
‘Oh, not the collar, yer honour,’ said one of the guinea pigs in a woeful tone. ‘Surely we can hide ’im out like. No need to report it to the Queen.’
The Black Rat waved a distracted hand at his servant. ‘You know the rules as well as I do. All dead must be reported to the Red Queen and must be collared. If you want to risk your own head, that’s fine by me, my good man. But as this happened in my house, we will follow the letter of the law. I happen to like my whiskers sitting above my neck, you know.’
And with that he turned away to find Alice was watching them.
They all made a rush at Alice the moment she appeared; but she ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself safe in a thick wood. She wondered if this was the same wood she had seen from the little door before. It certainly looked dark and foreboding enough. No birds gathered in its branches, and she could only see small red eyes peeking from the thick underbrush within. But she had wanted adventure; and surely the wood had to be better than rats and other animals that wanted to eat her arm.
‘The first thing I’ve got to do,’ said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the deep dark wood, hearing only her own footsteps crunching in the dead leaves scattered across the shadowy forest floor, ‘is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely graveyard. I think that will be the best plan.’
It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it; and while she was peering about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over her head made her look up in a great hurry.
An enormous dog, its head like a sharply-angled rock, two flint coals for eyes staring eagerly at her, was stretching out one massive, taloned paw, trying to get at her. ‘Oh my!’ said Alice, in a terrified tone, and she tried shoo it away; but she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her hopeful shooing.
Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of rotting bone under a huge dark tree root, and held it out to the savage dog; whereupon it jumped into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of hunger, and rushed at the bone, worrying the bits of decaying flesh upon it; then Alice dodged behind the great tree trunk, to keep herself from being run over; and the moment she appeared on the other side, the growling animal made another rush at her, and tumbled head over heels in its hurry to get hold of her; then Alice, thinking it was very like having a game of play with a cart-horse, and expecting every moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the twisted tree again; then the monstrous dog began a series of short charges at her, running a very little way forwards each time and a long way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat down a good way off and began to chew upon the rotting bone in earnest, its great eyes half shut.
This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape; so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out of breath, and till the animal’s gnawing sounded quite faint in the distance.
‘That was close!’ said Alice, as she leant against a thin sapling that felt dry and cancerous to her touch. A fairy circle of stinking toadstools, all pale and striped with red and brown, were spread round the trees near her, some quite large, in fact, big enough for her to sleep beneath if she ever wanted to sleep in such a musty and frightening place. ‘I might have liked to take a bite of him, instead, if I’d only been the right size to do it! Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see—how is it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or drink something or other; but the great question is, what?’
The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round her at the tall foreboding trees, all dark and shadowed within their vast skeletal branches and but she did not see anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the pale, smelly mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large black wurm, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly supping on a freshly dismembered human ear which it had stolen from the nearby graveyard and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.