The worst of it had passed, and all that was left of Alyss’ swell of unhappiness was the occasional hiccup. Someone touched her shoulder.
“Tag, you’re it.”
Alyss lifted her head and saw a little girl. Is that…? She brushed the hair out of her face and wiped her eyes to be sure. She looks exactly like me.
It was: Alyss Heart, age seven, wearing her birthday dress. “You want me to chase you?” Alyss asked.
The girl clicked her tongue, annoyed. “Haven’t you ever played tag before?”
“Yes, but…not in some time.” The princess got to her feet. It wasn’t every day that you met up with your younger self. Who knew where it might lead? “Okay,” she said. “You’d better run then.”
With a cry of pleasure, the girl sprinted down the corridor. Alyss chased after her, and corridor after corridor of the Looking Glass Maze was briefly visited by the running pair. As much as Alyss had wallowed in the depths of her sorrow moments before, she now entered into the buoyant pleasure of the chase, laughing with each near-tagging of her younger self. She approached a corner in the maze and the younger Alyss jumped out from behind it, teasing the princess with her capture.
“Hah!”
They both laughed so hard that it became difficult to run, and when the girl stopped to catch her breath, Alyss hurried up and took hold of her.
“I’ve got you now!” she said, tickling the girl. “No, don’t! Stop! Stop!”
The younger Alyss squealed in delight because of course the princess knew where she was most ticklish. But the girl suddenly became serious, pushed Alyss’ hands away, and looked off at something. Alyss turned to see what it was. A diamond-encrusted scepter topped with a white crystal heart at the far end of a wide corridor.
“Do you think you can get the scepter?” the girl asked.
It looked easy. Alyss only had to walk down the corridor and take it. “Why not?”
The corridor walls consisted of looking glass panels that lined up perfectly, facing each other. Alyss
stepped between the first pair and her reflections swirled and swirled to form a sort of vortex, and then she was no longer in the Looking Glass Maze. She stood in a featureless Nothing with a tornado of images whipping around her, the words and gestures of the people in them wounding as much as any made by beings of flesh and blood.
“Off with her head! Off with her head!”
Redd swooped toward the princess. Alyss jumped out of the way, her heart thumping when- There was Dodge Anders, as a boy, wearing his guardsman uniform and receiving a lesson in the
etiquette of palace guardsmen from Sir Justice. But like Redd before them, they too vanished. Quigly Gaffer stood before her now, pointing and laughing in her face as if she were the most ridiculous creature he’d ever seen.
“Stop it,” she said.
But Quigly was joined by the rest of the London orphans-Charlie, Andrew, Otis, Francine, Esther, and
Margaret-as well as some of the wardens she’d known at the Charing Cross Foundling Hospital. “Stop! It!” she screamed.
Their laughter continued to echo in her ears even after they’d faded from sight and she was gazing upon a silent but confusing scene: she and Prince Leopold surrounded by what appeared to be their four
children, picnicking in the Everlasting Forest with Dean and Mrs. Liddell. Two of the children were infants, but they had the faces of Genevieve and Nolan. Alyss wanted to call out to her family, but she couldn’t get her voice to work. The Cat stood over her oblivious, picnicking family, licking blood off his paws until a single drop fell to the ground and became a roiling, bloody sea in which her family was drowning. The Alyssians were in it too-Dodge, Bibwit, Hatter, General Doppelganger, the chessmen. All were drowning. But then the sea drained out through an open door, carrying her friends and loved ones with it. Above the door was an illuminated exit sign and next to it stood the walrus-butler.
“Oh my, oh dear,” said the walrus. “It’s only going to get worse, Princess. You don’t have to put yourself through this. It’s not necessary. Please, I beg you to leave while you still can.” With his left flipper, he urged her to use the exit.
But Alyss knew better. The maze had shown her these things to soften her up, to make her more vulnerable for whatever she might face next. She was determined to face it.
She turned her back on the walrus, lifted her foot to step forward into the nothingness before her, and found herself back in the Looking Glass Maze, in the corridor leading to the scepter.
She had made it past the first pair of looking-glass panels.
She moved forward to stand between the next pair of looking glasses, but no sooner had she done so than the maze melted away and she found herself in the South Dining Room of Heart Palace, the scene of Redd’s invasion.
“I don’t need to see this,” she said.
Everyone in the room was staring at the kitten that had begun to morph into The Cat as- “No!” Alyss cried.
Kraaaaawbooosh!
An explosion blew the doors apart and Redd and her rogue soldiers spilled into the room. Alyss was forced to relive the horror of that ungodly hour, to experience all over again Sir Justice’s murder and the destruction of her home, her own near death at Redd’s hands. Once was too much! No one should have to experience such horribleness! She watched with steadily rising anger as her seven-year-old self and Hatter jumped into the palace’s emergency portal (that wrenching, final separation from her mother!) and Genevieve turned to face her sister alone. Then she saw what she had never seen before: her mother bound by Redd’s carnivorous roses, Redd cutting off Genevieve’s head with a single swing of the scarlet energy bolt.
“Aaaah!”
She ran at Redd, fury in her heart. But the way to Redd became long, and suddenly the
twenty-three-year-old Dodge was running alongside her, saying in a voice tight with rage, “Hate makes you strong. Forget restoring White Imagination to power and Wonderland to its past glory. There’s no justice except the justice of revenge. The only way to defeat Redd is to embrace your anger.”
The Cat jumped in front of them and Dodge plunged his sword into the beast again and again. But he seemed no less angry for it, as if his anger would remain no matter how many times he killed Redd’s vicious henchman.
Alyss was almost within striking distance of Redd when her mother’s head, lying in a corner where it had rolled, opened its eyes and spoke.
“Black Imagination feeds on anger, Alyss. Give in to your anger and you merely become a pawn of
Black Imagination, which may triumph for a time but never for eternity.” “But look at what happened to you!” Alyss said.
“Yes, look at me. It should tell you a lot that I’m the one saying this.”
But the pressure of hate in Alyss’ skull was too great. “It tells me that you were weak and that’s why you lost!” she screamed, snatching Redd’s scepter and cutting off her aunt’s head with a single swing, just as she had killed Genevieve.
Redd and the roses faded into the floor and Alyss discovered herself standing in a circular room with walls of telescopic glass that allowed her to see the Chessboard Desert and Wondertropolis in their entirety.
Bibwit rushed into the room with an open book in his hands, reading from it with great urgency, wanting her to understand. “Fleg lubra messingpla gree bono plam,” the tutor read. “Tyjk grrspleenuff rosh ingo.”
“Bibwit?”
“Zixwaquit! Zergl grgl! Fffghurgl grgl!”
The tutor continued spouting gibberish, growing more and more agitated with Alyss’ lack of understanding, which was when she glimpsed herself in a looking glass. Instead of her usual features, she saw Redd looking back at her. She had become Redd.