Circus Read online

  “Good girl,” Lorina says. “Let’s go.” She glances at Edith. “By the way, the maid’s dress looks so good on you, Alice.”

  I have a feeling I am going to understand what she is implying in a few minutes.

  Chapter 66

  Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

  Time remaining: 1 hours, 12 minutes

  Descending to the basement, I see Edith putting on her gloves. And with Lorina’s fan, I realize those are the fan and the gloves I was supposed to find.

  Then I remind myself I am wearing the maid’s dress. The triangle is complete. The three things the Hatter had wanted me to find, only I mistook the fan and gloves I found in the bottom drawer in my room upstairs for Lorina’s fan and Edith’s gloves.

  What kind of truth am I about to know about my past? I have a feeling it’s going to be darker than darkness itself.

  There is a small cage in the basement, a smaller version of the one I saw in Wonderland. Toys are scattered all over the floors. Endless books, dog-eared and ripped apart, are scattered on the floor. All of them copies of Alice in Wonderland.

  Closer, I see countless playing cards and chess pieces in the corners, too. What happened in this room?

  “Still can’t remember?” Edith folds her arms in front of her.

  “I’d prefer if you tell me.” I shrug. My own suppressed memories are on the tip on my tongue.

  “This was your circus,” Lorina says. “We used to cage you in here when you were seven years old.”

  I try not to panic. I think it’s coming back to me.

  “We used to make all kinds of fun of you,” Edith says without the slightest tinge of guilt in her voice. “Sometimes we invited our friends from school to watch you in the cage.”

  “We let them watch you with your silly books, playing cards, and, of course, those stupid Lewis Carroll childhood tales,” Lorina says.

  “It was fun,” Edith says. “Of course, we only did it when Mum was away, trying to make a living after Father left.”

  “And you never said a word to Mum,” Lorina whispers in my ear. “You know why?”

  “Why?” My hands are trembling.

  “Because you were a coward, among so many other reasons.”

  “What was the point of keeping me in a cage and entertaining your friends?” I ask, my lips dry, my neck feeling wobbly.

  “You were mad, Alice,” Edith says. “It was so much fun having a mad member of the house.”

  “With all your funny stories about Wonderland,” Lorina elaborates. “The white rabbits, the Hatter and the tea parties, and don’t get me started with ‘eat me’ cake.”

  “It seemed like you read everything in the Alice books and thought they happened to you, only you made them more sinister,” Edith explains. “Lorina and I had always been the bullies in school. It was so much fun, but we had no one to make fun of when we got back home.”

  “And there was you.” Lorina snickers. “The highlight of every day.”

  “I was seven years old, for God’s sake.” A tear trickles down my cheek. A blurry memory of me holding on to the cage, begging to be let go, attacks me.

  “But you were really entertaining,” Lorina says. “That Invisible Plague of yours. Oh, man.”

  Suddenly, a question hits me. “How do you know about the Invisible Plague? How did the idea of the cage come to you?”

  Lorina and Edith stare at each other, suppressing a bubbly laugh. Then they let it out in a burst of chuckles and snickers.

  “Alice. Alice. Alice.” Lorina wraps her threatening arms around me. “You were the one who gave us the idea.”

  Chapter 67

  Buckingham Palace, London

  The Queen of Hearts, posing as the Queen of England, was ready to take the stage again. She was about to go announce her brilliant plan after showing her guests one last video.

  But she couldn’t do it before she received that call she was waiting for.

  Her phone rang.

  “What took you so long?”

  “A few twists and turns in my plan,” a muffled voice said. “But it’ll be good in a few minutes.”

  “So the video will be ready?”

  “Give it half an hour,” the voice said. “I’m on it. It will be a live feed, and you will be able to show it to your guests.”

  “Is it going to be good enough?”

  “Much more than you think,” the voice said. “A piece of art, like nothing you ever seen.”

  “Frabjous.” She grinned, feeding Brazilian nuts to one of her dogs. “Everyone in Britain is going nuts looking for the rabbit with the bomb. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear about it much longer. The public will need some statement. But I can’t wait half an hour to show the surprise to my guests.”

  “You will, My Queen,” the voice said. “Long live Wonderland. Death to the real world.”

  “Ah, one more thing,” the Queen said. “Next time, I prefer you tell me your plans in detail. When Margaret first told me about the rabbit loose in the streets, you hadn’t told me this was your plan. I stood oblivious of what was going on.”

  “Apologies, My Queen,” the voice said. “The idea came out of the blue, after I learned of a psychological term called the Rabbit Hole.”

  “Really? Is that a real scientific term?”

  “Just like the Alice Syndrome,” the voice said. “It seems those real-world doctors stole their ideas from Lewis Carroll’s genius interpretations. The Rabbit Hole means putting a patient under severe stress, metaphorically sending them into a rabbit hole, and pushing until they remember their past.”

  “Well done, then,” she said. “So I should be counting on her remembering?”

  “Like I said, it’s only half an hour and she will remember,” the voice said. “However, it will be most heart-wrenching. I am making sure she doesn’t die or something from the shock.”

  “We can’t afford this girl to die, you know that.”

  “Don’t worry,” the voice said. “I have it under control.”

  “And her sisters?”

  “They know nothing,” the voice said. “They are just pawns in the game. Doing what I have planned for them to do.”

  Chapter 68

  Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

  Time remaining: 1 hour, 01 minutes

  “How did I give you the idea?” I ask, as flashes of my horrible childhood are nothing but playing cards flying in front of my eyes. I can’t seem to catch any of the cards to take a better look, but I see fragments, flashes, flipping before my eyes.

  Flashes of who I really am.

  “This brings is us to the shocking truth.” Lorina waves her fan again. The memory of her waving it and snickering while Edith punches with her gloves while I am inside the cage hits me like a plague. Now I know what the gloves and fan meant. But what is the dress for?

  “Are you telling me there is a more shocking truth than what you have just told me?” My breathing grows heavier. First I witness the atrocities against Wonderlanders in the circus, then my own horrible childhood in the basement of my family’s house, then I am supposed to learn something much darker?

  “Remember when we told you went missing as a seven-year-old girl?” Lorina says. “Remember when we told you, you told us about having gone to Wonderland and came back with that glinting knife in your hand?”

  I nod, but don’t say a word.

  “That actually never happened that way,” Edith says. “The truth is...” She hesitates. “That you were never lost.”

  “What happened then?” I ask.

  “Alice.” Lorina stares right into my eyes. “You knocked on our door one day. When we opened it you were a lost seven-year-old standing with a knife in her hand, blood spattered all over.”

  “I—I am not following.”

  “I wanted to kick you out, but Mother took sympathy on you,” Edith says. “I mean, I never understood why she wanted to save you.”

  “She is my mo
ther,” I retort. “Of course she’d want to save me.”

  “She doesn’t get it, yet,” Lorina told Edith. “You think we shouldn’t tell her?”

  I scream at them, “Tell me what?” Deep inside, I have already remembered the truth. “Tell me what, Edith?” I shake her with all my might.

  Edith doesn’t reply. I think she enjoys the madness lingering in my eyes.

  I find myself turning around, looking for something to threaten them with. Funny—or terrifying—how my eyes spot a glinting knife on the floor right away. I kneel down, grab it, stand up, and press them both against the wall. “Tell me what?”

  “That’s the same look you had in you eyes when you were seven years old,” Lorina says.

  “Tell me what, goddammit?”

  “That you knocked on our door, told us you were running from the Wonderland Monsters, that they wanted to kill you, that something horrible happened in Wonderland.”

  “You were laughable,” Edith continues. “A lost, mad child whom my mother pitied and took in and made you one of us.”

  “You mean...?”

  “You were never our sister, Alice,” Lorina says, as if she is delivering the happiest news in her life. “You were never one of us, and you have always been mad.”

  Chapter 69

  Buckingham Palace, London

  Tom Truckle saw the Queen of England take the podium, that sinister grin glinting like a knife on her face.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Pardon me, I mean mad ladies and gentlemen.” She snickered and the crowd laughed. “I am about to offer you something that hasn’t been done in the history of mankind before. Something that will make us, Wonderlanders and fellow madmen and women, avenge what happened to us in the circus two centuries ago.”

  Tom noticed the glaring silence of the crowd. Everyone seemed to be counting on the Queen now.

  “What we’re going to do is going to shake this human world upside down,” she said. “It will make Wonderland look like such a very sane place to what we’re going to do to the real world around us.”

  Tom himself was as anxious as ever. Although an imposter, he felt like he’d like to be part of the Queen’s lunatic plan. Who worked in an asylum and didn’t feel like the sane world outside wasn’t the enemy. To Tom it was the taxes he paid, the expenses of his divorce, and his medications. How much did he have to pay for those pills, just to stay sane in this mad world?

  “But first, I want to show you a glimpse of the kind of madness you love to watch.” She pointed at the screen behind her. It showed people in England hunting all kinds of rabbits, opening them up to look for a bomb. Some people killed the rabbits, some ran when they saw one, even if it was on TV. The streets were a mess of accidents and panic. And oh, how insane the world looked right now. “This is just the beginning. In a few minutes you will be watching something much more insane, so keep watching.”

  Chapter 70

  Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford

  Time remaining: 53 minutes

  “That’s why you hate me so much.” I nod at Lorina and Edith. “I never was one of you.”

  In truth, I can’t remember the part of me knocking on their door with a knife in my hand. But I do remember the basement. The horrible circus inside the basement.

  “We don’t just hate you, Alice. We loathe you,” Lorina says. “You’re like that itch in the top of my mouth that hurts more if I try to lick it away.”

  “Even when you were put in the asylum, you still escape and make our life miserable,” Edith says, totally neglecting that I may have been just a troubled seven-year-old, but that the incidents in the basement—which were their fault—may have turned me into a loon.

  “So how did you come up with the circus idea in the basement?”

  “Because you told us about the circus in Wonderland,” Lorina says. “Or rather the silly idea that Wonderlanders had crossed over to the real world in the 19th century, and that humans thought of them as mad people and freaks, and sent them to the circus for entertainment.”

  “Of course.” I sigh. “That was how I gave you the idea. So you decided to take it up a notch and make a circus out of me in the basement.”

  “And it was fun, Alice,” Edith says. “I mean, if you bully someone in the real world you may get in trouble. But bully a mad girl, wow, that was a million-dollar idea we got away with.

  “Because whatever you were going to say about it, no one was going to believe a lost mad girl who thinks she came from Wonderland.” Edith and Lorina high-five.

  The Pillar comes to mind instantly. All his madness, theories, and the harsh ways he treats the people in this world seem just now. How I would like to choke both of them with a hookah’s hose right now. Maybe I was hard on the Pillar. Maybe the twelve people he killed were the likes of Lorina and Edith. Bullies who needed to be put to rest.

  In the same time I stand, contemplating my past and what to do with Edith and Lorina, I realize I am too late again. Why do I always waste time lamenting my true past?

  Edith tugs on her gloves and picks up a baseball bat from the floor, while Lorina shoots me an even more sinister look now.

  “How about we play that circus game one more time?” she says.

  “What?” I grimace, unable to comprehend their thirst for evil.

  “Come on, Mary Ann.” Edith plops the bat against her fatty palm.

  “What did you just call me?” I take a calculated step back. I was going to lash my None Fu at them when Edith caught me off guard with what she just said.

  “Mary Ann.” Lorina sticks out her tongue and shakes her head like a bully teasing a kid on school grounds. “Mary Ann.”

  “Why are you calling me Mary Ann?” I am fully aware that this is one of my names in the Alice in Wonderland book, that the rabbit mistakes me for a Mary Ann in the first chapter. But why do they call me by that name now?

  What does it mean?

  “Oh.” Edith nudges me with the bat in my shoulder. Lorina fans away. “We didn’t tell you?”

  Both of my evil stepsisters wink at each other.

  “You also held a pot next to the glinting knife the day you showed up on our door,” Lorina says, still forcing me to step back, closer to the cage’s opening behind me. “A pot with a tiger lily in it.”

  “Remember that pot, loony tunes?” Edith swooshes the bar a breath away from my nose. “Inside the pot, there was a necklace, which probably was yours.”

  “It belongs to someone called Mary Ann,” Lorina says. “My mother called you Mary Ann then, and you never minded. It was only later when she realized your obsession with Alice in Wonderland that she called you Alice. She thought it sounded better for your adoption papers.”

  “And she gave you our last name, Wonder,” Edith says. “Odd how it all fell into place, isn’t it? Our last name being ‘Wonder’ while you think you came from Wonderland.” This part seems to amuse her the most.

  “So I was really Mary Ann in Wonderland?” I mumble.

  “Here she goes again,” Lorina tells her sister. “Did you see how bonkers she went, talking to herself about Wonderland again?”

  “That’s why we need to see her in the cage one more time.” Edith pushes me harder, the cage against my back now. “Come on, Mary Ann. Entertain us one last time.”

  Edith’s push does something to me. Something I was looking for all along: I remember them torturing me in the basement now. Vividly.

  It’s an even worse memory than remembering the Mush Room torture. The humiliation. Their friends they invited over to laugh at me. The worst memory a person can relive.

  But one thing strikes me the most. In that memory I’m gripping something behind my back. Something I don’t want them to see. I can feel it in my hand. It’s cold. And small.

  “Get in the cage!” Edith roars now.

  I close my eyes and don’t respond to her. My closed eyes are the draped curtain of my theatre of life, but they also open up another
place in my memory when I was seven years old.

  What was I holding in my hand back then that was important to me?

  I can remember I didn’t care about the pain. I only cared about that thing I was gripping.

  What was it?

  Then I remember seeing buckets in the corner of the room. A lot of cleaning tools next to them. What did I do with those buckets?

  Risking the loss of my precious memory, I open my eyes, seeing if the buckets are still in the corner of the room right now.

  They are!

  Something inside me tells me I hid that precious thing in the back of my head in one of the buckets. Something tells me that this is what all this is about.

  I am supposed to find what’s in the bucket.

  Edith and Lorina freak out when I aggressively beeline through them toward the buckets. I pull them out of the corner and rummage through them, having no idea what I am looking for, but knowing I will recognize it when I see it.

  “What?” Lorina says behind me. “You missed your buckets, Mary Ann?”

  “My buckets?” I turn back. “They are mine? Did they mean something to me?”

  “The whole world.” Edith rolls her eyes.

  “What do you mean?” I insist. “Why did I have them?” I can’t tell them about what I think I hid inside, because I’m somehow sure they shouldn’t know about it.

  If only I could remember it clearer now. If only!

  “Here.” Lorina holds a broom with the tips of her hand. “Yuck. Hold this.” She gives it to me.

  The broom is old. I don’t know why it should mean anything to me. “What is this?” I shout then take a step forward and almost choke Lorina with one hand. “Tell me what’s going on. What do these buckets mean to me?”

  “They were—” Lorina is choking under my grip, so I turn to Edith.

  “They were tools,” Edith says.

  “Tools for what?”

  “Cleaning tools, duh!” Edith says. “Let my sister go.”