I hope he wears the backpack for the transition. Judging from the current size of my clothes, everything touching him will shrink.
In a matter of seconds, Jeb plunges through the opening with the backpack in tow. The door snaps shut behind him, with the key on the other side.
Catching me around the waist, he pulls me against him. “What were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ won’t fix this mess. We’re the size of bugs and locked out of our only exit.”
“Well, you’re the one who left the key!”
His face flushes. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“We eat a bite of cake and get big again.”
He slaps his brow in feigned shock. “Of course. We’re just going to eat a piece of hundred-year-old magical cake.”
“You can stay this size if you want to. I’ll carry you in my pocket.”
Snarling, Jeb slips the backpack from his arms. “Whatever. Let’s just do this. We’re smaller than the stinking flowers, for crying out—”
“The boy thinks we stink, Ambrosia.” A craggy, witchlike voice erupts out of nowhere. Movement sweeps along the garden, as if wind blows the blooms.
Jeb and I edge backward, nearly tripping over the fallen pack.
One of the giant daisies bends low, casting a long blue shadow. A distorted mouth widens in the flower’s yellow center, and rows of eyes blink on every petal. “That he did, Redolence. The nerve,” she says. “After all, if anyone stinks, it would be him. We haven’t any sweat glands.”
Jeb drags me behind him, reversing our direction. “Um, Al? I’m not the only one seeing a talking flower, right?”
I clutch his waist, my heartbeat pounding into his spine. “You get used to it.” I try to suppress the panic stabbing me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I don’t have the chance to answer, because Jeb crashes us into a huge stem.
A nasturtium leans down, snarling. A hundred gray eyes nestle on her bright orange petals. “Watch where you’re going, would you?”
Several dandelions bob the fuzz on their heads, scolding. Tiny eyeballs protrude from their tufted seeds like snails’ antennae.
I swallow a scream as they all start talking at once:
“How long has it been since we’ve had such delectable visitors?”
“In our living-backward years or their moving-forward years?”
“Doesn’t matter, really. I was more just making a point.”
Jeb eases us into a small clearing in the midst of the chattering creatures and turns me to face him. “Did they just call us ‘delectable’?”
Behind us, a dandelion sneezes. Her seeds burst from her head in tufts, leaving bald spots. “My eyes! Someone catch my eyes!” She reaches out with her leaves to try to grab them.
Two places down, a geranium bends at midstem and opens a bucket on the ground. The word Aphids glitters on the side in red paint. Fishing out a pinkish bug the size of a mouse, the flower pokes the writhing victim into his mouth and chews, drool oozing down the petals that make up his chin. His eyelids close underneath the slobber.
Jeb’s expression grows wild. “A flower eating an aphid. The eater becoming the eaten! People sometimes eat flowers, Al. Delectable …”
That stab of unease becomes a full-blown punch. “We should—”
“Run!” Jeb grabs my hand and jerks me into a sprint toward the rabbit hole’s door.
“How do we get in?” My thighs strain with each jarring step.
“We break the friggin’ lock.”
I almost trip on my boot heels. Jeb is unrelenting, dragging me along. “We don’t have to go so fast! They’re rooted in the ground!”
“Don’t bet on it,” he says.
I follow his gaze over my shoulder. It’s like a zombie movie—the flowers moan and rip their stems up from the dirt; their mouths stretch wide, pressed open by long, spindly teeth, clear and dripping with slobber like melting icicles. The balding dandelion gets free first and sprouts humanlike arms and legs. She uses her roots for added momentum, as if she’s being propelled by snakes. She whips out a strand of ivy and loops it around Jeb’s ankle, lassoing him. With one tug, she drops him to the ground.
“Jeb!” I catch his wrists in a tug-of-war against the hissing flower.
“There’s no out the way you came in,” another flower growls as it squirms from its grave of dirt a few feet away. That’s when I realize none of them are flowers, not really. Just like with the dandelion, arms and legs appear as they burst out of the ground.
They’re part humanoid, part plant—multi-eyed mutants.
“The rabbit hole only opens into our realm. The portals that open out to yours are guarded in the castles far across the ocean, inside the pulsing heart of Wonderland,” one flower says while waving an arm. Vines cling to the greenish flesh along its naked biceps. “Therein is the only escape. Don’t you think we would’ve already left, were there a way out of the hole?”
I picture all the furniture pinned up along the tunnel wall with ivy. So, they’d been trying to build a way into our world? I shiver.