“Simply cleansing the palate of your mind. You must be relaxed and as light as a feather to channel your magic in the beginning stages. Otherwise, it will come in bursts and fits and be unruly, like it was at the asylum.” Morpheus’s disembodied voice floats around me as the chandelier blinks—dark to light, dark to light.
“Are you saying …?” No, it’s not possible. “I was in control of that magic?” To think I had anything to do with Alison’s near choking makes my insides quake.
“Out of control is more like it,” Morpheus scolds. “You were too distraught for it to work properly.”
I struggle to find him amid the chaos, needing to see his face so I’ll know if he’s serious. “But how?”
“The moment your mind accepted the possibility of Wonderland being real, it released the vacuum of doubt that once held you trapped,” he says from somewhere above me. “Now, stop thinking like a human. Netherling logic resides in the hazy border between sense and nonsense. Tap into that logic, visualize the chess pieces coming alive; see it, and it will be.”
Skeptical, I twirl in a circle of weightlessness alongside everything else: the glass shelves, the hats, the table, and the chessboard. The bed’s watery curtain forms a funnel around us, swaying and swirling in an effort not to touch anything. The Alice carving slides from my grip as I try to keep my balance in the swimming room. Halfheartedly, I pretend she can reach for me, take my hand, but she falls out of my sight.
“There once was a child named Alice,” Morpheus says with a voice of soothing liquid. I still can’t see him. “She was innocence and sweetness, happiness and light. Perhaps her only flaw was that she was very—”
“Curious,” I finish for him, and in that instant, the chess pieces grow to human size. I try harder to imagine them alive: visualize blood pumping through their carved bodies like clear mountain streams, envision their lungs expanding and sending oxygen to beating hearts of stone.
I’m concentrating so hard that I’m startled when the caterpillar, his hookah smoking in one hand, snags my wrist. “You look like a girl I once knew. Her name started with an A. Perhaps yours does, too?” The greenish smoke stretches into a thick, fragrant sheet around me, matching his jade sheen.
The cat floats up beside us. He holds out the sheet of smoke and, using his claws like scissors, cuts eight vaporous letters to spell the word: Allegory. He spreads the letters out like a strand of paper snowflakes. The smile on his green-tinged face widens.
“Ah,” the caterpillar says, his tobacco puffs making clouds around us, “she’s a figurative figure. She shall play on my side, then, as I’m the academician.”
The cat shakes his head, his smile vanishing. They start a tug-of-war, jerking me back and forth. I yelp, my arm sockets stretched to the limit. “Let go!”
“Tut-tut. The only things figurative here are you two idjits.” Morpheus breaks their hold on me, then folds one hand around my waist while snatching the caterpillar’s hookah with the other. “Now, take your places.”
At that, the animated chess pieces descend with the others through the funnel of water. Morpheus floats us up, up, up toward the huge chandelier in the domed ceiling—the one part of the room that’s still stable. The lightbulbs are as big as we are, and the dizzying height makes me nauseated. I wrap my arms around his neck and tuck my face against his smooth chest as he settles us on the brass fixture. “This isn’t happening,” I say. But it is, because I can remember it happening before, years ago.
“Find your courage. Look down. Your show is about to begin.”
I shake my head, eyes clamped tightly. “We’re too high … it makes my stomach kick.”
He laughs and inhales a puff off the hookah then blows the smoke over me, saturating me in the comforting scent. “That’s how you know you’re alive, Alyssa. The kicks.”
Before I can respond, a loud rapping makes me brave a peek.
The funnel of water forms a curtain, which parts to reveal a stage. Morpheus’s bedroom has transformed. The living chess pieces dominate the scene, their milky-green bodies vivid atop a glossy black and silver chessboard that stretches the length of the floor. Everything is arranged in a large circle that reminds me of a circus’s center ring.
The queen’s husband, king of the Red Court, lounges upon a velvet throne. Another woman in royal robes stands at his right hand, crimson bows tied on every finger. There are bows on her barefoot toes, too. She keeps shushing the ribbons, as if they won’t be quiet. Queen Red stands before them both, locked in chains. The jurors’ box, which is actually a cage filled with jagged-toothed tigers and bubble-headed seals, sits on the right. Card guards line the walls.
Seated in the witness chair is little Alice, fussing with the hem of her carved dress.