Harrietta “The white Rabbit”'s Arc

Chapter 5 of 7

Harrietta watched from behind the teapot cottage wall. Chester sat with the raven at the end of the long table, both of them digging into a fresh tray of frosted cakes the baker girl had brought out. Purple icing stuck to Chester's whiskers. The raven pecked at a crumb and did not look up. Harrietta counted three breaths, then ran for his house. Inside, the shelves stood half empty. She pulled cushions off the desk chair and shook them. She ran her paws along the eaves, climbed the rungs, checked behind the empty rows where she had hidden the day before. No book of hers. No Wonderland between the covers she could find. She climbed back down with dust on her sleeves and a tight feeling behind her ear. The book was not in the house. She slipped out and ran past the cobbles, past the tower, into the ink-dark stretch where Chester had not yet built anything. The ground here was soft. Small pools of ink sat between the roots like spilled tea. She kept going until she found a garden she had never seen before. A hedge grew tall and square, leaves clipped flat, and inside the leaves stood shelves. Rows and rows of books pressed into the green. Loose volumes lay open on the grass at her feet. She walked the hedge slowly. Halfway down she stopped. A large book lay open on a low stand, pages spread wide. On the right page, painted in bright color, stood a girl with a blue bow and a white dress. Alice. Harrietta's breath caught. She gripped the edges of the book and dragged it across the grass, leaves catching in the spine, until she had it beside the nearest ink pool. If anything dripped, it would drip into the pool and not onto Chester's path. She knelt. She pushed up her sleeve. She remembered the way Chester's paw had sunk through the purple cover as if the page were water. She set her hand flat on the painted page and pressed. The page gave. Her arm went in to the elbow, then the shoulder. Cold ink closed around her fur. She felt nothing at first. She reached further, fingers spread, sweeping through empty dark. She thought of Alice. The yellow hair. The blue bow. The small flat voice she remembered from home. Her fingers brushed silk. A ribbon. A bow. She pulled. Alice came out of the page hair first, then shoulders, then a white dress drained of color, then small blue shoes. A black flamingo blinked under her arm. Alice stood up on the grass and looked at Harrietta with brown eyes that did not seem surprised. "You're the rabbit," Alice said. "You're lost." Harrietta nodded once. She had pulled Alice into Chester's Wonderland. Now Chester was not the only one who could open a book.