THE WRONG ALICE“There you are at last,” a voice hallooed from the darkness, as Alyce slid down the sandbar as gracefully as she could, which was not very.
“Who’s there?” she called nervously, but walked toward the voice, for there was no other way to go.
“And have you brought any sugar?” came another, sleepy-sounding voice.
“I’m so sorry, I haven’t,” Alyce said, remembering all of a sudden the request for sugar on the un-invitation. “And I’m afraid I haven’t got a teapot either.”
“Who brings their own teapot to a tea party?” a third voice said. “How dreadfully impertinent.”
“Oh, I thought it was what you wanted, but the invitation was a little burned and smudged,” Alyce said, as she crept closer to the light and the voices.
At the end of the tunnel was another circular room, this one with no roof at all. It looked like one of the buildings damaged in air raids that Alyce had seen in the newspaper. The walls crumbled at the top so that a bright cloudless sky could be seen above. Burned velvet curtains hung around the edges of the room, and many doors of different sizes could be seen through the ripped and singed portions. Some of the doors were no bigger than Dinah, and some were several times the height of Alyce.
In the center of the room was a three-legged table that was much too tiny to host any sort of tea party. It was stacked with a great pile of cracked and dirty bowls and plates and teacups and teapots all on top of and inside each other, and every time one of the three seated guests moved, something crashed from the top of the pile to the floor, so that they were sitting amid a great circle of smashed china.
The three voices belonged to three strange . . . Alyce could not quite say “people,” as two of them weren’t. A hare sat in an armchair that was missing one leg so it tilted to the side. He wore what once would have been a very smart jacket, shirt, and bow tie, but they were as tattered and burned as the curtains. A dormouse perched on top of a very tall stool, looking rather drowsy. But every time it looked as though he would drop off and fall, the Hare gave his stool a kick and jerked the Dormouse awake, and then caught the stool before it fell. The third character stood up from the pile of cushions he had been sitting on and came over to Alyce. He wore a hat made of purple velvet, the top of which had been sliced right off and filled with feathers, which would have looked quite spectacular if they too were not burned. Indeed, alarmingly, some were still smoking.
“Who are you?” he asked, peering closely at her. “You are almost right, but not quite. For one thing your hair is the wrong color.”
“I’m Alyce,” she replied. “And I don’t see how it can be wrong, as my hair has always been this color.”
“You’re certainly not our Alice.”
“No, I’m my Alyce.”
“We sent our Alice an invitation.”
“It came to me; in fact it hit me in the face quite hard, so you should be more careful how you direct them. And anyway I’m Alyce too. Alyce with a Y.”
“A why?”
“Why, yes.”
“Do you have a where or a who?”
“Pardon me?” Alyce said, not following at all.
“You have a why, so I assume you have a where or a who,” he elaborated. “But perhaps you have a what?”
“What?”
“What I mean to say is, where is our Alice? The one without a why?”
“She’s at home, I should think,” Alyce said. “Your Alice—the one with an I.”
“We all have an eye,” the man said. “Most of us have two.”
“No, you’re getting it all wrong!” Alyce said, starting to feel rather frustrated. “I mean that I am me, not her. I’m just me.”
“Clearly so! Our Alice knew you could be twelve people by tomorrow, and even more by yesterday,” the man said, putting his hands on his hips.
“It can’t be yesterday,” Alyce said. “Because it’s today! It’s always today . . . until it’s tomorrow, I suppose.” She frowned.
“Quite right, quite right,” the man said. “Yesterday does always seem to be dropping behind, doesn’t it? Very careless of it. Now, where did you say our Alice was?”
“At home!”
“Please could you go and get her?”
“I don’t think I know how to get back if I wanted to. But even if I could, why do you need her and not me?”
“Because I thought you said you already had a why!”
“I mean, why do you need the other Alice? I am the only one here!”
“In that case,” the man said, “perhaps you will have to do.”
Copyright © 2025 by Anna James. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
