"Alice, would you like to come to Wonderland with me?"
"Didn't I already say? Of course."
The warmth that moved through him was immediate and real. He knew, of course, what his man had been trying to tell him — that this Alice wasn't wearing a hat, wasn't wearing a wig, was walking beside him entirely of her own volition. His own people had been rushing to correct what they saw as an oversight.
He was glad they'd failed.
A controlled doll could perform the words. It could smile on cue and tilt its head at the right angle and produce the right syllables in the right sequence. But the answer would be empty — a recording, not a reply. This woman had her own thoughts. She'd answered him as a person, not a puppet. Whether it came from genuine warmth, or from the survival intelligence of someone in a very dangerous room who understood that compliance was the safest option, or from some other thing he couldn't name — it didn't matter. What mattered was that she'd said yes the way Alice had said yes, without hesitation, without the particular cruelty of a pause.
His previous "perfect day" attempt had gone differently.
He had prepared everything identically — stage, cast, props, lighting. He'd extended exactly the same invitation. And she had looked at him and said: I would never want to be with a freak like you.
That answer. He had spent a considerable amount of time trying to locate a memory that felt worse than that answer. He hadn't found one.
He took the blonde woman's hand.
"Alice. Let's go."
The park entrance had a man in a red suit selling tickets from a booth the color of a strawberry.
His father finished his speech — "Jervis, you have a very important responsibility today" — and then caught sight of their faces and abandoned the serious register entirely, laughing out loud, the kind of laugh that came from somewhere genuine and unguarded: "Your task is to have as much fun as possible."
His mother opened her handbag. She pressed several folded bills into Jervis's hand and leaned down slightly, the way she did when she wanted him to understand something was important without making it feel like an instruction.
"Whatever your guest would like, darling. Remember to treat her well."
Alice stood beside him, composed and polite, the way she always was. "Thank you, Mr. Tetch. Thank you, Mrs. Tetch."
The ticket seller held out the yellow stub.
"Your voice is too quiet," the Mad Hatter told the man in the red suit at the Wonderland entrance. "I can't hear you."
He took the ticket. He looked at Alice smiling beside him, and the gap between what he saw and what he remembered pulled open for a moment — the stage's warm light against the memory of afternoon sun, the hired actor against the genuine thing, this corridor against that one. Two scenes laid over each other like transparencies that didn't quite line up.
He was familiar with this feeling. He'd lived inside it for years.
Offstage, the world presented itself to him blurred and shapeless, his brain's chemistry altered by years of compound use until even the basic signal traffic of emotion had become unreliable — he often couldn't tell whether what he was feeling was joy or fury, and had stopped trying to distinguish the two. The psychedelic haze was something he'd come to rely on, not because it made things clearer, but because it made reality tolerable. Manageable. A soft focus that kept the sharpest edges from cutting.
But here, on the stage he'd built to his exact specifications, the happy memories came back with the force of a tide coming in — and in their vividness, they created the opposite of comfort. They made the differences visible. They stripped the soft focus away and showed him exactly where the stage failed to match the day, where the recreation fell short of the original, where the gap was.
He could see everything. That was the problem.
They passed the Rabbit with the clock, frozen mid-stride, wound up in perpetual urgency.
"Oh, I'm dreadfully late!"
At least, Jervis thought, at least the rabbit sounds right.
They moved into the black-and-white checkered corridor. The Drink Me bottle waited on its table, bubbling. The Eat Me cake beside it.
"The cake should be smaller," he said. "And the doorknob placement is wrong — it needs to come down about six inches."
"Boss, yesterday you said the cake should be bigger and the doorknob higher—"
The gunshot resolved the disagreement. The gang member went down. The Mad Hatter pulled Alice forward without breaking stride, though he cast one backward glance at the cake.
Too dark. The color was off — the purple of the Drink Me bottle was too saturated, the cake too dim. The day he remembered was brighter than this. Lighter. Everything had been more vivid, as if the world had been turned up slightly before it turned down for good.
Colonel Caterpillar sat on his mushroom in the next room. The Cheshire Cat smiled from his branch. After the sound of the gunshot a moment ago, the Caterpillar's voice had developed a faint tremor.
"Speak — explain your purpose."
"You stuttered," the Mad Hatter said. "Try again."
Explain your purpose.
"Better."
He said it without conviction. His eyes moved over the Caterpillar and the Cat and found them both wanting. The Caterpillar looked dull, its colors muddy and dark. The Cheshire Cat's grin had something wrong in it — not playful, as it should be, but slightly sinister, the smile of something that knows more than it's telling. He had hired these people more than a decade ago. They had worked for him for years. How had they let the costumes get to this state? How had anyone looked at those props and thought they were acceptable?
The anger was building — that formless, borderless anger that arose whenever the stage failed to hold up its end of the bargain.
They passed the Queen of Hearts.
"Laugh," he told the room. "Everyone should be laughing."
They passed the lion and the unicorn in their endless sparring bout.
"Alice, you should look happier—"
The chimneys shaped like rabbit ears. The ice cream cart. The pool of tears.
"You're captivated by all of it," the Mad Hatter said, watching her, the words coming from somewhere half-rehearsed. "And then our hands are very close, and you'll say — you'll say, 'You know, Jervis, I wasn't sure I'd have any fun, but...'"
He stopped.
He was looking at her, and she was smiling at him — a gentle, careful smile, the smile of someone doing their level best — and it wasn't right. It wasn't wrong, exactly, but it wasn't the smile from the park. The Alice in his memory had been softer than this. More beautiful. Kinder. More—
He couldn't finish the comparison. He changed direction.
"You know, Alice, I love tea." His voice came out quieter than he'd intended. "Certain teas — they take me back. To places I've been. To very specific moments that are still completely intact, somehow. Moments that live in the senses, not just the memory." He walked beside her, past the pool of tears. "Some things are so deeply etched that they play back perfectly. Like a film you can watch over and over, and nothing fades."
He reached into his coat.
He pulled out his gun.