MEETING HALL, BUCKINGHAM PALACE, LONDON
T om Truckle squinted at the screen in the dark.
The movie was out of this world. It was as if some loony director had made a movie about Wonderland, pushing everything up a notch. A great movie, indeed. Except that the Queen was calling it a documentary.
Everyone around Tom was sighing and talking about how they missed the old days of Wonderland.
It should have driven him crazy, but it didn’t. Tom, unbeknownst to most, was all too aware of Wonderland and had his own plans for finding it.
Surely he had fooled everyone with his act, that he didn’t believe that it existed—basically shocking Alice to death in the Mush Room for it—but that was all a facade.
No one knew who he was, and he was just waiting for all the threads to come together so he could strike as hard as he planned.
But even so, watching this movie was melancholic.
What really took him by surprise was the part when the screen went black for a few seconds. Everything went silent, and then a word appeared on the screen.
A word that meant nothing to Tom but stirred sighs among the crowd.
“And now,” the Queen said, “it’s time to look into this memory we usually hate to remember, but trust me, it’s a must.”
The movie began, and Tom was wondering about that word he had just read. Why was it so frightening to everyone in the room, including the Queen?
It was a normal word. Even funny. A word that usually instilled mirth in the hearts of kids.
The word was: circus.