Alice’s screams echoed as she tumbled head over heels down the enormous, dark hole. Her hands reached out, searching for something to stop her fall, and she realized that the walls around her were lined with odd things . . . things you would never expect to find in a rabbit hole. Hanging on the dirt walls were crooked paintings, ancient maps, cracked mirrors, demonic masks, and bookshelves crowded with bizarre paraphernalia.
She grabbed the first thing her hand touched and found herself holding an empty jam jar. Frustrated and terrified, she let that go and grabbed for something else—a crystal ball. Growing frantic, she scrabbled through object after peculiar object, finding herself holding books, more jam jars, a badger claw, a monkey’s hand, and finally a human skull. With another shriek, she flung this last terrible thing away from her and kept falling, down and down and down into deeper darkness, where there was no longer anything to hold on to.
Still she fell, as day passed into night, down and down, still falling.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Alice landed on a hard wooden floor, smacking her head as she hit the ground.
“Ah!” she cried in pain as the wind was knocked out of her. She gasped for air for a moment, then sat up, rubbing the bump on her head.
She was in a circular hall with closed doors all around her. There was something strangely familiar about it, although she couldn’t imagine when she would have been in a round room at the bottom of a rabbit hole.
Alice got to her feet and tried one of the doors, but it was locked. She tried the next—and the next— but they were all locked. What was the use of so many doors if you couldn’t go through any of them?
Finally she took a step back and glanced around the hall. That’s when she noticed a three-legged glass table nearby. Had that been there before? She didn’t understand how she could have missed it.
There was a tiny gold key sitting on top of the glass tabletop. Alice picked it up and tried it in a couple of the doors, but it was far too small. She paused and studied the key for a moment, then glanced around at all the doors in the hall, wondering if any of them were small enough for this key.
She spotted a thick velvet curtain between two of the doors and swept it aside, revealing a door much smaller than the others. It was only about two feet high and quite narrow, with a pattern of vines carved into the wood.
Alice crouched to fit the tiny key into the lock of the little door. It fit perfectly. The small door swung open, and she ducked her head to look through to the other side.
It was difficult to see much, but she could tell that beyond the door was a garden with a fountain in the center. She got down on her stomach and tried to squeeze through the doorway, but her shoulders got stuck in the frame, and no matter how she wriggled, she couldn’t go through.
With a sigh, she wriggled back into the hall and shut the door again. Stumped, she climbed to her feet and went to put the key back on the table. But to her surprise, there was now a bottle sitting on the glass top of the table. She was sure it hadn’t been there before. Alice looked around curiously.
The hall looked deserted. Alice squinted at the bottle. A tiny white label around its neck said: drink me. Yes, that sounds like a great idea, Alice thought. Follow the mysterious instructions of someone you can’t see. Drink a mystery potion. What could go wrong?
She removed the top, sniffed the contents of the bottle, and recoiled. It didn’t smell appetizing.
Alice looked around the room again. On the other hand, she didn’t have a lot of choices. She shrugged. “It’s only a dream,” she said aloud to herself. A familiar dream . . . although she couldn’t remember falling asleep. Maybe in the meadow? Or in the woods on the way to the gazebo? It was all so muddled now. But this had to be a dream. There was nothing real about it. And if it was a dream, then what could happen to her?
Alice poured some of the drink into her mouth, shuddered, and coughed, gagging at the taste. Apparently things could still taste horrible, even in dreams.
She replaced the bottle top and suddenly noticed that the table was getting larger. She frowned at it.
It took her another few moments to realize that the table wasn’t growing. She held out her pale hands and stared at them in shock as she got smaller and smaller and smaller. Finally she was two feet tall, surrounded by a puddle of her now-oversize clothes.
Well, that raises some new problems . . . but at least it also solves one, she thought. Wrapping her skirts around her arms to lift them out of the way, Alice flounced over to the small door and tried to open it.
She groaned in dismay. It was locked again! And of course she’d left the key on top of the table. She turned and gazed up at it through the glass tabletop. The key glittered in the dim light, mocking her from far out of reach.
What Alice didn’t know was that at that very moment, she was being watched.
A round eye blinked at her through a keyhole.
“You’d think she would remember this from the first time,” muttered the eye’s owner.
There was a flutter of feathers and some jostling, and a new, smaller eye, this one rimmed in brown fur, replaced the first one at the keyhole. “You’ve brought the wrong Alice,” said this new watcher.
“She’s the right one.” said another voice behind them, indignantly. “I’m certain of it.”
The second eye blinked dubiously.
Alice was now trying to climb the table leg, but she kept getting tangled in her too-big clothes and sliding down. She was starting to think this was impossible. She’d never get back to that key. She’d be stuck, tiny and trapped and tormented by the key just out of reach, until she wasted away and died.
Then she noticed a small box under the table. Now that hadn’t been there before, either! Alice whirled around and glared at the doors of the hall.
Exasperated, Alice opened the box. Inside was a beautiful little cake with the words eat me written on it in ornate pink icing. It was almost too pretty to eat, but again, she didn’t have much choice. She considered the cake, then looked up at the key, high above her on the table. It was worth a shot. Of course, she might disappear altogether, but then she’d just wake up from the dream, and that would be all right, too.
Alice took a tiny bite of the cake, and then another.
WHOOSH!
Suddenly she shot upward. She grew and grew at an alarming rate. She reached her normal size, where her clothes fit again . . . and then kept growing. Buttons popped, seams began to strain, and her skirt got shorter—Alice couldn’t help thinking how scandalized Lady Ascot would be at the sight of her bare ankles. But then she was distracted by the feeling of her head bumping against the ceiling. What if she kept growing until she filled the whole hall? What would happen then?
To her relief, that was where she stopped. Towering over the table, she bent far down and picked up the small key. It looked no bigger than an eyelash in her giant hand. She sidled across the room, crouched, and put the key into the small door’s lock.
“She’s the wrong Alice,” said the second voice definitively.
“Give her a chance,” the third voice insisted.
Alice giggled a little at the thought of trying to fit through the door at her current enormous size. She sat down with the bottle in one hand and the cake in the other. Sipping from one and then nibbling from the other, she managed to shrink and grow and shrink herself down to the perfect size for the door, about two feet tall. Of course, now her clothes were far too big again, but she’d solved one problem. Dragging her skirts behind her, she ran to the door, unlocked it, and stepped through.