What have you done, Alice. What have you done.
Haven't you read the fairy tales? Not the saccharine-sweet diluted happy ever-afters. The real ones. Where evil step-sisters get their heels chopped off, and the children eat the witches, grimmer than Grimm, back when the nonsense was there for a reason. For your protection. No, you knew the stories well enough I'm sure, you knew the dangers, as all children know before age teaches them ignorance. But what did you do with that knowledge? Nothing. Against all instincts, you stepped through the looking glass. Into their world.
Not that that's a problem, for a careful person. For someone who understands the old tales, the old rules, and why they're there. But you just walked in, as if you could queen yourself by playing along, mouthing the words without knowing their meaning, like a child singing hymns in church.
You stupid, stupid girl.
"Mine now, all mine." He polishes it furiously, grinning widely, wildly,
eyes too eager and not quite human.
You managed to avoid him for most of the journey. We won't talk about the first time, when you tumbled down the rabbit hole. There at least you found a way to innocently dream through Wonderland, without actually crossing over. You were just like them, without substance, without power. But when you stepped through the looking-glass, well, that was something dangerously different.
"Mine mine, like cockle-shurs in the gimble wimble searing sea," he
cackles to himself, dancing from one foot to the other, still rubbing.
As if his life depended on it.
Every time we look into a mirror, we glimpse another world. The looking-glass world. Complete with all its madness, governed by its secret logic. A world of shadows, twisted reflections. But every time we look away, it is destroyed. Disappears. Shadows cannot live without an object to cast them, without a mind to dream them to life. As children we know this, before make-believe and play-pretend go the way of worn out toys, and the mirrors go blind.
A pity some lessons must be lost to gain others. As children pass from their springs to their summers and falls, they learn to look past the surfaces to the hidden truths. The true natures. His true name's hidden within the name he gave you. He's clever like that, like all the creatures beyond the pale, beyond the silver limn that protects our world from theirs. But of course you didn't know that. Look to the letters. Hatred hides within them, death as well. A clever name for a clever creature, with nimble fingers and a nimble mind, no matter how much he tries to seem otherwise. Pan from the older tales, Loki too, but there's a million different names and stories for him. He goes back a long way, you see. Maybe one of the longest ways.
"You're going to keep me alive, aren't you little trinket? You're my
twinkle-star, my staircase, my tram my trolley my didgeridoo." His hands
are a blur, polishing polishing polishing, his mad eyes darting
nervously. "Just a moment longer, love. Just a wee little bittle shittle
moment!"
Perhaps you didn't notice that you never saw one of their reflections. That they have no reflections. How could they? Ours is the source-world, the caster. They are our likenesses, distorted by dreams and...older things. No objects in Wonderland can hold reflections. Only things from our world can. It's a sort of magic, a sort of control.
The world around him disappears with a whining scream, and he looks desperately into the spoon he holds in his hands. He wavers, thins, and goes ghost-pale, but he stays there. Seeing his own reflection, creating himself. Snake devouring his own tail. And he's laughing that awful laugh, God the same laugh as he murdered Time with the shards of a metal metronome. Because now he can see the mirrors, all of them, hanging in the empty whiteness like silver eyes. He strolls over to one, whistling, top hat cocked to one side, left eye always on his reflection.
Of course we were safe from them. How could they get out? They existed only when we looked into mirrors, never for any real length of time. And when we did look, the true mirrors were masked, hidden within their own infinite reflections. Any of them that tried to go through found themselves trapped in those endless corridors, those fatal mirror-mazes.
A bathroom mirror in London. One foot out. Wriggled around in air. Followed by a head with two burning eyes, and that maniac smile. There's a child sound asleep in the next room, a little girl only six years old.
Pity her.
All they needed was a mirror. A casting-mirror. No one knows how you managed to cross into their world. Perhaps your fancies put more of them in you than a normal child. You were, after all, such a strange little girl. It doesn't matter, though. What matters is you took things with you when you crossed the threshold, and he picked your pocket, while innocently munching on his bread, sipping his tea.
A dresser-mirror, boudoir in Bordeaux. He's got a hand mirror now, licking his fingers to smooth back his eyebrows. He looks much more solid. There's blood on his gloves, on his black top hat.
There's no catching him now. He's got casting objects. There's nothing he can't, won't do.
A child's bedroom in Sydney. On the wall, the shadow of claws, and the drooling snarl of the Jabberwock.
There's no stopping them. A million mirrors, a million nightmares, a million looking-glass worlds.
Kalingrad at night. In an alleyway, the brief glimpse of the Bandersnatch's frumious claws.
And him to lead them, with his madness, the feverish rage that's fueled his reflection for thousands of years.
You let him out, Alice. And now it's teatime.