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By way of answer, Rose pulled the second bottle’s stopper and knocked back the contents. “I shouldn’t go back anyway. The worm’s after me.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Oh…I feel strange…”
“Right!” I remembered the story now that it was happening before my eyes. “It makes you smaller!”
“This is so weird!” Rose’s voice rose as her height fell.
While Rose shrank, the bottle in my hands started to shake and grow with an ominous cracking sound. “Damnation!” I pulled the stopper and lifted the bottle to my lips, hoping I could gulp it all down before half a liter became two liters or five. The stuff tasted like cherries and pineapple. I kept swallowing and swallowing. I tasted custard, butter, more swallowing, apples…and…roast turkey? Really?
“Wake up!”
“Whu?” I wasn’t sure which voice was mine. I swallowed. My mouth felt dry, my eyes gummy, unfocused. “Huh.”
“Wake up, Red.” Xavier’s cultured voice held a measure of concern. “Are you all right?”
“Huh?” I straightened and found that I’d been leaning with my forehead against the bookshelves. “I…uh…must have dozed off.”
“I’m taking you to where you live,” Xavier said. “You’ve clearly got a concussion, probably a mild one, but the treatment is the same whether it’s mild or severe.”
“And that is?” I yawned and stretched, looking around at the bookshelves. I certainly didn’t feel entirely right. Something—perhaps the vagrant’s bone-crushing grip or the two-ton steel box that had slammed into me—had cracked me. That’s how it felt. As if I were cracked and things that should be inside were leaking out, and things that should be outside were leaking in. “The treatment,” I asked again. “What is it?”
Xavier looked across at me oddly. Even more oddly…we were in his car. “Like I told you: rest and monitoring.”
I nodded, deciding not to mention that I’d just lost five minutes. Clearly, I’d given him directions, because we pulled up outside the Togetherness Trust house. And, watched by a lone face up at fellow inmate Sarah Godwin’s window, I got out and set off toward the front door. Time to face the music.
I remembered a belated “Thanks,” and Xavier pulled off as I turned away again.
The front door opened before I laid a finger on it, and there was Stacey-Ray, reaching for my sore shoulder with a meaty hand.
“Where the hell have you been? We thought we’d lost you too!”
I yelped in pain as she hauled me into the house. “Too? Who else is gone?”
“Sophie, of course!” She maneuvered me ahead of her. “We thought you’d run off together.”
“Sophie? But she came back…” Concussion or no concussion, I remembered that.
“She didn’t.” Stacey-Ray pushed me into the kitchen, where Frank watched me, grim-faced over a big mug of coffee bearing the legend BIG MUG.
“But Greg said she did! Greg said…” I protested.
“Greg?” Stacey-Ray shrugged her heavy shoulders. “He’s gone too.”
Chapter 15
Rose
Red vanished while drinking the last few gulps from the sizable bottle that had just started to shake, indicating an imminent growth spurt. He disappeared entirely, without the least warning, and left the bottle hanging in the air. Sadly, it hung only for a heartbeat before it started to fall.
Rose ran for the door, screaming, knowing that the danger was not limited to being squashed by the empty container, now three times her own height thanks to the shrinking potion she’d consumed. The shattering sound behind her was deeper than she had anticipated, as if a factory chimney had fallen rather than a medicine bottle. She was sprinting with reckless speed, and yet the impact site lay little more than a foot behind her. Time seemed to slow, miring her in the slackening tempo of her heart. The first chunk of glass, larger than her head, passed her as if she were standing still, a tumbling, glittering, razored mass. Another fragment, a shard long as her arm from elbow to fingertip, whickered past, its wickedly sharp points chasing each other in circles. Suddenly the air was full of fatally swift pieces of broken bottle, one larger than she was.
Quite how she remained without perforation, Rose had no idea. The floor to either side of her route to the door lay littered with the bottle’s remains. She staggered out onto a graveled path sparkling with tiny bits of glass and lined with similarly sparkling knee-high hedges. The doorway through which she’d come stood unsupported, showing the giant hall from both sides. The house she and Red had gazed at together lay in the middle of the formal gardens. The sort of home that might be a vicarage or something of that order. Not as grand as Miss Havisham’s home, but vastly more welcoming.
Even so, Rose turned away, wanting to get a feel for the place before becoming ensnared in conversations with the locals. She found herself wishing instead that she had had more time with the boy, Red, who had seemed, despite his distraction, to be someone she would like to know better. And not only because it seemed to her that he might inhabit the world that the Badger had told her about—the world where the place she now stood in existed within a book upon a shelf. The world where her mother had written her onto the pages of a book that she had set her muse to guard.
Red had been able to travel between that world—that existence—and the linked series of worlds that Rose had been running through. He seemed to share that ability with the worm that pursued her, though she’d sensed no malevolence in him, quite the opposite in fact. She wished now that they had had longer together, that he had not been so keen to wake from the dream of her. If he lived in her mother’s world, he might take her a message from Rose. But what hope they would meet again among so many different worlds, each of them so wide? Especially when his visit seemed to have been unintentional.
The countryside in this Wonderland proved to be not dissimilar to that of the Riverbank, and it was to a river that Rose’s feet led her, following the slope of a country lane down which she could easily imagine Mr. Toad driving at reckless speed.
Rose came toward the water’s edge, through grass that, though it was waist height for most of the way, grew ever longer as it approached the river, until she felt herself drowning in an emerald sea.
