The Hazel Wood

The gates open without Alice having to push them; the look of the lawn and estate have a surreal, story-like quality. She thinks it appears to be “perfect.” She goes in. She sees five-year-old Ella on the landing and tries to keep up as Ella runs away. This attempt draws her further into the house, where she observes many strange rooms, halls, and spaces. She runs into a man who fits the description of the duke Althea married; he seems to think Alice is someone else, becomes upset, and goes into the next room, where there is a gunshot. Next she sees a strange ballroom crowded with dancers. Finch is there with a figure that looks like Alice. Leaving the dreamlike ball, she finds a “nightlight-lit bedroom” that at first seems homey and safe (241). Going in, though, she realizes it is not “any more real than the rest of it” because Althea sits on the bed inside (241).

Alice also sees a teenage Ella on the bed. Althea begins to tell Ella the story of how they came to be recluses in the Hazel Wood, stylizing the tale as a fairy tale. She says she built a bridge to the Hinterland and sought the Storyteller there to learn the way out. Althea took the stories and spread them back in her own “kingdom,” inadvertently knitting the two worlds together. She tells how ones from the “Other Kingdom” came through to hers, mocking her supposed escape and killing her King. Althea then tried to lock herself and Ella safely away in the Hazel Wood. Ella grew up clever and strong; one day she found a Hinterland baby in the Halfway Wood, a girl baby with black eyes—and stole her.

Althea seems to recognize Alice then and tells her that Alice is actually Alice-Three-Times. Ella took her from the Hazel Wood and began their nomad-like life together, moving whenever a Hinterland character found them (their “bad luck”). Althea says Katherine tried to get Alice to kill herself in the woods because her doing so “would burn a door between worlds that would never fade. Their vicious holidays out there would never end” (251). Althea grips Alice by the hands and tells her that “she” has tried for a long time to get Alice back and has not permitted Althea to die because Alice has been missing. Althea’s touch on Alice opens a door to the Hinterland, and Alice falls through.

Alice sees and senses her surroundings with a hyper-acuity that makes trees and landscapes on earth fade dismally by comparison. She sees a girl descending stairs and moves toward her, but a man eating a chocolate bar stops Alice: “You don’t want to come between a Story and their story” (258). When he realizes Alice just arrived, he tells her to find her Janet for orientation, explaining briefly that he and other refugees know to stay away from Stories. Then he sees Alice’s hands, which are now so white and ice-like they seem bluish. He realizes she is Story, and she asks for his gloves. Going the direction he instructed, Alice encounters the Briar King, the foul-smelling Hinterland character who took Ella. He cannot tell her where Ella is, even when Alice touches him threateningly and he begins to freeze from her touch. She next finds the old woman in need of a task as the refugee directed. Alice collects apples for her; when the old woman offers her a wish in return, Alice asks to go to Janet. The woman pushes Alice, and Alice is suddenly on the ground in front of cottage with a red door.

Ingrid and Janet live in the cottage. Janet calls Ingrid “Tam” occasionally in a pointed reference to Tam Lin, a Scottish folktale in which a maid named Janet falls in love with and saves an enchanted man named Tam Lin. Ingrid is suspicious of Alice, especially when she sees the Hinterland-style tattoo on her shoulder and neck, which Alice got in imitation of Ella’s (Alice now understands why Ella was upset at the sight of Alice’s tattoo). Janet pours them each a shot of a liquor that tastes of many different flavors to Alice; it turns out to be a truth serum-like drug that causes terrible stomach pains when the drinker lies.

Janet sends Ingrid out and briefs Alice on more Hinterland details: It’s not that big; she arrived on purpose; Story characters become ex-Story when their story is no longer told. Janet asks for Alice’s story and is quietly amazed to hear that Althea is Alice’s mother’s mother; Janet knew Althea and came to the Hinterland with her, 50 years prior, when Janet was searching for doors between worlds. She found a lead in a book to a door to the Hinterland, and Althea and she planned for the excursion while falling in love. Althea, however, was like a “bored child on holiday” in the Hinterland and made a “dark deal” with the Story Spinner to leave (279)—but not before following the Stories very closely and learning all their tales.

The Story Spinner wove a story Althea used like a bridge to go back; then she had her Hinterland stories published, resulting in bridges between the two worlds all over. Refugees came in, and Stories got out, some to cause trouble, some to track down copies of Althea’s book and destroy them. At this point, Alice reveals to Janet that she is actually Alice-Three-Times, and they discover that her ice has climbed to her shoulders. Janet tells Alice to try to go to the Story Spinner in the morning.

Janet and Ingrid insist the next morning that Alice’s sense of the Hinterland—like an intuition—will kick in and take her to the Story Spinner. Alice does feel more comfortable and confident in her surroundings this new day, as though she recognizes places and people. She ends up at a tavern, where she spends all day watching the refugees and ex-Stories come in to eat, drink, and talk. One bartender, Alain, is a Swiss refugee who wants to hear book plots and songs post-1972. Alice obliges. The other bartender is a blond woman who sees everyone out at the end of the day, then sits next to Alice at the bar. She is the Story Spinner.

She explains that once she sets a Story into motion, she mostly just keeps the threads from tangling, and that when a Story is over, it simply begins again. She tells Alice, “But you […] are the hitch in the clockwork” (295). She hopes Alice came back to return to her place in her story; Alice offers to do so one time before she goes, then realizes returning to New York may not be that easy. She asks if the Spinner will let her go home. The Spinner suggests that while Alice cannot “end” her own story, she might be able to change it—to “destabilize it from the inside” so that “the story might let you go” (296). She says it’s a big “if,” but Alice is eager to try, even if it means returning to a different time than she left.