Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

Genres: Horror; Psychological Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

Shirley Jackson meets The Shining in this richly atmospheric and thrillingly tense new novel from the acclaimed author of the "deliciously creepy" debut Baby Teeth (New York Post)

One mother's love may be all that stands between her family, an enigmatic presence—and madness.

After years of city life, Orla and Shaw Bennett are ready for the quiet of New York's Adirondack mountains—or at least, they think they are. Settling into the perfect farmhouse with their two children, they are both charmed and unsettled by the expanse of their land, the privacy of their individual bedrooms, and the isolation of life a mile from any neighbor.

But none of the Bennetts could expect what lies waiting in the woods, where secrets run dark and deep. When something begins to call to the family—from under the earth, beneath the trees, and within their minds—Orla realizes she might be the only one who can save them...if she can find out what this force wants before it's too late.

With an ending inescapable and deeply satisfying, Wonderland brilliantly blends horror and suspense to probe the boundaries of family, loyalty, love, and the natural world.

Release date: July 14, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

Orla tried not to think of it as an amputation, but that’s how it felt. When they left the New York City apartment behind, that was a leg. She’d hobbled northward weeks ago and now, waving goodbye to her husband’s Plattsburgh family, that was an arm. She buckled her seat belt with her remaining hand, gazed down at her remaining foot, boot-clad and muddy. This body would never dance again. No more exhilarating reveals as the curtain rose on the stage. No more applause. No more making her sinewy limbs as fluid as a piece of music. Only bare-bones living. And endless woods.

Shaw had been such a good partner in the first couple of weeks after her retirement. He’d focused daily on the positives: her perpetually strained muscles could finally heal; she’d suffer no more blackened toenails; she wouldn’t have to spend hours a day in the company of sweaty, smelly people. In the spirit of the new life they were planning, she’d acknowledged the truthfulness of his optimism. But she didn’t have a clear memory of having made such complaints, at least not frequently, and not with the intention of wishing her life had been different. Sometimes the writer’s pencils wore down, and sometimes the painter’s brushes became stiff. These were casual obstacles of the trade, as were her aches, not reasons to abandon one’s art.

Yet she knew, in her marrow. Forty-one was old for a ballet dancer and everything required more effort than it once had; the time had come. And she’d agreed—the end of her time would mark the beginning of Shaw’s. It was his turn to pursue his artistic dreams.

Some days she felt nothing but the excitement of such a big change, a true adventure. But other days…moving deep into the Adirondacks was a bit more extreme than what she’d once envisioned, when “leaving the city” meant moving to a place like Pittsburgh, where she’d grown up. A smaller city, it was the best of all worlds: diverse, cultural, affordable. They could have a nice family home there, sprawling by Manhattan standards, and the children could have their Lola and Lolo. Her parents would have been so happy to have them so close. But, as a couple, they also embraced the philosophy of seizing the day. And exploring. And the possibility of making discoveries about yourself in unexpected places.

“Carpe diem,” she murmured.

Her moment of acceptance shattered, flash-frozen, and she caught her breath. There, on the side of the road. A pair of legs. A bloated body.

The car drew closer and it was real enough—not an illusion—but the back half of a deer, not a human. She saw the rest as they passed, the front legs crossed in prayer, blood staining the snow around its skull. The road dissolved behind them, obliterated by the sideways sleet. It hadn’t felt like this before, when she knew they’d be returning to Walker, Julie, and the boys at the end of the day. The trees got denser and swallowed the light. There was no going back.

Shaw whirled his attention from the road to her. “Did you just say ‘Carpe diem’?”

Orla shifted her back to the hostile world just beyond the glass. His grin reminded her to resume breathing. There were flecks of bluish paint in his hair; it had become a common sight during the past year, when he finally understood the quivering arrow of his internal compass. He’d started with small canvases and acrylic paint, but over the months the canvases grew, and their apartment took on the aroma of linseed oil and turpentine when he switched to oils. He wasn’t the tidiest of painters and some part of his skin or clothing—or hair—provided a preview of his day’s work. Though what was in his hair now was surely from their daughter’s newly rehabbed bedroom.

“Did I?” she asked. “I guess I did—that’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. We’re carpe-dieming to the fullest!”

She snorted; sometimes his enthusiasm was contagious. Hoping to catch a glint of a smile on her daughter’s face, she turned toward the back seat. Behind her, Eleanor Queen sat gazing out the window, eyes on the sky. Orla prayed she hadn’t seen the dead deer. She wanted the wilderness—which was still what she called the Adirondacks—to be good for her contemplative child. Eleanor Queen—just El or Eleanor to some, but never to her mother—hadn’t seemed stalwart enough, aggressive enough, to survive into adulthood in the city. At nine, she was still afraid of the dark, one of many fears that Orla and Shaw accepted in a resigned way; they couldn’t, as imaginative people themselves, promise-promise-promise that nothing frightening lurked in the dark. And they respected that their daughter had pragmatic fears: bustling stairs that descended into the subways, sirens that screamed of danger, sidewalks with their crush of hurrying pedestrians.

Beside her daughter, four-year-old Tycho sat in his car seat bouncing a fuzzy, long-limbed moose on his knee. He sang under his breath with his own melody and lyrics: “Driving down the road…going to our home…driving in the car…going very far…”

As much as she’d tried to fully embrace the move—for her children’s sake, and because Shaw wanted it so very badly—a fear shadowed her that her urban family wasn’t suited to the wilds of nowhere. It followed her as they rode in the car, a black specter with an inky, human shape that she could almost see at the edge of her vision.

She turned back to Shaw, ready to request his reassurance (for the hundredth time) that they’d thought through every contingency and were truly ready for their new lives. But looking at him, she didn’t need to ask. So content and eager, his hands at ten and two, he drove their new-old four-wheel-drive SUV like it was what he’d been waiting for, and he was finally where he belonged. And maybe he was. She saw him with new clarity. The scraggly beard, the dirt under his nails, the way his bulky coat looked twenty years old in spite of being a recent purchase. The Adirondacks was his territory; Plattsburgh, where they’d spent the past three weeks with his brother, his hometown. When she’d Googled cities near Plattsburgh, she’d gotten a list of honest-to-God hamlets; the nearest actual city, by her standards—Montreal—wasn’t even in the same country. Maybe Shaw had never really been a city boy, but his creative impulses had driven him there.

Had Orla’s divinity kept him there? Sometimes she saw herself through his eyes—his shimmering awe of her talent, her drive.

Maybe, when they first became lovers, he’d thought a bit of her golden dust would rub off on him. He didn’t complain when it hadn’t and never suggested giving up on his own dreams. She respected him for that, and they stuck to their city lifestyle even when their friends moved onward, seeking a different life or more space in Brooklyn or Astoria. And then came Eleanor Queen. And Tycho. She’d made two post-maternity comebacks—rare for her profession—but the Empire City Contemporary Ballet wasn’t as elite or competitive as the city’s more renowned companies. And she had worked for it—to get in, to stay in, to come back—beyond even what her abilities and body might have predicted for her future. So they became the classic Manhattan family, squashed in a six-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom apartment, making it work against the odds.

Shaw slipped a CD into the dashboard player. Acoustic music, surprisingly melancholy. He never asked anyone else what they’d like to listen to. Orla might have been the primary breadwinner, supporting her family with her formidable albeit not quite star-worthy talents, but it was Shaw who set their family’s beatnik tone. Orla’s father called him, privately, a dabbler. She didn’t think that was entirely fair, since Shaw took on most of what should have been shared household duties. But it was undeniable that Shaw’s true calling was hard to pin down. He’d played guitar at several Village open-mics. Read his poetry at others. He wrote a screenplay, and  took photographs, and whacked away at pieces of wood that never quite became the sculptures he envisioned. But that had changed during the past year when he’d settled on a medium and the daily discipline needed to pursue it.

After becoming mesmerized by a particular exhibition while gallery-hopping in Chelsea (a favorite, free activity) and revisiting the exhibit numerous times, Shaw claimed an unfamiliar certainty: He knew what he needed to do. He channeled his energy into painting somewhat surreal versions of things he’d photographed. Cityscapes had attracted him at first, a blend of gritty realism with a touch of unexpected whimsy. Sophisticated and polished, they made his previous efforts look like doodles. But his real desire was to turn his eye on the natural world. Had it just been a matter of his needing more space—which he certainly did if he wanted to continue painting anything larger than the lid of a shoebox—Orla might not have been convinced to make such a rural move. But he needed nature now the way she’d once needed a metropolis with the heart of a diva.

  

They’d visited the land for the first time six months ago; his brother, Walker, had alerted them to it soon after they started talking about what they might do and where they might do it. Neither of them had particularly liked it; the old wooden farmhouse was a mess and more cramped than Orla had desired. They hadn’t even bothered to show it to the kids then, not considering it a real contender, though they’d poked around the nearby, undeniably quaint town of Saranac Lake Village. The only thing Shaw had really sparked to was the tree: a giant evergreen fifty yards behind the nothing of a house, its massive trunk rocketing upward from the middle of the earth, surrounded by smaller trees, like attendants in waiting.

While the real estate agent made phone calls in his car, Orla and Shaw had strolled back to the tree, Shaw attuned to its siren call, a glow on his face.

“I saw a tree like this once, a bit north of here, when I was camping with my dad. Was just a kid, maybe nine—Bean’s age. I told my dad I could feel it. I felt something. Maybe it was the first time I realized, or thought about, how there were things in the natural world that outlived us, that saw history and maybe recorded time in their own way. My brother just teased me—par for the course back then. But my dad said something really weird—so weird that I always remembered it, and Walker shut up, no witty comebacks.”

“What did he say?” Orla slipped her hand into his. Shaw’s father had died of pancreatic cancer years ago, and she often wished she’d gotten to know him better.

“That sometimes when you’re out in the world—he meant the mountains, the forests; he’d always lived here—you recognize the other parts of your soul.” Shaw looked at her then, still pondering those words. “I had no idea what he meant, but after that, every time I went into the woods I was looking…for something.”

“For parts of yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“Your dad taught you…to see how we’re part of something bigger. I like that.”

“How we’re connected.” He’d held her face in his hands and kissed her. Orla got light-headed, giggly, like they’d gone back in time and were newly in love.

Just as they’d reached for the tree, fascinated by the ancient bark, the real estate agent’s voice cut through the air. They hurried back.

Orla thought that had been the end of it, an interesting possibility and a pleasant visit. But after they got home, Shaw began reporting a recurring dream: Orla and the kids living on that land. Blossoming. And visions of himself in the room off the living room, conjuring his masterpieces. They resumed talking about it. The surrounding trees had been so beautiful in the spring, a tapestry of bursting green, with that special tree off in the distance.

“It’s like it’s our guardian,” Shaw had said. “I see it, towering, in my dreams.”

And his work improved and evolved, incorporating more and more wild greenery even though they hadn’t yet left the city. As his process and his vision solidified, he became more convinced.

“It’s calling to me. I think it’s my muse.” The ancient tree began to invade his work, peeking over the tops of buildings.

Orla had never been called by nature, but she believed him. It was a new thrill—for both of them—to see him find himself by losing himself in the creation of his paintings. Orla liked how the land reminded Shaw of his father and the philosophical lessons of his youth. When they checked back in with the real estate agent three months later, the price had dropped. The house had been empty for a while; out-of-state relatives were anxious to sell. They put in a lowball offer, and when it was accepted, a trajectory was set in motion.

2

Are all the windows in now, Papa?” Eleanor Queen asked from the back seat, sounding as concerned as usual.

“Double-paned. Keep the wind out.” Shaw grinned at his daughter in the rearview mirror. He’d become more animated in recent months—noticeable when they’d first committed to the move, but it had increased over the previous three weeks as he grew eager to settle into his new studio. Sometimes his enthusiasm manifested in him pacing or speaking too quickly or tapping his fingers or foot. Gradually her mellow husband was becoming more manic; Orla wasn’t sure she liked it.

Though the kids hadn’t seen the house before they’d left the city, they’d monitored the renovations via day-trips while they all stayed at Walker’s. It had been fun bunking up with the other Bennett gang. Shaw had an effortless camaraderie with his brother, and his sister-in-law, Julie, was so nice. Orla (a Bennett by marriage, even if she’d kept her last name, Moreau) had enjoyed their buoyant conversations and domesticity. The boys, too, had been surprisingly accommodating. Twelve-year-old Derek hadn’t minded giving up his room for Shaw and Orla, and fourteen-year-old Jamie had welcomed all the younger kids into his. Eleanor Queen and Tycho giggled at night as they shared a single inflatable mattress, head to toe and toe to head. Even though the children were cousins, Orla had considered it remarkable that the boys had been so quick to entertain a nine-year-old and a four-year-old for days on end. Good kids. They’d shuttled back and forth in various configurations of adults and offspring to get the new-old house ready.

Her daughter’s voice brought her back to the present. “And we won’t be cold?” Eleanor Queen asked, her voice full of worry.

The road was wet and black. The trees bare and black. Streaks of icy snow shot in horizontal bullets past the windows.

“Brand-new furnace,” Shaw said with a grin. “Thousands of dollars!”

“That’ll keep everything cozy-warm,” Orla said, turning to soothe her daughter. “And we got the chimney cleaned for the wood-burning stove, so that’s all ready too. I can already see you snuggled up in front of it, reading a book.”

Eleanor Queen started to smile. But then the pelting snow, a full-on blizzard now, caught her attention again and her little brow furrowed.

Shaw was as proud of the damn furnace as another man might be of a fancy Italian motorcycle. “This is the heart of the house,” he’d said as they stood in the basement watching its installation. “The heart of our new home.”

But for Orla, the cost of everything was becoming a concern. The house and property. The SUV. The furnace and windows. The new generator, in case the electricity went out—even their water, brought up by a pump linked to a deep well, depended on electricity. And the day-to-day things they needed to keep everything and everyone up and running, alive and healthy. They’d paid cash for as much as they could, but she kept a watchful eye on their reserves.

The Chelsea co-op, which they’d owned for twenty-two years, had sold quickly and earned them a nice profit, and she’d offered to pay her father back for the down payment, as promised. He’d declined it. “Keep it to help with the kids’ education, in case I’m not around.”

Everything about his words bothered her—that he didn’t foresee being alive when her kids were ready for college, and that he understood the more immediate problem: their savings simply weren’t going to last that long and they needed it for mortgage, food, utilities, car payments, incidentals.

Maybe Shaw expected her to get a job if things got iffy. It was his turn to be creative, her turn to manage the household. He’d supplemented their income with various jobs over the years—waiter, bartender, tax preparer, temp. Maybe such options would have been available to her if they were living in Plattsburgh, about an hour northeast of their homestead. But their place in the woods—a forested piece of land with a view of no one and nothing man-made, up a dirt-and-gravel road on a gently sloping hill—was beyond any clearly defined boundaries. After living in walkable, public-transportation-friendly New York since she was seventeen, Orla was just now learning how to drive, but she wasn’t yet comfortable behind the wheel. Even in good weather, it was too far to walk anywhere. And in bad weather…

She gazed out the window. The extended region had the dubious honor of having the coldest winter temperatures in the continental United States. Not to mention occasional snowfalls by the foot.

Julie had sent them on their way with a big bag full of extra and outgrown winter gear—snow pants, boots, mittens, even a couple pair of snowshoes—and some tomatoes and green beans she’d canned over the summer. Was the summer season actually long enough to grow vegetables? Were those skills Orla would have to learn to help stretch their funds—growing, canning, preserving?

She’d tried to fill her children with a sense of adventure, especially during the weeks when they’d been without a habitable home of their own. Tycho either didn’t notice or didn’t care that his life was in flux. As long as someone he knew was within his field of vision, he was happy. But it bothered Orla that Eleanor Queen still had such basic and essential concerns. She’d been to the house several times, had witnessed the progression of improvements. So why didn’t she think it was ready? Where did she think her parents were taking her?

Eleanor Queen had watched the workers remove the old windows from the farmhouse. When the reflective glass of the big living-room window was gone, leaving a shockingly dark hole, the girl had clutched Orla’s hand. “Are we going to die?”

“Of course not!” Orla had said with a laugh, giving her a squeeze. But for a second there had been only the squish of puffy jacket, and Orla’s blood throbbed with the panic that her daughter had abruptly evaporated. Then she felt Eleanor Queen’s little bones, and the sensation passed.

“Are you excited to have your very own rooms?” Orla said now in a cheery voice, pushing the uncomfortable memory away. Shaw slowed down as visibility diminished.

“Yay!” Tycho said, though he was probably the one who cared the least. Which was fortunate, considering his sliver of a room seemed to have been an afterthought, little more than a closet with a window, created by the addition of a wall that severed the largest of the upstairs bedrooms. But it was still more personal space than he—or any of them—had had. After Eleanor Queen was born, they turned the one bedroom into a nursery and bought themselves a new sleeper-sofa for the living room. A few years later came the bunk beds. The four of them were very accustomed to compact living.

“And Papa has his very first studio, where he can create his masterpieces!” Orla said. She grinned as Tycho’s face lit up, always delighted for everyone. She was still smiling when she turned to Shaw. He looked funny when he was happy, the progression of half-moon lines around his eyes and his teeth on full display, angled this way and that, his upper teeth sitting directly on his lower ones. A crazy grimace. But she was glad for his happiness.

“My own stu-di-o,” he sang, tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel in contra time to the music on the CD. “Where I’ll do my painting-o.” Tycho wasn’t the only one in the family who liked to croon little ditties.

The studio, as it had been in his dream, was the spacious bedroom directly off the living room. For the first time in fifteen years, Shaw would have his own workspace, with a door. Orla was a bit envious, but reminded herself that if he was in the studio, she could go to their bedroom upstairs—and shut the door. It would be new for all of them: the many rooms, the many doors.

Tycho’s eyes fluttered with sleep; the moose in his hand was splayed across his lap, already down for the count. Ever aware of her own body, she too felt a heaviness, a desire to hibernate. Yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast still trudged through her system. And her legs (still two, in spite of the lingering sensation of their having been severed, cleaved) ached and she longed to jump from the car, grab her heel, and extend her leg up to her ear.

They’d always said Plattsburgh wasn’t so far from where they’d be and that they’d go there often for shopping and family visits. But as they drove down Route 3, the world seemed to elongate behind them, stretching beyond recognition, obliterating the landmarks that would guide them back. Orla struggled to accept that they were still in New York—State, not City—but how could it be so different? It had been easier to agree to this when it hadn’t seemed so utterly foreign. North of the city hadn’t sounded so bad, with the word city dangling on, unwilling to let go, and New York still their resident state. But the city was gone. Her life was gone. And the landscape—unrecognizable.

She turned up the music, hoping to blot out the wind screaming beyond her window. You owe him this, it said. You promised. Shaw peeked at her, elated, and she let him assume the best, that she was as happy as he was. But even the dulcet tones of the strummed guitar wouldn’t let her off. Owe. In the vibrating strings. Her husband would never say it, but it existed in the silent space between them. My turn. We agreed. And even softer, beneath that, a voice she’d struggled to suppress. Your part is finished. The curtain had fallen and wouldn’t rise again. And she was afraid of the dark.

3

The snow had laid down a thick carpet by the time they snaked their way up the driveway. The kids were wide awake, faces pressed to the windows. They’d all been in the house before, of course, but none of them had spent a night there or seen it under such wintry conditions. Shaw turned off the music, and the fog they breathed, the recycled mishmash from all of their lungs, hummed with expectation.

“So pretty!” Tycho said when the farmhouse came into view.

Bless his heart. It must have been the snow, like frosting on the tree limbs with smears of white on the roof. Blue-gray paint, so old it looked mostly washed away, and the windows were trimmed in what might once have been a festive red, now rusty scabs. They’d need to have the exterior painted if they were to keep the wood protected, but next year; they’d already spent so much. It looked fragile to Orla, nothing like the massive steel buildings, the stone and brick and solid permanence of her past life. A gust of wind could blow it down. Two stories of decomposable wood, pitched roof, a porch made of matchsticks, and windows of watchful eyes and open mouths.

“All right, everybody ready?” Shaw pulled into the detached, three-walled garage, its flimsy boards even more weathered than the house’s, its roof equally as steep to prevent it from accumulating too much snow. Along the outside of the near wall, a bank of firewood, half covered by a blue tarp, sat ready for use. And around the back wall, out of view, was their generator. They’d had the electrician reroute the critical circuits in such a way that if they lost power, the generator would automatically kick on and take over.

The kids unbuckled and hopped out, their tongues ready to catch the snowflakes.

“Wish we could’ve left some windows open,” Orla said. Painting the bedrooms had been the last of their home improvements before their furniture was delivered from storage, and she worried about the fumes. She worried about other things too, more nebulous and harder to express.

Shaw grabbed luggage and groceries out of the back of the SUV. “It should be okay, been a few days.”

Eleanor Queen and Tycho spun in circles, enjoying the snow. In a flash of memory, Orla saw herself and her brother, Otto. It happened at rare moments, a ghost image from her past—a flickering film that quickly dissolved—when she saw her children playing together. “Ready to come in and check out your finished rooms? We can get all your stuff unpacked.”

Tycho, incapable of moving in a restrained fashion, ran toward the porch, arms flailing. The porch’s railing dipped slightly in the center where the ground beneath it had settled unevenly. Shaw, bags under each arm, opened the front door with his son hopping at his heels, both a-chatter with shared eagerness. The house swallowed their sounds as they entered.

Abandoned by her playmate, Eleanor Queen lingered in the yard. She looked up at the sky. The woods. Her dark eyes alert and watchful.

“Eleanor Queen?”

Still the little girl assessed her surroundings, with more wariness than she’d shown on previous visits to the house. Orla felt a chill as she watched her. What was she concentrating on with such rapt attention? The girl squinted, cocked her head, like someone trying to make sense of a distant sound. To make sense of something that Orla couldn’t hear, or see.

“Love? What’s wrong?”

“What kind of tree did Papa say that was?” Her mittened hand pointed to the giant that reared up fifty yards behind their house. Its immense boughs frowned down on the munchkin trees that surrounded it. Maybe it was the slate sky, or the other trees without their leaves, but the great pine looked even older than it had in the spring, like an old person drained of color.

Orla tried to recall what the real estate agent had said when he’d shown them the property. He’d boasted of the tree being over five hundred years old, she remembered that. “Eastern white pine, I think? We’ll ask Papa again. It’s so big because it’s five hundred years old.”

Eleanor Queen continued to gaze at it with an intensity that Orla found disconcerting. She didn’t see admiration for the ancient tree on her daughter’s face, or curiosity. But something more troubling.

Trepidation.

“Well, come on, we can get your snow pants and gear if you want to play outside.” Orla really didn’t think that’s what her daughter wanted in that moment, but it’s what Orla had hoped for her when they’d talked about the North Country, that she would like the tranquillity, the slow pace of the wilderness. Eleanor Queen wouldn’t have to worry about getting run over by a taxi or crushed against a pole in a crowded subway car. Perhaps she just wasn’t used to how quiet it was, how different. How the wind, in a silent place, made everything speak.

Eleanor Queen abruptly turned and charged toward the house.

Orla didn’t want to think it was fear she saw on her daughter’s face. But she hesitated in the yard as Eleanor Queen scrambled inside. What had spooked her? Was something out there? She scanned the terrain at the back of their property. The air carried the cozy fragrance of wood smoke—had Shaw lit the stove already? Or was that a plume rising above the trees? Impossible; there were no homes, not even distant ones, visible behind them.

Movement caught her eye and she refocused on the giant pine in time to see a cascade of snow drop from its ragged limbs. The wind had settled and she didn’t think it the source of the snow’s collapse. Could a tree shiver? Shake off the cold and wet like a dog? She heard a sound she couldn’t identify…a soft pfloof. Again, and again.

Her mouth dropped open. Something was moving toward her, something quiet but immense. Her gut said, Run! The nerves in her spine jangled a warnin. . .