Part VI

Raspberries. That's all Alice could think of. Perhaps this was because the father who had kidnapped her and brought her to this delightful house hidden in the woods with so many tools and sheds and boxes of metal with tiny wires hanging out of them, was putting little raspberries into his lemonade and dropping an occasional few into his rather greedy-looking mouth.

Distracted by thoughts of raspberries, Alice followed her so-called father back into the garage. He seemed to have forgotten about her as he stood looking at his motorcar. He wanted to tear up the sheet metal for a little experiment, he mumbled.

"Experiment the Fifth is ready," he told Alice, snapping his head around to look at her. A shock of hair so black it was clearly evil fell out of the gray-knit cap that was sagging on his head. "Come with me. NOW!"

Part V

The garage was blue. Alice asked why. The man did not know right now. But he dragged her by her thin arm through the doorway and into the house. What a strange little mountain house this was! Alice couldn't think of anything mountain-ier. And there was that man who called himself her father, making a tall glass of lemonade and doing all kinds of calculations in his head.

"One and forty-five, also, I need to check the formula of the radiator fluid."

Alice thought about this briefly.

Formula

A plan for doing hard things.

What was the man going to do?

Part IV

"What an intellectual this man must be!" thought Alice. She had heard the word intellectual used at dinner parties and knew that grown-ups reserved it for the best guests, who were usually professors. "So if a professor is someone who teaches how to do experiments, this man, who calls himself my father, is probably a scholar. Because he knows how to experiment." Alice felt very wise and in control because she now knew this in her brain. No one could hurt you if your brain knew things. She smiled a little as they sped up the road. She wondered if she should chat with the stranger, the way her mother did with men. She decided not to.

The Actual Meaning of The Word 'Intellectual'

A person who thinks of knowledge and does something with it.

"But where are we going?" asked Alice presently.

The stranger tapped his beard. "To the tower--that doesn't matter now," he interrupted himself to say. He also spit as he pronounced the letter 't.' Alice hated this. But how could one argue with a father who is also an intellectual? Anyway, she couldn't think of anything saucy to say at the moment, and when one can't think of anything kind or witty to say, one must keep quiet, which is exactly what Alice did all the way up the blue mountain to the tower' garage, where the stranger parked his motorcar.

Part III

The stranger was not lying.

High in the ice-covered mountains, far, far away from the heat-washed valley where Alice and her family lived among the cacti, a low building curled around the bends of a road. A tall tower pointed to the sky with many glass windows and wooden porches on every level, high and low.

Cacti:

Plural for cactus, which is a prickly plant and usually looks fat and green. Sometimes pink blossoms bloom from its branches.

Part II

Laboratory:

A building where tools are used for conducting tests (not like the kind in a school) and scientific experiments.

Part I

There was Alice, dropping down a well. She liked to pretend that there was a pink rabbit already down there to guide the way, like in her favorite stories. Alice, a very different sort of Alice than the one in those stories, could not hear talking at the base of the well. There was no gurgling of a little stream because the well had dried up like her grandfather did at his death. When she touched the bottom, the sun was only a pale circle in the sky and the dusty pebbles got in her shoes. Alice used the well to play hide-and-seek in, but it took ever so long to clamber back out, and it was noisy business.

That is why she hid there long enough for the cousins to spread out, searching, on that summery day, the fifth of June 1952. It was the same day Alice disappeared.

The man who took Alice was tall, with a sharp nose and dressed very neatly (neat as a pin, my grandmother used to say) except for his very scruffy hair. Alice liked him at once, though she learned later what some strangers do best: kidnap little children. And kidnapped she was, right out of the well by the long arms of the neat gentleman with scruffy hair. He held some candy in a handkerchief. Alice wondered if he had blown his nose on the handkerchief ever before, and if he had, had he also washed it carefully and ironed it before putting delicious candies in? He didn't have time to explain. He was her father, he told her.

"They all thought I had died in that war, but darling, here I am."

Alice scooped her arms around the stranger in a hug, which he awkwardly received.

"We've got to go," he told her. "They expect us at the laboratory."

"Oh, a laboratory? Whatever is that? Are the cousins coming?" Alice asked.

"A laboratory is a place where we do experiments. We do a lot of them, a lot of them we do."

"What sort of experiments?" said Alice nervously, twisting the now empty handkerchief in her lap. But they were already climbing in his motorcar and speeding away.