The tiny Craftsman cottage sitting on the hill was actually rather picturesque. It was more like her own little bungalow, with sky blue paint and a sharp-pitched roof. Pretty pink shutters and a lovely garden filled with carrots and cabbages completed the scene. “I didn't know Bill had such good taste,” she murmured as she entered the neat little home. “I figured he'd be a lot messier.”
She made her way upstairs, passing a lot of cute bunny-themed pink and white furniture. “Hmm,” she muttered as she entered a tiny office, with its wide whitewashed fireplace and polished oak desk with brass trim she would have killed for. “Wonder where the fussy idiot keeps his gloves?” Riffling through the drawers only revealed flight plans and the usual paperwork. A glass jar of glistening hard candies perched on a small side table near the window. “Ehh, he won't notice if one's missing,” Brett chuckled as she pulled out a glossy purple lump.
The moment she swallowed the mouthful, she knew she'd done the wrong thing. “Oh no!” she groaned as he arms and legs shot across the floor, “not again! I thought I had control over this!” Voices could be heard screaming outside as her head hit the ceiling. “Ouch! Damn it, where's that mushroom?” She tried to reach for her pocket, but her hands were stuck in the windows. Twisting them only left her with sore hands and broken window panes. “Bill,” she yelled out the nearest window, “I swear, when I get home, I'll send you a check for the house! You should put warnings on that candy, not leave it out where people can eat it!”
“My house!” Bill shrieked the second he saw the giant hands. “My beautiful house! Look at it! Monster! MONSTER! Someone help, there's a monster in my house! Oh, help!”
She managed to peer out the side windows. “Hey boys,” she yelled back, “what about me? Anyone want to toss me up some cakes or something, so I can shrink again?”
“You're not eating me,” Bill wailed, “you...you monster, you! PAT!” He leaned over the garden, where a short body with a familiar long face and bow tie over a checked sweater vest dug in a bare dirt patch. “Pat, I need your help! There's a monster in my house! You're a handy-pig. Tell me how to get rid of it! What are you doing, anyway?”
“Her,” Brett corrected. “I'm a her, and I'm NOT a monster! I'm a perfectly normal woman who happens to be having a lot of growth problems right now!”
Pat...who closely resembled Pat Harrington with pig's ears and a pink snout...popped up from his dirt. “Sorry, I was digging for apples.” He climbed over the fence, his eyes widening when he caught sight of Brett. “Holy moly, pal, you've got one hell of a problem here! How'd that get in your house?”
“I don't know!” The White Rabbit wailed. “One minute, it was like it usually is, and the next...poof! Monster!”
“She's a big one, isn't she?” Something sharp and heavy poked at her fingers. She shoved it angrily away. “Mean, too. You're going to have problems with this one.”
She shifted stiffly as she tried to keep her right foot from doing worse damage to his couch. “I'll give you problems if you continue to refer to me like that! My name is Brett, and I'm not a monster!”
“Yeah,” Pat could be heard saying, “it's an arm all right, pal. Long sucker.”
“Would you do something?” Bill wailed. “I've got to get in there and find my gloves and fan. I'm going to be late for the Queen's croquet game! I don't want to lose my head, or run into the Red King!”
“And we can't do that, or we're all going to end up in the nearest toy shop.” Pat poked at her again. This time, she shoved him away. His fur and soft cotton vest were sleek and smooth under her rough fingers. “Oww! Hey!” There was a crunch and a smash. “Sorry, Billy boy! Didn't mean to land us in the cabbages!”
“Ohhhh, my poor cabbages! My beautiful garden!” Bill wailed, now sounding more like fussy Rabbit from the Winnie the Pooh books. “We have to get her out of here, before she destroys my house!”
Her ears pricked as someone singing country music could be heard from the road. “What in the...” Damn, that voice was familiar. “Wait...Bill Anderson? Whisperin' Bill?” It had to be. No one else could have crooned “World of Make Believe” with a voice somewhere between amused and sincere.
“Bill!” Pat called. “If you ain't too busy with that guitar of yours, could you lend us a hand or a foot here? We have a little problem.”
“Well, I sure can try.” Yeah, it was Bill Anderson, a country singer who'd appeared on the show a few times. She'd know that Jimmy Stewart aw-shucks drawl of his anywhere. “So boys, what's the problem? Other than than the giant hands wavin' out the windows, that is.” He twanged his instrument. “You know, there might be a song in that. 'Giant hands out the windows...'”
“Bill,” Brett yelled sharply, “now is not the time to compose another number one hit! Now is the time to figure out how you can get me back to my normal size! I can't reach the mushrooms like this!”
“Actually, Miss Monster,” Bill drawled, “you probably could reach the mushrooms in the garden...”
“Could we forget about that?” Pat shoved Bill at the nearest garden ladder. “Go in there and get rid of her!”
“Well, all right,” Bill started climbing. “If you think it'll really do something.”
Brett narrowed her eyes as he clutched the rings and climbed into the chimney. “Oh no. You are not coming in here to try anything!” She kicked her sandal-clad foot into the fireplace as hard as she could, sending a cloud of dust into the air...along with a lot of western-accented screaming.
She managed to lean into the open window in time to catch a lanky figure in sooty, scaly green suede shooting into the air, finally landing with a crash in the White Rabbit's bushes. “Mr. Anderson!” Pat wailed as he and Bill the White Rabbit dug him out of the broken branches. “You really flew there for a minute! That monster sure had your number!”
“I thought...” Bill puffed, “I thought I was dead and gone! I thought I saw heaven up there. I thought...I thought it would make a terrific song. I want to do it again!”
“Don't even think about it!” Brett squawked in horror from the house. “Once was enough!”
“Fellas,” Bill Anderson drawled, “I think we're gonna need more help n' just the three of us. Maybe we ought to call the local knights or somethin. The White Knight always knows how to fix everythin'.”
The rabbit took off down the dusty path as fast as his fluffy feet could carry him. Brett struggled to grab at mushrooms or carrots or anything that could shrink her, stretching as far as her fingers could go. “Could you boys hand me one of those?” she asked, pointing downwards at a carrot. “If eating mushrooms could make me grow, maybe one of those could bring me down to size.”
“No, miss, sorry.” Pat pushed her hand away. “My pal needs those carrots, and I eat 'em with my slop.”
Just as her neck started cramping from peering out the window and she thought she was stuck in that little house forever, the sounds of a blaring trumpet rattled the leaves and made Bill and Pat jump into each other's furry arms. “The Black Prince found him!” Jimmie the Dodo waddled down the path first, somehow managing to grin widely with a beak. “I found him, man! Here he is,” he waved his wing at the sounds of clopping hooves, “the protector of Wonderland, the Ace of the cards, the greatest player in the history of the under-worlds, the man himself, the White Knight!”
The last thing she expected was an entire entourage, led by a short man riding a majestic snowy-white steed with a blue velvet blanket printed with spades. The White Knight was the opposite of the slovenly Red Knight in every way possible. Snowy armor and a horse-head helmet shone so brightly in the afternoon sun, they nearly blinded her. Three men dressed as playing cards and two teen boys in white chain mail guarded his rear. He carried a gleaming sword with a finely etched silver hilt.
“Mr. White Knight! Oh, Mr. Knight!” The White Rabbit rambled as he followed Jimmie and nearly dragged him off his horse. “You have to do something! There's a...a...monster in my house, and it won't leave! We don't know how to get rid of it!”
“A monster?” The Knight's faintly British tenor sounded fairly amused. “Looks more like a giant lady's hand to me.”
“Bless you, sir, whomever you are!” She managed to shake one of his gloved hands with her finger. “You seem a lot smarter than these noodle-brains. This clodhopper,” she nudged Bill the White Rabbit so hard with her middle finger, he fell over into his garden, “left out candies that made me shoot up in size, and now I can't reach the mushrooms to make me smaller!”
“See?” The White Rabbit wailed as three cards helped him to his feet. “She's a monster! Huge! She attacked me! You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to...burn this house down! That'll get her out! Yeah, that's what I'll do!”
Pat reached for two wooden stakes that used to hold up bean vines in his garden. “Here, sir! These should work for a start. Got a match, Mr. Knight?”
“Dad,” said one of the boys with a familiar piping voice, “I don't think burning the house down is going to help that poor lady in there!”
“Of course not.” The White Knight climbed off his horse with surprising ease for all the metal he wore. “Poor maiden!” He opened his horse-shaped visor and kissed her finger. “This is no monster. She's a lady in distress. She requires naught but our service and our sympathy.”
That handsome tanned face was one she knew well. “Dickie?” Brett groaned. “Dickie Dawson? Dickie, please! I'm not one of those blonde bimbos you're always drooling over. Could you quit pretending you're Lancelot and help me out of here?”
“What about those carrots, sir?” The Ace of Sevens had curly brown hair under his black hood and cute dimples that made him look a lot like Dickie's host buddy Bert Convy. “They're edible.”
“No!” the White Rabbit yelped. “You won't get your hands on my garden! I need these! I grew them from seedlings! They're my dinner!”
He tried to block Richard from his carrot patch, but Dickie ducked around him. “Fair maiden, who is so trapped in that poor little dwelling,” he said with a bow to her finger, “your wish is my command.”
“Could you wish a little faster?” Brett grumbled. “I'm getting cramps in here, and I need to find my boys. They're out there all alone. Have you seen them around, Dickie?”
“Two teen boys?” It was Dickie Dawson, all right. Short smirking Lothario with sly blue-green eyes and a perpetual pout that every woman in Burbank but her found sexy. “Why, yes!” He tugged harder at the bright orange tuber, panting with the exertion. “We saw two lads come this way not more than twenty minutes ago. They were searching for their mother, whom they seem to have lost.”
“I'm their mother!” Brett called. “I've been stumbling around for hours looking for them! Boy, am I going to have a long talk about wandering off when we finally get out of here. I should have told them to wait for me at the bottom of the rabbit hole.”
“Here you go, Sir White Knight.” Sounds of a shovel hitting dirt and Pat's nasal tenor hit her ears. “Let me give you a hand with that stubborn root there.”
“Thank you...whoa!” Richard yanked too hard and fell backwards into the White Rabbit and Bill Anderson. “Sorry about that, gentlemen. Thank you for providing a soft landing.”
“Anytime, Your Knight-ness.” Bill gave him a short bow over his guitar. “I think I could get a song out of this. How does 'Falling Backwards Over the Carrots and Into Love' sound?”
“Who cares how it sounds?” The White Rabbit checked his pocket watch again and his blue eyes nearly bugged right out of his head. “I'm late again! I have to get going! Sir Dawson,” he flung the sticks into his arms, “if you want to burn the house down to get rid of that monster, be my guest!”
Brett sighed as the Rabbit hopped off. “I wish he'd linger for five minutes. He's going to give himself an ulcer. All that stress isn't good for anyone's heart, including rabbits.”
“At any rate, fair maiden,” Richard insisted as he handed the sticks to Pat, “I have the carrot you required. You need but take a small nibble of this, and you'll be restored to your true self.”
“Thank you, Dickie,” she rasped. “There might be a gentleman in you after all.” She managed to lift the carrot in the air and pop most of it in her mouth. The second she swallowed the mush, she felt her limbs contract and snap back into their original size. After a few minutes, she found herself sitting on the floor, surrounded by overturned furniture.
Brett peered out the window of the house, shaking her head. Richard and his sons were out back, trying to dissuade Jimmie and Pat from actually setting fire to the side wall. “As much as I appreciate Dickie helping me out there,” she muttered as she escaped out the back door, “I think I'm better off finding the boys on my own. These people don't know their rear end from a hole in the ground! They probably didn't even realize I'm gone.”
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