“What if it were a real rabbit? A living thing? What would you do with it?”
This was another one of his lessons. Weeks ago I had watched him dip his fingers into a small cage and pinch a bunny by the scruff. I’d flinched when he’d broken its neck. Never had I seen something die, and it had shocked me to tears when the doctor set the dead animal on my lap.
That first time he’d killed the bunny with his bare hands. A week later, he’d used a cleaver to sever the poor things skull from its shoulders. Today was to be a new lesson. With an approving smile, the toy rabbit was taken from the desk and replaced with a small, helpless animal.
Beside it Sir Rothfield laid a carpenter’s hammer.
“Now, Alice, you have power over your mind. Destroy the rabbit.”
Even while I shook my head no, head orderly Calvin unlatched the workings of my straightjacket. My arm was set free. After so little use, and so many injections, the muscles were hard to control. Calvin put the hammer in my fist, his meaty palm wrapped around my grip. He guided my arm to draw back. Under his steam, our joined hands smashed down. It took three hits to kill the fluffy beast that would serve as my dinner.
I just wanted to go home. That’s what I thought each time droplets of blood splattered my face.
All I wanted was home.
Chapter 8
Stomach sour from another supper of rabbit stew, I lay on my back, eyes to the ceiling, and waited.
Maybe I was crazy. It no longer mattered. I had to get out of Rothfield asylum. It had to end.
I knew she would come after the clock’s booming ticks shook my bones. I don’t know why I knew, but I knew.
The Red Queen slithered out of her corner.
Turning my head to the side, arms still bound in the straightjacket and my ankles cuffed to the floor, I watched bloodied feet stain the pillowed ground with each slinking step the Red Queen took.
I offered her one word, the first I may have ever spoken to her. “Hello.”
Crackling noises, her squished, bubbling breaths, they would be my dirge. Tonight I was going to close my eyes and I was going to let her have me. Maybe she would peel off my skin and wear it as a hat. Then this would be over and I would be free.
There was no fight left in me.
She sensed it too, for her beady eyes shone bright behind the dripping tangles of her dark hair.
It’s funny that I had borne all the years of sleepless nights, all the treatments and examinations—hilarious even to think I’d ever thought I might find a way to do more than just delay the inevitable. Being made to inflict pain on a defenseless creature, having to hear a bunny squeal when the first strike of the hammer had not been enough to end it, had been my ultimate undoing.
I could see clearly now. Had I not fought to hinder Calvin’s initial swing, the animal might have died without pain.
All this time, I was standing in my own way; fighting back was pointless. I was the bunny on the table. Resisting the inevitable hammer was the reason the pains I’d known had never struck hard enough to kill, they only left me there twitching and unable to hop away.
The Red Queen looked me dead in the eye, she’d even stopped her pacing. Standing hunched, rubbing her hands together, she clicked her teeth in excited chatter.
She had been the first. She would be the last.
After a lifetime of vigilance, I lowered my lashes and looked away.
I was laughing louder than the Madman of Cheshire as her feet pattered straight in my direction.
“Sweet Alice.”
My laughter turned to weeping at the first dulcet sing-song of the Hatter’s hello. Face turned into the floor, eyes screwed shut to block out the intrusive, never ending electric light, I sobbed, “Make it stop.”
The smile in his voice, the gentle teasing, it was cruel. “And why should I? This was all your doing.”
“I know.”
A light chuckle decorated his voice. “Ungrateful child... all I’d wanted was a single kiss. Was it worth it, these long years without my company?”