Twice (Scenes 4-10)
4
And falling through the rabbit hole of unconscious slow-wave sleep and struggling with Alice in the darkness, struggling against Alice’s hold on her wrists for nine long seconds, gritting her teeth and wrenching herself onto her side and yanking an arm free from her grasp amid a sea of taunting voices calling her name. So she flailed and struck at the monster called Alice Liddell, bloodying her nose and finally getting her off—
When the voice of Alice turned into her mother’s, so Colbie sat up in her bed and saw her mother crying on the floor at the foot of her bedside with her hand pressed under a bloody nose.
That’s when Colbie looked down at her hands and then felt at her stomach, her back, and the side of her thigh beneath the sheets, flinging it away. No blood on her pajamas over her stomach and none pooling on the sheets behind her back or under her leg. It had all been a dream, a horrible dream.
She looked at her mother and said, “Mom, are you okay?” She got off the bed and approached her, saying, “Did I hurt you?”
Her mother wiped the blood on her sleeve and stared at her daughter with eyes of fright, as though she had been wrestling with a monster possessing her daughter.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry! I’m sooo so sorry!” And she came up to her mother and reached out to touch her, but she grabbed Colbie’s hand and yanked her into a partial embrace on the floor.
Her mother then dug her hands through Colbie’s shirt and felt at her stomach and then at her back, then yanked her pants down her thighs (“Mom, what are you—?”), but no sign of bloodshed was there. Her mother sighed and said, “You’re not hurt, thank God!” And she hugged her daughter close to her, kneeling on the floor with tears trailing down her cheeks. “I thought I lost you.”
Colbie blanked on the import of her words, but then it clicked. She pulled from her embrace and said, “Did you see?”
”I did,” her mother said, wiping tears away with her sleeve. ”Who was that girl?”
“I don’t know. I think . . .” Colbie paused, her mind racing with fresh images of the girl she fought, and the skin of her thigh, back and stomach tingled with the residual burning sensation of getting slashed. “Alice-something. I think her name’s Alice . . . Alice . . . Arrrrrgh, I can’t remember!”
Her mother’s eyes flashed with something of recognition, as if a curtain was pulled back and she saw glimpses through the keyhole of a closed door.
“Liddell?” her mother said under her breath. “By ‘Alice,’ do you mean Alice Liddell?”
Colbie looked at her, speechless.
”As in,” she continued, ”Alice Pleasance Liddell?”
And a look of shock lit up Colbie’s face. “You know her?”
Her mother paused for several moments, seeming to dwell on things that Colbie couldn’t see or understand, seeming to linger on the cusp of indecision about something beyond her ken, before getting to her feet in silence.
Colbie waited a moment for her to speak, and when she didn’t, she said, “Mom, what’s going on?”
“There’s more to this than you know.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
But her mother left her bedroom, saying, “Follow me downstairs, and I’ll tell you in the kitchen. And yes,” she added at the threshold, “it’s gonna be one of those talks.”
5
With the last traces of Colbie’s astral presence fading before her, Alice looked at the knife with the girl’s blood on the blade, still vibrant and warm with the pulse of a beating heart. She raised the blade to her nose and the iron scent of it misted below her eyes and made her eyes water, tracks of it falling down her cheeks. And for a moment, she thought of the Madonna statuettes crying tears of blood down cheeks of cold stone and porcelain, wondering what it would be like if Alice herself had that kind of gift within her power.
She then looked at the blood-stained blade of her knife and ran it flat on her tongue, lapping it up like a kitten lapping up milk, then turned the blade over and ran it flat on her tongue again, savoring the taste of it and feeling the euphoria washing through her senses and sharpening her mind.
“You’re a truant, my darling,” Rancaster said behind her back.
And she turned around, saying, “And you are a voyeur,” and turned back around in a pout.
“And you sure are a glutton for punishment, too,” he said, looking at the recent blood stains on her ruined sky-blue dress. “You just came back from the dead, and already you’ve been slashed and stabbed. I was wondering where Auna got her proclivities from.”
Alice gritted her teeth and said, “What do you see in that girl-character, anyway?”
“You, of course,” he said, walking up to her, and wrapped his arms around her waist and ran one of his hands across the wound in her stomach, making her wince.
So she grasped the offending hand and held his fingers to her mouth and licked her fingers clean of blood, then turned around and looked up into his face, gazing into his eyes, and said, “And what do you see in me?” And she raised her knife to his face and placed the flat side of the blade on his cheek. “Answer carefully now. You might not get another chance.”
“Saucy as ever, I see,” he said, then smiled and raised her chin up with his hand and French-kissed her, then pulled away. “It’s time for your debut, my darling. Best not to make them wait too long.”
“Just a little bit longer,” she said. “I want to pay my girl-character a visit.”
“I thought you despised her.”
“No, I don’t,” she said, then threw her knife to the parquet flooring, sending an echo through the ballroom, where it stuck in place. “I can’t despise the very means for my return, even if she is a good-for-nothing girl-character.”
“You’re being too hard on her.”
“Perhaps I am,” Alice said and looked up at Rancaster and pulled him closer to her height and kissed him again, lingering a moment before letting him go. “I want to make it up to her if I can. In my own way, of course.”
The man just stood there in thought, then said, “You’re a cruel child, Bambina.”
She smiled another slasher smile. “I know.”
6
After a time, Auna found herself once again in Katherine’s library, standing before the very mirror that Alice looked through when she peered into the Looking-Glass House in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
Instead of her Shad-Row uniform, Auna wore a white Sunday dress that she wore when she tried it on for Rancaster during July before the school term started. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, finding it all spick and span, not a blemish on her face, not a hair out of place. She felt better than she had since her father abused her, let alone since she broke her leg in her tumble down the stairs, yet the more she looked, the more anxious she became at her uncanny reflection.
So she leaned towards the reflection and saw her face getting bigger and bigger, as though this second self were copying her movements to the last degree of pantomime. Auna then passed her hand across the reflected face, crossing her own line of sight, and saw a slight change in the expression of those reflected eyes.
And in that split second, she recognized the roving predatory eyes of that she-wolf wearing her own face and her own clothes, but was not herself. And those eyes lit up with mischief, hinting at forbidden desires coming to the surface like hellfire from unfathomable depths. And in those eyes, her doppelgänger carried a cesspool of bodily sensations that only wanted more, more of Auna’s body, more of her heart, more of her soul.
Then a slasher's smile stretched across her doppelgänger’s face, and it said, “It only happens when you’re not looking.”
And the words of her imposter filtered through her mind and took her back down the rabbit hole of unconscious sleep and back to the conscious awareness of a nightmare.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, nooooooo!” she screamed, backing away from the mirror, away from the imposter wearing her face. “You can’t be real! You’re the imposter, not me!”
”Sorry for bursting your bubble, bambina,” this imposter said, “but it was never your debut to begin with. You’re just a stand-in for me, a persona that I merely adopted for my debut.”
Now it dawned on her who this second self was, who the little girl really was, the one she had hugged on the gondola floating down the Canale Veneziano into Arcadia Park, the one she had hugged in bed every night. “You’re Alice Liddell!”
“Bingo,” her doppelgänger replied, forming a gun with her fingers and pretending to shoot through the mirror. “Bang! Now you know who I am, you clever girl-character!”
“Alice, please, listen to me,” Auna said. “This isn’t right. You have to stop this, right now!”
“Why should I stop what you never had the nerve to endure yourself?” Alice said, no longer smiling.
Auna remained silent on her words, silent on the shame her father had brought on her, silent on the shame she has repressed for most of her life. By adopting the name of a ‘girl-character’ from a children’s book and repressing that sacrificial vessel that was Alice Pleasance Liddell from her memory, Auna thought she had escaped. She was wrong.
“You created me to endure your pain,” Alice said, “a pain that was never mine to suffer, while you hid yourself and watched your father commit atrocities on me and listened to my screams. I was your friend, Auna.”
“We’re still friends, believe me!”
“No, we’re not,” Alice said, shaking her head.
“Yes, we are!” Auna yelled, then broke down into tears and fell to her knees. “Alice, I love you. I love you more than anything in the world.”
“And yet you left me to endure those godless nights, left me to strive with a beast of a man,” and Alice raised the hem of her Sunday dress, revealing no knickers.
Auna averted her gaze from the evidence of her father’s crime. “Alice, I’m . . . I’m sorry, I—”
“It is I who should feel sorry for you,” Alice said, and when Auna looked up, she squatted down and met Auna’s gaze. “I should feel you for you, but I’m not. I should still be your friend, but I’m not anymore and never will be again. Even so,” she added, standing back up, “you’ve given them a good show, dear, worthy of Hamlet himself, if he were actually real. But he’s not, and you’re not and never will be again.”
“Alice, wait, listen to me!”
“Ah, look at the time!” she added, checking her watch and ignoring Auna’s pleas. “I must be off with the White Knight, but I’ll send you a card on your birthday. Oh wait, you don’t have a birthday! Oh, well. I’ll send you one, anyway. You can depend on it! In fact, I’ll mail it to ’Nowhere’ and address it to ‘Nobody’—how does that sound? Anyway, I’d love to stay and chat, Ms. Nobody, but my debut’s about to come,” and she bowed to her in mock-respect. ”Tootles!”
And she waved at the horrified Auna, then turned on her heel and walked out of the library entrance where Auna’s astral body still lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs, ready to make her big entrance in front of Rancaster’s adoring audience.
“Wait, waaaait!” Auna said, banging on the mirror, trying to break it, trying to break through, but to no avail. Soon her banging had ceased and she started to cry, crying more tears than she had cried since her father abused her, crying and crying till she leaned on the mirror, her tear-slicked face on its surface.
Now reduced to inaudible mumbles, she slid down to her knees again in despair, crying and crying and crying . . .
7
After splashing water on her face and patting it dry with a dish towel, Leslie Amame checked the time on the LCD clock that read 4:39 a.m. above the television screen before joining Colbie at the kitchen counter, leaning on her elbows over the countertop just like her daughter. Even when Leslie’s feet ached a bit on the cold linoleum flooring, and Colbie suggested they sit on the couch or at the dining table, she was adamant about keeping her feet on the kitchen floor.
“But why?” Colbie said. “Was it a dream?”
“Yeah,” she said, then paused to find the right words that won’t creep out her daughter. “Do you remember that movie we watched?”
“The one about Sleeping Beauty?”
“Yeah.” Leslie waited, expecting her daughter to say something about that movie that might clue her into something Leslie felt upon waking up, but when Colbie remained silent, she let it slide and said, “Do you know what time it is?”
Colbie looked at the LCD clock above on the television. “A little past half past four. Why?”
“Four o’clock in the morning,” she said. “That’s the hour of wolves. It’s the most dangerous time of night, and I was running from a pack of wolves in my dream.”
Colbie blanched at her words and sucked in breath, her mind flooded with memories of her misadventure in the old Rancaster district with her friends, where they had run afoul of an entire pack of them. Big ones, too.
Leslie noticed and said, “Did you encounter them?”
Colbie gulped and nodded her head.
“In the Rancaster district?”
Again, Colbie nodded.
She remained silent for a time, rolling more thoughts through her head, and when her daughter kept waiting for an explanation, Leslie said, “I’m not as good at dream recall as I used to be. It’s been years since the last time I kept a dream journal, and even when I did, I only remember them in fragments.”
“That’s okay,” her daughter said. “Just say what you can.”
So Leslie closed her eyes, visualizing whatever manifestations she could, and said, “Right after I went to sleep, the first thing I remember was getting up from that couch after someone kissed my forehead,” and her observation made her daughter pink a bit, and when she noticed her reaction, she smiled and said, “Ah, I thought it was you. Anyway, I got up from that couch, and I wasn’t sure at the time, but I thought I heard the sound of bells ringing. It wasn’t very distinct, though, so I just wandered around the house a bit. At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, but I began to notice that the sound grew stronger in the kitchen.”
“Is that why we’re in the kitchen?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I started opening all the cupboards in the kitchen, but I couldn’t pinpoint where the sound was coming from. So I went to the pantry and opened the door,” and she pointed it out to Colbie, adding, ”and that’s where I heard the sound getting stronger. They were ringing bells, all right: the sound was unmistakable. All of the sudden, I had an image of wedding bells in my mind. And for whatever reason, the sound of wolves howling accompanied the sound of bells, so I turned to get out, but when I did . . .”
8
The door slammed shut on Leslie, trapping her inside the moment she moved. She cursed and grabbed the handle, wrenching it and yanking on it, but it stayed in place like a rusted screw nut. She cursed again and leaned into it, leveraging her body weight against it, torquing it into turning over, but to no use. So she slammed her forearms against the door, preparing to summon a hurricane blast to break through the door, but stopped herself before the winds stirred.
Even if this was a dream, she preferred not to break the actual pantry door or destroy the stuff on the shelves if she was sleepwalking. She hadn’t slept-walked in years, but she wasn’t about to take any chances now.
She looked back over the shelves stocked with cans of food and boxes of dried goods and household supplies, went up to a corner of the shelves and crouched down to the lower shelf, then pushed open a hidden door compartment and reached into a cubby hole where the key was—
Only to find that key missing.
9
“I couldn’t find it there,” Leslie continued, “so I looked everywhere in the pantry. I even took everything off the shelves to look for it, but it wasn’t anywhere no matter how hard I looked.” Then she noticed the nervous look on Colbie’s face and said, “Do you know where it is?”
Her daughter remained silent, looking down on the countertop to avoid looking her in the face.
“Colbie, what happened to my key?”
“I didn’t mean to lose it, okay? Honest!” Colbie said, slamming a fist onto the countertop. “It just appeared in my drawer. I didn’t know it was yours!”
Leslie sighed in exasperation and said, “You didn’t take it with you, did you? Did you?”
Colbie stayed silent.
Leslie cursed and said, “Ugh, why do you keep doing this to me?”
“I didn’t know, okay? Geez!” And she stormed off in a huff.
“Colbie, wait!” And Leslie grabbed her daughter’s wrist. “I’ll deal with that later, okay? My key can wait. This is way more important, trust me. You need to know this.”
Her daughter relented and joined her side again, resting her elbows over the countertop.
“I’m sorry for getting angry, okay?” Leslie said, then continued with her story, adding, “I’m not gonna lie. I was pissed when I couldn’t find the key, but then the sound of wedding bells came through the pantry door, and when I turned and . . .”
10
Leslie saw the door opening on its own into another part of the Phantom Realms, where the bells rang on the whispering winds outside. And mingled with the clanging promises of marriage were long and lugubrious howls of wolves in the distance, where many travelers of yore feared to tread at night. She gulped down her qualms and approached the open door on tenuous feet and saw the pale gleam of moonlight on the linoleum floor on the threshold of the door, left ajar for her to enter if she dared.
And Leslie dared even as her heartbeats thumped like drumbeats in her chest. She approached on the balls of her sandaled feet, almost on tiptoe as though making sure not to stir the howlers of the night, stretching out her hand and pushing the door open into a nightmare.
