Beautiful Madness, Book One: Follow the White Rabbit

Follow the White Rabbit

Headlights illuminated the road ahead, flickering with each bump and crack in the pavement as Alice barreled across the countryside in her ‘95, Ford hatchback. The road she’d turned onto in an attempt to find coffee had taken her farther away from civilization instead of back towards it, all in the name of caffeine and a supposed shortcut. That was the price for trusting some third-party GPS app, but if it would get her to Chicago faster it would be well worth the somewhat sketchy detour. There wasn’t a Starbucks in sight, but her phone insisted she was headed in the right direction, so she drove on into the night.

Alice knew she should have stopped at the last motel she had passed like, she’d promised her parents. They had even handed over cash to pay for a room, which was a small miracle, but the place looked so rundown that she couldn’t make herself go in. At the very least a night’s stay would have resulted in a dozen bedbug bites, which would have made the last six hours of the trip an absolute nightmare. Itchy red welts. Itchy red welts, everywhere. No, Alice’s time would be better spent driving, and a little extra cash could always come in handy once she got to her destination.

The plan was to press through the night, crossing the state line by sunrise and be enjoying the Windy City by lunchtime. It was supposed to be the summer of opportunity—sleep wasn’t on the to-do list.

If Alice was ever going to make it in the music industry she needed to get some real experience and start making connections. Top priority. While her friends were all drinking away their last summer of high school, she’d be living with her Aunt Elenor and taking on an internship usually reserved for university students. It was all planned out, so long as she could stay awake long enough to make it there in one piece.

Flicking on the radio on, Alice turned the dial until she found something other than static. Where the hell was she that the only available stations were playing country music? And bad country music at that. It crossed her mind that she must have been even farther off track than she’d thought, but turning around would only add time to the trip. GPS technology was a meant for situations like these, and Alice was willing to trust that eventually she would hit a highway or at least a recognizable landmark.

She eased her foot down onto the gas pedal. Turning back was not an option.

The first time Alice saw her happened so quickly that she dismissed the whole thing as the result of an overactive imagination.

She glanced back at the road after popping in a CD and for an instant saw a figure in her peripheral vision. She could have sworn there was someone standing right outside the driver’s side door of the moving car. Not possible, or at least insanely dangerous, especially as it was already well past midnight, and this area wasn’t exactly meant for pedestrians.

Her heart rate doubled, but within the span of a blink there was no one there. She checked her rearview mirror, but there was nothing behind her but endless fields and pavement that stretched on for miles. She was definitely still alone on the road. And in the middle of nowhere. Where all kinds of horrible, gruesome things happened. Crazed wanderers. Car thieves. Serial killers.

Focus.

Alice kept going, trying to force the brief distraction out of her mind. There was no point even thinking about it. She had obviously imagined the whole thing, and there were signs of civilization up ahead.

Her eyes were just beginning to droop when she passed through a small rural town. Small as in one stop sign and no streetlights. It was reassuring to know she hadn’t traveled too far off the beaten path. If people lived this far out, it couldn’t be that bad.

Every house was completely dark, but a sign outside of the Clarkson Community Church was there to welcome visitors. Flowering bushes lined the road, and a white picket fence decorated the lawns of most of the homes. It would have been a nice place to stop for Alice to stretch her legs had their one diner actually been open. There were no night owls in this part of rural America, apparently.

Too soon, the last house—a beautiful Victorian era manor—was behind her as another sign thanked Alice for her visit. Already nostalgic for civilization, she glanced back towards the town for one last peek. Instead, her eyes locked briefly with someone else's.

Standing near the back of the ‘thank you’ sign was a girl. A girl who had not been there only a moment before. Yet there she was, impossible to miss. Dressed in a cropped black vest, with long nearly white hair, she stood out dramatically from the colors of country life. Alice turned her head back to look at the road as her brain thrashed back and forth between slamming on the breaks in shock and putting her foot on the gas in panic. Unable to react at all, she continued down the road as though she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, though her jaw had fallen slack.

When her eyes flicked to the passenger side mirror, the girl was still there, standing in the grass. Her head turned slightly, following the path of Alice’s car as the road curved away from the town of Clarkson.

Watching the stranger from her rearview mirror until she faded into the darkness, Alice had zero interest in stepping on the breaks. Stopping in the middle of nowhere to help a lone traveler could only end in the kinds of stories that are told around campfires. She knew she was over-thinking the pale girl’s appearance, and picturing her own demise wasn’t helping to push back the feeling of dread that clenched in the pit of her stomach. She was probably just a local, out because there was literally nothing else to do. A teenager—not a deranged, murderous hitchhiker.

If the lack of sleep didn’t manage to ruin this road trip for Alice, her own imagination would do the trick. She needed to get back to bright lights and big cities as soon as possible.

Alice forced herself to inhale and exhale slowly. In less than a week she would be the newest intern at 92.2 FM, KRNX. It was not the time to dwell on pale, creepy girls and all the things that could go wrong between that moment and her triumphant arrival in Chicago. It would be fine. There was literally nothing dangerous for miles. There were people around, and they were just asleep. And probably too far away to help if anything happened.

Stop it.

Alice was still feeling slightly paranoid when a massive lake came into view and managed to finally pull her attention away from what she was by then calling ‘the ghost girl of Clarkson.’

The lake looked almost too perfect to be real, probably man made. As the car pulled closer, Alice’s nerves calmed further. It was hard not to appreciate the way the large still surface reflected the moon like a luminescent painting.

The car jolted slightly when the road turned from pavement to wood slats. As her jaw snapped together and her fingers clenched the steering wheel, Alice’s eyes grew wide. The girl returned. No, not returned—appeared. One moment there was nothing, and the next she was standing in the middle of the bridge. The half-second it took Alice to remember to put her foot on the brake was all it took to run out of time. There wasn’t enough room. There was no way to stop the car from hitting the girl, who looked as stunned as Alice felt, if it kept moving forward.

Swearing, Alice jerked the steering wheel to the right, remembering too late that she and her car were currently on a bridge and at least twenty feet over water.

Shit.

There wasn’t far to go before smashing through the guardrail. As the car tilted forward, beginning its descent, Alice’s head smacked against the horn, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to send a warning blast off into the night.
    The obnoxious sound from the horn continued to echo in her ears as she saw the car’s reflection getting larger and larger in the glassy surface of the lake. There was absolutely nothing to be done to alter its course into the water. The already paralyzing fear was amplified by complete helplessness as a scream clawed its way up Alice’s throat in the instant before she hit the water. Her lungs contracted, but the scream never came. There was nothing to do but watch as the still image of the lake was shattered into a million chaotic pieces.