Behind Sanity

Chapter Fifty-Two

*The chapters from here on out are pretty bloody and horrific, so get your raincoats out and snuggle those white rabbit dolls.  Here we go!*

Behind Sanity

Chapter Fifty-Two

1

                The sound of churning gears was what roused her, but it still took a great deal of effort to pry her burning eyes open.  Smells of smoke and grease filled her nose (though she couldn’t identify the latter) and in the pitch darkness, she was sure she was lost, or dead, or worse: trapped.  Still, she forced herself to stay rational and think clearly.  The last thing she remembered was…

                I was standing in front of the gate to the Queen’s courtyard.  It was right there!  I could have reached out and touched it!  There was a Cheshire Cat fountain there.  It spat at me and I was blind, deaf, and breathless all at once.  The Hatter was there…

                The Hatter!  Alice attempted to shake her grogginess away, but with no sense of direction or matter in the dark space she was in, she couldn’t quite keep the darkness from shifting and making her dizzy.  There were so many shapes in it that squirmed without her permission, and it wasn’t until she heard the Hatter’s voice that the room she was in had any depth.

                “You’re perhaps wondering many things now,” he said, his sour voice coming to her ears from a few feet to her left.  By the sound of it, she would also guess that his back was to her.  He continued.

                “But out of all those things, you should know that only one of them is truly important: you’re here.  That’s all you need to know.” 

                He came closer then, his footsteps echoing off walls that sounded to her as if they were stone.  She could feel the chill from them.  The gears of mechanics continually turned above her, and she wondered briefly what was going on up there – though, according to the Hatter, that was one of those things that didn’t matter.

                She realized then that she was lying down, her back planted firmly against a hard surface.  The Hatter’s footsteps sounded as he passed around the table, speaking to her.  She forced herself to remain quiet for the time.

                “For instance, you might be wondering how I survived the fall that you surely thought would bring me death.  You might be curious to know how exactly I got myself into the Queen’s favor in the first place, or what led to my obsession with machines and mechanic perfection.  Perhaps you might like to know how I knew to find you in the Queen’s maze.  But all of that is pointless and irrelevant, my dear.  Just know that you are here.  And here is everything you need to know.”

                Alice blinked against the blackness, listening to the words that she didn’t quite understand.  He was riddling, she knew, but it was not his normal “raven and writing desk” games.  This was something different, and for a moment, she almost thought she was talking to someone else.  Instead of an eccentric old man driven mad by mercury, she was talking to a calculating psychopath.  The latter had likely been the truest all along.

                “Three times I have attempted to kill you, and three times I have failed,” the Hatter said, his voice now coming from just above her head.  She could still not see it through the dark.  “Each time, I was weak!  But I am beyond the point of caring now, my sweet.  No more gentleness.  I see that there is only one feasible solution to this dilemma, and I should have seen it hours ago!”