"Alice, are you there?" she begged for the hundredth time.
"She's somewhere around here," I replied for the hundredth time. "With her dolls, I assume. You know Alice." We both knew Alice.
"Are you sure?" Her voice wavered, as if deterred from floating up the steps by the dust motes that flew crazily up the grand staircase and across the landing.
"I'll go check on her. Ma'am, I'm sure she'll be fine."
And Alice was. Well, Alice was a particular definition of fine, a definition which left much to imagination and pretending. Alice was in her playroom, as always, with her precious custom dolls, made specially for her at the request of her doctor. She spun at my entrance, her eyes unfocused, the Rabbit and the girl dolls clutched firmly in her sweaty hands.
Alice hissed when I entered. Standing fully upright, she was barely half my height. She used to be as tall as I. But that was when she was normal. She had been holding the girl doll backwards, but at my entrance, it fell so I could clearly see its front. The chest of the doll had been ripped out, 'skin' flaps held apart by safety pins. What seemed like awfully realistic blood was smeared all over the doll's pretty blue dress. Her corn-blonde plaits had their ends dyed red with the stuff.
Had I been anyone normal, I might have screamed, vomited, prayed, ran, something! But this house had tainted me, and I almost felt like such incidents were becoming everyday.
"Alice," I said briskly. "Put the Rabbit away and give the girl doll to me. I'll clean her up."
Poor Alice clutched the dolls to her chest like her life depended upon it. "You can't clean up hell," she whispered. "Please don't take them. The Queen wants the Rabbit and the girl. The Queen will get them again. The Queen will kill the Rabbit. The girl will try to escape, but just come home to death." By the end of this speech, Alice had dropped to her knees, down at my feet in a mockery of submission. Her words stabbed deep places in my heart, reopening wounds. I didn't let a second of it show on my face. After all, Alice had hurt me before. This certainly wouldn't be the last.
I was employed not to listen to her ramblings. I took both dolls away -the girl doll as I had said I would, and the Rabbit for disobeying me.
I returned Alice to her room. There was a regular routine that had to be employed. The windows had to be locked, bolted, and barred. The curtains had to be drawn. Alice's medicine had to be administered (two tablespoons of some foul liquid that seemed to hiss as it went down, five different types of pills) on 8 pm on the dot. Alice had to be shocked twice, once on the chest and once on her clasped fists. Her cupboard had to be sealed. The bedcovers had to be clamped down. The inner door had to be locked three times, triple checked, and bolted. The outer door had to be chained shut.
No one wanted Alice to escape again. Last time - the only time - she vanished for a year. Her father killed himself, thinking he had driven her to run away, or she had been kidnapped and he had failed to protect her, or worse. Her mother was mentally destroyed. When Alice came home claiming tales of mystical wonderlands, and forgot her father even existed, her mother completely broke. Alice was assigned a fulltime doctor, Mr Hathaway, and a live in caregiver - me. It paid well.
It was all for her own good. All of it, I promised myself as I bade goodnight to Alice through two locked doors, and to her mother, though an equally sealed heart.
