Uninvited Strangers: Very Late

It was always tea-time with the Hatter, Alice had said, but he hadn’t decided to test the truth for his own edification. Oliver must have come down the wrong rabbit hole.

He had half-listened to her stories when they were children, all about that fanciful place hidden away beneath the ground, with its glamorously frightful Queen and slightly disturbed inhabitants.

Alice had called it Wonderland. While the rest of the classroom was memorizing arithmetic and various psalms, Alice drifted off with a vacant expression by the back window, her tablet filled with scratched stencils. Like all the other children, Oliver had paid her no mind and threw mud on her dress when she annoyed him enough, which she did easily by not responding to the insults. He had laughed and jeered at her and called her names, but thinking back to the schoolyard, never once did he remember seeing her bright blue eyes fill with tears that threatened to spill over her pale cheeks. Her defiance had only made the bullying worse and a couple of years later, after a few boys had taken to cutting her hair off with shears, Alice left the town.

Not to say she had gone alone. Her parents and older sister had disappeared as well without a word to anyone else, gone as quickly as they had come. It seemed alright with everyone else, since the family wasn’t missed so much anyway. Oliver personally thought that the older, mature sister had been the most amiable of the whole lot. With long, glossy brown curls and a smile that warmed the entire room, it was a shame that she had such an unpopular sibling. The older sister was destined for better things. But as for Alice….

Oliver supposed that he would be thinking of all that now; he shook his ankles, hearing the chain links rattle and scrape against the cellar floor. His wrists rubbed raw against rusted metal cuffs that dug into his skin at the slightest movement. They were probably red and blistered by now, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the tip of his nose in this darkness. Looking back at his immaturity, the school days spent joining in with the other jeering children, he felt a small twinge of guilt. It was really bad form for him to have tortured the girl, especially now, almost a decade later, when he realized that she had been right the entire time.

He smacked his head against the cold, wet wall behind him in disgust. Streaks of water from the leaking foundation beneath the cottage slid down the brick face, tickling his nape. It was bad form for someone with his promising marks at University to be shackled to the wall like a prisoner, with little in the way of food or clothing. His shirt sleeves and the hem of his trousers were in loose-thread tatters, snagging on unseen objects. He felt like a month’s worth of dirt was glued to every part of his body, and would have given anything for a steaming hot bath and a fresh bar of soap, or even his own standard bed in the safe confinement of the dormitories.

If only he hadn’t chased after that ball…

So many times had he retraced his steps in anguish, thought of what he could have done differently and wished he had not done anything it at all. It had begun simple enough: on a short holiday from his studies, he had come back to his family’s village for visitations. He had taken the time to reconnect with his childhood friends who suggested a game of catch-ball for old times’ sake. As young boys, they had played nearly every day at the edge of the village, right next to the woods and beside the river.

Allowing himself a few hours of leisure before his return trip to the dormitories, Oliver had let himself get immersed in the game. It had felt too nostalgic to shed off his early adult responsibilities and worries and play like a child again.

Then it all had gone downhill.

He had lost sight of the ball, missing the throw as it sailed over his head, and had offered to retrieve it. He traced the smooth furrow trail all the way within the deeper part of the village woods to the base of a rather large tree. Then he had fallen down a man-sized rabbit burrow as he lost his balance on the loose soil while reaching for the ball. It was like being pushed off a cliff; he remembered the feeling of air rushing around his body until he was knocked unconscious by some unrelenting object. When he awoke with blurry vision, a splitting headache and aching limbs, he had been in a strange forest with whispering trees that had odd-angled branches that creaked like old bones in the wind.