Red Queen

The Eyes do March

The mind is a marvellous delight of corridors, walkways and hidden trapdoors. Just when you think you're wandering casually through the well traversed hallways of your memories, you step where you haven't before. The ground gives way beneath you and you fall. You think you are falling for eternity, with the stars exploding and dying out while you plummet to the icy depths of your psyche. Eventually you land and suddenly it seems as if the unending descent, which had actually just ended, has taken but a second.

You look around. Your mind doesn't know what it is seeing. Your eyes are lying. They are deceiving your brain and you can't completely take in your surroundings. Or you can't believe them. You try to leave your mental abyss and swim back to the surface. Back to reality. Back to what you know. What's real. What you can grab hold of with both hands and rip in two or smash into as many tiny pieces as your fists can create.

The mind is a marvel. It can show you truths you would never conceive and lies you would never believe. It can both hurt and protect you.

For Alice, her mind had been her retreat. Though Dr. Edwards might think it was her prison, she had incarcerated herself within its haunted walls. There had been no leisurely stroll through her memories. Such recollections would have hunted her. They'd pursue her like a pack of angry wolves, intent on devouring what little was left of her soul. No. Alice had stepped deliberately where she shouldn't. She'd let the trapdoor open beneath her and had allowed herself to be taken by the gravity of her family's failings. Alice had hardly noticed the hands on her arm leading her to lunch or to her treatments. Toileting had long since become her body's habit so she left it to control movements as required. Her feet knew to move in turn, like a Newton's Cradle of limbs just missing each other as they swung back on themselves.

But something had changed. Edwards' words had an odd tone in them which had wormed its way through her ears and down to where she was cocooned. They pulled at her, casting a net with which to reel her back to where he thought she was meant to be.

Alice would disagree, but she trusted in him and so let the net pull her up. She could feel herself re-entering her head. Her mind was pushing against her eyelids, wanting to be released back out into the world. As her eyes opened, remnants of herself were still returning to their proper places. She stared forwards, her eyes cast down to the mottled off-white of the floor. She breathed in again, noticing the scent of jasmine was fading. That was a shame. Her mother used to buy a particular brand of fabric conditioner which was jasmine flavoured and Alice would often bury her nose in her clothes to be wrapped in the smell.

Perhaps it was her imagination reminding her of why she was in the asylum. Her mother. Her father and sister. The mental home was the patio under which her body could be buried. They'd walk over her memory for so long, they'd forget she was even beneath their feet.

Alice smiled. The smell was nice, even if the cause was not. Take the positives from the negatives and sharks to chew on the remains. It was something Edwards sometimes said to her. She didn't entirely know what it meant, but she understood the sentiment. She liked Jasmine.

She looked up.

"You're back," she said calmly.

At first, she couldn't quite comprehend the person facing her was not, in fact, her sister. Even when she moved her arm to brush away a hair and the other Alice did the same - with the same coloured hair - it could still have been Alice2. But Alice2 didn't have dark circles under her eyes. Alice2 wore clothes which accentuated the colour of her hair and the perfect contours of her face. Alice's eyes were surrounded by a shadowy halo and her clothes were a simple, anonymous smock designed to be as inoffensive as possible. The fact design has entered into the construction of her outfit amused her. There were no belts to hang yourself. No buttons to choke on. It was unobtrusive. Boring. And it was that way for good reason.

Penelope Addison was a patient a few years previously. She was sweet natured and spoke softly, as if butter really had melted in her mouth, coating her throat in a smooth veneer which laid her words on gently on your ears and let them slip in at their own pace. She had no sense of time or place and each day would believe she was in a different time period in countries far removed from her actual location. Clearly educated, she fluently spoke the languages of those countries, whether it be Japan or Brazil, Sweden or a long forgotten location in the depths of South America. She dressed for the occasion too. She was able to turn her meagre wardrobe into a loud variety of outlandish costumes, perfectly suited to where and when she felt herself to be.

Until another patient, Henri (etta) Watkinson, decided she should have Pen's clothes. The knife was stolen from the kitchen, though patients were not allowed entry to the kitchen and had to remain in the food hall. It didn't cut Pen but it did slash her dress, a rather sombre Victorian frock which ruffled high at the neck and dropped to just above the floor. Penelope's sweet nature seemed to have been torn too. It turned savage. The velvet in her voice turned to Velcro, rasping as the words separated themselves from her mouth. Henri dropped her blade but it didn't touch the floor. It was never found afterwards yet Henri's face was repeatedly cut and one of Penelope's fingernails was embedded in her assailant's inner ear.

From that point on, all residents were required to wear the same garb and said garb was as nondescript as possible without asking them to wear a sack.

The reflection regarded Alice silently. She could feel its hate filled stare drilling into her as if it were (tre)panning for neurological gold. It was then she sensed a multitude of other gazes. She felt as if she'd woken up in the middle of a forest and the trees hid wolves with only the slits of their glowing eyes showing. Her heart began to race and she was afraid to look around. But she had to. She must. Look your demons in the eye and they become mortal. You can defeat a mortal, Dr. Edwards said.

Alice looked. She turned her head defiantly to her observers. She immediately wished she hadn't. It wasn't one sister, sitting opposite and taunting her, it was a hundred. More. In each mirror, reflected in the one opposite, there was an unending stream of siblings. They smiled and then laughed. While Alice screamed, her replicas cackled in hideous hilarity. She could see their faces contort and their fingers lengthen into claws. Their black hair began to fall out, leaving bare patches of festering skin. Then, as one, their laughter halted as they pointed at her.

Alice gulped, trying to force moisture into her barren throat. She had to fight them. She had to vanquish her monsters.

No, not monsters, monster. Singular rather than plural. She was a twin. She had one sister. If she could overcome just her, the others would fall also.

Turning away from the devils in the mirrors, Alice looked back at the one she faced when she first opened her eyes. This mirror was massive, engulfing the wall. In it, Alice could see only her reflection. Her body and chair. The rest of the room seemed to have disappeared, leaving only the twins to be separated by the silver-backed glass. Surrounded by an ornate working of swirls which seemed to force the eyes into the centre of the image, her sister pushed herself up and walked forward. Alice found that she, without realising she had stood, was also stepping forwards.

As they approached, the darkness around the twin swirled like the frame and broke like waves against her ankles. The waves became grasping hands, pulling at her garments and legs. The hands churned and changed again, this time taking the form of long, thin shadows which scurried up to sit on her shoulders. Alice's reflection stroked the head of one of them. It smiled, baring its finely pointed teeth in a wide, welcoming grin.

The girls stopped, almost nose to nose.

"What do you want?" Alice asked, trying to push some confidence into her shaky voice. Her reflection didn't answer. Instead it simply watched her, smiling as broadly as the shadow on her shoulder.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

No response.

Alice raised her fist, pulling all her sorrowful years into its clenched fingers, and thrust it forward into the face of her tormentor.

Her reflection vanished. The glass was gone. Alice's hand and arm went through something which was no longer there and was engulfed by the darkness.

She tried to scream but a sudden, unseen, pull yanked her forward leaving her cry to fall on nonexistent ears.

Only the solitary chair remained. The mirrors sighed and returned to showing only the room.