If she moved her head all the way up against the wall and tilted it to the left she could just see the edge of the moon through the bars. Just a silver sliver, almost close enough to eat. A sliver of cheese, a sliver of cake, a cup of tea to be polite. Someone had given her a cup of tea once, someone with blue-green eyes and long ears. Funny how she couldn\u2019t remember his face, though. All that part was hazy, her memory of him wrapped in smoke but for the eyes and ears. And the ears were long and furry.<\/p>\n
When they found her all she would say was, \u201cThe Rabbit. The Rabbit. The Rabbit.\u201d Over and over. When she acted like that they said she was mad. Alice knew she wasn\u2019t mad. Maybe. Not deep down. But the powders they gave her made the world all muzzy and sideways and sometimes she felt mad.<\/p>\n
Everything had happened just as she said, when she could say something besides \u201cRabbit.\u201d She and Dor went into the Old City for Dor\u2019s birthday. Sixteenth birthday. Sixteen candles on your cake, a sliver of cake and a cup of tea for you, my dear. They both went in, but only Alice came out. Two weeks later came Alice, covered in blood, babbling about tea and a rabbit, wearing a dress that wasn\u2019t hers. Red running down the insides of her legs and blue marks on her thighs were fingers had been.<\/p>\n
Her hand went without thought to her left cheek, touched the long thick scar that followed the line of bone from her hairline to the top of her lip. Her face had been flayed open when they found her, and she couldn\u2019t say how or why. It had been open for a long while, the blood oozing from it gone black and brackish, the skin around it tattered at the edges. The doctors told her parents they had done their best, but she would never be beautiful again.<\/p>\n
Her sister said it was her own fault. If she had stayed out of the Old City as she was supposed to, this never would have happened. There was a reason why they lived in the New City, the ring of shiny new buildings that kept the Old City at bay. The Old City wasn\u2019t for people like them. It was for the filth you threw away. All children were warned about the dangers of straying to the Old City. Alice didn\u2019t belong there.<\/p>\n
The hospital where Alice had lived for the last ten years was in the Old City, so her sister was wrong. Alice did belong there.<\/p>\n
Sometimes her parents came to visit, doing their duty; their noses wrinkled like she was something that smelled bad, even though the attendants always dragged her out and gave her a bath first. She hated the baths. They were icy cold and rough with scrubbing, and she was never permitted to clean herself. If she struggled or cried out they would hit her with the bath brush or pinch hard enough to leave a mark, always somewhere that couldn\u2019t be seen, the side of her breast or the soft part of her belly, with a promise of \u201cmore where that came from\u201d unless she behaved.<\/p>\n
Her parents didn\u2019t visit so much anymore. Alice couldn\u2019t really remember the last time, but she knew it had been a long time. The days all ran together in her room, no books to read, no things to do. Hatcher said she should exercise so she would be fit when she got out, but somewhere in her heart Alice knew she would never get out. She was a broken thing, and the New City did not like broken things. They liked the new and the whole. Alice hardly recalled when she was new and whole. That girl seemed like someone else she\u2019d known once, long ago and far away.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlice?\u201d A voice through the mouse hole.<\/p>\n
Many years before, a mouse had gotten into the wall and chewed through the batting between her cell and Hatcher\u2019s. Alice didn\u2019t know what had happened to the mouse. Probably caught in a trap in the kitchens, or went out on the riverside and drowned. But the mouse had led her to Hatcher, a rough voice coming through the wall. She had really thought she\u2019d gone round the bend at first, hearing voices coming from nowhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, you,\u201d the voice had said.<\/p>\n
She\u2019d looked around wildly, afraid, and scuttled into a corner on the far side of the window, opposite the door.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, you. Down here,\u201d the voice said.<\/p>\n
Alice had resolutely put her fingers in her ears. Everyone knew hearing voices was a sign of madness, and she\u2019d promised herself she would not be mad no matter what they said, no matter how she felt. After several moments of happy silence she released her fingers and looked around the room in relief.<\/p>\n
A great sigh exhaled from the walls. \u201cThe mouse hole, you nit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alice stared in alarm at the small opening in the corner opposite. Somehow a talking mouse was worse than voices in her head. If mice were talking, then there really were men with blue-green eyes and long furry ears. And while she didn\u2019t remember his face, she did remember she\u2019d been afraid. She stared at the mouse hole like something horrible might suddenly emerge from it, like the Rabbit might unfold himself from that space and finish whatever he had started.<\/p>\n
Another, this one shorter and much more impatient. \u201cYou\u2019re not hearing bloody voices and a mouse is not speaking to you. I\u2019m in the room next to yours and I can see you through the hole. You\u2019re not crazy and there\u2019s no magic, so will you please come here and speak with me before I go madder than I already have?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re not in my head and you\u2019re not magic, then how do you know what I\u2019m thinking?\u201d Alice asked, her voice suspicious. She was beginning to wonder whether this wasn\u2019t some trick of the doctors, some way to draw her into a trap.<\/p>\n
The attendants gave her a powder with her breakfast and dinner, to \u201ckeep her calm,\u201d they said. But she knew that those powders still allowed her some freedom to be Alice, to think and dream and try to remember the lost bits of her life. When they took her out of her room for a bath or a visit, she sometimes saw other patients, people standing still with dead eyes and drool on their chins, people who were alive and didn\u2019t know it. Those people were \u201cdifficult to deal with.\u201d They got injections instead of powders. Alice didn\u2019t want injections, so she wasn\u2019t going to say or do anything that would alarm the doctors. Doctors who might be trying to trick her with voices in the wall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know what you\u2019re thinking, because that\u2019s what I\u2019d be thinking if I were you,\u201d the voice said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the loony bin, aren\u2019t we? Now, come over and have a look through the hole and you\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n
She stood cautiously, still unsure it was not a trick, whether of her mind or the doctors. She crossed under the window and crouched by the mouse hole.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I can see are your knees,\u201d the voice complained. \u201cCome all the way down, won\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alice lowered to her stomach, keeping her head well away from the opening. She had a vague fear that a needle might flash through the hole and plunge into her eye.<\/p>\n
Once her cheek was on the ground she could see through the small, tight opening. On the other side was an iron grey eye and part of a nose. There was a bulge just where the rest of the nose disappeared from view, like it might have been broken once. It didn\u2019t look like any doctor she knew, but Alice wasn\u2019t taking any chances. \u201cLet me see your whole face,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cGood,\u201d the grey eye said. \u201cYou\u2019re thinking. That\u2019s good. Not just a pretty face, then.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alice\u2019s hand moved automatically to cover her scar; then she remembered she was lying on that side of her face and he couldn\u2019t really see it anyway. Let him think she was pretty if he wanted. It would be nice to be pretty to someone even with her fair hair all snarled and nothing to wear but a woolen shift. She heard the swish-swish of wool on batting as the grey eye moved away from the hole and became two grey eyes, a long broken nose and a bushy black beard with flecks of white in it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll right, then?\u201d the voice asked. \u201cI\u2019m Hatcher.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that was how they met. Hatcher was ten years older than Alice, and nobody ever came to see him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you here?\u201d she asked one day, long after they were friends, or at least friends who never really saw each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cI killed a lot of people with an ,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s how I got my name. Hatcher.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was your name before?\u201d Alice asked. She was surprisingly undisturbed by the knowledge that her new friend was an axe murderer. It seemed unrelated to who he was now, the rough voice and grey eyes through the hole in the wall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t remember,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t remember anything from before, really. They found me with a bloodied axe in my hand and five people dead around me all slashed to pieces. I tried to do the same for the police when they came for me, so I must have killed those people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy did you do it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t remember,\u201d he said, and his voice change a little, became hard. \u201cIt\u2019s like there\u2019s this haze over my eyes, black smoke filling everything up. I remember the weight of the axe in my hand, and the hot blood on my face, in my mouth. I remember the sound of the blade in soft flesh.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember that too,\u201d Alice said, although she didn\u2019t know why she said that. For a moment it had been true, though. She could hear the sound of a knife piercing skin, that sliding slicing noise, and someone screaming.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you kill a lot of people too?\u201d Hatcher asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d Alice said. \u201cI might have.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all right if you did,\u201d Hatcher said. \u201cI would understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI really don\u2019t know,\u201d Alice said. \u201cI remember before and I remember after, but that fortnight is gone, save for a few flashes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe man with the long ears.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes,\u201d Alice said. The man who hunted her, faceless, through her nightmares.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we get out we\u2019ll find him, and then you\u2019ll know what happened to you,\u201d Hatcher said.<\/p>\n
That had been eight years before, and they were both still there, rooms side by side in a hospital that had no intention of ever letting them go.<\/p>\n
From ALICE, Ace trade release August 4, 2015. Preorder here:<\/p>\n
Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n Barnes & Noble <\/a><\/p>\n Books-A-Million<\/a><\/p>\n Indiebound<\/a><\/p>\n Powells<\/a><\/p>\n or ask your local bookstore to order a copy for you!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If she moved her head all the way up against the wall and tilted it to the left she could just see the edge of the moon through the bars. Just a silver sliver, almost close enough to eat. A … Continue reading