Preface

She knew her name was Alice. It's the only fact she could hold on to in the inky blackness. There were moments when she imagined that if her name were something else; her life would not be so completely devoid of purpose. She concluded that there must be something terribly and horrifically wrong with her that caused her to be entombed in a lightless, lifeless cell. There was no illumination, there were no sounds save from periodic and terrifying screams in the distance, and no one ever came to see her other than the doctor. She could not tell if it was morning or evening. Alice continued to ask the doctor for information or news of the world outside, only to receive platitudes and redirection.

Alice could not remember very many things. She would repeat things she knew, hoping desperately to remember the words. Inevitably, the doctor would come to take her for a treatment and she would not be able to hold onto some things she knew only a few hours earlier. After her therapy and always in the dark, the doctor would escort her from his laboratory, down the stone corridor to her tiny room. Alice was always shaking and nauseated from the pain of the medicine the doctor told her she had been given when she was placed gently down on her narrow mattress. The doctor would spend the next several hours just talking to her in a soft tone, the words melting into each other until it sounded as if he were purring over her. She would sigh, relax into the scratchy material of her pillowcase, and float into unconsciousness on the waves of his voice.

When she woke, everything in her head was gone again. Only Alice remained.

The Dark

There was only ever darkness. Alice had begun to believe the sun had died. The doctor came to her after time passed, bringing food and talk. She always saw him before he arrived; in fact, he was the only person she recognized in her visions. Her mind would become fuzzy and she would watch him hurry down the corridor to the place she sat in perpetual shadow, his face suffused with the light of wistful sadness with his eyes ever veiled from her. Then her head would clear and moments later, she could hear the heels of his shoes clicking hollowly against the stone surface as he moved.

Alice did not recall how she came to be in this room. She concluded that her visions were directly responsible because most of the time, she was unable to abstain from voicing them aloud. The doctor never answered the question of why when asked directly. He would tell her that she was brought to him to be his angel, a beacon of light in his dreary existence. Sometimes this response would anger her, but more and more, she would become despondent and cease to speak for increasing lengths of time. Her silences would cause the doctor to become agitated and his pleas for her to speak would grow more frantic.

When she was being honest with herself, Alice knew that she used her silence to punish him. She would beg him for details of her life before the darkness, and the steadfast determination he had for keeping them from her made her feel cruel and vengeful. Then, as she withheld her conversation, she felt a surge of power - intangible, but still bolstering her resolve to maintain her silence.

She was mostly left to herself. The result of such extensive isolation and little stimulation for her mind or body was that she was often lethargic and slept often if for no other reason than to allow time to pass until she next saw the doctor or woke with a vision. To fill her waking hours, Alice would look inward to see what the future held for her; hoping to see anything that would indicate life outside of the doctor's care. She considered her gift, as the doctor called her delusions, to be a curse placed upon her because she was inherently evil. Yet, as her isolation endured, the world of her visions gave her comfort in knowing that she did have a future, if only in this darkness. It never occurred to her to attempt to end her life. She sensed that beyond this place, something was waiting for her and she became increasingly engrossed in efforts to see that future.

Alice returned to the present with a start. She had been watching the doctor speaking to her, words she was unable to hear. She assumed that he had asked her to look into his future. She could infer that whatever she foresaw would be visually terrifying because her hands grasped the arms of the chair she was sitting in so forcefully that her knuckles blanched white against the gloom of what must have been the doctor's laboratory. There was a single lantern burning on the table beside her and she cowered as close as possible to it, as though it could shield her from her visions. She did not recognize the room, but her memory was so full of holes that it was as tattered as the blanket covering her tiny cot.

As Alice recounted the details of her vision, the doctor's expression turned from one of intellectual curiosity to that of a trapped animal, terrified and dangerously reckless. He appeared to be firing questions rapidly at her, and Alice watched in concern as her future self withdrew into herself as the questions battered at her ears. She put her hands up to cover them in a futile attempt to protect herself from both the doctor and the horror of what she had seen. As the scene faded, Alice saw the doctor reaching for her as in comfort and apology.

Her mouth formed a little moue as she bit down on her inner lip, struggling to remember another time she had seen that room filled with books and jars. Her mind phased again and she was again in the laboratory, only this time, the doctor was staring into her eyes very intently. Her expression was one of determined disapproval. As he held her gaze, Alice watched her eyes turn vacant and her body relax from the rigid posture she had been holding. The doctor gave a brief nod and spoke softly to her. Then, as he stood and extended his hands, she watched herself languidly accept his assistance in standing and allow herself to be led from the laboratory.

She wondered how the doctor passed the time when he wasn't talking to or with her. She felt that she had asked this many times in the past, and Alice looked inwards for the doctor's future and saw a vision that terrified her. She broke from the vision gasping for air, the taste of bile in her mouth. Dr. Coombs had gathered a small woman into his arms and appeared to be embracing her lovingly. The woman's head had fallen to the side and Dr. Coombs leaned forward to her neck. But rather than placing a kiss on her exposed skin, he opened his mouth and sank his teeth into her flesh.

She blinked rapidly as it occurred to her that the reason she could not remember many things was that the doctor, in addition to being a vampire, had the ability to remove her memories. Following closely on that thought, she wondered how many times this same realization had come to her only to be wiped out like rain on a window. Anger flared in her chest, making her warm despite the constant chill of the place she was kept.

Only the previous day, when she could bear the quiet no longer, she had implored the doctor to take her outside, to let her see the sky, smell the fresh breeze, anything to let her know that she was still alive even though she was apparently insane.

"Please, Dr. Coombs…" Her hands grabbed at the empty space she thought he was occupying a second before. She blinked rapidly because he was now several feet away from her in the darkness. He always seemed to move so fast. She tried again. "Just for a moment... I saw that you will take me out to see the sky, it will be raining. Please."

He shook his head sadly at her.

"Darling girl, there is no scent of rain this evening," he murmured. "You have never before attempted to gain your way through subterfuge, why start now?"

She hung her head, momentarily defeated. She had known that he would catch her lie. In truth she had seen something far more disturbing. Alice's mind blurred and she saw Dr. Coombs running so fast across a brick courtyard that he seemed to be flying. His long coat was streaming behind him like the wings of a crow. Her heartbeat began to thrum painfully until she could hear the blood pulse through her body. The vision faded and her breathing slowed infinitesimally. She scooted herself into the corner furthest from the door and waited. Something was very wrong and change was coming.

Tonight.