Alice didn't know how long she stood, fingering the skirts of her dress over and over, the patch of silk flowers soft under her hands. She wondered if time mattered here, and resolved that it didn't. It awed her somewhat, how the dress (which appeared to be the very one she'd borrowed from Mrs. McCann) existed so simply, here alongside her, just as it had when she'd last been aware of it high on a cliff-side. The hem of the skirt was ringed with dirt and burs – expected and not.

What a strange place Hell is, she mused. There were no tormentor demons anywhere, no flames, no torture contraptions, no screams of the damned or any of the things she had imagined, distantly, whenever sermons turned to fire and brimstone and she'd edged closer to Cora in her terror.

There was no Cora here.

The thought conflicted her so profoundly, joy and sorrow and relief and pain, that Alice had taken a tentative step forward before she was aware she'd had, like she could leave behind the thoughts if only she left behind the spot of floor she'd had them in.

She could stay there, she realized. She could sit there in the candlelight and stare into the darkness before her forever, because mealtimes and day and night other people were, it seemed, for the living. And Alice was…

"Lost," she whispered, "I am lost. I am not simply dead, but lost as well." And that thought alone, that she was somewhere nobody would come to find her, made her feel colder and lonelier than anything ever had.

She could not stay. She had to move. A thing could not stay lost if it found something else.

(Or, at least, that was the only thought she could bear).

Alice turned, nearly clipping her nose on the wall of logs behind her. This was a dead end, then, though she didn't remember any dead ends in the real Fort William Henry.

This left her no choice but forward.

With a tentative frontward lunge, Alice did exactly that, watching the quiet halls almost as much as she watched the tip of her hardy boots as her feet took her down the candlelit corridor.

Alice walked for a long time.

There were no adjacent corridors, no crossroads or rooms. There was just her corridor, its dirt floor and candles, the soft pat of her shoes against the compact earth, the whisper of her skirts, the crackle of flames.

Sooner rather than later, Alice began to feel frantic. It struck her that she might be walking the same loop of corridors over and over, and her chest tingled with fear and a deep sense of claustrophobia. She'd knelt then, drawing three lines with her fingers in the brightest path of light beneath the candles; the earth parted beneath her hand like powder. Even as her breath came quicker in panic, Alice went over the lines again and again. If I cross them again, I will know.

And she had dashed down the corridors again, gasping more from panic than exhaustion of any kind.

But the lines had not reappeared.

Alice had put two fingers carefully on her tongue, then put them to the wick of one of the candles. Its death created a sliver of deep shadows in the hall and Alice had walked away from it, looking over her shoulder as the little alcove of darkness slowly hung further and further back. She had stopped when it disappeared in the distance.

I do not run in circles then, but walk a never ending hallway. The thought was no less alarming, and Alice clasped the front of her dress tightly against the wave of distress. She felt as if a great weight settled over her shoulders and sagged under its heaviness, back slamming into the log wall to her right.

If I claw through these wooden walls, she thought with rising hysteria, will I find another hallway, and another and another like it?

Perhaps this was her punishment, to be lost here for eternity. No need for torment or whips or flames: Alice would be her own jailer and torture master.

"Why?" With no space to fade away into, Alice felt as if the word had come out of her mouth to settle upon her, a lost moth from the closet.

Is there nobody to help me, Alice thought as the tears bloomed in her eyes, overflowing. Is there nobody to come find me?

Then the arm that had supported her slipped. Floundering for a grip, Alice's hand suddenly found purchase…

…on a door frame.

Righting herself, Alice turned, and yes, there it was. Where before only solid wall had been, a small entryway had appeared. It had no door, nor the leather curtain she'd seen on the huts in the village where she'd seen Cora last. There was beyond it a darkness so tangible, Alice at first mistook it for black velvet drapes.

There was no other place for her, anywhere. She would go inside.

A slight tremor was at her fingers as Alice wrested one of the candles free. She wondered if the flowing wax would burn her, if she could catch fire. If, were that to happen, she would find there was some dark, quiet oblivion to escape into, beyond the overwhelming solitude of death.

Is this why nonbeing is the heaven of atheists?

After a moment of hesitation, Alice stepped through the doorway on trembling legs, the candle held aloft in front of her.

The candle was so small in this vast darkness. Alice half expected it to become swallowed by the shadows around her, but it held, and so she looked.

She turned in a slow circle: it was a room with no windows. She edged forward, and her meagre light fell on an elegant table and chairs of a high back. A few more steps in she saw empty candle brackets.

And then there was the back of a head with a powdered wig upon it, still as a dressmaker's form.

Alice balked, her breath catching, but the figure didn't move. It wore a red coat –

Recognition flooded her, and Alice leaped forward with a shout.

"Papa!"