I tweaked this one a bit, of course. Hope you enjoy the walk down memory road hehehe...

Chapter XIII: Going Mental

As Mad March and the posse of Suits marched through the game room, Alice gripped her father's watch like a lifeline. She had barely had time to briefly glance around the poor drugged up souls in the game room to see if any one of them was her missing father. It would not have been likely, she thought, considering that her father had been missing for about eleven years. Certainly he would have been completely drained dry of his emotional capacity. But, then, why would Jack raise up her hopes by slipping her his watch and covertly informing her about her father's whereabouts?

Could she even trust Jack, who had lied about everything to her?

But how would he have acquired her father's watch? For now she could indeed see it was her father's favorite old watch. He had continued to wear it even after it had stopped working simply because it had been a birthday gift from Alice's mother. He would certainly have been wearing it the day he had disappeared. Jack could not have known about this watch even if he had done top notch research. The simplest and most likeliest of explanations was that her father really had been here in this casino the entire time.

Oh goddammit, why did he spring this on me now? Of all the inconvenient times to bring up my daddy issues...

Her hand shaking slightly, Alice stowed the watch safely in her pocket. If her father was indeed here in the casino, she would have to figure out what to do about that strange, new development later. There were events in motion that she would have to reckon with first. The sleep she had denied herself the night before was throwing her body into exhausted overdrive. Her mind could not encompass both the knowledge that she might be physically tortured as well as the knowledge that, for the past eleven years, her father had been here in Wonderland. It was all just too much for her to handle at the moment. So, with a deep breath, she forced herself to focus on the matter at hand and pushed all other thoughts and feelings aside.

They were taking her to a place called the Truth Room, which sounded like it was a misnomer for a torture chamber. Alice's abused stomach churned at the realization that, in order to make her eventual confession sound valid, she would have to undergo at least some physical torture. If she blurted out the false information right at the beginning, they probably would suspect it was not true. She would have to make them believe they had pried the location from her through sheer agony.

The things I do for...what? Why am I doing this? Hatter's face drifted, uninvited, into her thoughts. Against her better judgment she opened her mind up to the memories of the night before, wishing there was some way she could apologize for everything she had said and done. If only there was some way she could tell him he had been right all along. It had been foolish to try to rescue Jack from the casino, though perhaps not for the exact reasons Hatter had argued. She wondered what he and Charlie were doing now that she was gone.

She wondered if she would ever see them again.

No, don't think like that. You'll get out of here and see them again once you've given them the false location. After all, you can't get home without the ring and the ring is back with them.

The girl was jolted out of her thoughts when she was forced to an abrupt halt in front of a large, gray desk where, behind it, sat an extremely bored looking receptionist. The woman did not even look up, preferring instead to file away at her glittering red nails as the Suit at the head of the group inquired as to the availability of the Truth Room. The woman sighed in annoyance at having been interrupted, as if she had been doing something incredibly crucial. Nevertheless, she ruffled through a sheet of papers hidden from view before she told them the room was available and ready. She slid forward a pink sheet of paper and a red pen with none other than a large plastic heart at the end. The entire scene struck Alice as so very ridiculous, she almost laughed.

Wow, how nice to see they're so bureaucratic about the torture business.

The door leading to the Truth Room was, ironically, an ordinary single red door. The Suits in front suddenly split to the sides, leaving a pathway for Alice and Mad March, who still gripped her upper arm securely. He walked forward, leading the girl along. Her heart thudded ominously and beads of sweat broke out all over her pale skin. The creak of the door as her captor opened it seemed about ten times louder than what it actually was. She held her breath as he pulled her inside the door. Mad March only took a few steps in before he roughly shoved her forward, almost causing her to fall flat on her face. With his cold, mechanical chuckle sending shivers up her spine, he then turned on his heels and walked back to the slightly ajar door, pulled it open, walked through it, and slammed it shut.

The room looked like no torture chamber she had ever seen. The young Slayer was not even certain she had stepped into a room at all. Black and white lines set into circles grew larger and smaller before her eyes in an endless hypnotic cycle. There was no clear delineation of walls and corners. She may as well have been standing on the ceiling or lying down on the floor. She did a full 360 degree spin, finding no sign of any sort of furnishings, particularly those used in brutal information extraction. Alice did not know whether or not she should be relieved by that.

"Okay...this is weird," she muttered.

Then she felt them.

One moment the girl was alone, and the next, she felt two presences suddenly appear behind her. She immediately whipped around. Standing behind her were two men dressed in gray-blue leather jumpsuits with three brown belts across the chest. The pudgy men were as pale as vampires, a feature made even more apparent by the fact that they were completely bald. They were also complete mirror images of each other. The only reason Alice knew there were absolutely two men was because she could sense both of them. If not for that, she could easily have believed she was seeing two images of a single man.

Holy crap, it's Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

"I know what you're thinking," one of the men said in an oily, inquisitive voice. "But it isn't so, no how."

Alice did not know quite what to say to that. She decided it was a rhetorical sentence and remained silent, a frown furrowing her brow.

"Contrariwise," the other man intoned, grinning slyly, "if it was so, it could be, and if it were so, it would be, but, as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

"Huh?" Alice eloquently replied. She hoped she was not supposed to unravel that in some way because the way her brain had been bamboozled since being in Wonderland did not bode well for riddle-solving.

"I'm Doctor Dee," the man who first spoke informed her, pointing to himself. He then motioned towards his twin. "This is my brother, Doctor Dum."

Alice nodded, unsurprised by the introductions since she had already figured out who the two were supposed to be. She just did not know what they were supposed to do. While it was true their appearances were slightly perturbing, she did not feel exactly threatened by them like with Mad March. She could probably easily knock the two out and escape, provided Mad March was not standing guard outside the door. Unfortunately, the girl suspected that was just what he was doing.

Just hang out for a bit and see what they'll do. No rash decisions, Alice, she admonished herself.

"Our job is to open you up, pull everything out," Doctor Dum began, clasping his hands together in front of him and walking toward her other side.

"Until we find the thing we're looking for," Doctor Dee finished, grinning at her madly. The twins chuckled together in unison, their laughter filled with menacing notes.

Yeah, fuck this. Jump ship. Alice turned toward where she thought she had come in, but her jaw dropped when she saw there was no longer a door to speak of. There were only the endlessly shifting black and white lined circles.

"We are the only ones who can open the doors from the inside," one of the brothers told her.

Like clockwork, his brother added his own bit. "You shan't go free till we release you, or until someone opens it from outside."

Seriously, fuck my life.

"Just relax. Let your mind go. Allow yourself to fall into a deep sleep," the brothers urged her in deep, oily tones.

When she turned around, breathing heavily with feelings of rage and fear, she saw that both the twins had disappeared. Their voices echoed in her skull and around the room. It was then that she realized what their method of information extraction was. They did not use physical torture at all. Opening her up and pulling everything out had not been meant in the literal sense. They had been speaking of her mind. The Tweedle twins were going to try to get inside her head and pull out the location of the ring from her memory. She recalled how easily the Cheshire had slipped into her thoughts, plucking out unspoken plans like they were on display at a department store. But the Cheshire was a being of immense power, most likely a god. The Tweedle twins were only men.

Alice drew upon her mental blocks, pulling up random words and images to focus upon like a mantra. "Stay out of my head!" she screamed, clapping her hands to her temples and falling to her knees.

"Oh, now, don't try to shut us out," one of the twins chided.

She sought the image of a safe, imagining the ring's location stored safely in there. Then she tried to picture a wall, a sturdy, impenetrable stone wall circling around her thoughts. This sort of arena had never been her strong suit. She was very much a being of the tangible, physical realm.

"It takes far too much effort," a Tweedle remarked smugly.

"Yes," his brother chimed. "Just give in."

"You're so tired," the other one noted.

Alice was tired, but she was a Slayer. Her stamina could keep her up and running for days without sleep, though she would not exactly be operating at full capacity, so to speak. A fall through a portal vortex, running around a city almost a mile above the ground, then nearly being jabberwock chow had succeeded in sapping even her impressive reserves of energy.

"Oh, how delightful," a Tweedle crooned.

"A challenge," his brother remarked in anticipation.

Alice gritted her teeth as she fought the rising tide of lethargy weighing down her limbs. She felt she would have rather contended with physical torture rather than suffer this invasion of the mind. It was the worst sort of violation imaginable. If she succumbed to sleep, her mind would be left completely open and vulnerable. The Tweedles would pick through it mercilessly until they found the location of the ring.

No. They must not find that. But I don't know how long I can keep fighting this.

"Stop fighting it, Alice," one of the twins commanded in an all too persuasive tone of voice.

"No," she cried, shaking her head, her eyes squeezed shut. "I won't let you in. I won't."

But the urge was becoming too strong. Her last desperate ploy was to again bring up the idea of a safe, holding the true location of the ring securely locked away behind its metal doors. She could only hope that would hold, for she could feel her body surrendering to the powerful urge to descend into sleep. Though she railed against it, her body let go of the conscious realm.

When she opened her eyes, Alice was no longer huddling on the floor upon her knees with her hands clasped against her temples. She was standing in the foyer of the house she and her mother shared in Cleveland. The girl was dressed for cold weather with a thick silver and blue Colombia coat, black snow boots with a faux fur lining, and a...well, she had been wearing a red toboggan, but now it was gone. Her coat was also ripped and stained with grime. There were holes in her blue jeans at the knees, and the skin which was exposed was raw with fresh abrasions. Her head stung, too, and there was a peculiar sensation of something wet and sticky coating the right side of her face and neck. When she lifted up a hand to see what it was, she saw that her fingers were dirty, the nails broken and scraped. Her right hand was badly bruised and swelling up.

"What happened to you here?" a voice asked, not sounding concerned, merely curious.

Alice looked up, unflinching, at the sight of the enormous face of a fat, pale bald man staring at her from outside the window next to the front door. The sky outside was not a grim wintry gray, but a swirl of purple and gold with large pink bubbles occasionally appearing behind the man's face.

"I got in a fight," she answered, her tone somewhat dazed. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror, seeing that the sticky fluid coating a large portion of her right cheek, lower jaw, and neck was blood from a scalp wound. Strands of dark hair clung to the blood-encrusted parts of her face. Otherwise her skin was as pale as the snow outside. Her blue eyes were rimmed in red and the remnants of salty tears streaked down her cheek.

"How old are you?" the man outside inquired.

"Fifteen," the girl replied. She reached up to lightly touch upon the wound which was just past her hair line and winced at the stinging pain which resulted from her prodding fingers. A fleeting memory of slipping on a patch of ice and smacking her head against rough asphalt came to her.

"Who did you get in a fight with?" he asked serenely.

The girl went rigid with terror, images of strange beings in black robes with X marks over their closed eyes clouding her vision. She remembered the bright silver sheen of their huge curved knives. They had ambushed her when she had cut through an alley way shortcut on her way home from the dojo where she had her lessons in various martial art styles. She had only just managed to escape with her life.

"They tried to kill me," she whispered, her eyes widening.

"Who tried to kill you?"

Alice's bloodied brow knit together as she sought to remember what those beings were. She felt like she had known the answer, did know the answer. But the name of the creatures and the reason they had tried to kill her eluded her for some reason.

She shook her head. "Them. They did. They had big knives, black robes, and slashes over their eyes like X's."

"Hmmm. Why would they try to kill you, Alice?" That man sure had a lot of questions. She was now starting to wish he would just go away.

The girl drew in a tremulous breath of air. "Because of what I am," she said, barely even understanding her own words.

"And what are you, Alice?"

The distraught teenager shook her head again. "I...I don't know. I don't remember," she lamented in a distressed tone.

She glanced down the looming hallway towards her bedroom. "I have to...I have to clean up before Mom sees. I don't want her to worry." She began to walk towards the bedroom, her pace quickening with each step. Gradually, the aches and pains in her body eased until they disappeared altogether upon entering the room.

It was not her bedroom which she entered, however. Now she was standing in the middle of the living room of a different house. It was the house she had lived in with both of her parents when she had been a child. Alice herself had grown younger, her height shrinking and her body shifting backwards through puberty, losing the nascent curves and breasts she had harbored at fifteen. Her outfit had morphed into a quaint blue dress with wide, frilly short sleeves.

The young girl was staring at the sliding wood-paneled door which led into her father's study. She did not often go in there, for when he was in there he was usually working on lesson plans or his research. But, sometimes, whenever Daddy's attention was absolutely required, she would slide that door open and creep inside. Right now, however, a nameless fear was holding her back.

"How old are you?" There was, yet again, the face of a fat bald man staring at her through a circular window. The sky shifted in purple and gold colors behind him.

"Ten," Alice replied, not disturbed in the least that she had lost five years of her age in the space of a few seconds.

"But, you're alone in the house," the man pointed out. "Why have you been left alone?"

A sudden sense of sorrow coupled with desolate loneliness filled her. "Dad's left," she answered, her blue eyes filling with tears. "Mom's asking the neighbor to take care of me so she can go look for him."

"Did he say goodbye?"

The little girl gave a miniscule shake of her head, biting down on her lower lip. "No, he was just...gone. I don't know where he went." She twisted her tiny hands together in front of her nervously. Oh, how she wished her father were here.

The man outside the window spoke up again, his voice softly urging. "Why don't you see if he's left you something in his study?"

This was answered with an emphatic shake of the head and a strangled, "No!" Fear gripped her heart, pushing the little girl back from the door a few steps.

"Why not?" the man asked soothingly.

The girl swallowed. "I'm scared to go in there," she admitted.

"Nonsense," the man scoffed.

Without realizing it, the girl started to take tentative steps towards the door. She grasped the brass circular indentations and slowly slid the doors apart, revealing a shadowed room all but empty save for the strange wooden crib set in the middle of the floor. Alice started advancing towards the crib, her heart pounding away in her chest at what she might find in there. Her face twisted into a frown of confusion when she saw it was a pig wrapped up in a white blanket sitting in the crib.

What? A pig in a blanket...that doesn't make sense

Meanwhile, the man outside had been joined by another man to taunt, "Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again."

The voices echoed from all directions, and Alice, back to her twenty-one-year-old self, whipped her neck around trying to follow the giant faces of the men who were circling the room she was in. The doors to the study which she had left hanging open suddenly rolled and slammed shut, startling her into a gasp. The noise, however, had served to wake her up, in a manner. All of a sudden she remembered who those men jeering at her with nursery rhymes were and why she was here. She was in the Truth Room, and these were the Tweedle Twins who were attempting to extract the whereabouts of the Stone of Wonderland from her mind.

Oh crap, the bastards are in my head. But, wait, I'm awake, though. Or, I think I am...

The face of each twin filled a long rectangular window on adjacent sides of the room. They peered in at Alice with contorted frowns on their faces which probably meant they were growing impatient with her. The room, which had been so dark before, lit up with the timely appearance of a large, glistening crystal chandelier. The pig in the crib had disappeared altogether. It was just Alice, standing alone in the room upon the long, slim floorboards with the ugly faces of the twins staring at her from their window vantage points.

"Now it's time for a battle!" one twin declared. She had a feeling their idea of battle was somewhat different than her own idea of battle.

"Let's see if we can find a little lever," his brother mused.

"And prize the tasty little oyster open," the other finished, smiling maliciously.

The young Slayer raised up her fists, preparing herself for anything they might throw at her. But then the floorboards started popping out, and the girl thought her heart died within her chest when she saw the gaping holes in the floor reveal a dark, yawning abyss. One by one, every single board fell into the chasm, eventually leaving the one she was standing upon the last remaining one. Terror completely enfolded her. Her chest and abdominal muscles contracted dangerously, squeezing out her own breath and preventing any more from coming in. Her heart raced at unprecedented speeds. How her legs continued to hold her up she did not know because she could no longer feel them from beneath her.

Ohgodohgodohgod...must breathe...can't breathe...ohgodohgod...

Her legs wobbled and she quickly kneeled, throwing her weight forward to grasp the board with both her hands. If she had tried to stand for much longer, she felt she would have lost her balance and fallen to her doom.

"Well, looks like someone has a nasty fear of heights," one of the twins remarked with cold triumph.

"Please! Please, no!" Alice begged. She gripped the board, digging splinters into her hands, as she attempted to work through her panic attack. Her breaths came in quick and shallow, not nearly sufficient enough to provide a body with oxygen. A full scale panic attack was imminent unless she gained a measure of control over the situation.

"It's not real," she whispered to herself between those quick, shallow breaths of air. "It's not real. It's all in my head. It's just a dream." That was true, was it not? They had somehow gotten her to fall asleep in the Truth Room and now they were attempting to sift through her memories to find the treasure. All of this was simply in her head, so nothing could truly happen to her.

She forced her battered mind to repeat those words over and over, slowly winning over her motor control and rising to her feet. She knew the rules about dreams and falling. One always woke up before he or she hit the ground. All she had to do to escape this horrible torment was to jump. Then she would wake up and proceed to break every single bone in those twins' bodies. So, Alice forced herself to stand, instinctively stretching her arms out like she was on a balance beam. Then, very slowly, she started walking toward the end of the board.

"I just have to wake up," she wheezed.

She let her left foot dangle over the edge. Her entire body had gone completely numb save for the tingly sensations traveling up her arms. She breathed in as deeply as she could manage and then took the plunge...

Only to have her natural survival instinct take over, forcing her body to twist in mid-air and latch onto the board. The wood buckled alarmingly under her weight with the added accelerating force of gravity behind it. But, miraculously, it held, leaving the young Slayer with her legs swinging above the black, endless pit below. She could try to fool herself into believing it was a dream to her heart's content. Her bone-deep instincts knew the horrifying truth. This was no dream. If she had really fallen, she would have been smashed to pieces whenever she hit the bottom. Slayers could fall much farther than a normal human, but at heights approaching hundreds of feet, a jump could be just as fatal. And Alice knew this abyss was unfathomably deep. She never did hear those boards hit the ground.

"Jesus Christ! It's real!" she shouted in disbelief.

The twins cackled scornfully.

"Of course it is, silly girl," one of the brothers jeered.

"But," Alice sputtered desperately. "If I fall, I'll die."

"Undoubtedly," one of the Tweedles remarked, loading his voice with false regret.

Though afraid to shift in any way that might make the board crack in half, the girl could no longer withstand the sensation of her legs dangling so freely above the gaping, black hole. So she gritted her teeth and swung her legs up, hooking them up over the board so that she was now hanging on by all four limbs underneath the board. With a heave, Alice flipped herself over so that her entire body was now fully upon the blessed board.

Holding tight to the wood, she pointed out to the Tweedles, "But what about the ring?"

"Oh, we don't really care about the ring," one replied mildly.

"Yes, it's not ours," the other said.

Under different circumstances, the young Slayer may very well have been able to discern if they were bluffing so as to scare her into confessing the ring's location. As it stood, it was all the poor girl's mind could do to keep from breaking down completely. She honestly could not tell if they were serious or not.

"Besides, this is much more fun." That statement was followed by another bout of derisive cackling.

Alice decided to try another tactic. "The queen will be pissed. If you kill me, she won't get her ring."

The laughter ceased, and one of the twins said in a dangerous tone. "Then you'd better tell us where it is."

"Otherwise, we'll just kill you," the other told her in a nasty, serious voice.

"And tell the queen it was an accident," the other added.

"It happens all the time."

Alice shook her head, crying out, "God, you're fucking insane!"

The twins' laughter bounced off the walls, practically booming inside her head. "Clinically," they both chimed together with mad glee.

"I wonder," mused one of the brothers. "I wonder what would happen if that board were to disappear."

Oh no.

The sharp cracks which followed the Tweedle's words made Alice's blood run ice cold, and the shriek which escaped her lips came out as little more than a strangled gasp. The end of the board was starting to disintegrate before her very eyes. The girl quickly retreated, standing back against the wall with her arms stretched out and flattened against it as the board literally grew shorter and shorter. Within the space of about two seconds, the board had shortened to just barely contain the length of Alice's purple boots.

"Okay!" she screamed. "I'll tell you where it is!" Her mind was far too close to the breaking point to even fathom continuing with this most unusual and cruel of torments.

"Best do it quickly," one of the twins demanded harshly.

"It has a mind of its own," the other warned.

Great.

"I...uh...have to write it down," Alice told them, her eyes squeezed shut as she tried to beat back the rising urge to vomit. "It's...ah...kinda complicated. I'll have to draw a map." She was not being precisely truthful, but she could no longer take the torment. Bile was steadily crawling up her throat, ready to spew out at any moment. She needed something to convince them to lengthen the board or bring the entire floor back altogether.

What a fine Slayer you are, she upbraided herself bleakly.

"Oh, ho hum. Very well, if you must," a Tweedle said resignedly.

A large oak desk materialized into existence right in front of her. There was a sheet of blank white paper and a black ballpoint pen on the desk. The tightness in her chest loosened by the slimmest of margins at the appearance of the desk. Although she would have liked it better if the floor had reappeared along with the desk, she was willing to take whatever she could get at the moment. At the very least, the desk gave the illusion of there being more solid ground even though she figured the thing was probably hovering in the air.

Swallowing her trepidation and distrust of the twins, the girl reached for the pen. She swiftly began to write the address of a safety deposit box in a bank in New York City. The deposit box actually did belong to her, as she had been born in New York City and had resided there for the first two years of her life. She often journeyed there to visit relatives on both sides of the family tree. Alice was giving them a lie sprinkled deviously with a bit of truth.

But would this confession satiate the twins' sadistic desires? They certainly did appear to enjoy tormenting her, intent on breaking her mind down until she was a dribbling idiot. Just because she had given them the thing the Queen of Hearts desired most, did not mean they would stop playing with her. She could be trapped in this endless cycle of torture and agony for an unbelievably long time. Despair rose within her at the thought. Even though she had finished writing the address, she could not make herself put down the pen. She remained leaned over the desk, frozen by hopelessness. How could she ever get out of here on her own? The twins had told her only they could release her, unless someone was compelled to open the doors from the outside. She was not going to hold out for such a prospect. Alice hardly believed there was anyone out there who would have any interest on opening those doors to deliver her from this horrible ordeal.

But the doors did open.

Alice's head snapped up when she heard the rumble of the heavy, wood paneled doors sliding apart. Her jaw dropped in pure amazement when she saw who was standing in the doorway, bracing his arms against the sides in order to keep from tumbling into the endless black pit. Shock, relief, and elation rose up within her. Salty tears suddenly wet her eyes as she stared at the face of a man she had truly thought she would never see again.

"Hatter!" she cried jubilantly. He had come for her! She did not know how he had managed it, but somehow he had slipped into the casino and found her. Suddenly, the despair which had been strangling her resolve was gone, replaced by renewed hope.

"Who is that?" one of the twins demanded furiously.

"Go away!" the other ordered. "This is a private session!"

Hatter ignored them. With one glance at Alice full of more emotion than her mind could possibly comprehend at the moment, he stretched out one of his arms and issued a simple command.

"Jump!"

Sorry for the delay. I was at my boyfriend's this past week for the wedding of two of his friends and so there really wasn't much opportunity to write.

As always, feedback is much appreciated.