To Play the Fool
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Coming out of anesthesia has never been pleasant. Some people, such as myself, experience profound feelings of emotion when they wake up. For me, it's extreme sadness. I started full on sobbing for a good half hour and was unable to make myself stop even though I knew there was no reason for it. Well, there was, but it was still an artificial depression for me.
When I finally managed to put myself back together, I took stock of my surroundings. There was absolutely no light, which contributed to my previous bout of despair. My heart was beating rapidly in anxiety at losing a sense. In my family, sight is our most depended on sense as we are all capable of living without our ears. The ground wasn't dirt or cement. It was solid, lumpy stone, and my back was sore from being in an odd position for several hours.
I felt the ground with my hands and heard chains rattling. My wrists were shackled to the ground by a long chain. It was about two yards long and attached to the ground by a loop of metal that had been bolted into the rock. My fingers told me the bolts were thick and probably quite long. The shackles were locked to my wrists with two heavy padlocks. No dial so I couldn't figure out the combo, and large enough that I wouldn't be able to smash them off with a rock. Judging by the dried blood on the edges, these were used.
I stood up slowly, giving my blood a chance to get to my head. My head pumped the ceiling when I was still hunched over. Not good. I pulled as far away from the bolt as I could to get a better idea of what the room was shaped like. For half of a circle, my back was bumping into the wall. Then it fell away and even when I was down on my belly and reaching for the wall with my feet, I couldn't feel it. So I was in a small room, probably deep in a cave. So deep that the light didn't reach back here. So deep that no one would hear me scream.
I rolled around on the ground for a bit until I found a comfortable place to sit with my back against the cool and damp wall. The presence of water was a good sign. I could lick it off the cave walls if I had to. As for how to go potty, that I would have to wait for Jervis Tetch to explain to me.
The waiting was already getting to me. My mind rebels at stagnation. Jackie can wait patiently because there isn't much going through head. I have to find something to do. I decided to save counting the links in the chain for later and figure out what I had now. My hair had no elastic, hanging freely all over the place. My shirt was a basic t-shirt; no screen printed designs, no pattern, very thin. My bra was a basic one with no under-wire. Yoga pants, also annoyingly flimsy. No socks, no shoes. One toe was numb from being so cold already.
My ears strained to listen to anything: bats, mice, bugs, spelunkers. There was nothing. Nothing at all for … so long. Hours? Days? I have no idea.
Then I saw light. It was faint, but gave everything a shadow of definition. Over the next few minutes, the light grew until I could actually see colors. With the light came sound. Footsteps, hammer on rock, scraping of metal. Someone was coming.
A hand set a lantern on the floor of my room, then pulled up the rest of a body. It was a man with blond hair and a toothy grin. "Jenny, I'm so glad I found you! Are you alright?"
"James? What are you ..."
"No time." He put a finger to his lips, indicating that I should keep quiet. He ran over to me with a key in his hand. "I'm so sorry about all this. I never wanted this all to happen." He unlocked the shackles on my wrists, dropping them to the ground, and pulled me to my feet. "come on."
With quite a bit of help and guidance from James Carroll, I was led out of the room, down a rock wall, and around a bend. I held onto his hand in a vice grip out of a fear of losing my way. He seemed to be terrified of someone following him, always checking over his shoulder, but he knew the way. Very well. "Were you a part of all this?" I asked quietly.
"Yes."
"But you're getting me out?"
"I can't live in a world where you don't exist." Even when he had no one to impress, he was still an incurable romantic. "And the things that the Mad Hatter does – "
"What exactly do I do, Jim?" Jervis Tetch appeared from around the corner, dressed like a typical rock climber. He did not look pleased.
"I've never asked you for anything. Just ..." He looked pleadingly towards me, "not her."
"Are you quitting Jimmy?" The venom in his voice was getting thicker, and we could both feel it.
He gathered his courage and swallowed his fear. "Yes. I'm not going – "
Bang!
The echoing report of Jervis' gun in my hears nearly overpowered the sensation of having James' brains spray all over my face. I almost couldn't comprehend what just happened. Gunshot. The back of James' head missing. Blood all down my shirt. James Carroll dead on the ground for trying to save my life.
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking in shock. When I looked back up, Jervis was in my face, breathing his last meal of garlic infused something into my cheek. "Down here, Alice, you have no allies."
"My name is Jenny Harkness," I hissed.
The cave was silent for five whole seconds. Then he grabbed the hair on the back of my head and dragged me away, kicking and screaming for him to let go, somewhere down the cave's tunnels. He turned right into a cavern with a small subterranean lake. With no warning, he plunged my head into the icy water.
My first instinct was to get my face back into the air. I pushed against the lake bottom with my hands, but the rocks were too slippery and I could gain no traction. My lungs seized up in panic. My first gasp had taken in water instead of air and now my body fought to get rid of it. I held my breath until I saw spots and my ears were ringing, and still I fought. I must breathe!
He pulled my head back up and I inhaled a grateful gallon of oxygen. "What is your name?"
My ego is possibly not great for survival. "Jenny." And back in I dove.
His grip was different this time. He was just pushing my head down, not holding it there. In a desperate bid, I ducked down and slipped out of his hand. My head broke the surface for a second and I gulped in a swallow of air before he wove the fingers of both hands into my hair and forced me under again.
I should not have wasted that one chance of escape. My head swam and pounded, screaming out for oxygen. I was running out of strength to fight against him. Then he pulled me out again. "What is your name?"
"Jenny!"
My lungs and throat burned at the abuse they were undergoing. I could hold my breath for up to a minute under far calmer circumstances. Where was that capability now? The logical part of me said he wouldn't drown me. The survivor in me said that was a lie.
Air. "What is your name?"
Anything but Alice. "Jenny." Water.
The human body can go three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without oxygen. I've tested the food limit before. On accident. It was finals week. I remember ignoring how lightheaded I was getting because the stuff I was remembering was taking up more brainpower than my will to eat. I wasn't about to test the water limit. And now the Mad Hatter was providing me with some valuable information on the air limit. It makes me panic.
Air. "What is your name?"
Too dizzy to speak. Water.
My arms stopped moving. My brain kept shouting at me. My eyes lost focus. The spots took over my vision. Too far. Too far. Oh look … bubbles.
95. 95 links in the chain. That makes each link worth 0.81522 inches of the chain assuming that it really is two yards long. I counted the links again. They were becoming my rosary.
I'm good at finding things to think about, even when there are distractions. Distractions such as a growling stomach trying to eat my intestines, a dry throat cracking with thirst that I could barely satiate with the water on the walls, and the white noise that was making my ears bleed.
He left me in the dark again with no sight. Then he turned on some speakers that played only white noise, full blast, to overpower everything else I might have heard. He could have picked rock music. He could have picked bagpipes. He could have played recordings of the screams of his previous victims. He chose white noise, knowing that it was going to drive me nuts.
Much in the same way Chinese Water Torture works, the noise began as an annoyance. I pushed it out of my mind for a while, but it wormed its way back into my head. Again and again, I shoved it out and it burrowed its way back in. It was always there, hissing in my ears, licking at my eyes. Even when I covered my ears, it was still there. Either it was that loud, or my brain was producing it for me. Thank you, brain. Thanks a lot.
Several times I tried to fall asleep, but the noise filled my dreams, waking me up. I would try to block the sound with my hands and close my eyes again, but the noise slipped in there and wouldn't let me go.
"Alice."
I sat straight up. Who was talking to me? It sounded like James. But he's dead. Every one of my senses said no one was there. Maybe I didn't actually hear it. I have been wrong before. Not entirely because James was involved, but I never even suspected anyone like Jervis –
"Alice."
That one I definitely heard. This time it sounded more like the Mad Hatter. It was just under the white noise, easily missed unless you were listening for it, and I happened to catch it. He said it slowly, loving the name, but not the girl it was supposed to be attached to. It was supposed to sneak past my defenses and be the aural variety I was craving.
"Alice."
It slipped under my skin. It smelled like daisies and clover. It tasted like proper English tea and tea cakes. It looked like a curious, innocent, rude little girl. It was spoken by a Cheshire cat grin. It wasn't pretty, but it was interesting. Curious.
"Alice."
I shot straight up, hitting my head on the top of the cave room. That was my voice. My voice. Fury rose up my throat from the boiling rage simmering in my stomach. This man wants to destroy my mind, steal my name, obliterate my hope, and I will fight him on every front, every step of the way. "And you, Mad Hatter, you will not steal my voice!" I shouted. "No trick of technology or voice acting will ever make me hand you control of my mind!"
"Alice."
"I'm Jenny," I snapped at my voice.
"Alice."
"My name is Jenny!" I argued back. With myself. This is childish.
"Alice."
"Jenny! Jenny! Jenny!"
"What is your name?" the Mad Hatter asked.
I thought over the question carefully. I was named after my aunt, my father's sister. She was a brilliant poet who wrote sonnets about the heartbreak of poppies and the tragedy of a sunrise, and who killed herself when the world got to be too much for her to handle. Dad hoped her intelligence would be passed on to me. I am Jenny, named after my late aunt, Jennifer.
My left leg was beginning to creak and groan under my weight. My outstretched arms were shaking furiously. I held two full teapots, one in each hand, and stood on the one foot. After the first two hours of this, which weren't pleasant to begin with, my muscles began to protest. An hour after that, those same muscles started to have random spasms, but I dared not move positions for fear that I would be electrocuted.
"Tell me your name," the Mad Hatter demanded again.
His voice was muffled a bit by the hood over my head. "My name is Jenny Harkness."
"It's a simple request, Alice. Why must you make this so difficult? You could be at a tea party right now instead of holding the teapots."
The tea was shaking out of the teapots. If it was still hot, it would have scalded my hands. I did not feel like having electricity tear through my blood again. How long have I been down here? A week? Two? Maybe just a day. I don't know. My brain had slowed considerably due to no food and no sleep. Jervis had decided that I had been in the dark long enough and flooded my room with powerful halogen lights and glued headphones to my ears so I would constantly hear white noise, black noise, and the audio recording of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
All in an effort to turn me into that little girl. Someone I admittedly was very much like. I liked an ordered world and tended to enforce rules on Gotham to make sense of the insanity, which never went over well. I made strange friends like a man who dressed like a bat and a girl who wanted nothing more than to do my hair and make me happy. I am curious. I'm not afraid to ask questions. I am a good student. I don't grow at unusual paces, nor do I shrink, but I will object to authorities when they're being unfair or stupid. Maybe it wasn't so bad to be Alice –
No. I am Sherlock Holmes. I am Irene Adler. I am Jenny Harkness, and my sister is Tex. She is coming for me with Batman and Dad and the whole force of the FBI. They are not coming to rescue a broken me. "My name is Jenny Harkness."
The Mad Hatter flipped a switch on what I can only assume was a car battery. I bent over double as the muscles in my torso contracted at the touch of electricity flooding through my body. Every part of my body tingled and burned. My veins felt like they were going to explode and the ends of the wires felt like they were stabbing my skin. Sheets of lead were swimming under my skin as my body contorted into embarrassing positions.
When the electricity was finally shut off, I realized my hands and arms were sliced open. The teapots had shattered when I fell, and I landed on them. Now I was bleeding freely. How convenient. Maybe now I could slip into blissful unawareness.
But this was not to be so. Jervis stopped all the bleeding with some quick bandages. He disappeared for a few minutes, only to return with a needle piercing my skin. He sewed me back together with a needle and thread like a little patchwork doll, very much unlike Humpty Dumpty.
He can't make me call myself Alice. But he can make me want to kill myself.
That's what I realized when I was put into solitary again, this time without the lights or the noise. My ego really is going to be the death of me. It has overpowered my need to survive. Reluctantly, I put that part of myself aside and summoned my more basic human desires to help me form a plan. I could lie to the Mad Hatter. I could pretend to be Alice. What I was afraid of, though, was not being able to come back from that.
I counted the links on the chain for the hundredth time. When I came to number 95, I noticed something odd. The lock hadn't been closed all the way. I gave it a tug, and the lock clicked open. I pulled my hand out and realized I could take the shackle off the chain itself. That meant I could pull it out from the loop bolted to the ground. With a few quick yanks, the chain was free of the ground.
My heart did a somersault at the prospect of being free. I gathered up the chain and climbed down the rock wall James had helped me down before. This time, I was blind, weak, and on my own. I more or less slid down the rock face, smashing my toes a couple times, but the pain didn't matter to me anymore.
If I could remember correctly, James took me down to the left. No, the right. Or was it straight ahead? A pinpoint of light dead ahead gave me my answer. Where there was light, there was civilization. Or stars. Or sunlight. I needed one of them. Using my hands as I guide, I followed the walls of the cave towards the light. The floor dipped down, rose up, and curved away from the place I wanted to go, but I found a way to follow it like it was a star. The floor sloped down towards the center where water ran down to form a small stream. I was following it upstream, as that was more likely to be the way out of the cave.
Climbing up the stream was probably the most difficult part as it was freezing, there were more rocks there that cut the soles of my feet, and it was slippery to climb. I would have been grateful for a pair of flip-flops at this point, just to have something protecting the bottom of my feet. But our ancient ancestors walked around barefoot constantly. I was sure I could accomplish the same feat a caveman could. Of course, their feet weren't coddled or abused by high-heels like mine have been.
The stream turned into a small waterfall, and the light was getting stronger. I found something like a staircase that went up the side of the waterfall. My hands were getting cut up and scraped by all the rocks, and the shackles weren't helping either. They had cut into my wrists after rubbing my skin raw. My left wrist wouldn't be doing as good now that it had the entire chain's weight on it. This is how the blood got on it in the first place. A desperate girl trying to pull at the chain, hoping that at some point, it would give, the entire time making her hands more likely to break off first.
I threw my chain up to the landing and pulled myself up with it. Then I stopped short. The light I was following was a lantern. And there was an odd chair here that looked much like a dentist's chair. And a machine I couldn't recognize. And the Mad Hatter was right there waiting for me.
I didn't even have the wherewithal to run at that point. I just fell to my knees. "No."
Jervis casually took the end of the chain and locked it around the base of the chair before returning to his equipment on a desk a few feet away. "Took you long enough. It's been tea time for several days now."
"Why are you doing this?" I half-whispered. "Wonderland isn't your delusion."
"No, it was Jimmy's. He was diagnosed with Schizophrenia years ago, about the same time I was deemed a high-functioning sociopath. Jimmy wanted to go back to Wonderland, but he never had the backbone to get anything done. I did. He asked for my help, and he gave me a place to hide." He approached me with a syringe in hand. Taking my right arm, he cleaned off the area in the crook of my elbow with an alcohol towelette, then slid the needle into my vein. I had to look away from the injection. "It all worked out in the end."
The drug started to work its way into my system, making me feel a bit woozy and just slightly numb. "But you just killed your friend."
"I didn't need him anymore. Besides, it's time to retire, try something new." He unlocked the shackle on my left wrist and lifted me into the chair. "I want to do something other than the same tea party over and over again. There's more to Wonderland than that. And what better way to celebrate the end of an era than a giant F-you to the agent who's been hunting me for the last couple years?" Velcro straps secured my arms to the armrests and my legs to the chair.
"You don't really care about Alice, do you." Tears were leaking out of the corners of my eyes.
"No, I do. I want to see the fruits of my efforts. You have been one of my favorite, but more difficult projects. Mostly because I've been on such a tight schedule." He started attaching some electrodes to my temples. "ECT should never be given without informed consent. So, Electroconvulsive Therapy will induce a small, controlled seizure for about fifteen seconds. Side effects may include confusion, memory loss, retrograde amnesia, and the other kind of amnesia. Anteretrograde, that's the one. Questions?"
I would have had a few, but he placed a tongue guard in my mouth to keep me from biting my tongue, effectively gagging me.
Then he flipped the switch. Pulses of electricity surged through my head, lights danced in my eyes like a rave, and my mind raced down the rabbit hole.
"Tell me your name."
I turned my head to the man in the strange suit. He looked like the sixth Doctor, except his suit was many shades of blue. He wore a funny hat with a 10/6 card in the brim. It was bigger than his head. "Who are you?" I asked him.
"I am the Hatter, but most people call me Mad. What is your name?"
"Alice," I replied.
He gave me a warm smile. "Alice. I thought so. You look like an Alice. Did you know that it's my un-birthday today?"
I giggled. "It is? It's my un-birthday too!"
He gave me one of his hands to help me to my feet. "Well let's get you dressed up, then. It's tea-time, you know."