"Do you want to go down the rabbit hole?"
The question was rhetorical. To answer no would mean death, that much she had gathered. Yet she didn't want to give in, there were things worse than death after all, she had heard that saying often and she believed it. It was quite recently after all that the face looking back in the mirror had stopped appearing to be hers and instead had distorted itself to take on some other quality, like another her had come to form, almost identical but not quite right.
Then there was this thing talking to her now. An abomination to be sure, oh it seemed like a normal creature at first glance with its whiskers, a twitchy, black nose and the soft, white furred, long, erect ears of a rabbit but rabbits did not wear waistcoats or hold pocket watches or speak. The humanity of this being, she realised, was ironically what made it seem so monstrous. Too odd to think that there should exist creatures neither human nor bestial but lost somewhere in between.
She had come here to try and avoid the mad people but this encounter proved such a thing simply wasn't possible anymore.
"It's getting late," the rabbit creature addressed her in a warning tone.
"It is," she agreed politely.
She looked to the rabbit hole and suppressed a shudder. Far from a mundanely dug dirt tunnel it appeared more like someone had snatched away a large chunk of the ground and left a void of nothingness in its place. Not an exposure to the ground below but nothingness. Staring at the void made her uncomfortable just as staring at mirrors made her feel lately.
She glanced over her shoulder but could see no pursuers and wondered if she had been abandoned. Perhaps this was an apt punishment for trying to run from her nightmares. Maybe she ought to have been brave and confronted them. Except when she tried to make sense of them nothing made sense anymore, even awake she started to feel there was no sense... just nonsense.
Her nightmares had become so terrifying that even in them she had cried in terror but that had been disastrous as soon she had found herself drowning, submerged in a pool of her own tears or had it been that she had been cast into a salty sea? She didn't know, it had all been so queer and in those moments in Hypnos' realm she had sensed monstrous things watching her as she had splashed and choked in waves of grief and below, glinting in the deep dark of the water there had been something.
"It's almost too late."
She looked back to the rabbit, fixing on its pink eyes as she wondered if perhaps it might be albino or if it was just the natural order of things that rabbit men should have pink eyes.
"The dreamer wakes soon, too late for you, your nightmares couldn't be contained, they'll imprison you and have your head."
She shuddered at the reminder, it was a queer way of putting it but she understood. Hadn't that been the point of today? Hadn't she known things were off from the way her mother had brushed her hair before that wretched mirror and she too hadn't appeared to be quite herself? And her mother had permitted her to wear her finer dress, the pale blue with the silk and chiffon paired with the white gloves, an outfit meant to be reserved for high dining and fine drinking in the evenings. Yes, everything had seemed queer today and she hadn't felt like herself wearing an evening gown in the daytime. It was all quite wrong, playing dress up or farewell, what had her mother being doing, had it been both?
It seemed so silly thinking about it, that a few nightmares could affect things so. She had tried to keep them back but these things had an odd way of slipping out, dreams leaking out of her brain like fluid, staining the real world with a lunacy that could only make sense when one was unconscious. It had been bearable until she had glimpsed the thing one night in Hypnos' trance. An elder beast that did not belong in this world and certainly did not belong in her head. A being that fixed upon her not with eyes but with orbs of gold flames set in a form too large and strange for her to comprehend even in her dreaming state. She had some vague notion of it being draconian, part of some ancient, forgotten species that maybe with its leathery wings had been cast down from the stars just as the angels once were. Yes, she realised now that she had ceased to be her normal self when she had glimpsed that thing.
The rabbit was right, they did want her head. They had tried talking, shocking, bribing and depriving, many manner of wretched things in fact. She had viewed the treatments like unhappy subjects she had to suffer for an education, instead of English lessons she had therapy and in opposition to her elocution lessons there were instead speeches to be made of the difference between dreaming and waking. It all seemed so obvious but at some point she had failed those lessons and now the time to board instead had come upon her. That was why she got to wear her fine blue dress, one last time before they bored - ah yes, she was not to board there but rather they would bore into her skull and see if they could silence the nightmares that way.
"Where does it go?" she pondered as she looked to the vaguely sinister patch of oblivion before her.
"What does it matter? You can't go back."
Well of course the rabbit was right there.
"You first," she suggested.
He extended out a gloved hand and she gave a terribly unlady like giggle as she took in his kid gloves for didn't they appear to have a trim of rabbit fur on them?
She knew taking the hand would somehow be both the start and end for her. Was it possible to end a race just as one started it or was that losing the race? Were they the same thing or did things become an endless loop? Perhaps if things ended and started at once then nothing moved in one direction or another? No, that wasn't right, the rabbit had said they were late so time must still be moving.
Rabbit hole or the asylum? Weren't they both offering oblivion? She supposed the latter might put her into an eternal sleep but the former might wake her up properly this time and end the nightmares.
She took the gloved hand and into the rabbit hole she followed the rabbit, never considering how she might get out again.
For a moment she fell fast through nothingness and contemplated that maybe this was death. When the fall continued she considered maybe she had actually tumbled into a very real hole and faced a painful death at the end of it.
It was bearable until her body turned wrong side up and the blood started to rush to her head. She flailed in an attempt to right herself, not noticing that the rabbit's hand was gone from hers, but she could not manage it try as she might.
In despair and pain, the tears began, slipping down her brow and through her hair instead of down her face as gravity took them down the never-ending darkness. Her vision flashed red and her head pounded with pain as some vein in it threatened to burst from the pressure.
Just as the oblivion about her threatened to devour her, her entire body became drenched in an icy cold and she glimpsed a city suspended above her, wrong side up as she faded away from it into murky salt waters that she swore could surely not be from her crying this time.
With the water she was able to turn and right herself. As a pressure started to build in her chest, she reached up for the air, kicking her feet and stretching up her arms all while foolishly thinking how the salt that burned her eyes would destroy her dress.
Up through choppy waves her white gloved hand extended, an odd apparition in the grey sea, mistook immediately for a ghostly omen by a few of the gloomy faced fishermen watching on. They backed up, making gestures to ward off the evil and hoping that the hand would return to the depths again.
She spluttered against the water, filling with despair once more as the waves tried to push her back down. Tears of fear mixed with the sea and she thought for one fleeting moment that perhaps she would drown in her tears and wouldn't that be an unfitting end?
She felt the shadow below, something gigantic, stirred to attention by her splashing, perhaps a shark but perhaps something worse. She feared to look and focused again on the surface, pushing up to break the water once more.
A man marvelled at the sight of the face looking up at him. His cynical side had half-expected a creature to emerge or one of the aquatic fish folk who somehow breathed as well on land as they did in water, defying all logic as far too many things seemed to these days.
"Curious," he murmured dryly as he seized upon her reaching hand.
She grasped at the arm extended to her, holding it steadfast though she wondered if she might be causing its owner pain. Her shoes skidded and kicked against the rotting wood stems of the pier he had stepped out on to reach to her.
He reached with his other hand, grabbing at her shoulder and pulling hard and fast.
She heard the large splash behind her as she was wrenched up from the sea at last but the flash of a gold fire burning impossibly under the water was for his eyes only. Two points of flames like eyes glowering up in anger as he robbed something monstrous in the ocean of its prey.
He fell back slightly with the force of her and his hands skidding slightly on the wooden to keep his balance. He turned up to her with a probing dark stare, his face serious though the cracks in his sanity showed in one brief flash of worry in his brown irises as he wondered for a passing moment if he had robbed some god of its sacrifice.
She stared down at him calmly as her long hair dripped onto his dark trenchcoat and her hands planted on either side of him, steadying herself but trapping him beneath her. She could see that standing he would be much taller than her, tougher and older with the war worn form of a soldier but right now she had him at her mercy.
"From a rabbit hole to the sea and from the sea to you, curiouser and curiouser," she murmured softly.
"Who are you?"
She smiled but it felt odd on her face, sharp and bitter not warm and pleasant as a smile should be. "I normally would have a cordial introduction for you but I think today I am a different sort of Alice."
"Huh and how did you get here?"
She glanced back to the choppy sea behind her. "Did I really cry so much?" She shook her head in shame for herself before turning back to the man. "There was a rabbit," she attempted to explain, "and I followed him. Did you do that? Go down a rabbit hole?"
The man's mouth set in a line as he seemed to consider his response carefully. "No," he looked back to the shabby looking docks behind him as he wondered if the stench of salt and rotting fish might be some sort of limbo for him, "but it would be an improvement."