“Just like the Alice Syndrome,” the voice said. “It seems those real-world doctors stole their ideas from Lewis Carroll’s genius interpretations. The Rabbit Hole means putting a patient under severe stress, metaphorically sending them into a rabbit hole, and pushing until they remember their past.”
“Well done, then,” she said. “So I should be counting on her remembering?”
“Like I said, it’s only half an hour and she will remember,” the voice said. “However, it will be most heart-wrenching. I am making sure she doesn’t die or something from the shock.”
“We can’t afford this girl to die, you know that.”
“Don’t worry,” the voice said. “I have it under control.”
“And her sisters?”
“They know nothing,” the voice said. “They are just pawns in the game. Doing what I have planned for them to do.”
Chapter 68
Alice Wonder's house, 7 Folly Bridge, Oxford
Time remaining: 1 hour, 01 minutes
“How did I give you the idea?” I ask, as flashes of my horrible childhood are nothing but playing cards flying in front of my eyes. I can’t seem to catch any of the cards to take a better look, but I see fragments, flashes, flipping before my eyes.
Flashes of who I really am.
“This brings is us to the shocking truth.” Lorina waves her fan again. The memory of her waving it and snickering while Edith punches with her gloves while I am inside the cage hits me like a plague. Now I know what the gloves and fan meant. But what is the dress for?
“Are you telling me there is a more shocking truth than what you have just told me?” My breathing grows heavier. First I witness the atrocities against Wonderlanders in the circus, then my own horrible childhood in the basement of my family’s house, then I am supposed to learn something much darker?
“Remember when we told you went missing as a seven-year-old girl?” Lorina says. “Remember when we told you, you told us about having gone to Wonderland and came back with that glinting knife in your hand?”
I nod, but don’t say a word.
“That actually never happened that way,” Edith says. “The truth is...” She hesitates. “That you were never lost.”
“What happened then?” I ask.
“Alice.” Lorina stares right into my eyes. “You knocked on our door one day. When we opened it you were a lost seven-year-old standing with a knife in her hand, blood spattered all over.”
“I—I am not following.”
“I wanted to kick you out, but Mother took sympathy on you,” Edith says. “I mean, I never understood why she wanted to save you.”
“She is my mother,” I retort. “Of course she’d want to save me.”
“She doesn’t get it, yet,” Lorina told Edith. “You think we shouldn’t tell her?”
I scream at them, “Tell me what?” Deep inside, I have already remembered the truth. “Tell me what, Edith?” I shake her with all my might.
Edith doesn’t reply. I think she enjoys the madness lingering in my eyes.
I find myself turning around, looking for something to threaten them with. Funny—or terrifying—how my eyes spot a glinting knife on the floor right away. I kneel down, grab it, stand up, and press them both against the wall. “Tell me what?”
“That’s the same look you had in you eyes when you were seven years old,” Lorina says.
“Tell me what, goddammit?”
“That you knocked on our door, told us you were running from the Wonderland Monsters, that they wanted to kill you, that something horrible happened in Wonderland.”
“You were laughable,” Edith continues. “A lost, mad child whom my mother pitied and took in and made you one of us.”
“You mean...?”
“You were never our sister, Alice,” Lorina says, as if she is delivering the happiest news in her life. “You were never one of us, and you have always been mad.”
Chapter 69
Buckingham Palace, London
Tom Truckle saw the Queen of England take the podium, that sinister grin glinting like a knife on her face.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “Pardon me, I mean mad ladies and gentlemen.” She snickered and the crowd laughed. “I am about to offer you something that hasn’t been done in the history of mankind before. Something that will make us, Wonderlanders and fellow madmen and women, avenge what happened to us in the circus two centuries ago.”
Tom noticed the glaring silence of the crowd. Everyone seemed to be counting on the Queen now.
“What we’re going to do is going to shake this human world upside down,” she said. “It will make Wonderland look like such a very sane place to what we’re going to do to the real world around us.”