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The padding under me shifted, and I imagined that he crouched, knees up like a cricket, right beside my buried head.
I was right. His breath ran over my ear. “Will you not look at me, Alice?”
No, I would not. How could I? “Please go away... bring the Red Queen back.” My voice broke and the sobs came all the harder. “I want to die.”
My hair had not been washed or properly combed in weeks, it was clumped and frizzy, a perfect shield over my face. The Hatter caught it up, tucking bits behind my ear. “Oh no, the dregs sent here don’t die. They will keep you alive well past old age. The only thing that will die will be your mind, piece by piece, until you are a shell for them to claim they’ve cured. They will carve my sweet Alice up for her own good. I’ve always appreciated the evils of a good nut house.”
A ring of truth ruined the softness in which the Hatter spoke. Whether he was mocking me or cautioning me, it mattered little. I got the point: I was to receive no mercy. Turning my wet nose from the floor, breath shaking, I let the Hatter see what I had become.
The familiar sharp lines of his face, the bizarre yellow glow of his eyes, his manic smile inches from my tear streaked cheeks, he giggled. Crouched over me like a spider on its prey, my body wrapped in the straightjacket and pinned to the floor, I may as well have been spun in his silk—a snack saved for later in a web of padded white.
The brightness of the room’s bare bulb haloed around the Hatter’s head, casting an angelic glow. Had I the capacity to laugh, I would have. “Maybe none of it is real. Perhaps I am still a little girl, tucked into bed, having one long, bad dream.”
Dusty knuckles smoothed over my cheek. “Your suffering is as real as anything.”
“Was I not a good girl?”
The Hatter looked at me as if he loved me. “Mommy and Daddy, do you still think they will come for you? His greed, her vanity... acquiring their souls was child’s play. What they offered for loveliness, success in business, what they are willing to give without even knowing what I take, a beauty in itself. But you, you would not take my pennies for your tooth. At your essence you would never esteem riches. Exquisiteness was bestowed on you in spades, yet it’s only value in your eyes is how it might please your parents. Still you love them, though they sent you here and will leave you to rot. Who has ever cared for you but I?”
I had nothing and no one. “You promised to torment me.”
“And I have. The Devil owes me a great debt, and I chose to collect upon it in acquiring you. But he cannot bestow upon me what isn’t his to give. You are pure as much as you are insane. As fun as it has been teasing and tricking you into giving me what I desire, I’ve grown impatient. Games, tea, drying your tears on my sleeve, what did I get for it? To hold your hand and kiss your cheek? You deserve all they do to you for thinking to deny me.” With that he bent lower, laying his cold lips on the corner of my mouth, a whisper following. “The Devil will have his due and so will I. It can all end, sweet Alice, if you would just give yourself to me of your own free will. Have you had enough? Let me take you home.”
I longed to go home to my nursery with the broken furniture and tattered wallpaper. I longed to see my parents, even if all my presence earned from them was frowns. “You would get me out of here?”
His mouth lingered over mine, the Hatter’s breath filling my nostrils as he hissed, “Oh, yessssssss.”
Heart racing at the thought of freedom, there was no question on my part. Stretching my neck, I gave him the kiss I’d denied him all those years ago, and felt him chuckle at the innocent press of my lips to his.
I counted to three before drawing back, and his laughter came all the louder.
The Hatter was positively cackling. “You would think that was a kiss, wouldn’t you?”
He fell upon me before I might try again, his mouth sucking the air from my lungs. His tongue drove in, his lips slid over mine, and I felt the kiss a man might give a woman. It was a shocking thing, and all I could fathom in that instance was a single repetitive question: why would a man put his tongue in my mouth?
Is this why he had pulsed his fingers in and out of my lips when feeling my loose teeth? All these years had he been angling to lick at my tongue?
Why?
He was still laughing, his body seizing and shaking in mirth. No, that wasn’t laughter, it was another noise. It was an extended groan, racking moans, and I could feel them vibrate in my chest—just as that machine had vibrated between my thighs.
There was a twinge, a reason I felt a dire need to press my legs closed. Head driven back upon the padded floor, I angled my jaw away. Sucking in a breath, I felt the Hatter’s tongue lick at my lips while he allowed me a brief offering of air.
Though his fingers were spread, hands braced on either side of my head, though his body hovered over mine, at no place did we touch. He still could not, and I knew to mock him for it, for the way he scuttled to angle for my mouth, that I would be abandoned for another set of years to decay in this hell.
Warning and threats black as sin, burned hot in his unforgiving eyes.
If
I were left in this padded cell for even one more day, I truly would go mad. “You’ll save me from the examinations, from pinching fingers? They strap me down and I cannot get away... They spin me around until I vomit. All the water is ice.” Sickness was twisting in my gut, there was buzzing, my muscles tensing to the point I tremored. “I long for tea. Please, make it stop!”
The Hatter’s head cocked and he seemed for a moment transfixed. “Say the words, Alice. Give yourself to me.”
Nodding, frantic to be out of the confines of the straightjacket, out of the blaring light of that room, out of the asylum, I swore to him, “I’m yours.”
With a smile blooming from the deepest parts of his evil heart, the Hatter sealed our deal. “My pleasure.”
His hands were on my shoulders, my relief palpable when he helped me to sit up. But he was not angling for the straps at my back. With force, I was twisted, my belly slamming into the ground. Yanked back until my knees parted, my legs crooked like a frog, he lay full upon my prone figure. The skirt of my hospital gown no longer brushed my thighs, and I was as bare as I had been on the table day in and day out.
