We are All Alice

She came to this place only in her dreams. A patchwork of tapestries forms a tunnel, she doesn’t know how long she has been there. But she is crawling like a child, weightless inside its cacoon. 

Beautiful quilts of flannel, floral sheets, and woolen blankets are all stitched together with invisible thread. She knows this part, where she crawls on hands and knees, following the quilted tunnel through its turns.

The tunnel usually lulls her into the vague darkness of endless sleep.

But this time— it ends.

No longer weightless, she puts a bare foot on metal scaffolding. The room— no, warehouse— before her is vast and dark. She blinks as her eyes adjust, yes the tunnel was dark but it was soft and warm like the womb.

She is only wearing her nightgown, and the chill bites as she stands in the empty warehouse her weight squishes the tender skin into the iron slatting of the scaffolding. 

Before her is a flight of stairs. 

In her sleep-encumbered mind, she is careless on the steps. Her grip on the railing becomes vicelike— the fear of tumbling forward from great heights down the metal stairs in the dark grips the only part of her mind that is awake.

As she descends, lights hanging like pendants from an invisible ceiling splash light on the concrete floor at the bottom of the stair.

She reaches the concrete floor, it is empty. But on the edge of shadow— where the light cannot touch, there is a hovering, wavering figure.

She stills.

Sweat beads on the back of her neck. Fear grips her chest in a tight fist and when the figure moves into the light she stops breathing.

She wants to laugh when she sees the face paint. Of course, clowns were supposed to be funny. She never liked them— their exaggerated features and saccharine smiles always made her stomach churn. But this man— his makeup was smudged. He wore no bow tie, nor suspenders. In lieu of oversized shoes, he wore tight-laced boots over stained cargo pants. He wore a flannel button-down of brown and yellow. His makeup was sweat-stained and smudged. His hair was long and wet. 

Gloved hands held an axe.

Suddenly she was a deer in the woods. A hummingbird in the garden. She darted this way and that, bare feet smacking upon cracked concrete. 

The only sound was her own gasping breath and the pounding of blood in her ears. 

She ran deeper into the warehouse and hazarded a glance over her shoulder. No one was behind her. At second glance, she realized that the quilted tunnel— the one from her dreams, that she luxuriated in forever— since she was a child, she dreamt of the tunnel. Again and again, it would always appear to her— comfort her. It felt like home, wonder, and safety all at once— it was held up by the metal scaffolding.

Someone had built it for her.

The man stepped forward out of the shadows. He did not chase her, she realized, he was stalking her like prey.

She runs past reams of cloth, ugly, moth-eaten, and torn. She runs until she trips. Staggering and in pain from the fall she huddles under a nearby table. She wills her labored breath to still. And after a moment, she peers around the desk. No sign of the man behind her. On the desk, there is a sewing machine, possessing a single light, to the right is a pack of cigarettes, discarded thread, and a swimsuit magazine.

When the man approaches again, she nearly lets out a whimper, but she bites her lip to restrain herself. He continues to walk past her silently stalking her, not even his footsteps made a sound in the vast space. 

Once he’s gone, she runs until she finds, blissfully, a door. The handle turns without complaint and it whooshes open with a strong wind. Cascading rain beats the ground. It is dark but for one foggy streetlight light. She rushes down the steps to the gravel lot. She runs past the lot, towards the grass, where a thicket of trees lies ahead. 

The distance seems an eternity, and so when he wraps one arm around her waist, when she is weightless, and bits of gravel fall from her feet. She knows, that she was never going to make it. 

He brings her back into the warehouse, and slams the door shut, swallowing her scream. 

She fights him, suddenly, she is a jackal. Scratching, clawing, kicking, aiming to maim her captor. When the blunt end of his axe comes down on her head— and everything is dark.

When she wakes, she is in a cot covered in a musty blanket. Her hair is damp around her face, and a chill goes through her body.

The man is sitting in a chair near the cot, an open beer is lazily cradled in one large hand as he brings it to his lips.

His face is pale and lined, but the makeup is making him look much older than she suspects he is. His appraising eyes are dark and gaunt. His mouth slanted, lips wet. The smudged makeup makes it hard for her to tell if he's smirking or snarling. 

“Who are you?” She croaks. 

He does not answer. 

“Where am I?” She says as she rises to her elbow.

He takes another drink.

She flings her feet over the side of the cot and gets ready to bolt. But he says, “No.”

He has a strange accent, his voice is deep and firm. Something about it makes her still for just a moment, but that hesitation is enough for him to stand, take two strides and grasp her tightly around her bicep. 

He pulls her closer, his grip is vice-like and beginning to bruise. She becomes aware of her bruised and swollen feet as he drags her off the cot.

She could run again, but it will hurt.

“Why am I here?” She asks.

“You came here,” he replies.

“I want to go home.” She cannot help it when her voice cracks. 

He loosens his grip on her arm. 

“Let me go.” She pulls away but still, his gloved hands hold her still. “What do you want from me?” She sobs.

“I want you to work.”

She sleeps in the cot. There is a small kitchenette where she eats canned soup and peanut butter for meals. During the waking hours, she sews. That’s what days are now, waking and sleeping hours. She has not seen the sun since she first came to this place.

There are other parts of the warehouse— places where he disappears during the sleeping hours. 

He does not speak to her. Does not touch her. But he watches her. She tries to walk quietly, calmly to the door again, but soon he was there and escorts her back to her work. 

A few days later, she tries again.

He does not say anything, he just appears and leads her back like a stray sheep. Back to the sewing machine. She sews and sews and sews. He shows her to only take the best fabrics, to manipulate and tease the quilts so that when they are patched together, they are the prettiest. Some of the fabric turns to dust in her hands, some are torn and weathered. It is not always easy to find suitable fabric. But when she does, she sews and sews and sews together the tapestry.

When it is time to sleep, he comes and collects her work, and takes it away. 

One day, instead of going to bed, she follows him to another set of scaffolding, with a quilted tunnel hanging from it. 

It was not nearly as intricate or long as her tunnel. But it was similarly constructed. She should know, she sewed it herself. This was the work. 

She watches him hike up the iron stairs, up, up, up the scaffolding to where the tunnel ends. And he stands there, she can barely see what he is doing, but when he is done, the new tapestry is attached, the tunnel is longer, and he descends the stairs. 

This continues until one day, she hears him speak in strange hushed tones, his voice low, and focused. Then, at the top of the tunnel, the fabric seems to bow and billow, cascading slowly down the passageway, the object in the tunnel has no hesitation as it tumbles down, down, down, and out the other side where he is waiting. And there she is. 

Another girl appears. 

She is younger.

She is scared.

And she is trapped just the same.

The girl’s name is Alice. She is eleven. She is in the very same nightgown that she was wearing. Plain, white, ankle length.

Alice cries every night. And every night he watches them curled up in the cot together. Alice kicks in her sleep, but she holds onto her anyway.

When they wake in the morning, she opens a can of soup for each of them. Alice refuses at first. 

“You must eat or you will starve,” she says. They both drink it straight from the can. For dessert, they take a finger full of peanut butter and suck their fingers dry.

Then they return to the work.

“We have to get out of here.” One of you says.

“But how?”

“We can’t leave out the door, he will expect it.” 

“What about the other girls?” Alice asks.

“Other girls?”

“You said you made the tunnel for me. So what are we sewing every day for? Who made your tunnel?”

Crippling nausea rolls down her spine. 

But he returns. No time to plot their escape now. Instead, she goes to bed and lies awake thinking of how to escape.

They need a weapon. But there is nothing around they could use. Except for the axe. Where did the axe go? She hadn’t seen it since the first day.

The next time the man disappears with their day’s work, she looks around for the axe and instructs Alice to do the same.

She trembles when she finds it tucked under their cot, but not because she is afraid to use it.

The next day, she runs for the door, and he grabs her by the waist, it takes almost no effort for him to stop the blow from the axe. He is so much stronger than they are, she thinks helplessly as he pulls the axe from Alice’s grip. 

Surely, he will kill them now, she thinks as she scratches and claws her way out of his grip. Alice kicks him in the back of the knee, and wonder of wonders, his legs buckle beneath him and he releases her and the axe.

She grabs it automatically and swings it with all of her might, striking true. 

Both girls are splattered in blood that glows against the stark white of their nightgowns. 

She opens the door and searing sunlight cascades into the warehouse, blinding her. 

The woods were just trees and beyond was ocean— miles and miles of ocean. They were trapped.

There was nowhere to run, except...

“We have to go back the way we came,” she says, pulling Alice back into the warehouse. 

She had no desire to live in this world. His world. She wanted to go home.

She hands Alice the axe.

After he lured her here, he asked her to work. To do his work, of luring others. She was complicit in Alice’s capture, she should get the weapon.

When they go back into the warehouse— he is not dead, but wounded gravely, he still might die. She doesn’t stick around to find out.

Deep in the warehouse, they must separate. Alice came from one tunnel on one side of the warehouse and she came from the other. On her way back through the warehouse, she decides that there is one more thing she must do. 

She takes the sewing machine and heaves it above her head, and throws it to the ground. Its delicate instruments tinkle and chime as they collapse in the machine, and the man howls like a beast. The sound is so loud and sharp that it stuns her for only a moment. He had followed her, crawling and pulling his way to get to her.

She keeps running, up, up, up the stairs, to the tunnel— she hesitates again, she does not trust it the way she used to. He is ascending the steps. So she must go. 

She tumbles into the quilted tunnel, fabrics race past her as she crawls quickly on her hands and knees. 

“Come back,” the man says, it could only be a whisper. But how could he be so close? She looks behind her and he smiles.

She scrambles up the tunnel, it is more difficult than she remembers. She rejects the thought that this is a one-way passage, and she pushes on, pulling herself forward, lunging, clawing, and scraping with every muscle in her body working in full concert. 

When she reaches the end of the passageway, it is completely dark— like the darkness that blurs behind your vision when you look at the sun for too long.

She had spent too much time in the darkness now to fear it.

“Come back,” he says again.

She does not think when she pushes herself forward with a cry. She falls, and one word echoes from her lips, and it seals the tunnel forever.

When she wakes, she is in a hospital room. Tubes are shoved down her throat and she chokes on them. 

She starts to panic and rip at the IVs in her arm. She flails out of the cot when the nurses rush in. They pull her from the ground, but she can’t handle their hands all over her, pulling, restraining, and lifting her weightless off the ground. She tries to scream but the tubes are obstructing her.

One of the nurses yells something and a rush of cold liquid spurts into her veins— chilling her, cooling her, making her heart slow.

She is restrained to the hospital bed this time. And she is not alone. A man in hospital scrubs has his back on her. Her clipboard is in his hands, and he hums over the report, like a gardener admiring his crop.

When he turns, she wets herself. It is him, the man, the clown, her captor. He is hard to look at without the makeup. 

“Welcome back,” he smiles.

The monitors hooked up to her beep maniacally, erratically, like they might combust. 

“Where am I?”

“Are we going to do this again?” He replies too quickly. His smile turns. “I’m disappointed.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Ah, finally asking the right questions.”

He takes a chair and turns it around, he straddles it, and crosses his arms over the back. He looks almost boyish. 

“Sick girls like you come in here.”

She was sick? But what about her—

“Their parents leave them in my care.”

Her parent knew she was here, did they know she had woken up?

“And I— how did you put it? I lure them in their sleep to my workshop.” His smile broadens.

“Why?” She asks, tears pricking in her eyes.

“Because it works,” he said. “Because I get one girl, and she gets the next, and the next.”

“But the two of you—“ Alice. She thought. Where was Alice?

“The two of you got the best of me I’ll admit.” He chuckles. “I never had two before. But you—“ He pets her face reverently, and she pulls away, with tears slipping down her cheeks. “You were my little worker bee. You were so eager to help.”

Shame pooled in her throat like poison. She did not question the work— not until Alice arrived. She trapped Alice. She did this to her.

“What happens to them?” She asked.

“They die,” he says, with lowered eyes. “They don’t like to live in my world. I give them everything they need, but if they do not take it, they die.”

She knew well enough, what happened. He never hurt them. But they would starve easily enough.

“What do you want?” She asked.

“I want you to let me back in,” he said. “You sealed the portal, and now, I cannot have you. There is work to be done.”

“No,” she said lowly. 

He flinched as if he had been struck.

“No,” She said again more forcefully. 

He stood up from the chair taking a few steps back. “No!” She shrieked. And he fell to the floor holding his head like it was going to burst.

“What’s going on in here?” A nurse appears in the doorway. “Doctor, are you alright?” She is an older woman, but strong as she lifts him to his feet. 

“Yes, Alice— thank you.” He replies to her with a warm smile. 

The room seemed to fall out from beneath her. “Alice? Alice! Please, let me go!” 

She screams for Alice. 

And Alice comes over, and adjusts her medical equipment— and she feels the ice of the poison seep into her veins and back again— she is asleep.

Drugged. Comatose. She is wheeled to the main room by him. He says nothing as endless doors pass them by.

The nurses, all smile and wave at him as he takes her deeper and deeper in the hospital to the main room.

It is windowless and vast. There are a dozen tables, six couches, four televisions, three vending machines, two plants, and endless girls in nightgowns. 

He rolls her into the room in her wheelchair and situates her in front of one of the televisions. The girls do not acknowledge her arrival. They are gaunt, they are starving. They watch the programming in silence.

He engages her break. And kisses the top of her head. 

“Rest now, Alice. Tomorrow, we will get back to work.”