The mouse sat in the corner of the room chewing the morsel of food slowly and relishing every bite. It wasn’t picky and it appreciated any thing it got, however it had stumbled upon this room on its nightly hunts completely by accident and had found that there were more crumbs and bits of food lying around on this stone floor than in any of the other rooms. The room was like any other that it had seen – it had a cold stone floor and dark dank unforgiving walls, which the mouse itself felt was quite unpleasant and it had seen a number of horrible places in its day to compare it with. There was one small window in the corner of the room, which had metal bars blocking it allowing a limited view to the outside garden.

After devouring the final piece, the mouse looked up at the bed in the far corner of the room near the window. It could make out a figure lying on the bed; the same figure that had been there every night since it had arrived and it seemed to the mouse that she hadn’t moved a muscle in all that time. The mouse scurried forward in a flash and climbed briskly up the metallic bedpost making itself comfortable on the corner post so it could look directly down at the figure.

She lay there with her eyes closed, her face expressionless. The mouse glanced at her face with interest; it had seen a fair number of humans in her time and it felt that this girl had a very sad beauty about her. She certainly was pretty but seemed to be in an undeterminable state of anguish. She was also pale and looked very ill yet also seemed resolute as if challenging death itself to come and drag her away.

The mouse felt very bold that night for it scurried forward onto her bed sheets so it was sitting on her stomach. Just to the right of the bed sat a small table upon which lay the remains of the dish from which she has been fed. The mouse saw the remaining pieces of the gruel sticking to the metal dish and it wondered how the girl found the food palatable because he could barely eat it himself. But what drew the mouse closer was a curious toy that lay next to the girl tucked safely beneath her arm.

It was a rabbit. Well it looked like a rabbit but the mouse wasn’t too sure since it seemed to be a little worse for wear and also seemed to be missing an eye. The cloth from which it had been made had become rough and unforgiving yet the girl seemed to find comfort from its touch and her cheek was pressed firmly against one of its long floppy ears. The mouse couldn’t quite place it but there was something very disturbing about that little toy animal and the only reason the mouse had remained alive for all these years was because it had learned that sometimes, you just had to trust those little hunches you had.

Without warning, the lightning crackled across the night sky indicating the coming of the storm. The sudden flash of light lit up the room and the bed but the mouse remained stock-still. It was frozen in complete horror, not by the lightning bolt and the clash of thunder but the white rabbit toy that it had been staring at for the past few minutes. With unnatural jerking movements, it had sat up and was grinning madly at the mouse while nodding its head.
 

She suddenly woke from her deep slumber that had been filled with make believe friends and incredible lands to the sounds of shouting. The voices were unrecognisable for a few moments as she tried to remember where she was and then realised that she was lying in her bedroom and the voices were coming from a nearby room. Quick as a flash, the little girl suddenly lurched from her bed as she realised that her parents were calling for her.

Alice started to choke as she realised that there was dark clouds of smoke rolling into her room from beneath her door. She ran forward opened the door and ran into the hallway where she saw the source of the billowing smoke. The walls were covered with flowing orange-yellow sheets of fire and she was stunned by the way it rolled over the walls like a beautiful mesmerising liquid yet at the same time incinerated everything it touched.

‘Mother! Father!’ she shouted before she started to choke again as the smoke found itself passing into her lungs.

‘Alice, get out the house!’ ‘Quickly do what we say!’ Was it her mother or her father? Alice could barely make out the voice beneath the roaring crackling flames but she had started to feel dizzy and couldn’t cope with the heat any longer. She could even feel her flesh starting to burn away from the intense heat but it was hard for her to determine what to do. The shouting from her parent’s room was increasing and all she could manage was ‘I am going outside Mother! I will see you there!’ The response may have been ‘Just go Alice, hurry’ but it was hard to make out and Alice assumed that was what it was.

She ran back into her room and grabbed her favourite toy – her little white rabbit and ran back into the hallway. The steps downstairs didn’t seem to be on fire but there was a lot of smoke bellowing up and she retreated back into the confines of her room. Opening up her window, she felt the cool night air seep in and felt relieved to be able to breath properly again. Tucking the rabbit beneath her arm, she stepped onto the windowsill and grabbed a hold of the nearby oak tree branch. Countless times she had left her room this way although her parents had told her that if she fell, she would surely break both her arms and legs and then everybody would know what a bad girl she had been. Alice thought that her parents probably wouldn’t mind this time and if they told her off later, she could always tell them that they had told her to leave quickly and there wouldn’t have been a faster way!

Grabbing hold of the branch for support, Alice gingerly placed her foot onto the main part of the tree truck and stepped forward. Using the branches as supports like a ladder she started to make her way down when her room exploded. The sound was deafening and her window exploded outwards showering the tree and Alice with glass.The force of the blast threw her off the tree and hard onto the snow covered ground where she remained unconscious. White rabbit was even unluckier and on top of being burned, its eye got caught on one of the branches on the way down and got torn off leaving the toy lying in a heap next to the battered child.

The ground seemed to shimmer slightly and then returned to as it was. However something had definitely changed and it was the white rabbit. It was now standing up next to the unconscious figure on the ground and muttering to itself ‘this will never do!’ repeatedly. After a minute of this, it picked up a nearby fallen branch and prodded Alice hard with it, with the words’ Stop dawdling Alice, we really are very late!’

 

Alice woke with a start and blinked a few times to comprehend her surroundings. She felt the cold metal bars of the bed beneath her and the white unforgiving ceiling, which she had stared at for countless days lost between reality and fantasy. And then the rabbit’s face suddenly blocked her view of the ceiling as it looked back at her with an insane grin.

‘Hurry up Alice, we really don’t have much time’ the rabbit said to her in a very strange squeaky voice. Alice started back in horror, her eyes widening in shock. She suddenly sat up and her instinct was to strike the rabbit away with one swipe, and did exactly that. It went flying across the room and slammed into the nearby wall before falling on the floor in a crumpled heap.

‘You know rabbit…sigh, won’t like that’. The voice was sleepy and slow and very familiar but Alice couldn’t quite place it and she couldn’t make out the source of it either. Except it was very close to her.

‘He is, right though…’ said the quiet voice again and this was followed by a deep meaningful yawn. ‘You…. well, we, really don’t have much time…’ And then the voice faded away replaced by a heavy snoring.

Alice blinked a few times and focussed on her bed sheets to make out a small pile of fur lying quite happily on her stomach. It was lying flat on its back and it was quite clear that it was a mouse. Well it ‘was’ a mouse because some parts of it certainly no longer resembled the poor creature. One leg seemed to have sbeen amputated and replaced by a small metal foot that resembled a mouse paw. The other leg also was replaces by a much larger leg and Alice wondered how the little dormouse could walk. Dormouse?

Alice glanced down in horror as it realised that she was indeed looking down at the dormouse, her childhood friend from all those years ago. But that had happened to the creature? It was now an abomination of fur and metal and looked like a hideous experiment gone wrong.

The white rabbit’s face blocked her view again quite suddenly giving Alice a start, only this time its eyes were hideously red and she immediately lost her grasp on reality feeling herself plunging down and down and down until she felt herself fall hard on some grass. She felt winded but not hurt and she clambered to her feet to take in her surroundings yet again. She seemed to be outside the entrance of some caverns in a small grassy enclave and the place has a familiar feeling but she couldn’t quite place her finger on it. Especially because that feeling was accompanied by a strange feeling of dread and horror that made her feel very ill. But adamant to discover the truth, Alice stepped forward towards the entrance of the caverns.

~END~