Madness (Madness #1)

Chapter 4

Chapter Four

My first night here was awful.

The darkness was overwhelming, consuming every inch of the room once the lights went out, and I never thought how awful the sounds of some of the patients banging around in their rooms and their heart-wrenching wails would pierce through the walls, haunting me once I finally managed to close my eyes.

“They’re bonkers just like us! Bonkers. Bonkers. Bonkers,” Queenie says.

“Mad… I’m utterly mad,” I begin, but the sharp knock at the door and the loud voice that booms through the wood startles me.

“You have to get up sometime,” Chesh appears above me, his large fluffy head apparating from thin air.

“But I do not wish to,” I whisper back, “What if this is all a dream, and I awake to be back at Alice’s house?”

“Her head is off, off, off!” Queenie says.

“You see, you are free,” Chesh says, his smile stretching over his face, almost reaching his eyes.

“Get up!” A guard slams his fist against my door, his voice a gruff command.

Chesh vanishes into thin air from above me, his large, slitted green eyes lingering for a heartbeat longer - the last to leave.

He’s always watching – lingering.

I decide to move. I do not want to risk the wrath of the guards since I do not know how they may react to me being late to breakfast on my first day here.

The warden warned me that they have rules I must follow and that I must follow them, or I shall find myself locked up in solitary.

I recite the rules out loud, counting a finger for each one to ensure I remember them.

“The rules are…” I uncurl my thumb, “Do not be disrespectful to the guards – they are there for our safety. Two…” I uncurl my index finger, “Ther apy is mandatory for anyone who steps foot into Wonderland with Abe. Three,” I uncurl my middle finger, “Do not wander at night. There are monsters far bigger than I am that won’t hesitate to end me. Four… leave Hare alone.”

Four rules should be easy to follow even when I do not know who Hare is or who the monsters that roam the halls at night are that I need to avoid.

Though they are not real monsters…

“Are they not?”

“They are not. They are only human,” I whisper back to the male voice.

“But you are only human, and you are a monster, are you not?”

I shake my head. I want to start my first day with more than the voices in my head as company.

Maybe I could make some friends for the first time in my life.

I open the top drawer of the chest of drawers that make up my room and grab a pair of white boxers, a pair of black joggers, and a loose blue T-shirt.

Opening the wooden door that leads out of my room, I expect to be greeted by the guard who woke me, but the hall is empty.

A flutter of paper draws my eye, and I see a scribbled mess taped to my door. My hand instinctively reaches for it, intent on tearing it off, but a voice stops me, “No!”

“No?” I ask, turning to see who doesn’t want me to remove a silly piece of paper.

A boy no older than seventeen stands just a few steps away. His amber eyes are wide and glistening like he’s only a moment away from letting the tears fall, “It’s a name!”

“A name?” I wonder.

“Uh-huh. All for you,” he says.

I look back to the paper and see a name that is indeed written on it - my name.

It's the only word I know how to spell, and it’s staring back at me in bright pink with a blue and green caterpillar on it.

“It’s pink.”

“Are you not a girl?”

“I am not. I am a boy.”

“Alice did not think you were a boy.”

“Shut up.” I hiss at the voice.

The boy visibly flinches, and I want to curse myself, “I did not say anything,” he mumbles, his lower lip wobbling.

“I know,” I try to say soothingly, but I have not interacted with many people since I was a child. “Thank you for my name. What’s yours?”

“Hare!”

I nod. The final rule making some sense now.

Hare seems younger than he is, and with how he clutches his stuffed toy to his chest and the drawing that is now on my door, I wonder how he ended up in Wonderland at all. It does not seem like a good place for a boy.

“Hare? Are you ok?” A woman emerges from her room, and I suck in a breath because I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.

Long red locks cascade down her back, and bright blue eyes swing between Hare and where my hand still hovers near the name.

“I’m okay!” Hare chirps, his face breaking out into a huge smile revealing wonky teeth with two missing from each side.

The air around him shimmers, and when I blink, he has two big grey rabbit ears on his head and a twitchy blue nose.

“Hare is now a hare.” the male voice in my head pushes forward.

I knock my fist against the side of my forehead, not liking how pronounced he is in the last few days.

“Mad… I’m utterly mad.”

Before, he would only appear every few weeks, with a small comment here or there.

Have I somehow got madder?

The beautiful woman and Hare stare at me, and I can feel my cheeks flush crimson from embarrassment, so I mumble an apology and make a hasty escape.

I do not need to show anyone else how mad I am .

As I rush away, the hallways seem to stretch, their shadows twisting and turning like spirals. They warp with ticking clocks and eyes that seem to peer through the dark corners – watching me.

I can still feel the weight of their gazes on my back, particularly the woman’s piercing blue eyes, which seemed to see straight through me.

Why does this keep happening?

I clutch my forehead as I rush down the hallways as though I could physically contain my madness.

I glance back, half-expecting Hare and the woman to be following me, but the corridor remains empty, and a mix of embarrassment and fear flushes through me. I can’t help but wonder if my madness is becoming more evident to everyone around me, even when I try to contain it desperately.

The signs that Hare has placed around help me navigate my way to the cafeteria, the only thing not warped by my mind. My stomach growls as the smells practically carry me there, and I breathe a sigh of relief when I open the doors to a mostly empty room.

“Just help yourself!” a harsh male voice shouts from the kitchen. As I walk closer to the kitchen, the sounds of banging and things being thrown greet me.

A plump, pink-faced man in his late forties moves swiftly between the counters and the stove. He grumbles, snorts, and grabs a saltshaker, then suddenly squeals like a pig and hurls it forcefully against the wall.

I duck instinctively, the saltshaker narrowly missing my head, and I retreat from the kitchen and back into the cafeteria.

Food is laid out on the rows of tables—an assortment of pancakes, fruit, bacon, sausages, and eggs, with teapots and coffee carafes on each one.

I tentatively sit at a table closest to the barred windows, desperate to feel some warmth from the outside, even when the threat of rain looms in the overcast sky.

It’s always raining down here in England, but after years of being locked in the house and only allowed outside at night to do as Alice asked, I bask in the weather no matter how severe it is.

“Hi,” the beautiful woman from before says, sitting across from me, “I’m Red.”

She holds her hand out for me to shake, and I happily oblige.

I brace myself for the delusions to appear like they always do when I meet someone new – warping the person in front of me into something not entirely human, but nothing happens.

“I’m Al,” I introduce myself, shaking her hand and then pulling it back.

“You’re not thee Alice? ”

“I am not Alice,” I respond rather grumpily.

“No, you are much too young to be thee, Alice. Did you kill her?” Red asks me, but there’s no judgment in the way she looks at me, only curiosity.

“Off, off, off! Off with her head!” Queenie shouts.

“I-”

“It’s okay if you did. I mean, you had to end up here somehow…” Red mutters to herself, and I let it all drone out, a buzzing static filling my ears.

I stare at her as she rants and how her clothes wrap around her body like silk. Her red hair looks like a river of blood, and I want to run my fingers through it to see if my fingers would come away coated in the substance.

“You don’t care?” I blurt.

Red’s blue eyes crinkle at the sides, and she laughs, but it’s not cruel; it's more as if my question humours her, “Why would I care about such a frivolous thing? This is Wonderland, Al, and we’re all a bit mad here.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Queenie mutters, “Very, very, very strange.”

“So did you?” Red asks again, piling pancakes and bacon onto her plate, “Tea?”

“Please,” I grab a cup, but tiny little holes appear in the bottom, and I stare at it, trying to figure out if this is a delusion or real.

Mad… I’m utterly mad .

I shake my head, squeeze my eyes closed, and count to ten.

One…

Two…

Three…

“She’s going to think you are nuts, nuts, nuts,” Queenie laughs.

“Shhh!”

“Excuse me?” Red exclaims.

“Not you.”

“Then who?”

I open my eyes. The holes in the cup are still there, and Red is staring at me, the teapot held in her hand - ready to pour.

I touch the cup, feeling the smooth ceramic beneath my fingertips, solid and real. Yet, my eyes tell me something else entirely.

“Nobody important,” I say, holding my cup out for her to fill. She obliges, and when none of the brown liquid falls from the holes in the bottom, I know it’s another delusion.

I mix in milk and try to ignore Red’s eyes burning into the side of my head.

How do I explain that I’m mad?

That my mind conjured things that simply do not exist in this world.

“Hare!” Red greets happily, pulling me from my mind.

A wide, amber-eyed Hare runs toward Red, his legs barely able to keep up with him, and he throws himself into her arms .

“Well, not Alice, this is Hare.”

“We’ve met,” I say, leaving out the minuscule detail that I nearly made him cry because I almost tore down his sign.

She came out of her room at the perfect time, giving me the ideal chance to escape before I made the situation so much worse.

I’ve never had a sign before, not one with my name on it.

The signs on the walls around here turn topsy-turvy, and the only way I can understand where I’m going is through the pictures Hare has drawn on the paper.

“I made him a sign!” Hare shouts, jumping up and down, “Sign! Look! Sign!” He points around the room to the multiple pieces of paper stuck to the walls.

“Yup, buddy, they are so cool. Do you want to sit down and have some tea?” Red asks him, already pulling a cup over to her and filling it with the hot liquid.

I wrap my hands around my cup, letting the warmth of the tea ground me.

Alice used to love making me tea. She said Wonderland had tea parties every day at precisely one minute to noon and that they were so fun that she just had to do it with me.

Her stories of Wonderland had turned whimsical, as if it was just a silly adventure she had been on .

The steam rising from my cup twists and curls in the air, and before I know it, I’m staring back at Alice’s face, her head thrown back in laughter and the familiar twinkle in her eyes as she tells me the stories of her escape from Wonderland and the characters that stayed there.

“Cake,” Hare says, pulling me from my thoughts; he reaches for a cake covered in pink icing with a weird lump in the middle and sits as close as possible to Red. She smiles down at him, heaping some strawberries and raspberries onto his plate.

“If I don’t put it on there, he won’t eat it. Then he’ll be on a sugar high all day,” she explains, adding a cube of sugar to his cup of tea, then her own.

“Aye, and then he’ll be bouncing off the walls like a wee mad ane. Just like a rabbit, ain't that right, Hare?” A rough Scottish accent comes from behind me just as a man appears at Red's other side and sits down.

“Cup!” Hare shouts, holding his cup above his head, then brings it to his lips, guzzling the liquid.

“A bad day then?” The man sighs, looking sad.

“Yeah. I’ll take him to the warden later, and hopefully, he can chill for a bit there,” Red says, “I'm sorry. I totally forgot to introduce you both. Harry, this is not Alice. Al, this is Harry. ”

“Nice to meet you, not Alice,” Harry says, barely sparing me a glance as he piles pancakes and banana slices onto the plate in front of him.

“Just Al,” I say for the third time since I got here.

Everyone wants to call me Alice, thee Alice or not Alice, but I’m just Al, not Alice.