[FIC] Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [2/3]
Title: Stepping Sideways Into the Underground
Author: toujourspret
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don't own Inception. This is a work of fiction written by a fan for fans. Any resemblance to people or situations fictional or otherwise is pure coincidence.
Rating: R
Characters: Ariadne-centric, ensemble cast
Summary: The team takes a case that's different from the usual case: extract the location of a serial killer's last victim. Ariadne finds herself inside the murderer's mind, lost in a twisted Wonderland where the only way out is in and the only way up is down. With the help of the team as various denizens of Wonderland and herself as Alice, Ariadne has to find the real Alice before the killer catches on. But is the killer really the only thing to worry about? In Wonderland, things are never quite what they seem.
Warnings: Very disturbing imagery, violence against children, offscreen mention of sexual abuse, character death (non-canon characters). IMPORTANT: Please be aware that certain aspects of this fic may be triggering, or cause emotional duress.
Author's Notes: See Part 1 for notes.
Link to Art: here
Chapters: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [2/3]
The problem is that she doesn’t actually know which direction is which. She recalls vague memories, different versions of the guardian of the labyrinth who hides a secret entrance, hides the utility path that leads to the heart of the maze, and presses her palm against the high, arched roots of the tree. Leaning over, she can see daylight between them, where the heart of the wood should be.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Cobb says behind her, and she jumps, swearing when her head knocks against a root.
“Jesus Christ!” she yelps, falling back against the ground. “What the hell’s wrong with you, sneaking up on people like that?”
“That’s not the direction you want to go,” he tells her instead, pacing around the tree and appearing back in the branches.
“Why not? We’re looking for Alice, and I’d just bet he put her in the center of the labyrinth,” she argues.
“That path doesn’t lead to the center of the labyrinth.” His gaze is like a solid thing, fixed on her face. “That path will take you underground.”
“We’re looking for a grave, aren’t we?” she asks, confused. He doesn’t answer, simply resting his chin on his hand to look at her. “That’s the utility path, isn’t it? There’s always a utility path to the center of the labyrinth, and that path will take me right to Alice.”
He regards her coolly, as if he were a professor speaking to a particularly slow pupil. “And when,” he asks her, “has this place ever reacted the way you expected it to?”
“Well, never, I suppose,” she agrees reluctantly. “But then which way do I go?”
“It depends on where you want to arrive,” he says, shrugging. “If you go to the right, you’ll find the Mad Hatter’s house. If you go left, you’ll find the March Hare.”
“Then I’ll go left. I don’t want to go to a mad man’s house.” She parrots the line from the story playfully. Cobb shrugs.
“Do what you like. It’s no skin off my nose,” he tells her. She frowns up at him and he laughs.
“You’re not supposed to tell me that! When Alice tells the Cheshire Cat she doesn’t want to meet a crazy person, he’s supposed to tell her, ‘We’re all mad here.’ You suck at this cryptic advice thing, Cobb,” Ariadne declares decisively.
“But you already know all that,” he says simply. “Where’s the fun in repeating old ideas? But let me try that cryptic advice thing one more time: have you ever woken up from a dream to realize you’re still dreaming? Everyone has had those dreams one time or another. But what about this time? Have you woken up, or are you still dreaming?”
“Of course I’m dreaming right now, Cobb. We’re in Wonderland, and I’m talking to a giant cat-man thing. Which happens to be you,” she points out, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“But the case. Does it make any real sense? Isn’t there something a little off about it, a little too Hollywood about it? And why would I take a murder case like this one at all?” His eyes are serious as he looks at her from the tree.
She laughs nervously. “Shut up, Cobb. You can’t incept me like you did Mal; I know better than that.”
“You’re waiting for a train-” he starts as he fades, voice drifting into the tree. “Watch out for the Queen.”
“And who’s this Queen, Cobb?” she shouts at the tree, knowing he can’t hear her. “Is it Lewis, or is it Mal? Is Mal going to chop off my head? Answer me!”
The tree is silent and reproachful. She thumps her fist against it, more tempted than ever to duck through the roots until the sharp crack of a snapped twig jerks her attention to the side. Alice is there, dark eyes fixed on her. She wiggles her finger in a childish beckoning motion before starting down the path. The back of her dress is tattered, thin polyester shredded and rotting to expose Pooh-bear underwear. Her legs are naked down to her bare feet, toes dark and murky colored with purple-streaked nails. There is a bloody trail wrapping around an ankle from a scrape on the knee above it and a palm-shaped bruise climbing the back of her calf. She pauses down the path, waiting for Ariadne to turn the corner and see the house.
This isn’t the Hatter’s house. Ariadne knows that, somewhere along the way, she’s supposed to visit the White Rabbit’s house and be mistaken for Mary Anne; she’s always loved that part of the story, with the lizard chimney sweep and the fan that makes Alice small enough to climb out the window, but she knows she didn’t put this cottage into the labyrinth. This is not the White Rabbit’s house.
Breath escapes her in a percussive whump like a punch as she stares up at the cottage from her case file. She already knows this house, with its whitewashed clapboard siding and its low little roof. She already knows from case photos what the inside of this house will look like, knows without going inside how the rooms will be laid out, knows about the vintage movie posters that line the hall from the front door to the “Alice room”, where investigators found Lewis’s collection of different editions of the two books and his wholly different collection of little girls’ clothes, each article left behind by a victim. She already knows everything about this house, everything in the pictures and everything in the police reports and everything in the newspaper articles. She even knows where she’d find the graves, if she could work up enough nerve to look.
The door opens. Inside, the hall unfolds like a telescope; she imagines she can see all the way down to the door of the Alice room, the heavy oak door vaguely pulsing with a sickly light. There is a girl in the window of the house, holding the wispy curtains back as she regards Ariadne with filmy eyes. She is half rotted, solemn and patient as she waits for Ariadne to enter. Ariadne stumbles back, a wobbly cry escaping her. She recoils from the house and turns, running blind away from it until her feet find the path and she finds herself shivering over a low white picket fence that surrounds a cozy little house that looks like a fallen layer cake. She can hear squabbling nearby.
“I told you I don’t like tea. I just want coffee; is that so hard?” Arthur is griping from somewhere behind the house she remembers designing for the Hatter.
“Honestly, pet, you must try to be a bit more civilized sometime. When I tell you it is a tea party, it is a tea party, not a ‘tea for Eames and coffee for Arthur because Arthur is a complete Yank’ party,” Eames responds, voice smooth and teasing. From beyond the gate, Ariadne imagines the typically grumpy expression on Arthur’s face as he tries to deal with his playful colleague and smiles to herself. She’s still shaken, but it’s nothing a good cup of tea with friends can’t help smooth over. She reaches over the fence and flips the latch, letting herself in to follow the voices.
“If you can’t comprehend the beauty of a perfectly pulled espresso, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says peevishly. His words trail off here, leaving the impugnation of the other man’s intelligence to the imagination. Ariadne laughs to herself as she rounds the corner of the house, then laughs harder when she sees the loudly colored hat perched on Eames’s head and the bunny ears on Arthur.
“You’re the Hatter and the Hare!” she cries out in delight. They turn to her and she takes in their Wonderland selves, so similar and yet dissimilar to their normal appearances. Both are dressed in frock coats, Arthur’s a pale dove gray in a dashing cut and Eames’s a wild, patched orange with tails turned into curlicues that bob as he walks. Even as the March Hare, Arthur is elegant, creases pressed sharp in his pants and waist buttoned up smartly with a waistcoat. Eames’s hat hangs rakishly over one eye, size card replaced with-of course-the ace of spades. The rest of his clothes are motley, giving off the impression of either a clown or the unfortunate victim of a mad, colorblind tailor.
“And you are Ariadne, my doll,” Eames says. Arthur shoots him an incredulous look.
“It’s Alice, come to the tea party, of course,” Arthur corrects him, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know where he got this Ariadne thing from,” he tells her, tone confidential. “Ariadne’s just a story book girl.”
Eames’s smile drops as he turns to look at Arthur. “Don’t you recognize our Ariadne?”
Emotion wells up in her chest, and she all but throws herself into the seat next to Eames, hands shaking with fear as the words tumble from her lips. “Eames, there’s something really wrong with this place! Some of the places I designed don’t look like they’re supposed to, and everyone thinks I’m really Alice!” She stops to catch her breath, then starts again in a small voice, “And that house is here, the one where Lewis-”
He cuts her off. “Don’t say that name, love. You don’t want to call him here.”
She swallows, nodding. “-the one where he killed those girls. I didn’t put it in here; I swear I didn’t put it in the labyrinth!”
“It sounds like we’ve got a lucid dreamer on our hands,” Arthur says as he sits down on her other side, coffee cup clenched between his hands. He sets it aside to take one of hers between his, and they are almost uncomfortably hot. “It’s like: imagine dreaming as if you were the architect of the dream, only there’s no PASIV. A lucid dreamer knows he’s dreaming, and because of this, he can exert his influence on the shape of the dream. He can even control what happens, at least to the parts of the dream that are his. He can consciously control his projections, but not only that; he can consciously control the surroundings. He can add to the dream space, make it more complex and change your labyrinth to the point that you can’t even recognize it anymore.”
“What can I do to stop him?” Ariadne asks.
Eames takes her other hand, squeezing reassuringly. “You mustn’t forget that you’re dreaming, Ariadne. You can’t ever forget that you’re dreaming, because you lose control of the dream when you forget that.”
Ariadne laughs, short and sharp. “Forget I’m dreaming? I’m in Wonderland. I’ve been talking to caterpillars and cats and rabbits and-” she blinks, a question falling into her eyes. Tugging her hand from his grasp, she shoves at his shoulder angrily. “And what’s all that creepy stuff with turning yourself into the dead girl and leading me to his haunted house, huh? That was really messed up!”
Eames narrows his eyes. “I’ve never been Alice, Ariadne. I haven’t left this table.”
“It’s true,” Arthur says, lifting a teapot over one of the empty cups in front of her. “Ever since he bored the Queen with his absolutely awful singing and she tried him for murdering the time, it’s always tea time. Would you like sugar?”
She looks at him, amazed at the lack of recognition on his face. Creeping fear gathers in her stomach, and she turns to Eames. “What’s wrong with him? Why does he keep doing that?”
Eames shrugs helplessly. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” he asks. At her uncomprehending stare, he shrugs again. “No one has ever been able to solve that one. It was kind of you to try, Alice.”
Horrified, Ariadne shoves away from the table. Standing on suddenly weak knees, she takes in the whole picture: in sets of two, half drunk coffee cups and tea cups pair around the table. Despite flashes of awareness, Arthur and Eames must have been playing the Hatter and Hare’s dance all day, and as she watches them, they shuffle over two more seats. Arthur offers Eames tea, and Eames frowns when he reaches for the percolator. “Honestly, pet, you must try to be more civilized,” Eames scolds teasingly. “When I say this is a tea party-”
She doesn’t hear the rest, already dashing through the woods toward the path. Trees reach out toward her, whipping narrow branches against her face, and she can feel blood trickling down from a thin cut above her eye. When she stops, breathless, to lean against the banyan tree, she notices her dress is shredded and cheap looking. Her chest heaves for air against the nervous sobs she can feel building up. She feels clammy, and her hands are shaking.
“You look more like Alice now,” Cobb says, and she’s not surprised to see him lounging in the branches again.
“I don’t want to look more like Alice,” she snaps. “I want to look like Ariadne, because I am Ariadne.”
“Ariadne’s just a story book girl,” Cobb repeats Arthur’s words.
“Stop it!” she cries, covering her ears. “Just stop it! You’re no help at all!”
He waits in the tree patiently until she uncovers her ears and looks at him. “Why is this happening to me?” she asks, voice cracking. “Why am I the only one who isn’t lost in the dream?”
“But you are!” he tells her, laughing. “You’re more lost than any of us.”
“Please, just,” she says desperately, “Just please stop trying to scare me and help me. I’m-I’m really scared right now, Cobb, and I need you to help me.” She waits for him to say something, anything, but he doesn’t. Turning on her heel, she starts to walk away.
“Ariadne,” he says, and she turns back. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get this son of a bitch, and we’re going to give that little girl back to her family.” She waits for him to say more, but he’s silent.
“I don’t even know where to look,” she complains bitterly. “She could be anywhere.”
“That’s not true. You know that. You even know where she is; she’s shown you,” he tells her, and she remembers the length of the hall opening up, extending deeper into the dream, the house like a cancer infecting her labyrinth.
“I don’t want to go back there, Cobb,” she admits.
“Listen to me: it has to be you. The rest of us are still dreaming. You’re the only one he hasn’t gotten to yet; you’re that little girl’s last chance. It has to be you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me how dangerous it would be, Cobb?” she demands now, anger seeping into the cold, numb fear. “That a lucid dreamer would have so much control over what happens in the dream, that you guys might end up corrupted and leave me here all by myself to deal with a serial killer and child rapist? What the hell were you thinking?”
Cobb shrugs, an entirely feline gesture. “Does being angry about that change anything that’s happened now?”
“Don’t you tell me not to be angry!” she retorts sharply.
He smiles then, eyes luminous. “You should hurry up,” he tells her, flicking his tail toward her. “Alice isn’t going to wait forever.” A branch creaks behind her, and Ariadne turns, taking in the sight of the dead girl sitting next to the broken stump of the sign. She looks worse, decaying now. Her hair is knotted, shorn close on one side and matted with dried blood on the other. Blackened toes curl toward the soles of her feet, and her fingers are twigs, twisted and stiff and bruise-colored. When she notices Ariadne looking at her, she tips her head in a way that exposes the handprints around her throat and climbs to her feet, waiting. Ariadne nods and follows.
“You’re just a projection,” Ariadne tells her. Alice ignores her as they walk through the strangely silent woods. There isn’t even any birdsong, and Ariadne shivers, filled with a strange compulsion to fill the empty air with words. “The question is: whose projection are you? Do you belong to one of us? Or are you what I was expecting to find here? Is that why you’re here? Or are you his?”
Alice stops, turning to her and holding up a hand. She shakes her head, and Ariadne lets out a frustrated breath. Alice touches a dirty, withered finger to her lips and makes a shushing sound like the wind rushing through dead leaves, crackling and dry and inhuman. Ariadne bites back the urge to be sick and nods, understanding: shut up.
It’s entirely too soon when she arrives at the cottage behind the dead girl. It looks worse for the wear, as if it is decaying, too, just like the little girls whose corpses it has hidden. The painted siding is peeling, exposing wormwood white boards like bleached bones. The low bushes are dead, branches grasping upward like skeleton hands from a grave, and a creeping black lichen like a mold covers the exposed concrete of the basement, seeping up the walls wetly toward the cracked and shattered windows. The gutter hangs loose, drooping sadly over the sagging porch filled with blackened, soggy-looking furniture. Alice takes the stairs toward the cavernous front door without a trace of fear, though Ariadne wonders briefly what fear there is to be had when you’re already dead. She reaches our to touch the rail to follow and jerks back, sucking at the splinter in her finger.
“Son of a bitch,” she mutters, peering at her hand in irritation. The wound looks clean, but she doesn’t dare trust the rickety rail again as she reluctantly approaches the house’s entrance. Curtains like cobwebs hang limp in the window, and when she looks closer, she can see spiders with more joints than imaginable skittering up and down the tattered lace. Somewhere inside the house, there is faint music playing, but she can’t make it out. When she touches the door to push it open, the splinter in her hand burns.
“Hello?” she calls to the empty house. “Is there anyone here?” To the right of the door, the parlor stands empty of the little girl she’d seen earlier; not even footsteps disturb the thick layer of dust on the floor. It’s the same thick dust that covers everything in the room, from the intensely detailed carved wood of the sofa to the elegant standing piano in the corner. There is only one set of footprints in the entire room, in fact: in the center of the cushion of the wingback chair by the fireplace, two perfectly formed child’s footprints point in the direction of the huge, ornate mirror above the mantle. A small circle is rubbed out of the dust on the glass; she turns her face away, suddenly afraid of what might be reflected.
Ahead of her is the Alice room. She can faintly make out the music now-the poem “Jabberwocky” set to an eerie, jaunty tune-and covers her mouth to trap the squeak of fear inside. She listens to the ballad long enough to figure out that it’s playing on a loop before cautiously pushing open the door.
In the flickering gas lights, the first thing she sees is the photograph, blown up and hung prominently in the alcove between bookshelves. Alice Liddell, the first and real Alice, looks down on her from the lithograph on the wall as she leans against a rough stone wall, greenery tangling around her bare ankles. She stands shoeless in a rucked and messy dress, hand cupped at her waist and a strangely adult expression on her face as she regards the camera, head cocked defiantly. The tangled neck of her dress is fallen, as if yanked, exposing a breast. The photo is surrounded by all of Lewis’s copies of the books about her, and Ariadne knows that some of these are only wished into existence. She raises a hand to brush the spines, to touch the gold lettering, and all around her she reads Alice, Alice, Alice.
“Don’t touch those,” Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne starts, turning to face her, she is surprised again. Alice is alive, cheeks pink and hale, dress untorn and whole. Rigor has retreated, leaving her skin fresh and pale. The crescents of her nail beds are no longer streaked with death.
“You’re Alice,” Ariadne breathes. Alice nods. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Alice shrugs. “I’ve been here the whole time.”
Ariadne frowns. “No. You’ve been following me.”
“You’ve been following me,” Alice corrects simply.
“What have you been doing this whole time?” Ariadne asks.
“Playing.” Alice walks over to the shelf, trailing her fingers until they land on a small, heavy-looking wooden hourglass, flipping it idly. “This place is wonderful. It’s just like the book. The part at the beginning was a little too Disney, a little cutesy, but the rest of it’s just perfect.” The sand in the glass moves sluggishly, trickling grain by grain as if reluctant to fall into the bottom of the glass. She taps it, frowning when the sand doesn’t speed up. “Time is such a strange thing,” she remarks, tapping the glass again.
“We have to get out of here,” Ariadne tells her. “Now.”
“No.” Alice’s refusal is short, strong. She taps the glass again.
“We have to get out of here,” Ariadne repeats desperately. “It’s not safe here.”
“You go. I like it here,” Alice says.
“Alice, please listen to me,” Ariadne pleads. “It’s very, very dangerous for you here. The man who lives here is a bad man.”
Alice turns, regarding her with a cool eye. “You know I’m dead, right?”
Ariadne chokes, remembers the decaying girl from earlier, wonders how Alice could ever think she’d forget, even for a moment. Alice watches her, disingenuously healthy and finally interested. “I-yeah,” Ariadne finally manages, flushing. “I just,” she pauses, looking for the word, “…forgot.”
Alice frowns, tapping the hourglass again. “I didn’t forget.”
Ariadne swallows hard. “I’m sorry.”
With the mercurial temper of a child, Alice smiles quicksilver bright. “What’s your name?”
Ariadne is overcome with the urge to lie, and she smiles too wide as she racks her brain for a name, any name. “My name is Lucy, like in Narnia. So we’re both named after little girls in books, aren’t we?”
Alice’s smile grows slow and secretive. “You’re a dirty fibber,” she says, and Ariadne’s skin crawls like spiders skittering up her arms. “The Cheshire Cat called you Ariadne.”
“I-”
“But Ariadne’s a storybook girl, too,” Alice says. Ariadne takes a step back, and Alice’s grin grows wider. “Just a different kind of storybook girl.
“Ariadne hanged herself, didn’t she?”
And Ariadne bolts, palms slamming into the space where the door used to be. There is a smooth expanse of paneled wood where it had been, not even a thin outline betraying its previous location. “Let me out!”
“Little girls shouldn’t go exploring where they’re not wanted,” Alice says.
“Oh, God,” Ariadne whimpers, curling against the wall. Alice closes the distance between them easily. Under the sweet exterior, Ariadne can smell the thick, brutish smell of decay. “Oh, God.”
“You’re an intruder,” Alice continues, reaching out to pet her hair. “You came in here to steal from me.” Her fingers tighten, grow fatter and longer and stronger, yanking her head back until she’s staring up at Lewis’s sneering face. “You can’t have her.”
“I just,” Ariadne starts, but she’s got no clue where to go with it, and then he slaps her, the full of his hand crashing along her cheekbone. Her head bounces on the wood paneling. The book case rattles, but nothing falls. She raises a hand to touch her throbbing head and he wraps a meaty hand around her wrist, yanking her to her feet. Ariadne raises her heel and kicks him in the kneecap. He stumbles, but his grip is firm, and when he squeezes she can feel the bones in her arm grating against each other. She kicks at him wildly, and he throws her again.
When she hits the wall, she recognizes the tunneling vision of a concussion forming, but somehow, miraculously, she recognizes something else: the wall bends, ever so slightly, with the force of her body against it. She reaches out with prying fingers at the corner of the hidden door, fumbling for a catch or spring or anything. His boot comes down, grinding, and for the first time she screams, the sound tearing from her throat more in surprise than pain. The catch pops with a click she feels in the bones of her broken hand instead of hearing it with her ears. The door creaks open an inch. She doesn’t dare stick her fingers through, but rolls to the side as he reaches for her again.
She comes to her feet clutching her wrist and leaning heavily against the low chair by Lewis’s reading table. Ariadne remembers wildly that in reality, this is the chair where Lewis had tied his victims, taking his time to touch and enjoy them before wrapping meaty palms around their throats, strangling them before disposing of the corpses under the floorboards of the Alice room. This thought blinds her, and somehow she is fumbling against the bookshelf, hands searching for something, anything to protect herself with. Her fingers land on something smooth, hefty. She has the hourglass in hand. Lewis shouts-“No!”-and she sends it crashing against his head. The glass is heavy, thick-bottomed with age. It doesn’t crack in the explosion that follows; the intricate detail of the wooden frame shatters, splintering in her hand, but the glass is intact, the sound of it hollow as it collides with Lewis’s skull, a flower of blood blooming on his brow before sluicing over the crumpled cheekbone and down the spasming jaw. The glass jars hard enough that the tingles spread all the way up to her shoulder and it falls from her suddenly nerveless fingers to the wooden floorboards. She takes a step back, hands at her mouth, and shudders hard once, twice. Blunt force trauma is such an intimate way to kill someone, she thinks improbably. She’s killed hundreds of times in the dreamscape before, but always with guns. Lewis groans, eyelids twitching unconscious but improbably alive, and she remembers the tiny catch, diving for it and yanking the door open to spill into the hall.
Smiling faces peer down at her, movie stars from decades past dressed as Alice decorating the hall. Ariadne grunts, pulling one down, a triumphant scream welling up in her chest as the frame shatters, littering the hall with glass. Her hand aches. She hears footsteps in the parlor and thudding footfalls behind, and her feet tangle together with indecision. Then she hears the voices.
Here, the whispers say. Here. This way, this way. Hurry. Hurry. They call her to the parlor, louder than Lewis thundering clumsy in the Alice room, louder than the pounding of blood in Ariadne’s ears. She stumbles down the hall toward the open door, freezing with her palm on the wood. There’s nowhere to go; Wonderland belongs to Lewis, the perfect playground-cum-hunting grounds, only half her design and half the Tulgey Wood, wild and cruel and dangerous. Movement catches the corner of her eye; she gasps in horror, and in the back of her mind marvels that anything can still unsettle her.
And it is unsettling, the way the girls are pressed against the inside of the mirror, palms flat against the glass and mouths hidden behind moist smudges of condensation. There are eight of them, two more than the police knew about, and Alice Seward is alone in the corner, eyes filmy white and expressionless. Her mouth opens, revealing tiny white teeth caked with dirt, and Ariadne knows she was buried with her mouth open. She was the only one buried outside.
“I’m,” Alice says in a thin, trembling voice like choking. “I’m scared.” The other girls stir, uneasy. I’m scared, they repeat in a whisper like the pages of a book being turned,. The sound rises and falls in volume as they cry like a Greek chorus. I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared.
“I tried to help you,” Ariadne tells her, and Alice tips her head in acknowledgement. “There was nothing I could do. I can’t find you; he’s hidden you too well.”
“Let me out,” Alice says, and her mouth’s movements don’t match the sound of her voice, like a three second delay between the recording and the image. She curls her hand against the inside of the glass, and Ariadne can hear the squeak of skin on glass as she tucks her fingers into a fist to thump at the glass with the heel of her hand. “Please let me out.”
Let us out, let us out, the girls cry, and the pounding of their fists begins to lift the frame from the wall. Please, they beg.
“Please, Mommy,” Alice whispers. Ariadne backs into the wall, one hand on the doorknob before she’s aware of it. “Please, Mommy, please.” Her face changes, quickens and becomes sly in a way that reminds Ariadne of Lewis.
“He’s coming.” Alice pushes her palms against the glass. “He’s coming for you, too.”
“I’m sorry!” Ariadne gasps. “I’m so sorry! I have to go; I can’t help you!”
“Find me.” It’s not a request. Alice is barely audible over the rustling, ethereal voices that tumble together, he’s coming, he’s coming.
“How? I don’t even know where he’s put you!” Ariadne says. She can hear the heavy crashing sound of Lewis trying to get out of the Alice room; the noises are growing faster, more sure. She has seconds to get away, and there’s nowhere to go.
“The looking glass,” Alice says, pressing both palms to the glass between them. “You have to find the looking glass. You have to go under the ground.” The looking glass. Looking, looking, the looking glass, the girls chorus. The door to the Alice room explodes as Lewis slams it open, and Ariadne is already out the door and on the path when he staggers onto the ramshackle porch, swearing bloody murder. The trees tear into her when she hits the tree line, branches curling sharp to try to hold her back.
The forest has expanded, huge swaths of it stretching and growing until the path is little more than rubble in a thin band and spidery new trees shove at each other for space between the manicured garden of Ariadne’s wood. A hunched willow like Black Annis twists its gnarled and knobby branches down to snatch at her with a dry cackle; Ariadne leaps to the side and plows through the rushes on the other side of the path just as a fine tremor begins to make itself known, shaking the world with all the tenderness of a mother shaking her child awake. Off the path, the plants are wild and somehow strangely flat, layered segments like a set for a children’s play even as they clamber and claw at Ariadne’s skin, drawing beads of blood where they touch her.
“Cobb!” she screams, hands coming up to protect her eyes from a hanging tendril of ivy barbed with nettle-like hairs that bite viciously into the soft flesh of her palms. “Cobb, where are you?”
“You’re sure you’re not Alice?” Cobb asks from nearby, and she almost stumbles over a root in her haste to stop. He’s nowhere to be seen.
“Cobb, please! You’ve got to help me get away from him,” she pleads, spinning in place as she scans the trees.
“Why?” he asks from behind her. She turns on her heel, but he’s not there. “Are you scared?” His voice rings echoes around her.
“Yes, damn you. Yes, I’m scared!” she admits, voice growing shrill. “Where the hell are you?” she demands.
“Hell? It could be argued,” he says contemplatively, slowly folding into reality at the base of a nearby bush. “I’ve heard things in the undergrowth here; they may be for eating,” he explains with the logic of a cat.
“Can’t you take anything seriously?” Ariadne snaps, and he turns to her, expression chilly.
“I’m taking this very seriously,” he says. “You’re the one that’s not even paying attention.”
“What do you even mean?” Ariadne cries, frustrated. “You’re almost worse than no help at all!”
He rounds on her, then, eyes flashing. “And you’re the one who’s lost her totem!”
Her breath stutters in her chest. “Lost my-I haven’t-” She reaches into the pocket of her pinafore, remembers tipping it out by the tree. Panic hits her in a wave. “No, I-Cobb, how could I-?” The pocket is empty but for the crumbled mushroom, its perfection making her stomach roll as she remembers its toxic taste. “I have to get back to the tree, Cobb. I have to find it!”
“And where do you think you are, silly thing?” he asks her, not unkindly. She looks around, confused, and it hits her: these trees, these branches-they’re the banyan’s roots. The dark tree has spread, infecting her labyrinth deeper and deeper. As she watches, the roots twine like naked bodies crawling together; a root drops from the top of the tree and plunges into the ground, pulsing as if feeding on something under the dirt. A disgusted sound falls from her mouth as she watches the pale roots dig and writhe, alive and wicked. They part for a moment and she sees the light at the heart of the wood, and before she can convince herself it’s a bad idea, she shoves her way between the roots of the tree and into the narrow tunnel beneath it. The roots snap shut behind her, and there’s nowhere to go but down the steep, winding path. Claustrophobic dirt walls squeeze in on her, but the roots don’t penetrate the tunnel, and it remains dimly lit by a distant source of light. She looks at the solid wall of wood where she entered and frowns, elbowing her way deeper when the tunnel grows too close and dropping to her knees to crawl when it becomes too short.
Just as she’s sure the tunnel is going to turn into a dead end, leaving her alone in the dark in a space too small to breathe, she comes to the door. It’s tiny, perhaps only a foot tall, and much too narrow to fit her shoulders. She doesn’t see any table in this anteroom, no cakes that say “eat me” or bottles that plead “drink me”, but she reaches out, tentatively trying the knob. It doesn’t budge. Ariadne lowers her face to peer at it carefully, and to her surprise, there is a key on the top of the frame. She fishes out the mushroom and eyes it suspiciously before placing it on her tongue and gagging. When she’s a little taller than the door, she spits out the mushroom and takes the key in hand. It’s surprisingly hefty, and for a moment a cold chill washes over her; she’d blindly trusted that this key would fit the lock. If it doesn’t, there’s not enough mushroom left to shrink small enough to fit under the gap beneath the door. She’d have to try squeezing through the roots of the tree and hope Lewis wouldn’t squish her like a bug.
The key fits into the lock with a snick like clockwork, cogs and metal ribbons fitting together precisely into their homes. When she turns the knob, the door swings silently and effortlessly into the room, and she draws in a breath. It’s Lewis’s parlor, just as she’d seen it the first time she’d entered the cottage, dust covered and abandoned. She steps in, the rounded, childish shapes of her shoes leaving footprints like those in a cartoon, evenly spaced and half-realized. Without thinking, she climbs up into the chair, and the footprints in the dust covering its cushion are hers. She looks through the hole in the dust on the glass and sees herself and the team in the prison cell, the PASIV’s red light glowing. The numbers are ticking down, and as soon as she realizes this, she hears the faint strains of music filtering through the glass. She presses her hand against the glass and shivers; it’s cool and malleable and elastic as gelatin. Ariadne pokes at it with her fingers and the tips go numb with waking.
“You’re not through here, you know,” Cobb says, and she’s almost unsurprised that he’s here with her. “There’s still more you need to know.”
“I don’t need to know anything. I’m done with this job,” she tells him, and she pushes through the glass and then she’s falling, falling, falling….
::
part 3
Author: toujourspret
Disclaimer: Clearly, I don't own Inception. This is a work of fiction written by a fan for fans. Any resemblance to people or situations fictional or otherwise is pure coincidence.
Rating: R
Characters: Ariadne-centric, ensemble cast
Summary: The team takes a case that's different from the usual case: extract the location of a serial killer's last victim. Ariadne finds herself inside the murderer's mind, lost in a twisted Wonderland where the only way out is in and the only way up is down. With the help of the team as various denizens of Wonderland and herself as Alice, Ariadne has to find the real Alice before the killer catches on. But is the killer really the only thing to worry about? In Wonderland, things are never quite what they seem.
Warnings: Very disturbing imagery, violence against children, offscreen mention of sexual abuse, character death (non-canon characters). IMPORTANT: Please be aware that certain aspects of this fic may be triggering, or cause emotional duress.
Author's Notes: See Part 1 for notes.
Link to Art: here
Chapters: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3
Stepping Sideways Into the Underground [2/3]
The problem is that she doesn’t actually know which direction is which. She recalls vague memories, different versions of the guardian of the labyrinth who hides a secret entrance, hides the utility path that leads to the heart of the maze, and presses her palm against the high, arched roots of the tree. Leaning over, she can see daylight between them, where the heart of the wood should be.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Cobb says behind her, and she jumps, swearing when her head knocks against a root.
“Jesus Christ!” she yelps, falling back against the ground. “What the hell’s wrong with you, sneaking up on people like that?”
“That’s not the direction you want to go,” he tells her instead, pacing around the tree and appearing back in the branches.
“Why not? We’re looking for Alice, and I’d just bet he put her in the center of the labyrinth,” she argues.
“That path doesn’t lead to the center of the labyrinth.” His gaze is like a solid thing, fixed on her face. “That path will take you underground.”
“We’re looking for a grave, aren’t we?” she asks, confused. He doesn’t answer, simply resting his chin on his hand to look at her. “That’s the utility path, isn’t it? There’s always a utility path to the center of the labyrinth, and that path will take me right to Alice.”
He regards her coolly, as if he were a professor speaking to a particularly slow pupil. “And when,” he asks her, “has this place ever reacted the way you expected it to?”
“Well, never, I suppose,” she agrees reluctantly. “But then which way do I go?”
“It depends on where you want to arrive,” he says, shrugging. “If you go to the right, you’ll find the Mad Hatter’s house. If you go left, you’ll find the March Hare.”
“Then I’ll go left. I don’t want to go to a mad man’s house.” She parrots the line from the story playfully. Cobb shrugs.
“Do what you like. It’s no skin off my nose,” he tells her. She frowns up at him and he laughs.
“You’re not supposed to tell me that! When Alice tells the Cheshire Cat she doesn’t want to meet a crazy person, he’s supposed to tell her, ‘We’re all mad here.’ You suck at this cryptic advice thing, Cobb,” Ariadne declares decisively.
“But you already know all that,” he says simply. “Where’s the fun in repeating old ideas? But let me try that cryptic advice thing one more time: have you ever woken up from a dream to realize you’re still dreaming? Everyone has had those dreams one time or another. But what about this time? Have you woken up, or are you still dreaming?”
“Of course I’m dreaming right now, Cobb. We’re in Wonderland, and I’m talking to a giant cat-man thing. Which happens to be you,” she points out, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“But the case. Does it make any real sense? Isn’t there something a little off about it, a little too Hollywood about it? And why would I take a murder case like this one at all?” His eyes are serious as he looks at her from the tree.
She laughs nervously. “Shut up, Cobb. You can’t incept me like you did Mal; I know better than that.”
“You’re waiting for a train-” he starts as he fades, voice drifting into the tree. “Watch out for the Queen.”
“And who’s this Queen, Cobb?” she shouts at the tree, knowing he can’t hear her. “Is it Lewis, or is it Mal? Is Mal going to chop off my head? Answer me!”
The tree is silent and reproachful. She thumps her fist against it, more tempted than ever to duck through the roots until the sharp crack of a snapped twig jerks her attention to the side. Alice is there, dark eyes fixed on her. She wiggles her finger in a childish beckoning motion before starting down the path. The back of her dress is tattered, thin polyester shredded and rotting to expose Pooh-bear underwear. Her legs are naked down to her bare feet, toes dark and murky colored with purple-streaked nails. There is a bloody trail wrapping around an ankle from a scrape on the knee above it and a palm-shaped bruise climbing the back of her calf. She pauses down the path, waiting for Ariadne to turn the corner and see the house.
This isn’t the Hatter’s house. Ariadne knows that, somewhere along the way, she’s supposed to visit the White Rabbit’s house and be mistaken for Mary Anne; she’s always loved that part of the story, with the lizard chimney sweep and the fan that makes Alice small enough to climb out the window, but she knows she didn’t put this cottage into the labyrinth. This is not the White Rabbit’s house.
Breath escapes her in a percussive whump like a punch as she stares up at the cottage from her case file. She already knows this house, with its whitewashed clapboard siding and its low little roof. She already knows from case photos what the inside of this house will look like, knows without going inside how the rooms will be laid out, knows about the vintage movie posters that line the hall from the front door to the “Alice room”, where investigators found Lewis’s collection of different editions of the two books and his wholly different collection of little girls’ clothes, each article left behind by a victim. She already knows everything about this house, everything in the pictures and everything in the police reports and everything in the newspaper articles. She even knows where she’d find the graves, if she could work up enough nerve to look.
The door opens. Inside, the hall unfolds like a telescope; she imagines she can see all the way down to the door of the Alice room, the heavy oak door vaguely pulsing with a sickly light. There is a girl in the window of the house, holding the wispy curtains back as she regards Ariadne with filmy eyes. She is half rotted, solemn and patient as she waits for Ariadne to enter. Ariadne stumbles back, a wobbly cry escaping her. She recoils from the house and turns, running blind away from it until her feet find the path and she finds herself shivering over a low white picket fence that surrounds a cozy little house that looks like a fallen layer cake. She can hear squabbling nearby.
“I told you I don’t like tea. I just want coffee; is that so hard?” Arthur is griping from somewhere behind the house she remembers designing for the Hatter.
“Honestly, pet, you must try to be a bit more civilized sometime. When I tell you it is a tea party, it is a tea party, not a ‘tea for Eames and coffee for Arthur because Arthur is a complete Yank’ party,” Eames responds, voice smooth and teasing. From beyond the gate, Ariadne imagines the typically grumpy expression on Arthur’s face as he tries to deal with his playful colleague and smiles to herself. She’s still shaken, but it’s nothing a good cup of tea with friends can’t help smooth over. She reaches over the fence and flips the latch, letting herself in to follow the voices.
“If you can’t comprehend the beauty of a perfectly pulled espresso, Mr. Eames,” Arthur says peevishly. His words trail off here, leaving the impugnation of the other man’s intelligence to the imagination. Ariadne laughs to herself as she rounds the corner of the house, then laughs harder when she sees the loudly colored hat perched on Eames’s head and the bunny ears on Arthur.
“You’re the Hatter and the Hare!” she cries out in delight. They turn to her and she takes in their Wonderland selves, so similar and yet dissimilar to their normal appearances. Both are dressed in frock coats, Arthur’s a pale dove gray in a dashing cut and Eames’s a wild, patched orange with tails turned into curlicues that bob as he walks. Even as the March Hare, Arthur is elegant, creases pressed sharp in his pants and waist buttoned up smartly with a waistcoat. Eames’s hat hangs rakishly over one eye, size card replaced with-of course-the ace of spades. The rest of his clothes are motley, giving off the impression of either a clown or the unfortunate victim of a mad, colorblind tailor.
“And you are Ariadne, my doll,” Eames says. Arthur shoots him an incredulous look.
“It’s Alice, come to the tea party, of course,” Arthur corrects him, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know where he got this Ariadne thing from,” he tells her, tone confidential. “Ariadne’s just a story book girl.”
Eames’s smile drops as he turns to look at Arthur. “Don’t you recognize our Ariadne?”
Emotion wells up in her chest, and she all but throws herself into the seat next to Eames, hands shaking with fear as the words tumble from her lips. “Eames, there’s something really wrong with this place! Some of the places I designed don’t look like they’re supposed to, and everyone thinks I’m really Alice!” She stops to catch her breath, then starts again in a small voice, “And that house is here, the one where Lewis-”
He cuts her off. “Don’t say that name, love. You don’t want to call him here.”
She swallows, nodding. “-the one where he killed those girls. I didn’t put it in here; I swear I didn’t put it in the labyrinth!”
“It sounds like we’ve got a lucid dreamer on our hands,” Arthur says as he sits down on her other side, coffee cup clenched between his hands. He sets it aside to take one of hers between his, and they are almost uncomfortably hot. “It’s like: imagine dreaming as if you were the architect of the dream, only there’s no PASIV. A lucid dreamer knows he’s dreaming, and because of this, he can exert his influence on the shape of the dream. He can even control what happens, at least to the parts of the dream that are his. He can consciously control his projections, but not only that; he can consciously control the surroundings. He can add to the dream space, make it more complex and change your labyrinth to the point that you can’t even recognize it anymore.”
“What can I do to stop him?” Ariadne asks.
Eames takes her other hand, squeezing reassuringly. “You mustn’t forget that you’re dreaming, Ariadne. You can’t ever forget that you’re dreaming, because you lose control of the dream when you forget that.”
Ariadne laughs, short and sharp. “Forget I’m dreaming? I’m in Wonderland. I’ve been talking to caterpillars and cats and rabbits and-” she blinks, a question falling into her eyes. Tugging her hand from his grasp, she shoves at his shoulder angrily. “And what’s all that creepy stuff with turning yourself into the dead girl and leading me to his haunted house, huh? That was really messed up!”
Eames narrows his eyes. “I’ve never been Alice, Ariadne. I haven’t left this table.”
“It’s true,” Arthur says, lifting a teapot over one of the empty cups in front of her. “Ever since he bored the Queen with his absolutely awful singing and she tried him for murdering the time, it’s always tea time. Would you like sugar?”
She looks at him, amazed at the lack of recognition on his face. Creeping fear gathers in her stomach, and she turns to Eames. “What’s wrong with him? Why does he keep doing that?”
Eames shrugs helplessly. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” he asks. At her uncomprehending stare, he shrugs again. “No one has ever been able to solve that one. It was kind of you to try, Alice.”
Horrified, Ariadne shoves away from the table. Standing on suddenly weak knees, she takes in the whole picture: in sets of two, half drunk coffee cups and tea cups pair around the table. Despite flashes of awareness, Arthur and Eames must have been playing the Hatter and Hare’s dance all day, and as she watches them, they shuffle over two more seats. Arthur offers Eames tea, and Eames frowns when he reaches for the percolator. “Honestly, pet, you must try to be more civilized,” Eames scolds teasingly. “When I say this is a tea party-”
She doesn’t hear the rest, already dashing through the woods toward the path. Trees reach out toward her, whipping narrow branches against her face, and she can feel blood trickling down from a thin cut above her eye. When she stops, breathless, to lean against the banyan tree, she notices her dress is shredded and cheap looking. Her chest heaves for air against the nervous sobs she can feel building up. She feels clammy, and her hands are shaking.
“You look more like Alice now,” Cobb says, and she’s not surprised to see him lounging in the branches again.
“I don’t want to look more like Alice,” she snaps. “I want to look like Ariadne, because I am Ariadne.”
“Ariadne’s just a story book girl,” Cobb repeats Arthur’s words.
“Stop it!” she cries, covering her ears. “Just stop it! You’re no help at all!”
He waits in the tree patiently until she uncovers her ears and looks at him. “Why is this happening to me?” she asks, voice cracking. “Why am I the only one who isn’t lost in the dream?”
“But you are!” he tells her, laughing. “You’re more lost than any of us.”
“Please, just,” she says desperately, “Just please stop trying to scare me and help me. I’m-I’m really scared right now, Cobb, and I need you to help me.” She waits for him to say something, anything, but he doesn’t. Turning on her heel, she starts to walk away.
“Ariadne,” he says, and she turns back. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get this son of a bitch, and we’re going to give that little girl back to her family.” She waits for him to say more, but he’s silent.
“I don’t even know where to look,” she complains bitterly. “She could be anywhere.”
“That’s not true. You know that. You even know where she is; she’s shown you,” he tells her, and she remembers the length of the hall opening up, extending deeper into the dream, the house like a cancer infecting her labyrinth.
“I don’t want to go back there, Cobb,” she admits.
“Listen to me: it has to be you. The rest of us are still dreaming. You’re the only one he hasn’t gotten to yet; you’re that little girl’s last chance. It has to be you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me how dangerous it would be, Cobb?” she demands now, anger seeping into the cold, numb fear. “That a lucid dreamer would have so much control over what happens in the dream, that you guys might end up corrupted and leave me here all by myself to deal with a serial killer and child rapist? What the hell were you thinking?”
Cobb shrugs, an entirely feline gesture. “Does being angry about that change anything that’s happened now?”
“Don’t you tell me not to be angry!” she retorts sharply.
He smiles then, eyes luminous. “You should hurry up,” he tells her, flicking his tail toward her. “Alice isn’t going to wait forever.” A branch creaks behind her, and Ariadne turns, taking in the sight of the dead girl sitting next to the broken stump of the sign. She looks worse, decaying now. Her hair is knotted, shorn close on one side and matted with dried blood on the other. Blackened toes curl toward the soles of her feet, and her fingers are twigs, twisted and stiff and bruise-colored. When she notices Ariadne looking at her, she tips her head in a way that exposes the handprints around her throat and climbs to her feet, waiting. Ariadne nods and follows.
“You’re just a projection,” Ariadne tells her. Alice ignores her as they walk through the strangely silent woods. There isn’t even any birdsong, and Ariadne shivers, filled with a strange compulsion to fill the empty air with words. “The question is: whose projection are you? Do you belong to one of us? Or are you what I was expecting to find here? Is that why you’re here? Or are you his?”
Alice stops, turning to her and holding up a hand. She shakes her head, and Ariadne lets out a frustrated breath. Alice touches a dirty, withered finger to her lips and makes a shushing sound like the wind rushing through dead leaves, crackling and dry and inhuman. Ariadne bites back the urge to be sick and nods, understanding: shut up.
It’s entirely too soon when she arrives at the cottage behind the dead girl. It looks worse for the wear, as if it is decaying, too, just like the little girls whose corpses it has hidden. The painted siding is peeling, exposing wormwood white boards like bleached bones. The low bushes are dead, branches grasping upward like skeleton hands from a grave, and a creeping black lichen like a mold covers the exposed concrete of the basement, seeping up the walls wetly toward the cracked and shattered windows. The gutter hangs loose, drooping sadly over the sagging porch filled with blackened, soggy-looking furniture. Alice takes the stairs toward the cavernous front door without a trace of fear, though Ariadne wonders briefly what fear there is to be had when you’re already dead. She reaches our to touch the rail to follow and jerks back, sucking at the splinter in her finger.
“Son of a bitch,” she mutters, peering at her hand in irritation. The wound looks clean, but she doesn’t dare trust the rickety rail again as she reluctantly approaches the house’s entrance. Curtains like cobwebs hang limp in the window, and when she looks closer, she can see spiders with more joints than imaginable skittering up and down the tattered lace. Somewhere inside the house, there is faint music playing, but she can’t make it out. When she touches the door to push it open, the splinter in her hand burns.
“Hello?” she calls to the empty house. “Is there anyone here?” To the right of the door, the parlor stands empty of the little girl she’d seen earlier; not even footsteps disturb the thick layer of dust on the floor. It’s the same thick dust that covers everything in the room, from the intensely detailed carved wood of the sofa to the elegant standing piano in the corner. There is only one set of footprints in the entire room, in fact: in the center of the cushion of the wingback chair by the fireplace, two perfectly formed child’s footprints point in the direction of the huge, ornate mirror above the mantle. A small circle is rubbed out of the dust on the glass; she turns her face away, suddenly afraid of what might be reflected.
Ahead of her is the Alice room. She can faintly make out the music now-the poem “Jabberwocky” set to an eerie, jaunty tune-and covers her mouth to trap the squeak of fear inside. She listens to the ballad long enough to figure out that it’s playing on a loop before cautiously pushing open the door.
In the flickering gas lights, the first thing she sees is the photograph, blown up and hung prominently in the alcove between bookshelves. Alice Liddell, the first and real Alice, looks down on her from the lithograph on the wall as she leans against a rough stone wall, greenery tangling around her bare ankles. She stands shoeless in a rucked and messy dress, hand cupped at her waist and a strangely adult expression on her face as she regards the camera, head cocked defiantly. The tangled neck of her dress is fallen, as if yanked, exposing a breast. The photo is surrounded by all of Lewis’s copies of the books about her, and Ariadne knows that some of these are only wished into existence. She raises a hand to brush the spines, to touch the gold lettering, and all around her she reads Alice, Alice, Alice.
“Don’t touch those,” Alice says behind her, and when Ariadne starts, turning to face her, she is surprised again. Alice is alive, cheeks pink and hale, dress untorn and whole. Rigor has retreated, leaving her skin fresh and pale. The crescents of her nail beds are no longer streaked with death.
“You’re Alice,” Ariadne breathes. Alice nods. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Alice shrugs. “I’ve been here the whole time.”
Ariadne frowns. “No. You’ve been following me.”
“You’ve been following me,” Alice corrects simply.
“What have you been doing this whole time?” Ariadne asks.
“Playing.” Alice walks over to the shelf, trailing her fingers until they land on a small, heavy-looking wooden hourglass, flipping it idly. “This place is wonderful. It’s just like the book. The part at the beginning was a little too Disney, a little cutesy, but the rest of it’s just perfect.” The sand in the glass moves sluggishly, trickling grain by grain as if reluctant to fall into the bottom of the glass. She taps it, frowning when the sand doesn’t speed up. “Time is such a strange thing,” she remarks, tapping the glass again.
“We have to get out of here,” Ariadne tells her. “Now.”
“No.” Alice’s refusal is short, strong. She taps the glass again.
“We have to get out of here,” Ariadne repeats desperately. “It’s not safe here.”
“You go. I like it here,” Alice says.
“Alice, please listen to me,” Ariadne pleads. “It’s very, very dangerous for you here. The man who lives here is a bad man.”
Alice turns, regarding her with a cool eye. “You know I’m dead, right?”
Ariadne chokes, remembers the decaying girl from earlier, wonders how Alice could ever think she’d forget, even for a moment. Alice watches her, disingenuously healthy and finally interested. “I-yeah,” Ariadne finally manages, flushing. “I just,” she pauses, looking for the word, “…forgot.”
Alice frowns, tapping the hourglass again. “I didn’t forget.”
Ariadne swallows hard. “I’m sorry.”
With the mercurial temper of a child, Alice smiles quicksilver bright. “What’s your name?”
Ariadne is overcome with the urge to lie, and she smiles too wide as she racks her brain for a name, any name. “My name is Lucy, like in Narnia. So we’re both named after little girls in books, aren’t we?”
Alice’s smile grows slow and secretive. “You’re a dirty fibber,” she says, and Ariadne’s skin crawls like spiders skittering up her arms. “The Cheshire Cat called you Ariadne.”
“I-”
“But Ariadne’s a storybook girl, too,” Alice says. Ariadne takes a step back, and Alice’s grin grows wider. “Just a different kind of storybook girl.
“Ariadne hanged herself, didn’t she?”
And Ariadne bolts, palms slamming into the space where the door used to be. There is a smooth expanse of paneled wood where it had been, not even a thin outline betraying its previous location. “Let me out!”
“Little girls shouldn’t go exploring where they’re not wanted,” Alice says.
“Oh, God,” Ariadne whimpers, curling against the wall. Alice closes the distance between them easily. Under the sweet exterior, Ariadne can smell the thick, brutish smell of decay. “Oh, God.”
“You’re an intruder,” Alice continues, reaching out to pet her hair. “You came in here to steal from me.” Her fingers tighten, grow fatter and longer and stronger, yanking her head back until she’s staring up at Lewis’s sneering face. “You can’t have her.”
“I just,” Ariadne starts, but she’s got no clue where to go with it, and then he slaps her, the full of his hand crashing along her cheekbone. Her head bounces on the wood paneling. The book case rattles, but nothing falls. She raises a hand to touch her throbbing head and he wraps a meaty hand around her wrist, yanking her to her feet. Ariadne raises her heel and kicks him in the kneecap. He stumbles, but his grip is firm, and when he squeezes she can feel the bones in her arm grating against each other. She kicks at him wildly, and he throws her again.
When she hits the wall, she recognizes the tunneling vision of a concussion forming, but somehow, miraculously, she recognizes something else: the wall bends, ever so slightly, with the force of her body against it. She reaches out with prying fingers at the corner of the hidden door, fumbling for a catch or spring or anything. His boot comes down, grinding, and for the first time she screams, the sound tearing from her throat more in surprise than pain. The catch pops with a click she feels in the bones of her broken hand instead of hearing it with her ears. The door creaks open an inch. She doesn’t dare stick her fingers through, but rolls to the side as he reaches for her again.
She comes to her feet clutching her wrist and leaning heavily against the low chair by Lewis’s reading table. Ariadne remembers wildly that in reality, this is the chair where Lewis had tied his victims, taking his time to touch and enjoy them before wrapping meaty palms around their throats, strangling them before disposing of the corpses under the floorboards of the Alice room. This thought blinds her, and somehow she is fumbling against the bookshelf, hands searching for something, anything to protect herself with. Her fingers land on something smooth, hefty. She has the hourglass in hand. Lewis shouts-“No!”-and she sends it crashing against his head. The glass is heavy, thick-bottomed with age. It doesn’t crack in the explosion that follows; the intricate detail of the wooden frame shatters, splintering in her hand, but the glass is intact, the sound of it hollow as it collides with Lewis’s skull, a flower of blood blooming on his brow before sluicing over the crumpled cheekbone and down the spasming jaw. The glass jars hard enough that the tingles spread all the way up to her shoulder and it falls from her suddenly nerveless fingers to the wooden floorboards. She takes a step back, hands at her mouth, and shudders hard once, twice. Blunt force trauma is such an intimate way to kill someone, she thinks improbably. She’s killed hundreds of times in the dreamscape before, but always with guns. Lewis groans, eyelids twitching unconscious but improbably alive, and she remembers the tiny catch, diving for it and yanking the door open to spill into the hall.
Smiling faces peer down at her, movie stars from decades past dressed as Alice decorating the hall. Ariadne grunts, pulling one down, a triumphant scream welling up in her chest as the frame shatters, littering the hall with glass. Her hand aches. She hears footsteps in the parlor and thudding footfalls behind, and her feet tangle together with indecision. Then she hears the voices.
Here, the whispers say. Here. This way, this way. Hurry. Hurry. They call her to the parlor, louder than Lewis thundering clumsy in the Alice room, louder than the pounding of blood in Ariadne’s ears. She stumbles down the hall toward the open door, freezing with her palm on the wood. There’s nowhere to go; Wonderland belongs to Lewis, the perfect playground-cum-hunting grounds, only half her design and half the Tulgey Wood, wild and cruel and dangerous. Movement catches the corner of her eye; she gasps in horror, and in the back of her mind marvels that anything can still unsettle her.
And it is unsettling, the way the girls are pressed against the inside of the mirror, palms flat against the glass and mouths hidden behind moist smudges of condensation. There are eight of them, two more than the police knew about, and Alice Seward is alone in the corner, eyes filmy white and expressionless. Her mouth opens, revealing tiny white teeth caked with dirt, and Ariadne knows she was buried with her mouth open. She was the only one buried outside.
“I’m,” Alice says in a thin, trembling voice like choking. “I’m scared.” The other girls stir, uneasy. I’m scared, they repeat in a whisper like the pages of a book being turned,. The sound rises and falls in volume as they cry like a Greek chorus. I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared.
“I tried to help you,” Ariadne tells her, and Alice tips her head in acknowledgement. “There was nothing I could do. I can’t find you; he’s hidden you too well.”
“Let me out,” Alice says, and her mouth’s movements don’t match the sound of her voice, like a three second delay between the recording and the image. She curls her hand against the inside of the glass, and Ariadne can hear the squeak of skin on glass as she tucks her fingers into a fist to thump at the glass with the heel of her hand. “Please let me out.”
Let us out, let us out, the girls cry, and the pounding of their fists begins to lift the frame from the wall. Please, they beg.
“Please, Mommy,” Alice whispers. Ariadne backs into the wall, one hand on the doorknob before she’s aware of it. “Please, Mommy, please.” Her face changes, quickens and becomes sly in a way that reminds Ariadne of Lewis.
“He’s coming.” Alice pushes her palms against the glass. “He’s coming for you, too.”
“I’m sorry!” Ariadne gasps. “I’m so sorry! I have to go; I can’t help you!”
“Find me.” It’s not a request. Alice is barely audible over the rustling, ethereal voices that tumble together, he’s coming, he’s coming.
“How? I don’t even know where he’s put you!” Ariadne says. She can hear the heavy crashing sound of Lewis trying to get out of the Alice room; the noises are growing faster, more sure. She has seconds to get away, and there’s nowhere to go.
“The looking glass,” Alice says, pressing both palms to the glass between them. “You have to find the looking glass. You have to go under the ground.” The looking glass. Looking, looking, the looking glass, the girls chorus. The door to the Alice room explodes as Lewis slams it open, and Ariadne is already out the door and on the path when he staggers onto the ramshackle porch, swearing bloody murder. The trees tear into her when she hits the tree line, branches curling sharp to try to hold her back.
The forest has expanded, huge swaths of it stretching and growing until the path is little more than rubble in a thin band and spidery new trees shove at each other for space between the manicured garden of Ariadne’s wood. A hunched willow like Black Annis twists its gnarled and knobby branches down to snatch at her with a dry cackle; Ariadne leaps to the side and plows through the rushes on the other side of the path just as a fine tremor begins to make itself known, shaking the world with all the tenderness of a mother shaking her child awake. Off the path, the plants are wild and somehow strangely flat, layered segments like a set for a children’s play even as they clamber and claw at Ariadne’s skin, drawing beads of blood where they touch her.
“Cobb!” she screams, hands coming up to protect her eyes from a hanging tendril of ivy barbed with nettle-like hairs that bite viciously into the soft flesh of her palms. “Cobb, where are you?”
“You’re sure you’re not Alice?” Cobb asks from nearby, and she almost stumbles over a root in her haste to stop. He’s nowhere to be seen.
“Cobb, please! You’ve got to help me get away from him,” she pleads, spinning in place as she scans the trees.
“Why?” he asks from behind her. She turns on her heel, but he’s not there. “Are you scared?” His voice rings echoes around her.
“Yes, damn you. Yes, I’m scared!” she admits, voice growing shrill. “Where the hell are you?” she demands.
“Hell? It could be argued,” he says contemplatively, slowly folding into reality at the base of a nearby bush. “I’ve heard things in the undergrowth here; they may be for eating,” he explains with the logic of a cat.
“Can’t you take anything seriously?” Ariadne snaps, and he turns to her, expression chilly.
“I’m taking this very seriously,” he says. “You’re the one that’s not even paying attention.”
“What do you even mean?” Ariadne cries, frustrated. “You’re almost worse than no help at all!”
He rounds on her, then, eyes flashing. “And you’re the one who’s lost her totem!”
Her breath stutters in her chest. “Lost my-I haven’t-” She reaches into the pocket of her pinafore, remembers tipping it out by the tree. Panic hits her in a wave. “No, I-Cobb, how could I-?” The pocket is empty but for the crumbled mushroom, its perfection making her stomach roll as she remembers its toxic taste. “I have to get back to the tree, Cobb. I have to find it!”
“And where do you think you are, silly thing?” he asks her, not unkindly. She looks around, confused, and it hits her: these trees, these branches-they’re the banyan’s roots. The dark tree has spread, infecting her labyrinth deeper and deeper. As she watches, the roots twine like naked bodies crawling together; a root drops from the top of the tree and plunges into the ground, pulsing as if feeding on something under the dirt. A disgusted sound falls from her mouth as she watches the pale roots dig and writhe, alive and wicked. They part for a moment and she sees the light at the heart of the wood, and before she can convince herself it’s a bad idea, she shoves her way between the roots of the tree and into the narrow tunnel beneath it. The roots snap shut behind her, and there’s nowhere to go but down the steep, winding path. Claustrophobic dirt walls squeeze in on her, but the roots don’t penetrate the tunnel, and it remains dimly lit by a distant source of light. She looks at the solid wall of wood where she entered and frowns, elbowing her way deeper when the tunnel grows too close and dropping to her knees to crawl when it becomes too short.
Just as she’s sure the tunnel is going to turn into a dead end, leaving her alone in the dark in a space too small to breathe, she comes to the door. It’s tiny, perhaps only a foot tall, and much too narrow to fit her shoulders. She doesn’t see any table in this anteroom, no cakes that say “eat me” or bottles that plead “drink me”, but she reaches out, tentatively trying the knob. It doesn’t budge. Ariadne lowers her face to peer at it carefully, and to her surprise, there is a key on the top of the frame. She fishes out the mushroom and eyes it suspiciously before placing it on her tongue and gagging. When she’s a little taller than the door, she spits out the mushroom and takes the key in hand. It’s surprisingly hefty, and for a moment a cold chill washes over her; she’d blindly trusted that this key would fit the lock. If it doesn’t, there’s not enough mushroom left to shrink small enough to fit under the gap beneath the door. She’d have to try squeezing through the roots of the tree and hope Lewis wouldn’t squish her like a bug.
The key fits into the lock with a snick like clockwork, cogs and metal ribbons fitting together precisely into their homes. When she turns the knob, the door swings silently and effortlessly into the room, and she draws in a breath. It’s Lewis’s parlor, just as she’d seen it the first time she’d entered the cottage, dust covered and abandoned. She steps in, the rounded, childish shapes of her shoes leaving footprints like those in a cartoon, evenly spaced and half-realized. Without thinking, she climbs up into the chair, and the footprints in the dust covering its cushion are hers. She looks through the hole in the dust on the glass and sees herself and the team in the prison cell, the PASIV’s red light glowing. The numbers are ticking down, and as soon as she realizes this, she hears the faint strains of music filtering through the glass. She presses her hand against the glass and shivers; it’s cool and malleable and elastic as gelatin. Ariadne pokes at it with her fingers and the tips go numb with waking.
“You’re not through here, you know,” Cobb says, and she’s almost unsurprised that he’s here with her. “There’s still more you need to know.”
“I don’t need to know anything. I’m done with this job,” she tells him, and she pushes through the glass and then she’s falling, falling, falling….
::
part 3