A Rabbit Alice Knew

Alisabeth’s consciousness drifted up through the darkness pressed upon it. It bobbed out of and atop his mind, surfacing to a bleary grey and black and white sky that flickered and ran in variable stripes and blotches above him. He shut his eyes against wakefulness. Or was it wakefulness at all?

Am I dead?

A noise—no, words—were coming through to him, blurred and grayscale as his vision was at first, but steadily clearer. “Hello!” it called. “Hello! Oh, for goodness sake!”

The heaving gasp that marked the harsh and final severance of the waking world from the darkness of falling—of the abyss, of a sort of liminal death—quickly answered her own subconscious question: she was still very much alive. But her gasping wasn’t simply the impulse of waking: it was the shock of the blur of white above her resolving into shapes, being dotted by patches of creamy brown, linens of pale yellow and white, and staring blank eyes. There was not only grey-black sky above her: there was a rabbit. A rabbit in a dress, standing crossly on two wooden legs and over where she lay, speaking to her in a voice growing sharper and sharper by the second—but a rabbit Alice suddenly knew she had known before. Her rabbit.

“What…?”

“By the Order! Awake at last,” her rabbit said. She straightened up, now staring down at Alice from on high and past her tiny white nose. She went on with a scoff, “Now, behave yourself! All dirtied and in disarray—why, it’s so extremely unseemly, I can hardly believe such a thing!”

There was nothing he could think to do but comply. He sat up slowly, blinking hard. His thickly gloved hand reached to the ground next to him but found, instead, the shaft of his shovel. His other hand found his forehead, supporting his bafflement as his eyes shifted all around. He wasn’t in the cemetery. He wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t even in a hospital. He was somewhere domed by a dark sky, but filled with a bluish daylight that made him shiver within his soiled jacket and nightgown. All around him was rock—jagged spires of the stuff, white and cold and flowing with grey veins: marble. He thought then he was surely dreaming—and yet, he knew he wasn’t. He was awake and alive. That, he could feel for certain. “Where… what is happening?”

Her rabbit sighed in exasperation. “You have landed squarely in the way of a messenger of the White Order, and in the Hollow Mountains of all places, and while so positively filthy! That is what is happening! Oh, never in all my time in Underland—!” she chastised. She chastised. Alisabeth was being chastised by her childhood rabbit, stitched back together and walking on two wooden legs and talking.

“This is insane! I’ve gone completely bonkers!” Alice cried. “I’m—I’m seeing things. I must be! I—that burial vault crashed in, and I got knocked in the head, and they found me the next day when they were supposed to bury my father, and I’m in some hospital that I can’t see right now. You’re just some nurse talking to me—maybe. Oh, but you can’t—you can’t really be—!”

His rabbit had fallen silent at the outburst. He stood stiff, frozen suddenly in something between suspicion and fear next to him. A weak, “My…” fell from her stitched mouth.

Christ… The hand on Alisabeth’s head fell to cover her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to frighten you. I…” but she didn’t know what to say, or do, or anything.

“My, my… the living… the madness…!” Her rabbit was creeping slowly back and away now, ears turned low onto her velvety head. She was trying to get away, slowly but surely.

“Oh, please don’t leave! Please—I have no idea where I am or where to go! I won’t hurt you!” But it was already too late from the moment Alisabeth had begun to speak; as quick as any other rabbit, this one had turned tail and ran down the path of white rock, white and yellow dress blooming behind her.

“Please!” Alice begged, clambering to her feet, grasp tightening around the shovel as she stood with it in hand. There was nothing else to do besides chase—chase and chase, through mountain passes, along sheer cliff sides, past black caverns and around needle-like spires. At every turn, she nearly lost her; at every turn, she only caught a glimpse of linen and wood before it was gone. And then, after one last turn, nearly became completely; and then, Alisabeth Hara was lost in the Hollow Mountains.

The young gravedigger drew in a shivering breath between his cracked lips. The air, chill and grey and sharp as steel, stinging in the very membranes of his now-weary lungs, pierced and instructed him all at once. It told him that one thing and one thing only was crystal clear: this was no dream, no hallucination. He was not sitting up in some hospital, wracked by waking nightmares more vivid than anything he had imagined ever before. This was real—as real as midnight, as the concrete giving way beneath his feet, as the shovel in his hand. This was a new reality he had fallen into, through darkness and abyss and death. This was—what had his rabbit said, amidst all her criticisms? This was Underland.

Alisabeth staggered, swayed against the rock. She was lost and utterly alone in this place, these mountains, and—after so much of a chase, after so quick a creature, and amidst so monumental a realization—she was exhausted. Sinking down the length of her shovel, she shut her eyes against the world once more. “This cannot be happening,” she whispered, though she knew it wasn’t true, and it could, and it was. 

She crouched there, in darkness, in fear, and eventually, in unconsciousness.