Allison's Adventures in Underland

by C. M. Stunich

  The long stretch of dark, damp well comes to an abrupt end and I land with a loud oof right in the arms of the bunny-eared murderer.

  “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” he breathes, his voice like bones and ice. It's a little weird, I'll admit, hearing such a sinful voice slip from the lips of a boy wearing bunny ears. “How late you've made me.”

  I'm so shocked by the sudden change of scenery that it takes me a moment to react. Instead, I just sit there and stare into his eyes, the color eerily similar to the stain on my hands. His heart beats rapidly against mine, echoing the adrenaline fueled thumping that's ringing in my ears.

  His arms are too strong, too sure, and he's holding me up like I weigh nothing. Plus, his body is ridiculously warm, and he smells like earth and growing things.

  If he hadn't just killed my classmate, I might've considered asking him out.

  “You … fucking shot Brandon,” I say, and the boy abruptly drops me in a pile of bones and dead things, their flesh stripped away, leaving nothing but fear and ivory. “What … the … where …”

  I can't even make myself finish the question; I'm too horrified by the pile of corpses underneath me.

  “I'm gonna puke,” I groan, standing up and stumbling back until I hit the hard-packed dirt wall of the cavern. My hand clamps over my mouth as I glance up at the boy, his red eyes focused wholly on me, his ears twitching like they're alive.

  He's wearing a red vest over a short-sleeved black button up with a pair of well-pressed slacks and slick black Oxfords with red hearts on the toes. As I stand there, he adjusts the cuffs on his shirt and gestures at the gun with his chin.

  “Nice choice. Good grip, not much recoil. You could take down a jabberwock with that thing.”

  The boy's full mouth twists into a sinuous sort of smile, not at all like something you'd expect to see on the face of a teenage kid wearing rabbit ears and a waistcoat.

  “Well, I'd best be going,” he says with a small salute of his gloved hand. The motion causes the muscles in his bare arms to bunch, highlighting the fact that he's literally covered in ink, brilliant swarms of tattoos that I can't quite make out in the shadows. “Fare-fucking-well, Miss Alice.” He pauses before turning away, shiny shoes scuffing against the filthy stone floor beneath our feet. “Try not to die before we meet again?”

  He takes off around the corner as I stand there gaping at the long, dark length of the corridor, the borrowed gun clutched in my shaking hand. Lifting it up, I realize that this … this is no modern gun. There's a fuse on it that I don't have a damn clue what to do with.

  “Wait!” I shout as I drop the gun, and even though I know I'm chasing after a murderer, I also want to get the hell out this place, wherever it is.

  Underground in a swanky suburban neighborhood, apparently. I always knew those people with their HOA fees and white picket fences were hiding something …

  Taking off around the corner, I stumble into a long hallway with a harlequin patterned floor, much the same as my tights. Up and down both sides are doors with big, gold locks. And hanging from the ceiling above my head, skulls with flickering candles inside their mouths.

  “What fresh hell is this?” I whisper as I slow down and start carefully across the floor, my boots scraping loudly against the tile. “Rabbit Dude?” I call, biting my lower lip and trying to avoid the eerie sense of déjà vu washing over me.

  It's not like I haven't read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's not like the similarities have escaped me. Narrowing my brow, I try to remember what happens next—and how Alice got herself out of that nightmare in the end.

  Or if she ever did.

  “Shit, I read too many books,” I curse, digging around in my pockets for my cell. For the life of me, I can't remember what happens in the real Alice's adventures. I've read so many adaptations, played so many games, seen so many movies and TV shows.

  But then I stumble upon a glass table, cracked in pieces and strewn across the floor.

  Okay, now I remember, I think as I stare down at a tiny broken bottle with the words FUCKING DRINK ME scrawled across the tag.

  Bending down, I tuck my blue and white skirt under my thighs and dig through the glass shards, looking for a small golden key.

  “Although it's just as likely to be a skeleton key in this nightmare,” I grumble, my heart in my throat, sweat sliding down my spine like tiny spiders. I know how fucked this whole situation is. And I'm more than aware that Edith probably just slipped me some LSD before we left the house. “I've never prayed so hard for hallucinations in my whole life.”

  Slicing my finger on a piece of glass, I curse and lift it up to my lips, getting ready to suck on it.

  But I stop when I remember that it's not all my blood.

  “Damn it, Brandon,” I curse as I stand up and kick the useless shards away with my foot.

  There's no key here.

  And I know for a fact that there was one in the original book.

  “This confirms it,” I say with a hysterical laugh. “I am out of my goddamn mind. It was Edith. It had to be. It just had to.”

  I start off down the hall and pause in front of a long, black curtain, hanging in tattered shreds from the wall. Behind this, there should be a tiny door, right? One that I could barely fit my head into?

  Instead, when I pull it back, there's a man sitting on a red chaise lounge, leaning back and smiling wickedly at me.

  Around his neck, there's a tag that says DRINK ME.

  “Oh, heeeell no,” I say, backing up suddenly, until my feet crunch over the shards of broken glass. Thank God I decided to wear combat boots instead of the awful heels my sister'd picked out for me.

  “What's the matter?” the boy asks, tilting his head to the side and letting the corner of his lip twist up in a smirk. “You're not thirsty?”

  “This isn't happening,” I tell myself as he stands up and makes his way past the curtain and into the main part of the hallway. “Clearly, I've taken some serious drugs and wound up with my unconscious mind all wrapped up in boys who obviously do not exist.”

  “If you think we're made of wax,” a voice says from behind me, “you ought to pay, you know? What do you think this is? An exhibit? A show?”

  Hot fingertips trail along the back of my neck, and I jump, whirling around to find an identical looking boy with an EAT ME sign around his neck.

  He has blue-streaked black hair rather than violet like the first one, hanging over his forehead and covering one brilliant sapphire eye, giving him this cheeky look that matches his twin perfectly. Because there's no doubt in my mind that these boys are, in fact, twins. Except for hair and eye color, they match each other perfectly, right down to the the half-erect curves of their cocks.

  “Contrariwise,” Mr. Drink Me says, “if you think we're alive, you ought to fucking speak.”

  He walks slowly—languorously—toward me, until I've got one naked boy in front and one behind. They're both sculpted gods, Adonis in the flesh. Made of wax he said? I honestly wouldn't be surprised. They both look too perfect to be real.

  “I just want to go home,” I say and the boys exchange a look over my shoulder.

  “You'll want to go to the garden then,” Drink Me says, and a warm shiver slides over my shoulder as Eat Me steps up close from behind, his breath feathering against my neck.

  “Yes, the garden.”

  “Although that won't get you home.”

  “Stop speaking in riddles,” I say with gritted teeth, because even if these guys are, like, seriously next level hot, I'm not about to stand here and play games. “Then what will get me home?”

  “How should we know?” Drink Me says with a dramatic roll of his amethyst colored eyes. “We hardly know where you live.”

  “And even if we did,” Eat Me continues, trailing his fingertips down the backs of my arms and making me shiver, “what makes you think we'd tell you, Alice.”

  “Allison,” I say, stepping out from between the two of
them, my boots loud against the harlequin patterned floor. I take another careful step backward, putting some distance between myself and the creepy twins.

  I open my mouth to keep talking and then snap it shut. I just corrected them about my name … but how the hell did they know it in the first place?!

  “She's going to panic and run like a rabbit,” says Drink Me, like he's bored out of his skull. He looks me up and down with a sigh. “For an Alice, you're awfully jumpy. What's your fucking problem?”

  “My problem?” I ask with a snort, pointing a single finger at myself. “I just saw some dude with rabbit ears murder my crush. He shot and killed him.”

  “How hard were you crushing?” Eat Me responds, crossing his arms over his chest and looking down at the broken glass on the floor like he's thinking way too fucking hard about this. “Enough to make diamonds?”

  “Did you not hear what I said, you fucking psycho?!” I ask, taking a few more steps back. “I said a guy with bunny ears murdered a kid from my school!”

  “You didn't say bunny,” Eat Me corrects, offering up a shit-eating grin, like this is all some sort of game, like he's not standing there naked and chiseled with blue-black hair dripping across his forehead and a sign that says fucking EAT ME hanging from his neck. The little blue ribbon slides across his muscles as he moves closer to me, and I see that his back is covered in tattoos. “You said rabbit.”

  I turn and run then, like any sensible person would do, back down the corridor and toward the pile of bones and ivory littering the floor. It's a dead-end down here, a wall of rough stone that leads to nowhere. And when I look up? The hole I fell down is a good ten feet above me. Even if I could reach it, what am I going to do? Go all spread-eagled and crab walk my way to the top?

  Sorry, but I got in C in gym last quarter specifically because I refused to even try to climb that damn rope. I have a thing about heights.

  “Oh? Is that where you came from?” Drink Me says, making me jump as I drop my gaze and scoot away from him, keeping both twins in my sight as I bend down and pick up the gun I dropped, the one with the fuse. I might not have anything to light it, but they don't know that. With my other hand, I pull out my cell and find that I have zero service.

  Of course I have zero service because what heroine in any story ever does?

  I turn on my phone's flashlight app and spin it to face the twins—and honestly, I'm not stupid, I figure these have got to be Tweedledee and Tweedledum although they're not really supposed to show up until book two, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Hey, if there's one thing I do know, it's books.

  “Stay back, this thing is powerful enough to burn the flesh off your bones.” I figure if I'm not actually on the grass at the party, frothing at the mouth and having a seriously bad reaction to some drug Edith slipped me, then I'm rolling with this whole magical world thing. And my bet—these assholes have never seen a cell phone before.

  “Your phone has the power to burn flesh?” Eat Me asks, looking like he's trying his hardest to hold back a laugh. “Well, now, who's being the ridiculous one here?” He ruffles up his blue and black hair with his fingers and tilts his head at me. “If you need to make a call, my phone is back in my pants pocket.”

  I drop my hand back to my side and just stare at the two naked men, doing my best to keep my eyes above their waistlines. It's hard to miss the fact that they're both fully erect though. Like, why the fuck are they sitting in this weird hallway naked anyway?

  Screw it—I'm going to ask.

  “Why are you both naked?”

  The twins turn their gazes to one another, clearly bemused at the state of my confusion.

  When they look back to me, Eat Me has a smirking smile stretching across his full mouth, his tongue sliding across his lower lip and making it shiny and pink. I can't seem to look away.

  “We're gifts for the Alice,” he says, as Drink Me smiles at me, a tad caustically. “Gifts for you. The King sent us.”

  “The King?” I ask, but I can already see where this is going. I'm a smart girl. I can make leaps of logic. “The King … of Hearts?”

  Drink Me's smile—or wait, is he Tweedledee or Tweedledum?—gets a bit more real.

  “Yes, the King of Hearts is waiting for you.”

  I tuck my phone back into the pocket of Edith's awful dress and cross my arms over my chest, still holding onto the strange gun. I might not be able to shoot somebody with it, but I could bash these guys over the head if I had to.

  “I'm sorry, but I think you've got me confused with somebody else. Look, I was at a party; I was running; I fell.” I glance down and notice the blood smeared across the front of my dress, bile rising in my throat as I relive Brandon's death all over again. That rabbit-eared son of a bitch … “I don't need any gifts, don't need to see any king. All I need is to get back up there.”

  I point at the hole with a single finger and Drink Me sighs, like I'm the dumbest person he's ever met in his entire life. This from a guy who's standing there naked with a DRINK ME sign hanging around his damn neck. Like, really? Talk about throwing stones in glass houses.

  “The Rabbit-Hole only goes one way, Alice.”

  “Allison,” I repeat and Drink Me sighs, putting both hands on his face and dragging them down.

  “I know your name is Allison, but you are the Alice. The one and only.” He scoffs and turns away, shaking his head, his purple and black streaked hair falling across his forehead. “I can't believe we belong to you now. How ridiculous.”

  “I'm sorry, what?” I ask as Eat Me takes a few steps forward and offers me his hand. “You belong to me? People can't belong to people.”

  “We're gifts from the King,” Eat Me repeats, like that's just a fact of life; the mellifluous quality of his voice never changes. “We're yours now. If you don't want to see him, that's your choice. All we can do is what you ask. But Tee is right—the Rabbit-Hole only leads into Underland, not out of it. If you want to leave, you have to start in the garden.”

  “Tee?” I ask, raising my brows. I'm not taking the naked weirdo's hand, not even if he's every woman's wet dream with his sapphire eyes, artfully disheveled hair, and that careful slash of a smirk across his face.

  “That's Tee,” Eat Me continues, gesturing in his brother's direction with his chin. When he drops his hand to his side, he doesn't look disappointed. No, he looks fucking intrigued, like I'm some sort of challenge. That motherfucker … “And I'm Dee.”

  “It's an easy one to remember,” Drink Me continues, giving his brother a look and reaching up to untie the purple ribbon at his throat, letting the little tag at his neck drift to the ground near the pile of bones. Now that I'm standing here looking at them, it all makes sense. I bet those are the bodies of animals that wandered into the brush, tumbled down the hole like I did … but had no bunny-eared murderer to catch them when they fell. “Easy because Dee is a d-bag.”

  Tee crosses his arms over his chest and looks at me in defiance.

  “Aren't you Tweedledee and Tweedledum?” I ask, because I'm still on the fence about the whole LSD trip/this is actually happening sort of thing. And if it is happening, then … I'm probably in shock because I don't feel anything. Not all that surprising considering it's been a hell of a long time since I felt anything at all. Not since my mother was convicted of murder last year. No, since then I haven't felt much. Why should I? All it does is hurt. When you let the world in, it cuts you and makes you bleed.

  I rub sweaty palms on the red waist cincher, trying to get off the last red-brown streaks of Brandon's blood.

  “Only if that's what you want to call us,” Dee aka Eat Me says as he tugs on a strand of his blue-black hair. He's smirking at me again, like we're not all standing around in a dead-end tunnel next to a pile of bones and ivory.

  “And isn't this … Wonderland?” I hazard, but I should've known better.

  The murderer with the gun? The mound of corpses? The chandelier with the skulls?

/>   I've read/watched/played enough fucked-up Alice interpretations to have figured it out.

  There's always trouble in paradise.

  Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, right?

  “Wonderland …” Tee says after a moment, surprising me by speaking up. He turns away and I see that his entire back, from his neck down to his ankles is covered in tattoos … and scars. Two big aubergine angel wings wrapped in chains take up every inch of available space, even covering the backs of his arms. “Hmm,” he scoffs on the end of a sigh, glancing over his shoulder at me. His smile, when he gives it, is nothing short of devastating, both beautiful and melancholic all wrapped into one. “Not anymore.”

  The chaise lounge I found Drink Me … sorry, Tee lying on when I pulled back the tattered black curtain has a small door next to it, about the perfect size for a baseball to fit through. In the original Alice books, she drinks the uh, DRINK ME bottle and shrinks to the perfect size.

  It only goes to show how sick in the head I am that I'm expecting the same thing to happen here.

  “So,” I say, standing up and keeping my gaze focused on the burgundy striped wall in front of me. It has vertical stripes in alternating columns of shiny and matte paint. To me, it just looks like blood. Blood on the backside of a boy's glasses, blood all over my dress … I hazard a look over my shoulder and find that both twins have finally wiggled into their pants, their beautiful cocks hidden from sight and never to be seen by me again.

  Because, like, I have no interest in ever seeing them again.

  “So what?” Tee asks, digging into his pocket and producing a phone.

  Holy shit.

  He was telling the truth—he does have a phone. And it looks … a bit like mine, too. He taps a button on the side and the screen lights up.

  “Didn't you want to make a phone call?” he asks as I stumble over and snatch it from his outstretched hand. As I do, the rough whorls of my fingertips slide across his palm and his amethyst eyes snap up to mine, heat curling down my arm and coiling inside my chest. I jerk my arm back and pretend like it was nothing.

  Because it was nothing.