I f birds hummed because they didn’t know how to speak words, then Alice’s silence was the same. She didn’t know what to say. What to feel. She wished she could numb herself to death right now. She didn’t want to feel this. Talking about it only stirred the pain.
“Let me take you somewhere safe,” Lewis offered.
“No. I want to see.”
“God, Alice.” Lewis sighed. “No, you don’t want to see.”
“I do,” She insisted. She decided she wouldn’t shy away from it. In fact, she wanted to engrave the morbid memory in the back of her head, so she would never forget it.
So she would always remember to have her revenge.
“It’s a bloodbath inside,” Lewis confessed.
She nodded, her tears threatening to drown her in a pool of eternal grief. But she rose above it somehow. She never knew she could. “Did He hurt them badly?”
Lewis looked away, saying nothing.
“Talk to me!”
“What do you want me to say?”
“How bad did he hurt them before he killed them?”
Lewis opened his mouth but said nothing. He was about to say his name. But the Wonderland Monster who’d killed the children had scared everyone so much, even Lewis preferred not to taste his name on his tongue.
“He …” Lewis felt the weight of the moment pressing against the back of his skull. He’d not been a man to stutter at this point. In fact, he’d been the most eloquent when he taught mathematics at the university. But this was too much to handle. “He chopped off their heads.”
The image flashed like lightning before Alice’s eyes. “What else?”
“Poked out their eyes.” Lewis felt dizzy reciting what he’d seen inside the dean’s room. “Then burned them. Please, Alice. I can’t go on with this.”
“I can.” She slid her hands from under his arms and turned to walk inside.
“Whatever you see inside will stay with you forever,” Lewis warned her.
“I want it to stay with me forever,” She said, not turning to face him. “I want this, Lewis.”
Alice entered the room and witnessed the gore fest with teary eyes. She fisted her hands and gritted her teeth, so she’d stop crying.
She took it all in.
Every last detail.
And for the rest of her life – until she later lost her memory in the real world – she would have nightmares, thinking about Him. He whom Lewis, and everyone else, feared the most.