Walls Held Their Breath/21

But then a sour, musky odour crept upward—heavy and slow in the close air. 

Alice hadn’t an inch—no, not even half an inch—left in which to wrinkle her nose.

“Dear me! Is it roasted beef gone positively pungent?” cried Alice. “How I should catch you, Mr. Rabbit—red-pawed this time!”

The words came out squeezed—thin, crumpled, and quite out of breath.

Every murmur, every thought, and every shadow of the room shifted, twisted, and set about reconfiguring themselves into murshathodowghtmuuur.

Nothing stayed where it ought: ceilings became walls, walls became floors and ceilings and wafloings  — until no one could tell what was what.

Pugin or Barry? They’d have failed the job, I should think—and Wonderland chop-signed my narration.

The room grew quieter; even the very wafloings seemed to hold their crooked breath—waiting, perhaps, only for Alice’s next thought to execute, like a line of code idling in the background, unhurried but inevitable.

It had proven itself—so long as the Wonderlandian system chose not to crash.

The Wonderland system hummed beneath the walls.

Coming up next: Folded Within Her Question

A trauma—or a despair?

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

The State Of Limbo/20

Before long, the distinct, four-note humming stopped.

“Red magic,” breathed Alice, exhaling with a grand relief. “You’ve ended just where you should.”

Kneeling in sudden surrender to the shifting room, she curved herself into a loop of her own question—neck pressed to the wall, nose relearning how to sniff.

A soft groaning filled the air, rather like a biscuit attempting to recall a crisp tune.

The mirrors—bent awkwardly like warm toffee, still brimming with dizzling bottles—shimmered faintly, actively composing the next line of the story together.

Their light flickered—brightening, dimming, brightening again—as if modelling with one hand and bargaining with someone on the far side of Wonderland, eager to have a well-reflected story.

Even the bottles quivered within them, their glass caught between cracking and vanishing, as though the words DRINK ME were desperately trying to erase themselves from the code.

Alice, her neck still stiff, cast a sidelong glance at them.

“Hopefully,” she murmured, “the system won’t hang before the next bit loads”—a phrase she’d only learned earlier that morning, and still half believed was a charm.

Coming up next: Walls Held Their Breath 

Nullity and Hum/19

Alice lifted the obliged bottle with extreme care, as though it might uninstall itself at a careless touch. Then, quite without consulting the rest of herself, she took a sip.

The taste was impossible to describe, which of course made it terribly interesting—part strawberry, part apothecary, and part… something that did not quite belong to syllable at all.

For one infinitesimal moment, she felt the room hesitate—as if waiting for her to save her progress.

Then Alice was caught in it.

The walls bent inward like soft clay, the ceiling drooped like a heavy curtain, and the floor curled at the edges. The effect was not gradual but total: her surroundings were reformatting themselves, wrapping up her as they went.

Her thoughts, too, began to fragment—one whispering behind her ear, another straying somewhere about her toe.

What was once a room resolved into a nullity.

And amid that nullity rose a long, sinking hum—the unmistakable drone of a Windows shutdown.

Alas, Alice had no room to hum along—a most regrettable error both in design and in situation, for she was always so fond of a good one.

The Default Bottle/18

Alice paused in the middle, wondering if she’d reached the edge of its story.

But there, after another two steps round the corners, before three mirrors that made a thousand bottles out of one, waited a single bottle—as if that were its default setting; its neck drawn out—perhaps in mild impatience at Alice’s tardiness.

It was filled with a liquid, as red as any garden rose. Its label read, quite clearly, “DRINK ME.” The letters trembled ever so slightly.

“They could hardly sit still to be read,” she giggled. “How very Alice of them!”

“Well now,” said Alice to herself, “it is remarkably obliging for a bottle to ask so nicely.” 

She looked all around, half-expecting a second label to appear with a “PLEASE DON’T.”

She was—as I could have told you—quite as cautious as a download, pausing at ninety-nine percent—and she could never quite master the Hot-and-Cold game—shivering when she should be seeking, flushing when she ought to be freezing, and generally confusing herself, most delightfully, all the while.

When no such warning appeared, something triggered—like an invisible program buried deep inside her curiosity.

The Thirteenth Step/17

Alice might have shouted or cast a bit of magic—nothing could pierce the Rabbit’s perfect ignorance. He whisked himself into a neat little room just round the corner.

"You have arrived at your destination. Welcome home!” chirruped a voice.

No one was to be seen—except, perhaps, a doormat stitched in the pattern of tiny musical notes, lying there and looking suspiciously pleased with itself.

Upon the door shone a bright brass plate engraved with the name W. RABBIT.

Alice nipped inside, as adventurous as ever and twice as curious.

There was no greeting of a cup of tea or some warm, buttery biscuits, which was not at all what she had expected. It was, Alice supposed, nearly tea-time.

“How small!” thought Alice, immediately realizing it was hardly polite to think such a thing, even for half a second. 

But it was true—never deny the truth. She had walked from the front to the back—the full extent of the little house—in no more than ten steps.

“Oh dear, that will never do! I ought to have at least two more. I always find the thimble on the thirteenth step,” declared Alice.