Falling into the rabbit hole. Tumbling with head rolls over heels. Deeper towards sleep. The sleeping girl rolls into tumbles of dirt unseen, as the flame of the torch is snuffed in its bounces. Roots lash her face, and dry earth falls into her open mouth. The tunnel grows darker.
There is an eventual bobbing deceleration before a sliding. The girl stirs up a cloud of dry and thick dust of thirsty soil with her stumble before skidding into a still. She is bruised and burned from the friction of dragging through ground. The dust is bitter on her tongue, and she coughs it out in dry heaves. The air down here is stale and cold, and it smells of old dirt and snuffed smoke.
She feels lost somewhere strange. She sweeps her hand across the ground, wondering if anything would come of it, maybe to at least get an idea in the dark. Shortly into it, she feels the long horn of a small shoe.
“Huh!?” She jumps back in the tunnel, reacting to the realization that she shares this underground.
Lights shoot across the cave, lighting the underground with colors of every kind, warm and cold, swirling overhead. The countless bits of saturated lights reveal the black, white, and red of a circus tent drooping around every side of her, far above her head, with walls as far out as a long walk. The figure’s shoe that was previously touched by her is now darting to the edge of the tent cover, running away in its black, white, and red scheme. The lights dance on and off, not in strobes, but in fast breaths. Their warmth washes over her face, then leaves it cold. There is a crowd of puppets smiling from tiers of benches at another side of the circus tent, their smiles fixed and their porcelain skin reflecting brightly. Their lacquered cheeks shine, and their glass eyes follow her, unblinking. These little toys of boys and girls are adorned in the classical formal attire of the early twentieth century, all looking like children. The smell of paint and old varnish drifts from them.
The woman is horrified, so she darts her head back and forth rapidly, looking at everything there again and again. She says loud enough for all to hear, getting louder with each question, “Hey!? Why am I here!? What is going on!?” She drags herself away from the crowd through the dry dirt, her weight supported by one elbow, one hand of the other arm, and her bottom, with her legs kicking. In her eye, there is the reflection in her pupil of one baby porcelain doll with angel wings, which strings the old-looking circus banner like the unrolling of a scroll, unraveling it through the air. The doll of the baby form is crying tears of blood. They run thick down its lacquered cheeks and drip onto the cloth. The banner reads, “Toll of a Tree: Death!”
The dolls are silent. The air is silent. Only her confusion and noises of panic. The banner reflects this at the top point of her pupils. Then more puppets come out from behind the ascending rows of benches, these ones playing instruments of horns and drums. The song sounds fake, as if the group of instrumentalists aren’t even playing, only mimicking it. The horns blare with no breath behind them, and the drums beat with no weight. The sound is heard elsewhere from afar, like the sound of an old record. They are wearing white with thin red stripes.
She screams louder with tears down her face, now red as a tomato, “Stop! Stop! This isn’t a joke! Listen to me!” Her voice cracks on the last word.
The sound of circus music drowns out her panic and cries. The sound of an accordion now descends from above, its notes sounding true in the choir of false.
The woman says out loud as she looks above, “No! Who are you!?”
A long-limbed Jester in black, white, and red, with gold buttons and a drooping hat without crinkles, descends on an abnormally large fish hook, lowered by a string from the top of the tent. The accordion lengthens and contracts with the long-limbed rhythms of the Jester. His fingers move naturally in glides and taps across the keys. The bellows wheeze, and his gold buttons click against the wood. The circus music sounds like a joke, the joke being her tantrum as a reaction to the trap.
“What is this place!?” the woman screams, demanding answers, her face now even more red and wet from endless bouts of crying.
The Jester hangs low enough for his nose to dangle over her crying red head, and he says loudly in a squeaky voice, after a long, wet sniff, “I smell an Alice! She smells like Samson’s, Christopher’s, and Kether’s! And something blue is sweating in their sleep! Oh this life is but a dream!”
The smiles of the dolls at the tiers twist with a disturbing length and exertion, their excitement growing more. A few of them whisper in cracked slight voices beneath the music, “Alice… Alice…”
“What!? You know Christopher!?” She screams and recoils, crawling backwards, her blood pressure showing in veins stretching in struggling waves, railroads stressing long across the temple above dark eyebrows.
“Pockmark girl! Are those bruises from the needles or from falling into this pit of your dreams!?” A shit-eating grin breaks wide across the contracted face of the Jester. His breath hangs over her, smelling like a deck of old playing cards. He begins chuckling loudly at his own saying, more than satisfied in this moment.
“Who are you!? Why do you know Christopher!?” Alice demands an answer, ignoring what he said.
“Because!—” The Jester raises an index finger high from a third arm stretching from his back, nonverbally saying to wait before continuing further with more talk. “I am the Fool, and your lover cut down the tree of neither life nor death, my tree! Crack, and down it went, no pardon, no warning! It was very rude of him! So now…” The Jester slowly grows a wicked, perverted smile.
She squirms in panic, trying to sit still on the ground. The musicians continue playing along. The dead stares and crooked grins of the toys in their seats continue their looks.
“I heard he broke out of the realm of my limbo! He killed my devil friend at the gate as well! Not the first time he died… It is the land of neither dead nor living, so that isn’t really a problem!” He points the index finger of his third arm upwards again, the white glove showing the point of his finger larger than the shaft of the lower tusk of itself.
Alice is darting her eyes back and forth again, now standing in disbelief. She is clothed in a dark-black dress with yellow chaos stars of many points decorating the exterior. She walks around barefoot across the ground, thinking of where to exit. The dirt is cool and gritty under her soles. Her tears are no longer flowing, but her face is still red and wet.
“Hey! I am talking!” The Jester is impatient, wanting his speech to not be mere background. His face is dressed in an arrowhead shape of squinching eyebrows across the powder white of his skin. He stamps his foot against the air, and the hook creaks on its string.
Alice looks up with a now-frustrated look. “What did you do with Christopher!?”
“What drug did he do with you to kill himself!?” The Jester chuckles as her face crinkles more.
“I think it is fitting we bring out the beast!” the Jester says aloud with foot swings, after the hook swings around to face the audience.
A bull with a goat’s head walks on all four legs into the circus tent from afar, where eight small boy puppets hold sixteen ropes tied to his one collar. The ground shudders under each hoof, and the ropes groan and creak. A hot smell of wet fur sweeps across the tent, smelling like a zoo. The dolls strain at the ends of the ropes, chittering, “Heave! Heave!” Alice is now slightly pale at the sight of it, as her eyes grow blank, and she takes a few slow steps back.
“Come on, dummies! Pelt her!” the Jester says to the crowd of spectators. Circus music is still playing in roundabouts. The dolls begin to chant in small voices, “Pelt! Pelt! Pelt!”
There is a dummy in a light-black outfit with thin vertical red lines walking through the crowd, where each doll reaches into a pale brown sack. They are all reaching into it to grab something red.
“Throw the tomatoes!” the Jester shrieks in his high-pitched scream, spit spewing from his tiny ram-like face wrapped in bulging veins.
The tomatoes do fly at her, or so she thinks them to be tomatoes… She flinches at the sight of one cranking his arm back for a pitch. The first one strikes heavier than imagined, splashing hard against her arm, now red. She looks at the ground, and she sees it pumping—a beating red heart. Blood covers her arm. It is warm and wet, and it smells of iron. More hearts fly, some missing and some landing. They slap against her skin, squelch in the dirt, and keep beating where they lie. The Jester—Fool lets out a wicked laughter, a squeal like a demon. The lights begin turning down, as the music plays louder, making it impossible for anyone to hear her words.
She puts her arms up in front of herself, confused and screaming in pain, before shrinking into a squat, where she tucks her head in between her legs, wrapped in her arms. The bull—goat grows riled, as he drags his hooves through the dirt, no longer able to resist… His nostrils flare, and his horizontal pupils lock onto her curled body. He lowers his head, and his horns level at her. He darts fast at Alice, the dolls holding onto his collar by sixteen ropes now being thrown into the air, and most are no longer able to hold on. The ropes snap taut, then slack, with sharp cracks. One little one does hold on by one rope though, being dragged through the dirt.
The bull is looking dead on at Alice in his four-legged, jacked sprint, his path throwing dust clouds as his exhales fume with loud wet anger. Hooves hammer the ground faster and faster, until the thunder runs up through the dirt and into her knees before she hears it. Spit and froth fly from his jaw, and the heat of his breath reaches her before he does. “Murder her!” the Jester screams, and the dolls gasp in a single breath. Alice, now terrified, like a deer in the headlights, locks up, and it seems almost like a dream to her. In one moment, the bull—goat slams hard into her, its horns gnashing into her skull and teeth hard, throwing her head backwards into a crashing drop of skull, spilling more red, but now from her brains. The crunch is wet and loud, and her body is lifted and thrown, then trampled over, almost stumbling the stride pace into a tripping, but the beast catches itself. Red squirts fire out like wet balloons popped from her torso being stomped apart, her head taking the full force of a right leg propelled through her jaw. The sound of an old record skips with skirling laughter, loudly. The Jester smiles with even greater perversion than before, pleased at the destruction of Alice.
Alice is presumed dead in her bed from a fatal drug combination of diacetylmorphine and phencyclidine, commonly called heroin and PCP. Her body is found blue with a feverish temperature. She stopped breathing. She died just an hour before the apartment staff found her dead in a room with shut blinds on the morning of inspections. The air in the room is stale and still.