Figment - Jace Cameron. Страница 4

"Why all the torturing?" I ask Waltraud. I'd like to scream in her face and punch her with oversized gloves filled with needles and pins. But the inner—relatively reasonable—voice stops me. If I want to forget about my madness, and if I want to keep avoiding the pain of shock therapy, I'd better keep to myself. When I walk next to a wall, I want people to only notice the wall.

I am not here to save lives. It's not true. Why should I care?

"It's not torture. It's interrogation," Waltraud explains. "A patient escaped the asylum recently while you were locked in here. We are authorized to use shock therapy to get confessions from the patients neighboring his cell."

I jump to my feet and pace to the door, sliding open the small square window to look at her. "Are you saying someone actually escaped the asylum?" I can't hide the excitement.

"You look so happy about it, Alice," Waltraud sneers. "Come on. Show me you're mad. Give me a reason to send you to the Mush Room. You want to exchange places with the poor girl inside?"

My face tightens instantly. I spend my days and nights in my creepy cell, safe from Waltraud's harm—and safer from my own terrible mind. I need to learn to control my urges.

Be reasonable, Alice. Last week was all in your head. You've never been to the Vatican, the Grote Markt in Belgium, or to Westminster Palace in London. If you want proof, it's easy. Think of why the Pillar never sent for you again. Why Fabiola never entered your cell again. Why your sisters and mothers never visited again. It's better not to care about the escapee as well. Even if you escaped, there is no one out there waiting for you outside.

"Play the 'sanity' game all you want," Waltraud says. "Sooner or later, your brain will be mine to fry." She laughs. An exaggerated laugh, the way they portray an evil person's in Disney cartoons. I am really starting to wonder why she isn't locked in a cell, unless she is like Hitler, knowing he's mad and persuading the world otherwise. "Now get ready," she demands.

"For what?" I grimace.

"It's time for your break," she tells me. "You're rewarded for your good behavior: a ten-minute walk in the sun."

Chapter 3

Walled garden, Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum, Oxford

The garden where I am taking my break is guarded with barbed wire and concrete walls, high on all sides. Very reminiscent of maximum-security prisons where they want you electrocuted if you try to escape. The walls are ten feet high; they almost block the skewed sunrays trying to shine through. I need to move to a certain spot and tiptoe to allow the sun on my skin. When I do, my pale skin feels nourished, loved, and spoiled. No wonder my Lily lives next to a crack in a wall. Now she silently dances to the beautiful daylight, as though she worships the sun.

Don't ask me why I bring her along, even when she is sometimes mean to me. I can't explain why I am so attached to her. Like Jack, I consider her family for some reason.

I close my eyes, spread my arms sideways, and inhale all the air I can. The more oxygen into my lungs, the saner I feel.

The earth underneath me is sand, gravel, and boulders. I kick my shoes away and walk barefoot. I wonder if I keep my eyes closed long enough, would my life change for the better when I flick them open again? Will the madness subside? I wish it were that easy.

Maybe that's why people only dream with eyes closed. To open one's eyes is such a dream killer.

I walk barefoot, and in the darkness of my shut eyelids, a vision shapes before me. A colorful vision that looks as if a rainbow has crashed onto it and spilled its paint everywhere, turning the place into a palette of different hues and shades. I see huge mushrooms, funny-looking trees, giant fruits, as well as oversized rabbits and cats. A dormouse. Flying pigeons. A hookah's spiraling smoke. Nonsensical music is playing somewhere nearby. The vision is so beautiful I don't want to open my eyes again.

My feet keep walking. It feels like I have stepped into the transparent bubble of my own vision, leaving the real world behind.

A thin orange hue occasionally seeps through my vision. I am thinking it's the sun over the barbed-wired walls, seeping through my eyelids and into my daydreaming vision.

My feet still keep walking. I can't stop them. Nothing can stop me from walking farther into my vision. I breathe in again. Air is such a precious thing. So underestimated. I feel the oxygen fill my brain. It's relaxing. It's soothing. This vision I am staring at with closed eyes must be real. The air is real, and the trees are real. There is no way I am hallucinating now.

Finally, I realize what I am staring at. It's the place I have been looking for. The place, maybe, everyone is looking for. I am staring with closed eyes at a memory of Wonderland.

My heartbeat shoots to the roof. I start to hurry barefoot in this amazing place, not even caring how I look like in the real world of the walled garden of the Radcliffe Asylum. Maybe I am standing there. Maybe I'm also running. Who cares?

My eyes inhale everything I see. Wonderland is huge. I mean huge. It baffles me that most of its vastness is blocked by the enormous fruits and trees. I run farther. I have no idea of my destination.

Could this be? Is Wonderland real? I can even smell it!

The farther I run, the more my vision dims. I don't know why, but I keep running. It looks like it's raining in the distance. It looks like the sun is fading in the distance. But the distance is where my footsteps take me. An inner feeling draws me toward it, away from Wonderland.

Why would my vision take me beyond Wonderland? I don't want to leave, but something urges me to go.

The last things I see in Wonderland are huge clocks hung from thin threads in the sky as if they were laundry. The watches are as flexible as cloth. They haven't dried yet. Someone has just washed them, so no time can be told from looking at them. Someone has washed time away.

But then Wonderland disappears behind me.

Now, I am entering a normal life again, bound by time, chained by reason, and surmounted by human stupidity. It's not the present time, tough. A newspaper swirls in the air and sticks on my face. I pull it off. Through the noise of the crowd around me and the heavy rain, it's hard to unfold the yellowish paper. But I manage.

It's a periodical newspaper. It's called Mischmasch, owned and edited by Lewis Carroll. This is the fourteenth edition.

With a beating heart, I raise my head and discover that I am standing in the Tom Quadrangle in Oxford University, a century or two ago. Somehow I arrived here through Wonderland. I lower my head and check the date on the Mischmasch. The date is January the 14th, 1862.

Chapter 4

Tom Quadrangle in Christ Church, Oxford University, January 14th, 1862

It's still raining heavily. A darker shade hovers over the Victorian atmosphere. The clouds are grey and cruel in the absence of the sun, blocked by the dirty smog and smoke all over this world. A world that reeks of pollution and stink. Poverty and homelessness overrule this not-so-picturesque vision of English Victorian times before me.

I snake through the crowd, all the way outside the university. I am outside at St Aldates. Deeper into Oxford, I see hordes of homeless people shading themselves with newspapers from the heavy rain. Coughs and vomits are heard and seen everywhere, as if there's been a disease. Young children with tattered clothes and bandaged hands, smitten with dirt, walk all around me. All they ask for is money. A penny. A shilling. Even a bronze half-shilling with the drawing of Queen Victoria upon it.