‘Take it,’ said the Rabbit, it’s skeletal face looking up at Alice from her dresser
drawer.

The creature had been there for more than two hours, just watching her, allowing the needles in her mind to do their work. The caterpillar sat next to it, both of them displaying grins frozen in enamel grimaces, as Alice sat on the carpet in the centre of her fuzzy, pink and decorated room.

She sat there, with her hands clasped over her hair, her eyes bloodshot, fixated upon a little packet in front of her. It was not a big packet, just a small, white bag of pills, pills meant to be taken straight to the brain, to warp the world and make reality melt, freeing the mind to fly in directions God had not intended. This was how Charles had described it to her. That was a month ago. Between that time, she had taken the magic medicines , each time lying back, and letting the power wash over her. The rabbit and the caterpillar had grown since then, starting out is little, skeletal babies that squealed in the back of her mind.

Each time she had fallen away into the world within, she had promised them that it was her last time, and though they themselves nodded, and believed her, they encouraged her, day after day, reminding her of the high she could escape to, the warm nirvana that waited just behind reality, where they would grow strong.

‘You know you want to,’ said the Rabbit, clicking its little teeth. ‘It’ll be the last time. Take us away with you, and we will leave you alone forever, and disappear until you want to visit us again.’

Alice gave a little sob. ‘Shut up,’ she whispered, a little tear going down her cheek. ‘I lied to my parents. I lied to my friends. I don’t want them to know about this...’ she trailed off.

‘They never have too!’ said Caterpillar, as he curled his way up her arm, whispering into her ear. ‘last time, and we’ll be gone back home. Then you can be free with your Charles and your parent.’

‘Shut up!’ exploded Alice, as she hurled the little creature off her arm. It hit the pink wallpaper with a loud crack, exploding into splinters of bone.

She looked back at the Rabbit, who simply angled his head sideways, treating her to another skeletal grin. As she looked back, the Caterpillar was miraculously back on her arm, with the bag clasped in its skeletal pincers. It was popping the pills with its little claws, allowing the white powder within each biodegradable to spill to the floor and vanish. ‘I’m not doing this again alright?’


The Caterpillar just rubbed its hands against the leering insectoid death’s head, smearing white powder across its eye sockets.

In a few moments, one more biodegradable casing was breaking and dissolving in stomach acids

---

Alice’s world spun around her, colours blending in a nauseating whirlwind of pigments and refracted light. She felt like she had passed out and her brains were bubbling, dissolving and reforming a thousand times over, with a thousand different dreamscapes blended in over each other. The deserts of the Sahara melted into the frozen tundras of the arctic, to a landscape painted in red and yellow, melting, equally liquid, gas and solid. Fire and ice crystals danced in the infinite void of her pupils. She collapsed to her knees.

A little skeletal mosquito with a mask perched on her side, and her head shifted in nine dimensions, as she turned it, watching the world dissolve.

The room had gone pitch black, and Alice tried her best to jerk herself to her feet. The floor turned to mist for a second, and she fell over. Slowly, she tottered to her feet, feeling the liquid air pouring across her fingers. This was a good feeling, the feeling of being free. She was sure that angels felt this way as they moved through the earth. The Caterpillar and the Rabbit were growing right before her eyes, shifting like holograms made of water. A man in a suit stood in front of her, a monocle hanging from his face, which was frozen in a horrific grin. She also noticed his eyes weren’t there. And yet, this barely factored into the equation. Neither did the fact that the Caterpillar had become a long, black snake with a baby’s face. They giggled silently, and twitched violently, and hissed at Alice, as she stood stock still.

‘We’re home,’ hissed the serpent, the baby’s mouth opening wide, to display three layers of razor sharp teeth, like a shark. ‘This is our home, Alice.’

The laughing man nodded, displaying his smile, which seemed to simultaneously be every smile in the world, warped perversely. Alice smiled, feeling that strange dichotomy play along her own lips.

‘We have a job for you, Alice,’ he laughed. Despite herself, Alice couldn’t bring herself to feel bad about this. She couldn’t bring herself to say no. Her lips smiled, and she felt that smile stretch beyond the earthly plane, into another dimension. The laughing man motioned toward the hallway, that existed just outside her room. Ghostly faces squirmed in the walls. Little flakes of corruption flowed upward from the floor, eternally recolouring the ceiling as they settled on the roof of the corridor. Black shapes moved across the walls, giggling and pointing toward the kitchen that was just around the corner.

‘You need to clear the haunting in this house, Alice,’ hissed the serpent. ‘Make it clean for us again. Then we can move here. Then we can leave you alone forever.’

‘Take this, Alice,’ giggled the laughing man, handing her something that looked like a single sliver of mirror, wrapped in blackness. She took the object in her hand, sizzled as her flesh touched it, sending a little paroxysm of pleasure up her arm, as silver smoke coiled upward in a line, from her hand.

‘This doesn’t feel right,’ she managed to drawl, her words blending into one another as she spoke them, and her mouth felt like it was made of vapour.
‘The try the other hand,’ hissed the serpent.

Alice did, and instantly, her doubts boiled away in her mind, the thoughts themselves disappearing in the burning nirvana that consumed her.

She walked through the flames in the corridor, the flames that licked the walls, and painted them black, with sloshing, inky liquid that ran upwards. She shook her head, and the vision cleared.

Alice stepped into the kitchen, and saw a horrific sight that almost made her sick. The walls were made of fleshy protrusions, and eyes that stared at her as she passed. A horribly thin figure, that looked like a grotesque parody of the female form was hunched over a burning piece of meat. Its skin was terrible and black, and it’s fanged maw tore into the meaty mass, taking it away in great, stringy bites. The creature looked at Alice and gave a wholly inhuman shriek and she saw it had little points of light for eyes.

Alice screamed and involuntarily fell backwards, as the laughing man and the serpent whispered ‘use the mirror! Kill the thing!’

Alice held the object up before the thing, as it charged at Alice, it’s enormous claws in stark parody of its thin, malnourished frame. The thing saw it’s own eyes in the mirror, and gave a horrid shriek, as red light fountained from the reflective mass, corroding shadowy flesh as the creature shrieked and shuddered. In less than a second, ii was nothing more than a few cinders, that hit the floor, and spread into a red pool. Alice looked into the pool and saw her own reflection in a kitchen, holding a kitchen knife. She saw a her mother’s dead face rise out of the pool. She saw herself clutching her own chest as her left arm seemed to fade out. The world around her bubbled once again, as if in rebellion to the vision, and the serpent and the laughing man looked down at her, both convulsing with unseen giggles.

‘You’re finally home, Alice,’ they spoke in unisen.

---

In the news today, the police made a gruesome discovery at the house of one Alice and Martha Cooper. It appears that the young Alice cooper had taken [drug], walked downstairs, and stabbed her mother to death while in a trancelike hallucinatory state. Police are trying to track down Charlie Bennet, her boyfriend and apparently, a rather big supplier of these chemicals to local neighbourhood children.

A word to the parents. If your child has been acting suspiciously, or if he or she shows the signs of drug abuse, contact the police immediately. Your life may depend on it.