The Story of Alice

I had such a bizarre dream last night. It was most definitely when I was older. I had long black hair half-way down my back. I was extremely thin and had a lot of tattoos.

I was in a room with six other girls. The room was white and the door had some very bizarre lock on it. There were two girls with as many tattoos as I had and the others with few or none at all. We had all been stripped down to nothing and locked in this room with two loveseats and table.

The other girls seemed worried, but not as I was. They were on the loveseats, talking about their families. I sat against the wall with me knees up to my chest and my head down so no one could see how exposed I was and felt.

One of the girls came and sat by me. She told me not to worry, that things would be okay. I wanted to believe her. Something in the way she moved and the softness of her words made me want to trust her. I immediately relaxed and brought my knees down from my chest. She and I lied down in that cramped little room. I knew her and I were going to be friends through this all. I knew something bad was coming up soon and she and I would have to stick together.

The cameras kept rotating in the corners of the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if the perverts that had done this to us were watching to see if anything kinky happened or were just trying to make sure none of us escaped.

I walked around and talked to the other girls as well. No one seemed to know what was going on either. They had all been snatched from their yards on the same cool summer evening I had. They all had that same black cloth thrown over their head and were shoved into the van with no idea where they were going. No one seemed to know where we were going, who our capturers were, or what they were intending to do with us. It wouldn’t be long until we found out.

I’m not sure how long had passed. Maybe it was an hour, maybe it was 12 hours. Time is nearly impossible when you’re unsure of where you are or where you are going and there are no windows for light to shine through. Finally two men came into the room wearing masquerade masks and suits. They gave us each a dress to wear and masks of our own. The only difference between theirs and ours, were that in ours the eyeholes had been covered with a thick black cloth so that we could not see through them. We were ordered to put them on and the men left. Once we all got into the dresses, the men came back in. They had an escort for each of us, all in suits and masks just as the men earlier. We were ordered to take our escort by the arm and get into the limo outside of this building. The man made it clear that anyone that tried to escape or remove their mask would be shot. We all did as we were told and climbed into the limo.

In the limo, we were not allowed to take our masks off, either. These mystery men did not want us to see where we were going or how to get there. The whole ride was dead silent. When we finally arrived, the men escorted us inside and left. The same impossible lock was on this door.

After the door was locked and us girls were left to ourselves, we got a feel for the place. It didn’t seem so bad. It was a house where we weren’t allowed to access the outside world. There was, however, a fully stocked fridge, plenty of books to read, clothes for the next three months, and a projector on the living room ceiling for watching TV. There were clocks and calendars everywhere.

There were three bedrooms with one bed a piece, so we each had to pick someone to stick out the remainder of the stay with. I chose the girl that had come up to me in the first hours of that lonely room. I found out that her name was Alice. Alice was one of the girls without a huge amount of tattoos. In fact, she only had one. It was an anchor on the back of her ear. Other than us, the tattooed girls stuck together and the other non-tattooed girls chose to stick it out with each other.

Alice seemed like a sweet, innocent girl at first. She had long blonde hair that she always kept braided, collarbones that most girls can only dream of, and a face that just said “trust me.” She chose me to stick with though, not the other girls, Alice was mine.

After getting settled in, we all went into the living room. Suddenly, the projector flipped on and there was a man on the wall speaking to us. He said that we would be given schedules and tasks and those who failed to keep with the schedule or did the worst at the task would either cause the rest of us to suffer or would be sacrificed.

I can’t recall what sort of tasks there were, but I remember the time limits. If we weren’t in certain rooms at certain times, we were punished. The tattooed girls were too busy doing god knows what in their bedroom one day when the man was going to be on the wall.  When the projector flashed on and the man saw the girls were not there, he announced that due to their lack of worry for the situation, we would not eat for the next week. The next morning when we woke up, the fridge had been cleared. There was nothing in that entire house to eat.

After four months of being locked in this house, the door was unlocked at certain points during the day. We were allowed to go to the library for books, but that was all. We were not allowed to try to contact anyone that we knew in our past life, go to schools, parties, or stores. One of the non-tattooed girls tried to escape for good. They found her, though. The man put that black cloth over her and kidnapped her just like the first night. She was put back in the house for that night so that we would know that she had not truly escaped and gotten away with it. The next day, she was killed.

Everything from there gets a little fuzzy. I know we were put on schedules and given more and more tasks as we were let out of the house. Each night, we all came back. Alice and I always made sure we were on time. The man on the wall’s patience seemed to be growing thinner and thinner. After the first girl was killed, not another tried to escape, but they still weren’t extremely timely. Besides me and Alice, the other three girls had been sacrificed for trying to contact their families, being over an hour late to our daily meetings, or anything else the man on the wall could think of for killing. Alice and I were the last ones alive.

One morning, the man on the wall showed up and told us that we were going to a ball and we were to wear the dresses that we had been given on that first day. Alice and I were so excited to be able to go out and dance with other people, to maybe have fun for once in what seemed like years. We spent hours in the bathroom talking of how the night would go and what we would do.

I had become very attached to Alice. She had been with me since day one. We had been in this horrid place for…a year, a whole year now. We slept in the same bed. We talked every night before we went to bed. We made the best of a bad situation.

We went to the ball that night and the man on the TV was there. We didn’t approach him for a long time. We ate plates and plates of food and spun each other around on the dance floor. At the end of the night, we went up to the man on the wall, but it was so bizarre because he was not on a wall this time.

It was even stranger approaching him. He was in our everyday lives without really being there. He was the only familiar face we knew, but never actually spoke to. Alice and I went up to him, and before we could even speak he said “Don’t.” Alice and I just stopped and stared at him. He continued “The food you ate was poisoned. You will die in the next 24 hours. Go back to the house. Enjoy your time together. This horrid world will be behind you soon.”

Alice and I left. No one escorted us. No one followed us, but we didn’t try to go to the places where we came from before. There was no point now. If we would be dead in 24 hours, there would be no point in telling our families that had been on the search for us for the last year that we had been alive this whole time, but were dying now. Alice and I went back to the house we had spent the last year together in and we lay in bed and talked, just like we did every night. Alice fell asleep. Shortly after, so did I. We never again woke up.





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