Alice through the Looking Glass

Some violence

The mirror showed a reflection that wasn't my own. Which wasn't surprising as I wasn't there. Neither in front of the mirror nor reflected in it. No, I was long gone from there. Although, once, that mirror captured all of me. My very essence, you could say. And it still does as my killer stands before it, gazing at her image through scattered drops of my blood, red dots like plague decorating her face as she takes her weapon of choice, today a bowie knife and lovingly caresses her face with its blade, whilst gazing with some desire and passion into her own eyes as she performs this macabre ritual.

It's not only my blood that she looks through. I am mixed with others in the same way that I am in my resting place. I share the ground with others, dispatched in the same or similar ways, The others do not have my presence. I'm not sure why, as I am here whilst not being here at all. She does not realise as she gazes reverently at her terrible self that I am watching her. She thinks that she has buried me in the abandoned gardens of this abandoned house, her own private Wonderland. My remains are merely fodder for the worms and the toadstools. And she would be right. On one level. But not every level.

For I am here and I am within reach of her. And the time will come where I will stretch and grasp and entangle and extinguish. And she will be dead, like me. Of this, I am certain. Otherwise, why am I here? It has to be for that reason, doesn't it? Unless it is merely the power of love.

I'm not haunting her. An easy explanation would be to say that I'm a ghost. I'm not a ghost. I'm not sure what I am but I know that I am more than that. I am omniscient, omnipresent, all around her and all around you, or I would be if you were here. But luckily, you are not. Because if you were here, chances are you would have expired by now. Not like a mouldy piece of cheese with a "Best Before" date or a coupon or voucher that gives you a small slice of money off some desired item. No, you would have been mercilessly slaughtered for fun; chopped into little pieces like you were being prepared for a fruit salad. But before that you would have been perforated or scored or burnt or blistered or all of the above on all parts of your body but especially the pinkest bits whilst being shackled or tethered; this would have made you whine or screech or bleed or sizzle or sob or plead or faint or perhaps a combination of all, whilst simultaneously providing mirth and excitement and arousal and disbelief and delight. To someone else. Obviously. Although the disbelief is something you might share - different contexts though.

What I mean is that it would definitely not be pleasant for you.

I don't believe in God. You could say I am God - omniscient, omnipresent, remember? If those were the only criteria. But my intentions are not pure. And I do not crave worship. I desire vengeance which you could argue is a bit Old Testament - eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth and all that (after all, she did extract all of mine with her favourite pliers) - but revenge is not my main motivator. No. I do not want her to suffer in some horrific way. I'm not an hypocrit. Or a maniac. Although in some ways, that would be an added bonus, to be less feeling and more impulsive. But no, what I want is simple: I want her to stop. But more than that, I want to be the one to stop her.

I speculate on this as I watch her. She really is something to behold. Magnificent even. I hate myself deeply for admiring her but it is impossible not to appreciate her for her looks and her poise and her power. She draws you to her with the fascination of the apex predator - the shark or the tiger. Terrifying to behold and yet, magnetic.

Her eyes glint with something fierce and determined as she weaves herself in front of the glass, which is besmirched and smudged with evidence of her crimes, like a grim gauze. She does not wipe it clean because the dotted and randomly distributed darkness covering it is more a reflection of her than the way she looks. It is proof of her darker soul; the drive that prompts her to death; the urge that causes the surge that propels her to purge life from others.

There, she strokes the blade over her head, watching as it causes ripples through her stubble, like wind on a field of corn. She is quite beautiful, you know, even now, her hair removed for practicality. Wigs are so expensive to clean. She is repulsive to me but beguiling. Even now, knowing what she is. This is how she ensnares you. Captivating and alluring with a semblance of purity. A façade for the sinister, which works powerfully and relentlessly, as a disguise.

I can't help but sigh - why make something so beautiful if not for good?

She stops suddenly. Can she sense me? I am behind her, but the mirror still does not show me. In this, we are complicit. The mirror is my ally. She feels the whisper of me as she removes her eyes from her eyes and looks over her shoulder. Is that fear I see? No, but it is a wariness. Can you sense me, Alice? For I am here. Still. But not still, as I move beside her.

Oh, how I would love for her to see me! A flash of my face to remind her! I wonder how she'd react? Would she be shocked? Or would she attack? Would there be a small morsel of pleasure at seeing me again? If there was, it would be excitement at the chance of killing me.

Again.

Nothing else.

I am behind her now, and her gaze once more settles on her image. She is resuming her swaying, her blade-running, her gazing. Whatever she felt a moment ago that distracted her is retreating. She is preparing, driven towards destruction of another.

I knew that she had gained another susceptible, another victim last night when I heard the cacophony of noise that accompanies a successful trapping. All the noises of human suffering encouraged by fear and hurt. I have been here a long time, watching and waiting and observing. I have tried before to make my presence felt but with no success. Alice does not recognise that I am here with her. There has never been a moment where I have felt that she has become aware of me, after life, in death. Until tonight.

And what is different about tonight, I hear you ask? What makes my presence palpable to her? What void has been crossed in order for me to be here more? I do not know. But logically, if I had to take a guess and think about what is different, I would say that it is because I know this potential victim.

I have been here for others. So many others. There was Mary, the nurse; Natasha, who I think worked with animals in some way - zookeeper, maybe? I'm not sure. Barbara. Petite little Barbara. Not sure what she did but she had a bookish look about her with her rimmed spectacles and her hand-knitted cape. Librarian, maybe? Or school teacher? Natalia, who with her dreads and tanned skin, must have been picked up at a festival or a retreat. I apologise. Bad guesswork based on stereotypes. Appalling.

I would like, in some ways, to think that I was the first, that I was in some way special and everyone else followed on from me. What an accolade to have, eh? Alice's first kill! Where it all started! But there were others before me, whose life essence was already spotted on the looking-glass when I got here. They are lost to me. They have been lost to others. I hope they are remembered somewhere. Somewhere other than here.

Maisy. That is who she has here now. Maisy, the barista and I know that for a fact. No dodgy surmising based on an apron or a name tag. No, I have been served coffee by Maisy and shared words with Maisy. Nice girl, always smiling with a pleasant way about her. She brings a lot of light to people, Maisy does. Not in a big go-getting fundraising charity walk kind of way but in the quiet, sensible, respectful way she goes about things. She is an example of the glue, the societal adhesive personified whose smiles and kind words help to grease a person's day towards ease.

The world needs people like Maisy. And less like Alice.

Suddenly, Alice stops. She is ready. The preparation is over and she halts her strange, mesmeric shifting although her eyes never break the contact with her other mercury self. She leans onto the sink, her hands gripping its corners, making her knuckles show white and her triceps tighten. Her gaze is serene, her eyes searching those of her mirror image, her breath misting the glass as she looks deep into the irises of a killer.

Taut and tense, she bares her teeth into a snarl and her face is transformed into that of which I knew, that of which I was attracted, that of which I was terrified. Brutal, primal, inhuman.Would it be strange to say that I am still frightened by her? She can't hurt me, of that I am sure but memories of her can. Looking at her face as she shows her true nature, I am captivated still, but with a vividly felt compulsion to run, to escape, to flee.

I can sense the electricity in the air, the barely suppressed animalistic excitement that shows itself in her aggression and her protruding muscles, knotted and hard. I breathe deeply, if you can call it that when I have no actual substance but immediately, I feel like I have expanded; like I have filled with something akin to air. It is not life-giving - I haven't suddenly sprung into life. However, whatever it is that has decided to join me in that instant has its own charge and a magnetism that compels me to move closer to her as she continues to bare her teeth to the glass.

I could breathe on her neck now. I could move her hair with my fingers. I could whisper in her ear. I could trace the whorl of down that combines at the base of her hairline, blonde and light. I could press my thumbs into her throat. I could cut her with a knife.

The mirror is shifting. I am behind her but still I cannot see myself. I can see her and her alone. And I can see a perceptible shift in her expression. I see her eyes begin to move. They are no longer centred on her own but are following something. What is it, Alice? What is it that you can see?

Curious at first, becoming curiouser. I can see the development of realisation on her features, like reading a book as a story unfolds. Fascination and then disbelief. Confusion and then comprehension.

It takes me a while to distinguish what it is causing this change; her fingers no longer grip the sink and her eyes are no longer steady. They are darting, wider, with some other emotion? What could it be? Panic?

And then, I see it. And it dawns on me what is happening. Dots moving, spots of red - its many shades from vermilion to scarlet to russet to ruby - all coalescing and spreading, inching their way to form pools, no longer a gauze but growing and growing, expanding into a sheet of liquid red. And Alice is disappearing, her pale complexion becoming absorbed, blushing to crimson as the mirror is conquered by blood - stark, traffic-light blood. The blood that she has shed. The blood that she has enjoyed. The blood of her victims.The encroaching red is like a negative, being developed in a dark room. No, that's wrong. It is the reverse. The red light is causing a reduction, a distortion, a diminishing as her attractiveness blends with blood into something indistinct and repellent. How is this happening?

And yet, I know how. The day has come. It is the day of reckoning, for Alice. She realises it too. She has become frantic, the fascination of the unknown becoming less as the mirror becomes a rectangle of liquid, a shiny over-sized red tile, its silver usurped, its glimmer replaced with liquid sheen. She knows. Something as unusual as this can only point to something supernatural, something beyond her mortal strength.

Why doesn't she run? But I know the answer to this already. She cannot. She is transfixed, tethered, shackled. She is being kept in place by a power that she cannot control. And if there is one thing that I know about Alice, it is that she loves to control. Once she could, but not now. We are from other worlds, her and I. Like a magnet, I am inadvertently drawing remnants together, the core, the residual metal from others who she split and devoured and tore, and they are congregating. Here, on the mirror where they were scattered.

The mirror begins to vibrate, the red rippling, and her fear increases. Would it be wrong of me to say that on some warped level I am enjoying this? A little Alice-like?

The climax is near. But that is where Alice and I differ. I don't want to see it. I've seen enough. I know how this will end. I can feel it in the atmosphere around me and the hum in the air. It was the same for me, when I met my end - the anticipation of the kill in the frisson it creates. I don't need to see it. I turn away but not before I see a glimpse of myself in the red, Alice's reflection now overrun, by the faces of many, flashing before her eyes, a visual murderous montage, each face occupying its own part of that bloody mirror, the vibration causing the reflections to look monstrous, and moving with urgency towards her, like they will leap at her from the glass!

And then, it happens. With a crack, the glass shatters, unable to hold its form under the onslaught of so much contained slaughter, propelled into action by forces unseen. And the glass's sharp, blood-glistening pieces, like butchers' knives, fly. The shards propel themselves through the air with a sureness of direction. I do not need to confirm that they have buried themselves, like arrows in a target, in the beautiful disbelieving face of Alice, piercing, pinning and destroying the only person I ever loved. Her intense screams and the deadening tud of body hitting tile announce that.

It is over at last. Some might say it is a fitting ending but all I feel is remorse and a deep, deep sadness. No longer will I gaze on her beauty and wonder about how it could have been instead of what it was and is. No longer will I be witness to her savagery and wonder how she can be stopped.

There is no wonder here. There is nothing. I leave without looking back.

Alice has left this world and it is difficult not to think of its aptness; that it was not so much through the looking-glass but rather, that it was the looking-glass through Alice.