White Rabbit Chapter 10

10.

            When Delores woke she could smell the strong odor of rubber and she was lying on what felt like gravel. There wasn’t much room to move in the tubular internment which seemed so familiar. It was the same sort of predicament she found herself in when she was fourteen at the elementary school playground but she couldn’t remember or connect the familiarity of it with her Overworld past. Everything she knew was dissolving, slipping away piece by piece, the way landslides fall from a precipice. But, slowly her memory returned and she remembered the ridiculous boy she let kiss her and feel her up. It was apparent that no one taught him how to kiss for it seemed as though he was trying to swallow her face with the tenderness of a barracuda. He was sixteen somewhere up there, trying to do the same with a girl that is 900 miles away via an internet chatroom. His name is Ian, and instead of being a loveable geek, awkward and polite in the goofiness of his age, he was a little monster, a math whiz, that does little more than to be a brainy mathlete and an unsuccessful Casanova—a Jack the Ripper without a knife. Someday, he hopes, some girl will be afraid to say no, which is the way many unscrupulous people get laid for the first time.

            But Delores said no when his hands traveled down her stomach and began to unbutton her pants and Ian, after realizing she was not going to be persuaded by his slobber or his threats, slithered out of the tires angrily like an animal that had been bitten on the face by whatever was in the hole. His teen blood boiled and he started rumors about Delores being a whore which damaged her fragile psyche and caused her to switch schools. Her mother believed the rumors to be true and became stricter and preached more of the Good Book. The Good Book, when Mary Magdalene was a Catholic Church whore.

            “Hugo!” Delores called. There was a hollow vacant sound that returned directly to her ears but no Hugo. Was the boatman a fantasy? The boat a hallucination? Was the Underworld all speciousness as the Wonderland was to Alice? Was she dreaming, sleeping or awake, but dreaming? Was she in a seizure, a particularly strange and precarious seizure that took her mind with it? “Wake up, Delores!” She called to herself. “Wake up!” There was the feeling of motion how she assumed the trunk of a car might feel. The gravel feeling shifted beneath her and the curious swooshing sound ceased and there was a loud groaning that grew louder until she had to free her arms to cover her ears. The chains were gone but the smell of rubber and the constriction of her predicament offered her very little liberty. Liberty!

            But then there was a sliver of light above her head and the feel of warm water cascading over her like she was standing below a trickling waterfall. She quickly crawled through the opening and abruptly fell onto a ceramic floor and looking up through watery, exhausted eyes she could see that had been in the mouth of a whale. Unknown to her, she was in The Statens Naturhistoriske Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then she gagged up some black water and passed out from exhaustion.