Alexia peered down the dark shaft at her feet. It was an inky black chasm not much wider than the span of her thin hips. She strained her ears listening for the music that had seemed so prominent before. It was silent. A few moments ago the music had come floating across the yard, a chorus of voices, right through the window of her bedroom. It was so distinctive and rich in sound that her eyes could almost follow the notes as they floated in the air. It drew her out of her house and into the yard. Alexia had followed the sound all the way to the back of her yard, behind the big maple that marked the outer boundary of her family's property. There, just beyond the old tree, she'd found the hole. Alexia was fairly certain it had not been there before. As she stared down into the darkness, the toes of her keds resting at the edge of the hole, the music had abruptly stopped.
Alexia looked back over her shoulder at the house. She could hear her grandmother talking on the phone, animated and distracted. She quickly dropped to her knees and leaned into the shaft, trying to hear or see anything. A pungent odor filled her nostrils, something sweet and fermented, like the apple tobacco her grandfather sometimes smoked in his pipe. She debated running back to house to get her grandmother, to tell her about what she had found. Alexia dismissed the idea immediately. Her grandmother was a serious woman who did not traipse into the back yard to look at holes that spewed music and smoke. Alexia's grandmother did not subscribe to anything that did not involve church or school and was not a valid part of the mundane routines of life. She had lost a daughter, Alexia's mother, to madness and folly and had no tolerance for such things.
Alexia knew very little about her mother Alice. She had gone to live with her grandmother at eighteen months old when her mother had been institutionalized. Shortly after her daughter's birth, Alice began suffering from hallucinations and insomnia so severe that she would go without sleep for weeks at a time. She became obsessed with keeping time, wearing watches on both her arms and constantly asking the orderlies if their clocks were set correctly. Alice had slowly deteriorated until she had dissolved almost entirely into a raving lunacy, screaming about the red queen and covering her room with charcoal drawings of terrible winged creatures and misshapen dwarfs.
Alexia had been sleeping peacefully in her grandmother's arms when her mother had, desperate to free herself of the madness griping her mind, barrelled through several sets of orderlies to throw herself off the balcony of the hospital mess hall. Seconds before her death plunge, witnesses had reported hearing her mother talking about the blue butterfly and being "out of time". Her grandmother had told Alexia more than once, that as a young girl her mother had let madness in, and it had never let her go. In her grief, Alexia's grandmother had crafted a safe and practical world for her granddaughter to grow up in. There would be no fairy tales, no princess, no red queens...and no holes that appeared as if by magic in the back yard.
Alexia thought she saw a sudden flicker of light in the darkness, something flashing bright in the depths. She craned her neck to peer down, leaned over the shaft just a little more. All at once, the ground under her knees gave way and she felt herself dragged forward into the hole. Her hands scrambled for purchase in the earth above but gravity took over and she fell, the hole eagerly swallowing her as she dropped.
To be continued...
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