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Getting into the vault wasn’t so bad, it was the getting out I was worried about.
Eleven years ago, when a tall man with an over-slicked, over-curled mustache came to my cottage, I was feeling less like Alice in Wonderland and more like Alice in Terrorstate. Truth be told, I hadn’t been the same since I woke up on the edge of that babbling brook as a child.
My mind was haunted by a red-faced queen, wielding a flamingo as a croquet mallet in one hand and an axe in the other as she bellowed, “Off with her head!” The glowing smile of a cat in the branches of a mysterious wood, accompanied by echoes of an eerie tune. Mad tea parties. Rushing white rabbits. Caterpillars blowing smoke and exploding anger. A poisonous garden branding me as insidious vermin. Confusion verging on craziness as I tried to decipher if the vividness of a reality could somehow be nothing more than a dream.
With no sleeping cookies or calming tonics to help me, I descended into near catatonia, living for the day, fearing the night when the dreams could return.
I rarely ventured past the four walls of my cottage, not knowing what lay beyond the garden gate.
Until the man, named Dis, invited me to step outside of it. Well—not so much invited me, but told me of my new living arrangements. You see, when I sold my story to Walt, Dis told me there were certain stipulations regarding my visibility in the public eye, and at that moment, the company decided it was best if that visibility became zero.
“I’ve been hiding for a while. You know, being a recluse and all,” I said, spinning my coffee cup full of tea on its saucer. I couldn’t be around teacups anymore. Too many memories—dreams?—of tea parties gone awry, and mice popping out of pots.
“Yes, but this is different from being a recluse. This will help to build your profile, your allure. The public can’t have you until we—you—let them have you,” Dis said, and clicked open his briefcase, producing a brochure and some photos of gilded quarters, plush couches, mountains of delicious foods that I couldn’t dream of cooking from my small garden. “As you can see, it’s quite stately, all amenities included—a pool, spa, seamstress—and you have your own suite, as you will be sharing quarters.”
“Sharing?” I asked, my interest piqued. My sister and I hadn’t spoken in years, not since she had decided I couldn’t handle real life and she couldn’t handle my “demons.” The worst part was, having her nearby made it easier to deal with, to remember which world I was in, as she had never been in “Wonderland” and I could set her apart from it.
Having company once more could be an antidote, or at the very least, a pain reliever.
“I’ll go. When do you need me to?” I asked and he grinned, the corner of his smile reaching to the loops of his mustache.
“You go to the vault right now,” he said, returning the photos to briefcase.
“The vault?”
“Yes, it’s not really a vault per say, more a marketing tool with the public. Make them think you’re hidden away like the treasure you are. Increase the demand.”
“That works?” It seemed like an interesting ploy, but I was suspect whether it would lead to the results he was suggesting.
“It does.” In a matter of minutes, I had my few belongings packed up— a few photos of my family, an heirloom blanket crocheted by my grandmum, a sketch pad full of drawings collected from my mind over the years, and my elderly cat Dinah, who each day, looked like she was on the verge of leaving our reality and entering into a new one beyond what I could see.
Although like me, Dinah was immortal. Depression, I decided, was not only for people.
When I arrived on Walt’s property, Dis did not lead me inside the mansion, but past it, through the cinder blocks and black top, to the edge of the property, where green grasses stood tall and rainbow fish leapt out of ponds. From the field protruded a single golden placard, and beside it a red, black, and yellow-sided building no larger than one of my cottage’s bedrooms. Two sentinels waited at attention outside the door, dressed in regalia like the Queen of England’s palace guards, only instead of the bearskin hats, they had mouse ears.
“The Disney Vault,” the placard read, as Dis did aloud.
Before I could question how this was the same location as that he showed me in the photos, Dis led me inside and it revealed itself to be all that he had described it to be. Thick carpet, and crystal chandeliers. A movie theater where you could watch any of Walt’s films— including your own if you were such a masochist. Kitchens with dozens of freezers and refrigerators stocked to the hilt. Bedrooms with cathedral ceilings, ornate mosaics, and windows that looked up to the stars.
And people, so many people. Cinderella sewing gowns, and Prince Charming dutifully shining her shoes. Peter Pan and his Lost Boys plotting their next mission to take out Captain Hook. The big-eared Dumbo soaring around the halls as his mom lumbered down them behind him. Magical instruments creating beautiful, thunderous music as they played in the Fantasia concert for Aurora and Prince Philip. It was lively and vibrant and buzzing with life, things I had not experienced in years.
If Wonderland was like this, I decided, I would never want to leave.
For a while.
At first, each day felt like I was at an endless buffet, bursting with new experiences to sample. I became friends with my cohabitants, learning mouse dialects from Cinderella, staying up late with Aurora, growing an indoor garden for Bambi and comrades to enjoy. My anxiety incrementally eased, enough that sleep and laughter were no longer a chore.
But like many of Walt’s creations, the vault was a good escape for a limited amount of time.
The longer you spend with special things, the more they lose their luster and become normal, commonplace, monotonous. Not an escape but the place you need to escape from.
Prince Charming became less of a charmer and more of a philanderer, and time after time, I found Cinderella scrubbing floors in fits of rage, screaming that she wished her Stepmother had broken both glass slippers so she wouldn’t have married a man she knew for four whole hours. One morning, the sound of shattering glass from their quarters let us know that the slipper was no more, just a couple decades too late.
Tired of the same flight paths up and down corridors, Dumbo stopped flying completely, and instead took to crushing heaps of peanuts beneath his feet and blowing the remnants around the room. Bambi and Co. pawed at the elevator doors each day, begging to run through the field for just a few minutes.
Without an enemy, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys became incorrigible, picking fights with anyone they could, including each other. It wasn’t a typical night unless cannons were fired off and you were pickpocketed by a small child, stealing for fun, and, I believed, any attention they could get. On one occasion, they created a cloud of purple smoke and triggered a mental breakdown for Aurora, who believed that Maleficent was returning to finish the job. Once called Sleeping Beauty, she became an insomniac, and after Philip lost her to her own mind, he lost himself in whatever medicinal aids he could.
As for me, the terror returned slowly, pink and purple walls that meant nothing to me one day suddenly made me think that the Cheshire Cat was lying in wait. The bright lights of a Lost Boys party evoked memories of the Tugley Wood and the mome raths. Any scream took me back to the maze of shrubbery and a near deadly game of croquet. Little by little, Wonderland crept back in, and little by little, I retreated inwards, falling down the rabbit’s hole endlessly with no release into another world awaiting me.
It went on for years according to the tally marks I scratched into the back of my door. It was the only way to keep track of time in a world of complete sameness. We had no visitors. I searched for exit points, pressing the elevator button repeatedly for the machine never to descend, crawling on my hands and knees to find doors hidden in the walls, in bookshelves, in the woodwork trim. But there were none.
Leave it to a storyteller to craft a setting with no plot holes.
Then, one day, 4,039 after I and the others arrived, we heard a quiet groan, not one of humans—we were used to those—but of a mechanism. It was new. Something new. I charged out of my suite and down the hall, over the carpets that hadn’t lost their softness while those who tread on them had. In the distance, I saw the glow of a light, again, something new, but where it was shining from was not. It was the elevator.
“Someone is coming down the elevator!” I shouted. Doors swung open. Feet took off running. Ears flapped in the air. The group of us, tired and mentally malfunctioning, gathered around the doors, listening as the groan grew louder, before it stopped. The light went off and with the darkness came quiet.
What had happened? Was the elevator on the fritz? We asked of one another, coming up with no answers that satisfied.
Ding! The elevator doors drew back, and, there, in the last place I had seen him, was Dis. Unlike the rest of us ageless creatures, time had begun to take its toll on Dis, lining his eyes, and striations of grey through his whiskers and hair, which had too become so overly slicked it looked more like a helmet than anything natural. Beside him was a young couple, the woman with a shaggy brown bob a pink dress and the man with a goatee and eyes that smoldered.
Maybe they’ve come to help us move out, I thought, well, hoped.
“Well, look at this, you all got the welcome committee!” Dis exclaimed with a laugh that the couple matched. “Hello everyone! Let me introduce your new residents: Rapunzel and Flynn.”
New residents? No. I saw the thought occur to the others, wide eyes and hopeful smiles fading to sadness and dejection that reached a half-hearted “welcome.”
“Oh, looks like everyone could use a little fairy dust this morning,” Dis chuckled. “We all have our rough mornings, don’t we?”
Rapunzel nodded. “Believe me, I’ve had my share.”
“You’ll have more,” I wanted to add, but I couldn’t find my words, not before Dis led them down the hall to give them a tour.
Everyone filtered back to their rooms, doing their best to seem jovial, but failing.
I was far from happy, but my brain had offered up another possibility for me, one that said it wasn’t time to return to my suite yet. I trailed Dis, Rapunzel, and Flynn from room to room, waiting for the opportune moment to pull Dis aside and unbottle one of the hundreds of questions I had stoppered within myself over the past 11 years.
As Rapunzel and Flynn tasted various chocolate truffles in the kitchen, I took my chance, and approached him.
“There’s our shadow,” Dis said, smiling. “How are you Ms. Alice? I’m guessing you need something?”
“Yes,” I said. “Are some of us going to be leaving with you? Am I?”
On the tabletop carved with the images of seven dwarves, Dis sorted through his paperwork, items that Flynn and Rapunzel had to sign off before he left, and, like myself, probably wouldn’t read through completely to understand what was to become of their lives.
“No, we’re not ready for you yet. But don’t worry, we are preparing,” he said, flicking his finger beneath my chin like I was his child or the bell on his bicycle, of which I was neither. His response extinguished my last hope.
“How long do you need to prepare?”
“Well, it’s all about the market, Ms. Alice. All about what the consumer is most interested in right now, and the moment for you all hasn’t presented itself. I can’t say when it will.”
I slammed my hand down on the table. Another bottle unstoppered.
This one held one ounce of the rage I felt during my time in the vault. I had a million more at the ready. “You should’ve been more explicit about that, shown us graphs and timelines for what we were to expect. I thought I would be here for maybe a couple of years. I didn’t realize you were talking about more than a decade.”
Dis shrugged, without losing his focus on paperwork and brochures. “Do you have a nice place to live, Alice?”
On the surface, “Yes.”
“Do you have anything you need to be doing outside of here? As you said, you weren’t leaving your home before.”
“Well … not really.”
“Then the time shouldn’t be a problem,” he said, plastering on another smile, but it was forced.
“That’s easy for you to say when you get to be outside and feel the breeze and see the world change rather than be in some immutable hell,” I yelled back at him, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Flynn and Rapunzel stilling, balls of chocolate in their hands.
He whipped his briefcase off the table. “Be grateful, Ms. Alice. At least there’s no Red Queen here.” I gasped, loud enough to startle Prince Charming outside the doorway as he strolled down the hall, most likely on his way to his next dalliance.
No, the vault did not have the Red Queen, but it did not have many other things either, those that made life beautiful and bearable and magical. For the first time, I craved Wonderland, and its magic potions and crafty candy and, more than anything, the ability to always find a way out.
“Now, that’s enough of that Ms. Alice. Why don’t you go take a lie down?” Dis said.
I shook my head at him. I was not about to go through another day without knowing when it would end. I was not about to let other people make the same mistake that we all had.
I bounded around the table towards Rapunzel and Flynn, my black Mary Janes nearly slipping on the tile Cinderella had polished too well the night before in another one of her fits.
“You need to run,” I told them.
“What? Why?” Rapunzel asked. I knew her story. I had read it multiple times during my time here. I knew how all too similar this vault would be to the life she had fled.
“Dis is your new Mother Gothel. He is going to keep you here forever, until he decides you’re no longer of use to him here. This is just a new tower, but at least that you could leave. There’s no way out once he’s gone. None of us have been able to leave. Get out while you still can.”
In their expressions, I recognized fear, the same that lived in my bones day in, day out.
From behind us rumbled a deep laugh. “Don’t listen to her. She’s mad,” Dis said.
“We all are here,” I countered, the words the Cheshire had spoken to me all those years ago making more sense than they ever had. “Because we’re here.”
“Okay, well thank you for letting us know,” Rapunzel said, her voice calm, too calm for what she had just been told.
“Did you hear what I just said?” I asked. “You’re going to go crazy here.”
“I did. Thank you,” she said, in a way that sounded an awful lot like placation. Slowly, she laid down her truffles, and reached for Flynn’s hand.
One tug on it, one look between them changed it all.
In a second, he was flying towards the door, pushing her in front of himself.
“GO TO THE ELEVATOR,” I yelled, hoping that with Dis still on this level, they— and I—would be able to escape.
I sprinted after them, throwing the trays of chocolate on the floor to delay Dis. I heard the clang of him hitting the tray, the swears that would never make it into our stories. I ran as hard as I could, harder than when I was chased by the Red Queen Dis had mocked.
His footsteps clapped against the ground like horses on a racetrack. In front of me, Rapunzel and Flynn had reached the elevator and punched the button. Ding.
Rushing inside, Rapunzel’s hand pressed against the doorway. “Come on! We’ll hold it for you!” she cried.
Twenty steps on, I thought I may make it.
Ten steps, I was sure I would.
One step, Dis latched onto my white apron and heaved me backwards, my tights tearing from the grip of his fingernails, my face burning against the carpet.
Rapuznel stepped over the threshold and held her hand out to me, but much like my breath, I couldn’t catch it. No. No. No. No. Please no.
I fought back, kicking, punching, but the old man was stronger than I gave him credit for.
As Dis dragged me away, one step becoming ten and then twenty once again, Flynn yanked Rapunzel into the elevator and the door slid closed. The groan returned. Relief for them. Horror for me.
It was the last time I ever saw themーalthough, the chances I would see them were slim to none, as I didn’t see anyone after that. Dis relocated me into the “secure vault.” No plush furniture. No skylights. No Cinderella or Prince Charming or Lost Boys or Dumbo or Dinah. No chance at seeing the world again. Dis had no use for me, so here I would rot in austerity, living on nothing more than sustenance and silence.
Until day 4,541.
“Into trouble again, I see.” A familiar voice sang as I laid on my cot made of only the finest hay —per Dis’s description. In the corner of my slate stone room hung a smile the shape of a crescent moon and the same glow. “What are you doing here?”
“Me?” I asked. “What are you doing here Chesire?” Terribly lonely, I didn’t mind conversation with Wonderland creatures, real or delusional. My sole interactions had become delusion anyways.
Round yellow eyes flickered above the smile. Pink and purple ribbon swirled in the air, the bands coming together in the shape of a cat. “To help you, obviously. If you take it.”
“What ever do you mean?”
He waved his paw at the foot of my bed. There laid a white box, its lid lifted, and a message inscribed in gold cursive. “To escape…”
Nestled in a bed of black velvet sat a singular cookie. “Eat me.” The blue frosting read.
I had no hesitation. I had left that behind a long time ago.
I took a bite.
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