Alice's Playhouse Prologue (a friends novel currently being written)

Alice's Playhouse

Prologue

My name is Alice, cliché I know but it is my name none the less. I find my memory beginning to fail me. It’s no surprise I watched it happen to my mother and grandmother before me, it seems this unnatural forgetfulness runs in the family. I’m finding that the most recent days are becoming the hardest to remember while faint shadows of my childhood still cling to the back of my mind like cobwebs. So many things are beginning to fall through the cracks like sand through an hour glass. I know that one day I will forget everything. It’s only a matter of time before I find myself lying mindlessly in a hospital bed, lost in a thoughtless abyss. I am, in short, slowly losing my mind. I write this not for the sake of those whom it may concern but for my own. For all the things I have forgotten, one year still returns to me to this day with vivid clarity. It was a happiest and saddest year of my life, and I never want to lose it for it shaped me into the very person I am today. I write this so that I may read it, and never forget. I will hold it dear to me for as long as I live.
It starts with a playhouse not the kind for children but for actors. Admittedly however, it became for me, a child’s playhouse, a place to hide away and imagine my own world, one where I made the rules. I grew up in reasonably large city in north Texas, the country was in a recession and for much of my life I hadn’t really understood what that meant for it didn’t seem to affect me or my home state to terribly much. Texas on the whole had done fairly well, although that didn’t mean that signs of economic downturn were not existent. They simply weren’t visible to me from where I stood in the grand scheme of it all. There was however a part of the city that was fairly desolate, many of the buildings had been abandon or condemned. Virtually the only things there that were still in use were a fairly cheap apartment complex, a gas station, and a small convenience store. Otherwise for about three blocks the streets were empty.
I wouldn’t likely have ever found myself in this place had it not been for my older sister Dorothy. You see I was the middle child of three girls, Dorothy, myself, and my younger sister Wendy. One year on Halloween my sister convinced our mother to let us go trick-or-treating with some friends of hers instead of having Mom walk us around the neighborhood. How she got Mom to agree to this in the first place still boggles my mind to this day. The woman wouldn’t even let me touch the microwave until I was twelve, which was rather unfair considering she never cooked anything for us but rather simply left us to scour the kitchen for food that did not require any cooking. Needless to say my early childhood was filled primarily with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, lunch meat, pop tarts, and an exercise routine of sitting in the filth filled living room staring a TV screen while my mother sat in her room eating chocolate and chips and pretending we didn’t exist. But I’ll get back to all that at a later date, the point of the matter is, Dorothy’s friends thought it would be a nice prank to drag us through the rundown part of the city in an attempt to frighten Wendy and I.
I was ten at the time, Dorothy was thirteen and Wendy was six. We were all dressed up in our costumes, I was a dead colonial woman with my face painted white and a stream of fake blood across my neck, my, at the time blond, hair had been dyed shock white and tried up in t neat little bun, Wendy was a bat but she kept taking her ears off complaining that they were to tight, and Dorothy had chosen for herself a rather seductive vampires costume, the red and black seemed to fit well with her long dark brown hair.
Admittedly in the dark the streets could be a bit eerie. I gazed uncomfortably and the boarded up windows and doors, I read all the graffiti out of pure habit, there were a number of things written there that I knew my mother would not have wanted me reading but I read them anyways. I wasn’t frightened so much as simply very aware that we were somewhere we shouldn’t have been.  This was the sort of place I only ever saw in my mother’s crime dramas. It felt surreal like being in a TV show. I wish now I that I had been paying more attention to my sisters friends then perhaps they may not have been able to startle me like they had.
BANG! The sound of a gun shot rang thought the air and in a split second I was gone running down the street to escape the sound. I gasped for air and my feet seemed to glide above the streets till I ducked into and alleyway and finally began to slow down. “Alice! Alice!” I heard Dorothy call.
“I’m over here!” I panted. My sister and her friend turned into the alleyway, Wendy trailing along behind nervously. Dorothy’s friends began to snicker uncontrollably.
“What!? What’s so funny?” I wheezed defiantly. I needed a moment to rest.
“A toy”, one of them snickered. “It was just a toy” the older of Dorothy’s two friends held up a small plastic cap gun.
The snickering evolved into an all out laughing fit my older sister included, I was too tired to yell at them, instead I went over to lean against the boarded up door of the building nearest to me. I may have leaned against the wall but the door was the closest surface. “That wasn’t funny” I panted and let my weight fall on the door.
“Yes it was, it was hysterical” the younger boy laughed. I wondered silently to myself why me sister couldn’t have had some nice female friends who played with makeup and Barbie dolls, why did they have to be boys? Granted I should have given her credit for even having friends, a luxury that I did not share with her. My sister’s friends may not have been the greatest but at least she had some, I was generally the leper, the black sheep of the school for reasons unbeknownst to me at the time. As I pondered this and listened to their jeering and suddenly crack awoke me to a far more serious threat. I was falling. In the split second of my fall a shriek escaped me followed by a hard thud and a flash of searing pain as I hit the ground.
“Alice are you ok!” my sister ran up to me her friends following behind looking genuinely concerned. I hadn’t fallen far, the door apparently had a gaping hole in it that someone had patched up with some flimsy plywood, the kind that had been used to fix the steps in front of our trailer back home, I didn’t think the wood would break under my weight but it turned out to be rotting and full of termites. I wasn’t hurt I just fell though the door was all. My sister looked me over to make sure I was alright, once she saw this to be the case the concern left her face. It wasn’t really concern for my well being so much as it was a fear that if I had been hurt she would have been grounded for a month. Or worse forbid to trick-or-treat with her lousy friends.
Sore and a little shaken I scrabbled back up to my feet.
“Dude check this out!” I looked up to see that the boys had poured into the building through the whole I had created in the door. Wendy flicked on the flashlight she had brought with and swung the splash of light around the room. The door had brought us to a hallway we poked our heads in through and empty door to the right to find a large ,or at least it is seemed large at the time, mostly empty room save for a chest or two and some mirrors tacked to the wall with empty light sockets above them.
“Hey guys come and see this!” Dorothy called from some place father down the hall. Wendy and I followed her voice through another larger hallway which led to a large rectangular room filled with stage props and busted lights. “Dorothy?” I called.
“Over here”, she called. I looked to my right to find a space where a door may had been had the walls been connected on that end of the room. I beckoned for Wendy to follow and we found ourselves standing on a large stage staring out at a sea of empty seats. “Where’s Dorothy” Wendy squeaked.
“BOO!” Wendy let out a loud shriek that nearly gave me a heart attack I spun around to glare at the masked, hooded figure who had frightened Wendy. “Dorothy!” my sister removed the mask she had been wearing and laughed playfully. “Relax I didn’t hurt ‘er, this face is full of neat little costumes, I should come here for my costume next Halloween, it’s cheaper”, she chirped staring admiringly at her new mask “better quality too”,
“Hey Dorothy it’s gettin’ late we should be heading home”, the boys called from somewhere in the gloom.  “That’s fine see ya’ll tomorrow”, she called back.
“Dorothy I think we should be headed home too”, I said taking Wendy’s small trebling hand in mine and heading back out the way we came. Dorothy looked up from her new costume then chased after us.
“Hey wait guys”, she grabbed my shoulder and I cringed resisting the urge to haul off and punch her in the face. I didn’t like her all that much truth be told. “What do you say we come back here over the weekend and fix the place up a bit?”
“And why would we do that”, I asked glaring at her.
“Why not?” she asked smiling at me wide eyed, “we could make this place like our own little club house, just for the three of us.”
“Three people ain’t much of a club”
“Ya don’t need any more than three to be a club Alice”
At the time I was reluctant to go along with it, I thought the very idea was harebrained and pointless but my sister wrote the rules in the house and Wendy and I just sort of went along with whatever she planned, so like always we agreed. We would sneak off to the playhouse on the weekends and over time we started making it comfy. We set up a little coffee table in that first room with the mirrors which I had concluded was probably the ladies dressing room at one point.
“Why the lady’s dressing room, why not the men's?” Dorothy asked.
“Cause ther’s to many mirrors, men wouldn’t spend that much time looking at themselves, they don’t usually care what they look like ain’t that why uncle john never shaves ‘is beard”
“I don’t think it works like that in the acting world” she said the word acting escaped her mouth with a sort of dreamy sound.
We brought in some cushions to sit on and we would go and play house, of course Dorothy was always the mom. In her mind she was and actress and a director, a one woman show and we were her stagehands.
We found out about the trap door on the stage when Dorothy accidentally fell through it one day. I didn’t feel at all guilty, after all her carelessness had caused me to fall through the door of the playhouse in the first place. The trap door led to a tunnel that opened up back stage. It was Dorothy’s idea to place a few cardboard boxes from home in the tunnel with our names written on them in crayon. She called these are treasure boxes. They were for all the little treasures we had that we didn’t want kept at home. It’s not that these items were secret per say but rather, our house was such a mess all the time that often one would find that most of their most precious belongings were always either lost among the garbage or would turn up broken.
After a while the appeal of the playhouse seemed to wear off for Dorothy and Wendy, especially after we moved in with our grandparents whose house was even more cluttered and filthy than the trailer we had been living in before, and over the years we started going there less and less. Eventually my older sister decided to run away, I guess she was fed up with the mess, the chaos, out inattentive mother. Mom called the cops but my sister was never found. I try not to think about her too much, I can’t imagine her story ended well after all there are all kinds of terrible things that can happen to a teenage girl out in the world on her own, I’m especially aware of this grim truth now that I am older and have seen some gruesome things first hand. After she left I decided to go back to the playhouse again.
It was only three days after she had left actually, no one could find her and my mother was worried sick. I stood there for a while in the dusty old building. Everything was precisely how we had left it. I found some comfort in that. In a way this place felt more like a home to me than my house. It became the place I would go to escape the very things my sister had run from. I suppose this is where the story truly begins, years later, my junior year of high school.