One minute Bethleann was reaching for the dustpan to help Miss Jessica finish cleaning up the tea tray mishap and the next she was tumbling down a long dark shaft. “Help,” she cried as she tried to figure out what had happened. “I’m getting so dizzy!”
Bethleann caught a glimpse of the floor and the hole that she had just fallen through. It was closing up and the entire tunnel was getting darker. She felt sick. She cautioned her stomach to be still but the tumbling about in the dark was very disorienting.
Slowly she began to slow down and sway back and forth instead of falling head over heels. “No wonder,” she muttered as she noticed that the dustpan she had clutched for dear life being her only connection to her disappearing world had turned into an umbrella and was steadying her pace. She floated and floated, down down down.
“Why this must be exactly the way Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole. I certainly have an attraction to that story.” She was referring to another time when she fell into a mystery tunnel that landed her in the lair of Black Veil. That adventure brought about the rescue of little bunny now known as Webby to them all but no time for reflection today, she could feel herself touching down.
It was still very dark. “I wonder if this umbrella acts like a bumbershoot.” Wellington had such devices in his wardrobe which acted as an umbrella and a torch. “They are very similar,” she spoke aloud for she very much liked the idea of talking out loud to herself over the endless silence.
She twisted the handle of the umbrella and it did light up. “That’s much better,” she went on dusting herself off. She looked around the room and began to giggle. “This is too bizarre.” For there was a table in the middle of the otherwise empty room and on it sat a small bottle. “And a key,” observed Bethleann. “I really am in the Alice story.”
Bethleann remembered that Alice found a tiny door that the key unlocked under a curtain. “Maybe I can find the door. But first I will put the key in my pocket.” Bethleann remembered that Alice left the key on the table and when she drank the potion that made her small enough to fit through the door she did not have the key.
“That’s when Alice began to cry and things got way out of hand.” Bethleann patted the key in her pocket. “Not this time.” She started to search for the door. But something was off. The draperies were hung floor to ceiling. “How am I ever going to find the tiny door in this upside down world? Did I fall up a tunnel? No that’s wrong. I fell down. At least I think that I did.” Bethleann muttered all these thoughts out loud. “Alice did not have this much trouble.”
“Why would you think that you are in Alice’s world?”
“Who said that?” Bethleann flashed her torch around the room but saw nothing.
“Stop shining that light in my eyes.”
“I’ll shine my light where ever I please.”
“Cheeky sort aren’t you?”
Bethleann had an idea. She turned off her torch and sat down to wait for the voice to make the next move.
Wellington Rabbit is a sixteen (soon to be seventeen) book series about the adventures of a gentle rabbit and his friends. Each book is ten chapters long, separated into three parts and published here Monday, Wednesday, Friday.