There was Alice, dropping down a well. She liked to pretend that there was a pink rabbit already down there to guide the way, like in her favorite stories. Alice, a very different sort of Alice than the one in those stories, could not hear talking at the base of the well. There was no gurgling of a little stream because the well had dried up like her grandfather did at his death. When she touched the bottom, the sun was only a pale circle in the sky and the dusty pebbles got in her shoes. Alice used the well to play hide-and-seek in, but it took ever so long to clamber back out, and it was noisy business.
That is why she hid there long enough for the cousins to spread out, searching, on that summery day, the fifth of June 1952. It was the same day Alice disappeared.
The man who took Alice was tall, with a sharp nose and dressed very neatly (neat as a pin, my grandmother used to say) except for his very scruffy hair. Alice liked him at once, though she learned later what some strangers do best: kidnap little children. And kidnapped she was, right out of the well by the long arms of the neat gentleman with scruffy hair. He held some candy in a handkerchief. Alice wondered if he had blown his nose on the handkerchief ever before, and if he had, had he also washed it carefully and ironed it before putting delicious candies in? He didn't have time to explain. He was her father, he told her.
"They all thought I had died in that war, but darling, here I am."
Alice scooped her arms around the stranger in a hug, which he awkwardly received.
"We've got to go," he told her. "They expect us at the laboratory."
"Oh, a laboratory? Whatever is that? Are the cousins coming?" Alice asked.
"A laboratory is a place where we do experiments. We do a lot of them, a lot of them we do."
"What sort of experiments?" said Alice nervously, twisting the now empty handkerchief in her lap. But they were already climbing in his motorcar and speeding away.
