Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (10 page)

Presently she was led through a door marked Chamber of Interrogation, into a room of mirrors. “Wait here,” Jack Russell growled at her. “The Over Assistant will be along shortly to question you.” He left the room, banging the mirrored door shut behind him. Alice looked all around in order to find an escape, but the mirrored walls repeated her image time and time again, until Alice was quite lost in her reflections. There was an infinitude of Alices in the room!

“This is really all too much!” she reflected to herself, reflected to herself, reflected to herself, reflected to herself, reflected to herself (ad infinitum). “I shall never find my true self in this room of mirrors.”

Just then, a thousand elusive images of Whippoorwill started to dance around the room!

“Oh dear!” cried Alice, as she flickered here and there trying to catch even one of the thousand feathery images: “How shall I know which is the real Whippoorwill?” she cried, “and which the unreal? And in any case, I wonder what the collective noun for parrots is?”

“The collective noun,” answered a croaky voice from out of nowhere, “is a pandemonium of parrots.”

“Who said that?” asked Alice in surprise.

“Celia said it,” answered the voice of a thousand parrots, as one of Alice's reflections peeled itself free from the mirrors.

“Is that really you, Celia?” asked Alice of the wayward reflection.

The reflection reflected, “.uoy eucser ot gniyrt m'I .aileC yllaer si siht, seY” And the reflection vanished once more into a merely mirrored image, taking all the reflections of Whippoorwill with it.

One of the mirrors then opened, and a Snakewoman came slithering forwards from the reflection of the reflection of a Snakewoman, whose curling body was somehow arranged into a vaguely human shape.

Alice was quite taken aback. “What do you want of me?” she asked of the Snakewoman. “Are you an adder?”

“I am a Subtracter,” replied the Snakewoman. “My name is Mrs Minus. I am the prime candidate for imminent election to the position of New Supreme Serpent.”

“What happened to the old Supreme Serpent?” asked Alice.

“He died from too much addition. I, on the other fork, subtract the crimes of this world; the Jigsaw Murder of a Spider boy, for instance. . .”

“But, you must understand, I was in the year 1860 when the Spiderboy was killed!”

“That is not nearly good enough, my little suspect!” Mrs Minus replied, wrapping a strangulation of her thick coils around Alice's body. “Your alibi smells of high wantonness. You have already admitted to the ownership of the murderous jigsaw pieces. I am hereby charging you with Probable Involvement in the crime of murder. Captain Ramshackle is the killer of the Spiderboy and the Catgirl; he wants nothing more than to bring chaos to the world, and you, troublesome Alice, are the Badgerman's helper in this endeavour. You shall be executed for this.” Mrs Minus then produced an evil-looking pistol from a pocket in her skin. She pointed it at Alice . . .

“But I'm innocent!” squealed Alice. (“Innocent . . . innocent . . . innocent. . .” reflected the thousand mirrors, all to no avail: Mrs Minus had every single image of Alice wrapped in her tightening coils.) At which thankful moment Inspector Jack Russell came bursting into the room.

“Has my election campaign mascot arrived, Inspector?” asked the Snakewoman.

“Not yet, Our Lady of Slitherness,” replied Inspector Jack, nervously, “but I have to report that there has been an escape from the cells. . .”

“Who has escaped, Inspector Russell?”

“Captain Ramshackle.”

“Captain Ramshackle! You puppified fool!”

Mrs Minus released Alice in order to wrap her slinky knots around Jack Russell's body. A pack of wild police-dogmen came howling by, and Mrs Minus and Inspector Jack Russell swiftly joined them in the search for Captain Ramshackle. Alice peeked out of the cell and looked along the corridor. In the long distance she saw Long Distance Davis escaping (at quite a pace for a snail!). On the other side of the corridor rested another door. This one was marked with the number forty-five and the words Room of Evidence, and it was through this forty-fived door that Alice slipped, to escape from the police.

The Room of Evidence was freezing cold, and Alice was shivering as soon as she closed the door behind her. She hugged her red pinafore around herself (checking her pockets to be sure that the six jigsaw pieces and the feather were still safe) and ventured forth into the coldness.

The Room of Evidence was lined with cabinets wall to wall, and filled up with large tables, all of which were empty except for one, on which lay a white sheet covering a lumpy shape. Alice noticed that a notice attached to the sheet was labelled with a label that read Whiskers MacDuff. Alice slowly lifted up the sheet. . .

Alice screamed then as she had never screamed before! “Upon my kittens!” was her strangled cry. She backed away from the table in a rush, fell over her own legs, and ended up in a heap of herself on the floor!

The reason for Alice's discomfort was that, upon lifting the sheet, she had uncovered the dead and rearranged body of the Catgirl, Whiskers MacDuff. Alice had never seen anything dead before, and the sight of such a thing made her go all wobbly. “I must be a strong young girl!” she was now saying to herself as she got back to her feet. “I must grow myself up!” Alice forced herself to look at the body. The Catgirl's face was covered in a fine gingery fur from which a pair of startled, human eyes were staring, lifelessly. The head of the Catgirl was melded to the juncture between her furry legs; her whiskers were sprouting from her thighs; her hind paws were growing out of her gingery chest. Her furry ears were planted upon each of her elbows (if cats have elbows, that is; Alice wasn't sure). And clipped with a brass safety pin to the Catgirl's left ear was a small linen bag. Alice, being curious, searched inside the bag and found a piece from a wooden jigsaw. She quite rightly decided to keep the jigsaw piece, which illustrated the golden eye of a wildcat. She added this feline fragment to the collection in her pocket. She had now collected seven pieces of the puzzle. Alice was more than halfway home!

But it was so cold in that freezing room that Alice's tears were forming icicles, and she decided to find a way out. “I certainly can't escape through the door I came in by,” she shivered to herself; “those horrible policedogmen might still be lingering there. But there seems to be no other doorway! Whatever shall I do now?” She was still looking all around when the only door opened and a very tired-looking, old bloodhoundman came lolloping in! He was dressed in a crisply clean and spotless white gown and his long face hung down with a hangdog expression, complete with briefcase eyes, a dripping wet nose and a long and lollingly pink tongue. This creature sniffed at the air with a gruff huff, twice times, and then lowly growled, “Who in the iciness are you?”

“I'm icy Alice,” replied Alice; “and who are you?”

“My name is Doctor Sniffer,” the bloodhound replied sniffingly. “I am the Chief Examiner of Corpses. What are you doing standing so close to my next job of work? And why is the body uncovered?”

“I was only being curious,” answered Alice, quite truthfully.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” growled Sniffer, stepping forwards to examine the Catgirl's corpse for tampering. “I trust you haven't been too curious?”

“Of course not,” replied Alice (not so truthfully). “I was only trying to work out the reason for the Catgirl's. . . that is to say. . . the reason why she had to die. . .”

“That's my job, young girl! And you're hindering my examination!”

Alice stepped back then and watched with trepidation as Doctor Sniffer snipped some locks of ginger fur from the body of Whiskers MacDuff. These locks he then examined under a microscope. (Luckily he never bothered to examine the contents of the small linen bag.) “This is such a mysterious case,” Sniffer gruffed after a few moments. “We cannot find out exactly how the victims died, only that their bodies are in some way strangely jigsawed. The prime suspect is one Captain Ramshackle, but he seems to have escaped us. Confound it! But no matter, all I have to do is find some traces of badger fur on the body.” Sniffer was twiddling at the knurled knob of his microscope as he said these words.

“I do not believe that Captain Ramshackle is the culprit,” stated Alice.

Doctor Sniffer raised up his luggagey eyes from the microscope. “That is for me to decide, young girl! Am I not, after all, the Chief Examiner of Corpses?”

“You most certainly are the Chiefest Examiner of Corpses,” replied Alice, before adding; “could you therefore please tell me where the first victim of the Jigsaw Murderer might be?”

“The Spiderboy called Quentin Tarantula has long since passed through my paws, I'm afraid; his body has been buried.”

“And what would have happened to any clues found on his body?”

“That now belongs to the Civil Serpents: the big snakes are making their own examination of the clues.”

“So the Spiderboy's jigsaw piece must be inside the Town Hall?”

“Exactly so!” answered Doctor Sniffer. “And quite rightly; deep, down below the Town Hall.”

“Oh dear,” sighed Alice to herself, “I shall have a hard time finding it then.”

“And may I ask what you are doing”, Sniffer sniffed, “in my Room of Evidence?”

“I'm looking for a way out,” replied Alice, calmly.

“There are only two ways out of this room: the first is through the front door.” Sniffer pointed with a limp paw towards the door that Alice had entered by.

“And where is the second way out?” asked Alice (rather too eagerly).

“Through this door here, of course,” Sniffer answered, tapping with his claws on an iron trapdoor set in the floor of the Room of Evidence: “This is where I shovel the corpses when I've finished my examination.” Sniffer lifted up the trapdoor to reveal a gaping hole in the floor. “This is the only other way out of the room,” he growled at Alice. This orifice leads directly to the cemetery, but you have to be officially dead to descend that far."

“But I am officially dead!” squealed Alice, triumphantly (and rather desperate to make her escape from the Room of Evidence).

“You look very much alive to me,” breathed Sniffer.

“I was born in 1852! Which means that I'm one hundred and forty-six years old! Surely nobody can be that old, Doctor Sniffer?”

“You should certainly be extremely dead by now, Alice; but can you prove your age to me? Have you your birth certificate, for instance?”

“I'm afraid not,” Alice replied, “but I have this. . .” She pulled Whippoorwill's lost feather from her pinafore pocket.

“Well, let me investigate it,” growled Sniffer, taking the feather from Alice's hand, and then placing it under his microscope. “But this is preposterous!” he then barked, lifting his baggy eye from the lens. “According to my forensic examination, this feather comes from a parrot that was alive in 1860! Either you're an obsessive collector of nineteenth-century avarian accessories, or else you should really have died a long, long time ago.”

“Now will you believe me, Doctor Sniffer?”

“But then you must be the very ghost of a girl!”

Alice grabbed the feather from the microscope and then said, “I do feel like the ghost of a girl, actually. I feel like I'm neither here nor there, or anywhere at all, come to think of it!”

“My poor little girl, how very sad that must be.” A pair of long, droopy tears were falling from the Doctor's baggy eyes.

“Will you please deliver me to the cemetery, Doctor Sniffer,” Alice pleaded, “where I can find my true home.”

“Oh very well then! But quickly, child, before the Civil Serpents find me out for doing such a strangeness.” Doctor Sniffer then shovelled Alice through the gulping hole in the floor.

And so it was that Alice went sliding down a long chute of darkness.

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Through darknesses and darknesses and darknesses, Alice slid; until, eventually, she slid out of the nether end of the chute and straight into a wooden cart that was fixed to the hindquarters of a beastly black mechanical auto-horse. She landed on the top of a mound of large, filled sacks that squelched dreadfully under her weight. Alice didn't want to consider what was inside those sacks, because the smell rising from their contents was quite noxifying! She decided to climb out of the cart, and she would have done exactly that, had not the auto-horse then commenced to gallop off along the road at a terrifying pace, and without any need at all for a driver!

Within five and a half rickety seconds or so, Alice was being driven around a place called Albert Square, where the Town Hall of Manchester magnificently loomed. “I do believe this auto-horse is not a horse at all,” she said to herself. “This auto-horse is an auto-hearse! I don't think I want to be delivered to the cemetery just yet!” Alice jumped out of the hearse and cart whilst it was still travelling along at speed. She did slightly scrape her right knee upon landing, but this was a small price to pay for escaping a far-too-early visit to the cemetery! Unfortunately there was a larger price to pay: without her knowledge, Whippoorwill's green-and-yellow feather had escaped her pocket during the fall.

The auto-hearse galloped off around the next corner, leaving the still-alive Alice in Albert Square. It had stopped raining by now and the Square was packed with people enjoying the lunch-timing sunshine. These weren't the kind of people that Alice was used to, of course, because all of them seemed to have an animalized part to their natures. There were several Squirrelmen in the Square; there were also Ostrichmen in the Square. There were also Lama and Goat and Beetle and Cow and Dog and Snake and Trout and Gorilla and Antelope and Sparrow and Puma and Turkey and even Jellyfishmen and women in the square. And all of these mix-ups were feeding their faces with greasy meat pies and slivers of fried potato!

There were also several even stranger creatures that Alice encountered in Albert Square; people jigsawed together with objects. Pianogirls for instance, and Soapboys, Curtaingirls and Wardrobing kids. “Why, everything except for the kitchen sink seems to have become a quite acceptable part of the human body!” Alice was only just thinking this random thought, when what should she notice gurgling through the crowd but a man with a kitchen sink in place of a head! This sunken creature dribbled past Alice, stuffing a sandwich into his plug hole. Alice ran away as fast as she could! (Which wasn't hardly fast enough at all, because of the closely knitted and knotted nature of the crowd.)