by Jeff Noon
“I surmise”, echoed and logicuted Celia, “that the black crosses mean that the victim has already been murdered. This is why the serpents call this room THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT.”
“But that means that Pablo Ogden’s Automated Guitar-player has been jigsawed!” echoed Alice.
“That’s correct. And Pablo is going to be ever so angry about that.”
“But the Under Assistant snake’s picture is also black-crossed: why should the Civil Serpents want to jigsaw murder one of their own kind?”
“Perhaps he was a traitor to the cause?” echoed Celia. “Perhaps the Under Assistant had decided the means of murder did not justify the end?”
(Once upon a writing time I had considered describing to the reader exactly what the jigsawed body of a snake would look like, but picturing that victim’s transformed body became quite a problem to me. I mean to say, how can you possibly jigsaw a snake? There aren’t enough bits on it to move around. I suppose you could put the head where the tail was, and the tail where the head was, but surely that would only make a snake pointing in the opposite direction! In the end I gave up; the reader must imagine it alone.)
Alice was busily scanning the floor for the last two pieces. “Look, Celia!” she cried. “There’s a rendition of Whippoorwill himself! The Civil Serpents want to jigsaw murder Great Aunt Ermintrude’s parrot! I simply cannot allow that to happen! But I wonder where the twelfth jigsaw piece can be lying?”
“I think we must be standing on the twelfth and final piece,” Celia suggested. Alice and Celia then looked downwards to find out whose image they were standing on…
But there was only a hole beneath them! A certain omittance of floor!
Oh no! It’s THE PLUMMETING DE…
PART…
MENT!
Alice screamed out Celia’s name as they fell into the yawning gulf of an ellipsis in the marble…
“Ce…
li…
a…
!
!
!
”
Alice landed (with a soft plump!) upon a gigantic bed of mattresses. “This is quite the softest thing I’ve ever landed upon in all of my adventures!” Alice observed to herself, as she bounced up and down. She was so comfortable with her new world, until she realized exactly where she was…
Snakes alive!
Alice was in the cellar of the Town Hall, and her soft bed of mattresses was really a vast seething ocean of serpents, who were continuously unknotting and reknotting themselves into new configurations. Alice hopped from one foot to the other, trying to keep her balance!
The cellar stretched out for miles and miles and miles, and the serpents filled every single inch of every single mile. Alice had heard of sea-serpents before, but never had she heard of a sea of serpents: and now here she was actually afloat upon such a thing! Far above her Alice could see the tiny jigsaw-shaped hole in the ceiling through which she and Celia had fallen. Celia was nowhere at all to be seen, but Alice didn’t even have time to call out her Automated Sister’s name, because just then, the snaking floor beneath her started to move!
Suddenly Alice was riding along on top of the twisting mass of Civil Serpents! Alice was a serpent-surfer! Eventually, she was carried towards the very centre of the cellar, where the gigantic head of a hideously malformed snake thrust its way upwards from the wriggling maelstrom. This monstrous reptile had glistening black slits for eyes; its long snout ended in a pair of jaw-like doors which slowly hinged open to let slip a dangling rope of thick saliva; two spears it had for fangs, sharp and to the point.
“Good afternoon. My name is Alice,” said Alice, curtseying, and crossing her fingers. “Are you the Supreme Serpent?”
The snake flickered out an unrolling red carpet of a forked tongue. This bifurcated implement changed Alice into an Alish, in a splash of sibilant hissingnesses. “Alish, we meet at lasht!” the serpent sprayed, and then spittled and spattled out this rain of rhymes:
“Alish, can you enwonda
About thish Anaconda?
Alish, can you ennoblra
Thish hoodifided Cobra?
And can thish girl enshcriptor
This corsheting Conshtrictor?
And can thish girl enladder
The shumming of thish Adder?”
“Well I’m trying to enladder your meaning, Mrs Big Snake,” Alice answered, “but you seem to be rather unsure of which kind of snake you are!” To which the bloated serpent replied with one final hissing verse:
“My Alish, can you engrashp
The venom of thish Ashp?
Or even the thirdly Boa
Shmuggled aboard with Noah?”
“According to my lessons,” stated Alice, “there were only a pair of boas allowed aboard the Ark. Are you saying that a third boa snake crept into Noah’s cargo?”
“That extra sherpent eshcaped from the Garden of Eden,” answered the Supreme Snake, “and from there he shlithered aboard the Ark. It was Shatan himshelf in shcaly dishguishe.”
“Satan was a stowaway on Noah’s Ark?” Alice shuddered.
“Shatan shurvived the flood of your little god by hiding in the water closhet of the Ark. Forty daysh and forty nightsh of torture did he shuffer until he could eshcape to plague mankind onsh more. Shatan Sherpent rulesh Shupreme!”
But Alice wasn’t listening. “Why do you keep putting an H after every S?” she complained. “I’m getting covered in your spittle!” (She wouldn’t usually have been so impolite, but the shower of snakely saliva was actually burning her skin!)
“It’sh a shpeech impediment I have,” replied the serpent with an angry flick of her tongue, before continuing with her story. “We Shivil Sherpentsh are the children of that illishit cargo. We are the mosht Shupreme Sherpent!”
“I thought Mrs Minus was trying to become the Supreme Serpent?”
“You don’t become the Shupreme Sherpent; you become a mere coil of the Shupreme Sherpent. We shnakes are the leadersh. There ish only one sherpent. We are Leviathan! We are the World Shnake! The Bashilishk!”
By this time Alice was more or less smothered in snake juice and her skin was very nearly aflame! But this discomfort didn’t stop her noticing the small piece of jagged wood impaled upon the Serpent’s left fang. “That must be the spider piece from my jigsaw!” Alice said to herself, “but how can I possibly steal it back? I doubt if even the Lord’s Prayer would work this time, for what single poem could possibly put such a fearsome snake to sleep?”
“Little Alish…” the serpent said with a lishp and an ellipshish, “I have an all-sheeing eye. I have followed your progresh through thish tale. I have sheen you hunting down eash piesh of the jigshaw. I have sheen you uncovering evidensh of my mishtakes with the Newmonia fever. I wash only trying to make thish world a better world! You musht have realished how absholutely random shoshiety wash becoming? I only wanted the people to conform to the rulesh! Ish that shuch a crime? Sho I fed the Newmonia germ to them all, hoping to make followersh out of them all. Ish it my fault that the exshperiment went wrong? And can you blame myself and my Contortium, Alish, for trying to cover it up with the Jigshaw Murdersh?”
“Yes, I can blame you,” answered Alice. “I blame you for everything!”
At this accusation, the Supreme Serpent snapped her jaws down and all around Alice. Alice was gathered up into the giant mouth; the twin spears were pricking into her skin! Alice (in her final moments) managed to wriggle free the spidery jigsaw piece from the left-hand fang. And then she was swallowed whole!
Down, down and down! Along, along and along! Around, around and around! Alice had no idea that the insides of a snake could have so many twistings and turnings. Being swallowed was making her quite dizzy, but this didn’t stop her from carefully adding the spider’s jigsaw piece to the other nine in her pinafore pocket. “What a strange coincidence!” she said to herself whilst being further ingested, “only a few hours ago I swallowed a wurm: and now I’m being swal
lowed by a snake! The future is filled with writhing!”
Eventually Alice was deposited into a small, dark chamber which contained only a neat and tidy desk: behind the desk sat a neat and tidy man with a neat and tidy fountain-pen in his hand; he was scribbling away at a neat and tidy ledger. “Your name, please?” he neated and tidied.
“Alice.”
The neat and tidy man scribbled Alice’s name into the ledger, without even looking at her. “Your purpose in the city of Munchester?” he asked.
“To find a way out,” answered Alice, which made the neat and tidy man look up at last.
“A way out?” he spluttered. “There is no way out! This is Munchester! The place where food goes after being swallowed.”
“What is your name, neat and tidy man?” asked Alice.
“My name is Neathan Tidyman; what of it?”
“I want to get back to Manchester, Neathan.”
“Manchester? Have you your tickling ticket?”
“Oh what a coincidence, Mister Tidyman!” said Alice, remembering Zenith O’Clock’s promise. “I have just such a tickling ticket!” Alice pulled Whippoorwill’s green-and-yellow feather from her pinafore pocket.
“Ooh, a green-and-yellow feather!” cried Neathan, snatching it from Alice’s hand. “I’ve always wanted a green-and-yellow tickling feather! I can visit the Chimera!” He then proceeded to tickle Alice’s nose with it! And then his own! “Oh yes!” he squealed, completely untidying himself. “Oh yes! Oh take me!”
Alice saw that three closed doors were waiting beyond the desk. Each had its own little hand-written sign: the first door read THE THIRD DOOR IS THE SAFE DOOR; the second read THE FIRST DOOR IS LYING; the third read THE SECOND DOOR IS REALLY THE FIRST DOOR. “Young girl, choose your door wisely!” Tidyman giggled as he tickled, “one of them leads to Munchester; another leads to Unchester; a further one of them leads to Manchester, and that’s the only safe door: the other two are deadly.”
“But which door should I choose?” asked Alice of herself. “Oh, if only Automated Alice was still with me! Celia would quite logically work out the problem. But as Celia isn’t with me, I shall have to pretend to be her. Now then, let me consider…” Alice then logicuted thus: “The first door claims the third door to be the safe door, but the second door claims that the first door is lying, so maybe the second door is the safe door. But then the third door says that the second door is really the first door, so it’s the second door that is lying, which means that the first door is telling the truth: therefore the third door must be the safe door…”
“Quickly, Alice!” laughed Tidyman. “It’s make your mind up time!”
Alice opened up the third door and walked through it.
DOROTHY,
DOROTHY AND
DOROTHY
THE third door shivered and vanished as soon as Alice stepped through it: now she was standing on a small hill which overlooked a most pleasant landscape. The sun was greeting her with a cheery smile on its bright face. There was a winding country lane that stretched lazily into the haze of summer. A bluebird softly whistled a lovely melody from a nearby willowing tree, and a pair of rabbits in courtship gambolled happily through a field of buttercups. “I must surely have chosen the correct door,” Alice congratulated herself, “for this is a very pretty land indeed! If only Celia were here to enjoy this particular part of Manchester with me!”
This was a world where it never could rain, and in the warm and shimmering distance a languid curl of smoke was rising from the chimney of a little wooden cottage. Alice set off down the hill and along the lane towards the cottage, and as she went along the bluebirds and the rabbits called out to her from the hedgerows. “Dear little Alice,” they twittered, “how nice of you to visit us!” Alice was quite taken aback by this tenderness, so much so that she completely forgot all about the time and the jigsaw and the murders and even the writing lesson! Her worries were like mists dispersing. Alice walked along without a single care in the whole world, until she came eventually to the small rose-enshrouded cottage. There was a beautifully engraved name-plate on the door, which read DONE WONDERING. Alice gently tapped her knuckles upon the door and from within, in answer, came a kindly voice saying, “Come in. It’s open.”
Alice pushed open the cottage door and stepped inside.
An old, old man was sitting at a dining table, on which two plates of hot roast beef, carrots and potatoes were gently steaming. The smell of food reminded Alice that she hadn’t eaten in a long, long time (except for a little wurm, that is!). “You must be hungry, Alice,” the man said, gesturing to the second plate, “won’t you join me?”
“Thank you, kind sir,” said Alice as she sat down.
The old man looked at Alice then. He explored her keenly, as though to remember her forever: but the young girl was so busily feeding her face with the roast beef that she never noticed his eager study. “Have you forgotten me so easily, Alice?” the old man finally found the courage to enquire.
This question caused Alice to pause for a second (with a forkful of boiled carrot halfway to her lips), and to look across the table at the old man. What she saw then made her lower her knife and fork to the plate. “Mister Dodgson!” she cried, and she excused herself from the table and ran all the way around it until she was hugging and snuggling the old man. “You look dreadfully old, kind sir,” she whispered to him, “and are those tears in your eyes?”
“And is this beef gravy dribbling from your mouth?” the old man answered.
“But what are you doing in Manchester, Mister Dodgson?”
“This isn’t Manchester, Alice; you chose the third door, which was the wrong door.”
“But I solved the problem so logically! How could I be wrong?”
“You forgot to remember that the second door was really the first door, and therefore the third door was really the second door.”
“So it was the second door I should have taken?”
“That is correct, dear Alice,” answered the old man, with a further tear. “The second door would have led you to safety, whereas the third door has led you only to Unchester. This world is where the living come to live after they have finished off living. This is where I live now, having finished my living in the year 1898.”
“Oh Mister Dodgson!” cried Alice, “does this mean that I have also died?”
“You were swallowed by the Supreme Serpent, Alice, in the third of my books about you. I tried my best to save you, but I was too old and too tired to rescue you. I’m afraid that this does mean that you have died.”
“And has dear Celia also been swallowed?” asked Alice.
“Luckily, I managed to allow Celia an escape. I found that her superior automated powers enabled her to resist the Serpent’s maw.”
“But where is Celia now?”
“Would you like some treacle pudding, Alice?” asked the old man.
“I haven’t got time for your trequel pudding!” cried Alice (rather too rudely, I think). “I want my twin twister back! And I want to go home!”
“But that’s vurtually impossible, Alice. What’s gone is gone…”
“But if a thing is only virtually impossible, doesn’t that mean that it just might be possible?”
“I didn’t say virtually: I said vurtually, with a U in the word, instead of an I.”
“But I want to escape, unlike you, Mister Dodgson.”
“Well let me see,” considered the old man; “I was a real person who once upon a time naturally died: but you, Alice, are both a real and an imaginary character, and how can imagination be killed? Maybe there is a little way yet for your story to continue…although it would mean going against all the rules of life, death and narrative.” The Reverend’s tears fell like puddles onto his unfinished roast beef. “I was rather hoping we could spend some time together, Alice,” he choked, “but perhaps you must really leave me now…” And then the Reverend Dodgson leaned close to Alice’s face and said these final words, �
��Will this young Alice kiss me goodbye?”
Alice kissed him, and the old man’s lips were salty with life.
“Flummoxy Wummoxy!”
“I beg your pardon?” said Alice.
“Wibbily Wobbily!”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Lubberly Jubberly!”
“Who are you?” asked Alice.
“Flippety Floppety!”
“Oh, where am I now?” cried Alice.
“Chimeree Shimmeree!”
“This is the Chimera?”
“Flutterly Utterly!”
“Oh dear!” said Alice. “I seem to have landed inside a Chimera show. Mister Dodgson must have kissed me here, somehow or other.”
“Misterly Dodgily!”
“So you’re Flippety Floppety?” Alice asked the orange and blue rabbit that galumphed all around her. “I saw your name on a Chimera poster, isn’t that right, Mister Rabbit?”
“Posterly Mosterly!” guffawed the animated rabbit as he jumped, and clung onto Alice’s leg!
“What am I doing here?” cried Alice, as she looked all around for an escape. A soft white light covered the whole emptiness she was trapped inside, and within and around the emptiness danced and laughed a group of teasing children. These children were all laughing gleefully at Alice’s attempts to shake off the clinging Flippety Floppety rabbit.
“Alice, you’ve made it at last!” cried another voice. “I’ve been waiting simply ages!” It was Captain Ramshackle’s voice calling to Alice from nowhere at all, until she noticed that amidst the children lurked the adult badger-face that belonged to Captain Ramshackle!
