by Cameron Jace
Oxford University has turned into a simple Comic Con, waiting for Professor Carter Pillar. What can I say? It’s the Pillar. Always influential and doing what he likes to celebrate madness.
I walk among them, hugging my books and strapping on my backpack. The girls talk about their crushes on the professor. His free spirit, and the fact that he understands them.
“I hope you don’t end up in an asylum,” I mumble, chugging through.
“You know Alice is real?” a girl suggests to her friends. “Professor Pillar says so. There is a Wonderland War coming.”
I roll my eyes and stay silent. I think we’re all waiting for the lecture room’s door to open. There is a bulletin board that talks about the Pillar’s theories on insanity. It basically spreads the idea about the world going nuts. It also promotes hookah smoking.
A few professors, wearing ties and smoking pipes, pass through the corridor. They stare at us, Wonderland believers as if we’re parasites. One of them mentions the committee’s disgust with the Pillar’s ways, wondering how the university permits him to gather those teenagers and poison their thoughts.
Then the doors open.
The girls compete to be first inside. I wait for the clatter to subside and follow in. The lecture hall is almost full, so I resort to a lonely bench in the last two rows, and watch the Pillar enter.
My plan is to wait for a chance to approach him and talk him into helping me with finding Jack. But my plan is thrown out of the window when I take a better look at the professor.
How could this be?
The vicious serial killer is nothing but a nerdy professor like I have never seen before.
66
Professor Pillar wears a multicolored jacket too short at the waist. It’s battered and probably hasn’t been washed since Wonderland. His trousers are pink, too large, and he wears flip-flops. His eyes hide behind thick glasses with black frames. Glasses that desperately need wiping. The man stutters when he welcomes his students. He has a tic of adjusting his glasses whenever he says something. For God’s sake, the Pillar blushes when a girl compliments him.
I sit, mouth agape, unable to fathom what’s going on. How is this going to help me? I suppress a shriek when he mentions his idol is Indiana Jones.
I spend the lecture in a terrible kind of awe, waiting for him to finish. I need to talk to him. Wake him up.
When he is done, all I have left is seven hours. I slither through the crowd and pull him by the arm. “Professor!”
“Yes?” He adjusts his glasses. “How may I help you, kiddo?”
“I need to talk to you.”
His eyes dart sideways. “Aren’t we already?”
“In private,” I whisper.
His eyes widen. He blushes and worries. Says nothing.
“It’s important,” I whisper. “I’m Alice.”
“Alice?”
“I’m the Real Alice you’re looking for.” I grit my teeth.
He backs away, suspiciously scanning me from head to toe. Then he slouches, hugging his book, about to leave.
“We need to talk alone.” I pull him back again. “I need your help.”
“Who are you?” He stops, irritated now.
It’s going to be hard to explain things to him among all those girls. Then I remember seeing a poster out in the streets of the upcoming Star Wars movie. It gives me an idea. “I have tickets for the next Star Wars. Front row. Premiere day.”
His eyes widen again. Immediately he excuses himself and pulls me into his office. He locks the door behind us, gets behind his desk, and glares at me. “Is Darth going to be there?”
Really? I fist one hand. Is this really happening, or is he making it up?
I rap my hand on the desk and lean forward as he slumps back in his seat. “Look, whoever the Jub Jub you are now, I’m Alice Pleasant Wonder. Mary Ann. I used to know you in Wonderland. We go back then. Not in Wonderland, but in the future. I have seven hours to save myself from dying because of a lapse in time travel. According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wonderlastic Time Travels, I need to find my Wonder, or I will die. But even if I can’t find it, I need to save Jack. You know Jack? In fact, I need to save my classmates, probably the hordes of girls outside, from killing them in a bus accident a few hours from now. I need you to stop me from doing that. No, this isn’t right. I need you to help me stop me from killing my classmates and ending up in an asylum for the next two years. Do. You. Get. That?”
The Pillar sinks deeper into this chair, shielding his face with his arms. The look on his face is priceless. He stares at me and says, “Is the hookah you’re smoking that good?”
67
THE PRESENT: INSIDE THE INKLINGS, OXFORD
“What’s going on with her?” Fabiola said. “What’s happening to Alice?”
“Not good,” Mr. Tick said, reading the paper, some unearthly publication called Newsweek. No, it was actually called Nextweek. “Tell her, Mrs. Tock.”
“Alice can’t find Jack,” Mrs. Tock explained.
“So?” Fabiola said.
“She can’t save him.”
“I don’t care about Jack. What about her Wonder?”
“Well, she can’t find that either.” Mrs. Tock seemed worried. Unlike earlier, when she had all the fun, now she knew if Alice died, they couldn’t get the keys.
“Good,” Fabiola said.
“Good?”
“As long as she can’t find her Wonder, she will die in the past.” Fabiola sat down, relieved.
“Really?” Mrs. Tock said. “You want her to die?”
“The Real Alice must die.”
“I thought you loved her,” Mrs. Tock said. “You’ve repeatedly helped her fight monsters.”
“Thinking she was a regular girl doing good in the world.”
“And letting her think she is Alice?”
“We’re all delusional.” Fabiola didn’t mind her blunt deflations. “If it serves the good cause, so be it.”
“And now you want her to die in her past, even though you know she may change and become good in the future? Aren’t humans always redeemable? What about absolution?”
“Don’t feed me the words I fed the world when I was in the Vatican,” Fabiola said. “Evil has to be cut from its roots.”
“Well, she still has a chance to live,” Mrs. Tock teased her.
“How so?” Fabiola stood up.
“She found the Pillar.”
“The Pillar? The day of the accident?”
“Yes.”
“The Pillar was useless that day,” Fabiola said. “His memory was wiped out a year earlier at the time.”
“Is that so?” Mr. Tick lowered his newspaper. “I don’t quite remember it, Mrs. Tock.”
“That’s because we’ve got a lot of things to remember. Hundreds of thousands of years of memory mess up our memories.”
“What happened to him?” Mr. Tick scratched his cantaloupe head.
“I think someone secretly fed him a string of Lullaby pills to put him to rest.” Mrs. Tock scratched her head as well, hoping to scratch a memory out of it. “I wonder who.”
“Maybe if you scratch my head, you will remember,” Mr. Tick offered.
“Thanks, dear husband, for allowing me to scratch your head,” Mrs. Tock said. “But I’m afraid if I scratch it, you’d lose one of your hairies and blame it on me.”
“Wise woman,” Mr. Tick said. “Remind me again, why did I marry you?”
“That was a long time ago.” She sighed. “I don’t even remember when.”
“Not even me,” he said. “But, I think I remember a big bang rocking this world that day.”
“That’d be our wedding bells, Mr. Tick.” Mrs. Tock patted him, turning back to Fabiola. “So anyways, even though Alice found the Pillar, she can’t make it, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Fabiola said. “At this point, the Pillar hardly remembered anything.”
“I’m disappointed. I really wanted to
see the Real Alice live,” Mrs. Tock said. “I still can’t understand who was able to fool the Pillar into swallowing Lullaby pills. This has to be someone as devious as devils.”
“It was me,” Fabiola said. “I had to do it.”
68
THE PAST: OXFORD UNIVERSITY
For a whole hour, I keep pushing the Pillar to the edge. Until something happens. A headache so severe he drops to the floor, just like Lewis Carroll did a million times. I wonder if this is the moment when another Carolus surfaces out of the Pillar.
But it doesn’t happen that way.
“I think I remember something. But I’m not sure what.”
“I can help you remember more.” I help him stand up. “Does Fabiola ring a bell?”
“The nun from the Vatican?”
“The White Queen, actually.”
“Don’t be silly,” the Pillar says. “Next thing you’ll tell me the Queen of England is the Queen of Hearts.”
“It hasn’t happened yet, but yes, she will be.”
The Pillar stops then ruffles his hair. He hasn’t yet acquired a hat at this point.
“How about you will kill twelve people in the next two years?”
He laughs, adjusts his glasses, and says, “Me?” He raises an eyebrow. “I don’t even know how to use a gun.”
“Of course you do. Someone has wiped out your memory or something. I can’t figure it out.”
“I can shoot a gun?” He thinks it’s cool. “I prefer a whip, like Indy.”
“Stop it!” I say. “You’re much more…”
“Much more what?”
I don’t tell him the crazy killer he is going to become. I shouldn’t have told him about the twelve men as well. What if he has a chance to become a different person?
“Oh.” He jumps on his desk with his hookah hose in one hand. “I will kill them with this.”
Some things never change. I am starting to worry Mrs. Tock is right. I will not be able to change anything.
“A brilliant idea.” He examines his hookah. “I’ve always thought it could be a weapon. But I wouldn’t tell anyone. They’d think I’m weird.”
“How about love?” I ask him. “You remember loving Fabiola?”
“Who wants to love a nun in the Vatican?” he says. “Is that even legal?” Then his eyes glitter. “I’m really going to be that bad? Seducing a nun?”
“Forget about it.” I rest my hands on my hips.
“What else do you know about me?”
This is when I nail it. “The Executioner.” The most suppressed memories will always surface when tickled long enough.
The Pillar drops the hookah. His eyes are gleaming.
I take advantage of the moment and grip his hands. I pull off the gloves and point at his missing fingers. “Remember this?” It’s odd that I don’t even know what really happened to him. I was just told about the Pillar’s missing fingers by Fabiola last week. She refused to tell me the whole story, though.
The Pillar shrugs. The shrug turns into inanimate features. Then into a darker part of him, not so much like in the future, but noticeable.
“I remember something,” he says. “Can’t fully remember it.” He pulls off his glasses and throws them on the desk. “It hurts so much, though.”
“I’m sorry to do this to you, but I need your help.”
“I need to kill the Executioner, don’t I?”
I nod.
“Why?”
“I’m not sure, but you may have been his child slave in some drug cartel in the past. Whether it was in Wonderland or the real world, I don’t know.”
“So, Wonderland is real?” He sits back.
“It is.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Why? You seem to have persuaded half of the girls in Oxford it is.”
“A hope. A child’s wish. Reality is a bit scary. And I’m a Wonderlander?”
“Yes. The Pillar himself.”
“That whack atop a mushroom.”
“If you want to call yourself names, yes.”
“Wait.” He closes his eyes. “Why do I remember a book?”
“A book?”
“A book by Lewis Carroll.” He stands up again and starts to rummage through his wall-long library, dropping books left and right. “If you’re from the future, you should know what I am searching for.”
“I’m not sure. What book?”
“This!” He shows it to me. “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”
I am about to shriek. It’s the same book he showed me in the future, the first time I met him.
“One of the few original copies in the world,” the Pillar says. “Just remembered now when you told me. Why do I remember it now?”
I watch the dark smile on the Pillar’s face. A nerdy professor about to turn into a madman and kill twelve people. He is staring at the same book that drove him mad. This time, I really need to sit down and contemplate. I realized I’ve just triggered the Pillar’s madness.
Mrs. Tock is definitely right. The future can’t be changed. It will always find a way.
69
THE PRESENT: THE DEPARTMENT OF INSANITY, HA HA STREET, LONDON
Inspector Dormouse drank his fifth coffee in the last hour. Never had he felt the urge to stay awake like today. Since last week’s incidents with the mad Carolus, he’d begun to realize that sleeping wasn’t going to help him at his job. He needed to stay alert. Something was going on in this world. Something he needed to figure out.
He’d been tracing Alice and Pillar’s past through the documents on his desk. Never mind they had fooled him into thinking she was a girl called Amy Watson, and he was an animal rights activist called Petmaster. He’d figured out they were frauds last week. He’d also figured out they were mad and connected to some mysterious Wonderland War. Whatever that meant.
After dozing off again, Inspector Dormouse snapped awake and walked to the coffee machine, gulping himself another shot of caffeine. Staying awake was hard work. A pillow and a cushiony bed would be heaven right now.
But he had to get a grip of himself. He was about to discover something.
And there it was, right in front of him, in the Pillar’s profile.
The controversial professor had killed twelve people. Why twelve? Who were they?
Inspector Dormouse sat sipping his coffee, flipping pages in the Pillar’s profile. It mentioned the professor pleading insanity and ending up in Radcliffe Asylum. Inspector Dormouse wondered if that was what it was all about. The Pillar had killed those people to plead insanity in court and end up near this girl Alice for some reason.
But why kill? Weren’t there easier ways to sneak into an asylum?
Flipping pages, he couldn’t get the answer. Not right away. Not until he came about the victims’ names and the locations of death. That was when the inspector had his suspicions. Could it be?
Inspector Dormouse tapped the file and said, “So that’s why you killed them, professor.” And before he could follow up with a conclusion, the inspector fell asleep again. Coffee definitely wasn’t the answer for consciousness.
70
THE PAST: AN ALLEY IN OXFORD
Despite the Pillar’s dilemma with remembering the past, he does, in fact, know Jack’s whereabouts. It turns out, Jack is a well-known young hustler all over Oxford and London. Not in the ways I imagined, though. Jack is a card player of distinctive qualities.
I stand with the Pillar, peeking into an alley from the edges of a garbage can, watching Jack. He sits among a bunch of older men playing cards on the back of an abandoned vehicle.
“Five pounds for the next round.” Jack bites on the tip of a matchstick, mocking the muscled man before him.
“Ten pounds,” the man offers. “If I win this round of blackjack, I get ten pounds.”
“And if I win?” Jack inquires.
“You get five.”
“What kind of logic is that?”
“The logic of mus
cles.” The man stretches out his broad torso. His gargoyle friends back him up with a laugh behind folded arms.
Jack is really thin. He looks mischievous and slick, but he wouldn’t have a chance in a fight.
“I have a better idea,” Jack says. “If I win, I take all of your clothes.”
“What did you just say?” the man growled.
“In exchange, you get to beat the bonkers out of me if I lose.” Jack winks. “I swear I won’t file charges.”
“Who bets this way?” The man frowns.
“A boy who’s sure he is going to win.”
“Are you even aware of what you will become if we beat you? You’d be laying flat on the floor.”
“Just like this card on the table?” Jack lays down his first card.
“Rethink this, Jack,” the man says. “You’ve got all those fluffy girls liking you back in school. They won’t like you with a bruise for a nose and hole for an eye.”
“Truth is, I need the money,” Jack says. “And your heavy metal cha cha cha clothes look like they’re worth a hundred pounds.”
The semi-nerdy Pillar whispers in my ear, “This Jack is badass. Better than Indy.”
I try not to roll my eyes. They hurt from doing this too much already. “Are we going to let him do this to himself?” I ask the Pillar. “Jack may need help.”
“Help him if you want. I’m staying here,” says a cowardly Pillar. “Besides, I think he is going to win.”
But the Pillar is wrong. Whatever version of blackjack they’re playing, Jack is losing fast. The muscular men roar with laughter and start knuckling their fingers.
“Here is your ten pounds.” Jack grins.
“What?” the man says.
“You said you’d take ten if you won.”
“No, that was the first deal. Then you said we could beat you if you lose.”
