Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (9 page)

“Parp, parp!” went the trumpet, before it was lowered once again.

“Is this still the tune called 'Miles Behind'?” Alice asked.

“Miles. . . and. . . miles. . . behind. . .”

“This must be why they call you Long Distance Davis, because you take so very long to do hardly anything at all!”

This. . . is. . . why. . . they. . . call. . . me. . . Long. . . Distance. . . Davis. . ."

“Ridiculousness!” cried Alice, having completely lost her patience: “Here I am talking to a Snailman who can't even finish a sentence properly, when I have so very much to do! I have so much to find!”

“Alice. . . you. . . must. . . play. . . it. . . cool. . .”

“But I'm not playing anything!” Alice cried. “And how can I be cool, when I'm pressed up tight against a warm and wet giant of a Snailman in a tiny cell?”

“Cool. . . is. . . as. . . cool. . . does. . .”

“And what does cool do?”

“Cool. . . is. . . the. . . art. . . of. . . waiting. . .”

“Do you have anything to eat?” Alice asked then (having felt a wanting in her empty stomach, and also a wanting to change the subject). “Because I have grown mightily tired of waiting!”

“I. . . have. . . head. . . food. . .” replied Long Distance Davis, reaching into the bell end of his trumpet to produce a small velvet sack. This he slowly proceeded to unwrap; within its folds lay a silver jar, on which the words SWALLOW US were beautifully scripted in gold leaf. Long Distance Davis unscrewed the lid of the jar and then offered the contents to Alice. Alice took just one look at the contents and then reeled back, quite bilious at what she saw there.

“You're offering me worms to eat!” she cried.

“These. . . are. . . not. . . worms. . .” Long Distance drawled. “These. . . are. . . wurms. . .”

These are wurms!“ Alice cried yet again, adding the U. ”Won't they make me go crazy?"

“They. . . will. . . fulfil. . . your. . . need. . .”

“Very well then,” Alice said (but only because she was so very hungry), “but you first.”

With his untrumpeted hand, Long Distance Davis reached into the jar to bring up a wriggling, living specimen: this wurm he shovelled into his mouth. He then raised his trumpet to his lips to blow three more notes of the tune called “Miles Behind” --

“Parp, parp, parp!” went the trumpet.

Long Distance Davis then scooped up another greasy wurm from the jar. “Your. . . turn. . . Alice. . .” he meandered, “please. . . take. . . a. . . little. . . trip. . . with. . . me. . .”

Alice decided that she had very little choice anyway, if she wanted to eat, so she allowed Long Distance Davis to slither the wurm into her mouth.

Oh my goodness! The wurm was slippering its way down her throat! Alice fell back onto the bed in a falling faint.

And then everything went very slipperty-jipper indeed. . .

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Alice is now floating along a long snake of water, through a slowly turning world of golden-afternoon colours. It takes her an age to realize that she is no longer inside the prison cell, it takes her an age and a half to realize that she is now lazily reclining in a small rowing boat. Her two sisters, Lorina and Edith, are aboard the boat with her, as is her friend, the kind Mister Dodgson. It takes Alice two whole ages to realize that Mister Dodgson is now telling fanciful stories to the three little maidens.

“Tell us more, Mister Dodgson!” shrieks Edith at Alice's left. “Tell us more! More, more, more!”

“But my dearest girls. . .” breathes Mister Dodgson, “the well of fancy has run quite dry, how can I possibly continue?”

“Oh but you must continue!” cries Alice from the boat's bed.

“The rest next time --” the storyteller tries in vain.

“It is next time!” the happy voices squeal as one.

“Oh very well then, if you insist. . .”

The boat now drifts aground at the small village of Godstow on the Thames's bank, and the four friends disembark to take a picnic underneath a spreading elm tree; and here, between bites at a boiled ham sandwich (with not a single radish to be seen anywhere!), Mister Dodgson continues with his tale of Alice's Adventures Underground. The three sisters are so enraptured by his tale that Alice doesn't realize, until it's far, far too late, that a worm has wriggled its way into her sandwich; she takes a bite of ham, and also a bite of worm!

Alice recoils from the taste, and spits the offending morsel out of her mouth! “Alice, my dearest,” whispers Mister Dodgson, “you do know that little girls shouldn't waste their food in such a manner?”

“But it's got a worm in it!” protests Alice, still spitting. “And I fear that I've swallowed more than half of it, already!” Alice spits and spits, and spits and spits and spits! The soil is by now entirely covered in spume, and Alice notices that a whole knotted wrigglesome of worms is crawling over the picnic cloth! The worms are unfolding themselves upwards to grab at Alice's ankles, which is mightily strange, but the strangest thing of all is that Alice feels more than happy to allow the worms to slither around her flesh, even though they are dragging her below the very soil of England! Alice's three picnicking companions seem to be oblivious to her plight; they carry on eating and drinking and telling tales, as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening! And Alice is now happy to see that Whippoorwill the parrot is flying over the elm trees towards her. “Come to me, my sweet bird of youth,” Alice cries out. “Come and join me in the swim of these worms; we could surrender to the loopiness together. Wouldn't that be nice, Whippoorwill?” Alice is by this time half-sunk into the soil, and the worms are twisting around her with a thousand slitherings. Alice feels wonderful, especially when Whippoorwill flies down to perch upon her outstretched hand. “There, there, my long lost,” Alice breathes softly, stroking at the feathers; “at last you've come home to me.”

“Who is it, Alice,” the parrot riddles, “that contains only the half of the whole?”

“Why the answer is me, of course, Whippoorwill,” answers Alice, quite confidently, “because there's only a half of my whole remaining above this worm hole, and I'm very much looking forward to sinking all the way down!” At which Alice starts to giggle and wriggle about in order to drown herself in the worm bath.

“Right answer, Alice!” squawks back Whippoorwill. “But for all the wrong reasons. Think again and quickly, Alice. Before you sink down too deeply.”

“But the worms have such a warmthiness about them, dearest Whippoorwill,” says Alice, ever-so-happily. “I've never felt so much at home. . .”

“Alice, listen to me clearly,” says Whippoorwill in a surprisingly human voice. “These are not worms that you're drowning in, these are wurms; worms with a U in the name: the name that stands for Wisdom-Undoing-Randomized-Mechanism, as you well have learnt. The wurms just want you to go crazy, and to remain in the future for ever.”

“What in the earth are you talking about, Whippoorwill?” asks Alice, up to her shoulders in the soil. “And what is so very wrong with going crazy?”

“Alice, you will never get home at this rate,” squawks the parrot: “You will be forever lost in time.”

“But I am home,” replies Alice, sternly, trying to stamp her foot. “And if being home is the same as being lost, well then, I shall want to be gratefully lost for ever!”

I'm trying my squawking best to lead you back to the past,“ replies Whippoorwill. ”Only by following me will you get home in time for your writing lesson."

“Lessons! Pooh to lessons! Oh dear, I said a naughty! Well I don't care. I want to be naughty! I like it here, really. Let me sink, my feathery friend. . .” And Alice does sink then, deeper and deeper.

“Very well,” beaks the parrot, “I shall now leave you to the wurms. Let the crazies swallow you. You obviously want to be a pretty fool.” And with that utterance the parrot flies off into the far distance and Alice is suddenly alone again; suddenly alone with only the wurms of warmth to nuzzle at her cheek-bones. Mister Dodgson and her sisters, Lorina and Edith; they have all vanished quite away. And Alice does feel like she is being swallowed, all of a sudden. At this moment Alice notices something else again nudging into the corner of her vision. She has a real job turning her head around in the wurms, but somehow she does. And this is what she sees: a large grandfather clock has appeared on the grass, a few yards away from Alice's sinking visage. The clock's hands are applauding the imminent arrival of two o'clock. And then the clock's mouth dings a double dong; it's two o'clock in Wurmland and out of the clock's body come bouncing three large and very bulbous black dots!

“Oh dear!” Alice murmurs to herself. “Here I am being eaten alive by the crazy wurms, without a hope of escape; and the time is two o'clock! I'm late for my lesson! And if I'm not mistaken, that trio of large, black and angry-looking bubbles racing towards me is an ellipsis! Oh, what a horrible creature an ellipsis is! Maybe I should escape from this wurmy world. But however can I manage it?” The wurms were now nudging against Alice's nostrils! “I must try to think of a plan!” she mumbled. “Now let me see. . . the wurm came into my body through my mouth; how can I now get rid of that wrigglesome wanderer? Only by the never passage, I fear.”

(The never passage is of course the nether passage: the passage that can never be written about. But if my dearest Alice can only escape the world of the wurms by this terrible evacuation, then so be it, for I must give my writing to the young girl's future.)

By this time (thanks to my hesitation in the story's telling) the three dots of the ellipsis monster are gathering around Alice's head in a squelchy triangle of bubbles.

“My name is Dot,” the first bubble says.

“My name also is Dot,” the second bubble says.

“My name is also and also Dot,” the third bubble says. The trio of bubbles move in on Alice, ever closer, ever closer. . .

Alice feels herself being engulfed by the wurms and the Dots, and very terrified she is by the stifling presence of these two engulfers; so very terrified that she actually excretes the wurm.

(May I by the way explain that the rather naughty word excrete comes from the Latin for separate and discharge, and if a word comes from the Latin, it surely cannot be that naughty? Suffice it to say politely that Alice did separate and discharge the wurm from her body, through the never passage . . .)

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And through this passage Alice arrived back in her tiny cell below the police station. Long Distance Davis was curled up, snail-like, in his shell of a hat on the dirt floor, still travelling in the wurm's dream. Alice shook her head from side to side twenty-seven and a half times, in order to dispel the remnants of the wurminess, and then she announced sternly to herself, “Whippoorwill was right: I have been a pretty fool up to now. I have allowed myself to be carried along by strangers through this future world. From now on, I shall carry myself! I shall find my own way back to Great Aunt Ermintrude's house.”

Alice noticed the jigsaw pieces scattered on the floor. She picked them up carefully, added the snail piece from her pocket, and rearranged all six of them around the stolen feather from Whippoorwill. It was then that she found the real answer to Whippoorwill's last riddle: Who is it that contains only the half of the whole? Alice realized that the parrot had said hole, and not whole. Who is it that contains only the half of the hole? That was the question. Alice now knew that the hole that Whippoorwill had riddled about was the hole in her jigsaw of London Zoo, or rather, the twelve holes that the missing pieces were waiting to fill.

“Why, this whole future I'm trapped within,” Alice cried out loud, “is nothing more than a jigsaw of the past. If I can gather together all of the lost pieces, perhaps I will find my way back through the hole in time!” She then counted the pieces she had already collected: the termite piece, the badger piece, the snake, the chicken, the zebra and the snail piece. “That makes six pieces,” she added to herself. “I have six more to find, because twelve pieces were missing from my long-ago jigsaw. I did give the right answer to Whippoorwill's riddle, but for all the wrong reasons. I am the girl that contains only the half of the hole.”

Alice tried her best to remember the six pieces she was still missing: “There was a spider from the spider house, and a cat from the cat house, but they are both in the possession of the police! And what about the other four pieces? There was a fish missing from the aquarium, I'm sure, and also a crow from the aviary, and a parrot, I believe. Why, that piece must represent Whippoorwill! I must surely catch him so that I can arrive back in time for my writing lesson. And I still don't know the correct usage for an ellipsis, even though a three-dotted monster wanted to eat me in Wurmland! But there was one other jigsaw piece missing as well. Now then, what was it? Oh bother, I simply cannot recall it, no matter how hard I try! And anyway, however shall I find those jigsawed creatures while I am languishing in gaol? And what about Celia? I must also find my Automated Alice. And I expect I must also try to find out who the real Jigsaw Murderer is, in order to prove my innocence! Oh dear! I've got so many things to find. I shall never get home!”

Just then the door to the cell opened. It was Inspector Jack Russell, popping his furry head in. “Alice,” he barked, “please come with me and quickly! Our Lady of the Snakes is now ready for you. Your conviction will play a vigorous role in her election campaign.”

Alice was quite fearful of meeting such a high-up Civil Serpent, but really she had no choice at all. Indeed, she had less than a second's chance to pat Long Distance's sleeping shell-shape, and to gather up all the jigsaw pieces and the parrot's feather, before Jack Russell whiskered her out of the cell. Down a long twisting of corridors they travelled, and up an ever-increasing series of stairways. Alice became disorientated yet again. “Why, the future is so full of mazes,” she said to herself, “it's a wonder anybody can get anywhere!”