The Complete Alice Wonder Series - Insanity - Books 1 - 9 Page 5

  "Can you get me out of here?" I cut through the drama.

  "Here we go again," Edith says. Lorina rolls her eyes and looks away. I think she's eyeing a cute boy visiting his sick mother next to us.

  I ignore them both anyways. It doesn't look like they'll help me. "How long have I been here?" I ask my mother.

  "Two years," Lorina volunteers. She looks like she'd like to stick out her tongue at me. "Since you were seventeen."

  "And why am I here?" The real question is: who in the world am I? But you can't ask someone that if you want them to think you are sane.

  "You killed your classmates, every single one of them." Edith's words fall like stones on me. I think she is the older one. She is deadly serious. Lorina is the flirty one, with an obsession with her manicured fingernails.

  "How did I do that?" My brain refuses to believe I am capable of killing anyone. I try to remember anything about it, but I can't.

  "See that stare in her eyes?" Lorina tells Edith as if I am not here with them. "She's in the cuckoo's nest."

  "Stop it, girls," my mother demands. Although she cares, she looks weak. She has no control whatsoever. It makes me wonder where my father is. I have never seen him. Maybe he is dead, but I don't ask. "Can I ask you a question, Alice?"

  I nod.

  "Do you still believe that Wonderland exists?"

  "No." I shake my head.

  "It means your therapy is working." My mother looks pleased. I wonder how she'd feel after two seconds in shock therapy.

  "What is all this talk about Wonderland?" I ask.

  "When you were seven,"—Edith's seriousness is annoying—"you went missing one afternoon and came back saying you'd been to that scary place."

  "Edith got punished that day because she was taking care of you, and you escaped." Lorina can't stop snickering. I understand why Edith is dead serious now. Guilt is eating at her. She hides it by being a jerk.

  "Shut up." Edith owns her sister with a sharp look. I wonder how I escaped her when I was a kid.

  "Please, girls. Stop it," my weakened mother says.

  "Why stop it?" Edith says. "I don't buy that she doesn't remember."

  "Yes," Lorina says. "She has to admit the horrible things she has done since she came back that afternoon."

  "Horrible things." I tilt my head. "Other than killing my classmates?"

  "Remember your boyfriend?" Lorina inquires.

  "I have a boyfriend?"

  "Had a boyfriend," Lorina says. She seems like she may have had a crush on my boyfriend. "Before you killed him, along with everyone else on the school bus two years ago."

  "Why would I do that?" It's really hard asking someone else about things you have done, but I truly don't remember.

  "Who knows?" Lorina rolls her eyes again, snickering at Edith.

  "I remember she said something about monsters from Wonderland." Edith laughs back. Her laugh is dull. It's like she's lazy, barely lifting her lips.

  "Wonderland Monsters?" I narrow my eyes. I am not sure if they're joking, or if that is what I said. Somehow I don't care about all of this. I don't care about my mother's submissive silence, my mocking sisters, not even about the Wonderland Monsters. What I do care about is the boyfriend that I killed. It strikes me as odd. Even with a partial memory, I don't think I would hurt someone I loved. "What's his name?" I ask.

  "Whose name?" Edith and Lorina are still laughing.

  "My boyfriend, the one I killed."

  "Adam," my mother says finally. "Adam J. Dixon."

  I don't know how or why, but the name Adam J. Dixon suddenly brings tears to my eyes.

  10

  ALICE'S CELL, THE RADCLIFFE LUNATIC ASYLUM, OXFORD

  Sleeping has become increasingly hard since I learned about my boyfriend, Adam. It's not like I remember him or the incident of killing my classmates on the school bus. But Adam, to me, is like Wonderland. I can't remember them, but something tells me they are real.

  What bothers me about Adam is that I am, strangely, mourning his death. I don't know if science has an explanation for my feelings, but I can't escape it. I feel I want to cry for him, visit his burial ground, say a little prayer, and leave roses on his tomb. To me, it's a genuine feeling. I don't think I even feel this way about my family.

  I wonder if it's possible to forget about someone but still experience a feeling toward them. It's as if I have written his name on the inner walls of my heart. As if I am stained with his soul. Whatever we shared is buried somewhere in the abyss of my mind. I just don't know how to swim deep enough and return to the surface with it. My thoughts are interrupted by Waltraud's knock on the door. Sometimes it feels like I am the only patient in the asylum.

  "I am really tired," I say. "I don't want to eat, go to the bathroom, or meet anyone. Leave me alone."

  "It's Dr. Tom Truckle," he says and enters my cell. He has never entered my cell before. When he steps inside, his hands are behind his back. "How have you been, Alice?" He has never asked me so politely.

  "Mad." My favorite answer. I think I should copyright it.

  "I'll make it short," Dr. Truckle says, discarding my complaint. He looks disgusted with my cell. "This might be outrageously silly, but I really need to ask you something." He shrugs. I have never seen him shrug. He looks uncomfortable with Waltraud's presence. "How much is four times seven?" he asks quickly as if embarrassed to say it. Waltraud and Ogier try their best not to laugh behind his back.

  "Twenty-eight." I shrug. Then a surge of emotion hits me. It reminds me of my buried feelings about Adam. A light bulb flickers in my head. Suddenly, I realize I know the right answer to the silly question. Whoever told Tom Truckle to ask it of me is sending me a code. I don't know how, but I know. "Wait," I say, interrupting Dr. Tom's departure. "It's fourteen," I answer with a hint of a smile on my lips.

  11

  THE PILLAR'S CELL, RADCLIFFE ASYLUM, OXFORD

  "Fourteen it is!" Pillar chirped, coughing some of the hookah smoke in the air.

  "That's the right answer?" Truckle couldn't see the Pillar clearly behind the smoke.

  "Indeed," the Pillar said. "Now, bring her to me."

  "No. No. No!" Truckle snapped. "That'd be a serious breach of the asylum's rules."

  "I've always thought insanity was about breaking the rules," the Pillar said. "Be a good mad boy with a suit and necktie, and bring me Alice Wonder. This just gets better and better."

  "What's getting better?" Truckle couldn't hide his curiosity. The Pillar knew how to push his buttons.

  "Be patient, Tommy. Insane things come to those who wait." The Pillar leaned back on his couch. He looked content. A bit drowsy, too. Truckle remembered a moment in the eccentric professor's trial a couple of months ago. The Pillar had informed the judge that he preferred looking at the world from behind a curtain of smoke. The smoke was like a filtering screen, he had said. It helped him to see right through people's invisible masks.

  "I suppose I can make an exception and get her to meet you briefly," Truckle said. "But only if you tell me—"

  "I know, I know." The Pillar waved his gloved hand in the air. "You'd like to know why four times seven is fourteen. The answer is actually buried somewhere in your own childhood, Tommy, but let's say you can find it here." He nudged a copy of Lewis Carroll's original Alice's Adventures Under Ground toward the edge of the cell. Truckle was going to reach for it through the bars but pulled his hand back.

  "Oh," the Pillar said. "You're scared to even reach in. How very sane of you." He smirked. "Rest assured, Tommy. In Lewis Carroll's book, there is a part when Alice wonders if she's hallucinating. She questions her own sanity, and if she's even Alice at all."

  "What?"

  "In chapter two, 'The Pool of Tears,' Alice tries to perform multiplication but produces some odd results. She does it to assure herself she isn't mad," the Pillar said. "Alice finds out that while she is in Wonderland, four times five becomes twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven
is…" The Pillar's eyes glittered.

  "According to this nonsensical logic, fourteen." Truckle felt ashamed at having said that, but he wasn't good at caging his curiosity.

  "Frabjous, isn't it?" The Pillar waved his hands like a proud magician.

  "So, this is some nerdy code for those obsessed with the book?" Truckle expected more than this. The professor was a killer for God's sake. What in the world was his interest in children's books?

  "Nerdy is an awfully racist and out-of-fashion word." The Pillar raised his forefinger. "We call ourselves Wonderlanders."

  "Are you kidding me? You sound like you believe that Alice Wonder is the Alice in the book." Truckle chortled. "You're the optimum zenith of insanity. I don't think I can even profile you."

  "It's time insanity has a role model." The Pillar dragged long enough on his hookah to make a whizzing sound. "Now, go get me Alice, before I change my mind and escape again."

  12

  VIP WARD'S DOOR, THE RADCLIFFE LUNATIC ASYLUM, OXFORD

  On my way to meet this mysterious Professor Pillar, I break free from the warden and run toward Tom Truckle's office to get my Tiger Lily. My attempt is overruled again as the wardens grab hold of me and tie me back up in a straitjacket. This time, they squeeze me in hard, so I can't untie myself.

  Ogier grins, watching me get buckled up. He taps his prod on the thick flesh of his palm as if reminding me how much he'd enjoy shocking me if I untie myself again. As they walk me up to the VIP Ward, I try to squeeze my head for deeper memories of Wonderland and the people I supposedly killed. I can't remember anyone, not even the Pillar, who wants to see me.

  "You're by far one of the worst Mushroomers in my asylum," Dr. Truckle says, adjusting his tie as he walks beside me. He's always been self-conscious about the fancy way he dresses and how he looks. But it's the first time he calls me a Mushroomer. "And even though you killed your classmates, I know you're not a natural-born killer. I have been treating you for some time, so I know what I am talking about." He stops before the metallic door leading to the VIP hallway. It looks much cleaner than the mess I live in downstairs. I think of it as purgatory, one step away from the sane world outside. "Like I told you, Professor Carter Pillar is a cold-hearted murderer. He's done horrible things, like pulling his victims' eyes out and stuffing their sockets with mushrooms. He used laughing gas on another victim and smoked his damn hookah while watching him die of internal bleeding caused by the laughter. He even once hypnotized a man and made him jump off a rooftop of the Tom Tower at Oxford University after persuading him he had wings."

  "What's your point, doctor?" I can't help but notice Truckle's uneasiness with the Pillar. It makes me curiouser and curiouser.

  "The point is… once you're alone with him, he is known for messing with people's minds and convincing them of any ideas he wants to seed in their brains," Dr. Truckle says. "He always has an agenda and knows how to read people's insecurities. I advise you to stay tied in your straitjacket and as far away as possible from the bars of his cell. Or you'll jeopardize your chances of leaving the asylum."

  "I didn't know I had a chance in the first place." I stare him right in the eyes, making sure he isn't lying or playing games.

  "I know it's crazy, but you do." Dr. Truckle laces his hands together. "Your mother's lawyer has convinced the court that if the asylum proves you've been cured, they will rule out your crimes of killing your classmates."

  "She did that?" So the woman with the name I don't know must be my mother after all.

  "She's been trying with all her might to help you," Dr. Truckle says. "If that happens, then you've committed the perfect crime, in my opinion: killed your classmates, pleaded insanity, got cured, and got your freedom afterward. That must be every teenager's dream." He continues, "To believe you're cured, we have to either make sure you're not fooling us when you say you don't remember Wonderland, or…"

  "Or?"

  "Or the Pillar proves you're sane." Dr. Truckle rubs his chin.

  "How would a madman serial killer, who dresses as if he is a caterpillar, prove that?"

  "By proving that Wonderland is real." Dr. Truckle's face suddenly changes, and he begins to laugh at me as he nudges me through the door. I guess he was just messing with my head.

  13

  Tied up in my straitjacket, I walk down the hallway to meet with this Pillar. It's a much cleaner and broader hallway than mine downstairs. All cells are empty. All except the one with a shimmering yellow light. I hear music faintly playing in the background. As I walk closer, I recognize the tune. It's "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. Smoke circles out of the cell as I stop in front of it, ready to meet him. Pillar the Killer himself.

  The Pillar's cell is luxurious in a mad way. Its floor is raised almost a foot above the hallway's floor. It makes it look like a performer's stage. The Pillar is sitting, legs crossed, on a huge couch. He is smoking his hookah with one hand and holding a jar with a butterfly inside with the other. The butterfly crashes against the glass, wanting to be set free. The Pillar doesn't care.

  Silence creeps into the place, and I don't feel like starting the conversation. The Pillar's eyes scan me in a most unusual way. It's as if he knows me, has known me and is making sure it's really me. Although mad people don't intimidate me, I feel mysteriously uncomfortable. He has such an unexplainable presence for such a short and average-looking man.

  There is a chair in the hall facing the cell. I sit on it, not taking my eyes off him. His eyes are beady as he waves the hookah's hose in the air. He does it like a maestro orchestrating the song's unusual melody. It takes me a while to discover he is writing words with his hookah's smoke in the air. The smoke magically sticks. It's a question, one that may have been easier for me to answer more than a week ago: Whooo are you?

  This isn't happening, right? This is too surreal, even for my insanity.

  "I'm not sure who I am," I say, wondering why I feel the need to comply. "People around me seem to have an idea of who I am, though."

  "Who do they think you are?"

  "They say I killed my friends." I raise my eyes and stare in his, realizing that, in the weirdest of ways, we're both killers.

  "Why haven't I ever thought of that?" He sucks on his hookah.

  "Think of what?"

  "Killing my friends." He puffs a ring of smoke back into the room. "But then again, you can't kill something you don't have."

  "You don't have friends?" I didn't expect him to open up to me. Or is he?

  "Neither have you."

  "Actually, I do."

  "Ah, you must mean your Tiger Lily. A very interesting species." He sounds either sleepy or too comfortable in his skin. An apocalypse wouldn't shake him off his hookah. "I heard you messed up your escape because of it."

  "She is the first thing I remember seeing from a week ago. Since then, she has been my only friend."

  "I wonder if it meant more than that in the past." The Pillar takes a long drag.

  I stop and think about it. Was I attached to it because of an older suppressed memory, maybe? "Is that why you wanted to meet me to ask about my flower?" I ask.

  "Of course not. I am here to talk to you about Wonderland."

  "Then, you better read the book." I'm tired of talking about Wonderland. "Because it doesn't exist in real life."

  "That's strange. I am quite sure your mother and sisters repeatedly mentioned you talking about Wonderland. A real one." His eyes pierce through me. I am not even going to ask how he knows about my mother and sisters.

  I am not comfortable with him knowing about my family, but something makes me keep talking to him. "My mom says I escaped from my sister Edith when I was seven and came back blabbering about a scary place called Wonderland," I say. "It's a crazy story. I think it was my childhood imagination after reading Alice in Wonderland. It's just silly."

  "What's life but a big, silly book?" he says. "You've answered the question I sent you. It means you must remember something."


  "I don't know how the answer came to me, but I assume it's because it was written in Alice in Wonderland."

  "No, it's not. The fact that four times seven is fourteen is only hinted at in the book. It's never mentioned. You remember more than you think you do, Alice. It's just the shock therapies and medicine that made you forget," the Pillar says. "Seriously, Alice. Aren't you curious about the things you don't remember?" He places his hose on the edge of the hookah and leans forward. It's the first time he gives me his full attention. "I can make you remember amazing things."

  "Like what?"

  "Like who the Red Queen really is. Why she chopped off heads. Who the Rabbit really was. Where the real rabbit hole exists. What a raven and a writing desk really have in common. Why Lewis Carroll wrote this book and a lot of the other things," the Pillar says. "Basically, I can tell you who you really are. And you know what happens if you know who you really are?"

  "No, I don't." I think I am better off not knowing who I really am. I don't know why I think so.

  "You get to know if you really killed your classmates. And if you did, you get to know why you did it." The Pillar stops for effect. I am almost sure of what he will say next. "Don't you want to know why you killed the boy you loved?"

  14

  The Pillar's last remark gets to me the most. I still can't shake my mourning over the boy I loved but can't remember. Adam and my Tiger Lily seem to be all I care about in this world.

  "I am listening," I say. "Tell me what you want."

  "I want him," he says without hesitation as he clicks his TV on. It shows news coverage of the Cheshire Cat murders.

  "You're not going to tell me this is the real Cheshire Cat, are you?" I chortle.