by Jeff Noon
“That sounds rather too much like a certain parrot I know,” said Alice.
“Quark, quark!” quarked Chrowdingler, “come home to me, my kitten!” But the pet of a cat was nowhere to be seen. “This is why I called my cat Quark,” said the Professor to Alice; “because he was always so very prone to vanishing: and nothing can vanish quicker than a fundamental particle! I was doing an experiment, you see: one which tried to register the impact of the carryon particles on the innocent people of Manchester. The experiment entailed the encapturing of my pet cat in this particular box of tricks…” Professor Chrowdingler was tapping with her pipe upon the wooden box’s lid; from within the box’s interior came a further dismal call for help.
“So you placed your pet cat inside this box…” croaked Celia, “and then what did you do?”
“I funnelled a cloud of carryon particles into the box.”
“And what is a carryon, when it’s at home?” asked Alice.
“A carryon is the particle that allows the various species to mate with each other. This is why we are all currently suffering from the Newmonia.”
“So you’re a carryon crow?” pondered Alice.
“Exactly so! I uncovered and named that particle after myself.”
“And this is where the disease called the Newmonia came from?”
“That’s right; the Civil Serpents introduced the carryon particle into the nation’s wavey length. They were hoping to make the populace succumb to quietude, I guess. The original idea was to turn everybody into gentle, law-abiding mice-people: this inexact science is known as Djinnetic Engineering, on account of it being not unlike letting a rabid genie out of a bottle. The serpents’ silly experiment went dreadfully wrong of course, and the rampant carryon particle transformed the people into a mishmash of mutated creatures. My crowly shape is just one of the various outcomes. So it was that I devised this boxly experiment, containing both a domestic cat and a fog of the dreaded carryon particles.”
“But your experimental cat must have mewled and spat at being forced inside the box of canyons,” exclaimed Celia.
“Oh, how my little Quark mewled and spat! But really, I was only trying to prove the usage of carryon particles in the dissipation of the Newmonia disease. But my dear Quark was viciously attacked by the carryons!”
“What happened then?” asked Alice.
“Quark was mixed up with a chameleon’s nature.”
Just then, Alice noticed a translucent something moving through the scientifical equipment on one of Chrowdingler’s workbenches. It looked very much like the nebulous smile of a feline beauty, long since admitted to the disappearing realms of catouflage. A soft and plaintive “Meowwwlll!” came out of nowhere as something unseen and furry knocked over a test tube. “Quark, Quark!” screeched Chrowdingler upon the evidence of her phantom cat’s misdemeanour. The Professor made a feathery-fluttering move to trap the ghostly cat, ending up with only a few wisps of figmental fur in her pointed beak.
“Quark is an invisible cat!” cried Alice, recalling a certain incident in one of her previous adventures. (Although, never in the life of her, would she have suspected that one day in the future she would discover a scientific reason for the old Cheshire Cat’s disappearance!)
“Quite so!” cawed the crow. “Quark has become a chamelecat.”
“So it’s the Civil Serpents who are to blame for the Newmonia disease?” asked Alice, returning (finally) to the subject.
“That’s correct,” replied Chrowdingler. “The Civil Serpents tried their very best to cover up the carryon mistake, claiming the pandemonious Newmonia disease to be no more than a natural aberration of nature. There are only twelve beings in the whole world that know of the serpents’ real misdeed.”
Twelve! Alice, suddenly enlightened, asked, “Would these twelve beings include a computermite and a ramshackle badgerman and a sleepy snake? And would they also include a chicken-powered terbot musician and a zebraman and a long-distance snailman? Also, a spiderboy and a catwoman and a bookish plaiceman?”
“They would indeed!” answered Chrowdingler. “The Civil Serpents are determined to kill off all of the knowledgeable twelve, in order to hide their misuse of the carryon particles, and their ghastly crimes against humanity. Quark! The serpents are determined to kill off every single carrier of the carryon clue; this includes myself of course. Very soon the Snakes of Law will rearrange my body into a deathly puzzle.” With this utterance Chrowdingler reached into her wing’s darkness to produce a little piece of jagged wood: “This arrived in the post this very morning…”
It was the jigsawed fragment from the aviary in the London Zoo puzzle, showing a crow’s black feather. Alice took it quite pleasingly. “Oh, thank you, Professor, for delivering this jigsaw piece to me!” she cried. “I now have nine of my twelve missing pieces!”
“To be given such a jigsaw piece,” warned the Professor, “implies that the Civil Serpents will be wanting to kill you off for your dangerous knowledge. These are the jigsaw pieces of Cain!”
“But all along I thought the Civil Serpents,” queried Celia, “had been urging the police to find the Jigsaw Murderer? Isn’t this why they arrested Captain Ramshackle, and also Alice’s poor, innocent, real self?”
“The police are ignorant of the real murderer, and the real crime. The serpents are merely looking for escape-goats.”
Alice dearly wanted to ask what an escape-goat was, but at that very moment, from the insides of the wooden box, came once more a shrill voice that pleaded, “Please let me out of this box!”
“I’m not letting you out of the box so early!” screeked the crow-woman in reply. “The experiment is not yet over!” Simultaneously to this screeking, there was also a terrible pounding on the stairs that led down to the Uniworseity of Manchester. “This is the Civil Serpents!” pounded the pounding. “Alice Liddell and Professor Chrowdingler! You are both under arrest for the Jigsaw Murders!”
The pipe fell out of Chrowdingler’s mouth! “Quickly, Alice!” she urged. “This is what you have to do next: you must find the remaining three of your missing jigsaw pieces. You must then take all twelve of the pieces to your Great Aunt’s house in Didsbury village. Promise me that you will carry all twelve of the pieces to your puzzle back to the past, because only then will we futurites be saved from the serpents’ wrath!”
“We promise, Professor Chrowdingler,” croaked Celia.
“But my tenth jigsaw piece is with the Civil Serpents!” added the real Alice. “They are keeping it for evidence at the Town Hall.”
“So to the Town Hall must you journey!” screeked the crow-woman in a flurry of wing-beats. “But now you must hide inside the experiment box.”
“I’m not getting in there!” announced Alice in a huff. But the pounding of the serpents on the stairs caused Celia to add (in a second huff!), “But Alice, it’s our only chance to escape!” Celia opened up the box’s lid and climbed inside.
“But Professor,” hesitated Alice, “you haven’t yet told us about the chrownon particles.”
“I haven’t the time for that,” replied Chrowdingler.
And so Alice (rather nervously) followed Celia into the box.
SNAKES
AND
LEADERS
IT was very dark inside the box, and very cramped, so much so that Alice couldn’t see her own nose in front of her face! But her unseen nose could smell a waft of sickly talcum powder. “Captain Ramshackle!” cried Alice to the darkness, upon smelling that dusty aroma, “it was you in here, trying to find a way out!”
“Indeed it is my very own self, trying to escape,” answered the boxed-up badgerman from the darkness.
“But what are you doing inside here?” questioned Alice.
“I was hoping to follow the example of Quark the cat,” came the miserable, invisible reply.
“In order to make yourself invisible to the Civil Serpents…?”
“Precisely so!” admitted Ramshackle. “I
was hoping that Professor Chrowdingler could turn me into a badgermeleon! Am I correct to suspect that the experiment has failed?”
“I suspect, Captain Ramshackle,” said Alice, “that you are no more invisible than I am! And that is not very invisible at all! Even though it’s completely dark in this dangerous box!”
“What’s happening outside the box?” whispered Ramshackle, fearfully.
“The Civil Serpents have come to find us,” whispered Celia, hoarsely.
“Who are you?!” cried Ramshackle. “Are there two Alices in the box?”
“This is my automated sister, Captain,” introduced Alice. “She’s called Celia.”
“Alice has been split in two?!”
“Well yes,” answered Alice, “I suppose I have.”
“How superbly random that must be!” exclaimed the badgerman, finding a little of his old bravado. “Should we look outside just yet, do you think?”
“No, we should not!” cried Alice, as something heavy started hammering! on the roof of the box. “Is there a way to lock this box from the inside?”
“There is indeed…” responded Ramshackle, reaching upwards to turn a small latch on the box’s ceiling.
The noise from outside seemed to recede. Alice felt safe enough to ask some questions. “What do you know about the Radishes of Time, Captain Ramshackle?” was her first enquiry.
“Professor Chrowdingler told me nearly everything that she knew. The Radishes of Time are where the chrownon particles live and breed.”
“And what is a chrownon?” asked Alice with her second question.
“A chrownon is another particle that Chrowdingler has uncovered: it is the elementary unit of time itself! My dear Alice…you must have eaten some forwards chrownons in the past; this is why you have travelled to 1998! To get back to 1860, you would have to swallow some backwards chrownons.”
“I must swallow a radish, backwards?” protested Alice with her third question.
“That is correct, and you must swallow them at the very place of your leaving, and at the very same time as your leaving.”
“In other words, Alice,” explained Celia, helpfully, “we must travel to your Great Aunt’s house in Didsbury. Once there, we must eat some of the radishes in your Great Uncle’s vegetable patch, and we have to do all of this at precisely two o’clock.”
“Your automated sister is most wise,” said Ramshackle. “This whole process, according to Chrowdingler, is known as Chrownotransductionology; in other words: timely travel.”
Just then, Alice’s nose noticed a pungent whiff of gas over and above the badger’s talcum waft. “Have you made a social faux pas, Captain?” she discreetly enquired.
“No, I have not made a social fart-pants!” pleaded the badgerman.
“Captain Ramshackle!” cried Alice. “One should not say such things!”
“You said it first!”
“I did not! I said faux pas! It’s quite different; why, it’s French, for one thing! Therefore it’s much more polite!” Alice was here following her Great Aunt’s instructions in etiquette. (Great Uncle Mortimer did eat an awful amount of radishes, remember?)
“In the future, Alice…” explained Celia, “there are hardly any words at all that cannot be said aloud. Why, you can even say—”
“Well I don’t like the future,” Alice cut in. “It’s beastly, and I want to go home!”
“Sisters, sisters! This is not the smell of my netherness,” said Ramshackle; “this is the smell of carryon gas, seeping into the box.”
Alice screamed: “I don’t want to be changed! I don’t want to catch Newmonia! I want to be just me!” She nudged open the latch and began to push against the lid.
Oh dear! The box wouldn’t open!
Alice pushed and pushed, but still the lid wouldn’t open. It wouldn’t budge, not an inch! “The Civil Serpents have locked us in!” she cried, as the rotten smell of carryons stenched up her nostrils. “Celia, quickly! We must pull your right-hand thigh-cupboard lever once again; perhaps your telescoping legs will break open the lid…”
“I’m afraid I can use each of my thigh-cupboards only once,” was Celia’s reply to that suggestion.
“We must open your left-hand thigh-cupboard then!”
“But that cupboard is to be used only in an extreme emergency.”
“This is an extremely extreme emergency!”
“I’m not so sure it is, Alice,” said Ramshackle. “Maybe if we all three of us pushed together, we could get out?”
So all three of them did push together, and lo and behold! The box wasn’t locked at all, the Civil Serpents had merely placed something very heavy on top of it. This heavy something fell to the floor with a dull thud! as the trio opened up the lid in order to peer (surreptitiously!) over the box’s rim…
The laboratory was quite empty.
Alice (and then Celia in a pair of nervous brackets) ((and then Captain Ramshackle, in a pair of doubly nervous brackets)) climbed out of the experiment-box. They all seemed quite unchanged by their adventure. “I do believe the carryon gas needs much longer than that to work,” explained Ramshackle.
“Oh dear!” whispered Celia, as she noticed what exactly they had dislodged from the lid to the floor…
It was the corpse of Professor Gladys Chrowdingler! The crow-woman’s wings were now flapping lifelessly from either side of her eyes! Her sooty tail was sprouting from her lips! Her eyes were lifelessly peering from each of her knees!
“The professor has been Jigsaw Murdered!” cried Celia. “The Civil Serpents have reorganized her!”
And the laboratory wasn’t quite so empty, because Alice saw a certain translucent whispering of fur rubbing against the Professor’s mixed-up body. Alice picked up the translucent whispering, gently, and began to stroke it. (Have you ever tried to stroke an invisible cat? I can assure you it’s a very strange task; but if anybody could do it, Alice could, and Alice did do it…) For some almost unknown reason Alice was the only one of her party who could see anything at all of Quark, the Invisible Cat. The cat purred at being treated so kindly. “You’ll have to find your own way in the world now, invisible puss-cat,” Alice said, lowering the cat to the floor. Alice then turned to Captain Ramshackle. “What time is it, please?” she enquired of him. Ramshackle rolled up his left shirt-sleeve to reveal a little wrist-clock there. “It’s almost exactly one o’clock in the afternoon,” he answered.
“I therefore have only sixty minutes in which to find the tenth, spidery jigsaw piece,” deduced Alice, catching hold of Celia’s hand, “and then the eleventh parroty piece, and then the mysterious twelfth and final piece. Quickly, Celia…activate your automated speeding legs: back to the Town Hall of Manchester we must travel!”
“I’m coming with you,” said Captain Ramshackle, trying to climb aboard the doll’s already moving body. But Alice pushed him back gently. “This is my task alone, Captain,” she informed him. “Don’t worry, I shall try my very best to save you from the serpents…”
It took Alice and Celia only a single few minutes to journey the distance from the Uniworseity to the Town Hall. Alice’s first problem was exactly how to get inside the Town Hall, without the Civil Serpents knowing she was there. To this end she had instructed Celia to deliver her to the side courtyard of the building, where a small door marked with a sign admitting DELIVERIES ONLY! was guarded by the unravelling eightfoldness of an octopusman. This bouncing individual waved his collection of long legs around in a dance of clinging suckers, squelching out with a soapy voice, “What has this young girl to deliver, I wonder?”
“I’m delivering the new mascot for Mrs Minus’s election campaign,” invented Alice, pushing Celia forwards. “A vote for Mrs Minus,” announced Celia, in her most political voice, “is a vote for subtraction!”
“Let me check this delivery,” over-emphasized the octopusman: at which he blubbered into a brass mouth-horn fixed to the Delivery Door’s interior passage. A slithering voice answe
red back to him, and then the octopusman said to Alice, “You may (carefully!) enter…”
So it was that Alice and Celia gained a careful entrance to the Town Hall of Manchester. It was very echoey and also very cold inside those hallowed corridors; it was a stonely warren of wonderings through which the pair of them echoed like copies of themselves. The strangest thing of all about the Town Hall was that they met absolutely nobody at all along their way! “I always imagined that a town hall would be a very busy building,” echoed Alice. “Perhaps they do their business in secret?” echoed Celia. Eventually Alice and Celia passed under a sign reading THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT to enter a large echoing room of emptiness.
“Where should we head for now, Celia?” echoed Alice, pondering upon a signpost that sprouted directions for THE TREASURING DEPARTMENT, THE WHISPERING DEPARTMENT, THE TORTURING DEPARTMENT, THE TAXING DEPARTMENT and THE SLEAZING DEPARTMENT.
“I suspect that the department we’re seeking won’t be signposted,” echoed Celia. “We know that the Civil Serpents keep their evidence in the cellar of the Town Hall, so maybe it’s THE PLUMMETING DEPARTMENT we need to find?”
“But if a department isn’t signposted, how can we find it? Oh, if only I had a single clue!”
At which Celia suddenly cried, “Alice! Look at the floor!”
Alice looked at the floor. “My goodness,” she echoed, for the marble floor they were standing on was carefully tiled into exactly twelve over-large jigsaw pieces! And each of them contained a mosaic picture of each of the creatures that Alice was searching for. Miss Computermite was depicted, as was Captain Ramshackle and the snakely Under Assistant they had met in the knot garden and the chicken-thing they had found in James Marshall Hentrails’s automated stomach. These last two floor-pieces were painted over with vicious black crosses. (“I wonder what those black crosses mean?” wondered Alice.) Also pictured on the floor were the zebraman who had helped Whippoorwill across the busy road, and the trumpeting snailman called Long Distance Davis. The next four pieces showed Whiskers Macduff, the catgirl; the fishman they had found dead in the librarinth; Professor Chrowdingler and Quentin Tarantula the spiderboy whose tinier piece they were currently searching for. All four of these last floor-pieces were marked with the sinister black cross.