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

by Cameron Jace

  “So?”

  “The pot is in a locker in King’s Cross train station,” he explained. “I’ll let you live if you go get it.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  He sighed again. “I want the world to know why I am doing this, in case I die doing it.”

  She shrugged, not sure if he was playing her, but said, “Deal,” she stretched out a hand, inviting him to shake it.

  “I will never shake your hand, Duchess,” he said. “Just go get the note.”

  Then he disappeared into the smoke.

  Back in the bathroom, Margaret took a deep breath and one last look in the mirror. Outside, she could hear a bigger explosion now. She left the bathroom and darted toward the lockers to see.

  Hallelujah! The outlaws blew up the lockers. Now everything was scattered all over. But was the pot going to be intact? Was she going to find the yellow Wonder note?

  Ice-Cream Truck, Out of the Warehouse

  “Can anyone explain to me how the March is supposed to remember when he finds the mushrooms?” Constance asks in the backseat.

  Jack had worked on the abandoned truck outside and ignited it back into life. I guess he was also a mechanic in Wonderland or something — Fabiola commented that he liked to fix cars.

  Now we’re all stuffed into this ice-cream truck, with Jack driving. The best thing about the truck is that the locks on the doors are still intact, so we are safe inside. I would have preferred a big, badass police van, the one that transports prisoners and has barred windows. But hey, where is such a vehicle when you need one?

  “I am assuming that he needs to eat the mushroom,” Lewis explains. He and Tom Truckle are sitting opposite of Fabiola and me. We couldn’t get the Mushroomers on board in our travels, so we locked them safely in the warehouse — after we found a new food and drink source — and promised to come back later.

  “Eat?” Tom asks.

  “Don’t hang on every word,” I tell him. “We’re experimenting here. So why mushrooms, Lewis?”

  “What do you mean?” he grips his weapon tighter.

  “I mean you took a mushroom to forget. The March needs one to remember,” I say. “In the books, I have been depicted as the girl who grows taller or shorter when she eats mushrooms. What’s this all about?”

  “It’s magic mushrooms,” Tom grins, being an expert in pills and hallucinatory drugs. “I heard the first documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience took place in 1799. Guess where? In Green Park, London. That’s why you’re all bonkers.”

  “Are you saying madness is induced?” I ask him.

  “Well,” Lewis says hesitantly. “There are theories that madness didn’t exist before that date, or even in Green Park, 1799.”

  “But that doesn’t add up,” Constance says. “Madness had been reported all through history, way back.”

  “Those were possessions,” Fabiola suggests. “Or mere diseases that had been mistaken for insanity.”

  “Like vampires,” Tom says. “There are no vampires, but certain diseases centuries ago made people need to drink blood — or made them think they needed to drink blood, to be precise.”

  “Don’t say there are no vampires.” Constance grins at him with scary teeth. Tom leans away from her.

  “Fabiola is right,” Lewis says, as we’re rocking to Jack’s driving now. The sounds of war outside are worrisome, but Jack only takes smaller, abandoned routes. “Take me for example. I have a split personality. Inside me, there is a monster called Carolus. He was born out of my suffering from migraines—”

  “Or out of the figment of your imagination,” Tom snickers.

  “The point is,” Lewis continues, neglecting Tom. “Did Carolus appear because of the migraines, or the medicine I took for the migraines?”

  “It’s like shock therapy,” Constance still eyes Tom. “Did it help or did it make people who’d been just ill and mistaken for insane, actually insane.”

  “So tell me more about this event in 1799,” I ask Lewis.

  “A British man who had been in the habit of gathering mushrooms from the garden and cooking them ended up experiencing hallucinations,” Lewis says. “Black spots, odd flashing colors, disorientation and such. Then, when he went to the doctor he forgot why he was there.”

  “Wicked,” I chew on the words. “Like most of us with half memories, not knowing why we’re here.”

  “And so it’s been reported in the British Medical and Physical Journal as the first incident of its kind,” Lewis says.

  “So why is this significant?” Constance asks.

  “Because not one incident like it had been reported before,” Fabiola replies. “It is proof that insanity didn’t exist before.”

  “And it’s because of mushrooms?” I tilt my head.

  “That could be…” Lewis says.

  “Nonsense,” Tom adds. “That could be nonsense.”

  Lewis says, “Later people reported seeing others with weird dilated pupils, infrequent pulses and breathing everywhere when they cooked the mushrooms.”

  “Then,” Fabiola says, “people started to fear for themselves. They were afraid to die. Mushrooms became the equivalent of apples: a poisonous food that could kill.”

  “I don’t see how this induces insanity?” Constance says.

  “A year later, another British man had different symptoms from eating the mushrooms,” Lewis says. “As the reports describe it, he had an attack with fits of uncontrollable laughter.”

  “That was the first time doctors noted that symptoms of eating mushrooms are out of this world.” Fabiola says. “And,” she exchanges a look with Lewis, a slight smile on her lips, “it’s been the first documented time a doctor writes a very peculiar word in their reports about a mushroom-eating patient.”

  “What word?” I ask.

  Lewis smiles too. “Nonsense. The word was nonsense.”

  PAST: Wonderland

  The White Queen lived happily ever after. Well, for a few months.

  The mushroom’s effect was perfect. Never had she doubted her love for the Pillar. Not one day. The world moved on. Wonderland came to accept the fact that the beauty had just married the beast.

  She spent her days living in the forest, lazy, smoking and joking. The Pillar was a funny man. Unchained of all society’s boundaries. His days were a mixture of sleep, and leaning back and reflecting upon the stars atop of a purple mushroom. He never worried, and was never angry. It was like he had figured out the secret of life, and it kept him smiling.

  Of course, it wasn’t the secret of life. It was the mushrooms and the hookah smoke. He’d managed to sedate her anxieties and worries about tomorrow into purple haze and midnight dances. Life was beautiful with the Pillar. She’d married a catch.

  Sometimes, when she asked him about the way he made a living, he said he’d inherited the garden from his parents. The garden was lush with fruits, vegetables, and animals that he sold and didn’t need to work another day.

  “But why is it full of mushrooms?” she asked.

  “They’re like fungus,” he said. “They just grow here. But you know what? They’re delicious.”

  She ate one and giggled happily.

  “And you know what else?” he said. “They can make you taller.”

  “Really?”

  “And shorter.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Fabiola spent a few days with that game of growing taller and smaller. Sometimes she veered a bit far to the edges of the forest, and locals would call to her from behind the trees, asking her why she liked the Pillar, saying that he would eventually hurt her. She opposed their predictions and ordered them to leave.

  “Why do people not like you, Pillar?” she asked him later.

  “Because I am coo-hooo-hooo-lll,” he coughed the smoked out of his mouth. His beady eyes excited her. He did not care for this world, whatsoever.

  She grabbed the hookah and smiled back.

  Until the day another per
son called her from behind the bushes and vines. A taller, younger man with a hat. A tall hat. He wore funny rings, and teacups dangled from his sleeves. They clinked.

  “Who are you?” she asked, not out of sheer curiosity, but an unusual tickling in her tummy. Butterflies? But she never knew this man.

  “Remember me?” he asked her.

  “Should I?” her eyes widened.

  “I’m the Hatter.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Of course, that explains why I recognized you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “You’ve heard?” he was offended.

  “Yeah. You’re hosting those crazy tea parties where you break teacups and drink yourself to sleep.”

  “You don’t remember, do you?” the hatter stepped up. She took a step back behind the bush. “What did the Pillar give you?”

  “He gave me happiness and a great life no girl can dream of.”

  “I mean, what does he…” he thought for a while, trying to utter the right words. “I mean what do you eat every day, or drink?”

  “Such a rude question, why do you ask?”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” he played along. “I see you are so beautiful and wonder if the food you eat makes you look stronger and more attractive.”

  Fabiola blushed and fiddled with her hair.

  “Mushrooms, mostly,” she said. “They’re delicious. Want some?”

  That day, the Hatter left and didn’t return for a while. From there on, she began dreaming about him. Blurred dreams with no particular clearance or conclusion. All she knew was that she had to have met him before.

  A month later, Lewis Carroll himself came to visit. He was one of few people who were allowed into the garden without permission — the Cheshire too, but he creeped her out.

  “Looking lovely, White Queen,” he said, looking tired. He’d been looking tired for some time now. People said he was dying. That he’d been possessed by a demon called Carolus and it sucked his life away.

  But she had always loved him dearly. “Thank you, Lewis.”

  “I brought you a few photographs,” he reached out and gave her his latest work.

  “How lovely,” she said, flipping through. “You’re a great artist, Lewis. Why all girls? Why all young?”

  “There is a secret behind it, but I will tell you later. For now, could I ask you to look into their eyes? I mean the eyes are considered a true photographer's best work. I wonder if you can see something special in their eyes.”

  “Of course,” she stared at each picture, looking into the girl's eyes. Slowly she began feeling something. Those butterflies in her stomach. “There is something about these pictures,” she said. “I can’t explain it.”

  Lewis nodded, “Don’t worry. Keep them. Look at them. I think you will love them.”

  “What’s going on?” interrupted the Pillar, appearing from nowhere. “Ah, Lewis” he smirked. “What brings you here?”

  “Was just passing by,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” the Pillar eyed his wife as well, a devious look twinkling in his eyes. “Did you know Lewis once tasted one of my lovely mushrooms, White Queen?”

  “Oh, you did,” she naively turned to face Lewis, clapping her hands together. “Delicious aren’t they?”

  Lewis said nothing. He was starting to fall down the rabbit hole then. Carolus had been surfacing more and more, and his madness was prevailing.

  Pillar patted him, pretending empathy, “You know what, darling. We should let Lewis go now. His mushroom was a special one. It helped forget something he didn’t want to remember.”

  “Is that true?” she asked Lewis who resided to silence again. It wasn’t much silence as it was weakness and confusion.

  “But wait,” she said. “If you took a mushroom to help you forget, how do you remember that you took a mushroom to forget?” She rolled her eyes and giggled.

  The Pillar gazed back at Lewis and patted his shoulders. He leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “What do you make of that, Lewis?”

  “I-I-,” Lewis began. Years before he’d began stuttering after the events of Mr. Jay killing Alice’s family, but since taking the mushroom it had intensified. “Don’t know.”

  “Don’t bother,” Pillar continued whispering. “The mushroom has side effects. It messes with your mind. Makes you remember and not remember. Be there and not be there. You are you, and then you are someone else.”

  Lewis fisted a hand, but the horror in Pillar’s wife’s eyes stopped him. He didn’t want to traumatize the poor girl. “I will come back later,” he said. “Please, look at the photos White Queen.”

  “Your pathetic photos, Loui,” Pillar waved him goodbye. “You know noh wha ah think yah should dooo?” he mocked him. “You shh-haul m-maybe w-w-write ah book.”

  Lewis left defeated, and the Pillar embarked his mushroom throne to smoke again.

  As for the White Queen, this moment began to wake her up. The Pillar’s cruelty to Lewis shook her from the inside out. She flipped through the photos and suddenly dropped them all on the floor.

  Could that be?

  Did she see what she thought she’d seen or was it the effect of the mushrooms the Pillar fed her? Lewis’ incident ignited her curiosity and shook her out of her naivety.

  She knelt down. Picked up the photos and saw the girl in the photo was talking to her. In a picture?

  “He is not who you think he is,” the girl in the picture told her. “He gave you a mushroom, just like he gave Lewis one.”

  The White Queen’s heart trembled with betrayal. She wasn’t sure, but this was an eye-opening experience. She read the girl in the picture’s name at the bottom:

  Constance Westmacott.

  Present: Ice-cream Truck, London

  “So drugs are the source of madness?” Constance is skeptic. “It’s not a psychological issue?”

  “We can’t confirm any of this,” Lewis says. “The first diagnosis of insanity because of mushrooms was ‘detritus effects of a very common species of non-poisonous agaric.’”

  “What’s agaric?” Constance asks.

  “Mushrooms,” Lewis replies. “Today it’s called ‘intoxication by Liberty Caps’ which are magic mushrooms.”

  “I can’t imagine the word ‘magic’ in this conversation,” I comment, looking at the weak March.

  “Well, it was magic, dark magic,” Fabiola says. “In the 1950s the dark magic became LSD.”

  “I once read that mushrooms whisked humans off to another planet,” Constance snorted. “‘Whisked’ is the wrong word to use, but they used it.”

  “Is that why your book was bonkers, Lewis?” Tom mocks him. “To whisk us all away from our existing miseries?”

  “Wait,” I pick up my sword and go to check on Jack. “Are you alright, dude?”

  “Stop calling me dude,” he is bored at the wheel.

  “You called yourself Dude, dude,” I tease him. “What’s going on?”

  “I am bored to death, watching people kill each other everywhere,” he says. “Although, I am quite surprised by the fact that they don’t attack us.”

  “Maybe an ice-cream truck isn’t what they are looking for.”

  “Are you kidding me,” he says. “So many people need vehicles now, not that there aren’t many, but so many need help. Why didn’t anyone stop us?”

  “Maybe they don’t want help,” I say, watching the chaos through the front window.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think of it. What is this war about? They are supposedly looking for the Inklings, us, because we are the bad guys.”

  “And here we are, passing through without them noticing.”

  “See? That’s my point. The people just want to express their anger. They want to yell at someone. Point fingers. This isn’t exactly about us. We’re only an excuse for World World III to happen.”

  “You talk like the Pillar.”

  I nod, not sure if it’s a good thing.

  “So you
mean the end of the world was going to happen anyway?”

  “With or without us,” I point at a drunk man with pot belly sticking out of his short, and wearing heavy metal t-shirt. He winks and smirks while dizzily passing by. He sees the truck, gives us the finger and says, “Drink up, it’s the end of the world, bitches.”

  “Wise words,” Constance sticks her head between Jack and me, laughing at the man.

  “Are you supposed to hear such bad words?” Jack asks her.

  “Bad words?” she mocks him and sticks out her tongue. “It’s the end of the world, bit—”

  “Stop it,” I tell her. “What’s going on back there?”

  “Did you leave because of the overly philosophical conversation back there?” she winks.

  “Well, I don’t mind,” I say. “It’s good to know where all of this started. Also, there are always answers hidden between the words, so I love to listen.”

  “Well, it ended up with Lewis telling us where we are going.”

  “I know where we are going,” I tell her. “Jack too, or he wouldn’t be driving.”

  “Did you know the Kew Garden is a botanical garden in southwest London that houses the largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world,” she explains. “I didn’t get that word ‘botanical’ at first, but in short it means exotic plants, which include mushrooms.”

  “We’re on the right track,” Jack says. “I can feel it.”

  “Is it at the London Borough of Richmond?” she asks Jack.

  “Yes."

  “So we are going near the river where we escaped earlier.”

  “Yep,” he nods and rounds the wheel. “The worst place in London right now. It’s not going to be easy, but I know a way around. The Garden itself should be safe.”

  “Why hadn’t the March remembered then when we were in the boat, while we were nearby?” Constance wonders.

  “We weren’t in the garden itself,” Jack looks back Constance. “Why do you ask?”