“This is a message from the Cheshire to the world. Stay away from me and the people I am involved with. This is beyond the FBI, Interpol, and any other authority in the world. The girls I kill have nothing to do with you. It’s a Wonderland War. Stay away. You’ve been warned.”
Dr. Truckle wasn’t sure if it were the pills or the Cheshire’s monotonous voice that sent a shiver through his spine. The madness he’d just heard on national TV was beyond his years of expertise. It reminded him that the world was mad, in and outside of the asylum. He stood up and adjusted his necktie to meet with the Pillar. But before he did, a third pill wasn’t a bad idea.
Chapter 7
VIP Ward, the Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum, Oxford
When Dr. Truckle entered the VIP ward, Carter Pillar was sitting on the big couch in the middle of his cell. He was still wearing his fedora, white-gloves, and smoking his blue hookah from a pink hose. Dr. Truckle approached the bars while the Pillar leaned over his hookah. The Pillar wasn't an ordinary smoker. He demanded certain sizes, certain manufacturing, and no ordinary ingredients from exotic regions. The professor thought of his smoking as an art. Dr. Truckle was planning to intimidate him with his yelling, but the Pillar spoke first.
"Have you ever wondered if Wonderland is real, Tommy?" The Pillar liked to call him by his first name to provoke him. He didn’t even look at him, talking in his distinguished lecturing voice. Dr. Truckle grimaced, suppressing his surfacing anger, unable to respond to this nonsense. "I mean this lovely, stammering writer, mathematician, and photographer named Lewis Carroll couldn’t possibly have just imagined Wonderland," the Pillar puffed, readjusting the charcoals with the other hand. "Just think of how his book has inspired, affected, and shaped the minds of children for almost one hundred and fifty years. It’s safe to say that Carroll’s words weren’t a stroke of luck, but of genius. Something in that book makes people relate. Wonderland must be real."
"So instead of talking about your escape, you expect me to talk about Wonderland?" Dr. Truckle inquired, dying to know what was on the Pillar’s mind.
"The only philosophical problem with accepting the existence of Wonderland is that it means that our reality could actually be a figment of our imagination," the Pillar puffed out bubbles of smoke, which Dr. Truckle had never been seen before. "An assumption that spikes an even crazier question: Who are you?"
"Listen to me, you piece of..." Dr. Truckle couldn't play along anymore. He fisted one hand, but then remembered to breathe like his psychiatrist advised him. "I don't have the slightest idea how you escape the asylum, but I get your point. You don't really want to escape. In fact, you like it here for some reason. You know I love my job, and could lose it if you escape. So I'm all ears. What do you want in return for your stay, so I won’t lose my job?"
"Alice Wonder," the Professor said without hesitation, puffing and adjusting coals. He never seemed to be satisfied with the placement of the coals, as if it were rocket science.
"Alice Wonder?"
"Alice Pleasance Wonder, patient number 1832, the one you lock up in a solitary chessboard-like cell in the underground ward," the Pillar lost his whimsical lecturing voice to a flat and dull seriousness. But unlike Truckle, there wasn't the slightest hint of anger. "The girl you electrocuted over and over again, and succeeded in making her forget all about Wonderland."
"That Alice," Truckle rubbed his chin, pretending he just remembered her. It was a relief knowing the Pillar's need.
"I want you to ask her a question. If I like her answer, then I'd like to meet her in person. Don't send a nurse. Do it yourself, and ask politely."
"You're out of your mind." Truckle spat out.
"’Out of my mind.’ Ah, the irony," the Pillar laughed. "My victims used to say that to me." Just like that, any sign of humanity evaded his eyes. The change in his looks was so sudden that Dr. Truckle felt his throat freezing cold. "I made sure they never said it again," the Pillar added.
The silence in the room suffocated Dr. Truckle. He wanted to disagree, but the Pillar’s intimidation was beyond anything he'd done to his own staff. He understood now why the court accepted the Pillar pleading out due to insanity. He was insanity itself. Keeping him away from the world at any price was victory.
"What do you want me to ask her?" Dr. Truckle said.
"It's a simple mathematic question, yet the answer isn't as easy as it seems," the Pillar leaned back on his couch, crossed his legs, and stretched one arm sideways. In Dr. Truckle eyes, he looked like a loony version of Sigmund Freud. "Ask her what four times seven is." The Pillar plastered a fake smile on his face.
"This is nonsense." Dr. Truckle felt humiliated.
"Oh. You haven't seen nonsense yet," the Pillar said. “By the way, I choked one of your guards with my hookah hose and hung him like slaughterhouse meat at the end of the hall. I’d like you to clean that right away, before it begins to smell.”
Chapter 8
The Mush Room, the Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum, Oxford