But all this interest in food, whether in this vision or the real world, confuses me. Am I supposed to read between the lines and learn something about food?
The world around me here is all filth and dirt, aggressively ignored by a few rich men and woman waiting to enter the Drury Lane Theatre.
Still vaguely listening to the man and woman speaking about food, I see the man interrupt his wife and raise his glass of wine at someone in the crowd.
Someone almost dressed like a priest.
Lewis.
The men and women greet him as he steps down from the theatre's entrance. They hail his name and seem to love him, but he looks absent and disinterested. He walks among them, nodding politely, and tries to step away from them. A big suitcase with clothes showing from its edges is tucked under his arm. The other arm is hiding a package wrapped in a newspaper.
"Excuse me," Lewis says, and vanishes into the filthy dark. London is so dirty that the moon refrained from shining through tonight.
I follow Lewis into the dark. I even call for him, but he doesn't return my call.
This must be it. This must be why I am here.
I trudge through the muddy dark. Smog is the only guiding light for me.
"Lewis!" I finally see him kneeling down to talk to homeless kids. They gather around him as if he were Santa Claus. He unwraps the newspaper and offers them loaves of bread.
The kids nibble on the bread with their dirty hands. If a loaf drops down in the mud they pick it up again and eat it right away. Some of them fight for it, but Lewis teaches them how to be as one, promising he will bring them more.
I stand in my place, watching. The kids are too skinny, even when wearing layers of tattered and holed clothes.
I step closer. No one seems to see me.
It baffles me to realize the kids are much older than I thought. Their faces suggest they are about fifteen years old, although their contracted bodies look no more than nine years old.
One of the kids asks Lewis what he keeps in the suitcase. Lewis' smile shines like a crescent moon absent in the sky, but I can't hear what he says.
"Lewis!" I call again.
He doesn't reply.
"Lewis." I feel dizzy.
Otherworldly voices are calling my name from the sky.
"Lewis!" I repeat before they wake me up in the real world.
But I am too late.
As I leave my vision, my eyes are fixed on Lewis' suitcase. Why are clothes tucked inside? They look like costumes.
Then the vision is gone.
A peculiar smoke invades my nostrils. I surrender to sneezing, opening my eyes. The Pillar stands over me in the ambulance, saying, "Wonderland hookah smoke never fails to wake up anyone. It's even better than onion."
Alice Adventure's Underground
"The
chapter where Duchess appears is hilariously funny," the Pillar reads from a local newspaper. Behind us, the chauffeur buys our tickets.
"Really?" I am stretching my tight dress a bit. I am not used to this kind of intimacy on my skin. Neither am I comfortable with my heels. What's wrong with sneakers, or better, being barefoot?
"That's what the papers say." The Pillar looks at the billboards showing "previous attractions." "Damn," he mumbles. "We missed
"Who's your favorite, Lewis Carroll or Neil Gaiman?" He points his finger playfully at me.
"Carroll." I don't hesitate. "Lewis Carroll or J. R. R. Tolkien?" I shoot back.
"Carroll." He doesn't hesitate either. "Lewis Carroll or C. S. Lewis?"
"Hmm." I love the Narnia books. "Nah, Carroll." I can't resist. "Lewis Carroll or
I raise an eyebrow. I can't answer that. "Who do you think?" I feel eerily playful.
"God, of course." He waves hi at his approaching mousy chauffer, panting with the tickets in his hands. "Just look at what he has created." He secretly points at his chauffeur. "It can't get
"Who said it's a word? Absurd is an emotion." He winks and welcomes the tickets the chauffeur gives him.
"Eight tickets, like you ordered," the chauffeur remarks.
"Eight?" I grimace at the Pillar.
"My seat and yours." The Pillar counts on his fingers. "Two seats to our left and right, two behind us, and the two front of us."
"Why?"
"Precautions, Alice," the Pillar says. "Who knows what might happen inside? I have a bad feeling about this."
"All seats are also right in the middle of the theatre," the chauffeur elaborates.
"Evil people, such as terrorists, are dumb." The Pillar spares me the burden of asking. "They usually start bombing the back seats if they've intrusively entered from outside. Or bomb the front seats if they're sleeper cells. Middle is just fine."
"Not if the theatre's chandelier falls on your heads in the middle." My knack for opposing him grows in me.
"If something hits you in perpendicular line straight down from the sky, that's not a terrorist," the Pillar says while he hands a piece of his portable hookah to hide in my dress. "That would be God's sense of humor."
"What is that for?" I look at his Lego hookah.
"They don't allow hookahs inside, and I have a bad feeling I will need it."
I tuck it under my dress, counting on the Pillar to deal with security on our way in.
"So, let me be your guide for tonight, Miss Edith Wonder." He requests I engage him, and I do. "Pretend I am your father," he hisses between almost-sealed lips as we stare at the security gate. "A smile will do wonders, too."
We both smile, but I have to ask, hissing, "Why did you call me Edith?"
"In case something horrible happens, I don't want them looking for you," he says, not looking at me. "Also, your sister has been mean to you. Let's get her in trouble." We keep on smiling at the guards. "Tell the security man on your side that his taste of clothes is exceptionally
"And he happens to be in his mid-forties, not wearing a ring, and probably desperate to hear a compliment from a beautiful young lady too," the Pillar says as we close in. "Make him think this a special conversation between you and him, behind daddy's back."
I do as he says when we enter. The man blushes and doesn't bother checking the tickets. I emit a seductive laugh and turn to the Pillar when we're inside, "It worked. How did you pass your guard? You haven't promised anything you can't keep?"
"Nah." He raises his chin and greets a few ladies he hasn't seen before. "I puffed hookah smoke in his face. It hypnotized him long enough for me to pass."
"Just like that? You didn't show him anything?"
"Of course I did." He smiles broadly at he crowd. "My middle finger."
"I'd prefer you tell me what Lewis Carroll has to do with all of this," I say as we enter the auditorium.
The Pillar gently holds my hand as if I am a princess and ushers me to my seats. "No farting, I promise," he says to the seating crowd we pass in the row.
We finally are seated.
"Lewis Carroll used to work briefly with the theatre," the Pillar says, holding my hands between his. "They used a few plays he'd written long before he got mad; I mean, long before he wrote
"Proceed, please." I try to pose like someone who's accustomed to being in theatres.
"Carroll wasn't in any way fond of London. He loved Oxford, with all its books, grand halls, and studios," the Pillar continues. "He had also been a priest for a brief time; the Oxford Choir in the church will never forget him. But then Lewis developed a great interest in photography, particularly kids, like Constance's photograph."
The light in the hall dims, preparing for the start of the play.
"As you might have heard, photographers will tell you a camera never lies," the Pillar says. "In Carroll's case it was exceptionally true. The poverty his camera caught was heartbreaking. If you'd ever paid attention to his photographs, mostly of young homeless girls, you would understand his obsession. Poverty, hunger, and unfair childhood screamed out of every photo."
"I could imagine Lewis like that."
"Before writing books and puzzles, Lewis directed small plays in Oxford to entertain the poor, skinny kids with tattered clothes. He did it because there was not enough money to buy them food. In all history, art has been food of the poor, Alice. Remember that." The Pillar seems lost for a moment. I wonder what memory he is staring into. "Carroll called his intentions 'saving the children.' He wanted to save a child's
"I still don't understand his connection to the Drury Lane Theatre, where we're supposed to find the Muffin Man."
"That's the easy part," the Pillar says. "The plays needed funding for production. Carroll was smart and resourceful. He gave his plays for free to the Theatre Royal, which was struggling after being burned down a few years back and couldn't afford to pay for new plays. In return, the theatre provided Carroll with costumes for his plays."
"That was why he held the suitcase and smiled when the kids asked him," I murmur.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," I say. "So that's his connection to Drury Lane Theatre?"
"My assumption, with the Cheshire's clues, is that Lewis Carroll met the Muffin Man in Drury Lane," he says. "Only, Carroll never felt the need to mention the Muffin Man in any of his writings."
"Maybe Carroll wrote the nursery rhyme?"
"That's farfetched, and we have no evidence to back it up," he says. "All I know is that after all those connections and the fact that an
"Something like what?"
In this moment, the Pillar cranes his neck upward at the higher balconies in the theatre. An unusual look startles his face. "Something like this." He points up.
I look and squint against the faint light in the theatre. I see an important woman arriving in the balcony, accompanied by a number of guards.
"What brings Margaret Kent here?" I ask.
"The Duchess is in the house." The Pillar sighs. "This is getting curiouser and curiouser." He lowers his head, ready to watch the play. "I don't feel guilty using her credit card to pay for your dress now."
"What?" I crane my neck at him in surprise. "You did what?"
"We used it to book the theatre's tickets too." He shakes his shoulder. "She is a charitable woman." Then a huge smirk invades his face. "Which reminds me..."
"Take this." He passes me his hookah again, spits in his gloves, and says, "This is going to be fun."
The Pillar stands and faces the crowd. Sitting right in the middle of the audience, the crowd is watching us from every direction.
"Sit down!" someone says.
"Ladies and morons of the Theatre Royal." The Pillar's welcoming hands masquerade his insults. The smile on his face is overly sincere, like those self-help lecturers. "Tonight isn't a normal night. It's the kind of evening remembered in history books. You know history, which only winners write, and forge it the way they like?"
Someone chuckles among the crowd. A few still demand he sits. A couple swear at him, pretty vulgar words you're not supposed to say in a theatre. And to my surprise, the stage's curtains hang half open.
"Are you part of the show?" a kid asks.
The Pillar nods. "So, like I said, ladies and monkeys, all you silly Wonderland lovers." Another couple of spectators chuckle. "Tonight is the night. We're here in the presence of an extraordinary woman." He points upward at the balconies. The Duchess' guards keep calm, but reach for their guns. The light technician, thinking the show has turned elsewhere, directs the spotlight at the balcony. That's where everyone is looking now. "The one and only Margaret Ugly Kent!" The Pillar's theatrical act deserves an Oscar.
"Is that really her middle name?" I hiss.
He dismisses me with a wave of his hand and talks to the theatre's orchestra. "This wasn't really the bang I was looking for." He looks annoyed. "This is the most important woman in Parliament."