"Don't worry, you won't grow taller," he says, as he wants me to slip the mushroom into my mouth.
Suddenly, I am more than uncomfortable with the Pillar's suggestion. I still don't trust him.
The Pillar gets the message, but says nothing. He lights up his mini hookah and takes an unusually long and tense drag, puffing it out. "I understand," he says. "If you don't trust me, I understand. Sincerely."
"Really?" I squint. Something is wrong. "You will give up, just like that?"
"Who said I gave up?" he asks as I feel suddenly dizzy. My knees wobble under me and imaginary birds begin tweeting in my ears. I fall to my knees, realizing too late that I've been sedated by the smoke from his hookah.
The world fades to black. The Pillar fooled me. I don't think I am ready for the morgue trip yet.
No explanation comes to my semi-numb mind right now.
Where am I?
My body is numb, enough to chain me in temporary paralysis. Each of my limbs is heavy enough that I don't bother lifting any.
Somehow, I am sure this will subside.
A slow train of memories arrives. It's slow but noisy and heavy, like a locomotive breath.
The Pillar sedated me, and all the kicks and screams in the world are of no use—for now. I will have to face wherever I am.
Shouldn't I wake up in the morgue and inspect the heads of the deceased kids?
As the heaviness in my body subsides, I reach for anything I can get hold of in the dark. The tips of my fingers collide with some kind of a plastic. It's wavy. I can't see it. My mind finally registers a fact: I am stretched on my back.
A surge of panic alerts my weakened body. It's so threatening that my numbness subsides. I start to kick my hands and feet in the dark as unreasonable claustrophobia overrules me. The plastic darkness opposes me in every direction, as if I am imprisoned in an elastic balloon.
I keep kicking and scraping against the surface of this darkness. I need to get out of it before I choke or die from the lack of breathing, but I can't cut through without a sharp tool.
Panic captures me. Until my fingers come across a metallic thing attached to the plastic.
A zipper.
The thought that hits my brain almost puts me back in paralysis. I think I know where I am.
Thin rays of yellow light seep through the plastic bag I am trapped in as I pull the zipper down. I reach out with my hands like the dead out of their graves. Finally, I wriggle myself out of the black plastic bag. I feel like a dying cocoon evolving into a butterfly—it reminds momentarily of the deceptive Pillar.
I straighten up on the table I am on—it feels like a table more than a bed—and I realize for certain where I am.
I'm actually in the morgue. I was tucked in one of those plastic bags the deceased end up in. A body bag. This is what the Pillar meant by a maximum-security morgue that's hard to sneak into. The madman tucked me in a death bag and slipped in among the dead.
Paralyzed on the table, I can't even comprehend my surroundings yet. I do notice the chilling temperature of the room, though.
"Breathe, Alice. Breathe," I whisper as I hug myself, since I am all I have on this side of life. And I thought my cell was the worst place in the world.
The cold creeps up my spine, fluttering like a winter breeze through my blue shirt and jeans. The cold almost bites at the back of my neck. Goosebumps prickle like devil's grass on my skin.
When I am about to move my legs to get off the roller bed I am on, my bare feet give in to numbness. I have no idea where my shoes are. I fight the stiffness in my back and bend over to rub my feet. As I do, I glimpse a rectangular piece of cardboard attached to a string wrapped around my right toe. I think it's called a toe tag. It's how a coroner or mortician identifies a dead person in the morgue. My heart almost stops. Why am I wearing this? I reach out to flip the toe tag so I can read it:
How can I be dead? The Pillar wouldn't go so far to scare me. Why would he do that, unless I was imagining all of this? How did I die?
The answer hits me like a freight train when I flip the card. Someone has written something in the back:
The morgue's floor is cold as ice. I am barefoot, and I still don't know why. Whoever toe-tagged me decided I don't need shoes anymore, that I should suffer against the cold floor.
I hop like a panicked kangaroo for a few seconds before I realize that I will eventually need some kind of shoes.
Rummaging through the plastic bag I came in, I find nothing. It feels awkward and unsettling searching through my own coffin-like bag of death.
Before my mind scrambles for solutions, my lungs screech from the cold. I cough so hard I am sure something will burst out of my lungs into the air. My back bends forward. My hand clamps to the steel table, preventing me from falling.
I cough again, my mouth agape it hurts so badly. The clothes I am wearing aren't helping against this freezing cold. It takes a hard effort to lift up my other hand, as if it's tied down to a weight.
My hand is faintly bluish. I shriek—then cough again.
I manage to straighten my back and then rub my hands together for warmth. I rub them on my body as well.
Then I hop like a kangaroo again. Amazing how much unexpected energy your body can exude when you're in danger.
It occurs to me that if I am not dead yet, it's only a few minutes before I freeze to death in here.
See? How could you freeze to death if you are dead already? Let it go. Confess your madness and it will all subside. Just do what you came here to do. Examine the dead kids' heads.
My inner thoughts freeze to the cold of the floor underneath me. I rub my body even harder and do more of my kangaroo dance.
I really need to find shoes now. I haven't looked hard. I need shoes—and a coat.
I try to rip apart a piece of the plastic bag so I can wrap it around my feet and body. But the bag isn't elastic enough. Of course not. It's durable enough to hold a dead person inside. Why would it cut easily?
I tilt my head. The cold room doesn't offer any visible solutions. It's a huge, rectangular room, reminding me of the corridor in the underground ward in the asylum. I take a long, cold breath to get some oxygen into my head. It hurts, but I need it to think clearer.
The floor is marble all around. The walls are buried behind the endless metallic drawers with corpses inside. There are only three bulbs in the entire place. One is hanging over my head, another a few meters away, and the third is a bit too far. I can't see it—I am too numb to walk that far.
The three bulbs are slightly shaking, as if huffed and puffed by an invisible wind.
Closing my eyes and clenching my teeth, I try not to think about the dead all around me. Thanks to the dim light, I can pretend they don't exist, like all the scary things in the night we dismiss.
The cold attacks my feet again, chilling through my spine. It's getting harder to force my eyelids open.
Seriously,
I keep walking as fast as I can in the room to get warmth into my body. I am actually limping now. It reminds me of the Pillar's Caucus Race; walking fast inside the morgue, knowing it will get me nowhere.
Watermelon Murders
Still tapping my feet to the cold ground, it finally occurs to me to check my jeans pocket for my mobile phone. I guess I was too panicked to look earlier—isolated living in the asylum does this too you; calling someone for help isn't the usual reaction for a person with a Certificate of Insanity.
I find the mobile and pull it out. I am surprised there is a signal inside the morgue. Thank God. With numb fingers, I dial the only number on my contacts.
No one picks up.
I hate those
My face reddens when the call ends. Some programmed woman's voice tells me that no one is picking up, that I should try later.
"He has to pick up!" I scream at her
"Well, sweetie. Let's try again," the woman chirps.
I almost throw away the phone, shocked by the woman's response. Isn't this supposed to be prerecorded?
But then I succumb to the madness, which means basically ignoring it and not giving it much thought. I push the button again, almost hurting my forefinger.
The Pillar has to pick up, or is he a figment of my imagination, too?
Finally, someone picks up and says, "Carroll's Cause for the Criminally Cuckoo. How can I help you today?"
It takes me a moment to realize this is the Pillar's cool, nonchalant, and all-mocking voice.
Once I am about to fire all anger at him, he interrupts me, munching on food. It's not that
"It's me, Alice!" I growl, and try to furrow my brow against the cold. I can't say my face went red, as it is still numb. I start tapping my feet against the cold floor again.
"Alice," he munches. "From Wonderland," he welcomes me, slowly sipping a drink from a straw. "Did you inspect the corpses yet?"
"Not yet." I am too chilled, too little blood flowing in my veins, a bit too numb to fire back or scream. "It's too cold." I rub my sides.
"Dead people usually are." He pops open a bag of snacks.
"I'm not joking. I am cold and will freeze in here." I begin to walk around again, looking for some kind of shoes again. "I know the toe tag is your doing; a sick prank from a sick mind."
"Toe tag?" More sucking and slurping.
The Pillar stops munching. "No? I don't know anything about that. I admit I sedated you in the school, but that was for the greater good. All in Britain's name."
"Then who did that to me?" Still looking for shoes, I don't have the nerve to argue about him sedating me now.
"My chauffeur sneaked you into the morgue as a corpse. It was the only way we could surpass the security system. He must have added a toe tag, but he never told me he'd write you died in a bus accident."
"I don't believe you," I say. "And I'm tired of your games." I rummage through a few weird-looking instruments on a table, metallic, scissor-like cutters. I can't even begin to think what they do with them. "Get me out of here before I freeze to death."
"You can't get out before approximately thirty minutes." The Pillar starts munching again. "A mortician will pick up your corpse after she receives a fake call from my chauffeur informing her your corpse has been misplaced, so we can get you out again. That's the plan."
"I will freeze to death in here. I need shoes and a coat."
"Why is that a problem?"
"The problem is I can't find any." I try my best to express my anger. The tightness of my face doesn't help much.
"If I were you, I'd roll out a corpse from the infinite drawers and fetch me a dead woman's shoe." He stops munching again, as if waiting for my reaction to his suggestion.
I don't hesitate. I walk back to the drawers, pull one out. The steel drawer is much heavier than I'd expected.
The corpse's smell isn't that bad. Unlike the corpses on the table, the ones in the drawers have been examined and cleaned. It's the corpse's sight that imposes a dreadful atmosphere upon me.
"Alice?" I hear him on the phone's speaker, but ignore him. I have to do this. It's just borrowing a dead man's shoe. We need to look out for each other, don't we, the living and the dead?
But then I am hit with an imaginary hammer on my head when I realize the corpses in the drawers don't have their clothes on. I let out another angry growl.
"No shoes?" the Pillar mocks me.
Too weak to even talk, I close my eyes, trying to argue with reason. Why is he doing this to me?
"To spare your breath, you'll not find clothes in the drawers," he says. "Corpses in the drawers had their autopsies already. You need to try the bags on the metallic roller beds. Those are the fresh ones. Yummy!" He bites into what I think is a greasy hamburger.
I walk silently to one of the death bags, not those marked with
I zip the bag and try the one next to it. A woman.