“I’d like to try,” the Pillar says. “I burned my plane with my pilot in it, after all. I have no means of going back to where I came from, so I have no choice but try or die.”
“What’s the Trail of Mushrooms?” I hiss in his ear.
“It’s a pilgrimage. A road that has to be passed among the mushrooms,” the Pillar whispers, not looking back at me. “We have to take it if we want to meet with the Executioner.”
“And why is he called the Executioner?”
“He’s a Wonderlander who used to work for the Queen. Remember that scene in the Alice books when the queen orders him to cut off the Cheshire’s head and he argues that you can’t cut a head that’s disappearing?”
“Oh, yes, although most people would forget about him,” I say. “But he didn’t look scary to me.”
“Like most of the other monsters, he turned into a beast after the Circus, except that he works on his own, and doesn’t like any of the Wonderlanders much. Now shut up and let me speak with those madmen.”
“Here is something for you,” one of the men says. “We’re sending you a man who’s been trying to pass the Mushroom Trail.”
“I thought most men die from the dangers of the trail. Either die or make it to the Executioner.”
The men laugh again. “Well, this one ate a lot of mushrooms and lost it, so we keep him for entertainment purposes.”
We stare at a half-naked and skinny man barely straightening his back as he walks toward us. He is old, skinny, and disoriented.
“Why is he so unstable?” The Pillar asks.
“He thinks he is walking the rope.” A man muses from afar.
We wait for the man to arrive.
“Nice job,” the Pillar plays along. “I’ve never seen a man walk a rope like that.”
“I’m not walking the rope,” the scruffy man retorts. “I’m being careful while walking. Can’t you see I’m a bottle of milk?”
I am going to burst out laughing.
The Pillar pushes the man to the ground. “I guess I spilled the milk now.” He raises his head at the men afar. “Listen, I have no time for games. Let me walk the trail to meet the Executioner. I will take my chances.”
Silence hovers all over Mushroomland, except for the faint rattling of grass.
One of the men approaches us.
Slowly, he shows up. Scarred, wasted, a muscular giant with a machine gun.
Normally, I would be worried, but I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I want to laugh even more now.
The man flashes his gun toward the Pillar. “I’ll let you pass,” he says in a foreign accent. “If you tell me the password.”
“There is no password.” The Pillar steps up to him.
“Of course there is.” The man nudges the muzzle of his machine gun against the Pillar’s chest. “Can you do division?”
“As in mathematics?”
“Yes, but not the stupid real life mathematics. The Lewis Carroll mathematics.”
This is when the need to laugh ends. How do these men at the other side of the world know about Lewis Carroll? Not just that. The man is about to tell us a Carroll puzzle to solve?
“Only a few people are allowed to see the Executioner. They all are capable of answering this question,” the man says.
“I’m listening.” The Pillar and I await the puzzle.
“In mathematical Wonderland terms, what do you get when you divide a loaf by a knife?”
Another Lewis Carroll puzzle. Ugh.
That’s all that comes to mind, and I have no idea why I am thinking this. Staring at the man with the machine gun I should act more mature and responsible, but I still have this strange feeling; I just want to burst out laughing like him.
“I don’t quite remember this,” the Pillar says. Is that possible, a puzzle he doesn’t know of?
“It’s simple mathematics,” the man says. “Wonderlastic Mathematics, if I may say so.”
“Look,” the Pillar says, “we just want to pass through.”
“No can do.” The machine gun man roars with laughter again, followed by the same mockery from a few others, farther beyond the mushrooms. It’s the kind of pretentious laugh all cartoonish evil villains have in movies. “Or I will shoot you like this man.” He points at the man on the floor who thinks he is a bottle of milk.
Then something horrible happens.
Something that makes living in this world too hard to understand. The machine gun man shoots the man on the ground, blood spilling all over the mushrooms around us.
The Pillar fakes a smile.
I try not to pee my pants. Only for a second. Then I see the men take a selfie with the dead man.
The Pillar’s face tenses, as if telling me to hold it together.
But I can’t. I am scared mindless.
Then something even stranger happens.
I burst into laughter. The kind of laughter that hurts in the stomach and makes it harder to listen to what others are saying.
The Pillar stares at me with fiery eyes. He’s even tenser now. I haven’t seen him this angry at me before. “Hold yourself together.”
“Why?” I barely mouth the words between my hiccupping episodes of laughter. “I feel good. Really good. Tararara!”
“I get it. It’s the mushrooms,” the Pillar leans over and whispers. “They affect your brain, like I told you. But you seem to be too sensitive to the effect.”
“Mushrooms!” I find myself hailing. I grab one and give it a big smoochy kiss. Then hug it. Then snuggle it.
As I do, I see the stars in the sky have turned into diamonds. So awesome!
“She’s not my daughter.” The Pillar purses his lips. He’s pissed at me. I know it. But you know what? I love the mushrooms’ effect. Because I don’t freakin’ care. “Don’t pay attention to her.”
“I’m beginning to lose my patience,” the machine gun man says. “You don’t know the password, and your daughter is a lunatic.”
“I told you she isn’t my daughter,” I hear the Pillar say while I’m trying to catch a diamond from the sky. “And I don’t know the answer to your puzzle. Divide a loaf by a knife? What kind of mathematical question is that?”
“Wrong answer.” The man is about to shoot the Pillar while I’m chasing stars.
This is when I find myself standing before the Pillar to protect him. “You will not shoot my father!” I have no idea what I am saying, or why I am saying it. It’s strange that in the middle of my hallucination I care for the Pillar.
“Tell her to move, or I will shoot you both,” the machine gun man warns.
Then another totally bonkers thing happens. This time it’s too insane to swallow.
“Tell you what? You look like you’re itching to shoot someone today,” the Pillar says, pushing me away toward the man. “Why not shoot her, and let me pass?”
Suddenly, I am two feet away from the machine gun itself, unable to determine if what I just heard was part of my hallucination or for real.
My attempt to turn back and confront the Pillar goes out the window when the machine gun man decides he’s had it with me.
He shoots me straight in the chest.
All in all, the Queen’s men and women were making sure the world was going more and more insane.
“Well, I’m not satisfied,” The Queen pouted. “More. More. More. I want every child to become an orphan. Every mother to become childless. Every father to lose his family. I don’t care if it’s contradictory. Just find a way to do it.” She strolled all over the place. “I want fascism. Oh, I love that. I want every human to hate another human for being different. Not just color or nationality. I want those with crooked noses to hate those with round noses. Those who have mustaches to hate those who don’t. Do you understand?”
Margaret nodded and scribbled something down in her notebook:
Suddenly, there is this aching pop in my ears.
“I know the answer!” I raise a hand like a student in a class.
The pop in my ears blew off the pressure in my head. The effect of the mushrooms all around me, I guess. I am back in the real world.
Running my palm all over my chest, I realize I wasn’t shot. Not with marshmallows or real bullets.
Sneaky mushrooms.
“That’s some wickedly mad daughter you have here,” the machine gun man tells the Pillar. “So what’s the answer? I don’t have all day.”
“In Carrollian terms, if you divide a loaf by a knife you get,” I say, “bread and butter.”
“Right answer!” the machine gun man cheers.
The Pillar raises an eyebrow at me.
“What?” I shake my shoulders. “It’s lame, but it’s Lewis Carroll. And don’t ask me how I know. I just remembered it. I think the real question is how those lowlife gangsters use Lewis Carroll’s puzzles as passwords.”
“Shut your mouth, girl.” The machine gun man is provoked. “You and your father are good to go.”
“About time,” the Pillar sighs, grabbing my hand.
“You’ll meet other gangs on the Mushroom Trail. Good luck with that.” The machine gun man says behind us.
I am trying my best to stay focused as the mushrooms grow bigger all around me. “You’re sure of this Executioner we’re risking our lives for?”
“I’m sure. He definitely knows who cooked the plague.” The Pillar clears the way through the thick mushrooms. “Can’t you see what the mushrooms are doing to you already?”
“Why aren’t you as affected, then?”
“The substance I’ve been smoking in my hookah for years. It gives me immunity.”
“You sound like you’ve been preparing to come here for a long time.”
“Sort of.” The Pillar chugged through the darkness. “I’d stop asking questions if I were you. The mushrooms’ effects aren’t just in your brain. It’s like a sleeping poison. If you don’t drink from the Executioner’s special coconuts in less than an hour, you’ll...”
“I will what?” I fold my drugged arms before me.
“You will die, Alice. Why do you think no one outlives the Mushroom Trail unless they meet the Executioner?”
Lewis closed the church’s door behind him, a smirk stretching from cheek to cheek.
He turned around, walking to the podium while his followers clapped their hands.
“We love you!”
Lewis got to the podium and turned to face his followers. He looked terrible. He hadn’t slept for days, and that headache was killing him.
“I-I kn-know you all have it in your heart. A good thing, that is,” he began. His voice was soothing and relatable. He’d used to lure tens of children with it in the past. Sometimes he imagined his voice seeping through the paper of his Alice in Wonderland books. “It’s not an easy task to believe in the end of the world like you do.”
“The world has to end!” an old woman with a cane spat out.
“It’s about time!” another middle-aged man cheered.
“I know. I know,” Lewis said. “Those people outside have no idea what’s happening to them. First they didn’t believe me when I told them about the plague. Then they couldn’t deny it when they saw its effect on everyone who had bought the Hookah of Hearts last year. And trust me, this is only the beginning.”
“We’re curious, Lewis,” the old woman said. “You say you’ve been alive all these years. That you were imprisoned in Wonderland. We get that. But what does this plague do to people? Why do they hate each other so much now?”
Lewis smiled inwardly. As if I am going to tell you.