“The plague holds the one virus mankind can’t stand,” he began. “Revealing it now would spoil the impact of realizing what an awful world this is. But rest assured. Just right before the world really ends, I will tell you what it does to people.”
“So why are we gathered here?” another man asked. “You said you wanted us to help you with something.”
“Yes, I want you to find me a c...” Suddenly that migraine attacked him again.
Lewis swirled to the floor like a dying hurricane. It’d been so long since the migraine had attacked him this way. Long ago since Wonderland. His head was about to split open. He couldn’t take it.
His tongued curled inward. He was choking.
And as he did, he saw himself sinking into muddy ground. Deep down into a sea of mushrooms.
Aren’t we all?
“Tell me if the hallucinations increase to a point you’re going bonkers,” the cigar-smoking Pillar, acting like an older Indiana Jones, tells me.
But what am I supposed to tell him? That I just saw a playing card with legs running next to us in the mud? That when I asked it what it was doing, it told me it was ‘playing’ because apparently it’s a ‘playing card’?
No, I don’t tell him that. I pretend that never happened.
“In case I die, I need to know how come Lewis Carroll is a Wonderland Monster,” I say. “I am sure it’s impossible. I met him. He was the sweetest man in the world. I saw him leading the Inklings—which reminds me, why did you buy it for me?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He’s pulling a mushroom off its roots to clear a way. “That’s your new headquarters in your war against Black Chess. Not everyone has access to the asylum.”
“Which reminds me again.” I am just babbling whatever comes to mind to forget about the fact that I’m drugged. “Shouldn’t it be Black Chess who manufactured the Hookah of Hearts?”
“Not this time. It’s the Dodo Corporation,” the Pillar says. “And trust me, Black Chess wants to bring chaos to the word, but they don’t want to end the world. Who would they rule and manipulate if they killed everyone?”
Then we stop abruptly.
I take a moment, staring at the next obstacle in the road. Or is it just a hallucination of my mind?
I am looking at a man sitting on a desk in the middle of Mushroomland. He is writing feverishly and seems to suffer from a continuous headache.
I am staring at Lewis Carroll—a very shattered and older version of him now, not the one back in London.
Is that the next obstacle in the Mushroom Trail?
Glancing back and forth at the Pillar, I realize he sees this too. Is it possible both of us are hallucinating?
The man raises his head from the writing and stares at us. He smiles, but it isn’t a good smile. Not a Lewis Carroll smile.
Then he utters a question the modern world has been asking for more than a century. It’s sort of one of the most thought after mysteries of life. “Why do you think a raven is like a writing desk?”
“Is this real?” I ask the Pillar.
“I’m not sure,” The Pillar bites on his cigar.
“Aren’t you the one immune to the hallucinations?”
“Not entirely. I am rather sure Lewis Carroll is in London and not here.”
“Do you have the answer to his question?”
“Why a raven is like a writing desk?” He lets out some sort of confident pfff. “I’m one of the few who knows the answer.”
“So why don’t you tell him?”
Just before the Pillar answers me, another group of machine gun men slowly appears from behind the bushes. Those aren’t the laughing ones.
“You’re here to see the Executioner?” their leader inquires.
“No, we’re here to walk on mushrooms,” I retort. “Of course we want to see the Executioner, you cuckoo.”
The man grimaces, looking at me, anger about to steam out of his ears.
“Don’t bother.” The Pillar fakes a smile. “She has issues.” He spirals his fingers next to his head, indicating I’m mad.
“Issues?” the man says.
“She’s just been out of the most secure asylum in London,” the Pillar elaborates. “She ate her warden’s left ear. Then the director’s right ear. Then she ate the guard’s right hand, pulled the left off the guard next to him right off the bat. Plucked her fingers into a taxi driver’s nose until he sneezed to death, right before she bit a young man’s tongue off like a stretching pastrami. He looked very much like you, by the way.”
I wish I could deliver all my lines the way the Pillar does it. The machine gun men take an unconscious step back, steering away from me. The Pillar pulls me closer to him and pats my shoulder. I play along and tuck my thumb into my mouth, flickering my hallucinating eyes at them.
It’s funny how each one of us is in his own hallucination world at the moment.
“You will still need to answer a question to pass,” the man said. “Not the writing desk question, though.”
“Another puzzle.” I roll my eyes.
“Shoot,” the Pillar says. “Not the gun, but the question.”
“What do you do when you find a fork in the road?” the machine gun man says.
“Take the madder road immediately,” the Pillar says.
“Wrong answer.” The man is ready to shoot us.
Like a lightning strike I spit out the answer. “Take the fork and go find something to eat with it.”
The Pillar rolls his eyes now. It’s safe to say we’ve had some considerable amount of eye rolling in the past thirty minutes. It hurts.
“Right answer,” the machine gun man says.
The Pillar looks surprised.
I guess my hallucinations are up to par with their melancholic passwords. “What about the man on the writing desk? I thought that was a better puzzle.” I tell the machine gun man.
“What man on a writing desk?”
When I look, Lewis Carroll and his famous desk are gone. I glance back at the Pillar. He seems uninterested. “Let’s just move on.”
“One last thing,” the machine gun man says. “This is the last of the Mushroom Trail. Beyond the next few mushrooms, there is an open field.”
“Is that where meet the Executioner?” I wonder.
“That is where the drug cartels are in continues war,” the man says. “Where everyone dies within a few moments. So sober up.”
Carefully, the Pillar and I step closer beyond the mushrooms. Then we part a few smaller ones blocking the view. We could already hear the sound of war. The screaming. The shooting. The tanks rolling heavily on the ground.
Then we see it all.
“A war.” The Pillar’s cigar dangles from his lips. “So boring. I’ve seen better on CNN.”
But I don’t find it boring. It scares me to death. All the blood, gunfire, and screams. I need to find the Executioner and his damn coconut. How am I supposed to survive this war?
First, a bomb explodes a few feet away from me.
Then there is this flying Columbian dude air-paddling from the explosion in midair. He looks like he’s just been shot out of a cannon. A nearby helicopter finishes the dramatic masterpiece and chops off his head with its blades. The head flies off in midair again, lands closer to us, and starts rolling toward me.
“Does this head know it’s dead?” the Pillar comments.
Delirious, my feet are cemented in the mud. The Pillar pulls me closer, and we start running. Behind us, the helicopter crashes exactly where we once stood, right over that poor head.
Fire guns, wind, and shotguns are everywhere.
I run, pant, holding the Pillar’s hand. I am very much upset with myself. But I am not myself anymore. The mushrooms are messing with my head, and it’s hard to tell what is going on. All I know is that I need the Executioner’s coconut—as silly and preposterous as it sounds.
“Duck, Alice.” The Pillar pulls me down as a missile churns through the air, right into a Jeep.
“What are they fighting for?” I ask.
“They’re fighting over the throne of the mushroom empire all around the world. They grow it here, sell it for millions. But the question is who rules this jungle?”
“The Executioner, I suppose?”
“I thought so, too,” the Pillar says. “He was the main drug supplier in Wonderland, but it seems he can hardly get a grip on this real world.”
“So how do we find him?”
“I have a feeling I’m going to steal that Jeep with the dead men in it. It looks functional,” he says. “You don’t mind riding alongside the dead. Do you?”
We duck and run like scurrying rats along the fields, pushing our luck and hoping not to get shot by a wandering bullet or a missile.
I see a man on top of a missile, riding it like a banana boat, saying hooray!
Happens all the time, I tell myself.
“How come everyone enjoys murdering each other?” I ask the Pillar.
“Humankind, dear Alice, have enjoyed that sport since Cain and Abel.” He jumps into the Jeep, and I follow. “Luckily, killing is prohibited these days, unless you do it en masse. They call it conquering.”
“So I’m supposed to accept living in such a bloody world?” I shout against the maddening sound of war, then pull a dead body out of the passenger’s seat.
“No Alice, you’re supposed to outlive it,” The Pillar ignites the ramshackle Jeep and chugs through the mist of smoke and bullets.
“Stop that,” I protest, as the Jeep bumps over a few dead bodies. “Always trying to pose the human race as a bunch of lunatic apes who’ll never learn to love and live with one another.”
“In spite of this not being the time or place to have this conversation, I’d like to point out that advertisers pay tenfold for TV ads when the news is covering major war disasters around the world. Now duck before that bullet hits you and you make the news.”
I feel so dizzy. I can’t even pull out my umbrella and shoot at anyone.
Wait. Why do I suddenly feel so aggressive, wanting to shoot people? The mushrooms must be doing this to me.
“Hey!” The Pillar points at a dying soldier reaching out at us. He’s holding a letter in one hand.
Amidst the impossible killing fields, the Pillar detours closer to the soldier and pulls the letter from his hands.
“Send it to my family,” the soldier pleads. “Tell them I love them, and that I’ve buried over a hundred thousand dollars of drug money in the back yard.”
“Nah, I’m not taking that letter,” the Pillar says. “ You should have sent them an SMS. Twitter post? You know you can schedule those, right? Maybe schedule the to the day of your death?” The Pillar tucks the letter in his pocket. “Besides, who writes letters anymore? Die, you old-fashioned typewriter!”
I don’t comment because I’m not sure this is really happening.
But then something assures me I’m not hallucinating this war at all. Every bit of this is real. Someone has shot me in my left arm.
“Congratulations,” the Pillar says. “You can brag now that you went to war.”
“Why isn’t it hurting?” I stare at my bleeding arm.
“It’s just a scratch.” He is smiling broadly. “You’re not really hit. Let’s see if there is music in this car. Take the wheel.”
I take the wheel with my right hand because I can’t move my left arm.
Then Pink Floyd plays on the radio. Comfortably Numb is the song.
The Pillar tucks the cigar back into his mouth and continues driving like a tourist on safari watching the wildlife. I’m stunned at his ability to avoid bullets and missiles.
All until a tank bangs into our Jeep from the side.
As the Jeep rolls over, half of it under the tank already, I realize how much I’m drugged now. I need that coconut.
The world upside down doesn’t look much different from the normal world. Or maybe that’s how all fields of war look.
I lie on my back, listening to men jumping out of their Jeeps. They pull me up, grab me by my hands, never mind my achy, screaming left arm, and pull me toward their leader. The Pillar is pulled next to me.
We stop at one point and are ordered to raise our injured heads to stare at their leader.
I see a well-built man with a long scar on his right cheek sitting on top of the tank. He is overly sunburned. And of all things, he has his legs crossed and he is smoking a hookah atop of a mushroom in the middle of this war.
“What is a girl like you doing here in Mushroomland?” he says in a most foreign accent.
“I—” My eyelids droop as I am trying to stay awake. “I’m looking for the Executioner.”
The man stops smoking. “Is that so?” He rubs his chin. “And why would you be looking for him?”
“I need his coconut drink to survive the Mushroom Trail.” I can’t believe we’re talking with all this mess of killing still going on all around us.
“You walked the Mushroom Trail?” He doesn’t laugh or show emotion. I’ve rarely met a man I am so afraid of. He’s exuding a vague sinister personality I haven’t seen before.
“It’s a long story,” I say. “Please lead to me to the Executioner.”
“You know what they say about the Executioner?” He pulls out a Magnum .45, loads it, and then points it at me. “That you can meet him only once. You know why?”
I start to realize I am talking to the Executioner himself.
“Because you only look at me once, and then you have to die.” The Executioner aims his pistol at me with a smirk on his face. This time I think it’s real.
“Wait.” The Pillar wakes up from his fall. “Don’t shoot the girl. It’s me.”
The Executioner slowly turns his head. The Pillar is covered in dust, so it makes sense not to recognize him right away. But why would he recognize the Pillar in the first place? I am confused.
“Carter Chrysalis Cocoon Pillar!” The Executioner squints at the professor. “Is that you?”
“In the flesh.” The Pillar tucks what’s left of his cigar in his mouth.
I am baffled. I’m Alice’s all lost and delirious thoughts mixed in a bag of mushrooms and M&M’s.
The Executioner gets off his mushroom and stares at the Pillar with wonder. It might be my mistake, but the look in his eyes is that of a man fascinated with the Pillar. “Is that really you, Pillardo?”
Pillardo?
The Pillar mumbles something in Columbian, and the two men embrace like old friends.
“You know him?” Sorry, but I have to ask. I mean, what the mushy mushrooms is going on?
“Know him?” The Executioner raises an eyebrow. “Who doesn’t know Senor Pillardo, the most legendary drug lord of all time?”
He saw a man in his underwear with a baseball bat chasing his family out on the streets. Another maniac woman had gone into an unexplained episode of road rage, chasing her co-workers with her damaged car. The owner of Tom’s favorite soup shop had locked everyone inside, confessing to serving them frogs and now forcing them to drink his soup until they puked.
Tom watched the BBC’s TV host, and her crew abandon their camera and run away, leaving it to record all of the mayhem.
This must be the end of days, Tom thought. He hadn’t dared switch on the channel to take a look at what was happening in America or the rest of the world.
What troubled him deeply was everyone in Oxford had gone just as mad, which suggested his asylum was in danger now.
“Lock up the asylum!” Tom shouted at his guards. “And by that, I mean use the Plan-X system.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” the guard asked on the other side.
“I am sure. The time has come to lock every one of us within these steel walls inside,” Tom said.