ENTRANCE, RADCLIFFE LUNATIC ASYLUM, OXFORD
T he Pillar's mousy chauffeur picks me up from the asylum's main gate. Instead of arriving in the black limousine, he's driving an ambulance. Two guards from the asylum escort me to the back door as if I am the most dangerous girl in the world.
I still don't get why an ambulance. Maybe to camouflage me being transported for inspection in another hospital.
The guards snicker as they push me into the empty back of the vehicle. I glimpse the words written on the back doors before they close on me: The Carroll Cause for the Criminally Cuckoo .
Now I am sure I am going to see the Pillar soon.
Once the chauffeur takes off, he requests I sit next to him in the passenger's seat. This is the first time he talks to me. His voice is thin and annoyingly low. It's like he has a tight throat or something. No wonder he doesn't talk much. I watch him comb his thin whiskers while he drives—sorry, but I refuse to call those hairies on his face a mustache.
"Where is the Pillar?" I demand.
"I am driving you to him." He hands me a mobile phone for communication. It's a new one with a fairly big screen. He pushes a button on it to show me a YouTube video.
I feel like a spy on a new mission, watching the latest report.
The YouTube video's purpose is for me to catch on. I learn all about the Stamford Bridge crime. The head stuffed into a football. No doubt this is the Cheshire's doing. The phrase "Off with their heads" seems like one of his messages. Then I watch recorded local news about a man named Roman Yeskelitch who found another head in a watermelon he just bought.
I realize why I am out now. There is a new Wonderland crime happening out there, and I am needed. I can't deny my excitement. I am not going to lie.
Rolling down the window, I stretch out my hands like a child and sniff the day's cold air.
A few minutes later, the chauffeur stops in front of a "Richmond Elementary School." At least, the school bears a coherent name. I have no idea how no one comments on the name of the vehicle we're in, let alone why we're arriving in an ambulance.
"Why are we stopping here?" I ask.
The chauffeur points over my shoulder. When I look back, an old woman in thick glasses appears out of the school's main gate.
"You must be Alice." She approaches with welcoming sparks in her eyes. Her attitude screams "teacher," one of those kind-hearted and very talkative few in every middle-grade school.
I step down reluctantly. The woman pulls me into her arms, kisses me on the cheek, hugs me, and tells me how Professor Pillar never stops mentioning me.
She ushers me into the school, telling me Professor Pillar is so kind to agree to lecture her kids. A lecture about the virtues of going after one's dreams. It turns out he told them I am the optimum example of achieving my dreams.
All I do is nod. The woman will eventually send me to the Pillar, wherever he is.
I want to tell her she has a dangerous serial killer in her school. I want to ask if she'd never heard about Pillar the Killer. But she doesn't stop talking, so I have no room to even comment.
Finally, she departs, leaving me at a corridor leading to a few classes. She tells me the school management preferred to give the Pillar all the privacy he needed in the classroom.
The word "classroom" bothers me. I ask how many children he has with him in there. The teacher nods with the happiest smile ever and claps my hand between hers before she says her prayers and blessings, still enamored by the presence of one of the country's most renowned professors. All of this without telling me how many children. She tells me how kind it is that a man of the Pillar's caliber visits the children and how happy they are about meeting with such an idol.
"Do you happen to know he's been convicted..." I can't help it.
"Of murder?" She laughs and waves a hand in the air. "Professor Pillar was so kind to explain the misunderstanding. Of course, there is the other 'Pillar the Killer' who is locked away in a sanitarium. This kind man in the classroom has nothing to do with it."
"How so?" I am curious enough to blow my cover.
"Ah, dear. I know you're testing me now. You know it was a case of identity theft. The madman used the honored professor's name. He told me all about it. Besides, how can a madman ever escape a sanitarium?" She laughs again.
I can't argue with her, actually. I myself am not supposed to be out of the asylum. I think the brilliance of my cover is that I am not expected to be walking the sane world. "And why would a madman visit a school and lecture kids if he'd escaped the asylum?" I am thinking out loud, trapped inside the logic he fed to the poor woman. It's scary how the change of a word or two can twist any truth into a lie.
I pat the woman and thank her, turning to walk the corridor. A few empty classes away, I find an occupied one. When I peek in through the glass in the door, I don't see children flying paper planes or practicing all kinds of chaos in the absence of real teachers. Instead, I see them all building things. Some kind of Lego structure, except they are putting together pieces of a few hookahs.