I t 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 nom nom nom sound. It's brauch brauch brauch, deliberately provoking me. "Hello," he says. "Who's this?"
"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. Krrr krawww.
"The one that says I died in a bus accident." I keep looking for something for warmth. A mortician must have left a coat behind or something.
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 about 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 that 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.
Dead or mad, what would it be? I realize I'd prefer being mad.
"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 Watermelon Murders , as I don't want to mess with evidence.
I pull the zipper open, only to realize the one I chose is a man's corpse. What can I say? I am picky. I want a woman's shoe, and I want it my size.
I zip the bag and try the one next to it. A woman.
Now, these are the smelly, rotten corpses I expected. Dead, stinky, and bloodstained. I am too exhausted to even care.
The woman's shoes turn out to be too small for me. I go back and pick up the man's shoes. My size. Being picky isn't helping when you're trapped in a morgue.
I put on the shoes, enjoying the warmth in my feet—a dead man's warmth. Oh, the mad world outside. I realize I want to go back to the asylum again, a tear about to squeeze out of my eyes in this terrible cold.
"Reebok or Nike?" the Pillar teases.
I don't answer him. Instead, I rip off the dead man's duster jacket and put it on. If I am blunt enough to put on a shoe, I better put on all that will save my life.
"I am ready." I tighten the dead man's bloody duster around me, my feet not jumpy anymore. "I came here to accomplish something." I take a deep breath, fooling my mind into thinking I am wearing Cinderella's slippers and a beautiful wedding dress. "Should I open the dead kids' bags and look for clues now?"
"I thought you'd never ask." The Pillar sighs. "I'd do it as fast as I can if I were you. Like I said, a mortician will soon arrive to collect you, so you'd be sent to another morgue. She'd need to find you intact inside the bag you came in."
"Yeah. You said that before." I've already pulled the zipper of the bag of one of the victims. "Thirty minutes."
"That was thirty minutes when you arrived at the morgue, Alice." He sips and then burps. "You only have twenty minutes left, or your cover will be exposed. Time is slipping away."