MUSHROOMLAND, COLUMBIA
M y feet drag me through the Mushroom Trail.
Never mind my hallucinations. Never mind that I am going to die if I don’t get that drink from the Executioner’s coconut. I am just a girl trekking her way through a muddy mushroom-infested world, hoping to make sense of it all.
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 world, 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?”