THE PRESENT: INSIDE THE INKLINGS, OXFORD
“W hat’s going on with her?” Fabiola said. “What’s happening to Alice?”
“Not good,” Mr. Tick said, reading the paper, some unearthly publication called Newsweek . No, it was actually called Nextweek . “Tell her, Mrs. Tock.”
“Alice can’t find Jack,” Mrs. Tock explained.
“So?” Fabiola said.
“She can’t save him.”
“I don’t care about Jack. What about her Wonder?”
“Well, she can’t find that either.” Mrs. Tock seemed worried. Unlike earlier, when she had all the fun, now she knew if Alice died, they couldn’t get the keys.
“Good,” Fabiola said.
“Good?”
“As long as she can’t find her Wonder, she will die in the past.” Fabiola sat down, relieved.
“Really?” Mrs. Tock said. “You want her to die?”
“The Real Alice must die.”
“I thought you loved her,” Mrs. Tock said. “You’ve repeatedly helped her fight monsters.”
“Thinking she was a regular girl doing good in the world.”
“And letting her think she is Alice?”
“We’re all delusional.” Fabiola didn’t mind her blunt deflations. “If it serves the good cause, so be it.”
“And now you want her to die in her past, even though you know she may change and become good in the future? Aren’t humans always redeemable? What about absolution?”
“Don’t feed me the words I fed the world when I was in the Vatican,” Fabiola said. “Evil has to be cut from its roots.”
“Well, she still has a chance to live,” Mrs. Tock teased her.
“How so?” Fabiola stood up.
“She found the Pillar.”
“The Pillar? The day of the accident?”
“Yes.”
“The Pillar was useless that day,” Fabiola said. “His memory was wiped out a year earlier at the time.”
“Is that so?” Mr. Tick lowered his newspaper. “I don’t quite remember it, Mrs. Tock.”
“That’s because we’ve got a lot of things to remember. Hundreds of thousands of years of memory mess up our memories.”
“What happened to him?” Mr. Tick scratched his cantaloupe head.
“I think someone secretly fed him a string of Lullaby pills to put him to rest.” Mrs. Tock scratched her head as well, hoping to scratch a memory out of it. “I wonder who.”
“Maybe if you scratch my head, you will remember,” Mr. Tick offered.
“Thanks, dear husband, for allowing me to scratch your head,” Mrs. Tock said. “But I’m afraid if I scratch it, you’d lose one of your hairies and blame it on me.”
“Wise woman,” Mr. Tick said. “Remind me again, why did I marry you?”
“That was a long time ago.” She sighed. “I don’t even remember when.”
“Not even me,” he said. “But, I think I remember a big bang rocking this world that day.”
“That’d be our wedding bells, Mr. Tick.” Mrs. Tock patted him, turning back to Fabiola. “So anyways, even though Alice found the Pillar, she can’t make it, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Fabiola said. “At this point, the Pillar hardly remembered anything.”
“I’m disappointed. I really wanted to see the Real Alice live,” Mrs. Tock said. “I still can’t understand who was able to fool the Pillar into swallowing Lullaby pills. This has to be someone as devious as devils.”
“It was me,” Fabiola said. “I had to do it.”