Wonder

I roll my eyes and stay silent. I think we’re all waiting for the lecture room’s door to open. There is a bulletin board that talks about the Pillar’s theories on insanity. It basically spreads the idea about the world going nuts. It also promotes hookah smoking.

A few professors, wearing ties and smoking pipes, pass through the corridor. They stare at us, Wonderland believers, as if we’re parasites. One of them mentions the committee’s disgust with the Pillar’s ways, wondering how the university permits him to gather those teenagers and poison their thoughts.

Then the doors open.

The girls compete to be first inside. I wait for the clatter to subside and follow in. The lecture hall is almost full, so I resort to a lonely bench in the last two rows, and watch the Pillar enter.

My plan is to wait for a chance to approach him and talk him into helping me with finding Jack. But my plan is thrown out of the window when I take a better look at the professor.

How could this be?

The vicious serial killer is nothing but a nerdy professor like I have seen before.

Chapter 66

Professor Pillar wears a multicolored jacket too short at the waist. It’s battered and probably hasn’t been washed since Wonderland. His trousers are pink, too large, and he wears flip-flops. His eyes hide behind thick glasses with black frames. Glasses that desperately need wiping. The man stutters when he welcomes his students. He has a tic of adjusting his glasses whenever he says something. For God’s sake, the Pillar blushes when a girl compliments him.

I sit, mouth agape, unable to fathom what’s going on. How is this going to help me? I suppress a shriek when he mentions his idol is Indiana Jones.

I spend the lecture in a terrible kind of awe, waiting for him to finish. I need to go talk to him. Wake him up.

When he is done, all I have left is seven hours. I slither through the crowd and pull him by the arm. “Professor!”

“Yes?” He adjusts his glasses. “How may I help you, kiddo?”

“I need to talk to you.”

His eyes dart sideways. “Aren’t we already?”

“In private,” I whisper.

His eyes widen. He blushes and worries. Says nothing.

“It’s important,” I whisper. “I’m Alice.”

“Alice?”

“I’m the Real Alice you’re looking for.” I grit my teeth.

He backs away, suspiciously sca

“We need to talk alone.” I pull him back again. “I need your help.”

“Who are you?” He stops, irritated now.

It’s going to be hard to explain things to him among all those girls. Then I remember seeing a poster out in the streets of the upcoming Star Wars movie. It gives me an idea. “I have tickets for the next Star Wars. Front row. Premiere day.”

His eyes widen again. Immediately he excuses himself and pulls me into his office. He locks the door behind us, gets behind his desk, and glares at me. “Is Darth going to be there?”

Really? I fist one hand. Is this really happening, or is he making it up?

I rap my hand on the desk and lean forward as he slumps back in his seat. “Look, whoever the Jub Jub you are now, I’m Alice Pleasant Wonder. Mary A

The Pillar sinks deeper into this chair, shielding his face with his arms. The look on his face is priceless. He stares at me and says, “Is the hookah you’re smoking that good?”

Chapter 67

THE PRESENT: INSIDE THE INKLINGS, OXFORD

“What’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.”

Chapter 68

THE PAST: OXFORD UNIVERSITY

For a whole hour I keep pushing the Pillar to the edges. Until something happens. A headache so severe he drops to the floor, just like Lewis Carroll did a million times. I wonder if this is the moment when another Carolus surfaces out of the Pillar.

But it doesn’t happen that way.

“I think I remember something. But I’m not sure what.”