"Oh thank you, little Alice!" Pablo cried. "A child could have made this! Why, that's exactly the effect I was hoping for. Only at the age of six-and-five-quarters are we truly at home with our fantasies! The artist, you see, must travel backwards in time. To become, once again, a child of dreams."

"But Mister Ogden," said Alice, "that's exactly what I want to do. To travel backwards in time. Please find a way out of this garden for Celia and me."

"A way out for Celia, you ask?" Pablo muttered. "But that's amazingly impossible! A terbot leaving the knot garden? Why, the snakes would strangle you both! It's the written rulings. No, no and no! Terbots are bound to the garden. Even my latest and greatest creation, James Marshall Hentrails himself, why even he is doomed to stillness once the snakes get hold of him. There's no way out of the garden for a terbot. That's the unliving truth."

"Pablo, why are you making such a terrible tennis racket?" asked Celia.

"It might look like a terrible racket," replied Pablo, "but really it's a guitar. Although, it does make a terrible racket."

"How so?" Celia enquired.

"Watch closely," Pablo answered, slotting the tennis racket into the outstretched hands of James Marshall Hentrails, and then flipping open the top of the sculpture's skull. "Now, all that Jimi needs is a little brainpower." Pablo opened up a drawer in his workbench, and reached in with a garden trowel, to dig out a large scoopful of thick, black soil. "Aha! My lovely beauties!" Pablo announced, shovelling the soil into the hollow of the terbot's head.

"Are there computermites in that soil?" Alice asked.

"Pablillions of them! The tiniest computermites in the whole world! My own invention. Watch closely..." Pablo closed up the skull with a loud and violent squelch, and then turned a switch on the terbot's neck.

Nothing happened.

James Marshall Hentrails made not a move.

"It takes the mites a while to warm up," Pablo apologized, with a sigh. "Maybe there's a wurm in his workings. Oh dear."

"Pablo, we really do need to get out of the garden," Celia said during another awkward pause; "Alice is so very desperate to get back home." Pablo was nudging at the elbows of James Marshall Hentrails, paying no attention to Celia's urgings.

"Alice and I have come from the past, and if we don't get home soon, it may be too late..."

"Too late?" Pablo murmured. "Too late for the past?" He turned away from his beloved sculpture for a second. "How can one be too late for the past?"

"Alice is a girl," Celia responded. "When was the last time you saw a girl?"

Pablo looked long and deep into Alice's eyes and then answered, "Years and years ago. Years and years! Not since the years before the Newmonia."

"But why should pneumonia cause such a lack of girls?" asked Alice.

"Newmonia!" Pablo screamed at Alice, "not pneumonia! You silly creature! There's no P in Newmonia."

"But the P is silent in pneumonia," Alice explained (holding her patience).

"Why can't you listen properly, Alice? The Newmonia is a terrible disease that allows animals and humans to get mixed into new combinations."

"Like Captain Ramshackle?" suggested Alice.

"Exactly like the Badgerman. You're one of the last of your kind, girl! So pure, so very pure. Keep a tight hold of that. If you are a real girl, that is?"

"How dare you?" Alice protested. "I'm real, I tell you. Why, I might well ask if you are a real butcher, as your sign outside proclaims? Because I suspect that you're not really a butcher at all."

"I used to be a real butcher," Pablo responded, "in my youth, but I became tired of simply cutting up creatures, so I became a reverse butcher instead."

"And what is one of those?" Alice asked.

"Can't you work it out, girl?" Pablo asked, whilst beginning to close up the stomach-door of James Marshall Hentrails. "A reverse butcher is an artisan of the flesh who reconstructs creatures out of their butchered parts."

"Wait a minute, Mister Ogden!" cried Alice (having noticed a certain tiny something within the sculpture's giblets), "please don't shut up Jimi's stomach just yet! I do believe that this is mine!" She reached into the soft, damp, warm interior of the giblets (shivering from the squelchiness!) to pluck free a small piece of jagged wood that rested just to the north of the liver and the kidneys. "This is a piece of my jigsaw zoo," Alice said, bringing the bit of wood into the light. It very much corresponded to the eyes and the beak of a chicken (although why the London Zoo should want to display a common domestic fowl was quite beyond Alice's understanding). She added the fourth and feathery item to the other three jigsaw pieces in her pinafore pocket.

"Maybe that's why Jimi Hentrails was so slow to come to life," Pablo pontificated. "He had a splinter in his stomach. That would surely slow him down." And indeed, at that very moment the sculpture did make a small attempt at life; his spindly limbs jerked into a spasm of stunted dance. "Alice, my dear girl!" Pablo cried. "You have cured my creation! How can I possibly thank you?"

Take me home," Alice replied immediately, "take me back to the past."

"To the past we are heading!" announced Pablo Ogden, working at some complicated levers that sprouted from the shed's floor. With the manipulation of these levers, a frightening number of iron cables started to move along a series of pulleys that were fixed to the shed's ceiling; from the pulleys the cables fed into an array of holes cut into the shed's floor. "Hold on tight, my friends!" Pablo shouted above the resulting clanking din.

And then the garden shed started to move!

The garden shed started to quiver quite haphazardly and Alice was flung to the floor as the wooden world of her present life lifted up into the air. Celia and James Marshall Hentrails were both thrown to one side as the shed elevated itself above the garden! "Whatever's happening?" screamed Alice, clinging desperately to the workbench.

"The garden shed is taking a little stroll, of course," replied Pablo Ogden, as he struggled with the ship's wheel, in order to swing the shed around. "The shed has grown her legs!" There was a trapdoor in the shed's floor with some small holes in it, through which a few drifts of smoke were rising. "That's the steam given off by the shed's legs," stated Pablo; "take a little peek, Alice." Pablo swung open the trapdoor and Alice peered through the gaping hole, only to see that far below her the garden was passing by at an ever-quickening pace!

"Oh my goodness!" cried Alice. (And well she might, for just at that very moment the garden shed lurched achingly to one side and Alice felt herself slipping through the trapdoor.) "Oh my double goodness!" Alice cried once again. (As well she doubly might, because now she was falling out of the shed!)

(And the garden was a long, long way down and down...)

Luckily, just as her body started this gardenwards journey into breath-gulping air, Alice felt a strong hand gripping itself around her ankle. She was now suspended upside down! from the lip of the shed's trapdoor and from this advantageous position she could see in full detail the legs of the garden shed: they were the legs of a chicken, albeit mechanized and grown to a monstrous size; the legs were steaming and stepping over the hedgerows. The garden shed really was walking! "So this is how Mister Ogden manages to get around the knot garden," Alice said to herself. "He doesn't get around it, he gets above it." Alice also saw various tools falling upwards past her from the trapdoor, including a hammer and a hacksaw. "And this is why I came across so many tools in the knot garden," she added to her upside-down self, "and this is how I found the hacksaw that enabled me to find Celia Doll." Alice also saw, in the upside-down far distance, Whippoorwill the very naughty parrot flying over towards an iron gate that marked the exit from the maze.