"I surmise", echoed and logicuted Celia, "that the black crosses mean that the victim has already been murdered. This is why the Serpents call this room THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT."

"But that means that Pablo Ogden's automated guitar-player has been jigsawed!" echoed Alice.

"That's correct. And Pablo is going to be ever so angry about that."

"But the Under Assistant snake's picture is also black-crossed. Why should the Civil Serpents want to Jigsaw Murder one of their own kind?"

"Perhaps he was a traitor to the cause?" echoed Celia. "Perhaps the Under Assistant had decided the means of murder did not justify the end?"

(Once upon a writing time I had considered describing to the reader exactly what the jigsawed body of a snake would look like, but picturing that victim's transformed body became quite a problem to me. I mean to say, how can you possibly jigsaw a snake? There aren't enough bits on it to move around. I suppose you could put the head where the tail was, and the tail where the head was, but surely that would only make a snake pointing in the opposite direction! In the end I gave up; the reader must imagine it alone.)

Alice was busily scanning the floor for the last two pieces. "Look, Celia!" she cried. "There's a rendition of Whippoorwill himself! The Civil Serpents want to Jigsaw Murder Great Aunt Ermintrude's parrot! I simply cannot allow that to happen! But I wonder where the twelfth jigsaw piece can be lying?"

"I think we must be standing on the twelfth and final piece," Ceilia suggested. Alice and Celia then looked downwards to find out whose image they were standing on...

But there was only a hole beneath them! A certain omittance of floor!

Oh no! It's THE PLUMMETING

DE...

PART...

MENT!

Alice screamed out Celia's name as they fell into the yawning gulf of an ellipsis in the marble...

"Ce...

li...

a...

!

!

!

Alice landed (with a soft plump!) upon a gigantic bed of mattresses. "This is quite the softest thing I've ever landed upon in all of my adventures!" Alice observed to herself, as she bounced up and down. She was so comfortable with her new world, until she realized exactly where she was...

Snakes alive!

Alice was in the cellar of the Town Hall, and her soft bed of mattresses was really a vast seething ocean of Serpents, who were continuously unknotting and reknotting themselves into new configurations. Alice hopped from one foot to the other, trying to keep her balance!

The cellar stretched out for miles and miles and miles, and the serpents filled every single inch of every single mile. Alice had heard of sea-serpents before, but never had she heard of a sea of Serpents: and now here she was actually afloat upon such a thing! Far above her Alice could see the tiny jigsaw-shaped hole in the ceiling through which she and Celia had fallen. Celia was nowhere at all to be seen, but Alice didn't even have time to call out her Automated Sister's name, because just then, the snaking floor beneath her started to move!

Suddenly Alice was riding along on top of the twisting mass of Civil Serpents! Alice was a serpent-surfer!

Eventually, she was carried towards the very centre of the cellar, where the gigantic head of a hideously malformed snake thrust its way upwards from the wriggling maelstrom. This monstrous reptile had glistening black slits for eyes; its long snout ended in a pair of jaw-like doors which slowly hinged open to let slip a dangling rope of thick saliva; two spears it had for fangs, sharp and to the point.

"Good afternoon. My name is Alice," said Alice, curtseying, and crossing her fingers. "Are you the Supreme Serpent?"

The snake flickered out an unrolling red carpet of a forked tongue. This bifurcated implement changed Alice into an Alish, in a splash of sibilant hissingnesses. "Alish, we meet at lasht!" the Serpent sprayed, and then spittled and spattled out this rain of rhymes:

"Well I'm trying to enladder your meaning, Mrs Big Snake," Alice answered, "but you seem to be rather unsure of which kind of snake you are!" To which the bloated Serpent replied with one final hissing verse:

"According to my lessons," stated Alice, "there were only a pair of boas allowed aboard the Ark. Are you saying that a third boa snake crept into Noah's cargo?"

"That extra Sherpent eshcaped from the Garden of Eden," answered the Supreme Snake, "and from there he shlithered aboard the Ark. It was Shatan himshelf in shcaly dishguishe."

"Satan was a stowaway on Noah's Ark?" Alice shuddered.

"Shatan shurvived the flood of your little god by hiding in the water closhet of the Ark. Forty daysh and forty nightsh of torture did he shuffer until he could eshcape to plague mankind onsh more. Shatan Sherpent rulesh Shupreme!"

But Alice wasn't listening. "Why do you keep putting an H after every S?" she complained. "I'm getting covered in your spittle!" (She wouldn't usually have been so impolite, but the shower of snakely saliva was actually burning her skin!)

"It'sh a shpeech impediment I have," replied the Serpent with an angry flick of her tongue, before continuing with her story. "We Shivil Sherpentsh are the children of that illishit cargo. We are the mosht Shupreme Sherpent!"

"I thought Mrs Minus was trying to become the Supreme Serpent?"

"You don't become the Shupreme Sherpent; you become a mere coil of the Shupreme Sherpent. We shnakes are the leadersh. There ish only one Sherpent. We are Leviathan! We are the World Shnake! The Bashilishk!"

By this time Alice was more or less smothered in snake juice and her skin was very nearly aflame! But this discomfort didn't stop her noticing the small piece of jagged wood impaled upon the Serpent's left fang. "That must be the spider piece from my jigsaw!" Alice said to herself, "but how can I possibly steal it back? I doubt if even the Lord's Prayer would work this time; for what single poem could possibly put such a fearsome snake to sleep?"

"Little Alish..." the Serpent said with a lishp and an ellipshish, "I have an all-sheeing eye. I have followed your progresh through thish tale. I have sheen you hunting down cash piesh of the jigshaw. I have sheen you uncovering evidensh of my mishtakes with the Newmonia fever. I wash only trying to make thish world a better world! You musht have realished how absholutely random shoshiety wash becoming? I only wanted the people to conform to the rulesh! Ish that shuch a crime? Sho I fed the Newmonia germ to them all, hoping to make followersh out of them all. Ish it my fault that the exshperiment went wrong? And can you blame myself and my Contortium, Alish, for trying to cover it up with the Jigshaw Murdersh?"

"Yes, I can blame you," answered Alice. "I blame you for everything!

At this accusation, the Supreme Serpent snapped her jaws down and all around Alice. Alice was gathered up into the giant mouth; the twin spears were pricking into her skin! Alice (in her final moments) managed to wriggle free the spidery jigsaw piece from the left-hand fang. And then she was swallowed whole!

Down, down and down! Along, along and along! Around, around and around! Alice had no idea that the insides of a snake could have so many twistings and turnings. Being swallowed was making her quite dizzy, but this didn't stop her from carefully adding the spider's jigsaw piece to the other nine in her pinafore pocket. "What a strange coincidence!" she said to herself whilst being further ingested. "Only a few hours ago I swallowed a wurm, and now I'm being swallowed by a snake! The future is filled with writhing!"