"Captain Ramshackle!" cried Alice. "One should not say such things!"

"You said it first!"

"I did not! I said faux pas! It's quite different; why, it's French, for one thing! Therefore it's much more polite!" Alice was here following her Great Aunt's instructions in etiquette. (Great Uncle Mortimer did eat an awful amount of radishes, remember?)

"In the future, Alice..." explained Celia, "there are hardly any words at all that cannot be said aloud. Why, you can even say --"

"Well I don't like the future," Alice cut in. "It's beastly, and I want to go home!"

"Sisters, sisters! This is not the smell of my netherness," said Ramshackle; "this is the smell of carryon gas, seeping into the box."

Alice screamed: "I don't want to be changed! I don't want to catch Newmonia! I want to be just me!" She nudged open the latch and began to push against the lid.

Oh dear! The box wouldn't open!

Alice pushed and pushed, but still the lid wouldn't open. It wouldn't budge, not an inch! "The Civil Serpents have locked us in!" she cried, as the rotten smell of carryons stenched up her nostrils. "Celia, quickly! We must pull your right-hand thigh-cupboard lever once again; perhaps your telescoping legs will break open the lid..."

"I'm afraid I can use each of my thigh-cupboards only once," was Celia's reply to that suggestion.

"We must open your left-hand thigh-cupboard then!"

"But that cupboard is to be used only in an extreme emergency."

"This is an extremely extreme emergency!"

"I'm not so sure it is, Alice," said Ramshackle. "Maybe if we all three of us pushed together, we could get out?"

So all three of them did push together, and lo and behold! The box wasn't locked at all, the Civil Serpents had merely placed something very heavy on top of it. This heavy something fell to the floor with a dull thud as the trio opened up the lid in order to peer (surreptitiously!) over the box's rim...

The laboratory was quite empty.

Alice (and then Celia in a pair of nervous brackets) ((and then Captain Ramshackle, in a pair of doubly nervous brackets)) climbed out of the experiment box. They all seemed quite unchanged by their adventure. "I do believe the carryon gas needs much longer than that to work," explained Ramshackle.

"Oh dear!" whispered Celia, as she noticed what exactly they had dislodged from the lid to the floor...

It was the corpse of Professor Gladys Chrowdingler! The Crow-woman's wings were now flapping lifelessly from either side of her eyes! Her sooty tail was sprouting from her lips! Her eyes were lifelessly peering from each of her knees!

"The professor has been Jigsaw Murdered!" cried Celia. "The Civil Serpents have reorganized her!"

And the laboratory wasn't quite so empty, because Alice saw a certain translucent whispering of fur rubbing against the professor's mixed-up body. Alice picked up the translucent whispering, gently, and began to stroke it. (Have you ever tried to stroke an invisible cat? I can assure you it's a very strange task; but if anybody could do it, Alice could, and Alice did do it.

For some almost unknown reason Alice was the only one of her party who could see anything at all of Quark, the invisible cat. The cat purred at being treated so kindly. "You'll have to find your own way in the world now, invisible puss-cat," Alice said, lowering the cat to the floor. Alice then turned to Captain Ramshackle. "What time is it, please?" she enquired of him. Ramshackle rolled up his left shirt-sleeve to reveal a little wrist-clock there. "It's almost exactly one o'clock in the afternoon," he answered.

"I therefore have only sixty minutes in which to find the tenth, spidery jigsaw piece," deduced Alice, catching hold of Celia's hand, "and then the eleventh parroty piece, and then the mysterious twelfth and final piece. Quickly, Celia... activate your automated speeding legs; back to the Town Hall of Manchester we must travel!"

"I'm coming with you," said Captain Ramshackle, trying to climb aboard the doll's already moving body. But Alice pushed him back gently. "This is my task alone, Captain," she informed him. "Don't worry, I shall try my very best to save you from the Serpents..."

It took Alice and Celia only a single few minutes to journey the distance from the Uniworseity to the Town Hall.

Alice's first problem was exactly how to get inside the Town Hall, without the Civil Serpents knowing she was there. To this end she had instructed Celia to deliver her to the side courtyard of the building, where a small door marked with a sign admitting DELIVERIES ONLY! was guarded by the unravelling eightfoldness of an Octopusman. This bouncing individual waved his collection of long legs around in a dance of clinging suckers, squelching out with a soapy voice, "What has this young girl to deliver, I wonder?"

"I'm delivering the new mascot for Mrs Minus's election campaign," invented Alice, pushing Celia forwards.

"A vote for Mrs Minus", announced Celia, in her most political voice, "is a vote for Subtraction!"

"Let me check this delivery," over-emphasized the Octopusman; at which he blubbered into a brass mouth-horn fixed to the delivery door's interior passage. A slithering voice answered back to him, and then the Octopusman said to Alice, "You may (carefully!) enter..."

So it was that Alice and Celia gained a careful entrance to the Town Hall of Manchester. It was very echoey and also very cold inside those hallowed corridors; it was a stonely warren of wonderings through which the pair of them echoed like copies of themselves. The strangest thing of all about the Town Hall was that they met absolutely nobody at all along their way!

"I always imagined that a Town Hall would be a very busy building," echoed Alice.

"Perhaps they do their business in secret?" echoed Celia.

Eventually Alice and Celia passed under a sign reading THE PRUNING DEPARTMENT to enter a large echoing room of emptiness.

"Where should we head for now, Celia?" echoed Alice, pondering upon a signpost that sprouted directions for THE TREASURING DEPARTMENT, THE WHISPERING DEPARTMENT, THE TORTURING DEPARTMENT, THE TAXING DEPARTMENT and THE SLEAZING DEPARTMENT.

"I suspect that the department we're seeking won't be signposted," echoed Celia. "We know that the Civil Serpents keep their evidence in the cellar of the Town Hall, so maybe it's THE PLUMMETING DEPARTMENT we need to find?"

"But if a department isn't signposted, how can we find it? Oh, if only I had a single clue!"

At which Celia suddenly cried, "Alice! Look at the floor!"

Alice looked at the floor. "My goodness," she echoed; for the marble floor they were standing on was carefully tiled into exactly twelve over-large jigsaw pieces! And each of them contained a mosaic picture of each of the creatures that Alice was searching for. Miss Computermite was depicted, as was Captain Ramshackle and the snakely Under Assistant they had met in the knot garden and the chicken-thing they had found in James Marshall Hentrails's automated stomach. These last two floor-pieces were painted over with vicious black crosses. ("I wonder what those black crosses mean?" wondered Alice.)

Also pictured on the floor were the Zebraman who had helped Whippoorwill across the busy road, and the trumpeting Snailman called Long Distance Davis. The next four pieces showed Whiskers MacDuff, the Catwoman; the Fishman they had found dead in the librarinth; Professor Chrowdingler and Quentin Tarantula the Spiderboy whose tinier piece they were currently searching for. All four of these last floor-pieces were marked with the sinister black cross.