"I'm icy Alice," replied Alice; "and who are you?"
"My name is Doctor Sniffer," the bloodhound replied sniffingly. "I am the Chief Examiner of Corpses. What are you doing standing so close to my next job of work? And why is the body uncovered?"
"I was only being curious," answered Alice, quite truthfully.
"Curiosity killed the cat," growled Sniffer, stepping forwards to examine the Catgirl's corpse for tampering. "I trust you haven't been too curious?"
"Of course not," replied Alice (not so truthfully). "I was only trying to work out the reason for the Catgirl's... that is to say... the reason why she had to die..."
"That's my job, young girl! And you're hindering my examination!"
Alice stepped back then and watched with trepidation as Doctor Sniffer snipped some locks of ginger fur from the body of Whiskers MacDuff. These locks he then examined under a microscope. (Luckily he never bothered to examine the contents of the small linen bag.) "This is such a mysterious case," Sniffer gruffed after a few moments. "We cannot find out exactly how the victims died, only that their bodies are in some way strangely jigsawed. The prime suspect is one Captain Ramshackle, but he seems to have escaped us. Confound it! But no matter, all I have to do is find some traces of badger fur on the body." Sniffer was twiddling at the knurled knob of his microscope as he said these words.
"I do not believe that Captain Ramshackle is the culprit," stated Alice.
Doctor Sniffer raised up his luggagey eyes from the microscope. "That is for me to decide, young girl! Am I not, after all, the Chief Examiner of Corpses?"
"You most certainly are the Chiefest Examiner of Corpses," replied Alice, before adding; "could you therefore please tell me where the first victim of the Jigsaw Murderer might be?"
"The Spiderboy called Quentin Tarantula has long since passed through my paws, I'm afraid; his body has been buried."
"And what would have happened to any clues found on his body?"
"That now belongs to the Civil Serpents: the big snakes are making their own examination of the clues."
"So the Spiderboy's jigsaw piece must be inside the Town Hall?"
"Exactly so!" answered Doctor Sniffer. "And quite rightly; deep, down below the Town Hall."
"Oh dear," sighed Alice to herself, "I shall have a hard time finding it then."
"And may I ask what you are doing", Sniffer sniffed, "in my Room of Evidence?"
"I'm looking for a way out," replied Alice, calmly.
"There are only two ways out of this room: the first is through the front door." Sniffer pointed with a limp paw towards the door that Alice had entered by.
"And where is the second way out?" asked Alice (rather too eagerly).
"Through this door here, of course," Sniffer answered, tapping with his claws on an iron trapdoor set in the floor of the Room of Evidence: "This is where I shovel the corpses when I've finished my examination." Sniffer lifted up the trapdoor to reveal a gaping hole in the floor. "This is the only other way out of the room," he growled at Alice. This orifice leads directly to the cemetery, but you have to be officially dead to descend that far."
"But I am officially dead!" squealed Alice, triumphantly (and rather desperate to make her escape from the Room of Evidence).
"You look very much alive to me," breathed Sniffer.
"I was born in 1852! Which means that I'm one hundred and forty-six years old! Surely nobody can be that old, Doctor Sniffer?"
"You should certainly be extremely dead by now, Alice; but can you prove your age to me? Have you your birth certificate, for instance?"
"I'm afraid not," Alice replied, "but I have this..." She pulled Whippoorwill's lost feather from her pinafore pocket.
"Well, let me investigate it," growled Sniffer, taking the feather from Alice's hand, and then placing it under his microscope. "But this is preposterous!" he then barked, lifting his baggy eye from the lens. "According to my forensic examination, this feather comes from a parrot that was alive in 1860! Either you're an obsessive collector of nineteenth-century avarian accessories, or else you should really have died a long, long time ago."
"Now will you believe me, Doctor Sniffer?"
"But then you must be the very ghost of a girl!"
Alice grabbed the feather from the microscope and then said, "I do feel like the ghost of a girl, actually. I feel like I'm neither here nor there, or anywhere at all, come to think of it!"
"My poor little girl, how very sad that must be." A pair of long, droopy tears were falling from the Doctor's baggy eyes.
"Will you please deliver me to the cemetery, Doctor Sniffer," Alice pleaded, "where I can find my true home."
"Oh very well then! But quickly, child, before the Civil Serpents find me out for doing such a strangeness." Doctor Sniffer then shovelled Alice through the gulping hole in the floor.
And so it was that Alice went sliding down a long chute of darkness.
Through darknesses and darknesses and darknesses, Alice slid; until, eventually, she slid out of the nether end of the chute and straight into a wooden cart that was fixed to the hindquarters of a beastly black mechanical auto-horse. She landed on the top of a mound of large, filled sacks that squelched dreadfully under her weight. Alice didn't want to consider what was inside those sacks, because the smell rising from their contents was quite noxifying! She decided to climb out of the cart, and she would have done exactly that, had not the auto-horse then commenced to gallop off along the road at a terrifying pace, and without any need at all for a driver!
Within five and a half rickety seconds or so, Alice was being driven around a place called Albert Square, where the Town Hall of Manchester magnificently loomed. "I do believe this auto-horse is not a horse at all," she said to herself. "This auto-horse is an auto-hearse! I don't think I want to be delivered to the cemetery just yet!" Alice jumped out of the hearse and cart whilst it was still travelling along at speed. She did slightly scrape her right knee upon landing, but this was a small price to pay for escaping a far-too-early visit to the cemetery! Unfortunately there was a larger price to pay: without her knowledge, Whippoorwill's green-and-yellow feather had escaped her pocket during the fall.
The auto-hearse galloped off around the next corner, leaving the still-alive Alice in Albert Square. It had stopped raining by now and the Square was packed with people enjoying the lunch-timing sunshine. These weren't the kind of people that Alice was used to, of course, because all of them seemed to have an animalized part to their natures. There were several Squirrelmen in the Square; there were also Ostrichmen in the Square. There were also Lama and Goat and Beetle and Cow and Dog and Snake and Trout and Gorilla and Antelope and Sparrow and Puma and Turkey and even Jellyfishmen and women in the square. And all of these mix-ups were feeding their faces with greasy meat pies and slivers of fried potato!
There were also several even stranger creatures that Alice encountered in Albert Square; people jigsawed together with objects. Pianogirls for instance, and Soapboys, Curtaingirls and Wardrobing kids. "Why, everything except for the kitchen sink seems to have become a quite acceptable part of the human body!" Alice was only just thinking this random thought, when what should she notice gurgling through the crowd but a man with a kitchen sink in place of a head! This sunken creature dribbled past Alice, stuffing a sandwich into his plug hole. Alice ran away as fast as she could! (Which wasn't hardly fast enough at all, because of the closely knitted and knotted nature of the crowd.)