"Quickly, Alice, quickly!" Celia cried, fearful of the snakes dragging her back into the garden. "The gates are just ahead of us."
They made it only just in time. Celia wrenched open the iron gates with her terbo-charged arms (even as the myriad snakes were biting at her porcelain ankles) and then pushed Alice through into the next episode. Celia clanged the gates shut behind her (squashing a snake's head in the closing process). "Jolly bad luck, Mister Snakified Under Assistant!" Celia sang, quite gleefully.
And that was how Alice and Celia made their entrance into the streets of Manchester.
Alice had never heard such a hellish noise before, such a tumultitude, such a cacophonous display of wailings and screechings! And so very early in the morning! Why this was even worse than the terrible racket that James Marshall Hentrails had made upon his terrible racket. Alice and Celia were now standing at the side of an extremely busy thoroughfare; behind them the gates to the knot garden were being hissed at madly by the frustrated snakes. In front of them were hundreds of moaning metal horses, who breathed out a fulsome wind of smelly gases from their hind ends as they sped along the road (at more than twenty miles per hour!). Clinging tightly to the saddle of each metal horse was a person (not one of which looked entirely human).
"My goodness!" cried Alice to Celia. "What a pong! I've never seen so many horses before."
"These are not horses," said Celia, "these are carriages."
"Well they certainly look a little like horses."
"These vehicles are horseless carriages."
"How do you know that the carriages are horseless?" asked Alice.
"Because they haven't got any real horses drawing them."
"I didn't know that real horses could draw. Can they also paint?"
"Alice! You must know what I mean!" Celia cried. "A horseless carriage is what the people of the future call a carriage that isn't being pulled by a horse."
"Is that similar to a pianoless lampshade?" asked Alice.
"Whatever's a pianoless lampshade?" asked Celia.
"Why, it's a lampshade that isn't being played by a piano, of course."
"Alice! I'm getting rather tired of your loopiness!" Celia replied. "Only by working together can we escape from this future world and thereby make our way back to the past. We are the not-quite twins, the sisters of the corkscrew. Your feelings, my logic -- girl and doll. Only by this shared route may we travel back home. Don't you see that yet?"
Alice didn't see it, mainly because she was too busy studying the lights and cries rising above the houses on the opposite side of the road. Alice just knew that Whippoorwill would be attracted to those colours and noises, and (having spotted a small gap in the rushing traffic) Alice stepped out into the road. Oh dear: one of the ever-so-horseless carriages nearly knocked her down. In fact, that passing vehicle clipped Alice on the elbow! "Yeeooohhh!" Alice yeeooohhhed, falling back onto the pavement. "That hurt!"
"The proper name for a horseless carriage is an automated horse," Celia coldly responded, whilst rubbing at Alice's arm with her porcelain fingers. "But in these yet-to-come days, the people are far too busy to use the full name for things, so they call their transportations auto-horses. Which they sometimes even further shorten to simply autos."
"Well, that may be so," Alice replied (wincingly, on account of her pain), "but in our day, we called a horse a horse and a carriage a carriage, and there was no such thing as a horseless carriage, because a carriage could not move unless it had a horse in front of it!"
"Alice, won't you please admit that we're trapped in the future now. We must learn the latest lessons. Believe me, my dear, we are currently facing a drive of auto-horses."
"I hate lessons," sulked Alice as she nursed her injured elbow, "but at least I know that the collective noun for horses is a herd." (How proud Alice was, to have pointed this out to Celia.)
"I think you'll find, my somewhat pale human companion," Celia gently suggested, "that you can have a herd of cattle, a herd of bison, or even a herd of elephants. But you cannot have a herd of horses. You may, however, have a drove of horses. But when the horses are automated, they become a drive. And we are still facing a galloping drive of autos."
"Oh, Celia! You think you know every single thing."
"Well, one doesn't like to boast, but you must concede that the name auto-horses perfectly suits these carriages. Why, one need only examine their legs..." Alice did examine their legs (having completely missed Celia's correct usage of the ellipsis) and she had to admit to herself (because she didn't want Celia to think she was right all the time) that they certainly looked more than a little like an automated horse's legs. "To my terbot-mind," Celia added, proudly, "the people of the future have wedded the horse to the carriage; these are horsey carriages."
"Oh but look, Celia!" Alice interrupted, shrugging off Celia's healing hands. "The autos have snakes wriggling above their eyes!"
"Don't you worry, Alice," replied Celia, "those snakes are there in case it rains; they're called windscreen vipers."
There was no possible way to cross the road. The auto-horses were riding along, nose to tail, tail to nose; a constant creaking and neighing of metal and noise. "If they're not careful," Celia announced finally, "these riders are going to cause a horse-crash. We need to find a zebra crossing."
"Whatever's a zebra crossing?" Alice asked.
"A place in the road where even a zebra can cross. It's one of the Civil Serpents' better rulings --"
"There's one!" cried Alice. And indeed there was: there was a zebra crossing the road a long, long way away from Alice and Celia. "Follow that zebra!" Alice called out.
"He's a piebald, actually!" Celia added. Alice didn't bother to ask what a bald pie was doing in the conversation, she was far too busy running along towards where the zebra was crossing the road.
"Look at that, Celia!" she called out as the pair of them reached the spot, "Whippoorwill is perched on the zebra's shoulder!"
The parrot was perched on the zebra's shoulder. And, by that stripy transport, he was working his way towards the other side of the road. (Alice never thought to ask herself why the parrot simply didn't fly across the road, she was far too used to his wayward nature by now.) And indeed, just then Whippoorwill fluttered his green-and-yellow wings in quite a shameless display and twisted his head around through 180 degrees in order to squawk at Alice, "Why did the Catgirl cross the road?" Alice felt sure that the parrot was laughing at her, so she didn't even attempt an answer to this latest riddle. The zebra was looking rather scared during his passage between the parted ranks of the auto-horses (and wouldn't you, if you were a horse's relative in a horseless society?). It wasn't a real zebra of course; Alice had learnt enough about this future Manchester to know that nothing was really real any more. Oh no, following the effects of the Newmonia (if Pablo Ogden was to be believed), Whippoorwill was riding upon the shoulder of a Zebraman: a black-and-white-striped combination of the human and the zebra. This Zebraman had by now almost succeeded in crossing, so Alice nervously stepped into the road after him. The riders of the auto-horses shouted all manner of curses at Alice, the worst of which came from a sweating fat Pigboy: "What in the mud-bath is that?!" he snorted. "Some kind of a girl crossing the road!"