Alice in Zombieland by Lewis & Cook Carroll Page B

off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, ‘Have you seen the Corpse Turtle yet?’
          ‘No,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t even know what a Corpse Turtle is.’
          ‘It’s the thing Corpse Turtle Soup is made from,’ said the Queen.
          ‘I never saw one, or heard of one,’ said Alice.
          ‘Come on, then,’ said the Queen, ‘and he shall tell you his history,’
          As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, ‘You are all pardoned.’ ‘Come, that’s a good thing!’ she said to herself, for she had felt quite unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.
          They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun. ( If you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.) ‘Up, lazy thing!’ said the Queen, ‘and take this young lady to see the Corpse Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered’; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.
          The Gryphon, who seemed to be mostly made of scraggly feathers and patchy, mangy fur, sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. ‘What fun!’ said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.
          ‘What is the fun?’ said Alice.
          ‘Why, she ,’ said the Gryphon. ‘It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.
          Alice gave a sigh of relief and said, ‘Truly?’
          The Gryphon sneered nastily and replied, ‘No. She eats them of course.’
          ‘Eats them?’ Alice remembered the smeared blood around the old woman’s mouth and gulped.
          ‘No use wasting good meat, is there now?’ The Gryphon rustled its dead looking wings and smiled. ‘Come on!’
          ‘Everybody says “come on!” here,’ thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: ‘I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!’
          They had not gone far before they saw the Corpse Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him moaning as if his heart would break. He was a rotting hunk of flesh, white and gray, smelling of saltwater, seaweed and death. His flappers were eaten down to pasty knobs, and bone stuck through the white meat; his teeth hung in his mouth by strings of dead meat; his eyes were dead ovals that rolled round in his knobby head. She pitied him deeply. ‘What is his sorrow?’ she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, ‘It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!’
          So they went up to the Corpse Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.
          ‘This here young lady,’ said the Gryphon, ‘she wants for to know your history, she do.’
          ‘I’ll tell it her,’ said the Corpse Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: ‘sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.’
          So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, ‘I don’t see how he can even finish, if he doesn’t begin.’ But she waited patiently.
          ‘Once,’ said the Corpse Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, ‘I was a live Turtle.’
          These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of ‘Hjckrrh!’ from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy moaning of the Corpse Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, ‘Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,’ but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing. After all, she