You can't help that. We're all mad here.

Cheshire kitty paces on the tree limb, head bobbing up and down. "What will you do? Do you feel it? It's coming, isn't it?" His voice is low and smooth, with the sound of sinister humor in it.

"What's coming?" asks the girl.

Cheshire stops to flash a grin and wags his whole bottom, whipping his tail in excitement. "Why, the end. The end is coming! The end of all the world! Don't you see it?"

"I don't see anything, and I don't think anything is going to happen. You're just a crazy old cat. What would you know about the end of the world?"

"What is more important" purrs the kitty "is what you're going to do when it comes. Think on it. What will you do?"

"Well, I don't know what I will do, but I do not want to be out here when it happens. If you're so smart, then tell me which way I should go! I'm lost again."

Cheshire kitty becomes still and serious as he whips his huge, polydactyl paw around to explain again "As you well know, in that direction lives a March Hare...And in that direction..." He urges Alice not to visit the Rabbit.

Cheshire kitty's madness seems to be slowly taking him over, barely speaking in sentences now due to his excitement, complete loosening of associations, as his thoughts are enraptured and hypnotized by visions of the Crash, the death of the Hare and the chaos that will ensue. Wonderland will be reduced to nothing; any semblance of order (as if there were much of any) will be gone. The March Hare will be cooked and eaten, torn limb from limb. The Mad Hatter will laugh and giggle as he packs a rucksack and follows the Cheshire Cat into the wilderness while no one is looking. Kitty urges Alice to follow the schizoid Hatter, not the rushed, anxious rabbit. White Rabbit is going to pay, and all the creatures left in Wonderland are going to get a piece. Stop following the Rabbit; to be found with him will get you eaten, too. You will be destroyed.

But to escape with the Hatter means you must learn to be self-sufficient, and you must learn to communicate and function in this world forever, to completely let go of what you have come to know as sanity or reason, to be completely comfortable with the disconcerting and horrifyingly beautiful and to welcome the trial by fire. If you lose your mind, and you are not your body, only spirit you'll be. There is truth and comfort in perverted minds, the demented Sage Cat tells her. If you can just get rid of this attachment to the Hare and stop clinging so desperately to what you knew, what kept you functioning in the World, you will find more peace than you ever had. You must go among the mad people; your life depends on it.