“Yeah? Do tell.”
The dragon’s mechanical joints gleamed in the dim light.
“You came here for yourself, because you wanted a different life. You don’t care about the people of Oz, or making things better. Not unless it somehow benefits you.”
His voice thundered.
“You came here convinced of nothing but your own right to be free from the pain of the miserable existence you carved out for yourself.”
Kansas crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.
“I didn’t do anything.”
The Time Dragon made a noise between a snort and a sigh.
“You misunderstand. Not that that’s new. You have misunderstood my purposes since you arrived here.”
That self-righteous wind-up toy is getting on my nerves.
“Oh?”
Tik Tok bared his metallic teeth.
“I’ll put this in simple terms so that your puny little mind can comprehend. It’s all coming from within you.”
What?
Kansas shuddered, cold and sick and weak.
“Y…you’re lying! That’s impossible.”
A horrendous roar erupted from the Time Dragon’s metallic jaws.
“You think you’re in a place where laws matter?”
Her head hurt. She was so confused. She’d never wanted anything like this to happen. Hell, she’d never given the tin men or animals or any of them a second thought. So how could she be responsible for any of this?
“Now, now, Dorothy,” Tik Tok said, metallic jaw squealing. “You’re a smart girl. I’m sure you can figure this out.”
Kansas had been played with all her life, and fuck it all if she’d let the Time Dragon do the same.
“Sorry, but no.”
“Stupid bipedals.” Tik Tok shook his cog-filled head. “Creatures like you need suffering and pain. Crave it. But you cannot distance yourself from it. You retreat into silence, or break completely. So you hurt others to protect yourself, then sit back to observe.”
“No! I’m not like that!”
“Think again, Dorothy. Every horror, every nightmare you walked through to get here, came from your own twisted mind. An unexpected side effect of you being the only human in this wonderland. Just as your dreams created this place, here your emotions became real; your fears came to life in a physical manifestation. Your anger and hatred. Your hopelessness. Each self-loathing thought you’ve ever had in that pretty little head of yours came to life and destroyed the Oz you constructed when you first came here. The idealistic fool you once were had hopes and beliefs and goals. And as they died, so did Oz.”
Bile rose in her throat.
“The swamp, and the Munchkinlanders, the forest…you’re saying that was me?”
“Got it in one. In a way, you walked through yourself to get here.”
Kansas lost the battle with her stomach. She retched, vomit blending perfectly with the emerald floor.
All those deaths, all those horrors. All her fault.
It was true.
Kansas had wanted something to hurt as much as she hurt; wanted someone to suffer even worse than her.
Something broke within her. Everything that she’d once been—everything she’d become—shattered on the cracked marble floor.
Tik Tok laughed.
“Fool. Make the request you came here for or leave. I have no time for your self pity.”
Time…
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Make it all go away. Send me back to the beginning.” Let me make different choices.
“Ah. Escapism through denial. How predictable.”
She climbed to her feet, shaking. From what, she didn’t know.
“If you’re going to help me, then get on with it.”
The Time Dragon growled. “Insolent whelp. Remember, you are the one who controls the fate of Oz. Try not to ruin it this time, yes?”
Without warning, glittering teeth locked on Kansas’ arm and pulled. Kansas fell to her knees, screaming. Her skin ripped away from her body, unraveling like thread from a spool. She thrashed, tried to call for help, but was so far beyond pain that it paralyzed her. She couldn’t make a sound.
She was nothing. No name. No past.
Not Kansas, not Dorothy.
Nothing.
She huddled on the floor, naked, no more than a mass of blood and muscle and tendon. Not even pain could reach her, she was so far gone. Slick, shining flesh, seamed with veins and arteries, dangled from the Time Dragon’s jaws.
A bark of laughter.
Then, light.
There was nothing around her, above or below or behind. She floated in the still, dead air. She was pure light—formless, shapeless, nameless light.
Splinters, fragments of memory drifted around her. They scampered about like tadpoles with small flicking tails. Flashes of blue-black lightning and ghostly landscapes filled her mind.
What had her name been? Did light have a name? Or need one? And yet…there was something. She drifted toward it; felt it grasping for her.
Gold bricks, solid and heavy. Cheering voices, singing with joy. Fresh air perfumed with the scent of fresh baked breads and pulled taffy.
Eyes opened.
She lay on bright green grass underneath a wide, blue sky, sun warm and soft. Her heart leapt like she’d run a race. She hadn’t realized how much she missed the simple comfort of a spring day until right this very moment.
Laughter, high and manic. A voice, accusing her of murder, laced with grief.
She sat up. The green angular face was as familiar to her as her own. A decade worth of nightmares; a lifetime of regrets.
Standing, she wiped her hands on her lacy apron, picking a blade of grass off her blue plaid skirt. She felt young. She felt fourteen. A wicker basket sat at her feet, its small gray occupant yipping with sounds she’d never expected to hear again.
She picked up the basket and held it close. Just beyond the horizon were a scarecrow that needed rescuing, a tin man to divert, and a lion to neuter.
She took a deep breath, then rose and walked past the throngs of cowering Munchkins until she stood before the Wicked Witch of the West.
No alternatives. No holding back. No more second chances.
She extended a hand.
“I’m here to help. Call me Dorothy.”
The End.
The King of Oz
by Martin Rose
Oh, how she loved the fire.
Blue into yellow, into orange and red. Her temperature ran cold like her blood, but the flame gave life, parted her lips and drew her breath in fast, hitching with anticipation. In the burn ward, she continued to play with fire, and in the haze, David Gale flinched and repelled at the sound.
Click, click.
The steady click-click of a hand-held lighter permeated his dreams, his nightmares; he smelled lighter fluid, saw the flame between small, feline fingers, a wide, gray eye watching him beneath her bandages.
He woke up long enough to ask her if he was dying. She laughed and pressed her soft hand on his unburnt arm. The touch reassured, soothed, and awakened ancient memories of his mother with Scarecrow in the field.
He slept without rest or satisfaction, skin like crispy fried chicken, pulled taut over his muscles and organs. He breathed in the steady rhythm that reflected his pain, breathe in, throb, breathe out, throb. He hit the morphine button, a fresh stream of opiates entered his blood, and he fell into dissatisfied sleep once more.
He dreamt of the burning house, trapped with the black-haired woman, his fire fighter uniform ablaze, until only ashes remained.
By now, David Gale understood he was not human.
They skirted his dreadful secret with gauze and Demerol. His skin pulled apart like Christmas wrapping paper, tendrils of straw visible beneath his skin — snapped strands working their way through his wounds. How long until they found him out, while he lay like a slab of cooked meat on the gurney?
His weeping skin pulsed and throbbed as he pulled back the gauze. He groaned, his naked wound exposed to the cruel air while he fumbled with the IV drip, pulling it from his skin with a hiss, his motions weak and numb with drugs.
He came face to face with the pyro, a swatch of bloody, pus-filled gauze in his fingers.
Fear bloomed; he could not stop her as she leaned over him, pushing his weak fingers away where he had torn the dressing apart. Her hair and skin, burned away, and the twisting scars of flesh peeked from a mire of bandages, covering the eye the doctors could not replace.
“You shouldn’t tear yourself up like that, you —”
She stopped and stared.
You got beneath the skin, didn’t you?
He thought it; in the next moment, he realized he’d spoken.
She reached for the button on the wall, but he summoned the strength to take her hand, snapping it out of the air.
“Don’t call them,” he hissed.
“You’ve got straw in—”
“I know. It’s me. It’s me, don’t you get it?”
She did not.
“It’s a part of me.”
She stared at the open skin, burned and melted like mozzarella on an overdone pizza, with bits of straw poking up through the surface. She extended a hand, and he felt the cool pad of her finger against the inside of him. He shuddered.
She withdrew her finger.
“Keep it secret,” he begged.
He steeled himself for screams, for the doctor and a thousand curious scalpels come to tear him apart; but to his astonishment, the pyromaniac said nothing, but pulled up a stool and sat beside him. She played with her lighter, passing her fingertips through the flames with an expression of ecstasy, her lips parted in her freakish, burned face.
He passed out.
He dreamt; a place he has never seen.
His bare toes sink into an unfamiliar earth, but he feels, deep in his blood and his marrow, that he does know it; that this grass and this sky call and pull and suck at him, want him for their own. A few steps more, and he could be there, he could be in the place his mother dared not let him venture, the place the Scarecrow could not return to.
He takes a step, one following after the other, happy to leave behind him a thousand sorrows, his mother’s tears and the Scarecrow nailed on the cross in the field, with the lopsided smile. Happy to forget the persistent stare of the Scarecrow’s mismatched eyes that found him through rain storms, through warm summer evenings while he played, and window panes as he bent over homework — his presence destroying each moment as it elapsed.
On his right, the cornfield extends into Oz, and a groaning reaches him. Dust swirls around his bare feet as he stops, and turns to confront the scarecrow by the side of the yellow brick road. A quick glance ahead of him reveals an endless line of crucified scarecrows leading into an infinite distance, all the way to Emerald City.
He moves toward it — the world eclipses, coalesces and fades, and the scarecrow calls out to him—
The pyro’s voice.
He turned his head and saw her. She wore a wig, whose loose hair clung to her face, and she looked tired as she leaned over him. She looked younger without the bandages covering her burns and scars; he could see enough unburnt skin to know she had once been beautiful. Her nose remained intact, but her left eye was gone; above that, a rising surface of ropy scar tissue that moved into her scalp.
He didn’t ask her to see where she had brought him; he was back in the house in Kansas.
What had compelled her to bring him to this place? She didn’t know about the harsh violence of this world in the Midwest, the sowing, the reaping, the scarecrow nailed in every field and the worst one yet to come, the straw man of his youth: The Scarecrow.
She reached up and pulled the hair at her cheek, thick and black. It slid from her scalp, and he watched, mute, until her head was naked beneath the weak light of the bare bulb.
“You passed out, and I put my ear against your chest. What I heard was a heart; but not a human heart.”
Her voice trembled.
“Not a human heart. Something more fragile, packed in sawdust and straw. I took your chart, and all the pages, and when I saw your grandmother’s name —”
“Gale …”
The word escaped from him in a sigh. He turned away from her, thinking about the straw beneath his skin, harboring a thousand memories he could not voice — the curse of that name, and the Scarecrow. He did not have the words to express a youth endured as a stranger in his own home, a suspicious interloper of Oz blood, with his mother’s eyes, but not her husband’s heart.
“It’s not a fairy tale. It … claims you. Takes you. Destroys you. You call this straw life? How long do you think my lifespan is?” He touched the bandages, where the pain flared beneath his fingers, and he turned away, biting his lower lip.
The pyro flicked the lighter open, and the flame licked upwards. She enjoyed it with her eyes.
“When I was ten, I set a chicken coop on fire. It happened by accident, and I never told anyone about it. I began to look differently at fire, and all it was capable of—and it seemed an itch I could not scratch, I thought about those bright, glowing embers whenever my life was heading in the wrong direction. I was never abused, or beaten, or hurt, I don’t take drugs and I don’t even drink. Some people are doctors, or artists, or scientists—but I love fire.”
Her hand moved over the burnt and coarse surface of her scalp, where the skin was mottled and distressed.
“I have never belonged here,” she spoke with a burst of passion. “I have never belonged in this boring, ordinary world, and I said to myself, what kind of person puts out fires? I imagined you were a soulless sort, an empty-headed fool, set to extinguish everything I set alight.”
With a shaking voice she described her failed suicide attempt by fire, her crushing disappointment to encounter David in the smoke, pulling her through the square of light and back to the life she disavowed.
“If you’re going to save my life, make it worth the effort — take me to Oz; take me to the Witch, or I’ll set the world on fire.”
Halfway through the cornfield, the cross rose from the ground, and he was there, after all these years. The inanimate Scarecrow stared down at them like a crucified Christ, arms and legs twisted and unraveling in the wind. The Scarecrow dead, and he had been stationed at the cross, unmoving, for the last twenty years, nailed there by his step father’s trembling hands, in his burlap sacking and painted eyes, his lopsided mouth sinister in the moonlight. David spent his childhood in these cornfields, in the soybean fields; he knew there was a place were the turned earth crossed over into some other world —
“Oz,” he muttered.
“Surely, that is not the Scarecrow.”
“The very one. The man who raised me nailed him there, a punishment for my mother.”
Her hand stopped him, mid-stride.
“For what?”
“Ah, I think you’re guessed that much already. You’re not the only one who doesn’t belong here.”
Somewhere in the stalks, grown corn became stunted, twisting, and he was aware of a fire in the woods up ahead, and he clasped her closer to him as he started forward, urging her on. His bare wound felt raw and burning in the idle wind, yellow hay in his flesh. He had not imagined a future where he would ever come back here, to be a hybrid monster, this thing he had become.
He could not bring himself to explain to her that the Witch was dead; and had been for many years now.
They passed time with their steady walk, and he stumbled in the darkness. She caught him and steadied him, brushing against the straw that jutted from his wounds—it was healing into his skin, and would be impossible to hide, now. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her everything, about that terrible Summer day, and he found he could not. His tongue was leaden, unwilling to part with the words, so he kept it within, and they trudged on through the darkness, through brush, thr
ough broken yellow bricks, over tree roots and brambles.
After a time, the debris cleared, and through the darkness, he could make out the silhouette of the tower, black rising against black sky. He stopped, pondering it a moment, recalling his mother’s stories— the Winged Monkeys, he did not like to think of them. But there was nothing moving at the gate; it held the air of an abandoned inner-city ghetto.
She followed behind him as he trampled through the long grass, to the gate.
David found a button in the wall, and pushed it; there was a series of clicks, the snapping of a chain, and the gate began to open, wrought iron bars sliding behind them.
They passed through, and walked down a foot path that led to the castle, overgrown with vines that bore purple, evil looking flowers like knives.
“I’m so thirsty,” she sighed.
Uneasiness permeated the air around them. He was thirsty as well, but he said nothing, and he could see how pale and parched her lips were in the thin light. They had gone a long time without water.
“Oh, look!” she said, and pointed. He followed the line of her finger and it struck him, what an odd coincidence it was that she only mention her desire and it appeared before them: a stone column, and on the surface, an elegant goblet, beaded with condensation and dripping with wet. She started forward when he caught her by the wrist.
David did not believe in coincidences.
“What?” she hissed, impatient.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that a glass is sitting here all by itself? What if it’s been out in the rain, or it’s poisoned, or something of that sort?”
She leaned in closer, the glass loomed before him, deliciously wet, and the water glowed a faint chartreuse, like a glass of absinthe. She reached for it.
“The witch,” he spoke gravely.
She shivered. “I must drink it. What could it possibly do to me, worse than what has already happened?”
Her eye pleaded from within a scarred frame, and he looked away with a sigh as she reached for the goblet with both hands, her fingers sliding against the surface as she drank, a long deep swallow.
Shadows of the Emerald City Page 40
