Dorothy In the Land of Monsters

by Garten Gevedon

  “Let him out and I will,” I growl.

  “If I open the barrier for him, others will escape.”

  “Bullshit. I walked through just fine.”

  “Your armor.”

  “Then why did you insist he come?”

  “Because you could not do it alone.”

  “You’re disgusting for this. This is selfish and awful, and I won’t let you kill him,” I say and draw more of his power.

  “Please, I cannot hold the border if you continue!” he shouts, and Nick grabs my arm in the mist.

  “Stop! It will kill Werelion and so many more. Stop, please, Dorothy,” he says, and I stop. I hate he’s right.

  “I am sorry,” Oz says and disappears.

  “Not good enough!” I call after him, but he’s gone.

  The fire is spreading, getting closer and closer to the edge.

  “Go!” Ardie shouts to us from the other side of the misty wall. “If you don’t go now, you won’t get away in time.”

  “Werelion, Nick, he’s right. Go,” I say.

  “You must come with us!”

  “My armor is fire proof. I will try to get him out somehow. Go,” I say, and he shakes his head.

  “No, Dorothy, I—”

  “I said GO!” I say, and he disappears in a puff of red smoke and reappears in a puff of red smoke by our bags. I turn back to Ardie.

  “Please go, Dorothy. It’s all for nothing if you do not stay safe.”

  “I’m not letting you die here,” I say, more determined than I’ve ever been about anything.

  Voiceless words reverberate somewhere so deep inside me I didn’t know it was there. It tells me to stop looking outside myself to connect to the powers of the divine—the gateway lies within me. Whoever is speaking to me shines a beacon of light on a doorway hidden in the dark abyss of an unfathomable depth so deep I’m not sure if it is inside me at all, so I reach deep within and open it.

  The moment the gateway unlocks, a rainbow beams from me like a torrent through a breaking dam into the red mist border of the Zombielands and envelops Ardie. Now encased by a vivid rainbow, he floats through the red mist border to my side as the spot where he stood ignites in flames, the undead that surrounded him burning to ash and embers in an instant.

  “Dorothy,” Ardie says as he throws his arms around me in a hug. and I hug him back tight, so grateful to have gotten him out.

  “Let’s go,” I say as I pull away and look out at the red land before us. Nick and Werelion haven’t gone far. Too loyal for their own good, they hold our bags and carry Toto waiting for us.

  “Go! Run,” I roar as the fire combusts behind us and the impact sends us flying forward.

  My ears ring and my head pounds, but I scramble to my feet as Ardie does the same, and we run over the rolling carmine hills covered in scarlet vines. Ardie trips so many times, but every time he falls, I pick him back up and we run weaving through the tall rustic red trees covered in flowering vines with torch red blooms.

  Everything in this rainforest is one shade of red or another. Even the clouds here are like floating sweet pink puffs sprinkled with the dust of a glittering sunset. And even though the sanguine landscape is undeniably beautiful, it holds a rich, eerie magic that’s severe and ominous, but it still carries the optimism that magic seems to have, like there’s always a possibility of something magnificent on the horizon.

  When we make it to Nick and Werelion who have taken cover in a trench with Toto, we jump in with them and drop. Although the ringing in my ears has lessened, I can still barely hear a thing.

  “Dorothy!” I hear muffled through my half-deaf ears. I turn my head to see Nick looking at me with worry, and love, and I think maybe pride. My armor reveals my head and I can hear better but still not well enough because his lips are moving but his voice is faint.

  “I can’t hear you! The blast messed up my ears,” I shout and his brows furrow. He turns to Ardie and Werelion and says something. Ardie says something back and I just give up—I can’t hear them, and I can’t read lips—so I look up at the sky and notice the sweet pink clouds are now mauve and they’re moving fast toward the Zombielands. If those are what I think they are, we’re in trouble.

  “Damn it,” I curse and stand. Nick and Ardie are asking me something but I still can’t hear. “Those are rain clouds, right?” They speak but I still can’t hear. “I can’t hear, so nod yes or no,” I say, and they nod yes. “You can’t put out an oil fire with water. Water makes it worse, makes it spread.” Their eyes widen in alarm. They’re all talking, asking me questions when a far bigger blast throws me down face first into the ground.

  When I roll over onto my back, I see it—a massive fire with flames so high in the sky they light up the clouds.

  “Stupid moron!” I call out as I stand and watch the red mist border fall and the fire rush toward us. “Smother an oil fire!” I shout. “Bring sand in from the Great Sandy Waste or open the damn ground and swallow it up!” I shout and pick up Toto as the others scramble to their feet. We climb out of the ditch and run as fast as we can away from the fast-spreading fire.

  Through the thick, dense trees our feet pound the rainforest floor, and we haul ass putting as much distance between us and the fire as we can. Although I could run far faster than this, I cannot leave my friends behind. But now that I’ve opened the gateway within me, it’s like I have a new instinct that is tickling my senses, so I unleash the power and a rainbow of light lifts us off our feet and flies us away. As the ground beneath our feet cracks open and tumbles into the massive cavernous sinkhole Oz has created, I turn my head to see the burning Zombielands get swallowed up, but the flames are still too high, and they spread faster than the ground below us falls. It’s as though the breaking ground is chasing the fire that’s chasing us.

  Cradled by a rainbow, we fly over the rainforest floor, and although we move fast weaving around dense jungle and sharp rocks while running away from fire and unstable ground, I feel comforted, relaxed, loved. It’s as though the colors I have adored from afar for so long are finally here telling me they adore me just the same, and it makes me oddly happy in this strange and terrible situation. So I take a moment to thank the rainbow for saving our lives again.

  As we speed away, the ground catches the last of the flames, and the rainbow light that carries us stops right before it runs us right into a pink wall. When it sets us down on our feet, it envelops me before it absorbs into me with a tingling buzz, and I can hear again, no more aches and pains from the explosions, and I know the rainbow healed me.

  “Wow,” Ardie breathes.

  “You’re even more powerful than Oz,” Werelion muses.

  “Ugh, talk about a selfish jerk,” I say in disgust and shake my head.

  “Dorothy!” Nick scolds.

  “What? Are you afraid of him?”

  “You should be too.”

  “Well, I’m not. If anyone should be afraid of anyone, it’s him of me. After what he pulled today, shame on him. Shame. On. Him.”

  “Don’t say that!” Nick says, worried.

  “She is right,” Oz says as he appears in red beside us. “I am sorry I did not prepare for what would occur and was hasty in my requests. I will ask nothing of you again.”

  “That is unnecessary,” Nick says. “It is my honor to serve you.”

  “Not mine. You can take me off your list of people to use and toss aside when it doesn’t suit you,” I say.

  “Werelion is right, you know—you are more powerful than me. You are the most powerful being to enter this realm. I asked for you and you came, and you did what I asked, and I am grateful. Since your arrival, I have made many mistakes, but you fixed every one of them and for that, each of you have my eternal gratitude and my protection. Never again will I step aside and watch you fall. You have my word. As long as you are on my lands, I will do everything I can to protect you, and I will fight by your sides.”

  “Thank you,” Ardie says and Werelion
and Nick echo his thanks.

  “Thank you. All of you. And I hope someday you will forgive me for my offenses,” he says, and I groan, so annoyed.

  “Fine,” I grumble. “At least you know how messed up you were.”

  “I do, and I promise to always protect you and your offspring. Your forgiveness means more than you know,” he says and fades into mist.

  “Can you believe it?” Werelion says.

  “What, that he promised to protect you and your offspring? If I were you, I’d believe it when I see it.”

  “No, that he said you were more powerful than even he is.”

  “The rainbow is—I have access to it for some reason unbeknownst to me, but it’s the rainbow that’s powerful. Oz thinks the rainbow heard his call and brought me here as a vessel for its power.”

  “How do you know he thinks this?” Nick asks.

  “He told me he thought it this morning.”

  “What is this?” Ardie asks with his hand on the pink wall we stand beside.

  It’s about two stories tall and seems to go on miles in either direction. The wall has lots of large cracks and coiling scarlet vines with large torch red flowers hang over the top. But when I reach out and swipe my finger down the wall, it leaves a trail of white behind, and I realize the wall isn’t pink—it’s white and covered in red dirt. It feels like porcelain tile. Shines like it too. Odd.

  “It’s not on the map,” Nick says as he checks it.

  “What do we make of it?” Ardie asks.

  “We need to either go around it, over it, or through it. Take your pick,” I say.

  “Around it,” Werelion says.

  “Then around it we will go. Come on,” I say, and we begin our journey to Glinda’s Castle.

  28

  The Country of Bisque and Bone

  The ground continues to rumble with the goings on beneath the surface—Oz is still putting out that massive fire—and it’s hard to keep steady on our feet. The cracks in the wall to our right grow, and the sound of shattering glass and screams resound.

  “What is that?” Werelion says, a tremble in his voice.

  None of us have an answer so none of us speak as we make our way along the wall. When we get to the edge, we spotted from the start, we find the wall only curves and goes on for miles and miles more.

  “Should we try to climb it?” Ardie asks.

  “Let us keep along the wall,” Nick says. “There is a long walk ahead of us still.”

  “Are we walking in the right direction, O Holder of the Map?” Ardie says.

  “Do you want to hold it?” Nick says, proffering the map to Ardie who snatches it away for dramatic effect.

  “Yes, I do, thank you,” he says and looks at it.

  “Well? Are we going the wrong way or what?” I ask.

  “Yes, and no—we should go south, but we are going south-east.”

  “So we must go south-east first then west after,” Ardie says, “but if the wall goes down too far, we could go very much out of our way.”

  “The wall could extend all the way to the Great Sandy Waste. Then what? Do we climb over or come back?” Werelion proposes, and he’s right. How long do we walk before we climb over this thing?

  “What is that there?” Ardie says, pointing to an opening in the wall—there is a large crack where the wall has broken, and the opening might be big enough for us to fit through.

  We hurry over and look through the crack and the sight before us is nothing short of astonishing. And it might be my worst nightmare. Thousands of sinister porcelain dolls hustle about. Some lie in broken piles of themselves, their cracked porcelain faces crying out and whimpering. Other dolls pull porcelain carts and walk over to the shattered dolls, picking up their broken pieces and loading them up. They’re all no taller than my knee, and most of them have cracks patched with charcoal gray caulk-like material. Colorful designs adorn their porcelain clothes and faces, each made to look like a princess or a prince or a shepherd or a clown, but they are grimy, broken, with mismatched limbs placed askew or a cracked hole where their nose should be.

  Porcelain buildings line the walls throughout the seemingly endless space in a makeshift grid. A porcelain doll country that is the makings of nightmares. Their eyes are pink and scarlet and other shades of unnatural red, and many of them have broken parts that look as though someone put them back together wrong.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” we hear a little voice shout from below. When I look down, I find the most terrifying doll I’ve ever seen looking up at us with an angry snarl and neon pink eyes. Only as high as my knee, she’s got a dark brown blunt cut bob wig on and it’s knotted and frizzy and off-center on her cracked head. She holds two porcelain swords, one in each hand, and she bares her razor-sharp porcelain teeth at us. On her pink coat from the neck are streams of dried blood, as if she slit the baby’s throat who was wearing it and took it for herself, never even bothering to wash the thing. Werelion screams and jumps back at the sight of her.

  “What is this place?” Ardie asks.

  “Country of Bisque and Bone. Who are you and what do you want? We’re in the middle of a crisis here and I haven’t got all day,” she snaps.

  “We are on our way to Glinda’s Castle,” Nick says.

  “That’s due south,” she says when the ground rumbles again and a building not too far off cracks and crumbles. Doll screams echo off the porcelain walls. “Get the carts! Start grinding!” she calls out to other dolls scrambling about. “Look, you must go around. That shifter is far too big to come in here without causing more damage and we’re in a sockdolager of a situation as you can see. So, skedaddle, will ya?”

  “How far does this wall go?” Nick asks.

  “To the Great Sandy Waste,” she says and turns to the dolls hustling about around her trying to deal with the damage and save their friends. She calls to a maiden and a shepherdess with bright red and pink bodices and covered in mended cracks trying to lift a large piece of porcelain off another shattered doll. “Bring in the pulleys! You can’t lift that yourselves!”

  “What about in the other direction?” Nick asks.

  “Emerald Forest.”

  “How does no one know you’re here?” Ardie asks baffled.

  “No one comes this way. Look, you’ve got to go. I can’t keep standing here blocking your way and you can’t come in here with your giant oafish bodies, so leave. Now!”

  “All right, we’re leaving,” Werelion says and walks away.

  “No, wait!” I say, remembering I changed my size once. Maybe I can do it again for all of us. “If we were smaller, would you let us through to the other side?” I ask her.

  “How much smaller?”

  “Your size?”

  “Yeah, I could do that, but you’d need an escort.”

  “Okay, give me a second,” I say and turn to Nick. “I think I can do it.”

  “So, do it,” he says with an encouraging smile.

  “Huddle up guys.” Ardie and Werelion step in closer to Nick and me.

  Accessing the open gateway inside me becomes easier each time I do it. The rainbow emanates from me, surrounds my friends, and we watch as the porcelain world before us grows to the size of a metropolis. After a short moment, I stand eye to eye with the scary doll.

  “You’re the Rainbow Witch we have heard about. You destroyed both Vampire Witches.”

  Rainbow Witch? I don’t hate that title, but I prefer Dorothy.

  “Call me Dorothy. This is Nick, Ardie, Werelion, and Toto.”

  “Princess Wawa, but just call me Wawa. Come on,” she says and leads us inside, wobbling on one broken high heeled foot.

  At their height, the horror of what they are dealing with is far more disturbing. Every doll shows signs of being broken at some point, but some shattered because of the seismic activity, and they are being loaded into carts and hurried away. I wonder where.

  “Where are they taking the broken dolls?”

 
“We are not dolls! We are the Bisque People.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “They are taking them to the bone shop for repairs.”

  “The bone shop?” I ask, and she points to a tall building with a tarnished silver grinding mechanism at its side and Bisque People are feeding a human femur into it—the grinding sound sends shivers up and down my spine.

  “Bisque People comprise bone, crystal, and clay. When we crack or break, bones, crystal, and clay are the materials used to make those repairs. We grind the bones of the dead, mix it with Quadling crystals and Quadling clay to seal up our cracks and reform our lost limbs.”

  “Bones of the dead?” Werelion asks with a tremble.

  “Yes,” she says, her big neon pink eyes glinting and her sharp toothed smile the most sinister I have ever seen.

  “Where do you get the bones?” Nick asks.

  “The Zombielands. Not zombies, shifters, or vampires can infect us, so our scouts collect the bones of their prey. There are a lot of stupid animals out there that wander right in.”

  “That’s a human femur,” I point out.

  “Humans are animals too.”

  “Got me there.”

  “Oz swallowed up the Zombielands. That’s why the ground is quaking,” Ardie tells her and her neon pink eyes widen.

  “Look at what we have here?” says the creepiest clown doll I’ve ever seen. As he approaches us, his cracked head gyrating on his neck as his ball-jointed appendages wobble every which way, I can’t help but gape at him in horror. While his bright red eyes glint with sinister thoughts, the painted-on smile over his carved sharp teeth and black painted diamonds around his eyes give me the serious willies. “What are you looking at?” he snaps at me.

  “Leave her alone, Joker. That’s the Rainbow Witch. Madden her and she might crack you for good,” she says, and his evil eyes widen as the ground rumbles and quakes and the building to our right cracks.

  We all look up as the crack grows and the building breaks and falls to pieces over our heads. In an instant, rainbow mist rushes out of me and surrounds the building as it falls, putting it back together again. Wawa looks at me with her neon pink eyes wide and says, “Can you do that for the rest of this place?”