It was gone without even a sound. I had almost gone with it.
Everything I owned was in there. Every piece of ugly clothing. Every bad memory.
I was free of all of it.
“I’m sorry about your house,” my rescuer said. His voice was soft, but it startled me anyway. I jumped and looked up to find that he was standing at my side. “It’s a miracle you made it out. A few inches to the left and you’d have gone straight into the pit. Lucky, I guess.” The way he said it made it sound like he thought it had been something more than luck.
“Did the tornado do that?” I asked. I stared back into the pit, wondering how far down it went. Wondering what was down there. “I didn’t know tornadoes made giant holes in the ground.”
“Ha. No.” He laughed, but he didn’t seem to think it was all that funny. “The pit’s been here for a long time now.” He didn’t elaborate.
I turned to face him, and when I saw him standing there in the pale, blue-gray sunlight, my breath caught somewhere beneath my ribs. The boy was probably my age, and about my height, too. He was slim and sinewy and compact, with a face framed by dark, shaggy hair that managed to be both strong and delicate at the same time.
His skin was paler than pale, like he’d never left home without sunscreen or like he’d never left home period. He was part rock star, part something else. I couldn’t put my finger on what the something else was, but I knew that it was somehow important.
And those eyes. They were glittering even brighter than before, and there was something about them that made me uneasy. It was like he had whole worlds behind his eyes.
He was beautiful. He was too beautiful. It was the kind of beautiful that can almost seem ugly; the kind of beautiful you don’t want to touch, because you know it might burn. I wasn’t used to talking to people who looked like him. I wasn’t used to being near people who looked like him.
But he had saved my life.
“I won’t miss it,” I said, not sure if I meant it or not. “The house, I mean.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t argue. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Your tin farm. It must be very precious. A house made out of metal.”
I guess they didn’t have trailers where he was from. Lucky him.
I realized, looking around for the first time, that we weren’t in Dusty Acres anymore. But where were we?
On the side of the pit on which I stood, a vast field of decaying grass stretched into the distance. It was gray and patchy and sickly, with the faintest tinge of blue. On the far side of the pit was a dark, sinister-looking forest, black and deep. Everything around here seemed to have that tint to it, actually. The air, the clouds, even the sun, which was shining bright, all had a faded, washed-out quality to them. There was something dead about all of it. When I looked closely, I saw that tiny blue dust particles were floating everywhere, like the wispy floating petals of a dandelion—except that they were glittering, giving everything a glowing, unreal feeling.
But not everything was blue. Underneath the boy’s feet, yellow bricks, as vivid as a box of new crayons, were almost glowing in stark contrast to the blown-out, postapocalyptic monochrome of the landscape.
The golden path led all the way up to the ravine and then dropped off into nothingness. In the other direction, it wound its way through the field and spiraled off into the horizon.
It was a road.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was so astonished that I wasn’t even sure if I had said it out loud or not.
I had been dropped here by a tornado, and now I was standing on something that looked remarkably like a road of yellow bricks.
This had to be some big mix-up. Maybe Kansas had finally cashed in on the whole Dorothy thing with a theme park and the tornado had just happened to drop me there. In which case, this guy was just a really hot park guide. I stared at him, waiting for him to explain.
“Welcome to Oz,” the boy said, nodding, like he expected I’d figured that out already. It came out sounding almost apologetic, like, Hate to break the bad news.
Oz.
I touched my head, looking for a bump or something. I must have gotten knocked out and was having a particularly crazy hallucination.
At that, I let out a hoot of laughter. Good! With the way things had been lately, I figured I could use a fantastical hallucination right about now. It seemed like it had done Dorothy some good in the movie—and in Dorothy’s fantasy, she’d been greeted by a bunch of Munchkins. A beautiful boy beat that any day.
“Aren’t you supposed to bow down for me or something?” I asked, still laughing.
Instead of laughing along with me, concern washed over the boy’s face, like he was worried I was going a little bit crazy.
Was I crazy? My head was swimming. If this was a fantasy, it was a strange one: this wasn’t the Oz that I had read about or seen in the movie. It was as if someone had drained out some of the Technicolor and introduced some serious darkness.
Where were the good witches, the fields of enormous poppies? Where were the jolly Munchkins? I guess even in my concussion-induced fantasies, I’m not creative—or cheerful—enough to come up with all that. Instead, I’d conjured up something that looked suspiciously like Dusty Acres right after a nuclear explosion.
I spun around to take it all in—a little too quickly in my excitement—and began to wobble at the edge of the cliff. My rescuer was there with a hand on my wrist, pulling me onto the brick road just in time to save me, yet again, from plunging to my death.
It took me a second, but I recovered my balance and stepped forward, getting my bearings. As I set one foot and then another onto the road, the bricks themselves seemed to almost pulse under me. Like there was a current running through them. “It feels like there’s something under there,” I said, looking down at my sneakers.
“The road wants you to go to the city.”
“The road? Wants . . . me?” I rubbed my head in confusion.
“It wants everyone. That’s what it’s for. The road’s been here longer than any of us. There’s deep magic in there—magic even she doesn’t understand. Some people think it has a mind of its own. It wants you to go to the city, but it doesn’t like to make the trip easy.”
It figured. Nothing was ever easy, in my experience.
“Who’s ‘she’?” I asked.
The boy reached out and tugged at a lock of my hair. The way he did it wasn’t romantic, but more curious really. It was tender, too, but it was a sad kind of tenderness. No one ever touched me, anyway, and I flinched automatically. “There is so much you don’t know. So much you have to learn. I wish you didn’t.”
Learn what? I wanted to ask. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.
Then I felt a wriggling at my hip and looked down to see that Star was poking her head out of the pocket of my hoodie and was sniffing the air, looking just as confused as I felt. I pulled her out and placed her on the bricks, and she jolted. I guess the road had given her the same feeling it had given me.
“Easy, girl,” I said. “You’ll get used to it in a second.” I looked back up at the boy. “If this is Oz . . . ,” I trailed off, searching for the question that was on the tip of my tongue. Then I found it. “What happened here?” I asked.
I was waiting for him to answer when, out of nowhere, a look of panic crossed his face. For a moment, he looked disoriented, like he’d forgotten who he was. Something around the edges of his body seemed to flicker.
“Are you okay?” I asked. He didn’t answer. He hadn’t moved; now he seemed to be looking right through me.
I reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Go?” I didn’t understand. He just got here. I just got here. What the hell was happening? “Where are you going?”
He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s getting late. I’ve never left for this long. I have to get back before . . .”
“Don’t,”
I said, maybe a little too desperately. Maybe this was a dream and maybe it wasn’t, but either way, I didn’t want to be left here, in the middle of nowhere, all alone. “Before what? What are you talking about? Who are you?”
“I’m no one,” he said, turning away and walking toward the pit.
“Please,” I begged.
He turned back to me one more time.
“This is where it all began for her, you know. I don’t know why you’re here or who brought you, Pink Hair, but if you’re here, it means it’s all beginning for you, too. You’re like her in so many ways, but I can tell you’re different. I can’t help you. I’m not powerful enough. But you can help yourself. Prove me right. Don’t make the same mistakes she made.”
“But . . .”
“Be brave,” he said. “Be angry. Don’t trust anyone. I’ll see you soon.”
He stepped to the edge of the road, to right where the bricks crumbled away into the black. Then he jumped.
“No!” I screamed, lunging forward, catching myself just in time before I followed him. Below me, the darkness looked relentless and unforgiving. The road wanted something, he had told me, and now I knew the pit did, too. It was hungry. It was already infinite and still it wanted more.
There was no sign of him. The boy was gone.
I looked down at Star, who was perched on her haunches at my feet. “So what do we do now?” I asked, half expecting her to say something back.
She didn’t need to. I knew the answer already: what I was going to do next was the same thing I’d been doing my whole life.
I turned back. Just put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had changed except the color of the road.
Star and I walked, following the road, and when she seemed to get tired, I took her and placed her on my shoulder, where she perched patiently and looked out into the distance. She knew just as well as I did that we were very far from home.
Despite my crash landing in Oz, my body was surprisingly free of bruises, aches, and pains. Actually, I felt pretty good. The headache I’d had when I’d first landed had subsided, and now I felt full of energy.
I was hoping that the place would cheer up as I got farther away from the pit. I was still hoping for a tree that grew lollipops or a welcome committee of cheerful Munchkins—or anything cheerful, really. But as I walked down the road, the countryside remained as grim and desolate as before, everything cast in the eerie blue light that reminded me of the glow of a television from underneath the crack of a closed door.
There were no singing birds. The only signs of life were the giant ravens that occasionally swooped overhead, startling me every time they crowed. There were no trees to be seen, but the air smelled vaguely of burning leaves.
After a while, the bedraggled fields by the side of the road turned into huge cornfields on either side, with stalks as tall as my body. I was used to cornfields back in Kansas, obviously, but these were different: every ear was as black and shiny as oil. It looked like each one had been dipped in tar. Or like all the life had been sucked out of them and had something dead and evil pumped back in their place.
Curious, I reached out to pull one of them from its stalk. Before I could even touch it, a black vine sprung up from the ground and curled around my arm like a whip, squeezing tight. It burned. I yelped and pulled away, managing to twist myself free, and retreated to a spot in the center of the road that I hoped was safely out of reach. I made a note not to go poking around at anything else here. This wasn’t Dorothy’s Oz.
It was Oz, wasn’t it? The boy had called it that, and the fact that I was walking along a road made of yellow bricks was enough to convince me I wasn’t in Canada or Argentina. I just had no idea what this Oz had to do with the story I knew. It would have been nice if he’d given me a little more information.
Or maybe he had: Suddenly I remembered what he’d said to me before he’d disappeared into the pit. “Don’t make the same mistakes she made.”
Could he have been talking about Dorothy? “This is where it all began for her,” he’d said. Who else could he have meant? And what “mistakes” had she made?
I thought about it some more. What if Dorothy had been here, just like the book said, but she had somehow gotten it wrong? Like, what if the witch had killed her instead of the other way around? If so, this depressing version of fairyland definitely felt wicked enough to be the result.
It was a weird idea—so weird that I felt my headache coming back as I tried to wrap my head around it—but what if Dorothy had screwed everything up and someone had decided to bring over another girl from Kansas as some kind of do-over?
I shuddered to myself. I had enough problems of my own back in Kansas. Why couldn’t I have been swept away to an imaginary kingdom where nothing was wrong at all—where I could just kick my legs up and enjoy a nice, relaxing vacation? I racked my brain, trying to remember if there were any books or movies like that, and realized there weren’t any.
Well, one thing was for sure—I didn’t have any magical shoes to take me home. Even if I could click my heels together and be right back in Kansas where I’d started, I wouldn’t. This place was dark and scary and a little evil seeming, but it was something new and different. Now I just needed to find someone to tell me what was going on here.
So I felt my heart leap when the road dipped down into a shallow valley and curved to the right, heading right toward a cluster of buildings that was sprawled at the foot of the hill.
A town. There had to be people living there. This time, I would make them give me some answers.
As I made my way toward it, though, I began to see that my hopes for human contact might need to wait a little longer. The buildings, which were arranged around a decrepit stone plaza, were all cracked and crumbling and grown over with ivy that looked like it had never been tended. The facades of some of the houses had been spray-painted with some kind of graffiti tag: an angry, green frowny face.
The whole area had the distinct look of a place that had slowly been deserted, kind of like the town a few miles away from Flat Hill that everyone had abandoned when the plastic flower factory had shut down.
“Hello?” I called out when I had reached the ring of buildings encircling the town square. There was no response.
From up close, it was clear that this place had actually been nice, once. Even abandoned like this, there was something cheerful and quaint about the way the houses—all of various heights—were built so close together that they were practically stacked on top of one another, as if personal space wasn’t something they cared about around here. And although they were falling apart now, each house was beautifully crafted, with domed roofs and round windows and ornate wooden shutters with fancy iron hardware.
I had to hunch a little to peer inside the nearest window, which barely reached my chin. Inside, there was a table set for five with moldy food on each plate, like whoever had once lived there had left in the middle of dinner.
“They could really use some Munchkins around here, huh?” I said to Star, who hadn’t moved from her perch on my shoulder. She just stared back at me balefully and didn’t bother squeaking a response.
I jumped back in surprise when I stepped into the square. Someone was smiling down at me triumphantly. Then I realized it wasn’t a person at all. It was a statue cast in marble, and it was the first thing I’d seen in the whole town that wasn’t dirty and crumbling. In fact, it was so white that it was glowing—all except for the pair of glittering silver shoes on its feet.
Of course, I recognized it immediately. With her kind, smiling face, her jaunty gingham dress, and her neatly curled pigtails, there was no mistaking her: it was Dorothy. The silver plaque on the pedestal confirmed it:
Here Stands Dorothy Gale, it read. She Who Arrived on the Wind, Slayed the Wicked, and Freed the Munchkins.
By now, I’d given up on the idea that I was dreaming—my body felt too heavy and solid, and as bizarre as everything was, none of it had the sticky, under
water quality of a dream. Even so, it was kind of unreal to confirm the alternative with my own two eyes: that I had been thrown into a fairy tale.
“Dorothy likes her statues,” a voice said, from out of nowhere. Startled, I looked around to see where it was coming from, and saw a face peering down at me from the second-story window of a house a few paces off. “Me, I have to say, I’m pretty sick of them.”
There was a thud as a small black knapsack landed next to me. Unthinkingly, I reached down for it.
“Don’t touch that!” the voice growled. I jumped back and saw her scrambling out the window. She dangled by her fingers before dropping to the ground, landing softly as if the height were no big thing. It was a girl. She looked up at me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, and when she sprung to her feet, I saw that there was no way she was more than four feet tall, even in her platform boots.
Now this was more like it. I was face-to-face with a real, live Munchkin.
At least, I was pretty sure that’s what she was. Her hair was inky blue-black and her eyes were caked in thick eyeliner with triple fake lashes. She was wearing a vampy eggplant-hued lipstick and a leather skirt. Her T-shirt revealed arms covered in complicated tattoo sleeves.
But she was short, and she moved with a springiness and agility that was something more than just plain old human. Anyway, I’d already been here long enough that I wasn’t shocked to find out that there was such a thing as a goth Munchkin.
“Excuse me?” the girl barked as I looked her up and down curiously. “Do you have a problem?”
Heat rose to my face as my mind flashed to Madison Pendleton.
“Nope. Do you?” I snapped right back at her. I couldn’t even look at a Munchkin without starting trouble. Was she going to punch me now, too?
She didn’t. Instead, she let out a wry cackle and rolled her eyes. “Let’s see,” she said. “Do I have a problem? How about, do I have five thousand?” She marched right over to where I stood and grabbed her bag from where it lay at my feet. It was stuffed to the seams with what I figured must be an entire leather wardrobe. “The answer’s yes, by the way.”
Dorothy Must Die: The Other Side of the Rainbow Collection: No Place Like Oz, Dorothy Must Die, The Witch Must Burn, The Wizard Returns, The Wicked Will Rise Page 3