The Magril ruffled its feathers. “As you wish,” she said. “I must leave you. But I offer you a final warning: To survive the fog, you must be willing to become yourself.”
Then, without waiting for a response, the Magril took off, soaring into the white expanse of nothingness above and beyond us. I looked at Ozma, who blinked back at me and twisted her lip uncertainly. I took her hand, squeezing it for reassurance—I just wasn’t sure if I was reassuring myself or her.
“Who are you?” she asked me. Another question I couldn’t answer. But I didn’t have to, not for now. For now, all I had to do was step forward. So I took a deep breath, and Ozma and I walked into the mist.
It turns out that pitch black is not the scariest thing in the world. Bright, blinding white—the kind of white that makes you wonder if the whole world around you has been erased—can be just as scary.
That was where we had found ourselves. The fog we had entered was so thick that when I held my hand out in front of me, I couldn’t see it. I wiggled my fingers just to make sure they were still there. Well, I could feel them, so that had to count for something. Right?
With my other hand, I was still gripping Ozma’s, tighter than ever now, but when I looked to see her reaction to all of this, she might as well have not even been there.
The only thing I could make out at all was the road, and even that was just a faded, ghostly after-impression, like the floaters you get in your vision when you stare at a light bulb and then look away. Still, it was there: pale and thin, spinning out ahead of us, up and out into the blankness.
From behind the shroud of thick fog, it was impossible to tell what lay on either side of the road’s edges. Were we a thousand feet in the air, with only the clouds separating us from a heartrending plunge to our doom? Or were we strolling through a peaceful meadow without even realizing it? All I could do was put one foot in front of the other and try to keep the faith that we would make it through.
Faith: everyone knows it’s something you’re supposed to have, but it’s harder to put that into practice when your senses are telling you all hope is lost.
And the fog was just getting started on me. We had been walking for probably five minutes when there was a soft, sinister whispering in my ear. It sent me jumping out of my skin. The voice was slimy and reptilian, neither male nor female. It was so close that I could feel breath tickling my earlobe.
“Turn back,” it said. “You’re weak. You’ll never make it. You’ve never been ready. You’ve never been brave enough, or strong enough. You shouldn’t have bothered. You should never have come here.”
I shuddered, and tried to remember the giant bird’s warning. This was the Fog of Doubt. Whatever was speaking to me probably wasn’t even real—it was just magical trickery playing off my natural fears and insecurities. If I was going to let a little ghostly torment get to me, I had no right to be here in the first place. I was tougher than that. I just had to ignore it.
The next voice I heard was one I recognized, even if it wasn’t the one I had expected. It was Madison Pendleton, who had made my life back home hell from the day that my father left us, who had turned all of my friends against me, just for fun, and who had gotten me kicked out of school—the same day that I’d been carried away to Oz on a cyclone.
“Well, look who it is,” she was saying. Just the sound of her called up a feeling I thought I’d left behind for good, of being both angry and powerless at the same time. It was that horrible feeling that no matter how hard you tried, you were making things worse for yourself, and the best thing to do was give up.
“Salvation Amy. Haven’t changed much, have you? Still just a piece of worthless, stupid trailer trash. I didn’t ruin your birthday party. No one was going to come to it, anyway. And what are you wearing?”
“Go to hell, Madison,” I muttered. I wasn’t very impressed. Honestly, Madison had usually been more cutting than this in real life. If anything, she was just making me realize how far I’d come since the days when she could ruin my day just by sneering at me.
I wasn’t that girl anymore. I wasn’t a victim anymore. But as soon as I dismissed her, her voice changed seamlessly into Nox’s.
“So, I hear you have a crush on me, huh? Come on. Look, we kissed, okay, but I hope you didn’t get the wrong idea. I know messed up when I see it, and I don’t waste my time with it.”
Another voice chimed in on top of his. It was my mother. “Children are just vampires, sucking the life out of you. If I didn’t have you, Amy, I might never have started drinking. You drove me to it. You made your father leave me. You drove me out into that storm. You ruined my life, and then you just left. Did you even think of what you put me through?”
And a voice from so long ago that I was surprised at how familiar it was. A man’s.
“The best thing I ever did was leave,” my father said. Unlike the rest of the voices, his didn’t sound vindictive, or angry. He sounded just like I remembered him: gentle and easygoing. “I’m happy now, you know. I have a new life. A new family. I made things right for myself.”
“No!” I screamed. “You’re lying!” But I couldn’t hear myself, because suddenly there were so many voices shouting at me that I was drowned out. So many that I couldn’t separate them all. Glinda, Mombi, Lulu, Indigo, all of them reminding me of how I had messed up and worse, of all the things that had been wrong with me from the start. It was like that old show This Is Your Life, except this version was called This Is Why You Suck.
“Shut up!” I screamed, dropping Ozma’s hand to cover my ears and stopping in my tracks. “Just leave me alone! You’re lying!”
I’d yelled it so loudly that my throat was sore, but I barely heard myself—my screams were lost in the nothingness. Meanwhile, the other voices just got louder, now an indistinguishable chorus that shook my skull.
Selfish bitch. Loser. Damaged goods. Even when you win, you lose.
No one wants to come to your birthday party. Boyfriend? Who could ever love you? Who could you ever love?
All you know how to do is kill. And you couldn’t even kill her. You failed. Again. Just like you’ll fail next time.
You’re weak. You don’t belong here, and you don’t belong there.
My heart was racing; my breathing was shallow. I sank to my knees and took deep breaths, squeezing my eyes shut tight as I bit my lip, trying to hold back my rage and despair. I tasted blood.
It’s not real. It’s not real. I kept repeating that to myself.
It wasn’t. And the voices were wrong. Even if some of the things they were saying might have been true, they were still wrong.
Because I didn’t care what Madison Pendleton thought of me.
Because I knew what I had done for my mother—all the sacrifices that I had made for her, and that she had left me, not the other way around.
Because my father was no kind of father at all.
“Who are you?” Ozma had asked, just before we’d entered the fog. I had ignored the question, but now I knew that she had been trying to help me. It didn’t matter what Nox thought of me, or didn’t think of me. All that mattered was that I knew who I was.
And I did. For all the ways I had changed since I’d come to Oz, I was still the same person I’d been back in Kansas. Yes I might have been quiet and shy, the kind of person who did my best to keep my head down just to get through the day. But even then, I had never let people walk all over me. Even in the days when I didn’t know a left hook from a karate kick, I’d still always found my own ways of fighting for the things I believed in.
I had never been selfish or disloyal: I’d spent more time thinking about my mother than about myself, I’d put myself in the line of Madison Pendleton’s fire more times than I could count, because I saw her picking on someone even weaker than I was. I’d never given up, even when it might have been the smartest thing to do.
Oz hadn’t changed any of that. It had just made me stronger. Now I had the power to win any fight I took on
. I had a knife that could cut through anything, if I wanted it to. And I knew it.
Slowly, I opened my eyes. The clouds around me seemed to have lifted a little bit. And I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t my imagination, but I knew that in a place like this, imagination and reality were pretty much the same thing.
Even without Ozma’s hand in mine, and even without seeing her, I knew that she was next to me. I knew that she, in her stupid, nonsense way, was the one who had helped me through this. What had the Fog of Doubt showed her?
“Who’s next?” I shouted to the nothingness. “Any more ghosts out there?”
When I got my answer, I kind of wished I’d kept the question to myself. The fog had saved its biggest gun for last: Dorothy.
And not just her voice. She was there in the flesh, hovering a few feet above the road, right in the middle of my path, haughty and imperious, her red shoes crackling with magic.
At first, she didn’t seem to notice me, but when she did, her face softened into a disarmingly kind expression that bordered on sympathy. Instead of screaming or insulting me or telling me what a loser I was, she smiled.
“I knew you’d be here before long,” she said. “The Scarecrow didn’t believe me, but I told him you were too smart to listen to the Fantasms. They’re liars. Figments. I know you better than they do, that’s for sure. You and I are alike, you know.”
“Yeah, people keep saying that,” I said.
I moved toward her slowly, not sure what I was supposed to do next. She wasn’t any different from the rest of them, except that I could see her. But if she was a figment of my imagination, would she go away if I ignored her or did I still have to fight her?
She was a figment of my imagination, right?
Dorothy shrugged. “Aw, c’mon,” she said. “Don’t make it like that. We’re two of a kind. Two good old farm girls a long way from home. We could practically be sisters.”
“First off,” I said, still advancing on my probably imaginary enemy, “all I know about farms is that they stink when you pass them on the highway. Second, I don’t have a sister. If I did, and she was anything like you, I would have drowned her before she’d learned to walk.”
“Back home, they call that kind of spirit gumption,” she said, curling a beckoning, red-nailed fingertip in my direction. “And I like a girl with gumption. I am a girl with gumption, after all. Join me. It’s lonely at the top, you know? Plus, ruling this place is a lot of work. Between the two of us, though, we could really turn this dump upside down. Make it a place actually worth living in, and have some fun in the meantime.”
I shot off a fireball, aiming for the center of her chest. It went right through her, just as I’d known it would, but at least it had been enough to annoy her: Dorothy’s smile curdled.
“Fine,” she said sourly. “I didn’t really expect anything different. Hoped, maybe. Go ahead, keep on fighting, if that’s what you want. Like it even makes a difference? If you think you’re really doing any good, think again. You’re just winging it anyway, aren’t you? You have no idea what you’re doing unless someone else is telling you to do it. Guess what, none of the witches you let boss you around know shit either. Every brilliant move you make just makes me stronger.”
“Oh yeah? Maybe we should test that,” I said, faking confidence.
“You know why? Because you’ll never kill me, and the harder you try, the closer you get to becoming just like me. Pretty soon, you’ll be knocking on my door, just begging for me to clear off a throne for you. You know I’m right. I can see it in your face.”
Claim yourself, the Magril had said. I suddenly understood. Dorothy and Glinda both thought they had my number. They both thought I was what Dorothy herself had been: a good little girl from the prairie who hadn’t meant any of it, who had never dreamed that she would turn out evil but just needed a little help—a little temptation, a few empty promises—to get there.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Everyone else seems to think so. But there’s one important difference between us.”
“What’s that?” Dorothy asked sweetly.
“I know who I am,” I said. I thought I’d said it quietly, but when the words came out they weren’t quiet at all. They reverberated like I was whispering into a microphone.
Dorothy took a step backward.
I felt my knife itching to come to me, but I willed it away, just to prove a point to myself: that I didn’t need it. It was just a knife. It had a few magical bells and whistles, sure, not to mention a really nice hand-carved Magril on its hilt, but I wasn’t powerful because of the knife. The knife was powerful because of me.
So instead of summoning it, I just summoned myself. I thought of every doubt I’d ever had, of every time I’d had to eat the crap sandwich that my mother, and Madison Pendleton, and Dorothy had served me. Those days were gone.
“I. Know. Who. I. AM,” I said again, more confidently this time with each word bringing forth every bit of the power, the rage, and—yeah—the wickedness, that had been building inside of me since I was just a little girl. “And I’m willing to fight for it.”
My hands began to vibrate, and I clenched them into fists, then thrust them forward and brought them together with a thunderclap as a bolt of black lightning came down from the sky, cutting through the fog.
Everything went dark, and then slowly, the darkness lifted. The fog was gone, the voices were gone, Dorothy was gone, and I could see again. I had passed the test.
Ozma and I were standing on a narrow, pebbly beach in a basin in the mountains where the road had led us. When I turned around, I saw the road curving up through a narrow gap in a ridge of rocky peaks so high that I could barely see the tops when I craned my neck. Ahead of us was a vast, glassy lake, and beyond that, on the other side—it was impossible to tell how far away—were more mountains, even taller than the ones we had just come through.
As the road wended down the shore toward the water’s edge, it petered out until all that was left of it were a few scattered, moss-covered yellowish bricks. Wedged into the gaps sat a small, wooden canoe so weathered by age and wind and rain that it looked ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. Next to it, staked into the muddy bank, was a hand-lettered sign.
This way to the Island of Lost Things, it read.
The Island of Lost Things. That sounded at least slightly better than the Fog of Doubt. Actually, it sounded like it had possibilities. I kicked the side of the canoe and found it surprisingly sturdy, and as Ozma and I exchanged a glance, I sensed that we were both wondering the same thing.
If we were headed for the Island of Lost Things, was it to find something that had gone missing, or did it mean we, too, were lost?
No. I felt, for the first time, like I was found.
FIFTEEN
I rowed until my arms felt like they were about to fall off and then rowed some more while Ozma mostly dozed, every now and then waking up just long enough to look around, see that nothing much had changed, and slide back into a blissed-out nap.
I had started out paddling toward the mountains on the other side of the water, under the assumption if I just kept going in one direction long enough, I’d find the island eventually. But the mountains—which had loomed so huge in the distance from the beach—were now somehow growing smaller as I moved toward them, sinking into the horizon line until they had disappeared.
Even with a paddle, that left me pretty much up a creek. I was sitting in the middle of a smooth, almost motionless plate of water that reflected the sky to the point where it was hard to tell which was which. I couldn’t even head back to where I’d started: with nothing in any direction except water, it was impossible to tell where I’d come from.
I felt like I had rowed out to the end of the world and found myself right back at the beginning of it.
The only thing I had to guide me was the sun—not that it seemed very trustworthy at the moment either. While the mountains had been busy doing their amazing disapp
earing act, the sun’s movement in the sky had been speeding up, and now it was rising and sinking and rising and sinking over and over, like a time-lapse animation brought to life.
I guess it was possible that someone was going crazy with the Great Clock back in the Emerald City, but somehow I didn’t think so. When I was little, and my mom had told me about the International Date Line, I’d imagined it as a real line, painted down the middle of the world, and that if you stood with your feet on either side of it and looked at your watch, it would get so confused that the hands would start spinning around, out of whack. This felt something like that—like we were trapped in a place where time didn’t know which way was up anymore.
“I thought you were supposed to be the one leading the way,” I snapped at Ozma, who was still oblivious in her slumber, her hand dangling out of the boat, her fingers dragging in the water. “How about waking up and helping me out here?”
She sighed in her sleep and turned the other way.
Out of ideas, I tried casting a pathfinder spell, but when I conjured up the usually trusty ball of energy to guide us, all it did was flutter around in confusion, then sputter out.
I stared out at the water in frustration. “At least it’s not telling me what a loser I am,” I mused aloud. Secretly, I kind of wished it would, if only for the change of pace. A few Fantasms might not have been pleasant, but they would have given me someone to talk to other than myself and Sleeping Beauty over here.
The sound of my own voice made me feel giddy to the point of near drunkenness, and I began to giggle. “I guess I should have known that the Island of Lost Things wouldn’t be easy to find,” I said. “It would almost be funny, right? I mean, if we weren’t so totally, completely, utterly lost.”
Then my giggles became hysterical laughter. I wasn’t laughing at my joke (which wasn’t really a joke even) but from sheer joy. Because at the exact moment that my words escaped my mouth, I saw it: against the hot-pink silver dollar of the plunging sun, a tiny, crescent-shaped sliver of land had made itself suddenly apparent. Roused by my whooping, Ozma yawned, stretched, and rubbed her eyes, sitting up and cracking her neck from one side to the next.
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 47