Shadows of the Emerald City (2 page)

“
Hello, Dorothy,” Will whispered, then glanced at Fisk to see if he had heard.

Fisk smiled. “Did you notice her feet?”

Will looked again, almost expecting shoes that were covered in red glitter. She was wearing unremarkable flats, hospital issue.

Then he saw them move.

She was clicking her heels, three times in succession.

The first two months were busy ones for Will, and he only saw Dorothy Gale on two occasions, both with Dr. Fisk.

His predecessor, Dr. Vincent Colby, had left without notice two months before. Will found that odd, especially in light of Dorothy’s case, but Fisk was unperturbed.

“
Colby was a good man, but his heart wasn’t in it,” Fisk confided as they observed Dorothy. She was sitting near the duck pond, but stared at her hands, unmoving.

“
I read a couple of his papers,” Will said. “He seemed rather…
clinical
.”

Fisk nodded.

“
Skinnerian,” he said, his rosy face wincing as if he had smelled something bad. “I’d take the whole lot of them with their rats and black boxes and dump them in the Arkansas River.”

“
But in light of Dorothy’s family, the farmhands…”

“
I know what the papers say,” Fisk said. “But they never found bodies, did they? I think they were lost in the tornado, and the trauma of seeing that is what reduced Dorothy to catatonia.”

“
I think that theory has merit, Doctor,” Will said. “But it’s that lack of bodies that makes me question the disappearance of Doctor Colby.”

“
I would imagine if you called around to various psychiatric institutions, you’d find he was practicing in another state,” Fisk insisted. “Perhaps even in Europe.”

“
But, to leave his belongings behind…”

“
Doctor Price, the truth is I feel we are well rid of the man. Unlike you, he was a heartless bastard that felt all of Man’s maladies could be removed by a scalpel or some operant conditioning. If it gives you any comfort, there was no tornado the day he left, not even a slight breeze.”

“
Still…”

Fisk chuckled.

“
You think she killed him, buried him on the grounds somewhere. The police thought so, too. Had bloodhounds out here for three days. They scared the patients and the ducks. And before you ask, they checked Dorothy’s room, too. No one walled up behind the lath and plaster,
Montresor
!”

Will was unsure.

Fisk clapped him on the back.

“
You haven’t left the grounds in weeks. I’m taking you out for steaks and a round of martinis at
The Brazier
. Doctor’s orders.”

Will looked over at Dorothy, but she continued to regard her hands, as if waiting for them to reveal some great mystery.

The case was already something of an urban legend when Will first heard about it as a youngster in Bramble, a small town west of Topeka. It was the summer of ‘46 and he had just turned nine, the same age as Dorothy when she was found wandering miles from her home in Dryden after the big tornado of 1900. The little girl was unharmed, but everyone at the farm where she lived had disappeared. In Will’s time, the popular versions were that Dorothy had butchered her family and fed them to the hogs or that a ravenous monster had devoured them, driving poor Dorothy mad in the process.

There was no reference to Oz.

The story stayed with him, and he was plagued by nightmares for weeks. As a result, he remembered details of the legend long after his friends had forgotten it.

When he was fifteen, Will went to the public library in Lawrence and researched newspapers from that fateful summer in 1900.

Will had been fascinated by the story, mostly by the land the traumatized child had conjured up. To think someone so young could create such a vibrant, compelling delusion! This fascination stayed with him through high school, and led to his pursuing psychiatry as a career.

Now he looked again at his favorite patient, once again seated before her drawing and mumbling as she clicked her now-calloused heels.

It was the only time she appeared animated, other than when the skies became gray and stormy. Otherwise, she exhibited all the classic signs of catatonia, and had to be fed, dressed and washed.

In his first week, Will had leaned close to her to try and discern what she said as she regarded the painting, which he learned she had done in her first year at the institute, back when it was crudely labeled an “insane asylum”.

It was just five words, and she repeated them like a mantra.

There’s no place like home

There’s no place like home

There’s no place like home

In the spring of 1964, when the country was still reeling from the death of President John F. Kennedy, Will went to Dr. Fisk with a proposal.

He found the big man sniffling at his desk. Fisk held up a copy of
LIFE Magazine
which contained a picture of Kennedy’s young son saluting his father’s casket.

“
It’s a hell of a thing, Will,” Fisk said, putting the magazine down and blowing his nose on an enormous handkerchief.

Will agreed, but his sorrow was tempered by excitement.

“
Doctor Fisk, I…”

“
Son, you’ve worked here now for nigh on to two years. I wish you would call me ‘Carl’.”

“
You’re right,
Carl
, I should.”

Fisk beamed, and wiped an errant tear from the corner of his eye. He then looked at Will expectantly.

“
I would like to sign Dorothy Gale out for a day.”

“
For what purpose?”

“
I have been doing some reading in
Die Deutsche Fachzeitschrift fur Psychisches Wissenschaft
.”

Fisk smiled.

“
I haven’t gotten my translated copy, yet.” When he saw the younger man flush with embarrassment, he waved him off. “A joke, doctor. I remember from your résumé you speak German and French.”

Will almost mentioned that he also spoke Italian and a smattering of Russian, but thought better of it.

“
There’s an interesting article by Friedrich Leuchte concerning what he calls ‘
erschüttern der bekannten
’, or ‘
the shock of the familiar
’. He cites numerous case studies where some catatonic individuals have been shocked or jolted from their stupor by familiar surroundings. In Dorothy’s case, I’m thinking the Gale farmhouse.”

“
But Dorothy was returned there after being found,” Fisk said. “Doctor Walshe, the psychiatrist who initially treated her, also took her to other familiar surroundings. None of the attempts proved successful.”

“
But those trips were taken while she was still in the process of fabricating her fantasy world. She hasn’t been outside these grounds for over fifty years. In effect, she has spent all that time ‘in Oz’. Now it’s the farmhouse that would seem new and exotic, something both known but forgotten.”

“
A shock of the familiar.”

“
Exactly.”

Dr. Fisk sighed.

“
There are many who would say the old woman is at peace, leave her be.”

“
If that’s true, Carl, then why not just load up every patient with tranquilizers and sit them in front of the television or the duck pond?”

Fisk considered this and nodded. He pulled a form from his desk, and began filling it in.

It was a brilliant May day when Will and Dorothy set out for the farm in Dryden.

The drive was just over an hour, and Will had gone there on his last day off to make certain there was enough of the farmhouse standing to give Dorothy the necessary jolt.

She sat in the front seat, her large hands clasped in her lap. For all her lack of affect, she might be sitting out on the duck pond bench. She was far more animated in her room than she was now.

Her demeanor changed only once. Will heard her gasp slightly and saw her lean forward.

There was a young girl on a bicycle, a white wicker basket of flowers mounted on the handlebars. When it became clear it was only a young girl, Dorothy returned to her vegetative state.

Elmira Gulch had ridden a bicycle, Will remembered. It was funny, he knew the Gulch woman had had an altercation with Dorothy shortly before the tornado hit. He had thought of hiring an actress to play the woman, perhaps to come charging out of the house when they arrived. But he could find no pictures of Elmira Gulch, and realized the shock of seeing her double might be more than Dorothy could bear. One of the lessons he had learned in his residency was that results did not always come quickly. “
Patience for patients
” was something his instructors mentioned time and time again.

They were about three miles from the town of Dryden when Will took a dirt road off to the left. He thought he saw Dorothy’s eyes flicker, but he had to keep his eye on the rough and rutted road.

They passed one large working farm and two smaller spreads that had gone to seed, their houses and outbuildings slowly caving in to rotted piles of lumber and nails.

Then came the Gale farm.

The barn was burned down, and the pigsty and chicken coops were gone, but the house stood, seemingly little changed from that infamous day in 1900.

Will glanced at Dorothy, and was rewarded to see that her eyes were alert, her hands unclasped.

They passed the rusted ruin of a mailbox and parked in the dooryard.

The house was indeed crooked on the foundation, as if a giant had lifted it and then replaced it carelessly on the foundation.

It was a sad and plain gray house in a colorless landscape. Even the brilliantly blue sky seemed bland and charmless in this barren and desolate place.

My God, Will thought, it’s no wonder her fantasy world is so filled with bright colors and rainbows.

The two of them sat there for a moment, the only sounds the ticking of the cooling engine and a big dog barking somewhere in the distance.

“
Dorothy?”

She turned to him, and he noticed for the first time that her eyes were an amazing shade of green, like the ocean as the sky clouds up. Though he had seen many pictures of her over the years, he realized that in her youth she must have been extraordinarily beautiful.

“
Do you want to go in?” he asked.

She nodded slowly, looking again at the house as she did so.

As if it might disappear.

Will got out first, and went to help her out. Her hand was strong as it clasped his, and despite her age there was no hint of weakness or palsy.