Shadows of the Emerald City (56 page)

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, through 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.

The glass fell from her fingers and she leaned against him, exhausted. David wondered if they would die here, their flesh dissipating until all they left behind were bones in the dusty wind, where the witch waited to eat them like in the fairy story his mother read to him as a child, fattening them up in separate cages.

This train of thought made him somber, and she followed him, her face tired and pale. The sun was only beginning to crown the horizon, shedding weak light on them as they came to the main door. Easily twice his own size, big, wrought iron hinges and a lock like a lion’s mouth, teeth bared and snarling.

David reached up, fingers clasping the cold iron, and rapped with determination, twice.

Resounding silence returned to him. He knocked again and searched the facade, hoping to gain entry when she trembled beside him. A moment more, and she fell.

He caught her and leaned her against the wall, snapping his fingers in front of her face. Her skin, infused with a gray tinge beneath the eyes and around the lips, testified to the severity of her condition. Weightless as a bird in his arms, her ribs poked out from beneath her skin like fingers.

The door cracked open. David hesitated in the moonlight, expecting someone to greet him, but there was no one, no Winged Monkeys, no Munchkins. Darkness met him, and the eagerness of the castle to embrace them struck him as sinister. He feared to leave her, in case someone or something should encounter her, asleep and defenseless, or worse yet, in case he became lost in the empty castle.

He gathered her into his arms — how thin she was — he lifted her and with care, and moved forward into the darkness, into the musty gray of the castle great room.

His steps echoed like thunder in the expanse of stone. Each step he took affirmed they were alone, and arms aching, he continued to carry her up the West staircase. The air was chilly and stale as he ascended, and tasted like dust from a tomb.

The stairway opened, door after door stretching before him down a dark and empty corridor. Balancing her in his arms, her head lolling back, he tried to the first door. A musty library greeted him, and he dismissed it, onto the next door; a lavish bathroom of marble tile and silver fixtures. The next door knob was reluctant, and stepping back, he kicked it in. A rusty lock gave way, and the door cracked open as he pushed his way forward, cradling her as he eased inside.

Pale dawn light filtered through the castle window. He laid her down on the mattress, exhausted, and dragged the covers over her shoulders. When this was done, he sank into a neighboring chair, exhausted.