Shadows of the Emerald City (10 page)

Sure, the witch had made her promises to him, but he knew full well the breaking capacity of promises. When he had been a man, his wife had broken them. When he had been a productive Tin Woodsman, the Emerald City workers had broken them. Why would the witch be any different?

As they walked through the low hanging branches of the forest, Nick glanced into the trees. He knew that something was moving around out there; the longer he stared, the more certain he became that the forms in the shadows of foliage were the witch’s winged monkeys.

Fine,
he thought.
You watch all you want, witch.

Yet, as he observed the shapes in the tops of the trees, he became more and more aware that the posture to their forms was somehow off. The shapes up there were not the bodies of the witch’s minions…they were more rounded, more agile somehow.

A sound from the ground broke his attention. He looked down and saw one of the yellow bricks of the road protruding up, pushed from its underside. To his left, another brick did the same thing. He studied this one as it popped into the air and clattered to the ground. When the brick was free, revealing the ground below, four small fingers tipped with brown cracked nails tore through the soil.

“
What is
that?”
he asked. He readied his axe, prepared to lop off the fingers.

“
What is it, Tin Man?” Dorothy asked him. She was looking to him and then to the ground, back and forth, perplexed.

“
There!
Do you not see it?”

The girl shrugged. Even her dog seemed to be confused. Similarly, the Scarecrow and the Lion stared at him as if he had lost his mind. Nick looked to the ground and the fingers were still there, reaching and pulling. To both sides, more of the bricks were coming undone as something pushed its way out of the ground. The dirt shook and trembled and Nick could feel the movement in the hollow shapes of his legs.

Whatever it was that he was witnessing, the girl and their companions were not seeing it. Even the little dog, which seemed to have a higher sensitivity to unseen things, was unaware of anything happening.

Nick looked behind him and saw that thousands of the bricks were being jarred from the ground in similar fashion. And with each brick that was unearthed, a reaching hand took its place. The hands were small and the wrists and arms to which they were attached looked as thin as twigs. Still, there was something menacing about them.

Finally, he understood.

He looked back up to the trees and saw that the shapes had begun to descend. They were swinging from branches and scaling down the bodies of the trees. Their faces were hidden in shadows that came as if from nowhere, broken only by the menacing white of their smiles. And despite the shadows, Nick recognized the appearance of the Woodkins right away.

As they gathered around him, surrounding him and chanting in some woodland language that he did not understand, his traveling companions still saw nothing. It was in that moment, as Nick began swinging into the air with his axe, that his question was answered.

Yes.

Ghosts
would
haunt a man despite the absence of his heart.

Nick swung at the small figures as they approached. To the girl and her new friends, he was merely swinging at air. Realizing this only pushed Nick further to an edge of angst and hate that he didn’t understand—even if he had his heart, he didn’t think he’d be able to fathom the sensation.

He turned to them and swung with blinding purpose. The Lion reacted first, his cowardice forgotten in the face of a threat to the girl. But before he could raise so much as a paw, the blade caught him just above the left eye. There was a cracking sound followed by the creature’s yelp of pain. The lion reeled back, his paw going to his face as he tottered to the ground in a spray of crimson.

The dog came next, barking nonsensically at Nick’s ankles. Nick barely noticed the mutt at all. He was swinging at the shape of an approaching Woodkin. Its body had deteriorated; its face was a smear of color and wrinkled, its limbs caked with rot and stale dirt. As Nick brought his axe around only to watch it pass through the Woodkin’s form like mist, the end of the axe came down upon the dog like a club. There was a cracking sound like branches snapping and then the dog went limp. It happened so fast, the dog was unable to let out even the slightest squeal of pain.

“
Toto!
”

The stupid girl came rushing forward, her left arm raised to ward off his blows, her right one extended towards her crushed pet. Behind her, the Scarecrow looked as if he wanted to attack, to prevent Nick from further damage, but his legs seemed to fail him. He shivered with fear, the straw of his torso slowly unraveling and fluttering to the ground in frail strings.

Nick raised his axe over his head. The world was nothing more than a melee of moving Woodkin phantoms and this girl—this haphazard savior to the miracle land that had betrayed him—and it was all too much for him.

He screamed. Before the axe fell in a mad swoop, he saw the Scarecrow cringing at the scream. To Nick, his own rage-filled wail sounded like the shrieking of metal on metal in a violent collision.

But the sound he heard when the axe fell heavily on the girl’s shoulder drowned it out. There was a pop as her collarbone snapped in half and then a wet tearing sound as her entire left side was torn and fell away. For a moment, the face and neck of the girl from Kansas seemed to hover in midair and then collapsed with the rest of her split form.

Nick watched as her blood pooled on the ground, trickling between the bricks of the road.

The bricks…

The road was whole again. The yellow bricks he had seen popping from the ground were back in their rightful places. The Woodkins were also gone.

Only, as he stared down the Scarecrow and raised his axe again, he knew that they were still with him. He could feel them watching from the shadows of the forest. They were waiting for him.

Faced with death the Scarecrow was unable to move. He opened his oddly shaped patch of a mouth and let out a cry of anguish. Nick swung his axe around in an arc that could actually be heard on the air. The blade tore through the soft body of the Scarecrow. It tore him in half. His legs stood stubbornly for a moment before collapsing in a heap of straw and fabric. The upper half of the body twitched a bit in response. Nick watched contently as one of the idiot’s button-like eyes drooped from the surface of its face.

He looked to the girl’s body once more, her blood cascading over the yellow bricks. It seemed fitting, somehow. Had he the capacity to do so, he liked to think that he would have grinned.

Looking away from her, he walked to the edge of the Yellow Brick Road. He carried his axe by his side sternly as he felt the lure of the Woodkin dead from the shadows. He sensed them ahead of him, leading him somewhere. He wasn’t sure where at first, but as the forest grew deeper and darker, he began to understand. It was easier to think clearly with that damned road behind him.

The witch had taken his heart and for that, he was grateful. But in the end, she had expected something of him. And while he had done that duty—although not to her standards—she was expecting something from him in return. And Nick Chopper was done with being used.

Nick Chopper,
he thought.
I remember him. He certainly was a foolish man.

As he walked further into the woods with the ghosts of the Woodkin people ahead of him, he thought of the witch. He thought of what it was going to feel like when he plunged his axe into her guts.

And with that thought, he actually managed something similar to a smile. The shadows of the forest squeezed in and overtook him completely. As a parade of Woodkin ghosts led him towards his next kill, he left Nick Chopper behind to die in the shadows.

His heart was what had defined him as a man. Now it was time to be defined by the axe, the darkness and the tin.

The End.

by Camille Alexa

Madrigaard is closest to my heart. I hold her to my breast, croon to her. I stroke the sparse hairs on her misshapen head, soft like crow feathers but fine and ill-rooted.

“
Fly, pretty monkey,” I tell her. I lean far out the open window of my turret. Wind whips against my cheeks and neck, tugs cruelly at my hair, rakes my clothing from my body until it billows out in webby tatters like a banner of my imperfections, announcing that the Wicked Witch is home.

I kiss Madrigaard’s warty head once more and toss her into the whipping wind.

Her tiny stick arms flail helpless at the air. She tumbles like a small black stone.

Fly
, I silently urge, not shutting my one good eye against the sight of her plummeting body, out of respect.
Fly, pretty monkey
.

I expect to hear the wet smack of her small body against the stones far below, but her tiny wings like scraps of rotten leather unfurl from against her shivering body. They flap feebly. For a moment, I’m certain she’ll not make it. The rocks beneath my tower are littered with the tiny skulls of her siblings, her cousins, her foremothers—generations of their bones lying stark and naked and lovely, picked clean by keening birds swirling the cliffs near the waterside not far from these bony spires of my keep thrusting upward between sky and landlocked inland sea.

But her flapping strengthens. At the last instant before death on the rib- and femur-covered rocks, her bat-scrap wings slow her descent. She clutches at the nothing of wind and space, her tiny newborn body shriveled and fragile. She flaps and flaps and flaps, slowly rising on one of the bitter currents gusting from the inland sea. When she finally draws up level with me, I smile. In my hopes for her, I’ve bitten clean through the thin skin of my lip, and ichor trickles down my chin, wending toward the tattered open neck of my rotted black lace gown.

Flapping, hovering, she dips her tiny monkey paw into what my blood has become. She holds it to my mouth, as though I must kiss my own hurt better, and when I croon, “What a pretty girl, a clever girl,” she wraps her stick arms around my neck and sighs her tiny monkey sigh into my ear.

My sister’s murderer has been sighted in the poppy fields on the other side of that Green Monstrosity that Oz calls home.

I know those poppy fields well. In his younger days, Oz would meet me there on lazy, sunlit afternoons. He had a fascination for the flowers, a weakness, a longing for their sharp juice and numbing powers. Poppy juice turned out to be more addictive for him, in the end, even than his love for me. We always love most that which has the greatest power to destroy us.

I was beautiful then, and young. We both were: me, and that strange bright-eyed boy from somewhere over the boundless oceans of desert. We would lie under the large drooping heads of flowers at the edge of the field. A game, he called it: to see how long we could resist sleep, lying on our backs side by side with our long hair mingling, and our breaths. We’d laugh as we drifted in and out of consciousness, our minds floating, daring each other to see how long we could last before the poppies claimed us both too completely for one to drag the other to safety. It was always he who succumbed first. I’d watch the tinted shadows of poppy-reflected light play across his sleeping features, and I’d trace his lips with my finger. I’ve always been stronger than I looked, and when he became well and truly senseless from poppy fumes, I’d lift him gently and carry him well past the flowers’ influence. I’d lie down beside him and wait for him to wake, and when he did, he would always kiss me.

Don’t ever leave me
, my beautiful young Oz would say in a poppy-drowse murmur;
or I’ll send people to find you, and tell them to kill you
.

Even now a smile brushes across my lips at the memory of him. My smiles are rare these days, most of them spent on my dear pretty monkeys. Especially the babies, with their delicate skulls and unformed features and mewling cries. I always did love the babies.

A slight scratching comes at my door and Madrigaard’s sharp little fingers stab into my neck at the sound. I stroke her with one hand.

“
Come,” I say.

Baarg opens the door and enters, tray balanced in one hand, the other dragging the floor like a cane or a third leg as he hobbles into the room. His ancient ruined wings lie in tatters more ragged than my gown. If he didn’t hold my special favor, the other winged monkeys, warriors all, would have killed him long ago. Resources are scarce around here: food and space and love. Monkeys are not quite as jealous as other people, but they come close.

Baarg slides his dented silver tray onto a nearby table and sidles under my free hand where it dangles off the arm of my chair. I absently pat his wisp-covered skull, feeling without intending to the fragility of the bone beneath my fingers. I’m keenly aware that I could crush his brain between my fingers if I chose to. As he sighs and leans into my touch, I wonder if the same awareness runs through his monkey mind as well. We always love most that which has the greatest power to destroy us.

I give Baarg a last stroke and turn my attention to the silver tray. He has, as always, collected everything just so, arranged it with inhuman precision on the tray in the same order: the candle, the strap, the spoon, the needle. A small dribble of wax rolls down the side of the taper, and when I touch it with my finger it burns, though not enough. I move my hand into the flame, and though my skin reddens and the air fills with the scent of burnt lace, it’s still not enough.