Shadows of the Emerald City (48 page)

Follow my instructions. Had it said that before? Those exact words?

Maybe it’s telling me it’s all my own fault
, he thought,
For jimmying with the spell. If I’d just read it straight, maybe nothing would have happened with the bed. Maybe, even, Dot would have called me instead of Tinny
.

So I fucked it all up.
Again
. Story of my life.

He turned to the next page.

A Spell
, it read,
To Defeat an Enemy
.

To defeat an enemy!

He felt a sudden surge of relief go through him. He could breathe again. His shoulders dropped a few inches.

A tear rolled out of his left eye. The book was on his side after all. It knew what he needed. Exactly what he needed.

“
You, you were there for me all along, weren’t you?” he rasped to the book, patting it, “You wanted to help me with Dorothy, but I fucked it up. Now, you’re going to help me with the Tin Man, right?”

The book didn’t respond. It didn’t need to. It had given him the C-note. It had offered him happiness, tried to fix things with Dot. It hadn’t worked so far, sure, but that was his fault. For gumming up the works.

But now, if he played his cards right, it was going to save him from his worst enemy of all. From Tinny.

He didn’t hesitate this time. He read the spell out loud, straight through, knowing he was mangling the Latin. He didn’t care. He had an understanding with the book now. It was his friend.

The pounding came a moment later. Three metallic pounds from a big fist on the hotel room door.

Bert hesitated for a second. He told himself he wasn’t scared any more. Not scared at all.

So, why hadn’t he moved yet?

Three more pounds on the door.

He opened it.

Tinny’s six foot four frame filled the doorway. Bert backpeddled, letting him clank into the room.

“
Hello, T.M.,” he said, moving back toward the bed, “How did you know to find me here? Did Dotty tell you?”

He’d said the spell right. That was all he needed. A spot on the inside track. A friend who could show him the angles.

Tinny just stood there, huge, metallic, staring at him. His eyes were black coals, smoldering from behind.

Bert stared down at his feet.

“
You called
me
,” Tinny said, slowly, his hollow bass voice vibrating into the room, “You left a message on my fucking machine.”

On
your
machine?

Oh, shit
.

“
Well, I—I made a mistake, then. Dialed the wrong number.”

—
From guilt—

“
I—I thought I left it on Dotty’s—on our machine at home. She must have told you—”

Tinny shook his head. The eye-coals smoldered hotter, ready to ignite. His thick metallic lips twisted into a sneer.

“
Nope. Dot didn’t tell me about what happened,” the Tin Man said, his voice rumbling through the room’s thin walls, “But then, you know that, right?” He ignored Bert’s little head-shake. “But I did go to your house. Right after I got the message. I found her there.”

“
Well, I don’t know what she told you, but—”

Tinny shook his head again.

Bert held up his hands in a placating gesture.

“
Look, whatever she told you, there’s always two sides to the story,” he said, “Let me tell you what—”

“
She didn’t tell me shit! She couldn’t!
She was dead!
You beat her to death, you little
prick
!”

Tinny spat out the last word at Bert. He felt the world turn upside down. The breath caught in his throat.

“
No,” he managed, “No. I-I couldn’t have. I just—we just had an argument. I—
she
—”

“
And her little dog, too!” Tinny cried. “Do you remember that, what you did to Toto?”

Tinny pulled out a enormous black pistol from his the pocket of his jacket. Bert saw the silencer screwed to the end of it.

The gun had a laser sight. Bert watched the crimson dot appear on his chest.

“
Now wait!” he cried, backing away, “It wasn’t like that at all. I know I didn’t kill her! I couldn’t have! She was alive when I left!”

The bed hit the back of his knees. There was nowhere left to back away to. Tinny stared at him like he was a branch to be pruned away.

“
She loved me!” Bert choked.

“
That’s her blood on you,” Tinny said, “Isn’t it?”

Bert swallowed, unable to speak.

“
Isn’t it!
”

“
Y-yes—”

Bert was crying now. He’d forgotten all about the book. He’d forgotten about defeating his enemy, about the desires of his heart.

“
This is your lucky day, asshole. Because I’m not going to kill you just now,” Tinny said.

“
N-no?” Bert lowered his hands slightly from his face.

“
No. Look at your clock. It’s 3:45. Fifteen minutes ’til checkout time. You said you was leaving at four o‘clock, right?”

Bert nodded, his eyes frozen with fear.

“
Here’s what I’m going to do. In honor of dear departed Dorothy and your ten-year marriage—”

Bert felt his heart skip a beat.

“—
I’m going to kneecap you, faggot. Then I’m going to leave you here for fifteen minutes. If you can get to the phone, you little worthless piece of shit, and get the Winkies here by four a.m., then you’ll just be a fucking cripple in prison for the rest of your life. If not, then I’ll be back here, on the stroke of four, to finish the job, starting with your elbow joints. Fair enough?”

“
You wouldn’t—”

The pistol spat. Bert’s left knee exploded into pain. He screamed and fell to the floor.

Tinny moved fluidly into a shooter’s stance, and blasted the other knee, the one on the right. Bert shrieked.

“
Hurts like hell, don’t it?” Tinny said, flexing his own prosthetic joints.

He moved away, toward the door.

“
Fifteen minutes,” he said, before he clanked out the door.

3:47 a.m.

Bert whimpered now in agony, gasped for breath.

My knees, my knees, he did it. My knees!

Did he hear sirens? Had somebody else heard his screams? The shots? Called the Winkies?

The phone was up on the table, ten feet away. Might as well be a mile. He felt his heart pounding, felt himself going into shock. He dragged himself slowly forward, by his arms, crying softly, trying not to twist his legs. His ruined knees shrieked with pain that rode all the way up to his skull. Blood was soaking through his pants, onto the floor.

There was still time. He could sit up. Pull himself up by the bed, grab the covers…He could still win, still beat that bastard—

If he got the EMTs here, if he could get to a hospital right away, they could replace the knees. He didn’t have money. Didn’t have insurance. But they have to treat you at the emergency room, right? Even in Oz. They have to fix your knees.

He’d get bionic joints, better than Tin Man’s metal crap. Then he’d testify against Tinny, for attempted murder. And he’d say Tinny killed Dorothy. He’d figure out a way to make it stick. And even if that didn’t work, even he had to go down, Tinny was going down too for kneecapping him, that rotten dirty Winkie son-of-a-bitch!

He was almost at the table when he heard a sound. A clacking, slithery sound.

A sound from above him.

He looked up. The fleeby-jeebies were staring down at him from the wallpaper. Dozens of them.

He whimpered.

They began peeling off the wallpaper. They descended the paneling with dainty, spider-like movements, twitching their nasty claws and their awful mandibles all the way down. Filthy things, their glowing green carapaces covered with grease and slime.

They were moving down the wall, toward him. The clacking he heard was the sound of their teeth.

Bert gave the brown leather book a desperate look. It was lying there, sitting casually next to the phone.

“
You promised me my heart’s desire!” he pleaded with it, “To defeat my enemy! I said the spell!! I said it right!!”

He reached over and shook the table, nearly overturning it. The book slid from the table onto the floor. He picked it up, felt its warmth between his fingers.

The page read, in florid Gothic script,
I will give you the
deepest
desires of your heart.

The word “deepest” was highlighted.

“
But—you said—”

Then, with bone-chilling clarity, it came to him.

The spell had worked. It had done exactly what it promised. Only not how he’d planned.

He’d spoken
A Spell to Defeat an Enemy
. And who was Bert’s real enemy? His real, true, worst enemy?

Not Tinny.

Not even Dorothy.

It was his own booze-swilling, wife-beating, job-losing, no-account self. His self—an enemy to everyone who’d ever knew and loved or hated him. Including himself.

And his
Heart’s Desire
, his real, deepest desire?

He didn’t want to get on that balloon to Kansas. He didn’t need to catch that bus to Knoxville. He didn’t want to run away again to another town. He didn’t want to go on like this. Deep down inside, he couldn’t stand it anymore. The drinking, the emptiness, the violence, the lost loneliness he felt. He just wanted to be relieved of the weary burden of a senseless life.

A life that hadn’t improved one iota by crossing over the rainbow.

4:00 a.m.

All this he understood in one rare flash of sober insight. He had only a second to wonder if it was all really true, or if he had just been sanctifying the inevitable. Then his time was up. The hungry insects ran across the carpet
en masse
, fell upon his prone form and covered it, satisfying his deepest desires with a single undulating jitterbug rhythm.

The End.

by Gef Fox

The sackcloth of a long night’s sky turned to a bruised crimson of a coming dawn. Mazy, a Munchkin farmer, looked through the window of his workshop and frowned with fatigue and fear. The Good Witch of the North would return when the sun fully rose, and Mazy had yet to finish the scarecrow she had requested he fashion for her. She had been very clear in her request:
Have the scarecrow ready by morning. When I return, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

A headless effigy stuffed with straw lay atop his workbench, as he stood with his back to it. All four boneless, lifeless limbs stretched out from the body, as if racked in a Munchkin’s answer to a torture chamber. The construction of the body had been easy enough. She even provided the clothes to be used. Mazy was skilled in making strawmen, as many watched over his vast cornfields through Munchkinland. This, however, was the first time he had ever made one for someone else. This time for the Witch of the North, no less.

The Good Witch, he reminded himself as he peered through his window.

Before turning back to his task, he noticed the Good Witch’s Tick-Tock Man standing guard at the end of the cartroad to his farm. The mechanical servant had been a stoic guard since the previous evening when Mazy began his work on the scarecrow. A watchful eye afforded by the Witch to be sure no one disturbed him. Mazy couldn’t fathom why it was necessary for a guard to be placed on his property for such a menial task, but that was before he had witnessed the result of his latest creation. He needed to finish the scarecrow and he was running out of time.

“
What manner of witchcraft have I tangled myself into?” he whispered.

He stared at his work. Next to the body, above the neck, sat a burlap sack stuffed with straw and bran, as if severed from the body by an axeman. It rested on it’s side, detached from the body, adorned in a singed cap. A single painted eye stared in Mazy’s direction. When it blinked, the old corn farmer winced.

“
Be calm, you old coot,” he said.”’Tis nothing but a scarecrow.”

But it wasn’t just a scarecrow. Not this time. The burlap sack which was to be the head was the third Mazy had used through the night. The heads were always the finishing touch—start from the bottom and work your way up, he always told himself. Now, his hands tremored at the thought of going near the thing.
The abomination
, he thought.

It was well into the night when he started on the first would-be head. He painted a meager grin—a curved line to show a smile was all it was—on the stuffed sack. No sooner had he lifted his narrow paintbrush from the fabric, however, when the grin erupted into animation.

“
I can’t see! I’m blind!
” it cried out.

Mazy’s heart leaped in his throat and he had visions of an early grave. He snatched the screaming sack by it’s scruff and hurled it into the fire of his stove. He watched it vanish in a fury of flames and sparks. It took ten minutes for his pulse to come back down to something less than a hummingbird’s heartbeat.