D: L&L - Part 34 | Dot: The Straw Remains – Part II

I woke to creaking.

Not the casual kind—the kind that comes from rot and wind and the gentle settling of a corpse. No, this was deliberate. Footsteps, slow and heavy. Floorboards groaning like they resented being used. Two sets of footsteps, and something else, like one of them was shuffling. Like both were, or there was more than one something climbing down from above.

How did they get on the roof?

I sat up in a bed of old blankets and moss that smelled like smoke and mildew, my muscles stiff from the cold and from too many days without enough food. My hand went instinctively to Toto. Safety off.

The sound moved across the floor above, then paused. A shadow flickered across the blackened wall. Then a voice—dry and crackling, like old paper.

"You're in my home."

I froze, looked down at myself, and said, “I’m naked. I don’t give a fuck who’s home it is.”

It was true. Everything I’d been wearing was soaking wet from the river, and everything extra I’d brought was soaked through, too. Alice, my pack, wasn’t designed to go tumbling along underwater in a river, and every extra change of socks and underwear, the spare t-shirts and the few snacks I’d brought were a wash. Everything I owned was hanging from pieces of broken furniture, but Toto was locked and loaded.

I swung my legs underneath me and pushed up, slipping into my clothes with practiced ease, Toto still at the ready. Years of practice, a steady hand, a thundering heart. Sleeping in a bivouac in Afghanistan, ready at a moment’s notice for incoming. But I wasn’t facing whatever this was tits out. I stepped into my boots, and felt the fog of sleep shatter. Then, I was down on one knee, my left hand cupping my right. I only needed one shot. 

“You’re home? Could use a maid. A plumber. A proper bed. A cupboard full of food. Not many parties here. Looks like this place hasn’t been a home in a very long time. And you are?”

A shuffle, a muddy boot and torn pants leg. The man—if you could call him that—stopped and squatted on a step, silhouetted by the faint light of morning leaking through the tower’s broken bones. Tall. Too tall. Stitched at the seams. Straw drifted from the folds of a threadbare coat, and his head—sackcloth, patched and fraying—tilted ever so slightly to one side, like he wasn’t sure if I was real. I’d seen corpses that looked livelier. He hadn’t raised his hands, and why would he? Toto was a dog last time.

“I was the Emperor of Oz once.” A pause. “Not much now.”

He looked at me with button eyes, but not buttons. Not glass—something older. Charcoal? No. Something that shimmered faintly when he moved. He blinked and his eyes flashed real, pupils and a hint of color. Magical Scarecrow? My grandmother’s voice rang out in my head, “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” A scarecrow. The Scarecrow. A real thing. It walked. It talked. It danced. It stared at me. He stared. It. I wasn’t sure. Grandma had been so enamoured with it. Him. A friend. A companion. An emperor. A killer. They’d killed a witch to get her home. It was real, this Scarecrow.

“Name’s Dot,” I said. “Not Dorothy. Not that it matters.”

“Ah. A diminutive. A contraction of the original. A namesake.” He crouched and seemed to study me, but his eyes were wrong. Did he not blink? “A dog. There was a dog.”

“The dog died. Now there’s a gun.”

He nodded and stood, and I didn’t flinch, but I wanted to. His movements were slow but somehow fluid, like the limbs weren’t his but he’d learned to use them anyway. A ghost piloting a marionette. His boots clomped on the stone. Straw cascaded from his left leg, and he made no move to catch it. Was he bleeding? Is this how -- was he injured?

“What are you?” I asked, Toto wavering. So heavy. My hands were shaking, and suddenly I reached down and gripped my stomach as hunger pangs rippled through my gut. I blinked, woozy, the room spinning, and I fell into straw. I looked up at the charcoal-colored eyes, the ratty hat, cheeks that looked wind-blasted, and an expression that made my heart sore. It was a man, but not a man. A thing masquerading as a man? “What are you?”

“Broken,” he said and laid me down on the blankets. 

I hadn’t even seen him move. How had he gotten from there to…? 

“I’m broken. And you’re broken, too?”

I was starving, I told him. Hungry. I needed food and water. He smiled, his coal-like eyes twinkling, and excused himself with the grace of a king. I watched him while he moved, lying there, feeling as weak and helpless, as lost and feeble as I had ever felt. He didn’t seem to notice. Or care. He moved like someone used to walking among ghosts, his own limp pronounced, straw leaking onto the floor with every step. He was gone, then back, or I fell asleep, and he left me there.

“Sure about this?” I looked down at the spread the Scarecrow had assembled. Three tins of hardtack, or biscuits, a few dusty jars filled with vegetables in some kind of juice or water, a handful of mushrooms and a mummified cheese wrapped in a yellowed cloth. “Is this people food in Oz?”

He stared back and shrugged from his squat a few feet away. “I didn’t entertain much. And I don’t eat. You can imagine.”

I pulled the top off the tin, ignoring the rest of the feast; I wasn’t dying from dysentery in Oz. Starvation maybe, but not from shitting myself to death. That much I knew. But when I pulled the top off the first tin, it let out a sad little puff of smoke, and contents were nothing but dust. My stomach churned and growled, and I winced from the pangs again. I’d be grazing on the lawn before the end of the day.

“Not exactly a good host,” came a voice from the steps, and I glanced at Toto, already knowing I couldn’t lift him and get off a shot the way I felt. Instead, I let out a breath through my nose and accepted that maybe I was dead, then I glanced up and blinked a few times to try and clear the hunger-driven insanity that was clouding my vision.

It was a monkey. A monkey with wings. And it was holding what looked like a small deer by the neck. A small, dead, but very fresh deer.

“Don’t eat any of that, unless you wanna die,” said the monkey. “I brought breakfast.”

“I didn’t expect to find anyone here,” the Scarecrow said.

I grunted and pushed another sliver of venison in my mouth. With the mushrooms and some wild onions from the field outside, the monkey had roused up something equally mouthwatering and shocking. I’d seen Planet of the Apes, the old ones and newer ones, but this I’d never expected. He -- Turlo -- was fucking wearing a leather jacket. “But I’m not here for sightseeing.”

I glanced up at the Scarecrow, and he was deeply focused on a shred of parchment he’d picked up somewhere in the rooms above. He gave me a look, unreadable, then went back to the parchment for the blink of an eye and dropped it. I watched it twisted in the air, fluttering like a leaf to the ground.

“So,” I continued, “you’re really the Scarecrow. As in the Scarecrow. From the stories.”

“I was emperor of Oz for thirteen years,” he said. “Until I wasn’t.”

“How long ago was that? What happened?” Grandma had said there were some bad things in Oz, but so much of that part of the story revolved around the Wicked Witch, the crone that lived in a dark castle, a woman they’d killed in the weirdest way I’d ever heard. Was there more?

He chuckled—dry and low. “Glinda.”

That name again. “The sweet little lady in pink? Rides in on a bubble all full of smiles and hearts and cotton candy sweetness?”

He turned toward me then, slow as fog. “She doesn’t wear pink anymore.”

We sat. Or rather, I sat—he perched, like someone who never quite got the hang of chairs. Turlo, the monkey, was nowhere to be seen. Hopefully rounding up dinner; the venison had been the best I’d ever had, and it wasn’t because I was so hungry I could have eaten the bed of old, ratty blankets I was sitting on. We talked. Slowly. Haltingly. Me trying to wrap my head around the recent history and how there was so much it. Him lost in it at times, wandering through the years while I drank my weight in river water, this time on purpose. He asked about my grandmother. I asked about the war. He asked about the house I’d arrived in -- was it the same one? I asked about the fall of the Emerald Throne. The clockwork soldiers. The bubble gum fairy queen who was now a sociopath?

“I don’t believe you,” I said at one point.

“You will,” he replied.

Eventually, I did. He didn’t lie, except to himself, I learned. He was simply too smart to fabricate something. It made no sense. But there was something about him. Something hollow and sad. Something real. This wasn’t the storybook Oz. This was the broken version, the one that crawled out from behind the curtain after the technicolor faded. And he was still here. A relic. A ruin.

“So,” I said after a while. “How do I get out of here?”

His head turned slightly, as if startled.

“Out of the tower?” he asked.

“Oz.”

A pause.

“You can’t.”

I leveled a look at him.

“You can’t—yet,” he amended. “Not without a conduit. A tether. Your grandmother used the Ruby Slippers. Magic of that kind is rare and very... specific.”

“So I need them.”

“Yes.”

“And where are they?”

A longer pause.

“Glinda has them,” he said. “She wears them like trophies.”

Of course she did.

“Well then,” I said, yawning. I’d barely slept all night, and the room was warm, the stones of the tower baking in the morning sun. “Guess I’m going to take them.”

He looked at me for a long time. I couldn’t tell if it was admiration or calculation.

“We may have a shared interest,” he said slowly.

“You want out of Oz too?”

“No. I want, well, her gone.”

I stared at him.

“You want to be emperor again.”

“I want to restore balance,” he said, and smiled just enough to show stitching at the corners of his mouth. The TikToks aren’t of Oz. And I’ve heard stories about what she’s done in the Emerald City. The fog -- you saw it? How many Munchkins died in that sickening, creeping fog? She did that,” he said, but not to me. His eyes were real again, not buttons or coal or pinpricks of black against a clothwork face. For a moment he looked real, his face red-brownish with the hint of a tattoo on each cheek. “She did. I did. I. Did. That.”

He stared off into nowhere a long time, then he blinked and his eyes shifted to pieces of coal, then eyes again, the color fading until there was nothing but a ruddy texture to his face. “I’ll help you,” he said. “I’ll guide you. The land is dangerous, but I still know its bones.”

“And when we get to the slippers?” I asked.

Another smile. More subtle this time. “We return Oz to what it once was. Your grandmother loved it.”