The Fall of the House that Crushed Her

A rotten shack of shambles in the middle of nowhere, she thought while staring at the structure. The architecture didn’t match any other dwellings she passed in Munchkinland. Even the small stable nearby was clearly erected well after the house had landed. Alice led her horse toward the stable before making her way toward the house.

Those fussbudgets in Emerald City said she would find this building at the Yellow Brick Road Junction in the center of Munchkinland, but that had been a lie. Or evidence of how myths and legends grow impossibly large when compared to their kernel corns of truth.

She was feeling put-on as she stepped onto the porch, the boards creaking beneath her sensible riding shoes. Is it possible someone actually lives here? Some boards held nails which were shiner than others, so some masculine upkeep had been applied.

Before she could knock, the door opened, the hinges screaming for either oil or death. A tall, rail-thin man appeared in the frame once he adopted a stooping shoulder. It was as if a clothed stickman walked about, a butternut squash for a head, carved like a Jack-o-lantern.

“Ms. Alice, I presume?” asked the man. Whether she could call it a man was still in doubt, but the shambled suit and sub-baritone voice helped ease her mind. She nodded. “You are expected here at the House of Gale. Please come in. I am Jack Pumpkinhead.” Alice felt her face blanche: she knew Dorothy Gale had a house servant of that name, but expectations were currently unfulfilled. “Your face is not new to me. Though my house name is Pumpkinhead, I can adopt a variety of noggins, as gourds and vegetables are prone to rot. And who would find reliable a man with a mushy brain?” He looked to the stable. “I will bring your horse some feed and fresh water in a moment. Does he speak?”

Her immediate answer was no, but that small part of Alice which sometimes doubted the truth of animals was present. Could her horse speak and simply didn’t tell her? Did Gaston have the power of reason, as clearly the power of speech is the root of logic and understanding?

Before Jack went outside, he led Alice to the den where Dorothy first sat, then stood. Alice extended a hand. “Hello, Ms. Alice. I am…”

“Madam,” sputtered Alice. “Your reputation precedes you, of course. It is an honor to meet a legend such as yourself.”

Whatever brief smile had been upon Dorothy's wizened face slipped away to be replaced by one pickled in vinegar. “I asked the City to send me assistance and they picked a fan.” She moved toward another room, what turned out to be the kitchen.

“Madam Gale…”

“Dorothy, please.” In her gingham gown, she resembled the stained glass likeness back in the City. Alice couldn’t fathom why she chose to dress that way no, decades later.

Stuttering at first, she continued. “D-dorthy, ma’am. I am a fan in the sense that I know almost everything of your varied histories in Oz.” She rummaged through her satchel and produced a pair of leather bound books. “But I also brought what you requested, books about the Wicked Witch of the East, though it wasn’t clear as to…”

Dorothy interrupted with a gesture to the kitchen floor near the wall. It was blackened, moldy. The kitchen smelled freshly antiseptic, but the mold looked ancient. “It never goes away,” uttered the Kansan. It was the moldy spot where the house had done the crushing, for the black outline was in the shape of a torso, a head, but no arms or hands. Alice imagined herself throwing limbs to the sky in an attempt to stop an unwanted crushing.

“My first murder,” Dorothy said with a sigh. “I was pulled back to this land time and again, often in dire straits. Witches and Wizards, corrupt Kings, a clockwork man on two separate occasions! I was asked to dispatch them all, because I was so successful with the first.” She looked to Alice, a sheen in her eye. “It was an accident. A crushing, crunchy, horrible mistake.”

Dorothy huffed, dabbed her eye, and grabbed a book. “But what I’m needing from these books is something that might help. Though I’m not sure if anything can help me now.”

A sound from the porch and the hinges of the door made Alice jump as Jack returned. He said to Alice, “Gaston is well accommodated out in the stable. With the storm clouds on the horizon, he should be good for the night out there.” Alice hadn’t anticipated staying the night, but she knew she didn’t want to travel back to the City in the rain. Not through the dregs of Munchkinland anyway. He turned to Dorothy. “Madam Gale, if there’nt be anything you need, I'll be…”

“Nah, nah, go on, Jack. Stay safe, and look out for the crows.”

Jack Pumpkinhead bowed once to each woman, then stepped away quietly, the hinges proof he had left the house.

“Would you like some tea?” asked Dorothy as she moved toward the cupboard. “I only have black root tea out here, if that’s okay.” Alice said it was, and inquired about the Witch. Dorothy, a woman in her sixties, shrank at the prospect of voicing her concern, but eventually spoke as the water heated in the kettle.

She explained to Alice that recent nights had been wretched within the house. “I’ll be upon my bed, lying, or asleep, and a wicked sensation will suddenly fall over me.” Alice asked what might constitute wickedness. After pausing as if she hadn’t anticipated such a question, Dorothy finally said, “A blackness, like a shadow on the wall. Something intangible but perceived with my very own senses, and it’s trying to get…”

Alice prodded. “Get what, Madam Gale? Dorothy?”

She whispered, “Get. Inside. Me.” The kettle made itself known with a shrill whistle. Dorothy made no move so Alice stepped forward to steep the tea for them both. Silence dominated as Dorothy sat and Alice stood with random clinks escaping the China cups and saucers.

Attempting to keep the conversation moving, Alice asked again why she thought information about the Witch would be helpful. Dorothy related that the presence of the wickedness was unfamiliar to her. In her travels throughout Oz, she had encountered much of it with each harbinger of doom possessing their own brand of evil. As this style of darkness was unfamiliar to Dorothy, she thought learning of the one Witch she hadn’t actually met in life might help identify the culprit.

“But this Witch is slain, fifty years to this day, I believe. I’m not sure how often the dead rise back in Kansas, but in Oz, the dead stay dead.” Thunder rumbled distantly as she set a teacup before the aged, gray-haired woman.

Dorothy blew on her tea and sipped as Alice sat at the kitchen table, the moldy floor behind her. “Back in Kansas, I couldn’t know what state anyone was in now, though I know my current age is even older than Aunt Em when I first left. See, I guess time is different between Oz and Kansas. When I left here initially, after crushing one Witch and melting another, it was as if I had been in a dream. Barely a Kansas Day had passed. But I kept coming back. What had only been a handful of months or years, it was years or even decades in Oz Time. As if life here is compared to a crawling bug and Kansas is where the full-size people live.”

Alice couldn’t help taking offence and Dorothy appeared to sense it. “Or the other way around, maybe,” she added with a snort. “I’m not too good with philosophies, but I do know that’s why I can’t go back home. I couldn’t be Dorothy Gale back there. And they already thought I was crazy anyway.” She held her fingers to her temples, like the guard’s arms aimed at her head. “They zapped me, ya know. That was another time I came back here. After the zapping.”

The two left the kitchen, Alice looking once more at the mold. She asked why Dorothy never covered it up, to which she said, “It still shows through. Through carpet, furniture, even brand new boards. The planks have been brought up time and again, but the mold infects that space, that place of the crushing.” In her mind’s eye, Alice imagined a stamp pressing into a wax seal, and wondered how long such a seal was good for. Do seals rot? But the thought flitted away before an answer formed.

Dorothy brought Alice up the stairs as clouds further darkened the night outside. Rumbly thunder was still consistent, but it was the wind whipping nearby trees which made the most noise. The leaves produced a chorus of sound, like a sweeping broom.

A fire was started in the upstairs chimney and Dorothy stated she had just one bed, but a chez lounge would be her resting spot for the night. Alice set down her satchel and books and Dorothy suddenly asked for Alice to read them. “Please, read them aloud. A bedtime story would be pleasant for us both.” The statement was accompanied by a quivering smile, but Alice only nodded and picked up the smaller book. Dorothy pulled a blanket from the bureau and, without changing her clothes or removing her footwear, she retired to the lounge chair to face the fireplace.

Alice began reading the first book from the Ozian Library of Congress. The passage had already been marked, and she read Dorothy the tale of how the Tin Woodsman came to be. Long ago, he had been a man and had encountered the Witch of the East as he was chopping trees near her hovel. The Witch disliked this attack on the trees and charmed his axe so that it would dismember parts of him cleanly every time a tree was felled. Shortly after, a tinsmith fashioned replacement parts for the man, but the smith knew nothing of romance so could not create a heart.

An ethereal soundscape hummed just an octave below Alice’s range of hearing, but it sounded as if the chopping in the long ago story could be heard here in the present. As she progressed, Alice noticed Dorothy beginning to rock gently and shudder as she shed subtle tears. She regretted starting with this story: the Tin Woodsman was now long gone.

Dorothy sat up straight and Alice gasped. “Did you hear that?” Her words were strained trying to leave her throat. “As you read the Tin Woodsman's origin, him lopping off parts with that magicked axe, I could swear I heard wood chopping downstairs. Chopping and splintering, from beneath the floorboards.” Taking a deep breath, she continued, her voice heavy now. “That nameless Witch is returned. She's come back for me.”

Worried, and thinking the peculiar sounds might have been a rap upon the door, Alice looked through the glass, at the porch below. She saw no one, but it was very dark out here in the country.

Alice set the first book down and picked up the second. Dorothy remained erect before the fireplace. She wondered if the older woman was too close; sweat beads were upon her brow.

Beginning another story, though with some trepidation, Alice read about the Tin Soldier, and how the Witch had a hand in creating him, too. In a fashion similar to the Tin Woodsman, an enchanted sword was used in place of an axe. A soldier in life, he had fallen in love with the Witch’s servant girl. If they married, she knew the soldier would take her servant away, so the Witch took steps to stop that.

As before, Alice perceived audible accompaniment to her story, as if a symphony of sounds was scoring her narration. Though it had been chopping and splintering before, this had been steady steps, a soldier marching, but slower, as if in a funeral procession.

Another difference was that, while the chopping had been barely perceived, the footsteps were more generously appreciated.

Dorothy stood starkly, her wrinkled face a sheen of sweat, and pointed toward the door.

“She's here, she's here! Oh, though I've never seen the wretch face to face as she was promptly squashed between this house and the blighted Land of Munch, I know it is her! That Easterly Witch rises, mocking a holiday, a HOLY day, in this land that never knew no Jesus, let alone that he rose three days after death. But you rise decades later? Why make me wait in agony, you wretched crone?! Oh, Gods damn this Ozian nature of twisted time! Would that they had summoned a physicist, or an engineer, someone who could better understand the insanity of this awful, inbred land. Or now send a psychiatrist so I may finally be free of these delusional machinations!”

Alice stood aghast, looking to the door. In addition to the empty lands without, there was no other person within, save Dorothy. But could she save Dorothy, or was this gingham-draped elder beyond the pale?

“How do you KNOW it to be her whom you crushed? Is she green like her sister?”

Dorothy spat. “Her stockings, you foolish sow! Black and white, like what a Kansan prisoner is to have worn.” She yelled to the doorway, to the dark hall beyond, spittle flying. “But I've already played the felon, you Witch! I've been trapped here so long, and for what? Because I'm a killer? Because one accident after another created power vacuums for this contemptuous land of silliness and stupidity?”

She stopped as if a revelation blossomed, forcing Alice to step back and wonder if there really WAS someone in the hallway as Oz is, indeed, a queer place.

“These shoes,” started Dorothy while lifting her skirt to show off the tarnished, mildewy accessories. Alice hadn’t realized until now that they were the same fabled shoes from long ago. “That's what you want, yes? That bubble-headed bimbo used her magic to fasten them to me, and now you want them back?” She reached for a book and hurled it through the doorway. “Please, TAKE them back! I never wanted them! They are without power and, assuredly, don't go with anything. Even if it means dismembering me, you can have these shoes that not even a goat would eat. Better yet, swap your legs for mine and stick me in prison garb, so that I can finally wear the proper outfit while you have your gaudy, awful slippers.”

Her face strained, her graying hair bedraggled, Dorothy looked to be in the throes of madness with the firelight forcing twisted shadows of the Ozian hero upon the walls, the ceiling. Alice felt true fear and foolishly tried avoiding the shadows from touching her, but a deafening creak from the hall without doubled that fear and made her stomach drop, her bowels shift. Dorothy screamed again, not in fear but in defiance. Alice stepped back but knew she should step forward, if only to confirm the Witch in the hall.

No step was necessary. A mottled crone, what could only be considered a corpse in motion, entered the room, the light from the fireplace giving her agency. She wasn’t green but garish white, her nose bulbous, her arms dangled, broken, and the stockings just as Dorothy had described. Alice stood frozen, not even a breath able to escape her body; a prison for air.

Dorothy continued to scream as the Witch cackled and fell upon the Kansan, upon the lounge. The fall inspired Alice to run, for she knew there were two corpses in the bedroom.

She exited the house, the door hinges screaming, inspiring fright one final time, and she ran to Gaston. “What’s happened?” asked the horse. Panic and fear allowed her to forgive the omission that he could always talk, and she explained they needed to run through the night. A cackle chased them from an open window on the house. Alice looked back and didn’t see a soul, but witnessed the structure crack and crumble, collapsing in on itself, its purpose in Oz no longer necessary.

Word Count: 2,715