Bloodstained Oz Read online

  BLOODSTAINED OZ

  Text Copyright © 2005 Christopher Golden

  Text Copyright © 2005 James A. Moore

  Artwork Copyright © 2005 Glenn Chadbourne

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the authors imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Introduction: We’re Not in Oz Anymore

  Sometimes I feel like I’m from a different world. When I was a little boy, we had three television stations, no more. Later, cable came along, giving us several more stations. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to see it while it was showing at the theater. If you missed it during its first run, maybe you could catch it during its second or third run, but only if it was popular enough to have a second or third run. After that, you had to wait a year or two for it to show up on network television, heavily edited to fit in all those commercials and cropped to fit your TV screen.

  Then there was The Wizard of Oz, which showed up once a year, every year, on television. Those showings were big events for my friends and I. We never missed them. We talked about the movie in anticipation of each showing, and then we talked about it long after it had shown.

  The Wizard of Oz was then, and remains today, my all-time favorite movie. It has everything—it has laughs, it’s filled with wonder and magic, and it’s scary as hell. No matter how many times we saw it, my little friends and I never failed to be terrified by that witch and her damned flying monkeys.

  Along with Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz was my favorite childhood story for all the same reasons the movie was my favorite movie. It had everything. Even more than the movie, the book had gore—chopped-off heads rolled aplenty in the book.

  But back to the movie. It showed every year, and we children looked forward to it like some kind of religious event. For those two hours, time stopped and everything else was dropped so we could watch it. We were transported from our living rooms to a magical land of witches and Munchkins and cranky apple trees.

  Now, of course, things are very different. Movies don’t have second and third runs in theaters. They run once, and are heavily dependent on their opening-weekend take. Then they go to the video store months later, then to Pay-Per-View, then to cable.

  The Wizard of Oz still plays once a year on TV, but it just isn’t the same. You don’t have to wait for that annual network run to see it—you can rent it at the video store anytime you want to see it, or maybe take it off your own shelf and view it whenever the mood moves you.

  Somehow, this has leeched some of the magic from the viewing experience. There was something very exciting about being able to see the movie only once a year. Now, somehow, it’s just another movie, like all the rest. It’s still my all-time favorite, but it’s no longer a movie so special that you can only see it once a year on TV.

  I’ve seen the movie countless times. I can sing the songs and recite the dialogue along with the actors, as I’m sure millions of others can. I still get a lump in my throat when

  Judy Garland sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And I still get a little misty-eyed when it comes time for Dorothy to leave her new friends behind in Oz. It’s a remarkable picture that has withstood the test of time, and will, I’m sure, continue to do so for generations to come. The movie and the books have always—as a child and even as an adult—given me a feeling of comfort. They have always made me feel somehow safe.

  I bring all this up in order to discuss Bloodstained Oz. We’ve all seen the movie dozens of times, and many of us have read the Oz books. Christopher Golden and James A. Moore know this, and they have decided to punish us for it. They have decided to take our love for this timeless, magical story and use it to fuck with our heads. They have set out to use the familiar elements of Oz to scare the living shit out of us.

  And they have succeeded.

  Now that I’ve read this novella, I will never be able to look at Oz the same way again. When I watch the movie or read the books, I will forever have Bloodstained Oz peering over my shoulder and whispering in my ear in a hissing, sibilant voice, You’re not safe anymore.

  With beautifully understated prose, Golden and Moore take an ax to one of the most beloved stories ever written. They take delight in moving its characters and creatures from our dreams to our nightmares.

  Bloodstained Oz is one of the creepiest pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long, long time, and it’s going to take awhile to shake it from my mind. It doesn’t pull any punches. It doesn’t give the reader a break. It’s relentless and terrifying, and that’s all I’m going to tell you about it.

  Think of all the wonderful memories you have of The Wizard of Oz. Think of all the times you watched the movie as a child and the delight you took in the Technicolor Munchkins and Glinda the Good Witch and the dancing Scarecrow and the poor Tin Man who longed for a heart and the Cowardly Lion who so wanted to be king of the jungle. Think of the times your mother read the book to you, or the times you read it yourself. Think of how much you’ve come to love that story.

  Now, kiss all of that good-bye...and read on....

  RAY GARTON December 5, 2005 Anderson, California

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter One

  By the summer of Nineteen Hundred and Thirty Three, the good people of Hawley, Kansas, had tucked all their hope for the future into attics and storm cellars and other places where you put things you tell yourself you might need someday, but really are just too sentimental or practical to throw away. It was more than a hardscrabble life. It was a dry, dusty bit of hell. But nobody in Hawley was foolish enough to predict that things couldn’t get worse. If there was one thing they’d learned in the past two years, it was that things could always get worse.

  The 1920s had been the boom time. Demand for wheat was sky high and prices soared. Millions of acres of Great Plains farmland were plowed under to plant wheat. Nineteen Hundred and Thirty One had brought a bumper crop, – twelve million bushels – according to the papers. So much damned wheat that prices plummeted from sixty-eight cents a bushel the year before, to twenty-five.

  Farms shut down; fields were abandoned, as those who couldn’t adapt drifted away, spirit broken.

  But most of the folks in Hawley had faith in the land. They’d seen the hardest of times when they’d arrived in Kansas and built towns where there’d been only grasslands before. Pioneer spirit remained. The pioneers had known how to survive. Prayer at sunup and sundown; sweat and grit all the day long.

  Farmers increased their herd of milk cows, sold the cream for the money to survive, and fed the skimmed milk to chickens and pigs. But it wasn’t just the price of wheat that scoured the land.

  It was the wrath of God.

  That’s what Gayle Franklin’s daddy told her. “The wrath of God, Sugar, that’s what it is. We were supposed to take care of the land. Hell, ain’t that why He put us here in the first place? But folks got greedy.”

  Gayle was afraid of God.

  ’30 had been a dry year, but it only got worse. All those abandoned fields went to dirt. Bart Franklin told his little girl he’d never seen anything like the winds that swept the land, the storms that went through from time to time. Biblical wea
ther, he called it. Hundred-degree heat, drought, and far too often a blow that would choke what crops remained with dirt stirred up from the parched land.

  The dust bowl, they called it.

  Once, when he’d had a bit of whiskey, Gayle heard her daddy say the phrase made it sound quaint, almost pleasant; that they weren’t living in the dust bowl, they were living in Hell. She was never sure if he meant it.

  But sometimes she wondered.

  Wheat and other crops failed, the ground too dry to nurture them, and farmers in Hawley took to harvesting thistles. When the thistle crop failed, other folks quit and ran. But not Gayle’s mother and father. They were survivors. They went out onto the land and dug up soap weed from the chalky earth, chopped it up in a feed mill and fed it to the animals. Mr. Yancey, their nearest neighbor, tried to make a go of it as well. His son Chester found him dead under the hot sun, his heart burst.

  There were blizzards and tornadoes and dirt storms that swept across the plains like the End of Times, huge black clouds that turned day into night and tore from the ground much of the year’s plantings. Still, the pioneers survived – those who would not surrender to despair or to the elements.

  Inside the farmers of the dust bowl, the people of Hawley, Kansas, and inside the secret heart of Gayle Franklin, was the unspoken certainty that whatever hardship was heaped upon them, they would survive. Gayle’s daddy had set her a fine example in that regard.

  Things might get even worse, but somehow, they were sure, faith would carry them through; in the land, and in themselves.

  It was a foolish notion.

  On a scorching July afternoon, nine-year-old Gayle sat on the front porch of the house and stared down at her dirty feet. She had a glass of water in her hand and she took a sip, running her tongue over her chapped lips and savoring the wetness of the water. Warm as it was, it was still cool compared to the day. With a glance around to make sure no one was watching, she spilled a few drops on her left foot, watching in fascination as the water made dark streaks of the dirt on her skin. Her daddy would tan her behind if he saw her wasting water, when they’d had no rain for near a month. But it felt nice, and the look of it was interesting.

  The wind gusted, rattling the storm door. With a deep frown, the little girl looked up and turned west, the direction from which the wind had come.

  The horizon was dark from earth to heaven. The black, churning dirt storm was eating up blue sky as it moved across the land. Gayle’s first thought was that at least there might be some rain. But if the storm was bad, there’d be no crops left to soak it up.

  Another gust hit her and her hair whipped wildly about her head. Grit stung her eyes and she reached up to wipe it away. Behind her the storm door slammed over and over.

  For just a moment, the wind died. Out across the farm she could see her daddy walking in the corn field. It was a meager crop, wilted and dry, but most of the farms in Hawley couldn’t get corn to grow at all this summer, so they were lucky. Something swayed in the corn, dark and stiff, and she saw that it was the scarecrow that daddy had put up when he’d seen that the corn was going to come in after all.

  “Wishful thinking,” Momma had called that scarecrow. Gayle wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but hadn’t liked the way momma had said that.

  As daddy turned and headed for the house, buffeted by the rising wind, a big gust blew in. There was a loud crack like her daddy’s shotgun, and Gayle saw the scarecrow tumble over, blowing end over end across the field. The wind had snapped the wooden post right in two.

  And the storm hadn’t even reached the farm yet.

  Gayle watched it, a wall of black cloud, moving toward her.

  The wind died. Her hair settled on her shoulders and the storm door stopped its banging, but she wasn’t fooled.

  The storm kept on coming, and it brought the darkness with it.

  Chapter Two

  The guards at Guilford Prison’s work camp didn’t seem to know a hell of a lot about the project the prisoners were laboring over. Something about irrigation ditches, which—in light of the hard, dry earth—seemed about as sensible as knitting sweaters for sheep. On the rare occasions when the rains came, they swept through quick, splashed enough water down to flood the plains for a day or two, and then they were gone, leaving the land even more ruined than before. The cisterns might be filled, but the ground was so parched than it sucked up every ounce.

  Irrigation ditches were only useful when there were rivers and streams with water to divert. But there wasn’t so much as a creek within ten miles of Hawley, Kansas that hadn’t gone dry as a bone. Some days the prisoners were set to work harvesting what little could be grown in the soil, the pitiful wheat and corn, but more often thistle and scrub to feed the livestock. If not for the labor of the prisoners, no one at the work camp would have eaten, not the inmates, nor the guards, nor the warden.

  But these ditches . . . far as Hank Burnside was concerned, he might as well have been digging his own grave.

  The guards kept to whatever shade they could find, shotguns and rifles resting over their shoulders or cradled in their arms. The sun was blistering hot, and the prisoners had to walk a fine line. The guards were so lethargic with the heat that they weren’t going to go out of their way to stir up trouble—not even for amusement, the way they did so often when the weather was cooler. But tempers were on a short fuse, and that meant the inmates knew better than to push their luck.

  Hank paused in his digging, jammed his shovel into the ground and leaned on the handle. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a rag, making a good show of his exhaustion, letting the guards know how hard he’d been working. But when he took up the shovel again and plunged it into the crumbling, dry soil, he moved slowly and did not overexert himself. He’d seen other men just crumble in the field, toppling over to sprawl in the dirt, and he didn’t intend to share their fate. As long as the guards saw that he appeared to be working hard, they weren’t going to take a closer look.

  Too damned hot for that.

  He gripped his callused hands tighter on the handle of the shovel, ignoring the exhaustion that had become routine now after two long years at the camp. Just yesterday he had reached the halfway point in his sentence. Now there were fewer days trapped here ahead of him than there were behind. With that in mind, he could ignore the heat and the sweat, the ache in his bones, and the way the dirt caked him and the grit stung his eyes.

  The shovel split the gray, dusty earth with a scraping rasp. Hank paused. A fresh trickle of sweat ran down the center of his back, almost cold compared to his sun-baked flesh, and he shivered.

  The wind kicked up suddenly and he had to turn his face away to avoid getting a mouthful of flying dirt.

  “Jesus God, look at that.”

  Hank shielded his eyes with a hand and peered toward the horizon. The breath froze in his lungs. Four or five miles off it looked like the world simply ended, as though he could have walked over to the edge and thrown himself into some infinite abyss. From sun-bleached earth, the landscape gave way to a wall of pure blackness, a churning cloud of coal black shadows.

  “Son of a bitch, Hank, you ever see a storm like that?

  The words came from Terry Pritcher, a cattle thief who’d been in Guilford since the age of seventeen. Fourteen years working the fields had made him lean and ropy with muscle, but it hadn’t made him any smarter.

  Hank didn’t even look at Terry, only shook his head. “Never.”

  In seconds, the wind kicked up hard, whipping at them and raising loose dirt from the soil, swirling it around them, scouring their flesh. Hank covered his eyes, but could not stop glancing at the storm.

  It was coming their way.

  Already, the sky above was darkening.

  “What do you think, boss?” Pritcher called to the nearest guard. “We ought to get to some cover, don’t you think?”

  Fat drops of warm rain began to fall. It felt to Hank as though they seared him instead of sooth
ing, and the dirt in the air sucked at the moisture as though refusing to share.

  The guard, J.D. Cotton, scowled, but turned to look where Pritcher was pointing. When Cotton looked, they all looked. All of the guards and all of the prisoners out digging in the withered, lifeless earth.

  The upper edges of the dirt storm had begun to spread, mushrooming outward high above, so that it seemed grim black thunderheads were reaching out to claim more of the world. Soon all of the sunlight would be blotted out, day would become false night, and they would all be choked by the wind and the dirt.

  “All right, boys,” Cotton said, raising his shotgun and firing once into the air. “Get moving. Stay together. Anyone takes on the foolish notion that this might be a good time to rabbit gets buckshot in the balls. Go!”

  The men began to move toward the equipment truck, carrying their shovels and rolling wheelbarrows to load into the back.

  The air changed.

  Hank felt it. He stopped, and someone collided with him from behind.

  “Damn it, Burnside, what the hell’s wrong with you?” an angry voice barked.

  He wasn’t listening. With a frown, he turned to look at the storm again. The pressure of the air had changed. The wind had shifted direction. He squinted and had to blink a few times to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  The crest of the storm had blotted out much of the sky, quickly moving their way. And in that churning darkness, several funnels had begun to form. Fingers of furious nature and swirling dirt reached toward the ground.