So I don't lose the fucking thing.
How About A Little Fire, Scarecrow?
Bernie cranked the bellows and Paul disappeared into the sea. The murky red light of the setting sun gleamed off the helmet's glass faceplate, blinding his friend and denying him a last look at his haunted black eyes. He was gone, sinking under the weight of the huge rust-capped metal belt that circled his waist, pulling him toward an ocean floor that existed as little more than a vague idea of “well, it should be there.” Bubbles floated to the surface and popped.
Terrific strained noises blasted from the great iron bellows, Bernie's forearms beginning to feel less a part of his body than spokes in a wheel. He watched the muscles in his arms move. They spun feverishly, pumping air and electricity down to the pale man surrounded in the dark by leviathans and fluid-quick nightmares.
If it was down there, Paul would have to find it. There were very few doors to this world. At the bottom of the oil-black sea, Paul would have to get past the guardian to get through the door. Bernie would have to find another way through, the bellows had to be worked by someone and these two men had gone so long without trusting any one. If the line went slack or snapped too far in either direction, Bernie knew he should cut the rubber hose, raise the sails, and make for the next door.
There was blood between these two men, but it wasn't the oxygen-rich fluid coursing through their veins. This was the blood of an oath sworn in a distant place between the Fourteen. How many others were alive now? Four that these two men knew about. Seven more missing. The other Three were lost for all time. Bernie, for all his grit and fire could do nothing for those gone. His arms shone like brass with sweat, fighting to push another traveler from this hell world.
Once Bernie's hair had been a jet black crown around his head. It gleamed and absorbed all the light's rays like a lover's attention. After the first few trips through the iron doors, it had turned to the color and consistency of bone. Long ago he'd picked up a bruised fedora, which he kept low on his head. It drew attention from what had happened to his once crow-black hair and his bleached irises. He and Paul had been the tallest of them. Ceili, he saw her now with the turquoise ribbons in her downy soft hair and the varnish-handled hatchet she carried, used to say Paul was the wiry Scarecrow to Bernie's boxy Tin Woodsman. Their height was often little more than an aesthetic matter, but it fostered a feeling of older-brothership between the two men.
What lurked down there? What monster guarded this door?
Over the sound of the bellows, Bernie called down, “Careful, Scarecrow.”
The headlamp did nothing.
Trying to see in the dark. Christ am I in a Cure song?
Somewhere down there, the iron door gleamed and pulsed. Paul did his best to angle his descent toward it. He looked up, seeing how the canvas green sea above darkened at the edges til all time stopped at midnight.
How strange, he thought, to not be able to put my feet upon ground.
His fall was uninterrupted and controlled. The hose played out without end. He sucked in the clean air which must have rushed at speeds beyond telling down to his gasping mouth. Momentarily he wondered at the effects of oxygen deprivation. His right gloved hand remained closed on the barbed harpoon he'd selected at the dock. Long ago he'd read Moby Dick, and wished he'd paid more attention to the techniques used by Queequeeg, Tashtego, and that little Chinese guy who rode in Ahab's private hunting boat. Or was he Persian?
The gleam of the door was closer now.
A shadow slipped between Paul and the Door.
The harpoon seemed a toy.
A toothpick.
Had the Scarecrow been lacking for courage?
No, a brain.
I'm a man, he thought. We kill things all the time. Being alive means eating life. But seriously, who is going to eat who here? Fuck fuck fuck Fuck fuck
He'd killed before. He'd eaten life. Plants, leafy greens, the bitter taste of almonds, the ground flesh of cows, roast duck, whatever Baby Ruth's were made of, and hot dogs for days.
Suddenly he knew how to do this.
“It's made of hot dogs,” he said. “This is where hot dogs come from.” These words would travel the tube up to a bewildered Tin Woodsman, right before the tube snaps off in a bubbly gurgle. Memories of undercooked hot dogs, an afterschool snack cooked while on tiptoes peering at the blue flame of the gas range; Mom passed out on the bed, hopefully the bottle was empty so there would be less to clean up afterward. He wanted to know what hot dogs were made of, but no one was ever really around when the question floated to the top of his mind. The taste filled his mouth now, childhood and all the heroes of a quiet boy who did his homework by television light and prayed quietly over a paper plate.
Paul steeled himself. He pulled his legs apart as he fell, adopting a posture to deliver the harpoon clutched in both mesh-gloved hands over his head into the impossible flesh of what ever circled the door.
“Hot dogs!” Paul roared as the barnacled tentacles circled his waist. Flesh-colored suction cups gripped him in a liquid lover's embrace. He felt them pulling at his suit, trying to rip the mesh open, to crush him with the pressure of these depths. Suddenly he was struck with how much it felt like being tickled with feet. He laughed loud and hearty, bringing the spearhead-bright and flashing in the remorseless gaze of the headlamp-into the carnival of horrors.
The spearhead bit one of the tentacles, brownish blood spurted out like smog. Sharply, Paul raised and stabbed down blindly, never losing the sensation of still being pulled toward the gaping maw he knew could slam through him after decades of practice on the behemoths of the deep.
How long had gone by since he saw the shadow? Seconds? Time had a way of slacking off and catching up, confident of making the deadline because It was a prodigy after all. We all owe a day that we'll never finish.
Iron burned his mouth. Have I bit my tongue? Am I still screaming?
He gripped the spear in both hands, hoping the head hadn't broken off in the frantic stabbing, but unable to see with all the cancerous blood swirling and circling before the glass faceplate. His breath steamed it. Frost formed slowly around the edges. The spear weighed nothing. Everything weighed a ton. The pressure around his waist brutally intensified, he exploded in coughs and wheezes.
His eyes watered and throbbed but he wouldn't blink. Blinking would rob him of the precious second he would need to see the gaping maw. If he could see it.
So black.
Is this space?
Focus.
Hot Dogs.
Mmmmm.
Her hair was a strawberry field on fire. In her right hand, she wielded a barnyard hatchet, her arms bathed in crisp tattoos like those long gloves debutantes wear to autumn balls. Her left hand was crippled by a stroke in her jump-roping years. It was connected by a functional arm, but couldn't stop itself from looking like a crow's mouth.
Like the Tin Woodsman, her eyes were a bleached sea-green from door travel. The life didn't exactly drain out of her, traveling through the doorwars that stretched back through the years like a cancer. Rather, as the Tin Woodsman once told her as she shivered with the First Fever that followed everyone's innital trip, “You're not alive any more. There's a part of me that whispers and frets that I'm really just having one of those grand-mal seizures on a dirty gourney in a hospital i can't afford.” He had paused then, dumping some ash off of one of his hand-wrapped cigars. “You are alive, though,” he said, “you understand that don't you, Bazooka?”
She had shivered then and narrowed her eyes not unkindly. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
He laughed and coughed, the smoke pluming around his face like Civil War muttonchops. “I don't know, kiddo. I saw it in a movie once and I knew someone would need it someday. I've got a feeling you could use a new name.”
Now, with her needle-painted arms wrapped around her knees, sitting alone in the rotted basement of an empty house, Bazooka placed her axe on the floor with a small scrapping noise. From the pocket of her canvas vest, she pulled a brass coin and quietly rolled it's dull shine across her knuckles. Every few moments, she glanced up at the ironwood door across from her, waiting to see if the knob would turn. Maybe it wouldn't be the Tin Woodsman, maybe it would be the Scarecrow.
“Or the Laughing One,” she said to herself, shaking off the image of the nightmare-thing that dressed in pieces of men. She inhaled deeply, trying to pick up the telltale smell of putrified decomposition and the palpable hunger reserved for creatures that stalked before the stars burned.
They had found the Laughing One as the six of them had slipped through a burned out door in an ironworks. The Tin Woodsman, his axe tied to his broad back with a peeling orange extension cord, had stopped just before gripping the knob that opened onto the nightmare world. He turned to them, his face uptilted as he inhaled deeply. They all smelled it, the acrid odor behind a million apartment doors with newspapers piled in weeks. Something had died, maybe a million somethings.
Good Man Thomas, not quite the youngest of them but the newest and most prone to indulging an inquisitve nature, looked around the open factory floor as if he had somehow missed spotting a charnal house fuming and puffing. “What is it?” he asked, pushing his too long blond hair out of his face.
The Scarecrow knelt beside the door, his bony knees almost knocking both sides. The door itself stood alone, free of the crowding of any walls. “Christ, man, this door reeks like a crack house.” He stood too quickly, grabbing the door to keep his balance. Holding the frame for the barest of seconds, he reeled and gag into his hand. As Bazooka watched him wipe his sick onto the concrete floor, she noticed his coffee-colored skin had yellowed.
“You fucking junkie,” Good Man Thomas sighed. He gripped the Scarecrow's shoulders and shook him slightly. His crisp untraceable accent hummed, “You've got to get your head straight, brutha.”
“It ain't me. It's that door,” the Scarecrow hissed, his body wracked with tremors. “Touch it. It's poison.”
“They're all poison,” the Tin Woodsman said more softly.
Bazooka stood with her near-constant companion, the mutilated boy they had taken to calling Patch. She looked back across her shoulder to scan his countanence. From what they could gather from looking at him, Patch had been the victim of life at its most vindictive. At some point, his face had been horribly burned. Good Man Thomas, who claimed to have a passing knowledge of medicine in his young life, said that very likely Patch had been burned by oil.
His coarse brown hair was almost intact save for a strip that ran almost like a reverse mohawk just off to the right oof center on his head. His right eye lacked a lid, and for this he packed a silk eye-patch that he wore at night to get to sleep or when he needed a break from the harsh light of some worlds. Frequently his sleep was marked by violent convulsions that would be marked by screaming, had Patch a mouth.
His lips had been sewn shut with a red silk thread some years past. Good Man Thomas had offered, perhaps too energetically, to cut Patch “a new mouth.” Patch had utterly refused. With a piece of shale, he had scrawled upon a passing building “Mussn't.” It was the only time they had ever seen him write, and the only clue at all as to how he ended up like this. Bazooka almost wished she could have tore the brick out and stuff it in her canvas bag as proof that this shell man was alive. Bazooka had no idea how he ate, or even if he did.
“Some secrets feed you,” was all the Tin Woodsman had said as he calmly chopped spare firewood for them.
Patch's eyes were wide open as he stared at the door. His breathing came in ragged snarls through his nose. His open eye looked ready to boil in the socket. Tears coursed down his leathery right cheek. He reacted to the presence of the door with a terror reserved for the impossible moment the childhood monster grips your leg from beneath the bed and pulls. Watching him, Bazooka's pale skin crawled and she quailed.
“Tin Woodsman,” she said as she fell to the ground. “Patch--”
The big man was already upon the petrified youth, gripping his narrow shoulders and trying to get him to calm. He placed himself between Patch and the door, moving to counter his avid attempts to keep it in his sight.
“Patch,” he said. “It's the door we need, man. There isn't another one for a thousand miles.” His breath curled around his mouth. “We're going to freeze to death if we stay here, buddy. You don't want that for our Bazooka, do you?”
“Or our Thomas,” the young man piped from over the Tin Woodsman's shoulder.
“So we've got to do this, yeah?” the big man continued. He scanned Patch's face, looking for the ancestors of courage. “You still have your piece?”
The mute's free eye rolled up in thought. His mouth twisted as if to bite his lip. His hands sought his belt, reaching behind him to come up with a huge pistol made of a metal none of them had ever seen. When they found Patch (his face my god his face that day!) he had been hefting this weapon in both hands, bringing it to bear on them. It fired a sort of concentrated blast of air, narrowly focused like a hurricane pushing through a keyhole. The door behind them had split in half, nearly killing Bazooka.
The gun itself weighed around twenty pounds and had to be lifted in both hands by all but the Tin Woodsman. There were vents on the side that inhaled greedily and then plumed out black smoke when the weapon discharged. None of them knew, much like Patch himself, how it ran and what fueled it, so they trusted him with the weapon's keeping. Good Man Thomas believed it fed on the soul. For all his other foibles, Good Man Thomas was a spiritual man.
“Yer fucking bollocksed,” Good Man Thomas said to the youth. He reached for the knob, ever the spitfire. They'd found him on a dark world, one of the darkest the Tin Woodsman had ever been to, but the unflinching Thomas never carried a weapon. “I'm the hero of my story,” he'd calmly told them once upon a time.
Now as she watched him turn the knob, she heard him make the bleakest sound she'd ever heard, “What are we afraid of?”
The knob turned and the door slammed open of its own accord, exposing nothing but an ink black rectangle. Good Man Thomas took an initial step back, but leaned forward, his brow furrowed as he tried to see the other world through the darkness.
“Tom, buddy,” the Scarecrow began. He'd walked away from the door, but now he was edging his way forward.
“It's like there's nothing there,” Thomas said, “but then, where's the door itself gotten off to?”
He reached into the black rectangle, his arm disappearing as he attempted to feel the door. His face twisted as if insulted and he tried to jerk back on his arm, planting his feet on the concrete.
“LET GO!” he yelled, fear filling his voice. His hair was standing on end.
The Tin Woodsman, horrified and confused, grabbed Good Man Thomas by his silver hooded sweatshirt and pulled. Thomas drew back just a little, just enough for his arm to slip back through the door.
Four pale hands gripped Thomas' forearm. To Bazooka's revulsion, she could see the dirt under their nails.
“No, no, no, no, no” the Scarecrow muttered, falling backward in shock.
“LETGO! OH CHRIST IS HURRRRRTS!” Thomas shrieked. His eyes cried.
Other hands snaked out, alabaster arms covered in corpse soil dark and rich, grabbing the front of his sweatshirt.
Bazooka ran forward and wrapped herself around Good Man Thomas's back leg like an anchor. As she looked up, she could see the corpse arms bulging as they heaved and pulled the boy inch by inch toward the open doorway. She slapped at the hands, feeling their cold greasy flesh. Sobbing, she buried her face against his knee, smelling the worn denim briefly.
A hand gripped his handsome face, the fingers slipping into his mouth between his teeth and cheek. As he screamed, a finger pushed out through his cheek like hooking a fish. Bazooka screamed and gagged at the signt, briefly let go of his leg. Good Man Thomas, his mouth full of blood, his accent now a gurgle, was pulled forward terribly, his body disappearing into the black void. The Tin Woodsman flew at the door, catching hold of the door frame at the last second.
The door slammed shut.
That was the last time any of four saw Good Man Thomas alive.
But they did see him again.
Bernie cranked the bellows and Paul disappeared into the sea. The murky red light of the setting sun gleamed off the helmet's glass faceplate, blinding his friend and denying him a last look at his haunted black eyes. He was gone, sinking under the weight of the huge rust-capped metal belt that circled his waist, pulling him toward an ocean floor that existed as little more than a vague idea of “well, it should be there.” Bubbles floated to the surface and popped.
Terrific strained noises blasted from the great iron bellows, Bernie's forearms beginning to feel less a part of his body than spokes in a wheel. He watched the muscles in his arms move. They spun feverishly, pumping air and electricity down to the pale man surrounded in the dark by leviathans and fluid-quick nightmares.
If it was down there, Paul would have to find it. There were very few doors to this world. At the bottom of the oil-black sea, Paul would have to get past the guardian to get through the door. Bernie would have to find another way through, the bellows had to be worked by someone and these two men had gone so long without trusting any one. If the line went slack or snapped too far in either direction, Bernie knew he should cut the rubber hose, raise the sails, and make for the next door.
There was blood between these two men, but it wasn't the oxygen-rich fluid coursing through their veins. This was the blood of an oath sworn in a distant place between the Fourteen. How many others were alive now? Four that these two men knew about. Seven more missing. The other Three were lost for all time. Bernie, for all his grit and fire could do nothing for those gone. His arms shone like brass with sweat, fighting to push another traveler from this hell world.
Once Bernie's hair had been a jet black crown around his head. It gleamed and absorbed all the light's rays like a lover's attention. After the first few trips through the iron doors, it had turned to the color and consistency of bone. Long ago he'd picked up a bruised fedora, which he kept low on his head. It drew attention from what had happened to his once crow-black hair and his bleached irises. He and Paul had been the tallest of them. Ceili, he saw her now with the turquoise ribbons in her downy soft hair and the varnish-handled hatchet she carried, used to say Paul was the wiry Scarecrow to Bernie's boxy Tin Woodsman. Their height was often little more than an aesthetic matter, but it fostered a feeling of older-brothership between the two men.
What lurked down there? What monster guarded this door?
Over the sound of the bellows, Bernie called down, “Careful, Scarecrow.”
The headlamp did nothing.
Trying to see in the dark. Christ am I in a Cure song?
Somewhere down there, the iron door gleamed and pulsed. Paul did his best to angle his descent toward it. He looked up, seeing how the canvas green sea above darkened at the edges til all time stopped at midnight.
How strange, he thought, to not be able to put my feet upon ground.
His fall was uninterrupted and controlled. The hose played out without end. He sucked in the clean air which must have rushed at speeds beyond telling down to his gasping mouth. Momentarily he wondered at the effects of oxygen deprivation. His right gloved hand remained closed on the barbed harpoon he'd selected at the dock. Long ago he'd read Moby Dick, and wished he'd paid more attention to the techniques used by Queequeeg, Tashtego, and that little Chinese guy who rode in Ahab's private hunting boat. Or was he Persian?
The gleam of the door was closer now.
A shadow slipped between Paul and the Door.
The harpoon seemed a toy.
A toothpick.
Had the Scarecrow been lacking for courage?
No, a brain.
I'm a man, he thought. We kill things all the time. Being alive means eating life. But seriously, who is going to eat who here? Fuck fuck fuck Fuck fuck
He'd killed before. He'd eaten life. Plants, leafy greens, the bitter taste of almonds, the ground flesh of cows, roast duck, whatever Baby Ruth's were made of, and hot dogs for days.
Suddenly he knew how to do this.
“It's made of hot dogs,” he said. “This is where hot dogs come from.” These words would travel the tube up to a bewildered Tin Woodsman, right before the tube snaps off in a bubbly gurgle. Memories of undercooked hot dogs, an afterschool snack cooked while on tiptoes peering at the blue flame of the gas range; Mom passed out on the bed, hopefully the bottle was empty so there would be less to clean up afterward. He wanted to know what hot dogs were made of, but no one was ever really around when the question floated to the top of his mind. The taste filled his mouth now, childhood and all the heroes of a quiet boy who did his homework by television light and prayed quietly over a paper plate.
Paul steeled himself. He pulled his legs apart as he fell, adopting a posture to deliver the harpoon clutched in both mesh-gloved hands over his head into the impossible flesh of what ever circled the door.
“Hot dogs!” Paul roared as the barnacled tentacles circled his waist. Flesh-colored suction cups gripped him in a liquid lover's embrace. He felt them pulling at his suit, trying to rip the mesh open, to crush him with the pressure of these depths. Suddenly he was struck with how much it felt like being tickled with feet. He laughed loud and hearty, bringing the spearhead-bright and flashing in the remorseless gaze of the headlamp-into the carnival of horrors.
The spearhead bit one of the tentacles, brownish blood spurted out like smog. Sharply, Paul raised and stabbed down blindly, never losing the sensation of still being pulled toward the gaping maw he knew could slam through him after decades of practice on the behemoths of the deep.
How long had gone by since he saw the shadow? Seconds? Time had a way of slacking off and catching up, confident of making the deadline because It was a prodigy after all. We all owe a day that we'll never finish.
Iron burned his mouth. Have I bit my tongue? Am I still screaming?
He gripped the spear in both hands, hoping the head hadn't broken off in the frantic stabbing, but unable to see with all the cancerous blood swirling and circling before the glass faceplate. His breath steamed it. Frost formed slowly around the edges. The spear weighed nothing. Everything weighed a ton. The pressure around his waist brutally intensified, he exploded in coughs and wheezes.
His eyes watered and throbbed but he wouldn't blink. Blinking would rob him of the precious second he would need to see the gaping maw. If he could see it.
So black.
Is this space?
Focus.
Hot Dogs.
Mmmmm.
Her hair was a strawberry field on fire. In her right hand, she wielded a barnyard hatchet, her arms bathed in crisp tattoos like those long gloves debutantes wear to autumn balls. Her left hand was crippled by a stroke in her jump-roping years. It was connected by a functional arm, but couldn't stop itself from looking like a crow's mouth.
Like the Tin Woodsman, her eyes were a bleached sea-green from door travel. The life didn't exactly drain out of her, traveling through the doorwars that stretched back through the years like a cancer. Rather, as the Tin Woodsman once told her as she shivered with the First Fever that followed everyone's innital trip, “You're not alive any more. There's a part of me that whispers and frets that I'm really just having one of those grand-mal seizures on a dirty gourney in a hospital i can't afford.” He had paused then, dumping some ash off of one of his hand-wrapped cigars. “You are alive, though,” he said, “you understand that don't you, Bazooka?”
She had shivered then and narrowed her eyes not unkindly. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
He laughed and coughed, the smoke pluming around his face like Civil War muttonchops. “I don't know, kiddo. I saw it in a movie once and I knew someone would need it someday. I've got a feeling you could use a new name.”
Now, with her needle-painted arms wrapped around her knees, sitting alone in the rotted basement of an empty house, Bazooka placed her axe on the floor with a small scrapping noise. From the pocket of her canvas vest, she pulled a brass coin and quietly rolled it's dull shine across her knuckles. Every few moments, she glanced up at the ironwood door across from her, waiting to see if the knob would turn. Maybe it wouldn't be the Tin Woodsman, maybe it would be the Scarecrow.
“Or the Laughing One,” she said to herself, shaking off the image of the nightmare-thing that dressed in pieces of men. She inhaled deeply, trying to pick up the telltale smell of putrified decomposition and the palpable hunger reserved for creatures that stalked before the stars burned.
They had found the Laughing One as the six of them had slipped through a burned out door in an ironworks. The Tin Woodsman, his axe tied to his broad back with a peeling orange extension cord, had stopped just before gripping the knob that opened onto the nightmare world. He turned to them, his face uptilted as he inhaled deeply. They all smelled it, the acrid odor behind a million apartment doors with newspapers piled in weeks. Something had died, maybe a million somethings.
Good Man Thomas, not quite the youngest of them but the newest and most prone to indulging an inquisitve nature, looked around the open factory floor as if he had somehow missed spotting a charnal house fuming and puffing. “What is it?” he asked, pushing his too long blond hair out of his face.
The Scarecrow knelt beside the door, his bony knees almost knocking both sides. The door itself stood alone, free of the crowding of any walls. “Christ, man, this door reeks like a crack house.” He stood too quickly, grabbing the door to keep his balance. Holding the frame for the barest of seconds, he reeled and gag into his hand. As Bazooka watched him wipe his sick onto the concrete floor, she noticed his coffee-colored skin had yellowed.
“You fucking junkie,” Good Man Thomas sighed. He gripped the Scarecrow's shoulders and shook him slightly. His crisp untraceable accent hummed, “You've got to get your head straight, brutha.”
“It ain't me. It's that door,” the Scarecrow hissed, his body wracked with tremors. “Touch it. It's poison.”
“They're all poison,” the Tin Woodsman said more softly.
Bazooka stood with her near-constant companion, the mutilated boy they had taken to calling Patch. She looked back across her shoulder to scan his countanence. From what they could gather from looking at him, Patch had been the victim of life at its most vindictive. At some point, his face had been horribly burned. Good Man Thomas, who claimed to have a passing knowledge of medicine in his young life, said that very likely Patch had been burned by oil.
His coarse brown hair was almost intact save for a strip that ran almost like a reverse mohawk just off to the right oof center on his head. His right eye lacked a lid, and for this he packed a silk eye-patch that he wore at night to get to sleep or when he needed a break from the harsh light of some worlds. Frequently his sleep was marked by violent convulsions that would be marked by screaming, had Patch a mouth.
His lips had been sewn shut with a red silk thread some years past. Good Man Thomas had offered, perhaps too energetically, to cut Patch “a new mouth.” Patch had utterly refused. With a piece of shale, he had scrawled upon a passing building “Mussn't.” It was the only time they had ever seen him write, and the only clue at all as to how he ended up like this. Bazooka almost wished she could have tore the brick out and stuff it in her canvas bag as proof that this shell man was alive. Bazooka had no idea how he ate, or even if he did.
“Some secrets feed you,” was all the Tin Woodsman had said as he calmly chopped spare firewood for them.
Patch's eyes were wide open as he stared at the door. His breathing came in ragged snarls through his nose. His open eye looked ready to boil in the socket. Tears coursed down his leathery right cheek. He reacted to the presence of the door with a terror reserved for the impossible moment the childhood monster grips your leg from beneath the bed and pulls. Watching him, Bazooka's pale skin crawled and she quailed.
“Tin Woodsman,” she said as she fell to the ground. “Patch--”
The big man was already upon the petrified youth, gripping his narrow shoulders and trying to get him to calm. He placed himself between Patch and the door, moving to counter his avid attempts to keep it in his sight.
“Patch,” he said. “It's the door we need, man. There isn't another one for a thousand miles.” His breath curled around his mouth. “We're going to freeze to death if we stay here, buddy. You don't want that for our Bazooka, do you?”
“Or our Thomas,” the young man piped from over the Tin Woodsman's shoulder.
“So we've got to do this, yeah?” the big man continued. He scanned Patch's face, looking for the ancestors of courage. “You still have your piece?”
The mute's free eye rolled up in thought. His mouth twisted as if to bite his lip. His hands sought his belt, reaching behind him to come up with a huge pistol made of a metal none of them had ever seen. When they found Patch (his face my god his face that day!) he had been hefting this weapon in both hands, bringing it to bear on them. It fired a sort of concentrated blast of air, narrowly focused like a hurricane pushing through a keyhole. The door behind them had split in half, nearly killing Bazooka.
The gun itself weighed around twenty pounds and had to be lifted in both hands by all but the Tin Woodsman. There were vents on the side that inhaled greedily and then plumed out black smoke when the weapon discharged. None of them knew, much like Patch himself, how it ran and what fueled it, so they trusted him with the weapon's keeping. Good Man Thomas believed it fed on the soul. For all his other foibles, Good Man Thomas was a spiritual man.
“Yer fucking bollocksed,” Good Man Thomas said to the youth. He reached for the knob, ever the spitfire. They'd found him on a dark world, one of the darkest the Tin Woodsman had ever been to, but the unflinching Thomas never carried a weapon. “I'm the hero of my story,” he'd calmly told them once upon a time.
Now as she watched him turn the knob, she heard him make the bleakest sound she'd ever heard, “What are we afraid of?”
The knob turned and the door slammed open of its own accord, exposing nothing but an ink black rectangle. Good Man Thomas took an initial step back, but leaned forward, his brow furrowed as he tried to see the other world through the darkness.
“Tom, buddy,” the Scarecrow began. He'd walked away from the door, but now he was edging his way forward.
“It's like there's nothing there,” Thomas said, “but then, where's the door itself gotten off to?”
He reached into the black rectangle, his arm disappearing as he attempted to feel the door. His face twisted as if insulted and he tried to jerk back on his arm, planting his feet on the concrete.
“LET GO!” he yelled, fear filling his voice. His hair was standing on end.
The Tin Woodsman, horrified and confused, grabbed Good Man Thomas by his silver hooded sweatshirt and pulled. Thomas drew back just a little, just enough for his arm to slip back through the door.
Four pale hands gripped Thomas' forearm. To Bazooka's revulsion, she could see the dirt under their nails.
“No, no, no, no, no” the Scarecrow muttered, falling backward in shock.
“LETGO! OH CHRIST IS HURRRRRTS!” Thomas shrieked. His eyes cried.
Other hands snaked out, alabaster arms covered in corpse soil dark and rich, grabbing the front of his sweatshirt.
Bazooka ran forward and wrapped herself around Good Man Thomas's back leg like an anchor. As she looked up, she could see the corpse arms bulging as they heaved and pulled the boy inch by inch toward the open doorway. She slapped at the hands, feeling their cold greasy flesh. Sobbing, she buried her face against his knee, smelling the worn denim briefly.
A hand gripped his handsome face, the fingers slipping into his mouth between his teeth and cheek. As he screamed, a finger pushed out through his cheek like hooking a fish. Bazooka screamed and gagged at the signt, briefly let go of his leg. Good Man Thomas, his mouth full of blood, his accent now a gurgle, was pulled forward terribly, his body disappearing into the black void. The Tin Woodsman flew at the door, catching hold of the door frame at the last second.
The door slammed shut.
That was the last time any of four saw Good Man Thomas alive.
But they did see him again.