Chapter Fourteen:

 

As Dorothy was struggling to control her worst fears on their behalf, Margot, Barney and the Scarecrow were struggling with the steep and stony mountain pass their way led through. The crooked path they were on had dwindled to a rough track, more suitable to mountain goats than to lions, tin women, and scarecrows.

They'd put Barney in the lead, counting on his extraordinary feline balance and strength to help negotiate the treacherous pass. The Scarecrow, newly one-armed, was having difficulty climbing, and Margot's stiff metal joints had never been made for rock climbing and alpine hiking. Besides, she'd always hated heights.

She'd finally grabbed hold of the Lion's tasseled tail to maintain her balance, despite his well-warranted objections.

Just as Barney was telling her, for the hundredth time, to stop pinching, the three companions heard the distant sound of screaming.

"Hey!" Barney said. "Hear that?"

The sound of screaming grew in volume as the screamer drew closer to their position.

"Could that be -” the Scarecrow began.

"That sounds like -” Margot started to say

"It's Toto!" the Lion cried happily, and a sunny broad smile spread over his leonine face.

Sure enough, the little lamb, screaming continuously, soon dashed out into their path past an outcropping of rock. When Toto saw them, he performed a series of joyful leaps that the great Nijinsky would have envied, and then bounded directly into the Lion's arms and frantically licked his face between screams.

"Aw, that's a good boy - that's a good little fellow - dim ums get away fwom the bad old witchie?" the Lion crooned to the screaming lamb in baby-talk. "Isn't ums just the ONE? Yes ums IS, yes ums IS . . .”

Margot and the Scarecrow exchanged a wry look and waited for Barney to get through gushing over Toto.

Once Barney finally brought himself to set Toto down, the lamb greeted Margot with a playful head-butt, and then scampered to the Scarecrow, sat on his foot, and gazed up at him expectantly. Screaming like a fire bell all the while.

"Look at that," Margot commented, fascinated. "I think he wants you to make a new muzzle for him. He knows you're the 'muzzle-guy'. Who'd have thought?"

The Scarecrow reached down and gently closed the shrieking lamb's jaw. Toto responded with a look of unmistakable gratitude.

 "Why, I think you're right, Margot. Isn't that interesting? You don't really want to scream all the time, at all, do you, Toto? Well, I'll just have to oblige him, won't I?"

He straightened and his Harpy slipped out of his remaining sleeve and appeared in his right hand like a conjurer's trick. He sliced a length of wire off what remained of his left arm, quickly, to minimize the discomfort involved in further whittling of his person.

With Margot and Barney's help, they soon had Toto re-muzzled, much to the lamb's obvious relief.

"I wonder how he escaped the castle?" the Scarecrow remarked. "Dorothy must have cleared the path for him somehow.  I think we can take it as a good sign, although I hope she didn't have to pay too dear for whatever it was she did. We'd better quicken our pace, I think."

No one disagreed with that assessment. They all set themselves to resume climbing the difficult path, and had just gone around the stone outcropping where Toto had first appeared, when the lamb suddenly veered off the path and cut into a narrow cleft between twisted piers of stone. He vanished from view a moment, reappeared a moment later, then vanished again, then reappeared again.

"I think he wants us to follow him," said the Lion, who had a weakness for sappy movies about adorable children and faithful pets.

Upon investigating the gap that Toto had been drawing their attention to, they discovered that just beyond the twin outcroppings of rock, the way opened out to a level, decently maintained, relatively straight dirt road.

"Wow, this must be the way he came," Barney said. "What a good boy, wasn't ums a GOOD boy - yes ums was!"

"A service road, perhaps," said the Scarecrow. "The Witch could hardly expect to haul supplies for his menagerie over that crooked track we were on. This road must have been made for wagons. Barney, I do believe you're in luck. We may get to the castle before it gets dark after all."

Toto gamboled a bit to show his approval, and the four set off again, bound for the castle, making much better time on the service road that Toto had found.

 

Back at the Witch's chamber, Dorothy stood at the edge of the terrace/landing strip outside the great arched window. She was peering at the squads of pigs and monkeys down in the courtyard below, trotting through their evening drills.

She had the huge hourglass in her arms.

During her first half hour of waiting, she had tried to work the locks on the door, but she could not reach the deadbolt mechanisms on the other side of the stout wood. Then she'd occupied herself with an inventory of the chamber and all its contents, but had not found anything particularly useful as either a weapon, or an alternative exit. She'd examined the terrace and the adjacent castle walls, but had discovered that the terrace offered no means of escape, at least, not to anyone who lacked the ability to fly.

Frustrated, she had finally begun to consider the hideous hourglass that was meant to measure out the final moments of her life, not as a timepiece, or even as an ugly knickknack, but as a potential projectile.

She'd finally begun to consider just dropping the heavy, unsightly thing on the marching swine and whatnot below, and was currently peering down at her intended victims, trying to settle on an appropriate target.

The red sands of the hourglass continued to flow as she held it, measuring her remaining time, and her time was running out. But maybe time could run out rather more abruptly for some unfortunate below. The glass was very heavy, and, if dropped from a height, would undoubtedly give someone down in the courtyard a big surprise. Maybe several someones.

Dorothy watched the drill formations of the flying swine and winged monkeys carefully, waiting for the right moment.

 

"Not just NO," Barney was growling. "Fuck NO! I won't do it! It's disgusting!"

The service road had been a godsend. Margot, Barney and the Scarecrow had made far better time on it then any of them had dared to hope, and they'd arrived at the castle before the setting sun had dipped below the horizon.

They'd crept around the perimeter of the castle for a time, using the rocks and tumbled boulders of the mountainous terrain the castle was set in for concealment. Eventually they'd located the very same courtyard that Dorothy had been perusing with murderous intent, and had observed the soldiers of the Witch moving through their drills.

After a few minutes of watching, the Scarecrow had whispered that he had an idea, and had instructed them to look for sentries or lone soldiers posted at the outer edges of the castle's perimeter, closer to the rocks than to the keep.

A stroke of good fortune led to the discovery of three such sentries, three large monkeys, all stationed at a tiny guard kiosk beside the head of the service road. These soldiers, lacking the admirable military discipline of the flying pigs, had ducked down behind a boulder, out of sight of the castle, to indulge in an impromptu dice game.

An unfortunate choice of entertainment as well as a dereliction of duty. The Scarecrow and the Lion had ambushed the dice players from the rocks, and soon all three had crapped out, as it were.

Barney had been okay with stripping the uniforms off the three dead soldiers, and had been willing to don the clothing himself, even though the uniform he'd wound up with sorely needed laundering.

But when the Scarecrow had nonchalantly stripped the faces of the three soldiers off as well as the uniforms, Barney had begun to feel more than a bit queasy. And when he'd held out the dripping simian visage he'd chosen for the Lion's use, Barney had put his foot down.

"We need to disguise ourselves, Barney," The Scarecrow was patiently explaining, through the slack lips of his own borrowed face. "Just think of it as a Halloween mask, if you want. Margot's already putting hers on."

"I don't care! Gooshy stuff like this doesn't bother her as much. But ME - I am NOT gonna put that gruesome thing on my face and that's FINAL!"

 "Barney -”

"No!"

Margot intervened, smoothing her new face over her own tin features. "Come on, let's go. Just let him pull his hat real low, okay? We can't stand around here arguing all night."

"Margot, he doesn't look anything like a flying monkey, and you know it! The fact is - properly I ought to take their wings too, if we really want to do this right."

"Ugh!" Barney cried. "Just because YOU'RE a deranged butcher with no sense of proportion -”

"Never mind," Margot interrupted. "Let's not waste any more time. We just have to get inside, we don't have to look perfect. Scarecrow, you know he's squeamish - he'll never go for this. Let's just go."

Barney glared stubbornly at the Scarecrow for a moment, then stalked off toward the courtyard, tail twitching angrily past the vents in his uniform coat. Toto scampered after him. Margot followed a moment later, and finally the Scarecrow followed them all, discarding the extra monkey face and shaking his head at the foolishness of the world.

They waited in the shadow of the drawbridge gateposts just outside the courtyard, watching until the parade drills ended. After that, the troops formed a column and began to file over the drawbridge. The four companions chose their moment, and quietly joined the tail end of the column just as the great castle gate was about to be lowered.

They were inside the castle at last.

 

Above, in the Witch's chamber, Dorothy had remained, poised, on the terrace, still watching for the best target.

She'd hoped to take out as many of the Witch's troops as possible, so she'd waited for a time when a number of them would be massed together within the reach of her intended makeshift bomb. This had not happened during the course of the drills, and when Dorothy saw that the exercises were coming to an end and the troops were forming up to go back inside, she determined to hurl the hourglass anyway, before it would be too late.

She actually had the glass raised over her head, ready to throw, when she saw something that stopped her in mid-heave.

Three uniformed figures slipped out from behind some rocks and joined the very end of the line of troops on the drawbridge.

Three figures, one with what appeared to be a tasseled tail trailing beneath the hem of its coat.

Three figures. And a lamb with a brand new wire muzzle.

Dorothy carefully set the ugly hourglass down and leapt into the air, just once, just as her heart leapt gladly in her breast. She came down laughing with blessed relief and moved toward the locked door of the chamber.

 

Down below, Dorothy's friends were infiltrating the interior of the castle. They silently split off from the marching line of troops in the great hall, and faded into the shadowy dimness behind a stone column in the hall as the marching monkeys and pigs filed out. As they watched, a pair of monkeys swept the huge oaken main doors shut, but, they noted, did not lock them. Then the monkeys, jabbering animatedly to one another, strolled out of the hall down a wide corridor to the left. The great hall was empty.

The three perused the huge room; fully two stories in height, walls of ancient rough hewn rock, great pillars of stone bearing the massive weight of the structure, dusty flagstone floors, Gothic arched corridors and doorways opening off this central hall in every direction, a wide staircase leading to a gallery one floor above, and then up into higher floors. A few tatty tapestries and one or two rusty suits of armor set in alcoves were the only attempts at decoration.

"Ersatz Gothic," the Scarecrow sniffed, whispering. "How unutterably clichι. No wonder you don't care to inherit this tacky ruin, Margot."

"My brother makes the chambermaids get spiders out of the garden and put them in the corners at least once a week - to spin cobwebs," Margot agreed. "Can you believe that? He's such an asshole!"

"Do you know where they might have Dorothy in this ghastly rock heap, Margot? You know the castle, don't you?"

"Well, there's a dungeon level just through -” Margot began.

"We won't need to bother with all that," Barney interrupted, drawing again on his extensive knowledge of moppet/pet mythology. "Toto can lead us to her. Can't you, boy? Go find Dorothy, boy! Lead us to Dorothy!"

Perhaps there may be some grains of truth in such sentimental stories after all. Toto cocked his fuzzy head at the Lion a moment, for all the world as though he was considering the Lion's request, and then scampered toward the staircase, where he waited for them on the first step.

"Unbelievable," Margot commented.

"C'mon, let's go," the Lion said. "I told you he could do it."

The three of them followed the lamb up the steps, past the gallery, and up to the floor above, where Toto led them down a damp stone hallway to a stout double deadbolted door.

The Scarecrow tapped quietly at the door while Barney rewarded the clever little lamb with a good ear-scratching and some whispered words of praise.

A familiar voice on the other side of the door responded to the Scarecrow's discreet knock.

"Who-oo is it?" the voice sang out quietly, barely suppressing glad laughter.

Delighted grins broke out among the three in the hall, and the Scarecrow bent to the task of picking the two locks as he replied, sotto voce, to Dorothy.

"Oz Sweepstakes Patrol, madam. You've just won the Impossible Odds Contest."

The locks yielded to the Scarecrow's expert ministrations and the door swung open. Special Agent Dorothy Gale all but fell outwards, into the arms of her friends, as it did.

Much quiet hugging and whispered congratulation and swallowed laughter ensued. Dorothy scooped her faithful lamb off the floor and gave him a grateful smooch on the head, then set him down and threw her arms around the Scarecrow, so enthusiastically she almost knocked him over. He did the best he could to return her happy embrace with only the one arm.

"See, I did just what you told me - I stayed alive. And here you are. Here you all are."

"I told you I'd come for you, Dorothy. A promise is a promise."

"If you weren't dead, you said," she amended, and stepped back a pace to look at him. "Umm . . . what happened to your arm?"

"Why, whatever do you mean? I've got it right here," he pointed to the severed arm sticking out of his knapsack with his good hand and smiled sardonically.

"Oh. Well. That's okay, then," Dorothy responded. "I was worried for a minute, there."

"Where's the Witch, Dorothy?" he asked, "Do you know? We need to find him."

"WHAT???" both Margot and Barney hissed, almost simultaneously.

"Well, the Witch, of course," the Scarecrow explained, clearly a bit impatient with their thickness. "We did come to sort out the Witch, didn't we? And there is that hospital bed we were supposed to bring back to the Wizard."

"Oh, NO!" Margot snapped. "Oh, no you don't! I've had enough of this swashbuckling crap for one day. We're leaving, right now, while we still can! We can come back and 'sort out the Witch' some other time!"

"But, Margot -” Dorothy started to argue.

"No! Just don't say it! You two maniacs may not know when to quit, but I DO! We are LEAVING!"

"Right," added Barney. "I don't care if I ever see the Witch OR the Wizard again. Let's go."

Margot and Barney both spun around and marched toward the stairs without further argument.

Dorothy and the Scarecrow both shook their heads at the foolishness of the world and shrugged. Dorothy quickly ducked back inside the chamber, and came out with her tote bag (which the Witch, seared by the magical blast of energy when he'd tried to touch the Ruby Brain, had dropped to the chamber floor). She'd also, on an errant whim, picked up the great hourglass.

"Where on earth did you find a repulsive thing like that?" the Scarecrow asked, appalled. He and Dorothy turned and followed their friends toward the stairs, Toto at their feet.

"It's the Witch's, of course. Wouldn't you know? So . . . we'll never get out of here without a fight, whatever THEY think, and -”

"Of course. Hold up, a moment -” he said, halting and turning his back to her. "Can you reach into my sack? It's a little awkward for me, with just the one arm. There, just dig past those fashion magazines. I brought your shotgun. And a few shells. I do apologize, it's as many as I could find before we left the forest. Here, hand me that awful hourglass for a moment."

Dorothy dug past the fashion magazines, a number of ampoules of drugs, the crossbow, a copy of "Gray's Anatomy", two cookbooks, three pairs of silk socks, some mauve stationery, an astrolabe, four rolls of duct tape, and a dog-eared paperback of Dante’s "Divine Comedy", among other things, until she found her trusty old friend, plus several shells, and pulled them out.  

"Oh, now that was really thoughtful of you, thank you so much!" Dorothy said, opening the shotgun happily and filling it with two of the shells the Scarecrow had retrieved for her. "What a sweetie you are! I was sure I'd lost this baby for good."

They resumed walking. "I thought you might be pleased," said the Scarecrow smugly. "Why did you want this hourglass, incidentally?"

They started down the stairway. Margot and Barney were fuming on the gallery below, waiting for them.

"I'd been thinking of throwing it down on the pigs in the courtyard, where they were drilling? Maybe we could still do that, or something like it. Besides, anything THIS ugly, you gotta wonder if it might not explode or some nasty thing if it shattered."

"Not a completely out-of-the-way expectation, I'd say. He is a Witch, after all; he's a fool for all that histrionic hocus-pocus. I'll keep it, if you don't mind. I'm out of crossbow bolts."

"No problem. Can you throw it okay - one armed? Ever play any baseball?"

"I think I can manage. Baseball? What's that?"

They joined Barney and Margot on the gallery, and completely ignored the impatient glares that the two were dishing out.

"Enjoy your stroll, folks?" Barney asked through his teeth.  "Through chatting, or should we pull up a chair?"

"There's the front door," Margot said, pointing. "Think we can get to it sometime this evening?"

The five of them descended to the ground level of the great hall and moved toward the large door unmolested. The barren stone hall remained deserted, to all appearances.

But just as they'd gotten to the door, dozens of simian and porcine troops sprang out of concealment behind the stone pillars and out of doorways and hallways and filled the hall with a combined roar of battle lust. The now familiar sound of a hundred china plates breaking at once heralded the materialization of the Witch, cackling at them from the gallery above. And then the unmistakable wooden thud of the great front door being barred from the outside.

The soldiers of the Witch brandished ornately bladed pikes at them (highly impractical instruments, to the Scarecrow's expert eye for edged weapons) and drove them back against the locked door. They were trapped. Only Dorothy and the Scarecrow weren't particularly surprised.

"Leaving so sooo-oon???" the Witch gloated, absolutely ecstatic to find the top five individuals on his personal shit list neatly gathered in his foyer and, so he believed, in his grasp at last. He had complicated ideas for their individual demises that would have made the Devil himself puke, and would likely take over a year to complete.

"I wouldn't HEAR of it! You just can't imagine all the wonderful plans I have for each of you! I'm so-oo GLAD you three decided to drop in, Margot, darling, Barney, Scarecrow, old pal! Even if you didn't have an invitation. And Ms. Gale, surely you're not leaving yet? Why, the party hasn't even started!"

"If you're going to give a party," the Scarecrow said, raising his aristocratic nose to its most arrogant angle. "You really ought to have the staff dust this place, at the least. Honestly, what are you paying them for? I've never seen such a pigpen."

He was, of course, hoping to anger the Witch enough to draw him down from the gallery and into the range of Dorothy's shotgun. Failing that, he at least wanted the Witch as emotionally off-balance as possible.

"Maybe we'll start with YOU, you unconscionable snob! What happened to your arm? Shall we start calling you 'Stumpy' now?"

"Well, I can hardly object, I suppose, in all fairness. I happen to know that your very own people call YOU 'Smiley' whenever your back is turned."

Actually, he knew no such thing, although he thought it quite likely. If the Witch wouldn't come down, the Scarecrow calculated, it still might be possible to create a diversion. There was an unblocked corridor to the left, if they could just get past the bristling pikes of the pigs on the left flank.

"Isn't that right, Cordell?" he added, with a friendly you-can-tell-ME smile for the ugly monkey.

The Witch instantly turned his attention away from his prisoners below and glared searchingly at Cordell, who was squirming uncomfortably even as he shook his head in vehement denial.

All the soldiers of the Witch were deeply embarrassed and a bit anxious to have been caught out this way. Most of them gazed nervously up at the Witch, who was not known to be a particularly forgiving employer.

The Scarecrow nudged Dorothy.

"On three, both barrels, left flank," he whispered below his breath, cutting his eyes first toward the group of soldiers he wanted her to fire on, then toward the clear corridor just past them. "Margot, Barney - through there - be ready."

"Personally," he added to Cordell. "I think it's a bit mean of you to call him that. But I suppose it's not as bad as 'Jolly Roger', 'Handsome', and 'Fishhead'. And then there's the old reliable - 'Cocksucker', which I'm sure we can all agree is just too vulgar for discussion, even if everybody knows it is true."

The Witch trembled with betrayed rage and looked as though steam would erupt from his earholes at any moment, and Cordell was positively quaking at this point. The assorted pigs and monkeys in the hall below were simply mortified, rooted to their spots with trepidation.

"One - two - THREE!" the Scarecrow cried, and hurled the huge hourglass at the left flank soldiers of the Witch. Dorothy fired into their ranks at the same time.

The hourglass, just as Dorothy had surmised, did indeed explode upon impact, and a cloud of noxious green gas emerged in the wake of the explosion. The five companions dashed through the scattered left flank in all the green fog and confusion, and ran down the open corridor beyond.

Their way led up a narrow stone staircase and down another hall. They soon could hear the roar of the Witch's minions scrambling after them. They slipped out a doorway into the open night, and found themselves on the parapet of the castle, going toward a corner turret chamber. They could hear the soldiers more clearly now, could tell that their enemies were gaining on them.

Into the turret chamber, and around the corner and out to the open rampart again. Just ahead of them, they saw the first few soldiers of an entire battalion of pigs and monkeys piling out of the turret just ahead and running toward them from the opposite direction.

"Trapped!" Barney cried.

"Can we get over this wall?" Margot asked.

They could not. It was over twelve feet high.

"Let's meet 'em inside that turret room, then," Dorothy said. "I've got a couple of shells left. Do more damage in a crush - we can take a few more of them with us."

Nobody needed to ask where she thought they were going. Their final destination seemed dismally manifest. They all ran back inside the turret they had just emerged from.

Dorothy allowed as many of their foes into the cramped stone chamber as possible before she fired her last two shells, thus greatly reducing their numbers. But ultimately, it was an empty gesture. They were pinned down, outnumbered, had few weapons left, and were facing forces that had many, many excellent reasons to be utterly livid with them all.

It was over. They knew it.

Pikesmen pressed them each right up against the stone walls, the points of the pikes bare inches from each of their throats. The Witch came rolling in, trundled by a pair of hogs and Cordell, who was sporting a black eye.  The Witch's troops crushed against the walls as best they could to accommodate his bed. He had his servants roll him right up to the prisoners.

"You know," said the Witch, addressing the Scarecrow, his one goggled eye glittering with malice. "Everybody just makes the same mistake with you, over and over. And I'm as bad as everyone else. We all let you talk, and that's the problem. So, now, much as it pains me to do it, I'm going to just kill you quick, before you have a chance to say anything. Okay? Cordell, hand me that torch."

With his good hand, before anything more could be said, he thrust the flaming torch into the highly flammable straw midsection of the Scarecrow.

At first, nothing happened. Then the torch spluttered weakly, and finally guttered out. It was a classically anticlimactic moment.

Everyone in the room gaped at the Scarecrow, including Dorothy and his other friends. A long confused silence held sway.

"Why . . . why aren't you on fire?" Dorothy finally asked, breaking the silence.

He laughed. "Why, I had myself sprayed with flame retardant back at the Emerald City Wash and Brush Up, of course. One can't be too careful of fire when one is constituted largely of flammable materials."

"You mustn't feel too ineffectual about it, though," he added to the Witch, maroon eyes sparkling with cruel amusement. "You've almost succeeded in ruining my coat, at least. I'll never get this soot out. It's really a bit of a nuisance."

As the Witch's lipless maw stretched open to its limit and an ear-shattering bellow of ultimate wrath foghorned out, his sister, Margot, was having a small epiphany.

 The words "flame retardant" swirled in her head, along with several vivid childhood memories, recollections of more recent events, and one bizarre cause-and-effect logical extrapolation that caused her blue butcher's eyes to open wide as a number of mental windows aligned for her.

She immediately plunged her hand into the Scarecrow's knapsack and grabbed his severed arm.

"Cover me, guys - keep 'em off me for a moment . . .” she murmured to her companions, and then leapt heavily onto her brother's nearby hospital bed, crushing him under her considerable weight for a moment.

Before any of the Witch's minions could think to interfere, Dorothy, The Scarecrow, and Barney had done just as Margot asked, and attacked all those factotums closest to the Witch to gain Margot as much time as possible.

Margot stuffed the arm into the gaping mouth of her brother, six-fingered left hand first. She'd managed to get it a considerable distance down his throat before his servants could overpower her companions and clear the way to pull her off.

"Just watch THIS . . .” she said to her friends, as a pair of monkeys and a hog shoved her roughly against the wall. The Witch coughed and spluttered as Cordell pulled the intruding limb out of his master's lipless mouth.

Once the Witch's choked coughs had quieted enough for him to talk, he glared at his sister.

"What the hell kind of stupid thing was THAT to do? Were you trying to FEED me to death?"

"Not unless you enjoy hay, brother dear. Of course, you always were a horse's ass, so maybe you do. How're you feeling right now, by the way?"

"I feel FINE, of course, you stupid tin - erk. Eck. Errrckh. EEHH. CKKH!!"

The Witch's one eye had popped open and sweat had begun to pour down off his scalp and into his denuded face. His good hand started to spasm and then both hands began to swell. His feet and chest and belly and neck began to swell rapidly as well, all nearly doubling in size as they all watched, horrified and fascinated. Convulsive paroxysms wracked his entire supine frame, shaking his bed.

"Anaphylactic shock," Margot explained, smiling smugly. "We always had to be so careful about his pajamas and bedding and toys when we were little kids. He'd blimp up like a poisoned dog if any of the stuff even touched his bare skin."

The Witch was, indeed, blimping up like a poisoned dog even as she spoke. He looked like some awful surrealist depiction of a bloated Sumo wrestler now, and was still swelling quickly.

The Scarecrow figured it out first, and promptly laughed until he choked.

"What stuff?" Barney asked, staring at the puffing, swelling Witch. "I don't get it. Are you saying he's allergic? What's he allergic TO?"

"Flame retardant." Margot said calmly.

And the Witch simply exploded into a million wet, gooshy, sticky smithereens in a single, nightmarishly liquid blast.

A rain of pureed bits of former Witch rose into the air on the force of the detonation, and then fell back, splattering everyone in the room.

"Oh . . . my . . . GOD," Barney the Squeamish Lion, covered with a thin coating of wet, pinkish, biological goo, gurgled. "That was - without a doubt - the single grossest thing I have EVER seen in my entire life." He then fell bonelessly to the floor in a dead faint.

Everyone in the turret chamber (except the Scarecrow, who could not stop laughing) just stood, silent and stunned, for nearly five minutes.

Finally, Cordell uttered the first words they had yet heard from him.

"You killed him," Cordell said.

"Oh?" the Scarecrow answered, still laughing so hard that he was barely able to talk. He wiped a handful of fleshy gobbets of Witch off his face and flicked the vile mess to the floor. "What gives you that idea?"

Margot and Dorothy collapsed against each other and simply howled. It had been a very long day.

"I can't believe you guys killed the Witch!" Cordell went on, completely untroubled by the Scarecrow's notorious mordant humor. "Holy crap, thank you! Thank you so much - we've all despised him for years! Now we can start that air taxi business we've been thinking about!"

He waded through the two inch pool of slime on the floor and insisted on shaking all their hands, except for Barney, who was still indisposed.

Then ALL the pigs and monkeys had to do it, and cheerful chattering and hand-shaking and back-slapping and high-fiving and happy laughter and even several verses of  "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" erupted all over the room.

Cordell addressed Dorothy and her companions, who were attempting to revive the Lion. He had to shout to be heard over the racket of the impromptu celebration.

"We're all in your debt, all of you. Is there anything we can do for you guys? Anything at all? Just ask . . ."

Dorothy shared a conspiratorial smile with her companions, then turned to Cordell.

"The Witch's bed? Could you have some of the pigs fly it over to the Emerald city? Just deliver it to the Wizard, if you could?"

"Uh, sure. But don't you think we ought to try to clean it up a little first? It's - um - kind of yucky.”

"Oh, no, that won't be necessary," she said, grinning evilly. "I'm sure the Wizard won't care about the mess. Just drop it off at his doorstep, that'll be fine."

"We-ell, if that's what you want. What about the five of you? Can we drop you somewhere? You can be our first customers!"

Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and Margot conferred for a moment, but there was really only one appropriate destination, each of them could agree. Margot turned to Cordell.

"You bet you can drop us somewhere," she said, laughing. "This air taxi idea of yours, I gotta tell you - sure fire winner! You'll make a fortune!"

The Scarecrow spoke as the first official fare of the nascent taxi service.

"The Emerald City Wash and Brush Up Company, then, please, cabbie." he said, smiling. "And there's an extra ten in it for you if you get us there before the dinner hour."