Chapter one: The Tin Man Runs the Town
Chapter One
PROLOGUE
Who has endured more than me? Who has had their life, their love, their literal beating heart, torn from them? Who has endured the kind of treachery that I have? Treachery that turned me into a monster. My humiliations will burn everything down, and each thing that burns will make me grow stronger. I am unstoppable. Amee will regret leaving me and I am better, I am stronger, alone. Nick would be sad, wondering what he’d done wrong, wondering what he could do to fix things, for everyone to just go back to living simply and quietly. There is no Nick. Just me. I didn’t seek this Destiny, but I will embrace it. Why would The Mysteries turn me into this monster unless this was my true way? To be this monster, my Destiny? One who’s had to endure what I have had to endure?
My Destiny, it is clear, The Mysteries decree: To rule this criminal underworld. To use my strength, my will, my revenge. To destroy.
CHAPTER ONE
The forest is breathing. Haunted breath. Beautiful and dangerous. In the sigh of dangerous breath, sometimes a word is formed. Maybe a name. Calling out. And - it’s your name. Is this imagined? Is the Haunted Forest sighing, calling you, and if so, why? Is there reason or logic to apply, or being applied? Or is it Magic. If the forest is alive and breathing, if it has always been so, if it is both life-giving and haunted, a sanctuary and a death sentence, all things always, then can it truly be called Magic? If it has ever been so, this state of being, this understanding between nature and the people of OZ, is it Magic, or is it just life as it is known? And if it is just life as it’s known, then what is Magic? Is Magic a fact? A fact of this life? Is it a fact made permeable, malleable? Perhaps Magic is a fact that can absorb new meaning.
A clay pitcher, set on a table.
A simple thing. An everyday thing. Perhaps you notice the craftsmanship that went into the creation of it. Your father made it himself. It has meaning as an object, it has meaning as a memory, and this memory includes the uses you put to it. Objects, memories. What other meanings are possible? Magic is applied, and suddenly this plain pitcher made years ago by your father, as a present to your mother, shaped by his own hands, fired by his love for her, becomes something else. The water it holds is now poison, the water it holds escapes, scalding, it fills the room, this terrible spell – or the pitcher explodes, The Wizard appears, a fate is decreed, a life is saved or ended. Is the pitcher the same as before? A mere pitcher. No, it is not. It is no longer just an object. The memory, and the use put to it, is transformed as well, a new configuration. Magic. Magic is the third state of meaning. Object, memory, and Magic.
Magic is fact here in OZ. This third state of meaning, Magic, makes reality malleable, thus facts are malleable. If the field of possibilities is limitless, then reality is unbounded. How can you be sure of where the edges of the shared reality of OZ are? You cannot be sure. You cannot. Magic, the fact of it, is both risk and reward.
All of this to say - Nick is surrounded by Magic, right now, in this very forest. Magic is not on his mind since it is everywhere and nowhere at once. The haunted whispers of the forest are unnoticed as well. A world of whispers, hauntings, spells, surrounds you, but this all lives at the edge of perception when it is all as matter of fact as the air itself, as the songs of the birds as they cut and dart masterful angles through the trees, as the fog that glides alongside Nick. The fog, the songs, the thick, sweet air of the forest, all accompany Nick on this walk, a walk he’s taken hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. It is beautiful, and Nick knows this, he appreciates it, he feels the everyday Magic deep down inside him, and he is happy.
This path takes him to the Sawmill, and this time to himself is perhaps his favorite time of this and every day. He walks with purpose, for the easy reason that he feels like a man with purpose. A young man, yes, but a young man who feels like things add up, in a good way, that you do the right thing, you want the best for others, you get to the Sawmill on time, treat everyone with respect, and life will take care of itself. This adding up of life’s details is an equation that makes sense to him. There is darkness everywhere, of course, and Nick knows that at any moment life can take a strange turn, that the Mysteries can decide that Fate has been too kind, or too predictable, that the calculus that Nick is making unconsciously must be disrupted. A new variable introduced. He is not exempt from the inexplicable torments, the variables, that the Mysteries visit upon the unsuspecting of OZ. He is not exempt, but he is not cowed, for the simple reason that, to Nick, all is not bad luck! Some drift, expecting the dark black Wolf of Fate to show its dripping fangs sooner or later, and so they lay in wait, not to defend, not to surprise the beast and battle her, but to accept. Life is hard in OZ, always has been, and the sleepwalkers, the Vile-takers, remain in motion, but they drift, no destination, no purpose, they simply await the Wolf.
This dark black Wolf of Fate can strike anywhere, at any time, that the Mysteries decree. There is no announcement, only consequence. Of course! But why should Nick worry about that. He thinks of life as good, his life in particular as good, and should a Wolf show up at his door, that Wolf will find that she has a fight that she must truly prosecute, for Nick is strong, he is brave, his heart is true.
Just because Nick weighs each moment and finds, generally, the good vastly outweighs the bad, this doesn’t mean that Nick is one who drifts, or will accept the fate that the Mysteries envelop him in – this goodness, to Nick, is not a sign of weakness or naivete. He, a rare combination of good and real. He feels like he was born with a sense of Destiny. Not knowing, necessarily, what that Destiny was. Just a feeling that life would show him things, and he would handle it, or learn it, or take the next step. Whatever it was, but living in certainty that it would be something. Nick doesn’t lie in wait for this unnamed, unknown, Destiny. Is our Destiny foretold – a straight line – or is it a reaction to the circumstances that we find ourselves in? Or do we “find” ourselves in the circumstances?
Nick tends to believe that circumstances will only make him stronger. The challenges of life, and there are many, are the crucible and Nick accepts this. The crucible does not always burn hot, melting the core of your belief in yourself, you fighting the heat, the steel, the storm, to transform yourself. To not just survive, but create oneself anew. Sometimes the crucible itself is transformed. And too, there are lives, thoughts, hearts, born of ice. Frozen and unmoving, static and unmoved. This is sometimes more difficult to navigate, to transform, or to be transformed by. Nick’s mother. Frozen, unmoving and unmoved. He has no memory of his mother, Anna, transferring energy. He’s never felt the electricity of her love. Love can ignite you, shock you, electrify you, warm you, love is energy. He believes that his mother loves him, mostly because he cannot find reasons why she would not, despite not being able to find any evidence that she does.
She hides her supply of Vile from him, for no good reason. Of course he knows that she, like so many, is hiding herself as she hides the Vile. She is sleepwalking through her life. Sometimes he finds her out at the edge of the trail by their cottage, staring. He cannot say what are you thinking about, Mom? She doesn’t know.
He no longer asks this. She is not the only one who seems to have this dissociation. If it hadn’t always been so, he might’ve labeled it a sort of epidemic. An epidemic of energy lost, and what seems to be an epidemic of defeat. That is the only word that Nick can come up with to describe the general feeling in the Forest. Not that there aren’t happy moments, births to celebrate, smiles, jokes, love. There is. Yet an undercurrent flows below. Fortune is not something that people search for, it seems a given that the future is the past is the present. Like Anna, frozen.
Ambition is an arrow, taut in the drawstring, let if fly. You cannot be certain of anything except its direction. But that is enough for Nick. A trajectory. Nick feels like he is pulling on that drawstring in a way that most others do not. He doesn’t yet know the trajectory, he has not yet let the arrow soar. But as he draws it further back, the tension is testing his forearms, his shoulders, his mind, his body. When the arrow is unleashed, Nick will follow behind, and he will be strong and clear-minded, and he will track his Destiny down. Is the arrow endlessly airborne? Nick following behind forever more, or at some point does it find a target, the trajectory complete. Some, when the Mysteries reveal the target, it is definitive, this is Destiny, the end of the trajectory, and their life may both begin and end in this same moment. Their Destiny revealed, trajectory ended, a safe and common life awaits them. A safe and common life. This is life in the Forest. A Kalidah may attack. A cottage may burn. An accident at the Sawmill. These things happen, this is life, this is the Mysteries testing you, or testing your neighbor, testing the resolve of the Forest people themselves. But this and these are like any life, anywhere. You endure. The Forest people endure.
Nick respects this. He respects the way his father endures. Still working out in the Forest, sawing, cutting, sweating, still working in the Mill. Enduring. His beloved wife, Nick’s mother, lost to the affliction of memory, whatever this undercurrent is that renders so many adrift. He endures this too. A strange mixture of hopeless hope. He hopes and yearns and dreams that Anna will one day look at him as she once did, it is hard now to know if she truly sees him at all. He hopes, believing deeply in fact that it is hopeless. Nick thinks of his father as naïve, guileless, sweet. A good man. But not a fighter. Living a safe and common life. He is relentlessly optimistic and positive, and sometimes this makes Nick want to shake him, awaken him, ask him to do more, be more, fight for more. His worldview consists of – this is where the arrow landed. I will make the best of it, not ask for more, not expect more from life or myself. This is the safe and common life that nearly all live here in the Forest.
His father talks of the glorious Emerald City, the beauty, majesty, and magic of it. Nick’s bedtime stories as a young boy consisted of the fantastical Emerald City, of the Great and Powerful Wizard, who rules with great patience and wisdom, of the beautiful Yellow Brick Road that leads to the City. Nick can still remember the moment when he finally realized that his father had never been to the Emerald City. He had never seen the Wizard. He had never even set foot on the Yellow Brick Road. When he got the nerve to finally ask him why, his response was “Oh, that’s not for people like us”. His view of his father changed a little in that moment, even as his love for him didn’t waver, and never would. Not long after, he began to understand that almost no one had actually been to the Emerald City, almost no one had actually seen the Wizard, or set foot on The Yellow Brick Road.
Why? Was it fear? If the Emerald City is so majestic, and the Wizard so wise, what is there to fear? Nick finally determined that there was indeed some fear involved, a fear of the unknown, certainly. But it was more than that, a deeper kind of fear. The Forest people did not believe that it was their place to want and wish for more. They were undeserving of the Emerald City and its riches. Undeserving of being able to watch the Wizard at work, of watching the Elite at play. Their lives were here, doing the hard work of the Forest, keeping the natural world here abloom and filled with life, and supplying the lumber, the endless requirements of lumber that the Wizard deemed necessary to feed the dream of one day rebuilding the true OZ. It was, they were, a system.
Nick was a part of the system too, of course, and he knew his place in the system. This wasn’t something that he questioned. Nor did he question the fact of the Wizard, the Emerald City, The Yellow Brick Road, any more than he questioned the existence of The Mysteries. You didn’t have to see The Mysteries to experience them. The same with the Emerald City. It was a far-off land, but no reason to doubt its existence, or the stories about it that his father, that everyone, told.
Nick feels some pull of ambition, some feeling of a destiny greater than the here and now, but he doesn’t quite know what it might be, what it could be. Or even what he wants it to be. The thoughts come and go, there is a feeling inside him that he will know it when he sees it, or feels it. His ambition will meet a particular set of circumstances, and thus then his Destiny will be revealed, the bowstring tight, his arms slightly shaking from the tension of the bow and the tension of the future. He’ll release the arrow, it will fly straight and true, for he has taken the time to whittle and shape the stave so it is perfectly balanced, the bowstring reverse-twisted for strength and waxed for speed and accuracy. He knows he will be ready. Ready for what, exactly, the Mysteries have yet to reveal. Today, though it may be the day his Destiny is revealed, feels like another workday like any other, and the sun is starting to warm the forest, the rays peeking through the canopy, and Nick has a smile on his face.
He has walked this path so many times that he sometimes has to remind himself to take note of his surroundings, not just the beauty, and it is plentiful, but the dangers as well, for they too are plentiful. A Kalidah charging through the bush, or a Shadow Jester whispering and cajoling him into the darkness of the Forest, never to be seen again, neither Nick nor the Shadow Jester. Real danger, but in a way, the fact that the danger is ever-present makes it far easier to keep fear from invading his heart. It just is. It’s a fact of this life.
Nick can see enough of the sun through the tree canopy to know he is a little late to the Mill. He picks his pace up some, still absent-mindedly turning over stray thoughts. He hopes his Dad is already out in the Forest somewhere, hard at work. He surely is. He thinks about Amee, hoping to see his love after work. He tries to not think about his mother. He hears the bird’s harmonies above, the melodies truly magical to him. Other sounds are strange, like The Forest and everything in it is one connected being. A sense of things moving, grinding, surreptitious movement, this Forest and everything in it breathing in and out as one.
He is dressed for his supervisory workday at the Mill in canvas pants that don’t stretch much past his knees, tall boots, and a loose-fitting cloth shirt. The look of the clothes somehow split the difference between a medieval blacksmith and a Chicago longshoreman from 1932 – working class. Rounding a corner, stands of giant trees to his left and thick bushes and briars to his right, in the distance, somewhere in The Forest, a new sound grows. The clang of metal. A rustling, stomping, sonic symmetry, like soldiers marching in formation.
The sound grows louder, almost upon Nick now. Soon he sees, passing by him maybe 30 yards away: not quite in formation, but definitely together, a dozen men, unaware of Nick watching them.
Nick doesn't hide - but doesn't move either.
These marching men all look grizzled, rough, like days without sleep rough. Like stay still and don't make a sound Nick, rough. All dressed alike, all dressed like Nick. They all carry a huge wooden axe with a gleaming metal axe head. In all aspects, they appear just like any other man, with one important exception: They all carry that axe with a hydraulic metal arm. Made of tin. Some of them have two tin arms, some also have a tin leg. Their shirt sleeves are cut off at the shoulder, allowing freedom of movement and making the tin appendages visible to all. They are not hiding them.
These are the Tin Men. The Tin Woodsmen. Or at least some of them. Their one and only job: decimating tree stands with their monstrous metal-enabled strength, and equally monstrous axes. Nick watches for a moment as they stomp through a path-less part of the woods. Their gait is purposeful and direct, like Nicks’; unlike Nick, they telegraph menace, potential violence.
As they march nearer to Nick, he takes cover behind one of the many trees bordering the path. No sense needlessly provoking them in any way. A Tin Man is always ready to take offence at someone staring at them like they are some kind of monster. Yet, monsters they are. You would never see a Tin Man in town, and they are usually in the deepest, darkest, sections of the Forest, where both the trees and the dangers can seem overwhelming. They are much much closer to town here than usual. He’s never, in fact, seen any Tin Man from this trail before.
Nick watches them stomp past at a short distance. That sonic sense of things moving, grinding, of surreptitious movement, grows more present to Nick, it seems right next to him in a way.
He looks up at the tree he is hiding behind.
And The Tree looks back.
The Tree shoots two arm-like branches at Nick, bark popping, wood snapping, a haunted grimace on its inhuman face as a wordless guttural threat escapes.
Nick is strong, he’s quick, but the grasping branches possess a dark magic fury, and he is snatched. The Tree has his wrist.
It’s got him.
Nick cannot move his arm, just as he couldn’t snap a thick branch off this powerful tree no matter the effort or leverage he applied. The best he can do is to try to not let it get his other arm or any other part of him and pull him into the rough bosom of the tree, for that spells doom. The Tree will crush him, asphyxiate him, just like one of the giant snakes that swim unseen in the mighty River Lethe that divides the lands of OZ and courses through the Forest to its ultimate end in the Emerald City.
Nick tries to extract his wrist, punching the bark with his other hand, his knuckles bloodied in an instant. Flailing, failing, and The Tree’s other arm-like branch is on Nick now, it turns Nick around, he’s facing the at-a-distance Tin Men now, and The Tree starts to pull him backward.
The Tin Men stop.
The focus of unwanted attention from a dozen Tin Men is now on Nick.
The Tin Man that’s been leading this wild metallic wolf pack takes a step towards Nick.
Time in OZ can seem like it possesses properties that would be impossible, nonsensical, in other worlds. It can be a major component in Magical feats large and small. Could the Wizard completely slow time, so that various, nefarious, machinations might take place unnoticed? Might the gambler suddenly feel like a single second has been misplaced, displaced, and suddenly a face card is missing?
Time suddenly slows for Nick. He doesn’t know if it’s just his perception of time, or time itself, that is changing. The thought, unbidden, unwanted, that Nick has in this moment of Fate, is that the perception of time, and time itself, are one and the same. And if this is true, is there Magical arbitrage to be had in the difference between his perception of time, and someone else’s, in a moment that they both occupy? If time slows down for Nick, is it slowed for everyone who inhabits this moment? Is this moment a thing you can be inside of, or outside of, how would that work, he thinks. Nick is aware that he will be crushed by The Tree. He is aware the Tin Men now see him, that one is striding towards him. He wonders if time has slowed for this Tin Man, for The Tree. Is Nick’s perception somehow defining this moment? That seems unlikely. More likely is that time is on no timeline at all, that Nick, The Tin Men, the Tree, are all experiencing time differently, in this moment, and every moment. Nick feels like he is outside the moment, as if there were some way he might literally step through and out the moment, no longer occupying or being occupied in or by this exact moment. What would he do, what could he do? Could he change the trajectory of this moment if he could be completely outside of it?
Somehow these thoughts are rushing through Nick’s mind and still he is aware of the Tin Man’s forward motion, The Tree’s inexorable pull. Amee. What is she doing right now? She may be, in fact, thinking of Nick. He weighs the possibility that they will both be crushed soon. She loves him, he knows this beyond any shadows, any doubts. They will be together forever, no matter what, and if Nick does not survive this moment, there is a moment not long from now that Amee too will be crushed. By sadness, by Fate, by The Mysteries’ inexplicable interventions.
But Nick also knows that Amee is strong in every important way. Even with this terrible moment come to pass, Amee would somehow survive, and thrive. Somehow. He wonders if she might now sense something amiss, some signal sent by Nick, reverberations, his unalloyed love like its own arrow, across time and space, clattering finally at her feet, and she knows. She suddenly knows, this herald at her feet, that Nick is fighting for his life, and even more he is fighting for her, he is fighting for their life together. Nick thinks, in this moment, his own life doesn’t matter unless it is joined to Amee’s, and it forms this third thing, this love, somehow the deepest mystery, somehow beyond even The Mysteries omnipotence, and Nick feels love, and strength, and time, rush through his mind and his heart, and he must escape, this cannot be the end, his end, their end.
Informations pass between The Tin Man and Nick, their eyes, this slowed moment. The Tin Man betrays no emotion, but his stare pierces the uncertain air and it’s a long, fraught moment as Nick continues to punch the branches with his currently free hand while trying to keep his eyes on the somehow potentially even more dangerous Tin Man. Time, as Nick perceives it, as the Tin Man perceives it, as Nature describes it, seems once again to be seeking a common alignment, the Tin Man rushing forward, faster now, The Tree thrusts more and other branches out to wrap Nick up, like the snake with its rodent prey.
Nick knocks bark off the branches, bloodies his knuckles even more, but he cannot stop The Tree’s hug of death.
The Tin Man stomps towards Nick, both his arms, one flesh, one tin, look strong, his gaze equally so, locked on Nick.
Nick struggles mightily against The Tree’s natural embrace. He’s losing the battle. The Tree’s guttural wordless threats are getting louder as its prey is closer to defeat. A weird thin laugh, the sound of branches cracking.
Nick is pulled against The Tree’s trunk now, but he will not give up, ever, and flails away, against all hope, increasingly desperate but the odds of escape lower every moment.
In the scream of splintering wood, Nick whispers a prayer. Out of breath. Time has reversed itself and now the moment moves faster than meaning can capture. Thoughts and memories beholden to action. Circumstance will bend to the will. To action, speed, power.
The Tin Man is upon them now. Nick’s courage does not flag, his soft prayer again in the air, like an arrow of hope speeding to Amee, may she know his last sounds carried her name. Whether this haunted tree, or by the axe of the Tin Men, whatever the instrument of his demise, may she know he faced it and did not falter.
The Tin Man rears his hydraulic arm back, and Nick braces for the awful impact.
