A Barnstormer in Oz

Glinda led him to the far end where one of the little lights shone. A transparent sphere embedded in the stone held a glowing dust.

There was a huge low bed near the light, a bed the like of which existed nowhere else in the two worlds except in the castles of the Witches of the South and of the North and the castles which had been those of the Witches of the East and of the West. Even these were not quite like Glinda's. It had white sheets and covers and pillows and was canopied by a silvery dome from under which hung an intricate array of mirrors. These would catch the "essence" of the travelers— whatever "essence" meant—and would reflect them from mirror to mirror—building up the velocity and density of the "essences," so Glinda said—and would eject them through a silvery fu

The legs of the bed were silver and went through the floors of this room through the ceilings and floors of all below it and deep into the earth into a pool of mercury enclosed in thick glass.

Glinda touched a sphere on the wall, and it glowed as suddenly as an electric light turned on.

She signalled to Hank that he should remove his slippers and robe. He did so and put them on the floor where Glinda had shed hers.

Then she hooked her fingers into her mouth and removed a complete set of false teeth.

Oh, my God! Hank thought. How ugly that fallen face looks!

He should have expected this if he had been thinking clearly. Her body cells might renew themselves, but three centuries of wear would erode her teeth to stumps. Even she, with all her seemingly magical powers, could not grow new teeth.

She smiled at him as if to say, "See! I am no longer the beauty you craved, lusted for, burned with love for. I am, though a queen, also a subject of the worm."

She put the false teeth on the pile of clothes and crawled into the vast bed. Hank went on all fours after her and lay down by her side. She rolled to the edge and lifted from the floor a thin wooden object carved in the form of a three-pointed star. There was a faintly glowing writing on it, but Hank could not make it out clearly in the dimness. She reached out her left hand and took his right. Holding the wood up before her, she looked at it while her lips moved silently. She read the characters on one ray of the star, then whirled it in the air, caught the next ray, read the forms on it, and then repeated the procedure to read the inscriptions on the third ray.

She must have known them by heart, but perhaps the ritual or operation required that she hold the object.

Sighing almost inaudibly, she placed the star on her magnificent breasts and closed her eyes. Hank had been told to close his eyes when she shut hers, and he did so.

He had just begun to visualize the Palace Hotel when he sank—or seemed to sink—through the bed. Though he opened his eyes—or thought he did—he could see only a grayness that seemed to twist in corkscrew fashion. For a moment, he screamed with terror as a baby fallen from its mother's arms might scream. He could not hear his voice, but the crimson square waves pouring from his mouth and speeding ahead of him—downwards—must be screams. They looked like terror transformed into vibrations, a wavy watery route to Hell.

He did not know why he knew or felt that he was falling. Perhaps the silver shafts and the mercury pool were a sort of ca

He stopped screaming. At least, he was no longer consciously screaming. But the crimson waves still spewed out and raced ahead of him, narrowing far in the distance and forming a sharp point. As if they made the blade of an ice-breaking ship which was cutting a way for him through the grayness. He might be wrong in thinking that the waves were a "visible" projection of his terror. They could be something else. Or it might be that something unconscious in him was doing the screaming.

He slowed down, though he did not know why he knew that.

Glinda was not with him. But just as he "stopped" and began floating, the crimson waves dwindled, shooting back towards him like a cataract in a movie film ru

She smiled and moved towards him, expanded, and enveloped him. The thought that he was inside her rolled his mind like a snowball racing down a slope.

She had taken him into her "womb" just in time. Something that he did not want to see or even hear about was moving about them now. Only Glinda kept the thing from closing its "jaws" around him. And she was in extreme peril, though he did not know how he knew.

"Up we go," her voiceless voice said softly.

They "rose," but the thing was close behind them. Hank felt that he was trembling and sweating, though not physically. He could not feel his body. All his Terrestrial senses seemed to be shut down or left behind him, but there were other senses that he could not define.

The grayness became a deep purple through which he could see or sense what seemed to be the intricate network of tree roots, moles digging, and writhing nests of worms and snakes. And there was a flash of a hollow in which the dim wavering shapes of gnomelike things hewed stone and hacked out metal and one seemed to be sitting in a stone chair and listening through earphones to something far below it.

They ascended from the crust of the earth and were inside the hotel, quivering ghostly stuff. He was no longer in Glinda; she was a phantom by him but more solid than the floors through which he was rising like metaphysical smoke.

Hank recognized the room in which they stopped. It was the bedroom of the suite in which his parents had slept when they had taken him to San Francisco. Somehow, Glinda had pointed him—and herself—toward it. They had headed toward it as surely as iron leaped, toward a magnet.

What if he had never been here? Could Glinda still have found her way? He felt that she would have been able to do so, though she would have had much more difficulty.

The man in the bed was Warren Gamaliel Harding, the President of the United States of America. The woman sitting on a chair by the bed and reading to him from a magazine was Florence Kling De Wolfe, Mrs. Harding.

There were also two nurses moving around as if they had nothing to do at the moment but were pretending to find work.

On a table by the bedside was a vase with a few long-stemmed roses and a clock. The clockhands were on 7:27.

Harding was much fatter, older-looking, and far less healthy-seeming than in the photograph Hank had shown Glinda. His haggard eyes stared up at the ceiling while he listened to his wife, but he was smiling slightly.

The room and its contents seemed to Hank to be behind thin white veils. Still, he could see everything clearly, though he could not hear, smell, or feel anything. Glinda had told him that she could have activated these senses if it had been necessary to do so, but that would have required more energy. She had also told him that she was in a "form" that differed slightly from his. He could not affect anything; he would be as intangible as ectoplasm. She, however, would be more "dense" and could, when the occasion demanded, briefly handle material stuff. She was floating by him now near the ceiling and holding in one hand an object that he had not seen when in the castle room. She must have picked it up in her right hand when she closed her eyes.

Had she brought the actual object with her or was it an astral simulacrum of the object?

The President said something. Hank, lip-reading, thought that he said, "That's good. Go on. Read some more."