On the other side of the wall, the terrain was boggy and marshy, and smelled like ass. It was difficult to get through without stepping into muddy holes, but we persevered. Eventually we came to solid ground, and walked through the underbrush into another fucking forest.

  The trees here were taller and older than any we’d seen yet. “This forest is perfectly delightful,” declared the Lion. “Never have I seen a more beautiful place.”

  “It seems gloomy to me,” the Scarecrow said.

  “Not a bit,” the Lion answered. “I should like to live here all my life. See how soft the dried leaves are under your feet, and how rich and green the moss is that clings to these old trees? Surely no wild beast could wish a pleasanter home.”

  If that were true, no one had told the other wild beasts about it. We didn’t encounter a single one for the rest of the day. When it became too dark to go any farther, Toto and I snuggled up against the Lion’s hide to sleep, with the Woodsman and Scarecrow keeping watch as usual.

  I was exhausted. At least the day’s long trek had pushed some of the dark thoughts out of my mind. I had really started to lose my shit back in forest number one that morning, but the whole thing with the porcelain village was so weird and dumb that it actually kind of shook me out of my funk. And the more I thought about it, the more I decided that if Coma Patient Theater was a shitty trope, Mentally Ill Person Who Has Magical Adventures in Her Mind was an even shittier one. Schizophrenia was a very real, very tragic condition that a lot of people struggled with, but I was pretty sure it didn’t manifest itself as a Wizard of Oz fantasy that looked and sounded and smelled like you were actually living it.

  Which left me… well, I wasn’t sure where it left me. But my feet were sore, I had kind of a dull ache all over my body, and my current plan was to fall asleep cuddling this lion and worry about it in the morning.

  When morning came, I still had nothing. So we kept walking south. We’d eventually have to get to Glinda the Good Witch, or at least something. Right? Before long we heard a low rumbling of growling and snorting, and we discovered what had happened to all the animals in this forest.

  They had all assembled for a big ancient forest animal meeting. There were tigers and elephants and bears and wolves and foxes and all kinds of stuff, some of which belonged in a forest and some of which didn’t. They were all sort of snarling at each other—I guess when animals spoke among themselves they didn’t bother with English?

  Several of the beasts caught sight of the Cowardly Lion, and at once the great assemblage hushed as if by magic. The biggest of the tigers came up to the Lion and bowed.

  “Welcome, o King of Beasts,” he said. “You have come in good time to fight our enemy and bring peace to all the animals of the forest once more.”

  Okay, this should be good. “What is your trouble?” the Lion asked. His tone was statesmanlike.

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  “We are all threatened by a fierce enemy which has lately come into this forest,” the tiger said. “It is a most tremendous monster, like a great spider, with a body as big as an elephant and eight legs as long as a tree trunk. As the monster crawls through the forest he seizes an animal with one of his legs and drags it to his mouth, where he eats it as a spider does a fly. Not one of us is safe while this fierce creature is alive, and we had called a meeting to decide how to take care of ourselves when you came among us.”

  The Tin Woodsman’s face lit up. “The Flying Monkeys!” he said. “Surely an army of them could conquer this horrible beast.”

  Here was the thing about the Flying Monkeys. I had told myself that I would need my last wish to win some video game I was playing, and as long as I hung onto it, some tiny part of me could still believe that was true. Or, even if I was trapped here by a head injury or undiagnosed psychosis or whatever, playing by the rules I had imposed upon myself meant that I was trying to get through it, the only way I knew how. Using up my last deus ex monkeyna would feel like I was giving up, and somehow surrendering to Oz.

  Fortunately, the Lion saved me from having to make that decision. “No,” he said. “This is my battle.” He addressed the tiger. “If I put an end to your enemy, will you bow down to me and obey me as King of the Forest?”

  “We will do that gladly,” the tiger said. And all the other beasts roared mightily:

  “We will!”

  “Where is this great spider of yours now?”

  “Yonder, among the oak trees,” the tiger said, pointing with his paw.

  “Take good care of these friends of mine,” the Lion said, “and I will go at once to fight the monster.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “I’m coming with.”

  The Lion protested, whispering to me that if he didn’t go alone, the other animals might not accept him as their lord and ruler. But I convinced him that they couldn’t possibly dock him points for bringing along a ten-year-old girl. If anything, it was more impressive that he could dispatch a horrible beast while having to worry about keeping me safe while he did it. The fact was, I was desperate to find some whiff of plot that would give me the slightest hope that I was still voyaging through literature, and I could just get to the end of the book and go home. It was a long shot, sure, but the giant spider was the closest thing to actual story structure we’d come across since leaving the Emerald City, and I wasn’t about to sit around waiting to hear how it turned out.

  We crept through the forest as quietly as possible, and when we found the beast, it was as huge as the tiger claimed, and twice as ugly—legs like telephone poles, teeth a foot long, and all covered in coarse, black hair. If anything represented all my dark thoughts, or head wound or mental illness or whatever, it was this monstrosity.

  And it was asleep.

  The Lion put one claw up to his mouth in a silent shush, then quietly padded up to the spot where the beast’s head was joined to its massive body with a neck as narrow as a wasp’s waist. (I was fairly certain that whoever came up with this thing had never seen a close-up picture of actual spider anatomy, but that was neither here nor there.) He popped all five claws, raised his paw, and with one great blow cut the spider’s head right off its body. The headless, elephantine spider thrashed about for a minute, then finally curled its legs up under its torso and lay still.

  And that was it. We made our way back to the clearing where all the beasts of the forest were waiting for us to return. The Lion just gazed upon them regally and smiled.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.