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    "Maybe like a black hole..." I offered.

    "Yeah," he said, "like a black hole. Anyway, they say that every day there's a little more of the Hollow, and a little less of the Man. And logic would dictate that maybe that would make him go away eventually. But it's making him stronger, whatever it is. There's a Something in the Nothing."

    Inexplicably, I started thinking of "I've Been Working on the Railroad." Well, not inexplicably, because what Ralph was saying was giving me the same creepy feeling I used to get when I was a little kid, chills up and down my spine during that song, when you got to the part about "someone's in the kitchen with Dinah, someone's in the kitchen I knoo-oo-oo-oow..." Like, who the hell is it exactly in the kitchen with Dinah? Where did he come from out of nowhere in the middle of this nice railroad song?

    I think that was what freaked out Ralph, too. In a land of already insane physical impossibilities, here was something so mysterious and terrible that nobody knew what it was, where it came from, what the fuck it was doing in the kitchen with Dinah—and it was trying to Take Over.

    We moved out over a ridge not quite as steep as the last one, and Nick called a halt. Everyone got really quiet. I looked off where I saw Nick looking, and saw smoke coming up, far away. Thick, acrid looking black smoke, six tall columns rising up, evenly spaced over about a third of the horizon. It reminded me of something, something terrible, but I couldn't think of it right then. Later, I remembered: it was like descriptions I'd heard of the ovens at Auschwitz. I didn't know at the time how right on that was.

    Nick Chopper turned around, and from the looks of him, was about ready to give some more orders. But he didn't. Instead, he got a really preoccupied look on his face, and headed back down the ridge toward us.

    Gombo folded his wings across each other, and perched on his tail, using it like a tripod. Sool, a squat, peach-colored guy with purply-gray dreds, sat down next to him, and they both started smoking pipes of something, as if sure that we'd get an extra long break. The others seemed to take their cue from this, and relaxed into various leisurely activities: pissing, smoking, scratching.

    As he passed us, Nick said, "Ralph, Gene of Los Angeles—with me."

    Our eyes widened at each other, and we followed him down to a little copse of funny-looking skinny trees, next to some big boulders. We sat on some of the smaller rocks, and were silent, waiting.

    "Gentlemen," the Woodsman said, "I am at a loss." Then he shut up again. He took out a little stone, and started honing the blade of his ax, slowly, delicately.

    Ralph waited a bit, then, with his brow properly furrowed, said, "Nick, do you mean, about what to do next, or...?"

    Nick fxed him with a pleasant Charles Manson-meets-Fred Astaire smile and replied, "Yes, of course." More honing.

    I cleared my throat. "Excuse me, Nick," I said, I don't know what I was thinking of, maybe I'd gotten too much oxygen; I was temporarily insane. "Nick, why don't you do something like you did in the movie? You know, like when you guys snuck into the witch's castle?"

    He actually stopped honing, turned towards me. I couldn't tell if his look meant "I'm interested, go on," or he was marveling at the incomprehensible hogwash I was spouting, waiting for the perfect moment to split me in half. Ralph was behind him, waving his arms, pantomiming, trying to make me shut up. But I was on a roll, and I guess I just didn't give a shit right then.

    "Movie?"

    "Yeah, you know. Don't you? The Wizard of Oz? Anyway, you dressed up like the Winkies in the witches' army uniforms, and got inside the castle to save Dorothy."

    He was looking, then, inside of himself at something impossibly remote, impossibly long ago. "It didn't happen quite that way," he said, looking down at his metal feet. Then he got up. "But what a good idea. Hmm. Disguises."

    Then he stomped off back up the hill, spouting orders to make camp for the night, leaving Ralph and me perched on our rocks with our jaws hanging open, each for a different reason.

    I slept a little bit last night, but mostly sat around the fre with Kimbod and another guy, Zem. Zem was a Quadling, who tended toward the classic Quadling features, according to "So You're Going to Oz": straight coarse white hair, pale, almost vampire-white skin, covered with dark brown to black freckles, wide faces, almost like somebody wearing a stocking over his head. It took me a while to resist the urge to put my hands up, or give him my wallet.

    Zem the Quadling was really quiet all night, let Kimbod and me do all the talking, occasionally grunting at something we'd say. This seemed a little strange to me, as he'd talked my ear off the night before at dinner; I'd actually wanted him to shut up and let me enjoy a few minutes peace, but hadn't said anything.

    Also, while Kimbod and I talked, Zem would disappear into the woods every once in a while. I didn't think anything of it at the time, fguring maybe something wasn't agreeing with him and had the trots, and that it also accounted for why he wasn't speaking. I found out the real reason later.

    Kimbod told me about the land of Ev for a while, all about his family, about all the different wacky royalty they have; I guess he was homesick. I told him about my trip east, and how we have truckstops and Walmarts and titty bars out in our deserts, how ours don't directly kill you if you step on 'em, like the Deadly one.

    He hunched his cadaverous frame in toward the crackling blaze. "I haven't been back for awhile," he said. "It's getting harder and harder to fnd a quick sandboat or a zeppelin these days."

    "Yeah," I replied dreamily, half hypnotized by the brilliant glow of a dry branches's combustion, like I knew all about that problem, "I know what you mean."

    The conversation fagged after that, and I eventually climbed into my sleeping bag, gazing up at the moon through the crisscrossed skeletal tree limbs. I started to freak out then, a little bit, thinking stuff like the branches were dried-up witch-claws bending down to grab me. Then I noticed an owl up there, high up on top of one of the witch's thumbs. It had a half-chewed mouse in one of its talons—I guessed carnivores had a special dispensation when in came to the cannibalism thing—or maybe they only ate stupid mice? I fled the question away for another Ralph conversation.

    "Whoooo?" it called quietly.

    I wasn't sure if it was asking a question or was just being an owl, but I fgured—why not?

    "Gene Speilman" I said.

    As it few off, I wondered if I'd just now subscribed to some weird Oz version of a mailing list somewhere. And whose list? I should have kept my mouth shut, I fnally decided. But it was too late.

    The next morning,
this
morning in fact, the fute music was conspicuously absent. We had our breakfast, packed up and started marching again. My legs were sore from yesterday, and it was tough going until I warmed up a little.

    Early on, we paused briefy in the middle of a vast meadow, while Gombo and Nick wandered off and had an earnest conversation with a large pig wearing some sort of pig overalls. I wondered how he got in and out of them, and how much of a nuisance it must be to wear clothes if you had no hands. I said as much to Ralph.

    "Most of 'em don't," he said. "This one's kinda ritzy for a pig, if you ask me. He must be somebody important."

    Later we found out from Gombo that he was the traditional spiritual leader for the pigs who lived in an area half contained within the domain of the Hollow Man, half in Quadling. Part of his vows were to keep his body covered at all times except when bathing. The reason it came up in conversation was this:

    Around noon, we noticed Nick hanging back to talk to Zem, the Quadling I'd been sitting with the night before. Nick put his arm around the guy, and spoke quietly into his ear, as if imparting a great secret. Then, faster than I could follow, he swung his ax around and up, and Zem's head few off into the shrubbery. The rest of him stood there for a second spouting blood, as if not sure what had happened, wobbled on its legs a little, and collapsed.

    After I fnished puking, I heard the Tin Man addressing the rest of his men.

    "You are all my brothers," he said, as he wiped his ax down with a cloth, "but this one has betrayed me. My heart is broken. But I would do no less to ANY of you. To ANY of you. If you dare to do what this one has done. This—treachery."

    And then he reached down into the canvas sack the man had been carrying, and pulled out a contraption that looked like a mirrored lantern, with a sliding cover on one side.

    "The Hoyteb of the Quadling Pigs saw some interesting signals coming from our camp last night. This is where they came from." Nick heaved the lantern over in the same direction the lobbed head went.

    The mood has been pretty somber from then on, to say the least, and as we hiked, the scenery began more and more to match it. The sky was darkening, clouding over, and the vegetation started to look decidedly sickly and lacking in chlorophyll, like it had all been growing under some rock. We occasionally spied a farm that had the same sort of sick look, even though crops were growing, and animals were grazing in the felds. The trees, of the long skinny witch-claw variety, turned towards us as we passed, and gradually grew more and more cheeky, trying to trip us with low branches, dropping nuts and birds nests on our heads. A few well-placed thwacks from Nick's ax seemed to spread the word quickly that we weren't to be messed with.

    Luckily, there were still language bushes to be found every so often, which is something I continue to be glad of. The only thing I can think of that's worse than being in this situation is being in the middle of all this shit and not being able to understand anyone. I continue to be polite as hell to every bush I pick on.

    By late afternoon, if was starting to look full-on like Halloween. Great big clouds of bats few overhead, perhaps emptying out from a cave nearby, and and it seemed as though massive gothic spiderwebs spanned every available gap. A pale bug twitched in one of them, as a huge arachnid with glowing purple eyes made its way down towards dinner.

    This, of course got me thinking about the whole cannibal thing again.

    As I leaned up towards the web, I could hear a tiny voice shouting, "Help me! Help me!" Yeah, I know.

    This was just too much for me, of course. I reached into the web, and grabbed out the little pale-green insect, much to the dismay of the spider, who started yelling, "Hey, you bastard!" in an equally tiny voice, "that was my dinner, asshole! How'd you like a nice welt on your ankle for a few weeks?"

    I helped to disentangle the little insect from what was left of his bonds. He dropped down prostrate on the palm of my hand, I guess to thank me, and then tore ass out of there as fast as he could fy.

    "What's the deal here, anyway? Isn't that cannibalism?" I asked the spider, "Eating another sentient life form? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

    The rest of my party was getting ahead of me; Ralph hung back and called to me to hurry it up.

    "Look, shitheel," he said, purple glow-eyes pulsing, "If I don't eat the insects, I starve. My body chemistry requires it. That's bad enough. But if I don't eat those insects, you know what happens? A lot more bugs with a lot of time on their hands, making more bugs. Suddenly, there's not enough leaves for them to eat. They start to starve. Lots of them die, slowly, miserably. Not to mention all the plant life. My way is relatively painless. So next time you see one of us about to chow down, mind your own business, okay?"

    I didn't have time to argue with him. I caught up with Ralph and told him what had just happened.

    "I guess it's really a question of degree," he said. "Humans, other large animals have a choice. Some don't. When you're part of a delicate ecosystem like most of the critters out here, there isn't much of a choice. Sure, the prey doesn't want to get caught, but they accept it as a possible way to die, an act of God. They don't see the Hawk or the Spider as evil. They see them as part of a dance, a balancing act, whatever, that's been going on forever.

    "Usually farm animals have unions, make deals with their farmers, are generally well-treated. Alternatives to eating them have been worked out for ages. These kinds of beings are as socialized as we are. But that stuff just doesn't exist out in the wild. Part of Hollow Man's whole argument is that this 'law of the jungle' should extend to man. That man, an omnivore, should be eating the other animals because it's nature's way. We've been given the means to eat them. We have opposible thumbs and all that shit.

    "I mean, there's defnitely a gray area, but you can usually scope it out and obviously see whether it's wrong or not. Usually."

    I really had to think about that one—I'm still thinking about it.

    After a little more hiking, the word got passed back for everyone to shut up. We stopped while Pimbi and another guy were sent forward to scout something out. They were back in about fve minutes. I couldn't hear what they were saying to Nick Chopper, but it looked like something fairly serious was about to go down.

    Ralph confrmed what I was feeling. "Whatever happens," he said, "just hang back and stay out of the way. Nobody here expects you to fght. But take this, just in case."

    He opened his coat up. He took a really big pistol out of a leather holster and handed it to me. "This is my One That Got Through. Don't fuck it up."

    It looked like one of those ones from the Dirty Harry movies, a .357 Magnum. I couldn't be sure; I know nothing about guns.

    "I don't believe this." I muttered. The gravity of the situation was starting to sink in. "How do you work this?"

    Ralph took it back, unlatched the safety.