Dorothy Must Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoes to take me home. Even if I could click my heels together and be right back in Kansas where I’d started, I wouldn’t. This place was dark and scary and a little evil seeming, but it was something new and different. Now I just needed to find someone to tell me what was going on here.
    So I felt my heart leap when the road dipped down into a shallow valley and curved to the right, heading right toward a cluster of buildings that was sprawled at the foot of the hill.
    A town. There had to be people living there. This time, I would make them give me some answers.
    As I made my way toward it, though, I began to see that my hopes for human contact might need to wait a little longer. The buildings, which were arranged around a decrepit stone plaza, were all cracked and crumbling and grown over with ivy that looked like it had never been tended. The facades of some of the houses had been spray-painted with some kind of graffiti tag: an angry, green frowny face.
    The whole area had the distinct look of a place that had slowly been deserted, kind of like the town a few miles away from Flat Hill that everyone had abandoned when the plastic flower factory had shut down.
    “Hello?” I called out when I had reached the ring of buildings encircling the town square. There was no response.
    From up close, it was clear that this place had actually been nice, once. Even abandoned like this, there was something cheerful and quaint about the way the houses—all of various heights—were built so close together that they were practically stacked on top of one another, as if personal space wasn’t something they cared about around here. And although they were falling apart now, each house was beautifully crafted, with domed roofs and round windows and ornate wooden shutters with fancy iron hardware.
    I had to hunch a little to peer inside the nearest window, which barely reached my chin. Inside, there was a table set for five with moldy food on each plate, like whoever had once lived there had left in the middle of dinner.
    “They could really use some Munchkins around here, huh?” I said to Star, who hadn’t moved from her perch on my shoulder. She just stared back at me balefully and didn’t bother squeaking a response.
    I jumped back in surprise when I stepped into the square. Someone was smiling down at me triumphantly. Then I realized it wasn’t a person at all. It was a statue cast in marble, and it was the first thing I’d seen in the whole town that wasn’t dirty and crumbling. In fact, it was so white that it was glowing—all except for the pair of glittering silver shoes on its feet.
    Of course, I recognized it immediately. With her kind, smiling face, her jaunty gingham dress, and her neatly curled pigtails, there was no mistaking her: it was Dorothy. The silver plaque on the pedestal confirmed it:
    Here Stands Dorothy Gale , it read. She Who Arrived on the Wind, Slayed the Wicked, and Freed the Munchkins.
    By now, I’d given up on the idea that I was dreaming—my body felt too heavy and solid, and as bizarre as everything was, none of it had the sticky, underwater quality of a dream. Even so, it was kind of unreal to confirm the alternative with my own two eyes: that I had been thrown into a fairy tale.
    “Dorothy likes her statues,” a voice said, from out of nowhere. Startled, I looked around to see where it was coming from, and saw a face peering down at me from the second-story window of a house a few paces off. “Me, I have to say, I’m pretty sick of them.”
    There was a thud as a small black knapsack landed next to me. Unthinkingly, I reached down for it.
    “Don’t touch that!” the voice growled. I jumped back and saw her scrambling out the window. She dangled by her fingers before dropping to the ground, landing softly as if the height were no big thing. It was a girl. She looked up at me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity, and when she sprung to her feet, I saw that there was no way she was