Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Read online

  She strode away. Only Grommetik followed. The air went stale with things unsaid. By and by Pfannee’s hysteria grew quieter, and she merely snorted and wheezed, and then grew still, lying vaporishly and unkempt on the flagstone floor of the gazebo.

  “Well you all needn’t pierce me with your sniffy attitudes,” she said at last. “It was a joke.”

  Elphaba stayed in her room for a day. Galinda came and went with a dinner. On occasion she would stay for a few minutes. So the boys took to swimming and rowing on the lake with the girls. Boq tried to fan in himself an interest in Shenshen or Pfannee, who certainly were coquettish enough. But they both seemed besotted with Avaric.

  At last Boq cornered Galinda on the porch and pleaded with her to talk with him. She agreed, a measure of her demure demeanor returning, and they sat a short distance apart on a swing. “I suppose I’m to blame for not seeing through that ruse,” said Boq. “Elphie wasn’t inclined to accept that invitation. I made her.”

  “What is this Elphie?” said Galinda. “Where has propriety gone this summer, I ask you?”

  “We’ve become friends.”

  “Well, I can promise to have gathered that. Why did you make her accept an invitation? Didn’t you know I’d never write such a thing?”

  “How should I know that? You’re her roomie.”

  “By executive order of Madame Morrible, not by choice! I care to have that remembered!”

  “I didn’t know. You seem to get along.”

  She sniffed, and curled a lip, but it seemed to be a remark to herself.

  Boq continued, “If you’ve been woefully humiliated, why don’t you leave?”

  “Perhaps I shall,” she said. “I’m considering. Elphaba says that to leave is to admit defeat. Yet if she comes out of her hiding and begins to trip along with the rest of you—and me—the joke will be unbearable. They don’t like her,” she explained.

  “Well neither do you, I’d say!” said Boq, in an explosive whisper.

  “It’s different, I have a right and a reason,” she retorted. “I am forced to put up with her! And all because my stupid Ama stepped on a rusty nail in the railway station in Frottica and missed the orientation! My whole academic career up in smoke because of my Ama’s carelessness! When I’m a sorcerer I’ll have my revenge on her for that!”

  “You could say that Elphaba brought us together,” said Boq softly. “I’m closer to her and so I’m closer to you.”

  Galinda seemed to give up. She leaned her head back on the velvet cushions of the swing and said, “Boq, you know despite myself I think you’re a little sweet. You’re a little sweet and you’re a little charming and you’re a little maddening and you’re a little habit-forming.”

  Boq held his breath.

  “But you’re little!” she concluded. “You’re a Munchkin, for god’s sake!”

  He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.

  The next day Elphaba, Galinda, Boq, and Grommetik—and of course Ama Clutch—made the six-hour trip back to Shiz with fewer than a dozen remarks among them. Avaric stayed behind to disport himself with Pfannee and Shenshen. The pestering rain took up at the outskirts of Shiz, and the august facades of Crage Hall and Briscoe Hall were nearly obliterated with mist by the time they were, at last, home.

  6

  Boq didn’t have time or inclination to remark on his romance when he saw Crope and Tibbett. The Rhino librarian, having paid scant attention to the boys or their progress all summer, had suddenly cottoned on to how little had been achieved, and was all rheumatic huffs and watchful eyes. The boys chattered little, they brushed and cleaned vellum and rubbed finfoot oil on leather bindings and polished brass clasps. Only a few days left of this tedium.

  One afternoon Boq let his eye drift down the codex he was handling. Usually he worked without attention to the subject matter of the materials, but his eye was drawn to the bright red paint applied in the illustration. It was a picture—maybe four, five hundred years old?—of a Kumbric Witch. Some monk’s visionary zeal or anxiety about magic had inspired his brush. The Witch stood on an isthmus connecting two rocky lands, and on either side of her stretched patches of cerulean blue sea, with white-lipped waves of astonishing vigor and particularity. The Witch held in her hands a beast of unrecognizable species, though it was clearly drowned, or nearly drowned. She cradled it in an arm that, without attention to actual skeletal flexibility, lovingly encircled the beast’s wet, spiky-furred back. With her other hand she was freeing a breast from her robe, offering suck to the creature. Her expression was hard to read, or had the monk’s hand smudged, or age and grime bestowed a sfumato sympathy? She was nearly motherly, with miserable child. Her look was inward, or sad, or something. But her feet didn’t match her expression, for they were planted on the narrow strand with prehensile grip, apparent even through the silver-colored shoes, whose coin-of-the-realm brilliance had first caught Boq’s eye. Furthermore, the feet were turned out at ninety-degree angles to the shins. They showed in profile as mirror images, heels clicked together and toes pointing in opposite directions, like a stance in ballet. The gown was a hazy dawn blue. He guessed by the jeweled tones of the work that the document hadn’t been opened in centuries.

  Dramatically, or teleologically, this image seemed some sort of a hybrid of the creation myths of the Animals. Here were the flood waters, whether they derived from legends of Lurline or the Unnamed God, whether they were rising or sinking. Was the Kumbric Witch interfering with or accomplishing the ordained fate of the beasts? Though in a script too crabbed and archaic for Boq to decipher, perhaps this document supported the fable of a Kumbric Witch spell that gave the Animals the gifts of speech, memory, and remorse. Perhaps it merely refuted it, but glowingly. Any way you looked at it there was the syncretism of myth, myth’s happy appetite to engorge on narrative strains. Maybe this painting was the suggestion of some alarmed monk that the Animals received their strengths through yet another sort of baptism, by nursing at the teat of the Kumbric Witch? Inducted through the milk of the Witch?

  Such analysis wasn’t his strong point. He had a hard enough time with the nutrients and common pests of barley. He should do the unthinkable and deliver this actual scroll to Doctor Dillamond. It would be valuable to know about.

  Or maybe, he thought as he hurried to meet Elphaba, the thing safely smuggled into the deep pocket of his cape and out of the Three Queens library, maybe the Witch wasn’t feeding the drenched animal, but killing it? Sacrificing it to stay the floods?

  Art was way beyond him.

  He had run into Ama Clutch in the bazaar and begged her to deliver a note to Elphaba. The good woman seemed more sympathetic than usual to him; was Galinda singing his praises in the privacy of her room?

  It was his first time to see the funny green jumping bean since arriving back in Shiz. And there she was, on time, arriving at the café as requested, in a gray ghost of a dress, with a knitted overpull fraying at the sleeves, and a man’s umbrella, big and black and lancelike when rolled up. Elphaba sat down with a graceless fromp, and examined the scroll. She looked at it more closely than she would bring herself to look at Boq. But she listened to his exegesis, and thought it feeble. “What prevents this from being the Fairy Queen Lurline?” she asked.

  “Well, the accoutrements of glamour are missing. I mean the golden nimbus of hair. The elegance. The transparent wings. The wand.”

  “Those silver shoes are pretty gaudy.” She munched on a dry biscuit.

  “It doesn’t look like a portrait of determination or—what do I mean—genesis. It looks reactive rather than proactive. That figure is at the very least confused, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve been hanging around Crope and Tibbett too long, go back to your barley,” she said, pocketing the thing. “You’re getting vague and artsy. But I’ll give it to Doctor Dillamond. I’ll tell you, he keeps making breakthroughs. This business of opposing lenses has opened up a whole new world of corpuscula
r architecture. He let me look once, but I couldn’t make out much except for stress and bias, color and pulse. He’s very excited. The problem I see now is getting him to stop—I think he’s on the verge of founding a whole new branch of knowledge, and every day’s findings provoke a hundred new questions. Clinical, theoretical, hypothetical, empirical, even ontological, I guess. He’s been staying up late at night in the labs. We can see his lights on when we pull the drapes at night.”

  “Well, does he need anything more from us? I only have two days left in that library, and then school starts.”

  “I can’t get him to focus. I think he’s just putting together what he’s got.”

  “How about Galinda, then,” he said, “if we’re done with academic espionage for the time being? How is she? Does she ask for me?”

  Elphaba allowed herself to look at Boq. “No. Galinda really hasn’t said anything about you. To give you hope you don’t deserve, I should add she’s hardly said anything to me at all, either. She’s in a heavy sulk.”

  “When will I see her again?”

  “Does it mean that much to you?” She smiled wanly. “Boq, does she really mean that much to you?”

  “She is my world,” he answered.

  “Your world is too small if she is it.”

  “You can’t criticize the size of a world. I can’t help it and I can’t stop it and I can’t deny it.”

  “I should say you look silly,” she said, draining the last drops of lukewarm tea from her cup. “I should say you’ll look back on this summer and cringe. She may be lovely, Boq—no, she is lovely, I agree—but you’re worth a dozen of her.” At his shocked expression she threw up her hands. “Not to me! I don’t mean me! Please, that stricken look! Spare me!”

  But he wasn’t sure if he believed her. She gathered her things in a hurry and rushed out, knocking the spitoon over in a clatter, slicing her big umbrella right through someone’s newspaper. She didn’t look both ways as she lunged across Railway Square and was nearly mowed down by an old Ox on a cumbersome tricycle.

  7

  The next time Boq saw Elphaba and Galinda, all thoughts of romance fled. It was in the small triangular park outside the gate of Crage Hall. He had been just happening by, once again, this time with Avaric in tow. The gates had opened and Ama Vimp had come flouncing out, face white and nose dripping, and a flurry of girls poured out after her. Among them were Elphaba and Galinda and Shenshen and Pfannee and Milla. Free of their walls, the girls huddled in chattering circles, or stood beneath the trees in shock, or hugged each other, and wailed, and wiped each other’s eyes.

  Boq and Avaric hurried up to their friends. Elphaba had her shoulders high, like a cat’s bony yoke, and hers was the only dry face. She stayed arm’s length away from Galinda and the others. Boq longed to take Galinda in his arms, but she didn’t look at him more than once before diving her face into Milla’s teck-fur collar.

  “What is it? What has happened?” said Avaric. “Miss Shenshen, Miss Pfannee?”

  “It’s too horrible,” they cried, and Galinda nodded, and her nose ran messily along the shoulder seam of Milla’s blouse. “The police are there, and a doctor, but it seems to be—”

  “What,” said Boq, and turned to Elphaba. “Elphie what is it, what?”

  “They found out,” she said. Her eyes were glazed like old Shizian porcelain. “Somehow the bastards found out.”

  The gate creaked open again, and petals of early autumn vineflowers, blue and purple, came dancing over the college wall. They hung, and stepped like butterflies, and fell slowly, as three caped policemen and a doctor in a dark cap emerged carrying a stretcher. A red blanket had covered the patient, but the wind that tossed the petals caught a corner of the blanket and pulled it back in a triangular fold. The girls all shrieked and Ama Vimp ran forward to tuck the blanket down, but in the sunlight all had looked down and seen the twisted shoulders and back-thrown head of Doctor Dillamond. His throat was still knotted with congealed ropes of black blood, where it had been slit as thoroughly as if he had wandered into an abattoir.

  Boq sat down, disgusted and alarmed, hoping he had not seen death, just a horrible treatable wound. But the police and doctor weren’t hurrying, there was no reason to hurry now. Boq fell back against the wall, and Avaric, who had never seen the Goat before, held Boq’s hands tightly with one hand and covered his own face with the other.

  Before long Galinda and Elphaba sank down beside him, and there was some weeping, some long weeping, before words could be spoken. At last Galinda told the story.

  “We went to bed last night—and Ama Clutch got up to pull the drapes closed. As she does. And she looks down and says almost to herself, ‘Well there’s the lights on, Doctor Goat is at it again.’ Then she peers a little closer, down the yard, and says, ‘Well now isn’t that funny?’ And I don’t pay any attention, I’m just sitting there staring, but Elphaba says, ‘What’s funny, Ama Clutch?’ And Ama Clutch just pulls the drape very tightly and says in a funny voice, ‘Oh, nothing, my ducks. I’ll just step down to check and make sure everything’s all right. As long as you girls are abed.’ She says good night and she leaves, and I don’t know if she goes down there or what, but we both fall asleep and in the morning she isn’t there with the tea. She always gets the tea! She always does!”

  Galinda gave herself to tears, sinking and then raising herself to her knees and trying to tear her black silk gown with the white epaulets and the white bobbing. Elphaba, dry-eyed as a desert stone, continued.

  “We waited until after breakfast, but then we went to Madame Morrible’s,” said Elphaba, “and told her that we didn’t know where Ama Clutch was. And Madame Morrible said that Ama Clutch had had a relapse during the night and was recovering in the infirmary. She wouldn’t let us in to see her at first, but then when Doctor Dillamond didn’t show up for our first lecture of the semester, we wandered over there and just pushed our way in. Ama Clutch was in a hospital bed. Her face looked funny, like the last pancake of the batch, the way it goes all wrong. We said, ‘Ama Clutch, Ama Clutch, what has happened to you?’ She didn’t say anything even though her eyes were open. She didn’t seem to hear us. We thought maybe she was asleep or in shock, but her breathing was regular and her color was good even though her face seemed awry. Then as we were leaving she turned and she looked at the bedside table.

  “Next to a medicine bottle and a cup of lemon water there was a long rusty nail on a silver tray. She reached a shaky hand out to the nail and picked it up and held it in her palm, tenderly, and she talked to it. She said something like, ‘Oh well then, I know you didn’t mean to stab my foot last year. You were only trying to get my attention. That’s what misbehavior is all about, just a little extra loving being asked for. Well, don’t you worry Nail, because I’m going to love you just as much as you need. And after I have a little nap you can tell me how you came to be holding up the platform of the railway station at Frottica, for it seems quite a leap from your early years as a common hook for a CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign in that dingy hotel you were talking about.”’

  But Boq could not listen to this blather. He could not take in the story of a live Nail while a dead Goat was being prayed over by hysterical faculty members. Boq could not listen to the sounds of the prayers for the repose of the Animal’s spirit. He could not watch the departure of the corpse, when they trundled it away. For it had been clear, with a glimpse of the Goat’s still face, that whatever had given the doctor his enlivening character had already disappeared.

  The Charmed Circle

  I

  There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who had seen the corpse that the word, the correct word, was murder. The way the pelt about the neck had bunched up, caked together like an improperly cleaned worker’s paintbrush; the raw amber hollow in the eye. The official story was that the doctor had broken a magnifying lens and stumbled against it, cutting an artery in the process—but nobody believed it.

  The only one they could th
ink of to ask, Ama Clutch, merely smiled when they came to visit, with handfuls of pretty yellowing leaves or a plate of late Pertha grapes. She devoured the grapes and chatted with the leaves. It was an ailment no one had ever seen before.

  Glinda—for out of some belated apology for her initial rudeness to the martyred Goat, she now called herself as he had once called her—Glinda seemed to be stricken dumb before the fact of Ama Clutch. Glinda wouldn’t visit, nor discuss the poor woman’s condition, so Elphaba sneaked in once or twice a day. Boq assumed that Ama Clutch suffered a passing malady. But after three weeks Madame Morrible began to make sounds of concern that Elphaba and Glinda—still roomies—had no chaperone. She suggested the common dormitory for them both. Glinda, who would no longer go to see Madame Morrible on her own, nodded and accepted the demotion. It was Elphaba who came up with a solution, mostly to salvage some shred of Glinda’s dignity.

  Thus it was that ten days later Boq found himself in the beer garden of the Cock and Pumpkins, waiting for the midweek coach from the Emerald City. Madame Morrible didn’t allow Elphaba and Glinda to join him, so he had to decide for himself which two of the seven passengers alighting were Nanny and Nessarose. The deformities of Elphaba’s sister were well concealed, Elphaba had warned him; Nessarose could even descend from a carriage with grace, providing the step was secure and the ground flat.

  He met them, said hello. Nanny was a stewed plum of a woman, red and loose, her old skin looking ready to trail off but for the tucks at the corners of the mouth, the fleshy rivets by the edges of the eyes. More than a score of years in the badlands of Quadling Country had made her lethargic, careless, and saturated with resentment. At her age she ought to have been allowed to nod off in some warm chimney nook. “Good to see a little Munchkinlander,” she murmured to Boq. “It’s like the old times.” Then she turned and said into the shadows, “Come, my poppet.”