“I hope it’s a place where people don’t melt,” Daphne grumbled.
Sabrina took Daphne’s and Puck’s hands, and together they stepped through the door. There was a whooshing sound and Sabrina’s stomach dropped, and then they suddenly found themselves in a somber library. All the furniture was a dark cherrywood. Tightly packed books, some that looked as old as time, were displayed neatly on bookshelves soaring hundreds of feet into the air. A yellowing globe sat on a stone podium, and the head of some horrible, alien animal was mounted above a crackling fireplace. In the center of the room was a high-backed leather chair, and resting in the chair was a thin, elderly man with hair as white as freshly fallen snow. A pair of antique spectacles sat precariously on the tip of his long, pointy nose. He leafed through a book with one hand and patted the bulbous head of a strange, pink creature with the other. Sabrina recognized it as one of the scurrying creatures that attacked them on the road in Oz—the one the Tin Man had called a “reviser.” Its gnashing teeth and lack of eyes unnerved Sabrina.
“I know the fairy: Puck, Trickster, Imp, the Pooka,” the old man said as he gestured to Puck. Then he turned his tiny eyes toward the girls. “You two I do not know.”
“We’re Sabrina and Daphne Grimm,” Sabrina said.
“Did you say ‘Grimm’?”
“Yes, sir. What story is this?” Daphne asked.
Sabrina looked down at her own clothes to see if she and her sister had new outfits, but both she and Daphne were wearing their own clothing again. Even the silver slippers were gone. She looked up and saw that Dorothy’s shoes were resting on a tray. The old man placed them in the mouth of the reviser next to his chair.
“Prepare these for reinsertion into the story,” he said, and then turned his attention back to the children. “You are not in a story. You are in my library—a place few humans or Everafters have ever seen. I have been forced to bring you here to protect the sanctity of the Book you and your comrades are sullying. Running around in my pages causes quite a bit of damage.”
“You’re the Editor,” Sabrina said.
Four more of the pink creatures crawled out from beneath the old man’s chair. He treated them like pets, scratching affectionately at their grotesque heads and bellies. “The characters in the Book of Everafter are difficult enough to manage without the interference of visitors. You’ve made a complete mess out of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. You skipped over parts, you butchered the dialogue, and you changed the climax. I don’t remember the Witch begging Dorothy to kill her. My revisers will have quite a bit of work ahead of them to put things back to the way they really happened.”
The old man rose from his chair and crossed the room to the door the children had just stepped through, which was still standing open in the middle of the floor. The pink monsters followed him there, and when he knelt down they grinned and squeaked. He waved a hand as if to calm them and then spoke softly.
“I’m afraid I need more than the five of you,” he said. “I’m thinking The Wonderful Wizard of Oz needs a complete page-one rewrite. We’re going to start over with this one. No use discovering we have a problem later.”
The little pink monsters hopped forward to lick the man’s hand with their long, white tongues and then scurried back. To Sabrina’s amazement, the five divided themselves into ten, then twenty, then forty, and on and on and on. They were like bacteria in a petri dish, reproducing at an alarming rate, until there were hundreds of them. They scuttled through the open doorway with their huge, fanged mouths open wide, and then the doorway closed.
“What are they going to do?” Daphne asked.
“They are revisers, child. They are going to fix the changes you have made—which have been numerous.”
“And how do they do that?” Sabrina asked suspiciously.
“They’re going to erase everyone and everything.”
“Erase?”
“I suppose a more accurate word would be ‘eat.’ ”
“Those things are going to eat everyone we met in Oz? Because of us?” Daphne cried.
“Can I watch?” Puck said.
“That’s what a reviser does,” the Editor said. “When they are finished, I can re-craft the story so that it matches what happened at the actual event. You seem troubled, but if I were to allow the changes you made to stay in place . . . well, it would change history—real history. Dorothy might have been trapped in Oz for good. The repercussions could be unpredictable and dangerous. Luckily, I’m here to put it back the way it has always been.”