The Witch came back, skulking in a corner, appearing on a roof. Terror jerked Jonathan awake.

She called to the Scarecrow like she wanted to play a game. Then, most dreadful of all, the Witch threw a ball of fire at the Scarecrow, fire to burn him alive. Jonathan's shriek was the most piercing yet. Someone, somewhere, had decided to terrify him. That was what frightened Jonathan most: that it was deliberate. They could have made a movie without a witch at all.

He glimpsed poppies. They were about sleep and he could feel his own limbs go still and heavy. The movie turned into color and he seemed to sink down into it. He sank down and settled very gently, his feet touching solid ground and seeming to spark with life. He ran, into Oz.

He could hear his own running feet, and he could feel cobbles underfoot through the soles of his shoes. The bricks were bright yellow, so bright that it hurt his eyes.

"Wait for me!" he called. And they all turned, Judy Garland and the Scarecrow and the Lion. He caught up with them.

"Can I come too? Can I come too?" he asked them, panting. The fields were bright red, and the sky was full of a white smiling face, and it was snowing too, flowers and snow together, and there was music, grand and happy at the same time.

"Why, of course you can," said Judy Garland.

Jonathan woke up in the morning in his own bed. The room was dim and gray, shadowed by a curtain. Except that at the foot of his bed, there was a flowering of color. He woke and imagined that the Lion and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow were with him. Jonathan could feel the weight of the Scarecrow, not too heavy, against his feet.

Wake up, Jonathan! Judy Garland seemed to say. We're off to see the Wizard!

"Hurray!" cried Jonathan. He threw off his blankets and hurled himself into the cold air. "We're off to see the Wizard!" He ran into the bathroom. His new friends crowded into the bathroom with him.

Dorothy brushed her teeth too, and the Lion used dental floss on his fangs, just like Jonathan's father.

It was November and cold, though it had not yet snowed, and Jonathan ran to sit in his morning place: in front of the ventilator duct by the kitchen door where hot air blasted out. He warmed his hands and feet. The Lion held the tip of his tail near it. The Scarecrow hung back in fear of the heat.

"Don't worry," Jonathan whispered to him. "It's not fire. There's no fire."

It was Sunday, and his father was home. Normally, Jonathan and his father ate Sunday breakfast together. Afterward they would check the boiler in the basement and make sure the water around the sump pump had not frozen and killed Jonathan's fish who lived there. This morning, however, Jonathan heard his father already hammering away in the attic. Jonathan was glad. He wanted to be with the people from Oz.

His mother walked in with a bowl of porridge. "You'll have to hurry this morning, Jonathan," she said. "It's late and you've got Sunday School."

He and his mother and the people from Oz all sat at the breakfast table by the front window. The people from Oz were going to have porridge as well. Jonathan's mother sat down opposite him, smiling with love.

"You fell asleep," she said, sympathetically.

"When?" Jonathan asked.

"Before the end of your movie."

"I did not!" Jonathan had felt very adult, being allowed to stay up late. It was a sign of great childishness to have fallen asleep.

"You did," said his mother, sweetly. She was utterly charmed. He had fought so hard to stay awake.

"I saw the whole movie," he protested.

"Did you?" said his mother. "What happened at the end?"

Jonathan thought back and found he couldn't remember. This was a truly terrible thing; he was sure he had seen the film, but he found he had no memory of the Witch's castle or of the inside of the Emerald City or of Dorothy's going home.

He went very silent. He wished his mother would stop smiling. He hadn't seen it, after all. He had slept through his movie. He would never see all of the story now.

"It will be on again," said his mother.

"I did so see it," he murmured.

He watched the brown sugar melt on his porridge. He liked that. He used it to help himself forget. Then he poured on the milk to cool it. Otherwise it was too hot. The aim was to get all the porridge floating whole on the milk, so that the sugar on top was not washed away. He blew on his porridge, and the friends from Oz blew with him.

He looked up at them, appraisingly. He must have fallen asleep and pulled them into his dream from out of the movie. So when he woke up they woke up with him and were still there, and that's how they joined him. So maybe it was lucky he had slept.

After the porridge, his mother bundled him into the bathroom again and washed behind his ears, which made him squirm, and then she put him into his own gray suit, with his own red bow tie. Then she put him into his mud-colored coat and his cap with flaps that could come down over his ears. She pushed his galoshes over his feet and then sent him off to Sunday School.

There was already a Christmas wreath on the front door, though there was no snow. The house stood on high Canadian foundations, out of the mud. There was a bank of concrete steps leading down from the front door to the earth. Just in front of the steps, waiting like a trap for the unwary, was Jonathan's wagon. His father had made it out of spare bits of wood. The rubber wheels had a suspension system his father had invented out of springs, too sophisticated for Jonathan to appreciate. He only knew that his wagon ran quietly and smoothly.

Jonathan loaded his new friends onto it and then he ran with his silent wagon, ran down the slope of the small artificial hill on which the house rested. The wagon rolled smoothly over the cover of the cesspit, which his mother was always telling him to avoid. He imagined it was a gate into the underworld or an entrance to an underground house, like Peter Pan's. He ran over the cesspit to the front drive and its broad opening through the white fence that enclosed the Corndale house as if it were a ranch. He left the wagon right in the middle of the entrance where he always did, ready to be flattened.

The people of Oz walked to Sunday School with him. He hoped that he would see no one else, just them. The Second Line West became the Yellow Brick Road. The circular tin culverts under the driveways seemed full of secrets.

Jonathan carried his secret into Sunday School. He told no one that the Oz people were with him. They were his friends alone. The Oz people sang "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" to the colored slide that showed Jesus and the words. They sang "Suffer Little Children." They listened to the story of the parting of the Red Sea, and on the way home, they and Jonathan imagined that they were walking between two high magic walls of seawater, pursued by Egyptians. Within the glassy green walls there were giant fish.