Alice & Dorothy (40 page)

And now Dr Weller was the golden child. He had exactly what everyone in Hollywood and on CNN wanted to get their hands on; a pair of fat folders highlighting Alice and Dorothy’s lives up to that point, and unique perspective on what would drive Alice into a shooting rampage that ended with her killing herself while half the state troopers in the state were out looking for her.

“People are sympathetic to female serial killers,” one guy had said over the phone. “Ever since Charlize Theron made us fall in love with Wournos, we’ve been just waiting to get our hands on another Femme Fatale. Was Alice Pleasance ever raped as a child? That would garner sympathy with female audiences. We want to show the world how male dominated society drove this poor girl into the ultimate corner. Tastefully of course. We don’t want any lawsuits…”

Dr Weller had never wanted to hit someone so much in his entire life. He settled for a big
FUCK YOU
and slammed the phone down.

Of course, Hollywood would eventually get their story, no matter if Dr Weller was along for the ride or not. Eventually someone would write a script and use artistic license to fill in whatever gaps Dr Weller was so unfairly withholding from the general public. Then they could do whatever they wanted with those girls, and victim’s rights groups would whine and cry about how Hollywood was glamorizing violence, and maybe someday a disturbed child would kill her classmates and tell the world Alice & Dorothy: The Movie made her do it. Then the shit would start all over again.
Is this Dr Weller? Could we borrow a moment of your time? We’re just wondering what you thought of this latest shooting spree inspired by a girl who was once in your care...

Maybe that was the truth of it then. The girls were in his care, and he’d failed them both miserably. He’d made huge miscalculations about the stability of Dorothy’s mind and her resourcefulness. He’d also underestimated how much damage Alice had done to herself and her mental state, and how she could feed off Dorothy’s delusions the way schizophrenics were apt to do from time to time.

He was sure Alice had killed the motel manager at the Harvest Moon Motel. The girl seemed to wear her violence as a mask, while something else bent on expunging her guilt lurked underneath. Witnesses said she’d been screaming at someone called The Mad Hater during the gas station attack; it seemed to be an odd little tick of her personality that was constantly trying to confess her sins to the world; as though her guilt had been balled up and formed like putty into a small personality that Alice desperately wanted to expel. There was no telling what she was hiding, or what she might have been trying to protect from the world, but it must have been terrible.

Her drug overdose had almost certainly caused the fractures in her personality. If she’d just stuck around a little longer, Dr Weller would have been able to fix it. As it was, she probably died still hearing voices in her head. Still talking to people who weren’t really there.

Dr Weller sighed and reached for a small bottle of rye hiding in the back corner of his desk drawer. He took a quick sip and then placed the bottle in front of him on the desk. He had a lot of vacation time banked up over the past couple years. Maybe it was time to use them. Get away from it all. Maybe go up north and spend some time with his father. Or go on a road trip for a month or two. This case had ripped the heart out of him and made work bleary. It was a sure sign of burnout.

There was a knock at the door. Dr Weller looked down at the bottle on his desk but didn’t bother covering it up. A moment later, the door opened and the fat nurse stuck her head in the door.

“Dr Weller,” she said, “There’s a man from the
L.A. Informer
on the phone. He wants to know if Alice knew the guys from the gas station shootout. They were both killed trying to break into a police impound lot last night. Security guard got ‘em. Said they were after drugs.”

“Tell him to drop dead,” Dr Weller said. “And next time keep that fucking door closed until I tell you to open it. Alright?”

“You’re such a prick,” the nurse said. She pulled her head back and pulled the door closed hard enough to rattle the glass.

“You bet your sweet black ass,” Dr Weller said. He drained the rye with two sharp gulps then carefully screwed the lid back on and replaced it in the desk drawer. His pens were out of order and he fixed those. Somehow, his mother would have been pleased.

He decided he would leave, after all. He could call in a leave of absence from the road, or from home, wherever he was when he made the call. The board would understand. He was a bit of a black eye on their immaculate image now. Maybe they’d tell him to take all the time he needed off, hoping he wouldn’t come back.
We just think it would be best for everybody this way,
they’d say. Weller would only agree with them.

He grabbed up his coat and hat, and started to leave then doubled back to his filing cabinet. Thumbing through his case files he found one marked
Pleasance, Alice
, and another marked
Gale, Dorothy.
He couldn’t trust the nurses around here not to come in sniffing around at the first sight of a payoff.

No, if Hollywood wanted a story, they’d have to come up with their own version of things. They probably would, anyway.

The End.

About JW Schnarr

JW Schnarr is the evil mastermind behind Northern Frights Publishing. He currently resides in Champion, Alberta Canada with his daughter and a grumpy turtle. When not writing, editing or publishing, he can be found scheming. And watching sports.

A member of the HWA, he is the Editor of
Shadows of the Emerald City
,
War of the Worlds: Frontlines
, and
Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
Look for his collection
Things Falling Apart
out now!

JW blogs about his life at
www.jwschnarr.blogspot.com

Find JW on Facebook: http://facebook.com/jwschnarr

Shadows of the Emerald City

Oz Awaits...

19 tales by some of today’s hottest Indie writers peeling back the emerald layers of the land of Oz and revealing the pink, bloody flesh beneath. Some of the people and places you may recognize from your childhood, but you won’t believe what happens to them.

Shadows
do
fall in the Emerald City, and where they are their darkest is where you will find the true terror of Oz.

“
JW Schnarr hit it out of the park with this collection of macabre, dirty, perverse, corrupted stories. I have never paused while reading to say, “That is so f’d up!” so many times before while reading an anthology. And I meant in the nicest way possible. Though, nice is not a word to be used with this anthology—ever. 5/5"

—
Jennifer Brozek, Apex Book Company

$15.95

Visit
www.emcity1.blogspot.com
for details.

War of the Worlds: Frontlines

Looking for great Horror and Science Fiction?

GET IN LINE.

No one would have believed that in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched...

War of the Worlds: Frontlines
is an anthology inspired by the classic HG Wells novel
The War of the Worlds
. For this collection, we asked for stories that revolved around aliens and human beings in conflict. What we have put together is a collection of stories that are touching, amazing, and horrific (sometimes all at once!).

War of the Worlds: Frontlines contains 23 stories by some of the small press’s more established authors, including Edward Morris,
Anthony
,
Darrel
, and
Pushcart
finalist James S. Dorr, and
Writers of the Future
winner Brent Knowles (3rd quarter, 2009). Foreward by “King of the Zombies” Eric S. Brown!

$15.95

Visit
www.wotwfrontlines.blogspot.com
for details.

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells'

The Time Machine

Take a Trip Through Terror...

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away...

First published in 1895,
The Time Machine
by Herbert George (H.G.) Wells is a blueprint for science fiction and horror that persists to this day: underneath the science and the theories that attract a reader’s mind, there is an underlying story of a person who struggles with the question that burns in the heart of every man: what does it all mean?

Now is your chance to find out. 21 tales of time travel inspired by the grandfather of Science Fiction himself. Take a trip through terror with this exciting anthology from Northern Frights Publishing!

$15.95

Visit
www.timetravelantho.blogspot.com
for details

Things Falling Apart

A collection by JW Schnarr

An old riddle presented us with the conundrum “The lady or the tiger?” With JW Schnarr's stories, you often find the lady is the tiger – his stories are things of savage beauty, full of wild and evocative imagery that will leave you marked forever...Go ahead; pick a door, any door...

Mark Onspaugh, Flight of the Living Dead

JW Schnarr is one of the best horror writers working today. His collection
Things Falling Apart
proves it.
James Roy Daley. Best New Zombie Tales series

JW Schnarr's writing is lean and razor sharp…with occasional, hideous amounts of bloodletting

John Sunseri, The Undead: Headshot Quartet

An old lighthouse is where conjoined monsters come back from the past seeking vengeance…A young mother to be develops a very peculiar craving…A psychiatrist enlists the aid of a local priest to combat his night terrors…A young girl confesses her love for the woman she shares a cage with…A man stumbles upon the site of a UFO crash landing, only to find that the residents of the nearby town have been horribly mutated and are now roaming the streets hunting for their next meal…

$15.95

Visit
www.tfajws.blogspot.com
for details.

The Blackest Heart

by Vince Churchill

Death is just the beginning.

Descending from deep space like locusts, Yardon Wrath and his murderous band of mutants, the Plague, terrorize an isolated colony. Legendary lawman Thane Bishop is brutally beaten to death in front of his family by the inhuman psychopath he helped create. But the macabre half-man, half-machine’s sinister plans call for much more than murder.

Much more…

Now Vince Churchill’s classic space western is back in print!

One part horror, one part science fiction, one part revenge story, and one part Western, The Blackest Heart comes at you with both guns blazing from page one...

—Bram Stoker Award winner Lisa Morton,

author of
The Castle of Los Angeles

$15.95

Visit
www.theblackestheart.blogspot.com
for details
.

Big Pig

What happens when a group of friends flee a zombie infested city and run straight into the arms of hillbilly cannibals?

IT’S FEEDING TIME.

A new novel of survival horror

from the twisted mind of

JW Schnarr

Coming in 2011!

www.jwschnarr.blogspot.com