D"On the day that I melt that godforsaken grin from your nightmare face I will finally find peace" she told herself as she trudged through snow that was nearly at her knees and still falling.
"Gods above and below how I hate this frigid hellhole" she said through chattering teeth.
"Excuse me, mistress, but what is troubling you this day?" a tiny voice squeaked at her side.
"That you have to ask is enough to make me wish that you had died that day. The day he burned Haven to the ground." she spat at him.
"Oh...I..." he mumbled.
"Just keep walking" she replied. Her voice as cold as the world around them.
Her name was Dorothy and she hated this world. She hated everything about it. She hated that she was summoned here and she hated how her story had made her famous. She was not a hero. She never killed that witch. She hit her head and dreamed the whole bloody thing. She knows this because it's what the doctors had told her for years. She drove her father to the bottle at first with her stories and her mother far, far away. After she returned from her magical adventure life was never good enough for her. She needed the talking lions, flying monkeys and magical little people in her life again. She refused to listen to her friends or family. She wrote everything that she could remember down and sent her story to every magazine and newspaper she could. No one believed her. Why would they?
Depression set in first...then the Delusions began.
She wanted nothing more than to go back to that world and the friends that she had made. She decided to take herself there.
She tried pills the first time but didn't take enough. She was horribly ill when they found her but still alive.
After the bathtub incident she moved onto ropes in the barn. Her mother left somewhere in between and her father just seemed to become a ghost of himself. He withdrew into his room and wouldn't come out until he needed more whiskey or cigarettes.
Her aunt had come to live with them after her mother left. She cared enough to not let her finish the job but beyond that she was just interested in her father and his money.
It was her idea to send Dorothy to the doctors. The doctors with the needles and the tables that shocked you. The doctors and the pills that made you see strange things like cats that sang songs in German and would walk through walls. She had made a friend at the hospital that introduced her to the cat. Her name was Alice.
Alice was...unbalanced.
She had stories too. Her story was much less pleasant than Dorothy's. She talked of strange creatures and an evil queen. About a Mad Man and the beheading of those that didn't tow the line
She wanted to go back there too but not for her friends.
She wanted to burn it to the ground. Dorothy promised that she would take her there.
She checked herself into this place in hopes that she would find some way to get back there. Find someone else that had been there too perhaps. Someone that could show her the way.
Dorothy seemed like the answer to her question. She had gone to another world as well after all. It was no coincidence that they ended up in this hospital together.
After ten years of intense therapy and other...physical experimentation's they were released from the hospital. They were cured.
Actually, the state was running out of money and decided that the Asylum would make a better shopping mall than sanitarium.
Dorothy's father passed away while she was in treatment and left everything to her aunt. No family and no money, all she had was her friend Alice.
Alice lived with a strange old man. He was a hundred years old if he was a day. Alice called him Sir. She suggested that Dorothy not address him at all.
They spent their days in his rather extensive library, looking for anything that would help them get where they wanted to go.
They pursued any idea that sounded promising, from the white magic to the green to the black. Sadly, nothing ever worked.
They began to think that maybe they were both crazy after all. Maybe the hospital was the best place for them. Maybe they should find another one and just waste away in a padded room until they were dust.
The answer that they were looking for came several days later.
A knock on a door. A door in the middle of the floor. A door that neither of them knew was there.
He knew it was there. He made it. He could change things. Make things exist where they weren't before. Make things...strange.
He knew Alice from long ago. Time passed differently between worlds and things were not going well. There had been a shift of power in the Wishing Well. A great power was deposed and absorbed into another being. A being once jolly and loved by millions had become as cold as his namesake over the centuries. He tired of the stories and the laughter. He decided that he was going to run the show from now on.
His name was Frosty. Now he was called King Snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment