Silent Hill: Cracks in the Ice
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Chapter 1: Boo
It was 10 A.M. on the 9th of January in Hooper Lake City, northeast US. About a week after New Year's eve and two weeks after Christmas, the remains of fireworks lay in the gutter and Christmas trees still adorned a few front yards. The icy streets looked deserted except for a single 33-year-old human stubbornly meandering through the cold, intent on getting to the local bakery to buy her breakfast as she usually did on sunday mornings.
Her full name was Elizabeth Kalember, but her friends (not that she had a whole plethora of those) simply called her Beth. She lived in a cozy little apartment and worked as a shop assistant in My Bestsellers downtown. Her shoulder-length black hair made a sharp contrast to the pale face it framed.
The temperature was mercilessly biting the exposed skin of her face and hands, slowly colouring her fingers red. "I knew I should have bought those gloves they had on sale the other day," Beth thought and wandered on, knowing that the familiar warmth of the bakery was just around the corner.
However, once she had turned that corner, Beth saw something that made her forget all about the freshly baked breakfast awaiting her.
A little further down the street, on the other side of the road, a nine-year-old girl stood on the sidewalk and screamed. Although, technically, she wasn't really screaming. The street was quiet except for the sound of Beth's ragged breathing. The girl's mouth was wide open and her face was stretched into an expression of unbearable pain and terror, but she remained completely silent, glaring at Beth.
The latter carefully started walking across the slippery road. A grey fog had now settled over the area and didn't look like it would be lifting anytime soon. "Where did that come from?" Beth mused.
"Are you okay?" she asked the girl.
"Stupid question," a wise voice in her mind proclaimed, "does she look "okay" to you?"
"Are you having a seizure? Is there some medicine I can get for you?"
The girl refused to reply. She stood still and continued her silent scream. Her hair was brown and her eyes grey, her clothes a little oldfashioned and too large, but nothing unusual.
Beth had made it halfway across the road when the silence was finally broken by the low noise of a vehicle in motion. The noise quickly grew louder, and before the woman in the middle of the road could react, a yellow car burst out of the mist and roughly detached a pair of defenceless feet from the pavement.
A second later, Beth found herself lying motionless and numb with her cheek on the asphalt, snot streaming from her nostrils, blood from her mouth, eyes staring in disbelief at the cab that had hit her as it sped off into the fog. She tried to turn her head a little, to see if the screaming girl was still there, but lost consciousness in the process.
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Voices.
"Ugh, this looks bad. You think she'll make it?"
"Hurry up and get that gurney over here!"
Ambulance doors slammed shut.
"Lambert Hospital, quick."
"Get the adrenaline ready."
"How's her pulse?"
"Goddammit, get that oxygen right now!"
"It's weak, very fast …"
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When Beth woke up, the cold asphalt she had passed out on was replaced by a comfy, warm hospital bed. "So I got hit by some cab and had to go to the hospital. Great. What a way to start the new year …"
She opened her eyes, hoping to see relatives and friends visiting her, but there was no one else in the dim, dusty room. She pulled off the soft sheet and sat up in the bed, glaring slightly disappointed at the wooden table next to her. No flowers, no "get better soon" cards. "How long have I been here, anyway?"
She looked down at her patient gown: white with blue dots, falling to her knees. She briefly checked her body for scars, but it all looked normal, with the exception of some nasty bruises on the left hip.
Beth was about to lie back down and go to sleep again, when she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, a plain white sheet of paper resting on the middle of the wooden table. Didn't seem like anything was written on it. She was pretty sure it hadn't been there before, but then how could it have popped up in the splitsecond she wasn't looking? No, she had to have missed it the first time she scanned the table …
The patient swung her legs over the edge of the bed and her feet reached the grey linoleum floor. The walls and ceiling looked smooth and sterile. Two large windows in the wall behind the table gave her a view of white fog floating around outside like a huge crowd of restless, ghostly spirits. There were two doors – a wide, metallic one opposite the windows and another one, wooden and narrow, in the wall right next to the windows' wall.
Beth stepped up to the table, picked up the paper and turned it around.
BOO!
The letters and exclamation marks were all scrawled down in different colours, with a clearly childish handwriting. "Oh, I'm so scared," Beth muttered, chuckling.
That's when the wooden door to her left creaked open.
The woman flinched, her face going very pale, her fingers losing their grip on the paper. She approached the door that had opened inwards a few inches, and somehow, the terrified patient managed to stutter out a quiet "hello?"
The door replied by flying back and slamming into the wall. Beth gasped – she could have sworn that thing nearly fell off its hinges.
Hesitantly, she stepped over the threshold to contemplate the room beyond. No one there. Only one other door, metallic and located in the same wall as the metal door in Beth's room. They probably led to the hallway connecting all the patient's rooms.
In the sharp light of the ceiling's fluorescent tubes, Beth was relieved to see a black string tied to the knob of the door that had opened. The string was hanging between the knob and a bed at the back of the room. A white curtain hung around the bed, so she couldn't see who had been pulling the string, but a little girl could be heard giggling behind the curtain.
Beth smiled. "You really scared me with that door trick, kid. I thought that was a poltergeist or something ..." Beth followed the string across the room and pulled the curtain aside. There was nobody in there. The string lay curled up like some black serpent on the blood-smeared bed.
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A/N: To be continued, of course. Reviews will be held in high esteem. –E.P.O.