"Always crawling away like a worm. What are you doing here?"
"I can't remember. I hardly care. There are …too many memories… I forget when I come here."
"Look at me, then, and tell me just how weak you really are."
"I'm not weak."
"That woman tells you every day just how weak you are. Why don't you reiterate that to me?"
"It's not true…"
"You're so much better at lying to yourself than to that whore."
"I don't see why I should lie to her."
"She speaks nothing but lies to you."
"Does she…? I hadn't noticed."
With a heavy sigh, Walter looked up and felt small droplets of sweat trickling down his face. A salty taste crossed his lips. Everything in the world around him was scorching and painted with a dark crimson glow that could give anyone the impression of hell.
He never cared to look up at the man atop the stairs, who always conversed with him upon arrival in the torrid, nonsensical world. Together they spoke for hours, sharing thoughts and useless advice as the world beneath the stairwell lulled in and out like ocean waves.
Small, glowing red embers were rising up from the darkness. Walter reached out and snuffed one out in his palm, "I don't want to go back."
"You should. After all, it is her birthday, is it not?"
"Fuck her birthday."
The voice behind him gave a hushed laugh, "You love her so dearly."
"I love her so much I want to destroy her."
"Then do it. Kill her. End her. Bring down upon her all the pain she has brought you."
Walter shook his head and gave a tired smile, digging through one of the pockets of his weathered green jacket, "…I can't do that. …I would not be here now if it were not for her."
"You would be a god now, if it were not for her."
Walter paused, feeling his fingertips brushing along a familiar cotton and yarn object in his pockets. The smile still lingered on his face as he acknowledged the stair man's words, "Yes… I suppose anything would be godlike compared to this."
"She could be one of them, Walter."
"Twenty-one... but then everyone would suffer."
"Are you so certain?"
"Probably not… things are always kept from me."
"Just the peace you deserve. Paradise."
"I can find paradise on my own, thanks." Walter produced a small doll from his pocket, a slight smile emerging like a ray of sunlight on a gray, winter's day. A loud, almost bell-like chord was struck deep below them, in the tumbling world. As he stroked the doll's face softly he added, "It is somewhere. I have just been too frightened to leave this place…"
"There are many roads to Paradise, Walter."
"Then I am bound to stumble upon one of them."
Walter looked down past the doll, at the empty darkness beyond the foot of the stairs. He stopped stroking the doll as he realized the glowing embers had ceased, and droplets of rain began to fall. When he looked up, the iron wrought gates that formed a ceiling above him began to liquefy. He watched as they melted into raindrops and revealed a dark, cloudy sky overhead. The stairs beneath him were gone, and the tumbling, churning world in flux had vanished.
He sat on the steps outside Ashfield Gardens Apartments, holding the doll in his hand, having been forcibly returned to the world he had sought escape from. He shook his head and returned the doll to its warm place in his coat pocket and stood. The flowers he had bought—her favorite, white carnations with purple tips—had become dusted with raindrops.
It was May 13th… she was turning twenty-four, but as he climbed the stairs to apartment #204, he could only imagine the wrinkles around her eyes and the crevices at the corners of her lips. She had always looked much older than she really was—and in her teens, it fooled him (and many others) into believing she was eighteen or nineteen when she had been merely thirteen. Now, however, after years of drug abuse—meth, cocaine, speedballs, OxyContin, she was a withered shell of her former beauty.
…A wrinkled, almost shriveled stomach that had once been soft and flat, eyes that looked weary all the time, and a mouth that finally looked as disgusting as the words that came from it.
But he still loved her, he reassured himself. He was nearing apartment #204 when he began to hear all-too-familiar cries and moans from inside. The neighbors all the way down the hall had probably been dealing with the noise for a few hours, knowing her. Keys in one hand and wet flowers in the other, he paused outside the door. There were two voices within—hers and another man's.
"Fool you once shame on her, fool you forty times… well, we should all simply take a moment to pity you."
"…be quiet." Walter breathed.
"What did you honestly expect? For her to be waiting for you like a good little girl?"
"I didn't expect anything…"
"You should kill them. Both of them… that large French knife you used last night preparing dinner… you remember mulling over what it would be like to tear into her flesh. To carve away what was left of her disgusting body. Or what about that linoleum knife in the cabinet just past the bathroom? You cannot pretend the curiosity is not there."
"I wouldn't hurt her." Walter whispered, leaning his forehead against the door as the moans became louder. He squeezed his eyes shut and unconsciously clamped his fingers tight around the plastic wrapping of the bouquet. The flower stems were snapping beneath his white-knuckled grip.
His voice shivered as he repeated, speaking only into an empty, cold corridor, "I wouldn't hurt her. I love her."
"The tip of that knife would feel amazing would it not? …running smoothly over the curve of her breasts…"
Walter unlocked the door and stepped inside. The noise didn't cease—he had come in unnoticed. He set the bouquet down on the table and felt the… curiosity which the stair man had described rising up in the back of his mind. Nipping at his fingertips like a hungry little dog. His eyes were drawn to the kitchen nearby… that French knife among other cutlery were still lying out beside a cutting board. Looking ahead, he saw their silhouettes in their bedroom through a cracked door. Two tangled bodies glistening with sweat and grinding with almost desperate lust. His woman, his Cynthia was crying out another man's name he didn't care to know.
It wasn't the first time, Walter thought as he stepped into the kitchen, his amber eyes on the tantalizing blade. In fact, it hadn't even been five months into his relationship with his teenage sweetheart when he saw her from afar, down on her knees with her face down on some other boy's lap.
That was about ten years ago, maybe eleven? With a smile, Walter picked up the knife, picturing the way her skin would tear beneath it.
He set the knife down on the counter. They would have their privacy—after all, it was Cynthia's birthday. She was probably getting a far better present from Greg than Walter could have ever given her. Leaving the apartment as quietly as he came, the only reminder he had ever been there sat damp on the table; white carnations with striped purple tips.
As he descended the stairs, all that ran through his mind, despite his best efforts to erase the sounds he had just heard, was Cynthia. He was not a gullible man—he had been disillusioned with the girl he had once seen as a pure and beautiful goddess for years. But even he admitted he was a very dependant man. There were far too many things in his life that summed up to the man he was, craving the attention of that decaying woman like some love-starved child.
After all, he mused, that was probably what he really was deep down—just some desperate, love-starved little boy with low self esteem. However, the worst part of his life, he knew, was how self-aware he was. It was without effort that he recognized where his problems lie and what could be done to fix them. But that was when a bottle of Jack Daniels and a blurry, giggling balancing act on the railing o the Adler St. Bridge took his mind from the issues.
When he exited the apartment complex and made his way toward the parking lot, he cursed under his breath, realizing he had left his keys in the house.
Well, fuck me.
There was no chance in hell that he would go back. It was no big deal. He had taken the subway home from South Ashfield, and could take it right back without a problem.
South Ashfield… that sounds much better than this place.
In all honesty, anywhere but there was as appealing as an oasis to a desert wanderer. With a short walk down the street, he was down in the subway and it wasn't long before he had boarded the first train en route to the wonderful-sounding 'anywhere but here' South Ashfield.
"Why do you put up with that whore?"
"She loves me." Walter whispered into the empty train.
He was met with laughter. The laughter from one, obnoxious stair man that sounded like an audience bursting at the seams after a standup comedian told a classic joke. It made his stomach knot up in bitter, anxious rage. At that moment he was aching to acknowledge the humiliation and the degradation of the last ten years. The cherry on the top of that tall, filthy cake of dirt would be that long, heavy French knife plunged right between Cynthia's breasts.
Walter leaned against the foggy window and made an effort to push the violent thoughts from his mind. He was not a violent man, he reminded himself. The only fights he had ever been in he had lost, and Cynthia's sisters—the elder Catalina and the snot-nosed teenager Julie—were very adamant about reminding him how much of a worm he was every single day.
Ah, yes—Catalina and Julie, he mused with a bitter taste, imagining them thrown in the same shallow grave as Cynthia and being buried somewhere in the forest outside of Silent Hill. Neither of them ever enjoyed his presence. Catalina had established early on that Cynthia could "do better". Julie, however, was a far different story; a very different and uncomfortable story.
The South Ashfield Heights Station hadn't been more than twenty minutes away by train. When he stepped out into intensifying rain, he realized that walking in that rain wouldn't have been very uplifting at all. A liquor store down the street held the Jack Daniels he had promised his tired mind earlier—and the subway tracks held promise of an even greater release for his tired body. In and out, he paid, without a single word and without even a glance at the cashier's face. As he walked back to the station, he was swallowing the whiskey fast. It didn't take long for that pleasant buzz to spiral out into an almost sloshing dizziness that distorted his thoughts and movement.
"You look absolutely pathetic."
A clumsy Walter stumbled over the last few stairs and leaned against the cold, tile walls.
Where am I again?
"You were just at the bit where you intoxicate yourself and then commit a very improper suicide."
I'm sure there's a ritual for that, isn't there?
"You were such an intelligent boy. It is indeed a shame to see you go this way. Not my loss, however. In fact, I do not believe it is truly anyone's loss."
Walter scoffed at that remark, "You're n-not a very good friend, are you?"
"You and I had never even made it past acquaintances."
"That's because you're me."
"Of course. Let's say that."
Walter took a seat on a bench not too far from the Simmons St. platform, taking long, almost nauseating swigs of his drink. All he wanted was to become careless enough not to stop himself from stumbling on to the tracks and passing out. When all logic that could prevent his newest suicide attempt was erased, the liquor's job was complete. This one could not fail—there would be no way it could fail. He would be crushed painfully and ended certainly.
Nothing like that attempt almost a half a year ago, when he drunkenly opted to jump off of the Adler St. Bridge. Now it wasn't authorities or any kind Samaritan that stopped his suicide attempt—in fact, it had all gone according to plan, up until the dying part. After losing consciousness beneath the freezing river, he somehow, by such spiteful luck, awakened in a hospital with an angered Cynthia to belittle and curse at him as soon as he woke up.
Of course, she backed her rage with a tearful, "I was so worried, I was so scared for you!"
But the only thing she worried about, he thought with new distaste, was that with him gone, the rent wouldn't be paid that month, or the small debt she racked up with one of her dealers wouldn't get paid. As soon as the wrath of Cynthia had subsided, spiteful little Julie thought it would be funny to get her riled up again by mentioning, "If Walter really loved you he wouldn't be off trying to kill himself, Cynthia!"
Julie, he thought with a sense of disgust, had actually been tolerable at one point. She enjoyed his company and enjoyed talking to him—she was probably the most intelligent of the three street-walking, drug-addicted Velasquez sisters. However, a failed attempt at seducing him years ago had led to the bad blood between them. He still felt a sinking, almost nauseating feeling at the memory of her forcing her skinny, naked body on him.
"Is it truly any better than if you had stayed with Wish House?"
Walter shook his head, smiling and thinking in an intoxicated haze,
No… at least I got a few good fucks in before I died.
He stood on wobbly legs, feeling the heavy glass bottle slipping between his fingertips like it weighed a ton. A small leap down into the railway line, just a few yards ahead would lead to a very warm, welcoming sleep. It would be a wonderful and heavy sleep, he knew, one that not even the bellowing engine of the train would wake him from. Although…
Oh god…
Although…
Oh god… oh no… oh fuck…
As if acting on reflex, he felt something warm rising within his throat and dove into a nearby bathroom and forgot all about the railway line.
"…and so at the end we've got Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt huddled together in this barn full of like… knives and blades I don't know, it was some Texas Chainsaw Massacre stuff in there, and they tie themselves down to some pipe with their belts while this F5 tornado rolls over them like it's nothing."
"Oh come on… come on, that's…" replied the voice of popular rock-radio personality Rob "RJ" Jameson.
"Yeah, I know, I'm just sitting there like, 'Jurassic Park was so much better… it had Velociraptors.' Then my wife's like, 'Oh Tom, look, there's a hurricane over them!' and I'm just shaking my head like, 'What is this crap?'" Tom, "Beat Dog" Ichihara continued.
Rising static obscured their voices for a moment, and Eileen Galvin swung her hand over her sea of blankets. As if her arm were an uncontrollable force of pure bulk, she shoved the radio off of her nightstand by unintentional clumsiness. The sound of it crashing to the wooden floor startled her enough to wake.
"Well, you know, Twister wasn't all that bad. I actually liked it more than Jurassic Park. Helen Hunt was a lot hotter in Twister—" RJ was going on about that movie that had just come out a few days ago.
Beat Dog burst into laughter, "That wasn't even Helen Hunt, you idiot! That was Laura Dern!"
"What?"
"It was Laura Dern, that wasn't even Helen Hunt!"
"…Seriously? No, you're pulling my chain here…"
"Dude, let's just move on before the angry Laura Dern fans flood us with hate calls. So what do we got here, we got some new Butthole Surfers with some great new stuff from the album that just hit today. This is Pepper from Electriclarryland. You're listening to 106.5 MIRA."
Mikey got with Sharon, Sharon got Cherise
She was sharin' Sharon's outlook on the topic of disease
Mikey had a facial scar and Bobby was a racist
They were all in love dyin' they were doin' it in Texas
Tommy played piano like a kid out in the rain
Then he lost his leg in Dallas he was dancin' with the train
They were all in love with dyin' they were drinkin' from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain
Eileen bolted out of bed, crawling over her baggy tee shirt with an excited, high-pitched wail that turned into a shriek as she stumbled to the floor. Crawling to the radio, she cranked up the volume as she listened to her favorite band's new song with a wide and eager grin.
I don't mind the sun sometimes, the images it shows
I can taste you on my lips and smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies
You never know just how you look through other people's eyes