02: Silent Hill
So, I went to Silent Hill.
I know what you're thinking. And, I don't even really think it's wrong or unfair. The sun rises in the east, the same side of the moon always faces the earth, and dead people can't write letters. I deserve some credit, though. It's not as though I was ignorant of all the rational possibilities at work. In fact, I seem to remember examining each of them, in sequence, as I drove up the interstate, crossing over from Massachusetts into New Hampshire with the noon sun high in the sky but obscured by clouds. I knew Mary's handwriting as well as I knew the features of her face. It was too good to be a forgery. And, even if it were that, even if some skilled miscreant decided to write this letter in a near-perfect imitation of Mary's script, why bother? What would be the point? The gain? Could someone simply be playing the world's most tasteless joke, hoping for a few yuks at my expense? Possible, I thought, but not likely. Such a cause demanded a motive, but I could think of no one who would pull that kind of stunt, nor any reason which might drive them.
So, yeah, here I was, discovering that it sometimes isn't very difficult to think rationally even as you're acting irrationally. The letter said she was in Silent Hill, and even though I understood that this was, well, irrational, I decided I had to find out for myself. Sometimes, despair can do wonders for your breadth of logic, and there's no word that more succinctly summed up my life. I despaired. My life was in a free-fall. My wife was dead, and the last three years eroded my spirit like teeth dropped into an acid bath. I had precious few tethers holding me down, and while this letter was the strong wind gust that broke them, something else probably would have done it sooner or later. Could have been the drinking, certainly. Or, the ever-growing feeling of lethargy and despondence that was coming to rule my life. The Colt pistol sitting in the shoebox could have eventually played a role, too. Either way, all moot. The damage was done. The letter, now in my pocket, existed in defiance of rationality. It was an impossible communication from an impossible person. This I understood. A million years ago, in a normal life, that would have been enough for me. I'd have needed thirty seconds to make that determination and write it off as a bad joke. It would have troubled me no more than would some stupid kid making a crank call. Right now, however, normal life never seemed so far away.
The bright sunlight that had seared me into consciousness this morning was gone by the time I saw the "The Way Life Should Be" sign herald my passing into Maine. That was fine. I'd dulled my headache, but it wasn't dead. I could feel it just behind the ridge of bone, anxious to break free and resume this morning's operations. The sky had grown a thin sheet of cover like tissue paper in a shirt box, growing thicker as I went further north. I seemed to have the road to myself, and that was totally okay. It was a Saturday in May, and the tourist season would just now be ramping up in Vacationland. For Silent Hill, and maybe three hundred other tiny little places in the west of the state, May was the beginning of harvest season. I should be floating in a steady stream of New Yorkers and fellow Massholes all the way to Silent Hill, most of them wanting a chance to wrestle with the salmon and brook trout at the lake. I had wanted to try my hand at the trout myself, but Mary and I only visited once, and we hadn't the time to spare for an all-day fishing excursion—even if Mary hadn't been flatly unwelcoming of the idea.
By now, you're probably wondering why I would decide to suspend disbelief and follow the letter's instructions. I explained most of it a while ago, I think. The easy answer would be that I missed my wife so badly that logic was no obstacle, and that would be some of the answer. Important, but also incomplete. As fucked-up as my life was, I'm not sure that would have sent me on my journey by itself. It wasn't that she said she waited for me as much as where she said she'd be waiting. It was those two magic words in that crazy gibberish that decided everything.
Silent Hill.
As I mentioned, Mary and I spent some time there. She'd heard about the place, either from some friend or maybe one of her brothers. That I can't remember. What I do remember is her showing me the travel brochure, her eyes bright and shining. She had neatly sandbagged me with her proposal, the way a parent does when their kid gets clever near Christmastime and manages to elicit a promise for some expensive toy. It's not that I was against the idea of a week in western Maine, don't get that idea. I would much prefer a sleepy little town's tourism as opposed to the crowds and noise of a place like Bar Harbor or Portsmouth in the summertime, packing the beaches like cans on a supermarket shelf. Silent Hill was just fine, as far as I was concerned. For Mary, 'just fine' didn't even scratch the surface, and this was apparent to me even as she held the brochure in front of my face. And, I have to say, it was a wonderful week we spent there. This was in July, the sun hot and the skies clear, Toluca Lake shimmering like a rippled sapphire outside of our hotel window. I had a great time, no question. We went everywhere together, seeing not just the lakefront attractions but also the interior of the town, the places in which the locals lived and worked even when all the summer folk had gone back south to one of the states they all disliked and mistrusted. Mary treated the whole thing as some kind of religious experience, the look of wonder on her features would not have been out of place on those of a lifelong devout visiting sites in Jerusalem or Rome. I liked the town, but for her, it was something more. Something, perhaps, like awed love.
"You know what I heard?" she asked me on the last day. We had almost everything packed away and ready to go, everything but the camcorder. I didn't want to leave with the last twenty minutes unused on the tape, so I played with it, taking in the last bits of our little paradise and committing them to the memory of the VHS cassette. Mary gazed out the window at the lake, her back to me.
"No. What?" I asked.
"I heard that this whole town used to be a sacred place." She looked at me then, and her arms spread out in an encompassing gesture. After a moment, she turned back to the lake, a gem seeming alive with sparks in the morning sunshine. Her body relaxed, and the sigh I heard was unmistakably that of infatuation. "I think I can see why."
She was on her feet then, facing me once more. Relaxation vanished, replaced by a look of almost heartbreaking need. "James, I want to come back here. I want you to take me here again."
"Sure, okay," I said, trying not to laugh at how serious she was being.
"Promise me."
"I promise."
I did not keep it.
The author of my letter knew about that promise, and my failure to deliver upon it. It sure as hell wasn't a prank, and that was the proof. No one else knew about that, and certainly no one else saw the look on her face when she asked. It was something only Mary could know.
But, Mary was dead, and dead people can't write letters. This, I knew. I trucked nothing with ghosts and spirits. I was, for the most part, a man secure in his rational view of the world. Crazy, stupendous shit happened all the time, but enough careful examination would always reveal some combination of mundane circumstances at work. Yet, the letter denied all of that. The letter repealed such notions entirely. Its very existence was beyond explanation, perhaps a kind of proof in and of itself that everything I knew was wrong. Plus, well, I wanted to believe it. Sometimes things work just because you think they do. That's why we hit the TV when it's on the fritz and knock on wood when we speak of possible disaster. Sometimes it's just like that. I was going to Silent Hill this morning because I got this letter and I wanted it to be true. Because, if Mary Sunderland were a ghost, if she would haunt anyplace in the entire universe, Silent Hill would be that place. I went because I had no other tethers to my old life, and I wanted so desperately to preserve this one that I would go there to save it, if I could.
So, I went.
I spent most of the drive in a kind of daze, paying very little attention to anything. Our ability to drive a car exists almost entirely on some lower level. Even under normal circumstances, we react unconsciously to curves in the road, to traffic lights and traffic patterns, leaving us capable of holding conversations, or, if alone, doing some heavy thinking. Here I was, on the interstate, going north. Eventually, I got off and was following a smaller state road west, but my mind was miles ahead and years behind, thinking about my wife and the time we'd spent in Silent Hill, trying to recall the experience as best I could. Until this morning, Silent Hill hadn't been anywhere near my thoughts for years, and as such, what I got was more of an overall picture of those six days, those six wonderful days right before we went over the cliff together. I was awash in the sensations, wrapped in the emotional residue, trying hard to hold on to each pleasant moment because as soon as it departed, as soon as it met the tainted air of the present, such moments soured and curdled. Few concrete memories came from this, only a handful of actual events manifesting at all, and none of them formed into continuity, but I could still sense the skim of them. Bring back those shades of good times when the good times are gone, and it's like taking a big gulp of icy slime. I thought that, as I got closer, some of these things would become solid, but by the time I'd reached the eastern skirts, all I had left was a series of events, a simple timeline such as that you'd see in a newspaper, with only bits of info someone else considered important.
I didn't have a watch or dashboard clock, but I guessed that it was around two in the afternoon when I saw the Historic State Route sign, the first landmark that I recognized. Just past it, a sign telling me that I was only four miles from Silent Hill, and fourteen from a place called Brahms. Coming upon this first whisper of familiarity hit me like a quirt. I'd been in something like a trance ever since leaving the house this morning, and just like that, it was gone. Was it really two o'clock after all? Getting from Ashfield to the lake had taken us about five hours last time, and I'd left just after eight, but could that much time have really passed? It didn't feel right, and suddenly, it seemed important that I know.
I'd turned off the radio as soon as I left the driveway back in Ashfield. Deep Purple had been there to say hello when I keyed the ignition, and I was in no mood for Deep Purple or anyone else. It all sounded loud and jagged and confusing, an assault on the senses, and so I decided to drive to the sounds of the engine and my own thoughts. Now I clicked the knob. Had I been home, I'd have gotten the rock station out of Boston, but out here in the woods, 100.7 FM sounded like an inner tube suffering from a slow leak. I dialed across the band, and frowned. This far out, you couldn't expect much on FM, but usually, one or two signals from Portland or Augusta would make it this far. The dial needle went back and forth, but returned only white noise. I switched to AM, not expecting much, but still hopeful that there was some low-power talk station sending a feed. This time, I managed to pick up two stations. One of them seemed to be playing a long ad of some kind. A mile passed before I decided it was some kind of radio infomercial and gave it up as a bad deal. The other, tinny and choked with static, gave rise to a soft, plaintive moaning. A harsh counterpoint ran against this. A man, shouting. His words were loud but almost entirely lost to the poor signal. Even still, it wasn't anger in this man's voice. The tone of it rose and fell, like a conductor's baton. I guessed that it was a church service, and a guess it would probably remain. Even if they had a mind to pause for station identification and a time stamp, it wouldn't make it through the garble any more than did the preacher man's.
I snapped the radio off just as Historic Route 26 became Nathan Avenue. I knew from a map I had that Nathan snaked for about two miles along the south shore of Toluca Lake, and the South Vale district of town. At the western tip of the lake, you could choose to go north toward the other side of town, or continue west, where Nathan reverted to HR26 and would eventually lead you into New Hampshire, its White Mountains and its old mill towns. The sentinel forms of spruce and pine stood tall over either side of the road, a road that I'd had to myself ever since passing a place called Pleasant River about ten miles back. The evergreens loomed a mile over my car, seeming to touch the heavens themselves, beyond my ability to see. Who is this, they seemed to say. Who is this man to travel my paths and tread upon my soil?
The day had closed in around me, advancing toward me from all directions with imperceptible slowness. It was as if I were now driving through a small bubble of reality trapped within something larger, something I could not see. Sweat trickled from my brow, coming to a bead at the end of my nose. Why? What was this?
The heater. I didn't remember even thinking about touching it, but touch it I apparently had, because there it was, filling the car with dry dragon's breath, its ceaseless exhale a dull roar in the quiet. I turned the dial and it died with a sigh. No sound now but the soft hum of the engine. I didn't hear my heart beating, but the ol' girl was going at it with enough that I could almost hear it, pounding through my capillaries. I could almost imagine my ear drums bulging with the pressure.
"Christ!" I said aloud. I placed my right hand on my chest. Beneath a mantle of flesh and bone, my heart hammered. I pressed against that spot, as if trying to calm myself by touch. It must have done some of the trick, because the pause between beats grew noticeably spaced. My pulse still came hard, but at least it didn't resemble an engine being revved by some stupid teenager. And, even though the heater was off, sweat continued to bead on my nose and forehead. Was this some kind of panic attack? I almost thought it was, and with reason; the attendant physical symptoms were there, anyway, but it lacked the most vital element. I felt no panic. My body may have fired the afterburners, but my mind wasn't playing along. I felt… not a lot of anything, really. I've heard it phrased as "running on instruments", and that summed it up pretty well. My body put on a show giving an inside view of a man who's sweating out his first armed robbery attempt, but it was all on the outside. Inside, I was floating.
It was so bad that by the time I'd even noticed the fog, I did so only because I saw the barricade long after I should have. The sawhorses came first, connected by a slack cord of yellow tape. Behind it, an underpass of some kind, cordoned off by boards and chain link fencing. The brakes cried out as I plunged down on the pedal. There was no screech of tires on pavement, but a strained hiss issued forth from beneath my feet, as if the scream were only barely contained. I sunk into the old plush of my seat, and was instantly bounced forward, as if I'd fallen onto it from ten feet above. My chest thudded, the responsible organ knocking around in a frenzy, as if wanting to get out and away, but this wasn't because of my sudden stop. Christ, but I felt dreadful.
I backed the car away from the barricade, watching as the milky mist reached out and tried to swallow it. Had I backed up another hundred feet, it may have succeeded. Instead, I turned into a row of parking spaces. There had been a sign informing me of an upcoming scenic turnout, and that's where I now found myself. I killed the engine and opened the door.
Mere minutes ago, I had been sweating under the fury of my heater, cranked all the way to high. I could not remember turning it on and no reason for doing so had occurred to me. When I stepped out of the car, I got my answer. Somewhere along the line, the temperature had taken a big dip south on the thermometer. It had been above 70 when I left Ashfield, the skies empty of everything except the promise of a beautiful late-spring Saturday. I couldn't see any vapor trails riding my breath, but five degrees fewer, and I almost certainly would. I supposed that this explained the fog, but the chill itself defied explanations of its own. Oh, I don't suppose it was impossible at all to travel almost three hundred miles and find it thirty degrees cooler than when and where you left. And, yes, this part of the world was, at times, unlucky enough to be hit with March morning air on a May afternoon. Yet, it felt wrong, somehow. I couldn't really explain why, not then, but I did grab my jacket from the back seat. It had been there, unused, for about a month, and it may well have stayed there until September rolled along and pushed away the summer. Smelled a bit musty, but that was no big deal.
A small, ugly little shack stood off to the side. No signs were posted to tell of its function, but it only took a little detective work to find the entrance. It was open, with no door, and I went inside, stepping into a room choked with darkness and stink. The inside wall had been used as a sort of advertising board, still displaying tattered shouters for what looked to be a gentleman's club, plus a few others aged to the point of illegibility. The stench tipped me off to this place being a restroom, and it was a true work of art. If my eyes and nose were anything to go by, this baby was severely past due for a cleaning. By about three decades, was my guess. Graffiti marked the pitted walls so completely, it might almost classify as a montage, and the floor was even worse. It looked as if someone had taken a dump years ago, left it unflushed, and it took to growing like a fungus. All of this conspired to leave a fragrance unlike any I'd ever sampled before, and hoped never to sample again, but it wasn't acute. I didn't like it, but six hours on the road did leave me with a full set of kidneys. I chose the closest urinal and did my business. Nothing happened when I pushed the flush lever.
The sinks were dry, too. Lucky day for germs, I supposed. The mirror over the middle sink sported an oily stain, but it was clear enough otherwise. I almost didn't even recognize the face looking back at me. Dark circles ringed the skin on either side of the bridge of his nose. The eyes were shot through with tiny red stripes. Dirty blond hair went this way and that in thick, greasy strips in defiance of my attempt to shower them away. I'd had more than a bit to drink last night, and thus, I had dealt with a hangover this morning, but I saw a man in the mirror whose morning-after suffering had not yet climaxed. The man in the mirror was a veteran of hangovers, I'll admit, and by the look of him, last night's bender was a thing of legend. I made a half-assed stab at fixing my hair, and watched as the man in the mirror ran his inverted right hand down his weary face. It paused for a moment when it covered my eyes, perhaps out of hope that, when it moved, it would take away that pitiful image as it went. When it did move, the man in the mirror was plainly disappointed.
Outside, the chill seemed to have deepened. I found myself near a short retaining wall guarding the edge of a very steep incline. On a clear day, you could see all the way across the lake, to what the locals call the Old Town. As it was, I could just barely make out a series of undulating silhouettes, the presumably silent hills which inspired the town's founders. The fog wasn't so bad up here, but the town sat in a bowl, and my scenic cliff formed a part of its edge. Looking down, I could see no more than thirty feet. Tall, weepy trees poked through, their boles lost to me. I thought that this would be close enough to actually standing on a cloud.
In my restless dreams, I see that town, Silent Hill. You promised you would take me there again someday, but you never did. Well, I'm alone there now, in our special place. Waiting for you.
I had the letter in my hand, and I re-read it. I don't think I was trying to get any hint out of it, and I sure as hell wasn't trying to make sense of it. The letter was real, and it was in my hand. I came here because the letter made it clear that my presence was requested. Well, I was here, and Mary wasn't here to greet my arrival. I hadn't really expected that she would. Did I?
Of course I didn't.
Of course. No one else was here to greet me, either. So, now what? This whole town was our special place, but that was far too broad. Where should I go? Which part of our special place was more than special? I tried to think. Thinking still didn't come easy, and I had to retrieve the tourist map from the car. It focused mostly on the south shore, a business/residential area called South Vale. On our visit, Mary and I had been through here, but still… Only two locations made themselves immediately apparent to me. One was the Silent Hill Historical Society, which we'd visited on our second day. This was my idea, but I found the place something less than exciting. The most I got out of the experience was the surprise of Mary showing more interest in the place than I did. I had never known my wife to care anything for matters historical, but she was in rare form that day, driving the curator half-crazy with questions, driving me half-crazy for that matter. It wasn't that Silent Hill's history was dull. To be honest, there seemed to be quite a story behind the town's tourist-trap veneer. There just didn't really seem to be much of an effort made by the Society to tell this story. Worse, most of the building was closed off for renovations. The main attraction was the remains of the old prison, closed in the late 1950's, and none of it was accessible while we were there. A nice place, overall, but I couldn't really think of it as a special place. I couldn't envision that being where she awaited me.
The other place was Rosewater Park, about a half-mile east of the Society. At once, I knew I had a winner. Our visit to the museum was something of a lark, a place to have a little fun and possibly learn something. At the park, we entertained no such pretensions. It was small and secluded, and even in the peak of a July afternoon we were not forced to share the spot with but a few others. We explored its lush interiors hung high with manicured hedges ten feet high and ivy-strewn walkways that gave the park the appearance of palace rooms without a ceiling. There were two neat little gazebos, neither occupied at the time. Passing the first, Mary gave me a soft elbow and remarked, in a straight, even voice, that perhaps we could have a quick romp. "If you can get up and over in five minutes," was how she put it, and I couldn't help myself. I cackled with laughter, blindsided.
It was on the lakeside pier where we ended up. This was far enough into the day that the sun had begun to creep off to the west, turning the lake's surface into rippling, liquid fire. That's where we waited out the day. We ate hot dogs purchased from a cart vendor, we took turns gazing across the lake through a set of binoculars mounted on a short pole, and eventually, we just sat on one of the benches, hand in hand, watching as the trees lost definition and became silhouettes against a sky that went from yellow to rusty orange to purple.
I imagined that, if I could recall things that well, and the recollection wrought in me such a wicked twist of longing, that I had my destination. Rosewater Park it would be. It would be a matter of five minutes by car, but there didn't seem to be any way around the barrier. Someone had hung a series of placards spelling out the word WELLCOME! I had to wonder if that person appreciated the irony of placing a WELLCOME sign which blocked the only road access to town on this side of Toluca Lake. A sign off to the right bore the lake's name, with a finger pointing toward concrete steps. I stood at the top of these, looking down into the soupy gloom. The bottom wasn't visible from up this high, and I didn't know exactly what I would be getting into, but the map seemed to offer a squiggly outline which presumably indicated a natural trail of some kind. It was a trail which canted to the west and spilled out into town. Assuming there were no blockages down that way, it seemed like a way to go. I could walk to the park. I could see if it was the special place. I could also turn right around, right now, and get back in my car. The rational part of my mind screamed at me to do just that, screamed with the intensity of a child who knows he is being ignored and has had it up to here with the silent treatment.
I deserve at least the credit of understanding how crazy it was to walk down those stairs, though this understanding arrived only after I started to do so. After all, I always reserved the right to turn back if things didn't work out as I anticipated.