Silent Hill: A Pale Reflection

by Elliot Bowers

"Fallen"

lyrics and vocal by Jem

Chapter 7

1.

One big problem with their search through town was how Heather didn't exactly know what they were looking for. All that the petite blonde knew was that there was supposed to be something in this direction. That something would be recognizable when they came to it…whatever the fork it was. There was supposed to be some way through this town--a way out. Far out, was a hippie phrase that came to mind. Not that Heather was ever a surfer or hippie, but the phrase was most certainly fitting. They were getting the Hell out of this world and into another. About other worlds, Heather wasn't sure that things could get any more far out than that, dude…

And then they found the something they were looking for. It was more obvious than what one would initially believe. "Geez... No problem finding this thing, huh?" voiced Heather aloud, putting hands on jeans-clad hips. "This big building-machine thing wasn't here last time I was. I guess it's here now though."

Both girls now stood not too far from a black-metal structure that was the general shape and size of a building, yet wasn't a building. The building-sized thing, place or whatever it was--it had outer walls made of dark-plated metal instead of bricks. There were no windows, just more squares of metal. Near the top were rounded edges that arced up to the out-of-sight rooftop. Spikes thrust upward from that rooftop as seen from the ground. The thing was the size of a corner post-office, too. Cracks radiated outward from where its black-metal outer walls met the sidewalk as if the thing swelled into existence and shoved everything else aside. No doubt the thing had forced its presence into this world, shoving aside any other building that occupied this space before.

"I'm staring at it, but I still don't know what the fork it is," added Heather. "What's this supposed to be, anyway? Looks like some psycho's nightmare idea of a post office."

"It is a rather curious structure," agreed Janice. "It is also an accursed anomaly that has no place here. The very presence bespeaks discord in what must be an ordered world. I would very much like its complete destruction…after it has served our purpose. That which disrupts must be destroyed."

Uh-oh. That gave Heather pause. The petite young lady may talk like a temperamental airhead at times, but Daddy didn't exactly raise her to be a fool. Now Janice here was talking about destroying disruption. As in, a word that was synonymous with messing up reality as understood by Janice.

Said Heather, "Wait a sec… All this time, you kept telling me that another me is responsible for messing stuff up. I'm to blame too, according to you." Heather didn't mean to rhyme that, but it happened anyway. "So you're gonna get rid of me too?"

"Do not be absurd," declared Janice. Once more was her using that tone of voice reserved for chiding children--though Janice didn't look too far out of her teens herself. "You have led the way to the means of transition and have already largely served most of your usefulness. I could very well destroy your body now and still be on the way to restoring order to my realm. Yet you remain somewhat useful. "

"Destroy me? Oh really?" asked Heather. Her right hand went a little lower on her right thigh--where her quite-tight jeans nevertheless had the barely detectible shape of her switchblade in a pocket. Heather remembered that a certain brutish creature--nuclear jackhammer and all--was no match for Janice, but it wouldn't hurt to try, would it? All the same true was how having the little weapon gave her a little thrill of kick-ass confidence.

"Yes, really," countered Janice. "You well-know that my abilities are not something to be trifled with. The same can be said of yourself should you choose to allow them free reign from within. That said, there is perhaps something of prime interest that requires your attention. An experienced bookseller such as yourself should know the worth of any book…including this one."

"What book?" asked Heather just as Janice turned to reach into the air. What happened then looked like an optical illusion. Heather saw Janice's left hand pull at something that wasn't there. Then something slowly was, pulled into view. Now Janice was holding a book with a cover of dark red leather. It was leather, but not cow or deer leather. Something about that book gave Heather the shivers. Yet the girl found herself holding her hands out to accept and hold the thing.

Never mind how holding it was starting to make her feel scared. It's just a book, thought Heather in looking down at the hard-cover thing. Goodness knows the girl had dealt with probably a few million books at work. It's just a book…that Janice pulled out of nowhere. Guess it beats how people say they pull answers out of their butts.

Why be scared of it? How was Heather scared of it? This was maybe a bit larger than the average hardcover and was maybe three hundred pages thick. Just holding and looking at a book gave her an estimate of how many pages long the thing was. Yup, that's what happens when one works at a bookstore. Not only did Heather handle books as a point of her job, the girl also read them--books being a heck of a lot cheaper than renting movies or paying a sixty-dollar cable bill every month.

Heather knew that a book was not just a book. One day, some young college dudes could read the right texts at school and suddenly get ideas on how to make weapons to blow up some cities. And maybe some day before, perhaps a day that was decades prior, some other young college dudes read some other stuff and figured out ways how to control countries enough to use those bombs. Thousands of years before that, some bearded guys in a desert put words down on paper and called it a religion. Ideas on pages bound between covers are ideas that can destroy worlds or create them. To say that a book was just a book was like saying the Earth was just some salty mudball that floated in space--populated with a few billion meat-puppet idiot-creatures that called themselves humans. So, again, is a book ever just a book? Goodness no, it isn't.

After staring slack-lipped and dumb-struck at the book, the first thing Heather did was what most people would do. That is, the girl opened it up to have a look-see.

Inside the first page was an orderly arrangement of words…except the words were not written in English or any other kind of language that the petite blonde girl had seen before. Hell, the whole darned thing wasn't written in Heather's native tongue, unless…

No, Heather actually knew the language, including the reading of it. That was especially true of it. See, this page with the orderly arrangement of words actually said "Table of Contents"--except a literal translation of the text would be "Contents, Book, Chart." It's the same, though.

And oh, what contents they were. Heather found it pretty darned difficult to believe what this book really was. Something like this wasn't supposed to exist outside of Harry Potter movies and alcohol-induced visions. Drink enough of something alcoholic and find out what's believable. A lot becomes believable, even this thing. If somebody said that holding a hippie-marked gem out in the middle of a monster-filled night would make a flying saucer come down and take one away, it would have just about as much believability as the existence of that which Heather held in her hands. (Never mind how Heather's dad once joked about doing that saucer-thing once.)

The book was real, but were its contents for real? At one point, Heather read one of the chapter headings and somehow understood what the words said. The girl then turned to a chapter about sixty pages into the text, tried reading it aloud…and found herself gagging. Her mind saw the words, but her vocal chords couldn't quite get the pronunciation.

"Bleh… Jeez! Yeah, I know better than to try that again!" complained Heather to Janice--Janice standing here expectantly and not looking surprised. Again, Janice did not look surprised. or worried about Heather's reaction. Not being surprised could only mean that Jennifer knew… "You knew what'd happen if I tried reading this aloud, huh?" Just as you knew what kind of gigantic shambling brute-thing was waiting for us in the fog.

Janice nodded. "I did, indeed. Your denial of what lies within acts as a psychological means of making yourself incapable. Medical science calls it hypochondria. It is akin to one's own misbelief rendering oneself paralyzed. In your case, it is a form of paralysis…which may be aided."

Before Heather could accept or decline Janice's offer for assistance of some kind, Janice helped anyway--first by moving behind Heather. The fingertips of Janice's left hand went to the place on Heather's midriff which was left exposed by a rather brief top, while the fingertips of her right went to the ridged length of Heather's throat. "What are you doing?" asked Heather, trying not to sound worried.

"Simply read," commanded Janice from behind Heather. The thing was, Janice's breath was chillier than what breath ought to be. One could even see puffs of cold. Something was wrong with that.

Heather nevertheless did what was told of her and began reading, beginning with the subtitle of the chapter. Then it was on to the main body of the work--which somehow thankfully had paragraphs. And after that, the girl found herself reading the entire three paragraphs. No way could her voice make the sounds they were making. And there was no way any human being with a normal physiology of the oral or tracheal sort could read that out loud and pronounce everything as correctly as it must be. Yet the girl did so anyway--though Janice stopped touching at some point.

At the end of that first three paragraphs, Heather started feeling dizzy as a kind of swirl-ridden keening filled her head. The girl had consumed alcoholic beverages before. And when one of her dad's weird writer-friends came over to smoke something that wasn't tobacco, the girl…experienced that before, too. Yet those sensations weren't close to this.

But this was not to say that it didn't feel good. It started to feel wa-a-ay good, good enough for her to want to be touched a certain way if not starting to touch herself. Now that was embarrassing. "Oh my gosh… What is this?" asked Heather, feeling hot and a little breathless. "Some kinda cosmic porn?"

"That is a rather carnal way of describing it," said Janice in walking back around to Heather's front. Janice took the book from Heather's unresisting hands and closed it. And then Janice moved to put the tome back onto a shelf--except there were no shelves around here. There was just this damned foggy sidewalk along a foggy street as far as anyone else could see. The book nevertheless had to have gone somewhere. In this case, it will have gone back to its nowhere place.

And as soon as Janice did that, something else was making its presence known. Make that another set of somethings. Heather first sensed them coming--that whole somebody-is-watching-me feeling, just knew that those things were coming this way. They were taking their sweet old time at first in coming this way too, leaving plenty of time for someone's imagination to play the worst of tricks.

2.

Okay, thought Heather. What could it possibly be this time? Let's see… This trip, I've already seen sprinting shell-backed things with tentacles for legs, a giant cyborg-monster construction creature, and some invisible monster-things with big mouths… Well I can't say I really saw the invisible creatures 'cause they're invisible and all, just seeing what they do. Still… Okay, fog. What else have you got for me?

"Erg-ach!" came a high-pitched squeal of a voice as if in response to Heather's thoughts.

"Uyo n'esm'sirk, ed'n!" Bare feet scampered from right to left. Another shout came from behind and was just about as understandable the first. "Elkrik, o'me'sirk, igana-igana!"

Just as how Heather understood the words in that book, the girl also understood what the squealing voice was saying. Those scampering, squealing jerks in the fog were condemning Heather and Janice and anything associated with them. Some of those words could considered be the alternate-reality equivalent of saying, Fork you, bitch! Fork you and the horse you rode in on! As for the rest of what else they were saying, that pissed Heather off even more.

What was nice about this situation was how Heather could do something in response. It was just so easy for her to do something now, to let the inner darkness do what was necessary. The passage from that book Janice let her read was a great reminder of that. A not-so-nice smile came to Heather's lips, her eyes hazel taking on a dark gleam.

Some properties of the air itself began to change. A person could not see or hear these properties any more than one can actually see static electricity on the surfaces of objects. Static electricity was in the air. Anyone who gets struck by lightning and survives well enough to tell about it knows the creeping feeling on one's skin as electrical potentials build up in the air.

"Oblamah!" squealed one of the things in the fog and tried to make a run for it along the foggy street. This run brought it smack into a wall of a nearby store front--one of those stores selling fine kitchenware and other homely kick-knacks. It laid there stunned on the sidewalk.

Now that the thing was lying down and not scampering around, a person could see it. This is not saying a person actually wanted to see it, ugly little asshole that it was. The thing looked like a three-hundred-year-old midget with grimy hair. It was wearing dark-stained bib overalls on its nasty little humanoid body. Three hundred years old had to be the right age, given how its corpse-gray face was as shriveled and as shrunken as that much aging would do.

Yet age would not explain how the midget-thing got a big mouth full of triangle-shaped teeth or only had three fingers on each hand, or two toes per foot. Maybe it originally had the normal five fingers and went too far in biting its own fingernails? And while at it, the thing decided to have some toe-snacks for good measure? At least the bib overalls outfit was understandable--probably worn because that nasty little bastard was on the same team as that brute with the nuclear-powered jackhammer.

Another one of those little bastards came scampering out of the fog…and then two more. Now it was an extra pair of bastards. What, there was more than one? There had to be. Somewhere, in some other bizarro alternate universe, there had to be entire countries full of 'em, if not the whole darned world itself. But when Heather was done with the ones here, there would at least be a few less. Heather used her ability …

An incredibly bright flash, followed by a shockwave-blast of sound, and one of the jerks tumble-bumbled to the long asphalt of the dark-gray street, dead before it fell. Now the little bastard was a cooked little bastard--a charred and blackened corpse in the shape of an other-worldly midget. Crispy toasted dead was a phrase that came to mind.

The other little guy maybe made it a little farther. Another surprisingly bright, and the end results were more of the same. Yes indeed, yet another carnivorous dwarf was made crispified faster than a person can say the first syllable of bacon.

Any more of the short-little bastards that wanted to cause trouble were now deciding to not make trouble. A person could hear their bare two-toed feet beating out a rapid pace out of here. As in, Let's get the heck away from here. Then they were gone before they were made goners.

Heather stood there for a moment, giving a blink of her eyes. I did that? The girl raised hands to her eyes, seeing the bright after-image of the flash, also feeling a hot dryness on her skin. Her skin... The girl thoughtthat something was wrong with it—maybe some little spots beneath the surface of her own flesh. They were gone before Heather could give them a good stare, though. Maybe it was her stunned mind making her see things?

In fact, Heather was feeling so zoned that it took some moments to realize Janice was walking circles around her. "How does it feel to finally release an aspect of your true self?" went the tall goth beauty when coming around front. "That which was once lost is not so lost, hmm?" was Janice's question from Heather's left side. Behind her, "It was hidden for all of this time…" Moving around to the right, "And now one can truly feel it." Coming around front, "Accept that which you are."

"The Hell I will," said Heather. "Soon as this is over, I'm goin' back to my apartment and gonna have a nice hot shower. Then I'm gonna have a nice tall glass of hot cocoa and a heaping helping of pancakes…before going to the bathroom and puking it up all up bulemia-style. And when I do, I hope memories of you go with it…" And Janice was still walking in circles around Heather. "Hey, quit it. You're making me feel dizzy and stuff."

That wasn't exactly right. It wasn't Janice's slow circumambulations that made Heather still feel a bit off-balance. It actually was the questions being asked. Part of it was also the aftermath of what had been done. Heather didn't really want to forget this newly returned feeling…of power. Heather had power. Now it wouldn't be so easy for her to be intimidated by Janice. Let's see you try some invisible-monster stuff with me again. Said Heather again, "I told you to quit it."

"Hatred is an emotion that strengthens you. You wish to kill me, do you not?" asked Janice. Heather said nothing, so Janice added, "You wish to be rid of me, just as a mortal meat-puppet will strike a child to silence its squealing…"

"Yeah, so what! Shut up already!" said Heather as that feeling began to build within her. It felt so strange before. Now it was suddenly as familiar as anything--like a good buddy not seen for a while. "Why can't you just…!" Why can't you just stop trying to make me angry on purpose? Heather took in a breath, trying so hard to not be one pissed-off chick. "You're trying to make me mad. It won't work."

"Oh fuddle! It won't work, you claim?" countered Janice, her bottom lip out in an exaggerated pout. Her tone of voice was so unbelievably sad that it just had to be phony. "And to think we were making progress." The phony pout went away. "Well, it was more facile and somewhat necessary while we were here. Let us be gone, then." Janice began to approach the machine-building.

Uh…yeah, thought Heather. We're gonna walk into that nasty machine-building thing. Hopefully the thing's not so full of gears and wires and stuff that we end up being killed before we can get too far into there.

Janice found something that was more shaped like a long black-metal lid instead of a door. Her pale, elegant hands found a circular red valve. But that door just wasn't there before. Something like that would have been noticeable.

Oh really? So where was it before, then? Doors just don't appear change at random, like certain machine-buildings do, like this machine-building. There was nothing left to do around here. So in they went.

And only when Heather went into the opened door and just past the threshold did this suddenly seem like the opposite of a good idea. It was…bitingly cold, almost totally dark too. Air, there was no air. Heather wasn't even able to scream, the air sucked from her lungs and through her throat, no air to carry sound. A sunset-colored blur flared past her, and Heather began to lose consciousness…wondering if this was how somebody died in a situation like this. At least dying didn't hurt this way.

Out here on the foggy street, everything was just as jolly-good as it was before. The rectangular door closed behind them with a satisfied thump--as if the machine building had just consumed a good meal of two gullible girls. Suckers… That circular valve on the door began to un-turn itself in spinning closed. Then, with a sound of creaking metal, the industrial-styled door on the side of the machine-building was gone as if it wasn't there in the first place.

That little radio was doing its thing again, sitting atop that desk in a place that barely had a glow of illumination to see by. Dark, it was so close to dark…. As to which desk it was, one could not be sure. It could be the raised desk in Heather's room proper. Or, it was the industrial desk at the accursed hospital. Maybe the radio was actually between those places, being in two places at once--appearing to be a slightly faded presence to anyone with a solid existence in either world.

Right now, the thing wasn't making for much in the way of listening pleasure--hissing with static and snatches of lost sound that were barely picked up from other places. A radio won't tell a person where those waves come from, just what the waves are saying by transforming waves of electromagnetic radiation into sound waves.

Whatever the case, that little radio was making some noise. Now it was beginning to pick up a song… Yes, a gentle-strumming guitar strummed notes up and down, then up…and down again. A sad but anxious voice female voice sang with the rhythm …

Said there'd be no coming back!

Promised myself I'd never be that sad!

Maybe that's why you've come alone.

I can feel it, baby.

I feel like I've fallen for you

but I'm scared to

let go.

The radio played on a bit more before the signal was lost to chaos. Chaos, like how other sounds filtered in--sounds that weren't too nice to hear. Someone howled in pain, dimly in the background. The full intensity of it lost to the hush of the static. After that was maybe a sound that was like a deep dead chuckle.