Up on the third floor, there were more slugs everywhere. I was happily walking along mapping and swinging and squashing when I rounded a curve and

HOLY SHIT!

Of all of the things I ended up seeing that day, that may have given me the biggest scare. Up until now, everything I'd run into had been a familiar shape…a dog, or a plant, or a bird or a slug. That gave me a handy frame of reference. Somehow, when you know what something is, it's easier to deal with it, even if all you're doing is trying to figure out the quickest way to kill it or get past it.

What I was facing, now, was a creature that walked on two enormous arms and had a dark shaggy pelt like a yak or a mammoth. And two heads. Human heads. Pale-skinned little kids' heads, like something out of somebody's nightmare, side by side on top of the long dark hair. The eyes were squeezed shut, and one head sat lower than the other. It was taller and much heavier than I was. And it was standing there...

Looking at me...

Pointing with one of its hands as it leaned on the other. Pointing at me. Like Uncle Sam on those old Army recruitment posters. "We want YOU!"

I froze. Slugs be damned. This double-headed thing was bigger than I was, it looked as if it could run faster than I could, and it sure as hell knew that I was there. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do about it. I heard it say something, but neither of its mouths moved. Then, it dropped its hand and started rumbling toward me.

I'd been wrong…it was much faster than I was. It stopped a few feet away and pulled one of its hands back. I was just able to jump backwards out of the way before its swipe connected with the air where I had been standing. Then, to my surprise, it didn't lunge at me. Instead, it turned and ran away, and stopped after a few steps to stare off into the distance as if fascinated by some shiny object.

What does this thing want?

But I didn't have time to ask. I stuffed my notebook into my pocket and readied the pipe. Then, I moved up behind it at quietly as possible, doing everything I could not to slip in the slug guts splattered all over the floor. One false move and this thing would be on top of me in an instant.

Up close, it smelled like mildew and wet dog, times ten. I wound up my best major-league swing, took a deep breath, and let fly. All that did was get its attention. It turned around and stared at me as I backed away as fast as I could and readied myself for another hit. It seemed curious about me, as if it had no idea why I would want to hit it like that.

You've got two brains. Figure it out.

A second swing, and it was rampaging back and forth down the hallway. It was going to be a lot harder to get close enough to let loose on it the next time. Still, I watched it carefully, and just as it was running toward me I swung for all I was worth. That knocked it to the floor, and a fast stomp to one of its heads was enough to finish it off. Now it lay motionless before me, faces-down in the muck, a dead mound of smelly wet hair. I caught my breath, and tried to figure out the weird rattling echoing down the hallway before I realized that it was the sound of my own teeth chattering in my head. It was several seconds before the pain of my nails digging into my palms stopped the sound.

Then, I remembered that I was standing out in the middle of a hallway, exposed, and it was possible that these things traveled in packs. I ducked into the nearest unlocked room to try to pull myself back together. As I was about to sit down on the bed, I saw that it was covered in blood…and that the stain was about the same size and shape as a little kid. I dropped down on the little stool in the room instead and put my head in my hands. They'd stopped shaking, and so had the rest of me. But I guess I hadn't known how rattled I was by all of this until that moment.


You know, I'd like to be able to tell you that I reacted to all of this by gritting my teeth, rolling up my sleeves and beating the hell out of everything I came across. That I was one of those people who is always at his best when adversity strikes, who always knows what to do, who makes sure that everybody is OK and then takes care of business.

I'd like to tell you that, but I can't. I know that I could have handled all of this better. I should have handled it all better. If I had, who knows if it could have been stopped earlier, if fewer people would have died. I don't know. I'd lived a pretty quiet and sheltered life as a kid, a life that I worked hard to preserve once I graduated college and entered the real world, and I guess that this was all so incomprehensible to me that I…

That's no excuse, though. I don't really know how to tell you what was going on in my head. I was beyond freaked out, holding myself together as best I could, and in moments like that one I came very close to losing it. All that I knew just then was that I was as far up a creek without a paddle as I'd ever been, and there was nothing that I could do about it except deal with things as they came and try to stay alive.


I don't know how long I sat there, but it couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes. I knew that I probably didn't have a lot of time to waste. The sooner I found a way out of here, the sooner this nightmare would end. Suck it up, Henry, I heard my father's voice say in my head. You don't have time for this crap. Get over it and get on with it.

I lifted my head and looked around. The hole in the middle of the floor gaped like a huge round mouth in the darkness of the cell.

Now I see what the big deal was about the lights. It's dark as hell in here. Might not be a bad idea to get those lights going, actually.

I wasn't OK, nowhere near it, but I felt somewhat better. Having something to do helped, a lot. I stood up and stretched. The noise of my joints popping was very loud in that little room. Just then, I heard a footstep, and the room fell into darkness, then lightened again. Something was moving around on the other side of the peephole, in what I'd guessed was…

The guard room. There's somebody in there! Shit! What if he sees me?

I'd been an idiot again. Of course, if there's a guard room, there could be guards, and I probably didn't want them to know that I was there. I slipped back out into the hallway and made my way to the other cells as quietly and quickly as possible.

I had to take out a wall-man in one of the cells to get at a box of bullets next to him. There was another double-headed monster, too, but now that I knew to watch out for them, I was able to get a feel for how they moved, and this one was a little easier to deal with. One of the rooms was full of brown mushrooms, and the journal on the table in there gave me a good idea of just what happened to the bodies once they went down the holes. I don't want to go into detail, not here, but these cult people were nothing if not practical, I guess...if you believed that what the kiddies didn't know couldn't hurt them.

I finished up my map and climbed up the ladder to the last floor. The huge metal double doors opened readily, and I was on the sunlit gray roof. The walls were tall, and edged with barbed wire. Fog swirled within them.

Yep, there's the water for the waterwheel.

It was contained in a large square pool that surrounded a small central room. Of course, the door to the room was locked, and it bore the same round symbol that I'd seen on the huge door in the basement, and on the cemetery door by the orphanage. Sensing a pattern here?

The pool itself was four-cornered, like the hole for the waterwheel downstairs, and each corner was blocked off by a little wooden gate that led to a deep hole. So, the water would run down these holes once the gates were opened…and hey, over here's a wheel to turn. It doesn't get more obvious than that.

The wheel was stiff at first, but eventually it gave way, and as I turned it around, it squeaked and the little gates lifted up and the water poured down into the holes. Man, it felt good to finally do something other than bash things to death. I felt as though I might actually be getting somewhere now. Back downstairs to see if that was the case. The lights were indeed on in the third-floor cells. Glad to know that these anonymous note-writers weren't full of it. So, mission accomplished.

Now, to figure out how to get out of here.


I sat down in a cell under the newly working lights and looked at my maps for the first, second and third floors. Hopefully, there was a set of holes that I could get to that would drop me straight down. And damn…sure enough, there were cells on the second and first floors that were locked, one above the other, and both were below a third-floor cell with a hole. Right in the eight-o'clock position. Ten to one that the cells below the one with the hole had holes too. Now, about that falling-to-my-death business…well, if the guards had to do this all of the time, hopefully it wasn't that dangerous. Hopefully. Lousy design for a building, though. You'd think they'd just take the stairs. They're guards, so they would have keys to get where they needed to go. But I didn't, so down the holes it had to be. I put my notebook away and headed down the hall again.

Standing there looking at the hole in the eight-o'clock cell, it occurred to me that if I could get some forward momentum going, I might be able to overshoot the hole on the next floor and land safely on the other side. It was a long shot, but worth a try, and hopefully I wouldn't end up banging my head on the concrete as I went forward or something stupid like that. The floors were thick, and there wasn't enough space for a running start, so I just jumped forward and hoped for the best. Turned out that that was enough. I landed safely next to the hole on the next floor down. A couple more cautious jumps, and I found myself in a larger room shaped like a quarter circle, with shower heads along the walls, and a door…and two doubleheads out for my blood. Time to go.

The locked double doors that I'd come across earlier when I was on the enclosed stairs were now on my right. The door across from the one I'd just fled through was locked, but to my left there was a small hallway that ended in a large circular room with a ladder in the middle. It didn't take much thought to figure out where that ladder went to. Sure enough, on the next floor up I found myself in the first-floor central guard room. I was able to look through each of the eight peepholes and see into the rooms on the first floor, including the one with the bald guy in it. (He was still standing there looking out of the window forlornly. Geez, man, take a load off or something…)

There was an old metal desk and a chair in the guard room, and a note on the desk. That note told me something new. Well, a few new things, but as horrific as the thought was of those kids starving to death in their cells because nobody could be bothered to fix the doors, it wasn't of immediate usefulness. Apparently, not only could the floors be rotated, but it was possible to get into the "interrogation room" by the kitchen by moving the floors around. There was a bloody bed on each floor (I'd already run into the one on the third floor, so I knew that that was true), and if you lined them up you could drop down all the way into the kitchen area. Looking at my maps, I realized that that must be what was behind the locked door I'd just seen. Since it was the last area in the building that I couldn't get to, it probably was where I needed to go. Well, guess I'd be going through that code-locked door after all.

So, my next project was to get those rooms lined up correctly. What worried me was that I didn't know how to rotate the floors. There weren't any obvious switches or anything here. So, I made sure that my gun was loaded (if there were guards up there, they'd shoot me before I could hit them) and went up the ladder to see what was going on upstairs.

The second floor guard room was quiet. It was much like the first, except for two things…the note on the desk that explained the lighting system (thanks, been there, done that, got it), and the rusty wheel on a pillar across from the ladder. The note mentioned that the second and third floors were the ones that rotated, so this was probably the means.

Only one way to find out.

I peered into the nearest peephole, then stepped over to the wheel and gave it a good turn to the right. It squeaked and complained like the one on the roof had. There was a loud rumbling sound, and the building rolled and shook for a few seconds. Now, the cell behind the peephole was different…there was a hole in the floor where there hadn't been one before. It looked as though the floor had rotated one cell to the right. So that was how it worked. A good haul on the wheel would turn the rooms in either direction.

The note I'd just read said something about keeping the kids in line by doing this, to freak them out. Starving in their cells, seeing nobody, hearing horrible things happening in other cells, and prone to disorienting torture at the whim of the guards they never saw…this must have been Hell on earth for them. I rotated the wheel back in the other direction, to put things back the way I'd drawn them on my map, trying to shake the images from my head.

Now, I had to figure out where the bloody beds were. I climbed back down to the first floor and marked the cell on my map (it was in the one-o'clock position), then back up to the second to do the same. But as I was checking the cells one by one, I saw something lying on a table in one of the cells that gleamed and glistened in the faint light from the hallway. It was in a room that I knew had been locked, so I probably hadn't been able to see the thing from the door. Even in the dark, though, I could make out its faint boxy shape, and I knew exactly what it was.

It was a stun gun.

It lay abandoned on a table, as if left there by one of the guards. The shape was unmistakable to me, because my mother carried one every day when I was a kid and it looked just like hers had then. That stun gun was a huge point of contention between my parents when I was growing up. She insisted that she didn't need it, but Dad always made her carry it. Said that a little Japanese woman like her was a prime target for muggers. Not that there had been any muggings in Ashfield as long as anybody could remember, but that didn't matter to him. And she was half Japanese, and he knew that (she took after her mother, not her father, so she looked more Japanese than Caucasian). But yes, she was small. Even before I hit puberty I'd been taller than her.

Anyway, I knew what a stun gun looked like, and this was definitely a stun gun. Could I figure out how to get to it? There was a hole in the floor of that room, so hopefully if I could get into the cell I could get out as well…and if I could rotate the third floor to put a hole above it, I could drop down into the room, pick it up, and drop down again to get back out. The map told me that the cell below it on the first floor had a hole in the floor, too, so I went up the ladder. There was another wheel, and no desk, but another note on the wall.

The Secret Number for getting through the door in back of the kitchen this month is "0302".
Thanks for your cooperation.

Of course it was. Bleh. But didn't that piece of paper I found on the floor when I first got here say something about punching in numbers? On that keypad that I didn't want to deal with? Notebook time...flip through...right there...yep, it did. Well, it was an easy enough number to remember. I worked the wheel until I had one of the unlocked rooms with a hole where I wanted it. Then, back down the ladders to go back up to the third floor.

When I got to the bottom of the ladder, I realized that I wasn't alone…but whoever was there wasn't about to attack me. Right there in the middle of the hallway was the bald guy from the first floor. Guess he'd gotten out of his cell and come down here for whatever reason. Now, he was down on his knees talking to somebody. At first, I couldn't see who it was…but then as I moved closer, I saw that it was the little kid from the forest. How had he gotten here?

The guy was whispering, pleading with the kid for something. He sounded pretty desperate too, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. The kid just stood there looking unimpressed, though, and after a few seconds he turned around and walked out of the double doors, leaving the guy still on his knees, staring after him. The man jumped when I tapped him on the shoulder.

"Who is that boy?" I asked. "And who are you?"

"His name's Walter. Walter Sullivan," the man said.

Walter Sullivan! What the…

"I used to work at the orphanage," he continued. He slowly pulled himself to his feet. "Watching the kids. I'm Andrew DeSalvo."

He turned to me, and I saw the terror written across his face. Words came tumbling out of his mouth like water flowing over the old wood of the waterwheel.

"They tried to make it seem like an orphanage, but according to that town's Holy Scriptures, it was actually the center of their religion. That's all those kids ever heard…but he was different. That kid, Walter…he was really into that mumbo jumbo…"

I wanted to ask him so many things. The orphanage…do you mean the one in the forest? The Silent Hill cult? Is this really their prison? And how can that be Walter Sullivan? He's far too young…and Walter Sullivan is far too dead.

But Andrew kept talking, and I didn't want to spook him, so I let him. He was getting more freaked out by the second. His hands were shaking.

"He'd talk for hours about it to anybody who would listen. Especially that 'Descent of the Holy Mother' business…scary…" He raised his hands to his head and stumbled away from me. "My God…oh…oh, my God…"

Then, he was gone, through the double doors to the stairwell. I ran after him and threw the doors open, but he had disappeared. Now, I had more questions than answers. As usual.


There was nothing to do but to keep going up the ladders back up to the third floor. That took a while…stairs, ladder, door, door, ladder, roof, ladder, ladder, door, hallway, door. Another careful jump through a hole in the floor, and I grabbed the stun gun and kept dropping down. It was a hassle, yeah, and I got plenty of cuts and bruises on the way down. But that stun gun ended up saving my butt many times over later on, so it was worth the effort.

I ended up in the basement kitchen area. There was no immediate threat, so I took a minute to examine my new acquisition. It felt familiar, and looked as thought it might still be in working order. Its battery compartment door was stuck shut, though, so until I could pry it open I'd have to be careful and only use it when necessary. Anyway, stunning those slugs into a stupor wouldn't be half as much fun as hacking and stomping them. I pressed the switch, and current jumped from one terminal to the other. The blue spark and sharp smell of ozone in the dark room took me back twenty years, fifteen…but there was no time for that now.

There was the number pad on the door, as promised. It was the standard three-by-four model with the last number at the bottom. That would be the zero, right? I had to guess…the room was too dark to see. I worked the buttons by touch, but nothing doing. Every time I entered the code, the lock buzzed at me. Was it broken? Well, I hadn't been the first person to get stuck here. I don't know the numbers, and it was too dark to even see the panel, so I didn't go in. That's what that note had said. Would be nice to be able to see the buttons, so I could be sure I was getting it right. But I had to be…weren't all panels like this laid out in exactly the same way everywhere?

Then I remembered. Since each floor of this building can be rotated, you can light up any of the cells by matching up the holes. Just like I'd just done to get to the stun gun. If I could line up the cells to let the light in to this room from the third floor, then I could see what I was doing. And now that I thought about it, lining up the cells with bloody beds would do just that. I hacked through some white mushrooms (same as the brown ones, but…well, albino), and headed up the ladder.

I know that it didn't take more than a few minutes on each floor to line up the cells, but it seemed to take forever and a day. The grinding of the gears and the squeaking of the wheel echoed very loudly in the little round rooms. It was like nails on a chalkboard after a while, but I gritted my teeth and got on with it. And it felt damn good when I finally checked my map and verified that everything was lined up and ready to go. Light filtered down onto each of three bloody beds, one on each floor. Time to get the hell out of this place.

Back down the ladder and up the stairs again. A few minutes later, I stood at the edge of the third-floor hole, took a deep breath, and started the descent one more time.

What was I going to find behind that door?

The room was better lit this time. I could see the pad clearly, and I knew right away why the code hadn't worked before. This was the only three-by-four number pad I'd ever seen that started at the bottom and went to the top. What the hell? Stupid design, but what are you going to do? I leaned in closer and reached for the buttons.

I swear to God, my heart stopped beating when I saw the rectangular plaque on the door. Another plaque, another locked door…

Please tell me that this doesn't mean what I think it means.

This one had a large eye on it, with rays radiating out like an old picture of the sun. It was the same size and thickness as the others, and came off of the door readily. I entered the code into the number pad with a shaky hand, and finally I heard the little beep that told me that the door was ready for me. I wasn't ready for it, but I couldn't worry about that now. I steeled myself and turned the knob.

The room beyond was different. Round tiles were set into the walls in a honeycomb pattern. Huge round saw blades and metal racks and other …things hung from the ceiling. The floor of the room was mostly submerged but for a little space by the door and a metal walkway to its center. Everything – the walls, the saw blades, the walkway, everything – was covered in old and fresh blood. The water in the room slapped heavily against the walls, and there were green and black oily patches on its surface. The smell was truly indescribable. If the room with the hole and the number pad was the…dropoff (ugh), then this must be where…

Oh God.

I remembered the words from the diary that I'd found in one of the cells…the one that talked about the death chamber behind the kitchen, and what happened to the kids who died there. It had been clear as day.

Beef stew.

I'd read it before, but it hadn't really hit me until that minute. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn't. Then, I saw Andrew floating face-up at the other end in a spreading pool of blood, and all I could see were the red lines on the belly of his shirt.

18121

Somehow, I was standing over him now, watching him bob up and down in the water. His mouth was slightly open, and his sightless eyes were staring up at the ceiling. He looked so peaceful. The terror on his face was gone, but now he looked surprised. I was the one expecting to die any minute, not him…no wonder he looked surprised.

Then, a drop of blood fell from the ceiling and splashed onto his face, just next to his nose. It ran down his cheek and into his eye, pooling around the lower eyelid. I could see that it was separating, clear fluid running into his dead eye in one direction, thick red liquid in the other…onto the white of his eye and down under the eyelid…

I had just enough time to turn away and drop to my knees before I leaned over the rotten water and retched my guts out into its depths. Not that there was much to bring up, of course…I'd eaten very little over the last few days. Still, it made my stomach feel better, and I knew from past experience that that would last for about fifteen minutes or so before I felt like crap again.

My hands were gripping the edge of the round metal platform, which was slippery with mold and slime. I realized that they were shaking a moment before I felt my palm start to slide, and I nearly fell headlong into my own bile, which was spreading through the water slowly as it sloshed. Instead, I threw myself backwards as hard as I could, and ended up cracking the back of my skull on the center column on the platform.

That was the last straw. I couldn't take any more. I curled up on the rusty metal in the middle of that stinking room in the basement of that nightmarish prison with Andrew's corpse bobbing like a cork a few feet away and put my hands over my head and opened my mouth to scream. I don't know if any sound came out. I might not have heard it if it did. I remember shaking so hard that I had to reach out and grip the column with both hands to keep from vibrating myself right into that pool.

I laid there for the longest time…


On my bed.

Time was passing when I was in those places, it seemed. The amber late afternoon – early evening light was coming in through the windows now. I loved that light on a normal day, the way it turned everything to oranges and browns, but now it was a reminder that time was passing and that I still hadn't found a way out of this nightmare. And soon it was going to be night for real, and things were only going from bad to worse.

As soon as I opened the bedroom door, I heard the shower running.

Sure would be funny if whoever was doing this stuff to my apartment was in there washing off. Maybe I could go all Psycho on him and…

What am I thinking?

There wasn't anybody in there, of course. There was nothing but blood splashed all over the walls where the shower head had sprayed it into the tub. It had even soaked into the spare roll of toilet paper on the tank. The stink was familiar by now.

I heard voices outside the front door. There was more red paper there, slipped under the door, but it could wait. Outside in the hallway were Eileen and Frank, together this time and staring at my door in tandem as if they could do a Uri Geller on it.

Yeah, I wish.

"How's it going with Room 302?" Eileen asked. As lousy as I felt at that moment, I had to smile at that.

Not so well, but thanks anyway. How are you?

"Well, I…uh…just tried to open it up," Frank replied, "but it looks like something's, uh…blocking it from the inside." There was something white in his hand, an envelope or something like that.

Yep. Chains. But you wouldn't know that.

"Anyway, it's not the first time."

WHAT?

"You mean…the guy who lived here before?"

"And it wasn't just him, either. There's, uh, something wrong with this whole apartment."

GREAT. Just fantastic. Is that what you meant earlier, what happened "back then"? Do you mean, my room, or the whole building?

Oh, and you didn't tell anybody about this WHY?

"Don't say that," Eileen said, rubbing her arms. Frank bent down and dropped out of view as she looked around nervously. "You're scaring me…"

After a second or two, Frank's head reappeared. "Well, anyway, I just slipped a note under his door." He saw the look on her face and frowned. "Don't worry about it too much. There are a … lot of strange things in this world…"

Heh. Don't I know it.

Frank was still talking, which was a rare occurrence. "The umbilical cord I keep in a box in my room…lately, it's started to smell terrible…"

She stared at him as if he was crazy. "Huh? Umbilical cord?"

"Oh, forget I said anything," he said, and turned away. She followed him uncertainly.

"But still…those noises…" she said as she walked away.

I know what you're thinking. Why the hell would anybody keep an umbilical cord in their room? Or anywhere else? Oddly enough, I know why. When I was a teenager, I asked my mother about my birth…where I'd been born, what it was like, all of that. We'd never discussed it before, and she seemed rather shy about it, but she could sense that it was important to me. I don't know why it was, really. But she ended up telling me all about Japanese birthing customs, as her mother had told her, and one of the things she told me was that sometimes the mother would keep her baby's preserved umbilical cord in a small wooden box. She hadn't kept mine (Dad didn't like the idea), but her mother had kept hers, and since my grandmother's death it had been in the safe-deposit box at the bank. It would be mine someday, she told me, and when it was, I should make sure that nothing happened to it. So it isn't as weird a thing as it sounds. Normal, actually, where my grandmother came from.

Why Frank would choose to keep a cord, though, was beyond me. Maybe he heard about the legend and thought it was a neat idea. After all, he and his wife had had a son…perhaps that's whose it was. But from what Mom said, usually the cords were dry and mummified long before the baby was old enough to walk. So it wouldn't make any sense that a decades-old cord would have any smell at all.

Whatever. I didn't have time to worry about Frank's son's umbilical cord right now. Now, there were two pieces of paper under my door, and hopefully whatever Frank had to tell me would be helpful. No such luck, of course. The envelope that had been so white and crisp a moment ago was now so soaked in blood that I couldn't open it, never mind read it. So, that was another dead end.

But whoever was leaving me these red notes had come up with a winner this time. This one told of a kind of sword that he'd found by the orphanage, with a wooden triangular handle with writing on it. Apparently, the thing was really heavy, but it could do some serious damage to the ghosts out there.

So he knows about the orphanage and the ghosts, too? Does he know what's going on? He's got to. He's seen them.

There were only five of these swords. Well, so far I'd only run across a handful of ghosts, so that was enough…that is, if I could find any of them. Too bad you couldn't fit a heavy sword inside one of these red notes. For whatever reason, the date on the note caught my attention.

July 23. It looks like a page from a diary or something.

I dug out the other red notes...they all had dates, too. I put them in order, but so far they weren't telling me much of a story.

So, I plopped back down on my couch and emptied my pockets. The plaque I'd found in the prison's kitchen was the same weight and material as the others, but this one said Watchfulness on the back.

Return to the Source through sin's Temptation. Under the Watchful eye of the demon, wander alone in the formless Chaos.

Andrew had said that he had worked at the orphanage, watching the kids. That fit the pattern. So, if this was going to keep up (and it sure looked as though it would), the next person to die would be Chaos.

Then…then the list ended. What would happen then?

The plaque went into the chest to join its brethren. The red diary notes went back into my notebook. And I went back to my couch to rest and heal and watch the slug guts melt off of my boots.