Previously on Silent Hill: The Bat: Batman receives a letter from Rachel saying she's waiting for him in Silent Hill. Following a series of clues through the town and two different women who bear a striking resemblance to Rachel, but remain frustratingly out of reach, Batman ends up in a cenote—a deep, naturally occurring, limestone well that's filled with water.
Let me refresh your memory for this chapter: At the beginning of the story, Batman is on his way into Silent Hill when he meets a nervous and shaken teenager. The teen's on his way out of town. In the parking lot at the city entrance, Batman finds an abandoned car evidently owned by a middle-aged man named Andrew K. Hughes, who is nowhere in sight. When Batman shows the teen the car keys and ID that belong to Hughes, the teen admits he doesn't recognize the man, but that he has a sense of déjà vu and a bad feeling.
Ten
When I awaken I am underwater. Blackness surrounds me. The crushing weight of icy water presses in around me, and I inhale. A stream of burning cold water races through my nose, down my windpipe. Agony engulfs me. I begin to choke, drown. I fight for the undulating blue light above me, muscle memory kicking in full gear. As water fills my lungs, my body convulses, cramping. Holding my breath is impossible. My body seeks to expel the water, only breathing in more. A vicious cycle.
I break the surface coughing, sputtering. A yell escapes me. A yell of surprise, anger, astonishment, adrenaline. With my insides ravaged by the near drowning, gasping hoarsely, I swivel around, bobbing, searching for the black specter that looked like a silhouette of me, the thing that snatched me and threw me over the edge into this almost fatal pool. I see no one. I am alone.
Flicking on my night-vision, I see that the pool is positioned under a naturally occurring limestone cave. It is shaped like a dome. Stalactites hang like ancient daggers, thousands of them. In the center is a rectangular hole, a skylight. And then I know what this is. The Mayans used cenotes like these for worship and rituals.
I look down at the water, turn off the night vision. There might be remnants of their worship.
I pull out a breathing apparatus and fix it over my mouth, pulling the straps tight on the back of my head. Equipping a pair of goggles, I pull out my waterproof flashlight and dive. I flick the light on, shift the beam around. I see nothing but clear water. The floor is smooth, hewn out of limestone, covered with no algae, no life forms.
I sink to the floor, easy to do with almost a hundred pounds of armor and cloak on me. They act like weights on a scuba suit. With bubbles streaming upward, I bob lightly on the floor of the cenote. I scan the area.
There is a sudden burst of light from above. So bright it makes me squint. There was no light just moments ago coming through the skylight. But now it is as bright as the sun. And it is getting brighter, bluer. The pool is a cerulean jewel and I am inside it.
The cool blue illuminates a deep, wide shelf ahead of me. I turn off the flashlight and start swimming, streaking under the water level like a shadowy shark. I stop at the shelf, touching the edge to hold my depth steady. I press my stomach against the shelf and examine the contents.
The light above begins to wane.
There is something here buried under sticks and silt. I reach forward, brushing aside charred candles and a ceremonial dagger. As the light fades completely away, I scan with my flashlight. I push aside the silt and sticks, stirring up the debris. It floats up and sinks slowly like heavy smoke. Then I stop when I make out a shape. It's a human skull.
Along with the debris floats a tuft of dark brown hair. Long and youthful, even after so many years of being part of a sacrificial corpse. I've seen that hair before. It belonged to Rachel. It also belongs to the young woman who looks like her.
See the markings on the temple walls, she had written in her hastily composed letter before fleeing from me.
I raise my eyes to the walls to the sides, the back of the shelf.
The only temple I have ever known.
Sure enough, every inch is covered with intricate markings and glyphs, none of which I recognize or understand.
I am sinking lower slightly, so I push myself up further, inching along the shelf, trying to understand the glyphs.
In the center there is something that looks like a woman, encircled by a snakelike creature with legs, almost like a lizard. The markings are box-like and two-dimensional, indicative of Mayan origin. It appears as though the snake is preparing to constrict around her like a vicious and remorseless anaconda with its fat coils lying around her. In the drawing she looks unperturbed. A sacrifice that is willing, perhaps. But then I spot a bat above her head. I realize immediately I've been interpreting it wrong. The bat is enormous. Larger than she is. And it appears as though filling up the sky, making it black like the night. It's poised above her like an eagle about to swoop over the surface of a lake, about to dip its talons in for a split-second before curving back upward with a fish in its clutches. The snake is protecting her.
The flashlight flickers for a moment. Goes off. I tap it against the edge of the shelf. It comes back on. Weaker. The battery appears to be dying. But this is impossible. The energy cells are replenished without fail before each time I don the cowl and cape. They're designed to last eight hours at optimal output. Impossible, yet here I am. I try the night vision, but suddenly it's not working.
I scan more of the image under the waning flashlight. The large snake, which I now notice has feathers sprouting from around its head and spine like a dinosaur or a fringed iguana, is preparing to defend the woman in the middle. Its mouth is open and filled with fang-like teeth, ready to spring upward and seize the bat.
Suddenly, a shadow passed overhead. I raise my gaze. I see nothing but the skylight now, the illumination dimming, plunging the formerly turquoise water into a deep midnight blue. Darkness begins to creep in all around, giving the illusion that I'm in a bottomless pit. I turn back to the glyphs.
The shadow passes above me again, blocking light out completely just for a moment. It's a huge shadow, and moving very fast, I realize, gliding in the water above me.
My flashlight dies completely.
The skylight fades to black just as the shadow passes over it again. I cannot make out the shape, the size—except that it's long. Very large.
I make for the surface.
A current begins to swirl around below me like an undertow. It tugs me down even as I try to swim. There is a muffled rushing below me. And though I can see nothing, I am certain it's the shadow lurking under me. I make a break for the surface, kicking my legs, propelling me upward.
The muffled rushing grows louder. Bubbles rush past me, showing the way up. I swim harder.
But I don't make it. I don't know how far I am from the surface with something clamps on me from the left, two huge, long jaws, like a crocodile. I release the flashlight in surprise. It sinks immediately with dead metallic weight. I feel my armor breaks under the creature's bite—3700 psi—pounds per square inch—of pressure. I scream, releasing a swarm of bubbles through the breathing apparatus strapped to my face. My hands go for the jaws but I'm unable to make them budge. The beast opens its jaws slight and clamps down for a better grip. I almost faint from the pain. I feel pieces of my armor falling away.
The beast drags me downward. Then it's above me, pushing my downward.
The skylight begins to brighten again. The darkness reveals long wispy streams of my blood, shards of armor, and the beast. It's winged and feathered, with four legs like a crocodile but coils like a snake. Its prehensile tail flails back and forth, propelling it deeper and deeper with me in its mouth.
I look into its eyes and see the milky white nictating membranes covering its eyes, giving it the appearance of something with dead, occluded eyeballs. I reach over its four foot long snout, and try to gouge out one of its eyes.
Just as I pierce one eye with my thumb, jetting a cloud of blood and tissue into the water, it slams me into the cenote floor. I'm stunned, unable to move. The beast begins to roll. I resist, pushing against the floor, but it's much too powerful. I'm helpless as the animal spins, over and over, knocking my head against the stone floor, breaking loose more pieces of armor, crunching bone.
Then suddenly it stops, releases me.
With my eyes blurring with the onset of unconsciousness, I see a silhouette floating above. A woman. Through a film of blood mingling with the water, I see her swim, swim upward for the surface. I don't need to wonder if that's Rachel. Bruce knows that body, every sweeping curve, the shape of every slender limb. The anguish of betrayal tugs at his heart and he and I reach up together, pleading silently for help.
The beast slithers through the water, and the wings flap, propelling it out and above the surface. Rachel mounts the beast, and I think she looks back once. They disappear through the skylight.
When their shadows are gone, the skylight dims and blackens again.
I am in darkness. I don't know how long I am there, hanging between the surface and the floor, between wakefulness and consciousness.
The flashlight I dropped flickers to life a few feet away, like a groggy tube light.
I watch as my ragged breathing releases intermittent sprays of bubbles upward, along with tendrils of blood swaying with the gentle, settling current, like red seaweed.
A groan escapes me along with a stream of bubbles when I roll over and crawl almost weightlessly. I pass over shards of my armor, stirring them aside, and pick up the flashlight.
I arc the beam above, swing it back and forth in search of anything else that might be lurking in these dark waters. But I see nothing. Just a deep, black blue. I try the night vision. It still doesn't work. Holding my ribs, releasing more blood into my surroundings, I make for the surface.
After a grueling swim that takes ten times as long as it should, I break the surface and tear off the breathing apparatus. I sputter and gasp, tasting blood. I bob there on the surface, trying to catch my breath, but I realize it's impossible. I am gasping for air. I sweep the beam of light in search of the way out of this watery pit. There are vines that are draping down all around and some even reach into the water.
They are my only chance of escape, but I don't know how I will climb with broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Panting, groaning, I swim for the closest hanging plant life, leaving a streaming banner of red behind me. That's when I see the stairs. They are made of stone, wrapped around the wall of the cenote. I'm in too much pain to deny that I feel relief at the sight of those stairs. I sigh. It's the first thing to go right ever since I entered Silent Hill.
I swim to them, drag myself over the edge and just collapse. I lie there gasping for several moments, straddling the staggered, stepped edge with my body. My right arm and leg dangle in the water.
My positioning is immediately useful when I drift into unconsciousness without even realizing it. I startle awake, catching myself with a grunt of surprise just before falling into the cold pool.
I sit up, place the flashlight in my mouth, and, by its light, unhook the remaining pieces of my ceramic interlocking chest armor. My fingers are trembling so violently, I cannot undo the vest that's lined with ridges and hooks for the interlocking pieces.
My anger and frustration flare abruptly. I rip off my gauntlets. I snap off the moisture wicking gloves off and undo the vest with shaking hands. I ease up my stretchy, form fitting, full-sleeve T-shirt. I examine myself with my bare, freezing, searing fingers. I bite down on the flashlight, issuing a strangled groan as I feel for broken bones. I can see puncture wounds in two neat lines, bleeding rivulets of blood. Panting, I know that there is fluid in my pleural space—the space between the lung and the outer chest. My chest is almost undetectably swollen on the left side. The fluid is putting immense pressure on my respiratory organs, pushing them to the right.
I have a medical kit available on my belt and get to work. Stab and puncture are wounds nonexistent in Bruce Wayne's profession, but they're commonplace in mine. Bullets, knives, shrapnel, shotgun pellets—and more recently, the teeth of Titanoboa-like beasts—can pierce my sacrificed safety for freedom of movement and now I'm paying for it.
I use iodine cleanser for my skin and apply adhesive seals to patch up the holes on my left side. This will stop the outward bleeding and prevent more water, blood or air from entering the pleural space and making my lung collapse even further. I'm still short of breath, however, and I don't know if my injuries are causing me internal bleeding.
I sit for a few moments, for the first time hesitant to go any further in search of Rachel. I'm badly injured and I need medical attention, the kind I can't do on my own. I need an X-ray to find out what's in my pleural space. I need another pair of hands to help drain the pleural effusion. If I try to do a thoracentesis—a surgical procedure that involves a needle with a catheter to drain pleural fluid—I might pierce my own lung. Maybe I'll wait on that. Maybe I'll wait to see if my breathing becomes worse before I try it.
As I consider abandoning the search for Rachel, even just temporarily, there's furious protest from Bruce. Naturally. He's the irrational one. The one with hope. Rachel's dead, I insist. But Bruce's persistent hope doesn't want to die. After all, he's the one that got in the way that night. He's the one that lost control and assaulted the Joker. He's the one who foolishly underestimated the Joker. He's the one that got Rachel killed. It was all Bruce. Not Batman.
But she's here, I saw her. I saw her with my own eyes. She called my name, tried to protect me from the Ah Puch.
Well, yes, that did happen. It was real. Or was it? The creature broke my arm. It ran me through with its spear. I should have died then, but I'm alive. Perhaps I dreamed all of it up.
But it was too real. What if I wasn't dreaming? What if? Bruce's hope digs at me. What if she's alive? What if she's lost here among these beasts, these creatures, these monsters? What if she's hurt? What if she's hurt worse than I am right at this moment? What if she's lying somewhere in the dark, her leg broken, shot or stabbed or drenched in acid, bleeding out? Bruce can't stop the uncontrollable, horrific imaginings. And I can't stop worrying.
And yet—the Rachel I know would not hide from me. She would not abandon me at the bottom of a cenote to drown under the weight of a winged snake—her winged snake, her pet.
But Bruce won't, can't, ignore the biting hypocrisy of thinking something like that. I abandoned her to the Joker. I abandoned her. If only I'd done my duty, Rachel would be alive. If only I'd listened to logic, and not to emotion, I would have decided to go after Dent—and instead of him, I would have found Rachel. She'd be in my arms, my cowl would be locked away, and Dent would never have lived long enough to see himself become the villain. None of us would have witnessed the agonizing transformation.
I'm still haunted by my mistake. Her voice, the last thing of hers to touch me, was on the speaker phone in those last, rapidly fraying seconds of her life. Her voice telling Harvey Dent it would be okay. Her voice cutting off midsentence, mid-word by the crackling thunder of an explosion that destroyed her and the speaker phone simultaneously. Mingled with gentle assurance for a hysterical Harvey Dent was the dismay that I had not come for her first. It was the last thing she knew, the last thing to cross her mind.
I abandoned her that day and it cost Rachel her life. I know she died that day. And here I was, chasing her again, chasing a chance to ignore reality, to ignore what I'd heard with my own ears, what I'd seen. And sitting here, injured, panting, gasping for air, I was considering throwing that chance away. Batman would throw it away, because I know what the truth is. The truth is she's dead. But hope says she might be alive. Bruce will give anything to undo his mistake. He'd do anything to undo getting in my way, getting in his own way. Even if it means chasing Rachel's ghost. Even if it means dying.
Because, I realize, I'm not so unlike Rachel. I realize that the last thought to cross her mind was not that I abandoned her. But that someone would come. That I would come. Even in the face of certain death, she chose to hope. And so do I.
As I apply bandage dressing on my wounds, a deep moan of anguish echoes from a distance. I whirl around, snatch the flashlight from my mouth and swing the beam back and forth. Nothing is ahead on the stairs, which climbs at a steady ascent and ends at a darkened opening. I hear the distorted moan again, and it ends with a long wail.
Pulling on as much of the armor as I can, the pieces on parts of my chest and back no longer interlocking, I stand and stumble unsteadily up the steps. My vision blurs and blinks in and out of focus. I'm very weak and I can barely stand without holding the wall.
I dig into my belt again and pull out a shot of adrenaline. It will keep me alert, at least for now. I jab the shot into my side, where the armor's broken. The needle pops the plastic safeguard and plunges into my flesh with a faint prick of pain. The adrenaline follows soon after, making me gasp and snap to full alertness in mere seconds.
The moans are louder now—my hearing was dull from blood loss, but now it's much keener. I'm almost at the stairs landing, the darkened doorway that looks like a sewer tunnel entrance.
When I stop at the entrance, about to step over the threshold, there is a scream. This time I know without a doubt that it's human.
I run.
A young man screams for help, somebody, help, over and over, the fear in his voice scrapes at my own throat.
I sprint, short of breath, pain slicing at my side as his screams slice my ears. I check each and every door I pass. Made of rusted metal, crumbing red filth marks my gauntlets like dried blood.
Each door is locked tight, welded shut with rust. There are doors on both sides and I dart from one to another.
I've checked three doors when I realize that all the locked doors are marked with blood. Left, right and top. Streaks of blood, still dripping, stinking, desperately rotten and ripe for flies and their maggots. They've been passed over.
I glance at all the other marked doors and look at the last one, the one straight ahead. The door is surprisingly clean, free of rust and spotless of blood. But that is not what catches my attention.
Standing in front of it is the shadowy figure of a woman. Her face is obscured by her shiny, dark brown hair. She's barefoot, her legs and arms pale and colorless, like she's been living underground for the past six months. She's wearing a dark blue dress that looks familiar to me, but one that's also alien and unsavory. She doesn't move. This can't be Bruce's Rachel. Can she? Could something change her this much? Could almost dying distort and warp the woman Bruce loves into a barefoot, colorless creature that hides from the man she loves?
I stare at her, reluctant to move. Every other time I've given chase she's escaped me.
The voice screaming hasn't stopped. "Somebody! Please! Help me!"
Rachel tilts her head as if to listen. Her hair falls to veil more of her face.
I advance. Drag my right foot forward without a sound. Just an inch.
Her head snaps back to me.
"Help me! Please, somebody!"
"Rachel," I begin in Bruce's voice, now ragged with lack of air. "I have to help him."
To my astonishment, she speaks. In Rachel's silken, husky voice. "You can't help anyone here."
She reaches for the door, opens it.
"Rachel, stop."
I break into a sprint, as fast as I can, accelerating, shaky with nerves and pain and adrenaline. I'm out of breath almost immediately. "Stop!" I gasp.
But she slips through a gap in the door merely a foot wide and the door slams shut just as I reach it.
I throw it open immediately. It slams into the wall with a sound like a gunshot. She's gone. I lost her again. I utter a growl of frustration and punch the door with the side of my fist. "Rachel!" I shout breathlessly, hoarsely. "Rachel, where are you!"
The room is brightly lit inside. Fluorescent lights span the ceiling in five neat rows. There is a darkened control booth to the left. A wire-enforced window reveals the interior. It's empty.
I turn to the figure to my right. He's strapped into an old wooden chair. An electric chair.
I recognize him. The boy I met at Silent Hill's entrance.
Author's Note: The chapter was getting unbelievably long, so I split it up. Chapter Eleven to follow soon. If you see any typos, grammar mistakes, etc., please let me know. Thank you.
In Mayan mythology, the bat is a symbol of death and the underworld.