Silent Hill: Disciples of The Crimson Tome
by Egglesplork
"Lullaby"
by Low
Chapter 13
…
1.
…
Heather woke up…on the basement floor and was feeling just about as badly as one expected. Being yanked into an alternate reality through some hole in the universe, running around in that other world, breathing the air (and thankfully not drinking the local water), then coming back in less than a few hours, it was worse than motion-sickness and hangover mixed up in one bowl with a side-order of jet-lag,. How would you feel?
At least this was Heather waking up in what we would call a normal basement. Normal, because it was—in fact and indeed—the basement area of her apartment building. This was a short hallway of beige-painted cinderblock walls with various rooms behind painted metal doors, illuminated with fluorescent lights. Some of the rooms behind those doors were for storage of building-maintenance supplies and tools. The room at the end of the hall held the water-pump and circuit-breakers. The basement. You know, where all the cool stuff is.
And the electricity was on. Otherwise, the florescent lights wouldn't be working. Only thing that seemed immediately wrong was, the boiler room down the hall was quiet. As they say in all the cornball action movies, too quiet.
Quiet is good enough for me, thought Heather, sitting up with her head feeling like it was floating in a sea of vomit. I feel like crap.
When things got too bad, the girl repositioned herself as so her head was between her knees, taking in controlled breaths through her mouth. This pose made her look like a booze-hound (albeit an under-aged booze-hound), but it sure beat throwing up and smelling like one later.
This was one of those things that Heather learned to do—one of those little tricks learned because some forms of medication don't work for her. The local Rite-Aid pharmacy doesn't exactly stock anti-nausea pills for maybe-not-human girls born in alternate realities. Well okay, some drugs work for Heather—working maybe a bit too well. Heather once accidentally got herself hooked on some cold analgesics before realizing that there was a problem. This is the stuff, was her thinking at the time…until getting the shakes from not having the stuff, until Heather got over to one of the drug-treatment clinics to get herself offthe stuff. And as they say in the drug-treatment programs, you can't solve a problem unless you first recognize it.
Problems, like the location of someone who was with her not too long ago. "Intemelessy?" asked Heather, lifting her head. Now Heather was feeling too worried to be sick. Her voice got a little louder. "Intemelessy!"
The girl got herself up off of the floor, looked desperately around, not seeing Intemelessy anywhere. Did her high-tech bodyguard make it through the transition? For all Heather knew, Intemelessy could have fallen into some freaky place between the universes and been left stuck somewhere too terrible to really imagine, for someone to ever want to imagine.
That didn't stop Heather's imagination from giving it a shot, though—much as Heather didn't want to. It's like her imagination was saying, Too bad, bitch. We're going for a ri-i-ide…
For those who haven't been paying attention all this time—like the kid at the back of the dimly lit university lecture-hall who always manages to fall asleep during lectures (and will probably flunk out before the start of junior year)—let this be known. There are other worlds. The world that Intemelessy came from was passably normal enough, for example. However, it was certainly not our world. Our world does not have android-technology good enough to make artificial people (yet) and corporations running cities the sizes of small countries. Then there are all of the other worlds beside that which are run by folks who pretty much look like you do. Sometimes, they can't officially be called human beings because their insides are set up a little differently, but they look normal enough—people like Heather.
Now besides those worlds, we've got other universes beyond ours, other versions of this planet where there are things that don't look human, were never human, and probably couldn't give a rat's fart about human beings, period. Worlds crazier than a cockroach in a meth lab. Those are worlds run by what we would call monsters.
Worlds run by monsters, huh? Like that wonderfully cheerful place of darkness and rust-metal machinery? The one where all the cute creatures that are simply dying to meet fresh new people in fresh new other realities? Take that last example with a little sarcasm. Not to be taken with a little sarcasm is the idea that some of those worlds could be completely forked up.
As Heather looked around and just saw the plain-Jane cinderblock walls, perfectly normal walls, her imagination was running through all of that crazy imagining faster than those spaceships in that movie with guys in ballet-looking uniforms battle aliens. Other worlds… Other worlds!
You think that's crazy? Was this driving Heather crazy—or crazier than usual? Hell no and Hell yes are the answers to those questions, respectively. Heather's imagination was just getting warmed up.
Maybe there were other worlds where the oceans are nothing but churning masses of biological slime and gunk. The land-masses are ruled by tentacle-laden green squid-like beings in hive-cities. Overhead is a sky that is an eerie emerald-green—a sky that the tentacle-creatures pass through in gravity-defying ships that resemble hot-water heaters made out of polished chrome.
There could be worlds out there where the opposite was true, where the entire planet is a dry place of rocks and desert with an orange-colored radioactive sky—the creatures being some bastardized hybrid of living meat and metal machinery, living in factories and eating substances made by machines.
Who knows? Maybe those guys in that world would probably call over the mutant-midgets and squid-monster people for drinks or something. Some of them would probably have conversations like, So… Take over any good worlds lately?
Heather was screaming that android-girl's name all over the place and began shoving open doors, seeing the boiler room, seeing the storage-rooms, seeing a janitorial room, seeing the hall but not seeing Intemelessy. A sensible person would have been more systematic about the business, yet Heather was not at all feeling sensible. Let's take somebody's newly married wife and drop her off a cliff and see how sensible the husband is feeling. If it was a middle-aged couple that hated each other's guts, the husband would probably shake the wife-murderer's hand, but never mind that. (Wooh, doggie! 'Bout time I was rid o' that wrinkly ol' whore! Now I'm gonna collect me some life in-sur-ance an' marry me one o' them sweet-lookin' mail-order brides from countries where folks are so hard up fer money that they ain't got pots to piss in!) No… Never mind wives being given the old heave-ho off cliffs and the questionably legal practice of taking one's betrothed from a mail-order catalog. Where in the world was Intemelessy? In what world was Intemelessy?
"I am here," came Intemelessy's amplified voice, stepping out from the janitorial office which Heather just looked in. "Heather, what is your condition? You do not appear injured, yet an infrared scan indicates thermal anomalies within your body. Your respiration and pulse are elevated."
"That's because I was worried sick!" yelled Heather, her hands clenched into angry fists. "When I call you name, I want you to come running! Why the Hell were you hiding like that? I Don't you know when other people might want you around and stuff?" A step closer, a lot louder. "What's your problem!"
Not at all affected by Heather's shouting antics, Intemelessy stood for a moment as if giving a thoughtful pause. Actually, the synthetic girl's internal machinery was doing a run-through of its workings—what computer-geeks call diagnostics. "All of my systems are operating within optimal levels. However, my personality emulation remains within its beta phase due to a foreshortened development. I therefore do not have a significant problem."
"That's not what I meant, you crazy robot!" went Heather, all loud and angry…before quickly calming down.
When Intemelessy said foreshortened development cycle, that was a fancy way of saying that Intemelessy wasn't fully made. Heather remembered that Intemelessy had to be turned on before being ready, her world a wreck. Everyone that Intemelessy could ever know was killed. That's just about as bad as parents being dead before one could know them.
And here Heather was, at least having had the privilege of being raised by at least one parent. Better yet, it was a father who cared. Harry Mason was a good father. And who did Intemelessy have to raise her after they made her? Nobody. Intemelessy had nobody. Dead people have no parenting capabilities.
Thinking this, Heather was a lot more apologetic, her throat feeling thick because of all the bad feelings about her life and Intemelessy's life—about how life in general was treating them. "Look, I'm really sorry about getting pissed and all. Just please don't leave me all of a sudden like that. Please?"
"I shall comply with your order for the duration of this mission," said Intemelessy. "The primary factor which determines my presence in your world is that of your safety as compromised by them. This aspect of my mission makes being in your vicinity a critical factor."
Them, thought Heather. Wasn't that the name of a cheesy 1950's sci-fi flick? Gonna hafta think of a better name for those creeps. About Intemelessy being worried about safety, that sparked off a thought. When this apartment was sucked into that other world—that place which really likes to suck—everything in it was changed. Everything and everyone, that is. And when in that other place, something had also happened to the apartment's tenants.
Oh no… What happened to everyone who was in this apartment when it was sucked into that other world? Come on," said Heather decisively, making very quick strides for the stairs up out of this apartment basement level. "We've gotta check something."
…
It was as if Heather couldn't run fast enough. Moving over to the basement stairs up, getting up the stairs and moving fast, Heather was on the move. It didn't matter if it was already too damned late. What happened has already happened. Logically speaking, there was no need to run because what's done is done.
Nevertheless, Heather was moving a quickly as her lack of height allowed her. The girl was a skosh under five feet tall. Meaning, it was her not being too tall at all. Being petite may be cute when it comes to females, yet it puts a real damper on trying to get up some speed. For every stride that a person of so-called average height has to take in running, Heather has to take one and a half.
Whap-whap-whap…! Heather used her right palm to bang on the first apartment door her running brought her to. "Hey! Are you okay in there?" Whap-whap-whap… Then Heather noticed that the apartment door slowly opened a bit. Come on in.
Now look… An unlocked and slightly ajar apartment door in the city is either bad news getting ready to happen or is bad news that already came to pass. More specifically, an open apartment door is an open-door invitation to muggers, molesters, burglars, bastards, creeps, freaks (the human kind, not necessarily the other-worldly kind) and other assorted undesirables to just walk on into someone's home and do whatever. And if we are talking about an open apartment door after the bad news already happened, it probably means that the person who used to live there is probably in no state to close the door.
Or maybe that's all just a bunch of paranoia talking. Maybe it was just a case of somebody being too lazy (duh) or too drunk (hiccup) to close the door. Maybe Heather would just walk in on someone who was looking a wee bit befuddled—probably because some skinny girl in dollar-store clothes walked in without being given permission to do so. Oh, why'd I leave the door open, you're asking? Just wasn't feeling up to closing the door, would be the neighbor's reply. No worries.
Maybe, could be, possibly…but no. Heather did not get the good-news side of the equation. What Heather saw inside her neighbor's apartment just wasn't on the good side of things at all unless you're one of those dudes who cheers when the monster in the horror movie makes a mess out of somebody. That's because the place really was a damned mess, a mess that used to be a pair of human beings who lived here.
There was dried gore on the floor of the living room, all over the floor. (Gore on the floor, ha-ha.) The walls had more blood splattered on them too, along with all the furniture in sight. And the ceiling, can't forget the ceiling…which had more of the same.
This place looked like that nutball-artist Jackson Pollock turned psycho-murder and started using ground-up human meat and apartment surfaces as the media used to handle his art. Well, heck and horseradishes. if some people can photograph crosses in urine or put maggoty meat on display in galleries, call it art and get paid by gullible rich people with more money than sense, why not?
Consider this the art of chaos, then. It's the art of a human being having been obliterated and splattered all over and all around. And if some of us folks don't like it, that just means that we don't have a proper appreciation for artistic tastes. Uncultured philistines… Let's just go drink us some booze and watch us some baseball on tee-vee, y'all. And guess what? We'll enjoy ourselves while we do it, too.
Heather sure as Hell wasn't enjoying this. Those big beautiful hazel eyes of hers seemed to get bigger, her hands going to her mouth, trying to keep from screaming if not throwing up. Loud sounds or vomit coming out of her mouth would be a damn sight better than blood though, wouldn't it? Oh, that's right. We've already got lots of red stuff all over the place. A little more probably wouldn't do much. Neither would some mushy stuff. Let's see… Heather had cereal and bagels yesterday, so the stuff would probably end up being gray mixed in with some green.
No vomit forthcoming, Heather went to another apartment door on the first floor—which was also open and freely available for her to look inside. It also had more of the same. Same song, second verse. A little bit gorier, a little bit worse. Blood and gore on the floor, senor. Blood and gore some more. Don't have hard feelings on the stuff stuck on the ceiling.
It was the same for almost all the apartments. Never mind checking out her apartment, because Heather knew that nobody was in there to die when the creatures activated that machine. Her apartment just had her stuff in it. Just stuff. Stuff can be replaced. People can't. There were no other people in this apartment, not living people, not even in one piece. Those who weren't obliterated probably weren't here. And the super, that guy never seems to be around…except when it comes to rent. Or so goes the complaint. Nobody else was scampering around here like a scared girl with a synthetic female buddy, so that must mean that the death-rates were almost total.
To paraphrase a writer who worked in the same genre that Heather's dad used to dabble in, scampering is a waste of energy. Running around, not getting useful things done, that is scampering. Heather stopped scampering. The girl went back to her apartment to call the cops even if those guys weren't always at the top of the game…which was why Heather had that detective agency on tap to deal with possible trouble instead of the local constabulary.
…
2.
…
If this was a horror movie, the arrival of the police at sunrise would be the signal to the audience that means the show is over. The cops are here. Civilization is restored. All the monsters are long gone, and everybody can live happily ever after. Roll the credits and play the mood music. Yeah, then the audience can go back to blissfully, ideal lives of sitting deep and comfortable in gentle suburbs. Thank goodness we don't live in a nightmare like a horror movie.
But guess what, boys and girls? The pol-pols arrived in their neat and clean black-and-whites, but this story really isn't done yet—not really. Some of you can just walk away right now with the knowledge that Heather is safe, that the invaders were thwarted from using the apartment for an invasion staging-area, that the city was not going to end up like Intemelessy's world. Walk away if you want, but we've still got a madman out there somewhere who wants to put an end to all the suburbs, all the cities and all the movies for good. Again, walk away if walking is what's on your mind. You'd be walking away at the wrong time, though.
Heather was back in her apartment—keeping company with a police detective who dressed to the nines but kept asking some pretty stupid questions. They weren't stupid in the I-can't-tie-my-own-shoelaces-'cuz-I-never-graduated-kindergarten sense, they were more stupid in the sense that it was as if the detective was having a hard time believing the Hell apparently happened to almost every inhabitant of this building—everyone except Heather.
Heather didn't mentioned Intemelessy to the cops. Intemelessy, who was actually down the street and at a bar, probably pretending to drink and keeping the locals intrigued. Better there than here, because the cops would probably have a million questions for a strangely dressed girl with nuclear-powered pistols holstered to her hips and a glowing knife-thing strapped at her back. Weirdoes show up at city bars pretty often. Take those college-kids who like dressing up like their favorite foreign cartoons, for example. What do they call them? Cosplayers?
Said and asked the police detective, "So you woke up and found the remains of your neighbors… In their homes?" He glanced down at that little notepad of his before again meeting Heather's annoyed gaze.
Heather smiled before answering, amusing herself with the idea of that the detective was really drawing pornographic stick-figures in that notepad instead of taking notes. Those would be some pretty kinky lines, huh? "Yeah. That's pretty much it. Don't forget the part about the weird noises. Kinda like this. Bang-bang-bang!" Heather balled her right hand into a fist and began hitting the table, making the noise with her mouth too. "Bang-bang-bang!" Bang-bang-bang!
And just as expected, the detective looked a bit disturbed at the loudness of the sound. Correcting his facial expression and posture back to the trained-professional look, he resumed the questioning. "Did the banging sound muffled in any way, as if they occurred indoors? You're the daughter of a famous writer. Have you ever received any threats on your life? Bomb threats, for example?"
"Oh, sure!" went Heather, sounding too bright and cheerful. "People send me death threats all the time. I collect 'em like Pokemon cards. You know, the ones with the little…monsters? If you wanna trade some time, let me know. Death-threat letters, I mean. Not little monsters." Thinking, I've never run into a pikachu in real life, but a few more trips to that screwy town ought to turn up something that looks an awful lot like it.
"Please try be serious, Heather," said the police detective. Since Heather is still a teenager at the ripe young age of nineteen and still looks young enough to be jailbait, it must be okay to call her by her first name, right? (Heh, say that to a woman in a Westernized country and get ready to run.) "I can understand that you have been through a very frightening experience, but we still need some very important information about the bad thing that happened."
Damn, the dude was even talking to Heather as if this girl was a little girl. Don't think that Heather really happy about this. The amount of heated anger in her mind could categorically fit somewhere between lawn-chair in Hell and thermonuclear detonation. Vague images of the police detective ending up like slaughterhouse meat flittered through Heather's mind, along with the various ways that the meat could be prepared for a feast at the zoo. Heather was seething, but decided to kill 'em with kindness.
So the girl put on this big phony smile, tilting her head to a side. "Tha-a-anks…" Putting her head up again, "I'm really glad the professionals are getting the job done right." Two thumbs up. "Good job on solving the case, dude!"
The police detective gave an angry shake of his head. Bingo… "Look! I'm going to be brutally…honest…here!" He emphasized those last three words with angry taps on the table. "We'd like nothing better to do than take you downtown for questioning instead of leaving you in your nice and cozy apartment. Since you were at the scene of the crime when it happened, as it happened, you'd normally be the number-one suspect." He raised a pointer finger, indicating the whole number that comes after zero. "Number…one…suspect.." Finger down. (Never mind if Heather wanted to show him two fingers of her own, one on each hand. You need not be told which fingers they are. Now, back to the pissed-off police geek's rant.) "But then the police chief got wind of you being involved, since you live here. And because the police chief always has an ear to the mayor's policies, you're being given the VIP treatment. Your father's fame alone puts this town on the maps of some pretty high-up people from banking, from New York, probably even Los Angeles. We also know that you've got more money nine times over than the municipal government even if you do live like a hood-rat. So you can get away with murder if you want. All you have to do is hide behind a team of lawyers while the mayor gets us off of your case!"
Heather basked in the glow of victory from having royally pissed off the police detective. More basking could come later because there was still the issue of getting this useless guy out of her apartment. Useless, because the other police were probably already getting started on the paperwork. This guy here was just wasting her time with a million questions.
"You just don't get it, do you?" asked Heather. "No… It's more like you don't want to get it. You saw what happened. All of my neighbors have to be scraped off of the walls. What, do you think I went to everybody's apartment with bombs hidden in brownies, then blew 'em all up when I was far away enough? You've probably never seen anything like that before. Probably makes you feel all sick and stuff too. But it's real. It happened." At this point, the girl leaned back and crossed slim arms. "Now it's your job to explain it in some way that makes some kind of sense. "
Not that Heather was a writer herself, other than writing in her diary, yet the girl knew to pick her words very carefully. It would be completely ape-ship crazy for her to tell the police detective all of the truth. Heather wakes up, everybody's dead, that's true. Also true, a bunch of butt-ugly bastards from beyond were planning on invading this world—invading all the worlds. Some monsters in a giant truck delivered a huge machine that sucked this apartment into an alternate reality…
Never mind it. Heather didn't say a thing about any of that madness to the police detective. Heather had experienced enough madness to last her a few lifetimes, and there was no sense in sharing.
At some point, the police detective shut his notepad and shut his mouth. "Don't leave town," he said before he got up to leave, sound like every clichéd detective in every cornball crime-drama ever made. Heather regretted not seeing what the police detective actually wrote or drew in that little notepad.
…
Later, Heather was sitting in her room—perched on her favorite soft-cushioned tall stool, a book in front of her atop the raised hobby-table. Atop the hobby-table, along with the book of course, there was a big mug of chocolaty coffee in reach, two cloth-dolls near the edge and propped against the wall. The radio was tuned to a local station that always played cool and interesting music. Occasionally, the girl would sip some of the chocolaty coffee from the big mug on her—one hand on the book being read while the other brought the delicious drink to her lips. Turn the page.
Of all the rooms in the apartment, this one was the most comfortable. It was what Heather did after work to chill out, back when Heather still had to work, when her dad wasn't making much money from his books. When her father was still alive, that is. Funny how the works of some people are worth more when they're dead. Her neighbors, dead and gone.
Earlier, Heather was hearing the sounds of people coming back to their apartments from work and not liking what they saw—called back from work because the police told them what happened, the police being done with the place. The neighbors who were still in school wouldn't be told until after school—because the police did not want teenagers and such in school causing a scene and disrupting the educational environment. (Never mind how disrupted the students' lives would be when they found out.)
In all the detective movies and in all the books, the police are supposed to seal off crime scenes for days at a time. Not in this city. The police spend a few hours to get their evidence, they have certified people clean up the place as so nobody gets sick, and then they call the relatives. (Given how low-budget the municipal government is because of all the tax cuts, the locals ought to be lucky that they don't get stuck with the crime-scene clean-up bills.)
There were still distant sounds, muffled sounds of out-loud yelling—followed by the quieter sobs. Other voices comforted them. Even if those others were hurting themselves, they tried.
Heather didn't want to hear it. Damned cheap-thin walls, went a thought. Walls so thin people would probably fall through if they leaned on them hard enough. Closing her bedroom door didn't work. Turning up the radio, that didn't work either. Somebody upstairs stomped in angry misery. Time for some serious reality-blocking equipment.
There was some wine in the fridge—despite the fact that Heather was still two years shy of the legal drinking age and all. (Hey, when you're rich, people sort of look the other way on some things—wink-wink.) But that would mean Heather would have to leave her bedroom, traipse on out to the kitchenette and get the stuff. If Heather was still a smoker, one long drag on a cancer-stick would really settle her nerves. No to that, too. Just no to everything for now, in fact.
Putting a bookmark in the book being read, Heather closed it before getting some headphones out from a drawer. These were some huge and serious-professional things—the kind of noise-cancellation headphones that block out most all outside sounds while being capable of delivering music in surround-sound. They cost a pretty penny. However, Heather had lots of pretty pennies in multiple bank accounts. Too bad, not even all of the pretty pennies in all the banks can bring dead people back in this world. Not her dad, not those killed neighbors, not Douglas, not anybody.
Now comes the breakdown. Feeling a hot flush coming to her face and her eyes blurring over, Heather quickly plugged the surround-sound headphones in her dollar-store stereo set still on the hobby-table. The headphone cord was extra-long and allowed her to crawl into bed and curl up with the things still covering her ears.
Lots of songs played on the radio, songs from the local college station. College stations, whenever they're not covering the local sporting events, they tend to play some good music from artists that not too many people have heard. That's because the Disney-pop mainstream artists are too busy drowning out everyone else. Nah, Heather wanted her kind of music. Small comfort, yet it was some comfort. Went one of the songs on the radio, through her earphones…
Toss over
…and turn.
Feel the spark
…don't let it burn.
We all want.
We all yearn.
Be soft
…don't be stern.
Lull-l-l-a-by…
Love's not supposed to make you cry.
I sang the words, amen.
I…sa-a-a-ang…