Silent Hill: A Pale Reflection

by Elliot Bowers

"Never Grow Old"

music and lyrics by Rubyhorse

Chapter 14

…

1.

…

Moments faded in…and faded right back out again. The girl barely felt herself being here. Most of her was somewhere else sometimes. Even that wasn't certain, not sure of being here, not really anywhere. Things just went gently on by, coming and going.

How is that supposed to make any kind of sense? Nothing can exist nowhere. In other words, everything has to be somewhere. That includes the minds of skinny nineteen-year-old girls who dress up in trailer-trash clothes, dye their hair blonde and work at mall bookstores. Does it make logical sense? Of course not. It makes its own kind of sense.

Fade in, the girl saw a ceiling made of rusted grating through dimmed vision—herself drifting along. Circular light fixtures glared down. The glaring white brightness of the light fixtures made the darkness beyond the grates look even darker and…fade out.

Fade in again, a blurry red creature in darkness stood over her stilled and helpless body. The creature had a huge head of of wet, cancerous living meat. If head-size was an indicator of intelligence, then the thing was probably worth three Einstein-brains duct-taped together and with synapses firing full speed. Don't try glue for brains, because brains are wet and squishy, and they won't stick…. Suffice to say, nasty as the thing was, it was really smart when it came to using the strange machines. The creature was doing something very important pertaining to the business at hand. It was getting ready to use the machines for the girl's sake. Fade out…

Fade in, one of those strange machines was in a crimson-lit room of metal-brick walls. Those bricks were made of lead, because this room was all full of the bad radiation given off by the machine. The hard radiation was so intense that one could actually feel it like heat as the very flesh of one's body was reacting. Nobody in their right mind would be here willingly. That engine-machine was gushing out all of that hard radiation and more. Fade out.

…

Fade in… An engine-machine was still rumbling as Heather felt eased sideways into a seat. Her eyes opened…to see close-up a cold glass surface. The only thing visible beyond the glass was a roadway blurring by. It was just so dark out that only the side-running lights of the bus made the road surface visible.

That's right. This was a bus. This was Heather in the bus…or on the bus in more common parlance. Now that made the still-drowsy girl give pause. Thinking, Why the heck do people say, being on the bus? You'd think they got some hapless guy up to the roof and lashed 'em down with flexy bungee cord or something. It'd be a scary ride, especially getting round corners, but I'd bet the view would be pretty awesome. People are not lashed to the tops of busses. Normal people ride in busses—at least the busses Heather used. Other countries have busses where people can ride on top and have an open-air view, but not Heather's country. They also rode on the wrong side of the road too, and they called fuel by a funny name. Anyway, why don't people say, in the bus? It'd make loads more sense. Languages are funny like that at times, not always making sense…

Heather's mind was feeling a little without sense. All of her senses and sensibilities were a little bit out of whack. Getting a grip on her sense of place was a tad bit hard to do at the moment.

And then, there was the matter of this being a bus. A bus, of all places, how and why did that machine put them on a bus? So thought the girl in sitting up and looking around the florescent-lit interior of a gray, long-haul passenger vehicle. Funny how much the interiors of these huge land-based means of transportation resembled that of jet-plane passenger compartments—high-backed seats left and right of a narrow aisle. Way at the back was a privy. The thing was probably just the right size for one dwarf at a time on the plastic john. Over the seats and running most the length of the bus was a long series of compartments for luggage. The driver's area was up front with a light-up electronic sign for information. Of all places, a bus was anti-mystical. "And fair greetings to you as well, sleeping one."

That was Janice, sitting in the seat across the aisle. Pale as usual, certainly too tall and slender to be a dwarf, Janice was sitting sideways in the seat to the left. It had to be sideways because those long elegant legs of hers were not easily served with the amount of space allocated per seat. Her long black-leather coat was closed (for once) and belted at the waist, yet clinging just enough to show the slimness of the body beneath. Her big eyes stared, black-lipsticked lips with just a hint of mirth.

"Go ahead and say something else," said Heather, turning to face the tall seated girl of gothic inspiration. "Go ahead and make some other stupid crack about me falling asleep at the worst of times. Say it before I get a shot at asking about where the Hell we are this time." Though I would actually prefer taking a shot at you with something sawed-off and double-barreled.

"Oh, dear goodness, why-ever would I—of all beings—speak with such negativity in regards to your condition!" went Janice, her sweet voice thick with poisonous sarcasm. Her hands folded high on her left breast, just around the place in her chest where her heart would be if Janice had a heart. "I do so deeply care more for your health than I do for the well-being of my domain, the status of which was put in jeopardy due to your own doings."

"Just shut up about your domain already!" yelled Heather. More quietly, "Is that all you care about? You make yourself seem like some kind of princess or something. Maybe I'd care about your domain if I knew what it was, but that's really doubtful. "

Janice's dark eyes narrowed to angry slits, yet her sweet-poison voice remained even. "Having been there too many times yourself, corrupted as it is, you are quite familiar with it. That is all I shall explicitly say regarding details of the latter. You are perceptive enough to understand an answer from there."

What place was familiar? From what Janice said, that could be anywhere Heather had been often. What, did Janice think herself the Princess of the Central Square Mall Employees-Only Areas or some crap like that? Heather's own place of work wasn't really a corrupted domain unless one thought about the romance (porn) novels sold for lonely women looking for naughty literary thrills. Write up some porn, call it literature and sell it out in public. Now that's a great racket…pervie as it may be.

Nah, that couldn't be Janice's kingdom…or princess-dom, or whatever. How about…Princess of The Apartment Buildings? That place was definitely corrupt in the physical sense—the wiring and plumbing not being in the best of shape. Neither was the tiled floor of the building's first level. And who knows? Maybe the super was doing something shady on the side to corrupt local politicians. How else could that building pass building-code inspections and stuff?

If not that, then maybe Janice's domain was the bathroom! Hey, why not? Janice did say that Heather ought to be familiar with that place, and everybody knows bathrooms from using them all the time. If they don't, then they'd best see a doctor. Don't forget about the all-important, water-filled porcelain throne. But shouldn't a princess of porcelain have a taste in clothing that was more on the brighter and shinier side, just like how bathrooms are all shiny and tiley? Maybe Janice ought to trade in that goth-death getup for a toilet-paper gown of royalty and a scrub-brush tiara. On the other hand, who knows what a toilet-bowl princess supposed to look like anyway? Then Heather thought about another place where fate took her, again and again, a certainscrewed-up town. Was Heather there too often? Being there even once was too often for anybody. Being in bizarro-world alternate universes more than once was also too often for the sake of anybody's sanity. Heather wasn't the only one dragged in on the fun, though. Speak of which…

"Hey, where's that Janitor guy?" asked Heather, standing up from her seat and looking around the bus. Had Heather been of average height, standing like this would mean ducking down beneath the overhead baggage compartment. That was one advantage of being short—not having to duck too often. It didn't make the short jokes worth it. Nevertheless, it was a boon to someone who didn't want to be stoop-shouldered and hunch-backed later in life from having to duck down too often.

The so-called Janitor-guy leaned left to look out into the passenger aisle, gave a wave of his right hand. He was actually at the front-seat of the bus, closest to the driver. "Hey back there! Just passin' the time with the entity that's kind enough to get us to the right place."

Are you kidding me? Since when is a bus driver an entity? Heather guessed it must be so ever since floor-scrubs started having their professions capitalized like important titles. Hah, pistol-toting Janitors, claiming to be helping save the stability of the universe or some deranged superhero stuff like that. Deranged was the adjective because people like that ought to be thrown head-first into the loony bin and not let them out 'til they were better.

Yeah! Thrown 'em in the loony bin 'til they're better…just like the other me, thought the girl, sitting down and suddenly regretting previous considerations. No doubt her own Dad—when he was alive—had considered doing something like that. Heather remembered back some years when blank-fronted envelopes came in the mail. Curiosity made her hold them up to the kitchen light to see sentences in the unopened letters. Those sentences included words such as mental health and counseling. So what if Heather had the occasional angry fit? At least her father's concern wasn't because of her not liking boys. Dad was too enlightened a guy to consider that abnormal. Still, the girl's fiery fits of anger, the acts of petty crime, the underaged smoking, those couldn't be rightly be said to be parts of acceptable behavior. Being sane meant being acceptable depending on whatever society one lived in.

Heather heard the Janitor making his way back here to the center-seats of the bus, herself leaning over to get her a view of him coming this way. He had this big grin on his face as he sat down in a seat diagonally forward-left of Heather's—sitting sideways and leaning forward as so he could talk and be seen by the two others riding here. And he was still grinning. For cripes' sakes, how can that guy have a goofy grin on his mug in a situation like this?

Said the Janitor, "Okay, we're on the right way now. Turns out our location did a shift on us. Now we've got a little mercy and consideration on our side to help us go the right way. We're blessed."

Asked Heather, "Being 'blessed?' Is that what you wanna call this? Since when is a bus something holy? Like something just reached down from on-high and saved us from Hell or something, putting us on a ride where some hard-scrub guys have to use spatulas to get gum off the floor and wipe snot off the windows? How is that holy?" The girl leaned forward. "That sounds a little too much like religious craziness to me, and I've heard all the religion-talk I need for a lifetime. Make that more than one lifetime."

"More than one lifetime, you say. And you deny impeding upon my domain!" came Janice's surprisingly agitated voice. Heather suddenly looked at Janice—whose normally smooth manner was overcome with a surprising degree of anger. "Mark my words! We may yet be sisters in origin. Yet, even sisters are to respect each others' laws. Such laws that must not go unheeded."

Thought Heather, Hey, I'm supposed to be the one getting angry around here! "You know what, Janice? I still don't get what you're talking about." A smile spread Heather's lips. "Well maybe if you decided to stop ranting in riddles and started using normal language like everybody else, maybe people would understand what your beef is."

Said this angry Janice, "You know full well the nature of the transgression! By your own admission, you have in fact partaken of it. My servants may temporarily be indisposed, yet you must be chastised soon enough for your bold manner."

This made Heather's smile even brighter, her thinking, So goth-girl can't call up her invisible buddies for now? The fact that Janice couldn't hurt Heather for the moment was a bonus. This is way too cool. Now I can talk all the trash I want.

It wasn't way too cool for long. Clank-k-k! Something slammed something else hard, the bus lurching to the left, and darkness rushed down on everything—the lights of the bus… Boom-boom, out go the lights! So did Heather's lights…

…

2.

…

Heather was barely aware of what was done after that. Smooth-scaled hands—cold hands—grabbed her ankles and hefted her aloft as easily as one would snatch up a mannequin. The girl was particularly light and easy to lift. Even so, light or heavy, the inhumanly strong hands that grabbed her would probably have had an easy time of picking up anyone. Those hands lifted her up high enough to heft her onto a cold hard-fleshed shoulder that was too huge and muscular to be humanly possible.

Well, whoever said that humans were the only ones with shoulders? This must be the shoulders of an unseen servant—one of Janice's invisible boys. Gosh-golly, no wonder why those jokers were so darned strong. They were probably built like the living equivalent of wrecking machines.

Heather let herself get carried along. It wasn't like the girl was able to do much else anyway—being knocked silly by that bus crash. Things would be just fine so long as those hands on her didn't get personal. The girl would also like to not see the face of whatever thing was carrying her. That was okay as well—because a person could not see the face of the invisible servant with just human eyes.

The invisible servant lowered Heather butt-first onto a hard smooth surface and propped her up. Heather had just barely enough strength to sit up and not go slumping over. Sitting like that would mean her tits would be smooshed against her thighs. So Heather stayed sitting up her senses barely…started getting right again. Even somebody nearly knocked senseless knows a bus-stop on sight, even at night, especially somebody who's been using them for all of her adult life. That would be even if Heather was just two years into her adult life anyway.

A streetlamp with a one-story post shone down on this bus-stop with a dim electric-blue light. The bus stop itself was just a wide, backless-metal bench with support posts set in a gray concrete rectangle. This concrete square was set before the darkened highway which the bus must have used in getting here. Heather could only assume it was just a section of desert highway because—looking left and right—beyond the hazy reach of the streetlamp, the girl could not see anything else. It was as if this place was in an ocean of darkness. No, that wasn't quite right. Just barely, if Heather stared, there was a landscape out there—a dark and hazy-gray desert landscape…

Said Janice from behind, "I spare you the customary verbal goading and shall instead give appraisal of our situation. Suffice to say that we have somehow arrived at a location within the vicinity of our intended destination."

Though her head was still spinning a little, Heather turned herself around on the backless bench to see Janice leaning against the streetlamp. The artificial light from above made Janice's goth-pale skin look even more pale and therefore more gothy, her leather mini-skirted dress and open jacket looking darker still. With a slender body clad in something tight and revealing, Janice looked a lot like someone who stood beneath street lamps at night as part of a certain carnal profession. Then again, knowing Janice, anybody who paid her for a night of good times would probably wake up dead.

The Janitor did not wake up dead. He was slumped behind her against the same pole. That guy looked like the end-result of too much free time on a weekend night and in one piece. Even working stiffs needed their good times. Work hard, and play hard. That was the motto. Except the Janitor hasn't had hard-core play-time in a while. Trying to maintain the fabric of reality didn't give too much time off for breaks, the pay was terrible, and some of his current co-workers were the worst.

Beyond Janice, the Janitor and the street-lamp was the parking lot of a one-story motel. Both the parking lot and motel were well-lit against the surrounding night. The motel, that was important.

The structure was a one-story concrete deal that could be found along any stretch of highway. They always had generically eye-rolling names like The Motor Lodge or The Highway Inn. It was bad when the names got cute, like using alliteration—Motor Motel or Indian Inn. Busses and cars ought to stock barf bags when taking in sight of these things, because they were so boring and trite in monickers that they'd make a girl sick with disgust. Can't people be more creative for once? Thank goodness the motel billboard didn't have a name painted on it, because the name would probably just make her hurl with boredom ahnyay.

Janice's leggy stride took her some paces away as the Janitor began to stir, the Janitor reaching to the soft-cap atop his head as he looked around. "We're alive, baby! Not too shabby a state to be in."

"Speak for yourself," went Heather, right hand going to a side of that blonde-haired head of hers. "The way that bus ride went, I'm starting to feel like it ran over our heads before it left."

"Yeah, and we're kinda lucky headaches are all that we've got from the transition," said the Janitor. He then slipped into phrasing that was no doubt drilled into him from whatever training he received in whatever alternate reality or time period he was from. "Transition symptoms can range slight headaches and disorientation to severe nausea and temporary hallucinations, visual or auditory." He slipped back into his own common verbal patterns. "In short, it's gonna feel like we're suckin' for a little while."

"Sucking what," responded Heather. "Never mind. Don't answer that. Janice's looks like everything's all fine and dandy. Well, that's except for her domain and stuff."

"And stuff," mocked Janice. "In a previous incarnation, you were just so much more articulate in this tongue. They are present just beneath your consciousness, and I am tempted to have them reassert themselves within you at this very moment. It would be a simple matter for me to reassert those verbal patterns within your brain."

"Leave my brain outta this," said Heather. "It feels stirred up enough already." Crossing lithe arms over her midsection, the girl looked around—darkness around the bus-stop and the nearby motel. "Anyway, I thought you said that weird bus was going to take us to where we had to be. This doesn't look like anywhere that anybody needs to be. Is this anywhere?"

The Janitor gave an impatient shake of his head, which made him give pause from where he still sat slumped. Disorientation doesn't go well with shaking one's braincase. "Don't bad-mouth that good one. He gave us the ride here. He could have just left us to be where we were forever. Forever is a long time. But he didn't take us here without a good reason. And who knows, maybe you'll need his mercy again after we're done." Or maybe, Heather bad-mouthing the entity driving the bus led to them being dumped here—wherever here was.

"That still doesn't answer my question!" insisted Heather. "Where is this place? You said we were close enough. All I see is some motel and…" The girl paused. "A whole bunch of nothing all around."

Heather felt like such a liar even before finishing that statement. There wasn't just nothing out there in the night-darkened desert landscape. Oh yes, the girl knew that it was desert out there though no light shone down on it—dusty desert-like land. No, it was worse than desert-land. It was deadland, a wastedplace. If it was daytime, a person would see a forbidding and broken-down landscape that looked so desolate that it may as well be real-estate transplanted straight from the moon. Scientists used to have theories like the moon breaking off from the Earth all those billions of years ago when the solar system was formed. Of course, the Earth and moon had changed since their long geological divorce—the Earth having gotten all manner of slimy creatures coming out from the salty wetness of the oceans, some of them growing up evolutionarily to be backboned, naked-skinned creatures that had fur on tops of their noggins, fur somewhere else too, and still with slimy stuff inside.

Something laughed. It wasn't the Janitor making that laugh. And it definitely wasn't Janice. Heather didn't want to stick around to meet the thing that made the noise. Now it felt like the darkness was growing eyes. Dozens of eyes could be focusing on them right now. So… "Hey! Let's say we have a look inside that motel. Any port in storm huh?"

The Janitor nodded to Heather's obvious suggestion. He also gave a pat to his right hip and let hands dangle loosely at his sides, a dark shape suddenly in his right hand. Just like that, he had drawn his pistol without making a fuss of it. Yes, if there will be trouble, there will be blood. He said, "Now let's just make our easy way to that place. We're gonna be calm as clay as we move too, right?"

"Right," agreed Heather while doing her best to not notice the moving, humped shapes just beyond the illuminated motel parking lot. Her legs were shaky as anything. And as was becoming a habit, the petite girl then crossed her arms over her tight and quivering tummy, walking that way to keep said limbs from shaking so much. Don't scream… Don't try to run and look like a stupid idiot.

Past experience told Heather that the shambling, malformed things involved in this sort of craziness were generally handicapped. They were often too compromised physically to keep up with a decent set of running human legs. Calling the creatures handicapped, was that politically correct? Yet that was just past experience.

That was also not all of Heather's experiences. There were those shell-backed things with some really fast legs. Now imagine something with a fast pair of legs and a really big mouth all full of sharpened chompers…

Don't imagine it, because those things could be in the darkness around the parking lot right now. It was not a very big parking lot for that motel. Maybe it was wide enough for eighteen cars parked side by side. Only three cars were parked there now, though—plenty of room in even that modest parking area. Small as the lot was, it still felt like this was taking too long to calmly cross the paved surface. Who knows what the Hell was waiting to rush into the light and get them? Who knows what order of things was from out in the nearby ruined landscape in depths of darkness?

Heather forced herself to still keep going in a calm manner if her body was feeling like the opposite of calm. Janice was meanwhile somewhere behind Heather and taking her sweet-assed time. It was like the taller girl was saying, See how calm I am, unlike you? Heather looked back to see the goth-girl supreme not looking like an unknown number of unknown things were just waiting to rush in.

As her steps carried her along, her mind considered what could have happened here—making the ground look as wasted and as dried-dead as moonscape. Maybe a little nuclear warfare did that, blasting the forests and plains into lifeless and irradiated dusty plains until they looked like what one saw on gray face of that big round interplanetary neighbor in the sky at night. Nuke Earth. Make it look like the moon.

The nuked, lifeless plains would stay in place long after the rich psychos in comfy government chairs told the grim-jawed military guys in underground silos to press the proverbial doomsday button. They actually had to read codes, confirm those codes, turn keys, and do several other arcane steps of security procedures before nuclear armageddon could get a move on. But, the idea of one simple button for doomsday is just so much more a simple idea, simpler and catchier.

Or perhaps a little biological warfare was in order, nasty little demons that killed off anything and everything multicellular in nature. Those nasty little bastards were so small that not even light was big enough to see them, and scientists debated for decades if they were really alive—those viruses. After they've eradicated all known forms of life, the tiny gazillions of things would go into spore form—invisible and unseen in the soil—waiting around for a few thousand years or so just in case other forms of life tried to make its way in the world. So there you have it. Not only would nuclear and biological warfare kill off everything in the world now. Those bad boys could keep on killing and killing some more centuries into the future. Nuclear and biological warfare are the gifts that keep on giving.

Even those assumptions about all of life on Earth being killed off could be wrong. Life on Earth was said to be billions of years old. So some two-legged creatures with decidedly powerful brains and a spare set of limbs used to make stuff decide to put on a little armageddon-grade warfare, so what? That didn't abso-positive-a-lutely mean that everything on the planet would be killed off. Who's to say that some things couldn't change and live on? And, who was to say that some scrambling surviving bits of humanity couldn't change in order to live on? They wouldn't exactly look human anymore, yet they would still be out there in the land and getting on as best as they could.

Some of those things were most likely sitting out there in the vast darkness, the darkness out there beyond the light of the bus-stop streetlamp and the exterior lights of the motel. Billy-Joe and Emma-Jane, the post-nuclear creatures they turned out to be, could be sitting out there with just about a hundred of their misbegotten brethren, all of them with running sores for skin and stunted extra limbs, just waiting to see if it was safe to run in and make a quick meal of those tasty-looking new arrivals, their clean-looking flesh and slender-tender bodies… Never mind the clothes they wore to cover their naked, tasty flesh. Consider it gift-wrapping. Just unwrap the tasty meat and get to eating…

And finally, they made it through the motel parking lot and to the front door. The Janitor tried the door handle and pulled. "It's open," he said, opening the door and standing aside—pistol held with muzzle upwards and ready. He was scared and looked ready to bolt indoors himself, but that training he got from long ago told him to never leave battle-buddies behind. "Ladies first."

Screw being calm! Calm as clay? Whatever! Heather dashed those last few steps into the foyer. Janice did a curtsey, bending her legs and bowing ballerina-style while spreading out the bottom-hem of her long-coat with pinched fingertips. No way could Janice spread the foreshortened bottom of that dress itself. Once Janice got in, the Janitor followed and locked the door.

…

3.

…

Inside the motel was a place that looked like nothing especially bad or wrong had happened. In here was a softly lit living room-sized space, hard gray carpeting on the floor with a long check-in counter to the right—feeling a bit homely because the two yellow-shaded lamps on the long counter made for the warm illumination. A tall stool behind the counter was set as so the guy handling check-in would just sit up on that thing and wait for folks to come by. Next to that was another stool with a small TV atop it, serving as passive entertainment in the meanwhile in waiting for guests.

Of course, the check-in guy wasn't there. Maybe he lost his mind and ran out into the darkness to join those creatures for evening dinner, with him being the main course. Bring-your-own-bottle is one thing. Bring-your-own-body is another.

While the Janitor walked round behind the counter to have a look for keys and maps and all that kind of practical-tactical stuff, Heather leaned forward with elbows on the wooden surface—her eyes taking in sight of the television's blank face. Funny thing, outside of her own place, it had been a long time since the girl had seen a TV with analog turn-knobs and an honest-to-goodness pair of metal antennas sticking out the top—what they used to call bunny ears. All the TVs Heather saw sold in the mall shops had buttons and were cable-ready, with fancy digital-input gizmo-attachments. They must've stopped making analog sets ages ago. How old was that thing? How old was this place for that matter, and why hadn't those freaks outside ravaged this setup long ago?

Then Heather knew why. "They're afraid of light," was her answer, said aloud. Janice here and the Janitor over there looked quizzically at this skinny girl in jeans and midriff-revealing top. "Those things in the dark don't like light because it reminds them of whatever the Hell happened. Even if the bad stuff happened a really, really long time ago, they've probably been telling each other that brightness is the evil thing that cooked the world or something."

"Hmmph… Yeah! That makes too much sense to not be true," agreed the Janitor. "You sure you ain't been here before?"

"If not here before," chimed in Janice, "then my sister could have perhaps sampled the local news dispatches. Why-ever not? Her place of low-wage labor is indeed a place of reading material sold to the masses."

Heather turned to see that Janice was now elsewhere in this foyer, holding a newspaper that looked as grayed as the counter and the carpet. "In some way, shape or form, the mortals have indeed decided to try erasing themselves from existence by way of warfare…and conveniently saving my kind from the burden!"

On one hand, a person didn't want to read that paper of destruction, doom and gloom. On the other, there was no way that one could resist reading it. "Gimme," said Heather, taking the paper from Janice. The dim light from the lamps was still enough light to read the paper by.

This paper made for very interesting reading… And that is what journalists do—craft stories of interesting reading. All too often that interesting reading meant death and destruction. If it bleeds, it leads. Car accidents, train-wrecks, warfare and natural disasters make for fascinating news coverage, all dripping with spilled blood and burst bodies and severed limbs scattered higgledy-piggledy throughout the pages, described with words and shown in pictures.

Yet the stuff described in this particular newspaper made thoughts of train-wrecks seem like events at a teddybear's picnic. The front article tantalizingly described the escalating tensions from Russia and a bunch of countries that most people didn't care about. Threats of War, went one headline—talking about how President So-and-So while Prime Minister Such-and-Such said they were going to proudly defend their proud nation of Whatever-Land with overwhelming response to any provocations. It seemed like all the same-old, lame-old blah-blah-blah from scumbag-airbag politicians until one considered the dead darkness outside. A nuked world wasn't so blah-blah-blah after all, those millionaire idiots thinking they could have the world nuked. Destroy the world while they stay safe in luxury hidey-holes beneath the grounds of their mansion-estates—all nice and cozy, sipping burbon and banging their whores (male and female) until the radioactive holocaust blew over…so to speak.

Guess what? It didn't just blow over. This world stayed nuked. Things didn't get to be good enough as so those rich idiots could come out of their underground shelters to rule the world—what was left of it. Their world was destroyed, and so was hope of their future existence. Heather had the idea that some places in this world probably had places of underground luxury where the skeletons of those rich-idiot politicians sat. There sat the bony remains, dressed in scraps of rotting silk business-jackets and slacks, skulls grinning just like their once-fleshed faces grinned for the news cameras in promising better futures under their leadership. Some future it turned out to be. Her assumptions about this place being the ass-end result of a future World-War Triple-I was uncannily correct.

What part of the future? Heather turned back to the front page…and saw that the dateline had been conveniently and neatly nipped out. The way they were taken out, it looked like it was done by hand—probably doen by a certain set of black-painted fingernails. And only one person in this nightlamp-illuminated room was obsessed with fashion-accessorizing to the color of the night. In fact, all the datelines were missing. "Janice?" asked Heather. "What's the date on this newspaper?"

"Oh, why-ever should I know?" asked Janice, smiling. "Does it really matter when? This isn't your place and time to fret over. It very well appears that all the fretting to be done has already come to pass."

But it could be. Some of those names in the newspaper were very familiar. And some of their words were familiar as well—heard on radio news-breaks between songs. That weird bus could have taken them into another time instead of another place to leave them stranded. If so, they were screwed. Then Heather did hear a radio—fading in with…a loud muffled hissing.

…

Oh goodness, it seems that certain people have heard the beginnings of a radio fading into their nearest plane of existence. They are privileged, yes privileged, to hear the beginnings of another moment. What kind of moment? What other kind of radio moment is there around here, wherever here happens to be? Yes, indeed. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, creatures in all stages of physical development, it is time for another…Silent Hill Radio Moment.

A country-sounding guitar got the thing started, slight taps from a light snare-drum in the background before other sounds formed a harmonic background. Then a country-sounding man began gently singing…

By myself…

…for the rest

…of the day!

Feelin' hours

…steal away-y-y!

Or am I just a dreamer...with a brittle heart of gold?

Swear I'm never, ever growin' old.

Anything can happen

…in a flash-h-h!

True love leave you up

…the garden pass.

Oh I don't understand this

…this feelin' in my bones.

I know that it's time

…when I'm meant

…to prepare to go.

Paper planes and wooden cars!

Elevators…to the stars!

Where in the world, are you then?

Faster than the speed of light!

You never even left my sight

Where in the world, are you then?

Tell me, Mary.

Tell me where you've been.

Sleepin' in the woods…with the trees?

There's nothing behind the door

…or under the bed.

Go to sleep…again…

P-a-a-per planes and wo-o-ooden cars!

El-e-vators to the sta-a-a-rs!

Where in the world, are you then?

Faster tha-a-an the speed of light!

You never even left my sight!

Where in the world, are you then?

Or am I just a dreamer with a brittle heart of gold?

Swear I'm never…ever…growin' old…

A wash of static finished out the trailing end of the tune. The radio faded out from here not too much longer. This Silent Hill Radio Moment is over, the radio fading out of this reality before light came to spoil the fun.

…

Ka-blam-m-m! After kicking open the door, the Janitor dashed into the motel room and then sidestepped, his weapon ready to put a few holes hole in anyone or anything that was ready to cause trouble. If lights in the room had been off, the illumination from the carpeted motel hallway would have been enough to see—no time to click on a wall-switch after kicking open a door.

A light was on anyway, a bed-side lamp. It allowed the Janitor to see any and all possible threats, anything that moved. What could be a threat worthy of being shot? Not the motel-room bed, not the turned-on lamp and not the desk—though the nightstand did have four feet. Those were wooden feet, not real feet thank goodness. Could a nightstand have real feet and use them to start a ruckus? Stranger things have happened, especially when one was dealing with stuff related to—everybody say it altogether now—stuff related to…that screwed-up town!

Heather walked into the room next while Janice leaned against the doorjamb and crossed boot-encased ankles. "I heard a radio get turned on from this room," said Heather. "It sounded all staticky and messed up. Didn't you hear it too?"

"Yeah, I heard," said the Janitor, beginning to walk slowly along the perimeter of this motel room. "It wasn't really as messed up as a person would think. The radio was only playin' backwards. If we had some kinda recorder goin', we coulda understood what it was sayin'."

"Why the Hell would anybody play a song backwards?" asked Heather before a stray thought answered her own question. The girl remembered reading about how some religious holy-rollers used to say that Satanic messages were in rock-and-roll records. Such messages were allegedly audible when one played the records backwards. That didn't apply much in an age when people had fancy electronic stuff like CDs and those little expensive players that Heather saw the other kids having. A person can't reach into a CD player and turn it backwards, and those little plastic music-player things didn't have any parts to turn at all.

"Somebody had ta turn that radio on, though," said the Janitor in still looking around and not seeing a radio in sight. "Somebody musta also turned on the lamp in here." He passed a second corner of the room. "None of the other rooms got light spillin' out from the crack between the floor and bottoms of doors, so whoever or whatever's here musta been here. Maybe still here." Crack-k-k!

His pistol sounded like a thunderbolt in the quiet and peace, a fist-sized jagged hole now in the door of the closet. A typical pistol firing small-caliber, full metal-jacket rounds will actually punch a neat little dime-shaped hole in wood. Such a pistol will also make a sound no louder or more offensive than a single firecracker. The Janitor's pistol is not a typical firearm, and that gaping void blasted in the wood was not the result of a neat little small-caliber round.

"Jeez! What was that for! Have you gone psycho?" yelled Heather, wincing and putting hands over her ears. Yes, her hands were over her ears even if the temporary damage to her hearing was already done.

But the Janitor wasn't done yet. He strode over to the bed… Crack! Crack, crack! That lean-jawed man in work-clothes and coveralls shot the bed three times, every squeeze of the trigger making a loud sound matched with what looked like an unseen fist striking the cushioned surface.

"What the Hell, dude!" yelled Heather, yelling partially because her ears were still ringing—and partially because yelling was the thing to do when one was a little angry. "Are you trying to make me deaf before my time?"

The Janitor stood there for some seconds with his pistol still up and ready, eyes looking around. He spoke loudly enough. "Better safe than sorry, girl! Coulda been somethin' in the in the closet and hidin' behind the door, or somethin' waiting for us underneath that sleeper. Those things outside may be afraid of light, but still… Maybe not all of 'em are afraid of light."

"Oh great! That's…comforting…" went Heather as a yawn forced a pause. "Now that you've staked out the room all action-hero style, I'm gonna crash on the bed you just shot up. After all, there's nothing underneath there. At least nothing that's alive anymore…"

That said, the girl staggered over to the bed, took off her sneakers to reveal a little pair of footie-socks and flopped herself back-first onto the soft comfort, her hands at her sides. Easy as that, the girl was knocked out by exhaustion. Somehow this was done with the comfort that this safe place would keep her here. This was the world the dreaming would have taken her to anyway.