Chapter 21

Again

"So darling, if you're not here haunting me,

I'm wondering who's house are you haunting tonight?"

"Oh Lately It's So Quiet," OK Go

(Oh No)

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The feeling of slipping away, not into unconsciousness or back but into some kind of split state between the two, was very uncomfortable...but not nearly as much so as the feeling of returning to the land of the living, which came mere moments later. Walter awoke in the middle of the night, feeling the palms of his hands and the seat of his pants (for he was in a sitting position) pressing against some cold, hard surface. He wasn't exactly sure where he was, even when he saw the moon shining bright up above, just that he was back in Silent Hill...in a sense. He knew this wasn't the real Silent Hill. He wondered if there even was such a thing as the "real" Silent Hill. He wondered if the town he'd known about and visited off-and-on all these years was really just an illusion in itself, the inhabitants no more than projections of the damned--either the damned, or those unlucky enough to venture upon the place by accident.

These grim but somehow cliched thoughts were blown from his mind, however, once he remembered Henry. He rose to his feet, feeling his heart speed up. "Henry!" He cried out, cupping his hands over his mouth. He opened his mouth to shout again when a tired groan came from just a few feet to the left.

"Dammit," Henry said, sitting up. He'd awakened more slowly than Walter had. "Stop shouting," he mumbled, raising a hand to his forehead as if in pain. "My head is killing me. What just happened?"

"I don't entirely know," Walter said. "Last thing I remember is..." and then he remembered. "Yeah, I don't remember," he lied.

"I remember...I remember a dark place, and a monster or something," Henry said. "Oh, well. We're here now, so I suppose we'd better go ahead with our business. I don't like this place."

"You mean your business," Walter said. "I don't even know what the hell I'm supposed to do here." He looked around him at the night, which seemed to loom up around him on all sides like the wings of a wicked venus fly trap.

Pretty accurate metaphor, when he thought about it. They were probably really lucky to even still be alive, but for some reason he just didn't feel relieved. He didn't feel that grateful, renewed sense of vitality that a close call normally brought him. It could be because he knew there were likely more similar events to come; it could be because he was worried about the unnamed task which waited up ahead on the path for him; or it could simply be because he didn't care, and had given up. Or perhaps it was a combination of the three.

"Did you have other plans?" Henry asked, still sounding like he was stoned. It crossed Walter's mind that Henry had sounded like that since they had met, back in the prison cell, and that he hadn't really noticed. Weird. He wondered if Henry was the type to dabble in the drug underworld from time to time. Walter himself wasn't--he was too afraid of getting killed or addicted, or something else--but even though Henry seemed more prudish than himself, Walter knew that such people were usually capable of concealing their negative habits very well.

"No," Walter said. "Just musing."

"You mean complaining."

"Whatever."

"Well," Henry began, "my original plan was just to see that gravesite, both to satisfy my curiosity and to put this Other Walter mystery to rest. But I wasn't really expecting to find what we did--or, rather, what we didn't. I hadn't really sat down and thought about what I would do if I didn't find what I was hoping to find."

"So, what?" Walter shrugged. "Just give up? Turn back?"

"No," Henry said, his jaw protruding. "Not quite. Not yet. I've got this gut feeling...call it instinct...that empty grave means there's something more to this. As long as there's a plothole in this story, I won't ever be able to sleep right again. That hole means that there's something I haven't tackled yet. I don't want to leave any stone unturned, for fear of whatever this unknown thing is coming back to bite me."

"Or haunt you," Walter said for no apparent reason.

Henry turned. "What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing," Walter said, backing up a step. "I was just using a metaphor, jeez..."

Eyeing him, Henry turned back down the street. "I can't tell where we are. Can you see any roadsigns?"

"Yeah," Walter said, pointing at a corner to the right. "It says we're right at the intersection of Neely and Katz...but that can't be right. We were way down by Lindsey a minute ago."

"We were?" Henry said. "But I thought we were underground? You mean when that thing was chasing me?"

"No," he said. "Before that. Sorry, I forgot you weren't with me. I was..." he trailed off, hesitating before he shook his head. "No. You know what? Nevermind. Let's just figure out where to go and then go there. Don't think about this crap, or you'll go crazy."

Henry regarded him with raised eyebrows.

"I don't do this often," Walter told him, waving him away with one hand. "So sue me."

"This is only my second time," Henry said.

"Well, that's one more time than me."

"Hey, who's that?"

Walter turned to face the direction Henry was pointing--west-southwest down Katz Street--reaching for the gun he expected to find in his holster...only to find that it was no longer there. "What the hell?"

"Hey!" Henry said, and broke into a run down the street. "Hey, wait!"

"What's the deal?" Walter said, following Henry while trying to search his waistband and the ground around him for the gun. He must have dropped it during the fall. Great. It was probably lying at the bottom of a dark pit in that crazy place.

"I see somebody!" Henry hollered back to him, and when Walter looked up, he realized that he could see someone, too. A short person, probably a girl. He couldn't tell anything else about her, except that she seemed to be wearing some kind of short dress, perhaps a skirt.

"Hey," Walter said, just a minute or so behind Henry. "Who is it?"

"I don't know," Henry said, but he was already far away enough so that Walter could barely hear him. "Hurry up!"

"I'm going as fast as I can!"

They passed a couple of run-down low-income housing projects surrounding a well-maintained central building before a small apartment complex, surrounded by a rustic fence, came into view up ahead. The purported girl stopped at the gate--although 'stopped' was probably not the best word choice, for she moved so quickly that it seemed as if she had simply gone through it--and entered it. Walter couldn't tell from here if she had looked back over her shoulder or not--he found himself hoping that she had; for some reason, the idea put him at ease.

Up ahead, Henry took through the gate almost as quickly as the girl had, and before Walter had a chance to protest, the two of them disappeared through the front doors of the apartment complex. Again, the girl hadn't even seemed to open the door at all; she'd seemed to go right through it, real quick-like. Walter rubbed his eyes--quickly, for fear of running head-first into something whilst his eyes were closed--and had to marvel at the kid's agility. He thought for a moment about yelling some protest to Henry, but decided that it would be better if Henry stayed up ahead, in the event that he were actually able to catch up to the kid.

"Damn it," Walter sighed, slowing to a stop and propping himself up on the rusty metal of the gate through which they had run. "I need to get out more." After taking a deep breath, he looked at the apartment complex. His neck slowly arched backward as he looked up at the building's roof.

All of a sudden, it seemed a lot bigger than it had seemed from down the road.

"Wood Side Apartments," he mumbled. "I think this is the place where Ricky used to live." Ricky, of course, being a friend of his from when he'd still lived in Wish House. Something about that memory bothered him--it didn't feel quite right--but he dismissed it for now, his concern more focused on Henry's safety. If it had crossed his mind that the significance behind this feeling, this uncertainty, might have something to do with making sure Henry was safe, then he might have put more thought into it at that moment.

Instead, sighing, he pushed himself off of the gate and went inside.

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The lobby was very small, and just short of dilapidated. The carpeted floor was torn in several places, revealing the broken tiles beneath. The wallpaper was gouged just as much, as if during a struggle which had involved a sharp object, perhaps a knife. Walter took a step forward into the pitch blackness, and once again found himself wishing he had a flashlight. He felt something warm and smooth brush against the top of his head, and jumped. Reaching his hand up into the darkness to swat away the offensive object, his hand clasped around it--a glass object, almost oval-shaped. He tugged on the object, finding that it was suspended from the ceiling--quite strongly, at that, for it would not give no matter how much force he applied to it. He returned to the front door, feeling along the wall, and at last found the light switch and flipped it. The light bulb immediately sparked to bright life, only to die back down to a dim state of near-death. It was cracked in a couple of places, and looked like it was about to give up altogether.

Walter was just thankful for the light. A staircase protruded from the wall opposite the front entrance, following it up to the second floor and branching off in two directions--one continuing up to the third floor and one stopping at the second. Walter took the first branch and found himself on a walk leading to a door which would, presumably, lead into the second floor hallway. The door did as promised, and soon Walter found himself in a hallway which branched to the left and the right.

"Henry?" He started down the hall to the right, unable to see a thing. He kept his hand on the wall to the right, afraid of exactly how easy it would be to get lost in here. "Henry? You in here?"

Then, he felt something odd...in the floor. Not on the floor, but in the floor. It was as if the floor was shaking, but very, very faintly. Almost like someone in the building was playing a particularly loud song on a radio with a good bass system, or perhaps just playing a bass guitar very, very loud. But the catch was, he couldn't hear the sound of the radio or the guitar or whatever it was; he could only feel the vibrations.

The reason for this audio phenomenon became apparent soon enough, once the noise which was causing it began to fill the hall. He imagined, for a second, that he could hear it coming in from the outside, through the lobby doors and up the staircase, through the door and down the hall, engulfing him, faint as it was, like a ghostly wind, perhaps a derivative of the fog which blanketed the rest of the town even in the black of night. The sound of air-raid sirens filled the night, growing steadily louder. They sounded like they might be mounted on a moving vehicle, for they seemed to fade in and then fade out for a moment, only to fade in a second later with increased clarity and volume.

They were just air raid sirens, Walter knew, probably left over from a time long past and still capable of going renegade from time to time...but for some reason, they really got to him. They instilled him with an almost phobic panic--it was a 'door closing behind him' kind of feeling, like the last call at a bar or the announcement the big department stores made--"Closing in five minutes." It seemed to be the international-language phrasing for Last chance. He was possessed with the desire to turn and run, find the quickest way out of town, not out of fear but out of sheer instinct, as if the sirens spoke not to his mind but to his heart...but he was able to cling to the image of Henry and that little kid, alone in this crazy town, and pull himself out of this impatient haze. He closed his eyes--a mistake, he knew, but he was unable to do much else--and took a deep breath. In, out. He did it again. And again, and again. If those sirens continued, he didn't think he'd be able to keep going. It was as if those things were sending him waves of pure phobic energy.

Finally, though, they began to fade, and eventually they were gone altogether. Walter took another deep breath...and another...and soon he felt his heart begin to slow down. Now that they were gone, he found it odd that he had ever been intimidated by them...it was like waking from a nightmare in which bananas were the incarnate form of fear-inspiring evil. It even left him with a similar odd feeling.

With his hands to the wall, Walter continued, passing a door on his right marked 203. Interesting, he thought, that the first room he should come to would be the reverse of 302, Henry's room number back at South Ashfield Heights He tried the lock--not out of rational thought but out of absent-minded curiosity--and found it locked. It was only at this point that he noticed he was able to see, somewhat. There was some kind of light coming from behind him, distant but powerful. It barely reached this far, but it was there--the hall branched off away from room 203, perpendicular with this hall, and at the far end of it was a light of some kind, suspended about halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Walter rushed towards it, echoing a comic phrase in his mind as his pace quickened--Go to the light!

He passed another two rooms, 207 and 208 (208...he thought that was the room in which his friend had once lived), before he realized that the hallway up ahead was obstructed by some object or objects, and it was not until he was almost on top of the light that he realized what those objects were. He felt a chill run down his spine, though there wasn't necessarily a reason for it. It wasn't a scary sight; just unfathomably weird.

A dummy doll, seemingly of the storefront variety, had been strangled and bound with several (hundred?) feet of rusty barbed wire. The wire was driven into the walls on either side of the dummy, through a complicated series of holes that seemed to have been drilled there for this particular purpose, forming a makeshift fence that would be possible yet incredibly painful to bypass without some form of superior protection. The dummy's left arm had been severed and hung in the barbed mess just a few inches from the body, while the right arm seemed to be reaching out to Walter, flashlight in hand. Walter reached out and put his hand on the light, and for a moment his eyes fell on the blank face of the mannequin. He realized why his blood had run cold at the sight; the mannequin had no face, and yet it seemed to be expressing pain somehow. He looked at the face, and he seemed to see something that wasn't there; not a face, but an emotion. He knew that such a thing was impossible; mannequins and inanimate objects could not even have feelings, much less express them. All the same, though...it was as if he had just discovered the body of not a mannequin, but a fellow man, caught by some unspeakable fate, using the last of his strength to reach out to Walter and provide him some assistance with the flashlight. It was very unsettling, just to have this thing looking at him like that...and before he really thought about it, pulled on the flashlight and started to turn away...

...only to find that the flashlight would not give. It was stuck fast in the dummy's hand. Frustrated, Walter leaned in for a closer look. He had to step to one side, to prevent the flashlight from silhouetting the dummy's hand. Reaching forward, he tried to pry the fingers from around the flashlight. They wouldn't give an inch.

"Damn it!" Walter said, stamping his foot on the ground. He wanted that light; he wasn't even sure he would be able to find Henry again if he didn't have a light. He didn't know what the hell had possessed Henry to come running into a building like this one, pitch black as it was. He was going to ring Henry's neck if and when they were reunited.

Just as he was turning away from the mannequin, intending to examine it from the other side as well, he noticed something on its forearm, just below the hand which gripped the flashlight. It seemed to be a note, scribbled with something extremely small. From this angle, Walter couldn't even read it; he had to put his face almost up against it, squinting his eyes and trying to focus them, before his eyes could process the language. It read: The light of wisdom only comes to one who is worthy.

"Light of wisdom?" Walter spat, backing away from the odd structure and into the light once more. "What the hell is this crap? Some kind of fancy poetry?" Then, of course, he recalled Henry's story about the Other Walter, paired with his own knowledge of the Ritual of the 21 Sacraments. Could it be a coincidence that the Receiver of Wisdom was the 21st Sacrament, Henry? He knew it could be, but he doubted it was.

Then, from the other side of the artificial dummy 'barricade': "Hey...hey, wait! No!"

THUD.

"Henry?" Walter shouted, almost grabbing the barbed wire with his bare hands but allowing his reflexes to spare him a nasty wound. "Henry, is that you?"

A low, warbling noise, the nature of which was completely indiscernable.

"Henry?"

Nothing.

Walter turned to the mannequin and its hand...sighed...clenched his fists together and raised them...brought them down on the mannequin's outstretched hand...and cried out in pain, stumbling and falling onto the floor. The mannequin's arm did not break; did not even budge. It had been like hitting solid stone. Whomever had put this thing here did not want anyone but Henry to have it. Which seemed odd, considering that it was only a flashlight. Regardless, he rose to his feet, cradling his right wrist--the one that had actually come in direct contact with the mannequin's ridiculously hard arm--and glanced around, wondering how he could get to the other side of the barricade quickly. He wondered if any of the rooms were connected, as he knew they were in some hotels. He doubted it. However...

"Yeah," he confirmed out loud, turning to the door of the nearest room--208, it was 208--and trying the knob. It turned, and the door opened inward. He banged his face against the wall just inside--it was just a narrow front area, probably for hanging coats and ditching shoes, but the room expanded to the left--and shut the door behind him, moving left and into the larger portion of the room.

Directly inside the living area was a large round dinnertable, just barely allowing access from the other side into a small kitchen area. To the right, the room opened up a little, furnished by only a television set by the right-hand wall (complete with ancient 'rabbit ear' receptors), a reclining chair, and, behind the chair, a shelf which rose almost to the ceiling. On the wall to the left of the shelf, a narrow door offered passage into the bedroom area. Walter made for this door, which turned out to be a hub that turned in three directions: To the left, a bedroom; straight ahead, a bathroom; to the right, another bedroom.

Walter took the right doorway; it, unlike the other rooms, was completely devoid of furniture. Devoid, that was, except for a single grandfather clock, pressed up against the very center of the left-hand wall. He approached the clock and examined it closely, feeling his heart rising with anticipation.

"I wonder..." He leaned to the right, examining the spot at which the clock met the wall. He noticed several cracks in the paint on the wall; stepping around to that side of the clock, he pressed his shoulder up against the elderly structure and pushed. Sure enough, the clock gave way, exposing a crack in the wall about five feet tall.

"Booya!" Walter exclaimed under his breath. "It's still here!" He hunched down enough to fit into the crack and pulled himself through, entering the next room over--209. He found himself in a living area, this one completely empty, too, save for a pile of debris in one corner--from where the debris had come, Walter did not know, for nothing in the room appeared to be damaged, but that was not his concern at the moment. He ran for the front door and burst out into the hallway, coming out just on the other side of the obstructive mannequin.

"Henry?" he called out once again, still with no response. The hall to the right had not been afforded the luxury of lumination, as had the one to the left, and as a result Walter could only see two walls, a floor, and a ceiling, all decending into a black void. Putting his hand on the wall for guidance once again, he followed what he believed to be the source of the cry he'd heard.

Before long, he walked right into something cold and metallic. Feeling ahead of him, he deduced that it was a door. He felt for the knob but found a handle instead, and tried to pull the door open. It wouldn't budge.

"Henry?" he said, gently rapping on the door. "You in there? Are you okay?"

No response. He felt around on the door and found a deadbolt, running its length. He took it off and opened the door, and found himself in a narrow room with a staircase that went both up and down.

Placing one hand on the stoop where the stairs joined this floor, he looked up into the darkness and saw nothing. He thought about looking down, but decided that he didn't care what was down there. He also thought about calling to Henry, but he had already decided that they were pretty much separated for the moment--he was pretty sure that his goal in this place had become, once again, to find Henry. This time, there would be the company of that kid to worry about, as well.

He started up the stairs.

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The third floor hallway had not been deadbolted from the inside, as the one below had, so Walter was able to enter without obstruction. The first thing that caught his eye was a small flourescent light fixture, dangling from the ceiling up ahead, maybe sixty feet. The light seemed very important, shining out against the oppressive darkness of this place as it was; it seemed to be both warning him and calling to him at the same time, as if to say, What you need is here, but before you take it, you should ask yourself if you really do need it. But Walter was not to be intimidated by some luminary fixture; he broke into a jog towards the light.

Indeed, it was highlighting something--a door, marked 3079. On closer examination, Walter realized that the number '9' had been added with white paint, and that the room was really 307. He wondered why someone would paint an additional number on an apartment door. Even if it had only served to confuse someone, it would only work for a second or two; quick examination of the adjacent apartments would lead one to logically deduce that the room between 306 and 308 was none other than 307.

Shrugging, he reached for the doorknob...and quickly pulled his hand back, as if he'd realized at the last second that it was not a doorknob but a massive, malignant cockroach.

There was blood on the doorknob. Wet blood. Fresh blood.

"Henry?" he mumbled, wondering (once again) if he had screwed up royally by bringing Henry to this town. "Are you in there?"

Receiving no response, he covered his hand with the sleeve of his jacket and used it to turn the knob...and he pushed the door inward on its hinges.

The room was empty, and looked to have exactly the same (or a very similar) layout as 203. Empty, that was, except for one barely perceivable object in the far corner, near the entrance to the bedrooms. It was a small person, probably a kid (probably the kid, the one Henry had been chasing), standing over a small pile of something.

"Hey," Walter said, kneeling down. "Are you okay?" He squinted in the darkness, making sure to prop the door open with his right ankle so that he could use the light from the hallway to see into the room. He could see the windows on the far side of the room, but for some reason the moon wasn't sending any light in here. Now that his eyes were adjusting, he could see that it was not a pile that the kid was standing over, but another person. Either dead, or unconsious. "Who's that?"

The kid only stared at him, unmoving. Before long, Walter noticed something very odd: The kid's eyes seemed to be reflecting the light from the hallway quite clearly. Sort of like a cat's eyes, he pondered. Dismissing it as a trick of the lighting, he stuck his hands out in front of him.

"Listen," he said. "That guy that was chasing you...that was my friend, Henry. He's not going to hurt you, and neither am I. We don't want any trouble."

The girl pointed at the body lying next to her, drawing Walter's attention. It was only now that he realized--the body looked a little bit like Henry's from this angle. No, a lot like Henry's. Too much like Henry's. "That's not--"

He was cut off halfway into his sentence when he was struck with an unnerving sensation: Something crawling across his ankle, the one he'd left in the doorway. Without a second thought, he pivoted and shot his hands out towards his leg, intending to seize the intruder (he imagined something like a large snake, from the way it had felt)...but when he turned, his hands only touched the cloth of his jeans. No snake, no thing.

"Whatever," he said, turning back to the kid...but the kid was no longer there. Walter glanced around the room for a moment before his eyes came to rest on a large sliver of wood that had apparently fallen in from the decayed ceiling, lying in the floor right in front of him. He picked it up and used it to prop the door open. Just as he slid the wood into the crack beneath the open door, tightening it into place, his right ear suddenly plugged up. Surprised, he furrowed his brow and stuck his finger into his ear. "Weird," he said, feeling a sudden, powerful itch far down inside his ear. It wasn't enough to hurt, just to really irritate him. In any case, he managed to ignore this strange new ailment for a moment while he looked around the room. It wasn't very large; the kid couldn't have gone far without Walter seeing or hearing her. He craned his neck to look into the kitchen...nothing.

"Hey," he called into the room. "Hey, kid, I'm not gonna hurt you, okay? I'm your friend. I just want to make sure Henry's okay, and then we'll leave. You can even come with us, if you want." He crossed over to the bedroom area, intending to check there...only to brush up against rough metal. "What the...?"

A metal lattice had been placed across the doorway that would have lead into the bedroom area. He felt along it, searching high and low for some sign of a break. There was none, and it seemed too strong to try to tear through--his wrists were still sore from trying to break the mannequin's hand off--so he glanced back over his shoulder, towards the door--still no kid--and went to the window to look out into the night, confused.

"Huh," he said, pressing his hand against the paned glass. The light from the hall was enough to illuminate an odd shape, just a few feet outside the building, but not much else. The structure he was now seeing looked something like the bishop piece on a chess board--fat on the bottom, narrowing out in the center, and then growing slightly fatter near the top, where it connected to the spearhead tip in a little metal ring. The structure was mostly a reddish-brown color, as if from many years of rust and decay. It filled him with a sense of foreboding, as if he were only seeing the smallest corner of a very large picture. He didn't know why it should do that to him, but it did. He felt his heart begin to speed up. It almost steadied out again after a few seconds had passed, but then it began to race again when he heard a soft click, followed by a sudden absence of light in the room.

That had been the sound of the door sliding closed, he was sure. But how? He'd stuck that piece of wood under the door, so he should've heard--

Then, a swishing noise. Soft, but no less obnoxious as a result. It was coming closer; moving slowly, but definitely coming closer.

"Who's there?" Walter asked, knowing that he did not honestly expect an answer. He put his back against the wall and started to inch over towards the side of the room, near the door to the bedrooms, like a child trying to sneak around a feared animal, perhaps a large dog. It crossed his mind that he could not tell exactly from which direction the sound was coming; with one ear clogged up, he was unable to follow the direction of the sound. He only knew that it was there. Could that have been intended? It seemed crazy, that someone could 'magically' cause his ear to malfunction in that way, but really...that other place, that other Walter, wasn't all of that crazy, too? Wasn't the reason he was here in the first place completely crazy?

He felt something thick and wet brush up against his leg, and when he looked down at it, he saw those eyes again--the kid's eyes, the ones that reflected light. Even though there was no light in here to reflect off of them, they had a faint copper glow, much like one of those glow-in-the-dark toys that the cereal companies had always put in the boxes back when Walter had been a kid--the kind that you held up to the light for a few minutes, and then you turned off the light and watched them glow for a few moments before they crapped out. Cheap shit kiddie toys.

But the toy was not his primary concern; he kicked his foot violently, throwing whatever it was off of him and into the blackness, but before he'd gone two steps he tripped over the person who had been lying in the floor. He fell forward, landing on his face and causing immense trauma to his nose. He thought he might have broken it--it hurt like hell--but right now he was too excited to care. What had caught his attention was the slurp noise which had been produced by his collision with the body--that was not a normal sound. He turned and ever-so-slowly reached out towards the body, afraid to touch it but having to know, his worries temporarily forgotten in favor of this new oddity.

His hand touched some cold, dry substance that gave immediately beneath his touch, like pudding. It was a very unpleasant sensation, and he withdrew his hand immediately, rising to his feet. Already, he could hear a wet, slippery sound, coming across the floor. He knew it was coming for him, even if he couldn't judge from which direction. He turned and ran for what he thought was the door, and finally crashed up against it. He groped for the knob, found it, and turned it.

Well, tried to turn it. It was locked.

"What the fuck?" he hissed, kicking the jamb. He threw his weight against the door, unable to make it budge an inch. It was as if the door was made of stone. "Come on!"

That wet sound was getting louder, seeming to fill the entire room. Walter couldn't help but notice, with impending dread, that the floor was beginning to feel unnaturally soft--and porous?--beneath his feet, like some kind of bread. It was difficult to visualize in his mind...the closest accurate description would be that it was like walking on a sturdy trampoline made of bread white. He did the only other thing he could think of to do; he opened the sliding door to the blinded closet, which stood just around the corner from the door, stepped inside, and quietly closed the door. He didn't think it would do much good, but he didn't know what else to do. He was, quite literally, backed into a corner...and who knew? Maybe putting a door in between himself and this thing would keep him safe, if only for a little while.

The wet sound grew louder, and louder, until it seemed that it was going to burst Walter's eardrums. Then it was joined by another sound--a buzzing sound, loud and intrusive, as if from a chainsaw, but organic, more like a giant insect.

A giant insect with a chainsaw, Walter mused. He closed his eyes and bit his lip, trying not to tense--he'd heard somewhere that if you tensed right before you were cut, bruised, burned stabbed (or whatever it was that might be about to happen to him), then it would hurt more because your body would be offering resistance. He listened as that awful chainsaw-insectoid buzzing grew louder, warbled in and out of perception...and from beyond his eyelids, he sensed a very brief but nonetheless stunning flash of light. Curiosity outweighed fear, and he opened his eyes to look through the blinds on the closet door.

What he saw was both terrible and amazing. The walls, floor and ceiling were all glowing, a visceral orange and red color, swimming with hundreds of thousands of virile shapes. Unspeakable silhouettes of things seemed to be teeming from just below the surface, long and wide one moment and short and narrow the next. The body, the one that the girl had been standing over, was still lying there, but then something happened that made Walter sick with fear: one of the black shapes in the floor approached the body, and the next thing he knew the body was coated in a thick, black mess. The thing made a suckling sound, barely audible above that terrible buzzing, and--Jesus, Walter thought--the thing pulled the body into the floor. It wasn't like there was a hole in the floor; it was more like the black thing on the ground had just pulled the body into the floor, made it a part of the floor. Walter looked down at the floor of the closet and realized, with both thanks and utter confusion, that it was probably the only surface in the room that was still physically stable. The walls, floor and ceiling of the closet remained free of this hellish influence, by some miracle of a God which may or may not have existed.

Meanwhile, Walter noticed, the body had become a large, black smudge on--in--the floor. Soon, it began to waver, its very shape growing unstable, and then it burst into a million more of those tiny black things, all of which scattered to the far corners of the room.

Are all of those...people?! Walter wondered with horrified amazement. Is this what happens to people in this town? Is this where they all go? Somehow, he doubted that this was where they all went...but he knew that he had definitely caught on to the edge of something much, much bigger than he had expected. If he had still had any hope of surviving this insanity, it was gone now.

He closed his eyes, covered himself with his arms--for he was unable to shake the feeling that he was crawling with countless bugs, even though he knew he wasn't--and waited.

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After about twenty minutes the buzzing began to wane, toggling in and out of perception--one minute it was loud and unholy, and the next it seemed to be fading into the background--and another ten minutes saw the noise starting to fade altogether. Walter did not open his eyes until, several minutes after the noise had ceased completely, he heard the door click and slide open, creaking.

Relieved as he was, he couldn't move. He was paralyzed with the certainty of his impending death. He stood there, waiting for something to consume him, unable to snap out of his trance until he saw a potent flashlight beam, bouncing around the room, and heard a familiar voice: "Hello? Walter?"

"Shit," Walter whispered, unable to think of anything else to say. It seemed to be the only word left in his vocabulary.

"Walter?" Henry said, and the beam focused on the closet. "Are you in there?"

Walter nodded, breathless, as if he'd expected Henry to hear him.

"Come out of there," Henry said, pulling the door open and reaching out to Walter.. "What happened? Why are you in the closet?"

Walter shook his head. "You don't want to know." He took Henry's hand and left the closet, and they left the room together.

After looking at Walter's face, pale in the flashlight's beam, for a moment, Henry said, "No, I have the feeling I don't. In any case, we've got to get out of here."

"I'm way ahead of you," Walter said, starting for the door.

"I thought things were bad when I lost the kid," Henry started, following Walter, "but things didn't get really crazy until I found her. She's not normal, Walter."

"What do you mean?" he said. "I found her!"

"What?" Henry paused, grabbing Walter's shoulder.

"I found her," he said, pointing back to room 307. "She was in there. She disappeared when...well, when things went off the deep end."

"But I found her," Henry said. "Up on the roof. Well, not here, not exactly. I found her in the other building."

"Other building?"

"Yeah," Henry said. "This building's right next to another apartment complex. The geniuses who built it knocked out the fire escape on the second floor, so I almost fell to my death when I opened it." He sighed. "Anyway, there's a hole in the other building, and I was able to get in. There's all kinds of crazy stuff in there."

"Crazy, like what?" Walter said.

He turned to Walter. "You don't wanna know," he jeered.

"You're probably right," Walter said. "But I want to know about the kid."

"Right," Henry said. They had reached the south end of the hallway, where it branched off to the east and the west. Henry led Walter down the west branch and through the door to the lobby staircase. "I got to the roof and she was standing there, looking at me...just looking at me. I got down and called to her, trying to get her to come to me. She dropped her head, like this." He lowered his head suddenly, so that his chin rested on his chest. "And then she got on her knees, and her hair went down over her face...and the back of her head was..." he paused, shaking his head. "It was messed up."

"What do you mean, 'messed up?'" Walter halted.

"I mean, it wasn't human," Henry said, meeting Walter's glare. "Her 'face,' the human one, I don't think that was her real face. I think what I saw, on the back of her head, that was actually the front. That was her real face. It was like...it was just a big slit, running up and down the 'back' of her head, and there was...this is going to sound crazy, but there was an eyeball sticking out of it. It looked at me."

Walter shivered. He thought of the girl he'd seen back in 307...of the slimy thing that had chased him into the closet. Could that have been the same creature Henry had seen?

"I don't know what there was for us here, if there ever was anything," Henry said, "but I think we should get out of this building, right now. Get back on the streets. It's safer there."

"I doubt that," Walter said. "It's not safer anywhere in this town." He was thinking about the sirens, the ones he'd heard up on the second floor. He couldn't help but notice that all the weird shit had started happening after he'd heard them. He also couldn't help but think that maybe some other things had decided to join the party.

"Where do you think we should go, then?" Henry asked. They had reached the bottom of the staircase now, and were standing in front of the lobby.

"I don't think it matters," Walter said. "Listen...about that kid."

"Yeah?"

"How long ago was this that you saw her?"

"Not long," Henry said. "Just about ten or fifteen minutes ago."

"Hmm," Walter said, resting his chin on his elbow. "I suppose it's possible that she trapped me in there with that thing...or maybe she was that thing...anyway, I suppose it's possible that she trapped me in there and then came after you."

"Why's that?"

"Well, I saw her in there, but if my math is right--and if I can still tell time as well as I could yesterday--then we encountered her at about the same time."

Henry didn't say anything. Walter didn't need a flashlight to know what his face would look like.

"There's that," Walter continued. "And then, there's the worse possibility."

"And what's that?" Henry said, though he thought he might know.

"The worse possibility?" Walter said. "That there's two of them. Hell, maybe more."

Outside, the moon tried in vain to reach the town with its message of hope and good tidings; the fog, unforgiving as ever, would allow nothing to enter or leave--not even the inviting glow of the night sky. Hanging over the town like an omen of death, there was only blackness.

END OF CHAPTER 21