The double doors in the second floor lobby refused to open, no matter how hard Arelia and Bishop tugged. It was not a matter of them being locked; the doors would give way slightly before slamming shut again. Jammed. The third time Arelia pulled on one of the handles, something pulled back. With a sigh of agitation, she retreated to the elevator and held the doors for Bishop until he followed.
The situation was much the same on the third floor. Even after shooting the locks, neither could force open the doors blocking their path. Arelia sat down on the floor, back against one of the immovable obstacles. She folded her legs beneath her and made more room for Bishop to sit at her side.
"So, what now?" he asked, slumping against the wall. She looked over at him, studying the weary look on his face. His facial hair was becoming thicker; his five o' clock shadow had become an eclipse. Slowly, she set her handgun down on her lap and leaned her head back.
"I don't know," Arelia admitted. Something behind her eyes was pinched together, and she blinked several times to push away the effect. The pinch became a squeeze, until stars danced along the corners of her vision. Blue and red, blue and red, blue and red...
"Maybe we could talk a little bit? I, uh... think it might benefit us to know a little more about each other before we continue on." She could feel Bishop's eyes on her, but she had no strength to turn and glare at him.
"How so?" she snarled. The lights were so bright...
"Well... I mean, you said this place was, like, manifestations of our guilt, right? Kind of like a psychological Hell?"
"Yeah, but what does that have to do with--"
"You don't like hospitals. And suddenly, we're trapped inside one. This whole world is a nightmare, I'll give you that, but you react so violently to it. It's like you're visiting a place you've been before and had to run away from. So I'm wondering what we're facing and why." Bishop turned a little to get a better look at her profile, made nearly a silhouette by the degree of darkness. "I think you can tell me that much."
The blue and red flashes were so strong. Arelia shut her eyes and let the pain wash over her like the gentle, but enveloping surge of an ocean swell. Foam licked at the corners of her lips. Her brainstem trembled. Well, maybe it's time...
"I was driving to retrieve my... sister... Yura." She licked the froth away from her mouth, each word tempting an increase in agony. "The road that night was very slippery... very dark... I had my headlights on, but they just didn't seem to cut through the blackness of it all. I had to get to her before my parents made her what I had been..."
"A Marine?" Bishop interrupted. Arelia paused, then shook her head.
"I was so worried about her... I wasn't paying an awful lot of attention to what I was doing... how fast I was really going. By the time I saw the tricycle and slammed on the brakes... Well, even 12 weeks of basic training in the Marine Corps and perfect reaction time couldn't get my truck stopped." The color began to slowly drain from Bishop's face as he watched her confess to him an event he had all but forgotten. "I hit the little girl head on. I can still remember the small... jolt under my tires as she was dragged beneath them. That sharp scream in the second she had before the air was ripped from her lungs." She allowed a moment of silence, disturbed only by her repetitive, heavy breathing before she continued. "That scream seemed to echo on and on in the night...
"I don't remember calling the police. I don't think I could have. Maybe someone saw from the side of the road... But they came anyway. I don't remember much about that, either, except the lights... The flashing lights..." Suddenly, her voice rose to an inconceivable scream. "THE BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND RED, BLUE AND..."
As the horrible, piercing sound reverberated throughout the hospital, Bishop felt his heart pound, then fibrillate. Her pitch rose with the frequency of the repetition, those three words building up into a frenzied cacophony until they were indistinguishable from each other. The air became thick, and nearly unable to breathe. His chest burned with effort as his lungs spasmed, aching for oxygen. The moment they shuddered and became still was the moment Arelia finally stopped, and the air thinned, and Bishop doubled over, gasping, coughing, watching the floor spin in a clockwise direction.
"Then they took me here, to Alchemilla," she continued, as if nothing had happened. After a few painful dry-heaves, Bishop's world stopped the wicked merry-go-round effect and settled. He looked up at Arelia. Her tone had changed. She was no longer breathing hard. She was laughing. "They took me here, and they sent me to Kaufmann, that dumb bastard." Her head turned sharply to face him, her mind lost somewhere in the frightening throb of her green irises. "Do you know how long I was in the psych ward, Bishop? At first, they thought I had the Stigmata. My eyes were bleeding. I would get blood all over me, all over my bed, all over my restraints. It burned like a bitch," she snarled, animal-like. "It burned like Hellfire.
"After the bleeding stopped, Dr. Kaufmann thought it was schizophrenia due to childhood trauma. I had worked as a whore from age 10 until I was enlisted. Men in the neighborhood adored small, pure, child-like virgins." Her head suddenly wrenched away from him again, casting all but the dim glow of her eyes in shadow. Bishop watched her hands as they contorted into monstrous claws, the muscles and tendons so tense in the hideous transformation that her entire forearm shook with the strain. A dry, brittle laugh escaped her exposed throat, arched from the backward tilt of her head. Like the grinding of bones. "They loved them... My family was paid well the first time around. The customer even added a little extra because I had bled and screamed and cried while he held me down and broke the thin layer of skin keeping him outside of me." Another laugh, harsher and more violent. So much so that she gagged with the force. "Broke through it, and everything else."
"And that's what you tried to save Yura from?" Bishop asked quietly. Arelia nodded, then lowered her head. Some of her hair, torn from the hold of the ponytail, fell into her face and further obscured her. "When was she born?"
"Eight months and twenty-two days after the first condom broke on the job," she answered, now devoid of emotion. Her hands had relaxed at her sides, the fearsome claws lulled to simple fists. The police officer jumped in surprise, back thudding against the wall.
"She... she was your daughter?!"
"Oh, my family made me call her a sister. I wasn't allowed out of the house after I started showing the physical evidence of pregnancy. I was fifteen at the time. She's lucky, you know that? She came out beautiful, and lovely, and intelligent despite the way my father beat me when he found out."
"Did you ever find out who you hit that night?"
"Yes." There was nothing more. Bishop did not want to press. He waited for her to respond further on her own. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then suddenly the claws were back, and she scratched her own face, howling like a rabid coyote. "I hit Yura! I hit my daughter! I crushed her little skull under the tires of my truck and spilled her gorgeous brains out all over the pavement!" The way she tore at her flesh became more violent, and Bishop tried to pull her hands away. Arelia struck him in the face with her elbow and bared her teeth as she looked up at him, revealing a face that was red with fingernail marks and eyes that were producing blood at the corners...
"And you were there!" she barked. The gun clattered onto the floor as she moved to all fours, backing Bishop against the wall. "You kept me from her! You threw me into the BLUE and the RED and the PSYCH WARD!" Before she could strike him again, Bishop grabbed both her hands by the wrist and threw her to the side, giving him room to stand and move away. She recovered quickly and stood as well, discarding her jacket and moving her fists up into fighting position, one up by her ear, the other in front of her lower face. He watched her silently.
"Do you know how long they kept me there, Bishop?!" Arelia moved closer, feet in the constant motion of a boxer's shuffle, slightly crouched. He looked at her knees. They were loose. He wouldn't be able to disable her at the kneecaps. "Do you know what they did to me there?!" She swung at him when she was close enough, and he ducked under the right hook, grabbing for her waist to restrain her. Her body spun out of the grasp and backed up again.
That's it, Bishop thought, keeping his eyes on her. Keep coming after me and backing up. Eventually, you'll get to the wall. He caught her ankle as she kicked high at his sternum, then twisted sharply. Her balance was immediately wrecked; she fell backward and recovered, backing away again as Bishop moved forward. He let her come again. "Do you know what it's like to hear their screams at night?! To hear them wailing in pain, suffering, dying inside?!" Her fists lowered, and her maneuvers stopped. The rage was gone, as was the unfeeling indifference that had once haunted her. Now came the flood of real emotion: the despair and heartache she had suffered from ever since that dark, wet, fatal night. "Then the orderlies patrolling the halls open up one of the doors and start screaming at them, you know? Because they can't stand it anymore. And when the patients can't stop their crying or their howling, they get beaten into silence or unconsciousness with the riot batons the doctors let their staff carry around." She looked at Bishop's own baton momentarily.
"We couldn't stand to hear them screaming, either... and seeing the way it was dealt with made us that much more disturbed... that much more willing to resort to violence to shut each other up." Arelia fixed her hair absently as she went on, the words seeming to fall out of her mouth. "Like I didn't have enough to worry about... I'd killed my own daughter trying to save her... And you know, I think I was too late, anyway... I asked Kaufmann about it one day, and I guess he thought I was feeling up to hearing the whole story, because he told me that she had been riding back from a friend's house to see me. She was supposed to have been spending the night there, but... she'd heard I was back, apparently, and wanted to surprise me... In a way, she kind of did. That tricycle? It had been mine. My father bought it for me after the first time I had brought back some extra income for him.
"How was I supposed to live with that? I couldn't. I repressed it. I was released, eventually, after the legal issues had been dealt with. Then I went back to the Marine Corps, only to find out I'd been discharged. Honorably. So I gathered up my pay and took some time off to really recover. To really get used to not remembering. It took months. I eventually got an apartment and a job as a child psychiatrist. I'd received my degree in psychology while the Marines put me through school. It was difficult working with children, and in that profession. I'd get flashbacks of the hospital every so often. Sometimes hear whispers of one of the old rumors that circulated through the patients that could actually fall into lucid moments. They said the doctors kept a girl down in the hospital basement, a special case. Burn victim. She should've been dead, but somehow she'd survived. They kept it hush-hush because it had to do with the occult or something...
"Anyway... it finally started to get to me again... So I found a week of free time for myself and decided to visit a nice little resort town not far from the city. Silent Hill. Silent-freaking-Hill." She laughed. Genuine, but somewhat off. "And then the shit really hit the fan."
Bishop watched Arelia for a few moments more. She had her hands on her hips, head lowered slightly, a pensive expression on her face. Then he spoke: "She never knew?"
"No," she said softly. "I guess maybe she does now." He moved toward her to comfort her, but she stepped around him and picked up her gun, then her jacket. She tied the latter around her waist. "We'd better get moving. I don't want to be in here any longer than I have to." He moved for her again, then stopped. Let her deal, his mind urged. Just let her go and deal the way she needs to.
"Alright," Bishop said with a soft smile. He held the elevator doors open for her and looked again at the list of buttons. He blinked, then looked again. Then rubbed his eyes, shook his head, and looked a third time. Then he looked away and then back.
"Um," he said, catching Arelia's attention. He pointed to the button marked with a "4" on the row of floor options. "That wasn't there before, was it?"