Chapter 7: The Call

The "telephone" door was still there when Matt got back to the reading room where he had met Stu. He got the key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, tucked the key back into his pocket and entered this new room.

It had probably been an office before the sirens had sounded and the building had changed. There were a few broken desks, printers, computers and chairs put up against the walls, where empty shelves stuck out and ordinary bulletin boards hung. This was where librarians had gone to do their computer work and paper pushing. But now, all their important tools and furniture had been shoved aside to make room for a strange arrangement in the middle of the office.

Someone had daubed a circle of blood on the floor. Inside the crimson circle, about 50 lit candles stood in a white circle, and inside this circle, a small table had been placed.

And there, on the marble table top in the middle of the room, just like the plate on the door had promised him: an ordinary modern phone.

Matt hurried across the room to the phone, stepping on the blood-circle on the way but not caring a damn, and picked up the receiver.

Unlike all the other phones he had found in Silent Hill, this one wasn't broken.

He immediately dialled 911, but then the phone became completely silent. Matt now noticed that it wasn't even plugged in. "What the …" He hung up and picked up the receiver again. The "beep-beep-beep" sound was back. He tried calling some of his friends and relatives, but the phone still refused to let him contact the outside world (and, as he soon discovered through his trials, repeatedly muttering "shit" didn't improve the situation). Why was it even giving him a dial tone when it wasn't plugged in?

"Maybe it's cursed by these circles," Matt thought, "like some sort of black magic …" Having spent 41 years in this world, he didn't believe in black magic and occult stuff, although ever since seeing that Stewardess in the plane, Matt hadn't really known what to believe.

He kicked one of the candles. It flew a few feet out of its circle before it landed on the damp floor and the flame passed away to a better place. He once more picked up the receiver and tried dialling a randomly chosen number.

Nothing. No "hello, who is this?", no "beep-beep-beep", nothing.

"Fuck it," Matt said, hung up and began contemplating the bulletin boards. A paper attached to the middle of one of the boards, between all kinds of boring messages, schedules and photos of the librarians's loved ones, held his attention. At a glance, it seemed to be an ordinary typewritten memo, but there was actually something very strange about it:

TO ALL EMPLOYEES - Remember to call the following number in an emergency: Days in a week. Rivers that flow from the Tree of Life in paradise. Crosses on Golgotha. Choirs of angels in Christianity. Death and eternity. Furies. Loneliness so sad. Satan the Beast.

"What? … Oh, I get it. It's a number for the phone … with eight digits." Matt took the memo back with him to the phone and began dialling.

"Days in a week. That's easy," he mumbled and pressed 7 with his left hand while holding the receiver up to his ear with his right hand. "Rivers that flow from the Tree … 4, I guess. Crosses on Golgotha …" Despite Matt's lack of knowledge about certain stories in the Bible, he managed to recall that there had (at least according to the "holy book" itself) been three crosses on that particular silent hill. He pressed 3 and continued talking to himself: "Choirs of angels … er … 9? Death and eternity, that must be the number 0. And there were 3 furies … Loneliness so sad? Well, it takes 1 to be lonely … And lastly, Satan the Beast?"

Remembering the three-digit number venerated by so many lame bands and their teenage fans, Matt pressed 6.

Beeeep … beeeep … beeeep …

The phone rang. "I wonder who I'm calling?" Matt didn't know anyone with the phone number 74390316 - yet. "It's gotta be someone who will help me … someone living outside this town …"

The phone continued ringing. "Beeeep … beeeep …"

"Come on … pick it up, pick it up, pick it up," he droned, not in the mood for leaving a message.

He had been standing there for two minutes, waiting, hoping, expecting, when someone did answer the phone. But it wasn't the oh-so-wonderful rescuing angel he had hoped for. It was Tommy. And he sounded scared.

"Matt? Is that you?"

"Yeah, how did you know?"

"You've got to come and … do something. Save me," Tommy whispered, sobbing.

"What's wrong?"

"She's in here with me … she's hurting me … the monster," Tommy stuttered.

"What is, uh, I mean, where are you?"

"The church …"

"Okay, a church … Which one? There's a Balkan Church and a St. Ste…"

"St. Stella's Church. I'm in the St. Stella's Church … Please, Matt, hurry. It hurts and I don't think I can …"

Beep-beep-beep …

Tommy had hung up – or maybe something had done that for him. "Dammit," Matt muttered and put down the receiver. "How am I gonna get out of this library?" He kicked another candle. It flew all the way to the wall and landed on a printer.

Then he noticed a rusty valve sticking out of the middle of the bulletin board where the phone number memo used to hang ("where did that come from?"). Big red letters had been written on the board just above the valve: TURN 180 DEGREES TO THE RIGHT IN ORDER TO ACTIVATE EMERGENCY EXIT. Too tired to wonder what the hell that was supposed to mean, Matt turned the valve 180 degrees just like whoever wrote that terse message had suggested.

Nothing happened, although he did hear an odd crashing noise coming from somewhere west of the office. It sounded like fifteen empty trash cans hitting the ground after being thrown off a ten-storey building.

Matt left the office and wandered back to the gap in the middle of the second floor. A second bridge of flesh had appeared, stretched out between the doorway at the top of the stairs and the middle of the other bridge. Drops of blood regularly fell from the bridges and into the darkness.

Matt got on his hands and knees and crawled out to the middle of the first bridge. Then he turned left and slowly made his way across the new bridge to the doorway, after which he scrambled to his feet and walked down the stairway in the entrance hall. Some of the steps were missing now, so he had to be careful. The sliding glass doors on the first floor were gone, and all that was left was a big wide doorway.

Shivering, he stepped out of Carpenter Public Library through this doorway and walked across the parking lot and up Harris St. towards the church. A carpet of snow covered the streets and while the fog had lifted, the darkness of the night now prevented him from seeing much of his surroundings as he footed it down Katz Street. Apart from the colours of a few parked cars, the world was black and white out here. Looking up at the sky, he couldn't see a single star.

"Please, Matt, hurry. It hurts and I don't think I can …"

Beep-beep-beep …

He began to run.

---

A/N: Well, that turned out to be a short chapter. My boring work experience as a librarian is FINALLY over, so now I should have more time to update "Family". Yes, the "normal" version of Carpenter Library is (in my imagination) almost exactly like the library I was a trainee at, so it was funny describing the Otherworld library, hehe. –E.P.O.