Chapter 11: Descending into Madness

Daryl pulled the key out from her pocket and unlocked the door while Matt trained the flashlight's beam on the lock to reduce the fumbling of his companion. The sirens from Carpenter Library and the church once more began to wail. They pushed the door open and tripped into room C4.

It wasn't very different than the other hospital rooms. Mattresses and pillows were lying in a mess and you could see nothing but fog drifting around outside the two windows. Amanda stood at the back of the room, next to Sophie, whose left hand was resting on the kid's head. They were both smiling. The filthy skin emerged from Amanda's scalp and slowly covered their bodies, easily sliding over bulges and squeezing into depressions, clinging to their normal skin like wet clothes.

Daryl looked calm and slightly confused. She slipped the key into her pocket and said something, but Matt couldn't hear it – he could only hear the sirens and the slurping sound of the skin creeping across Amanda's face and Sophie's arm. When he looked back at the windows, the grey fog had been replaced by black darkness. Daryl stared at him and her mouth moved again, but Matt couldn't intercept a single word.

A violent headache overwhelmed him and he slumped down to the floor. A worried look appeared on Daryl's face and she yelled something – this time, he managed to hear it …

… "Matt, are you allright? What's wrong? Is it the PTV? Answer me, dammit …"

… but then Daryl's body faded away from his vision and only him, Sophie and Amanda were left in the room. Lying on the floor, he could see the blood swimming around on the ceiling and hear the deafening sirens …

For the third time since he had entered this town, he lost consciousness.

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Someone was chuckling.

Matt opened his eyes to discover that the ceiling was back to normal. Well, it wasn't completely normal, but at least the blood on it wasn't moving. Strange rubber tubes now hung from the ceiling, drops of a hot resinous substance regularly falling out of them.

Bumping against the gross tubes, he scrambled to his feet and scanned the Otherworld version of room C4. The mattresses and pillows were gone and a white screen partially covered the wall at the back. On a small table in front of the screen, an old-fashioned contraption was seated. Matt gingerly examined it.

"A movie projector? So that screen's for showing movies … But what is this stuff doing here?"

A body under a white blanket was lying on a stretcher in the corner. The happy chuckling sounds were clearly coming from that body, but Matt didn't want to check it out. Chuckling people on hospital stretchers were rarely good company, and besides, his radio was playing static.

He tried opening the door to the hallway, but it was locked. Hesitating for a moment before making the decision, he walked past the projector, up to the stretcher, and pulled the blanket off.

The body jumped up from the stretcher. It looked like the nasty remains of what was once a man, a doctor. It wore a white lab jacket and held a black revolver in its bony right hand. Its head was missing the nose, eyes and ears – in fact, it was missing the very skin that should be covering the flesh and the cracked skull. Chuckling like a child playing with a teddy bear and staggering towards Matt, the Doctor raised the revolver to take aim at its victim …

The bullet flew through the air and plunged into the Doctor's thigh. The chuckling grew louder for a few seconds ("Is that thing enjoying the pain?") as the creature stumbled back and almost toppled. But the monster was soon staggering towards its prey once more, holding the revolver with both hands, taking good aim. Matt fired the shotgun again. This time, the Doctor fell to the floor where it lay so still, you would have thought it was dead if you couldn't hear the radio's white noise and the insane chuckling.

Matt kicked the creature's head a few times and silence filled the room. With four shots left in the shotgun now, he picked up the revolver and examined it. It contained eight bullets and there was room for two more.

There was something familiar about it. Where had he seen this weapon? Had he used it before? But when, where, why … He couldn't remember the answers – or actually, he didn't want to remember the answers. He stuffed the revolver into his left trouser pocket and then searched the pockets of the Doctor's white coat. In one of them, he discovered the key to room C4.

"But I thought Daryl had that key – or maybe there are two keys? Or maybe this isn't really a monster and I just killed …" He shuddered, unlocked the door and stepped out of the room, into the 1F patient wing hallway.

Those tubes were now dangling from the ceiling out here, too. The walls had also changed – they were scratched and dented, as if a hundred nails and hammers had been used to redecorate the place while he had been unconscious.

A few Nurses, wearing white latex gloves, knocked against the tubes as they strolled around in the hallway. Like the Doctors, they might once have been ordinary nurses working at this hospital. But now their skin was cold and bluish, their uniforms filthy and reeking of decay. Ludicrously wide horizontal fissures and black eye-like bulges constituted their faces. Their upper bodies hung slantingly backwards and their arms were jerking as if they were having some kind of seizure. They were armed with those black revolvers, too.

Matt didn't want to fight any monsters unless he had to, so he ran through the hallway and swiftly tried the doors. As long as he kept moving, the Nurses didn't have time to aim properly and shoot.

It appeared that the only other room he could enter on the first floor was the day room. It was fairly large, with four pillars supporting the ceiling. A somewhat crude bronze statuette was seated on a table in the middle. The statuette represented some kind of snake. It looked mainly like a rattlesnake and, placed on the table in the middle of the room, seemed pretty important to Matt, who snatched the figurine and crammed it into his backpack.

He ran back through the hallway, got into the elevator, pressed the "2" button and felt the narrow metal box rise to the second floor. Suddenly, he heard loud white noise, but it wasn't coming from his radio …

"… and welcome to yet another edition of Silent Hill's most popular quiz, Trick or Treat!"

The annoying voice wasn't coming from his radio, either. He could hear an audience, too, shouting with joy. What was going on?

"Well, you all know the drill: Answer the three questions correctly and win the prize, or don't answer correctly and receive our punishment," the voice continued. "And tonight's challenger is MATT HARDT!" The audience's applause was deafening. "Matt, are you ready to play TRICK OR TREAT?" the host bellowed.

"How the fuck do you know my name?" Matt yelled.

"Now then, let's not have that kind of language in the show. Anyway, here's your very first question: Around 1850, a coal field was discovered around here and a coal mine opened. What's the name of this coal mine? 1. Silent Hill Coal Mine – 2. Gallo Coal Mine – 3. Wiltse Coal Mine.

Now, let's move on to the second question: There are two normal churches in this town, St. Stella's Church on this side of the lake and, in the residential area … 1. St. Maria's Church – 2. Balkan Church – 3. LemegetonChurch.

And here's your last question, the third one: Once upon a time, something strange happened at StepfordDayCareCenter, the town's nursery. A boy began to bleed all at once. The blood emerged from all over his body, from his nostrils, from his mouth, from his eyes … The pain must have been unbearable … yes, all he could feel was pain … And then he died. What was the name of the poor boy who had to suffer this awful fate? 1. Robert Woodhouse – 2. Joseph Maybrick – 3. Richard Bullock …

Well, that's it. No more questions. Go to the day room on the first floor to find out whether you can give the correct answers. But remember, Matt, if you answer correctly, you'll get a WONDERFUL prize, and if your answers are wrong, you WILL be punished. So, everybody, thank you all for tuning in, see you later! Bye …"

The noise vanished and the elevator was silent again. Matt started when the doors opened to the 2F hallway, which was fairly dark and devoid of both monsters and the weird rubber tubes.

As he was walking down the hallway and trying the doors, something gooey suddenly landed on his left arm. He looked down at it: slobber. A gross lump of slobber.

He looked up at the ceiling it had fallen from. It turned out that there were several dead babies hanging upside-down, like bats, from a steel wire suspended just below the ceiling, throughout the entire hallway. There had to be at least fifty babies hanging up there, on that sick festoon. Slaver was still falling down from some of the infants's mouths …

He tried to yell "oh shit", but no words would come out. He couldn't stay in this place any longer, not when he knew what was up there at the ceiling … He staggered down the hallway until he found a door that would open. Feeling like his brain had fallen to his stomach and his bowels had climbed up to his head, Matt stepped into the rest room and vomited in the nearest toilet.

"It's too hard like this. It's just too hard …"

He fell to the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Tears soon began to blur his vision.

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Looking at his tired visage in the mirror, Matt wiped the wet streaks off his left cheek and heaved a deep sigh. Black letters written on the glass partially concealed his brown hair and forehead:

The Midwife is in the ofice wing, you must go theire

"Whatever," he mumbled. The doors to the office wing were locked on the first and second floors, and he had a feeling it would be the same on the third floor. And who was the "Midwife", anyway? Another monster?

He left the rest room and walked through the hallway, trying the rest of the doors. There were a few Doctors and Nurses here now. Luckily, they were "only" armed with scalpels, so he could easily avoid their attacks and didn't need to shoot them. Intent on not looking up at the festoon, he made his way through the hallway and entered room M6.

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A/N: Yet another short chapter, I know, but at least it didn't have a cliffhanger ending. Thanks for all the praising reviews, it's good to know that at least I'm good at writing this stuff – (glares at the results of his annual examination at school) … -E.P.O.