Chapter 13: The Midwife
Matt pushed the doors open and was about to step out when he noticed that every single square foot of the 3F office wing's floor was gone. In fact, the interior walls, doors, furniture – everything was gone. Only a few of those rubber tubes were left, hanging from the ceiling.
Looking down, he couldn't see anything at the second floor either. Not even the second floor's floor was present. The first floor was lost in darkness, which neither the beam of his flashlight nor his eyes could penetrate.
It looked like someone or something had cleared the office wing of all its contents to make room for … what?
A ladder began at the threshold he was standing on and led straight downwards along the wall until it disappeared in the darkness of the first floor.
"Well, it's not as if I have a choice." He turned around and carefully put his feet on the horizontal bars. With his hands clutching the rusty vertical bars, he began the descent.
As he climbed down, Matt saw a number of small naked blood-stained bodies hanging all around him: even more dead babies. Some of them were attached to the walls with huge nails, others were dangling from the ends of the tubes, their heads plugged into the tubes like corks into bottles. Matt would probably have vomited if he hadn't already emptied his stomach back in the 2F rest room.
With a face as white as a sheet, he reached the end of the ladder on the first storey and planted his feet on the tiles of the damp floor.
All the interior walls of the 1F office wing had also vanished, thus joining all the rooms, the hallway and the stairwell. In addition, this was joined with the other two floors into one immense, empty entrance hall.
No, not an entrance hall. An arena. And it wasn't completely empty.
A circle of fifty spikes stuck out from the floor, each one five feet high and with an infant impaled on the point, like butterflies on pins. The circle looked big enough for a truck to park inside. The dark figure of a woman, five feet eight inches tall, stood in the middle with its back to Matt.
"Daryl?"
"No, it can't be her, can it? No, it's something else …"
In spite of that sage thought, he walked away from the ladder, towards the circle. "Hello?" he said. The figure remained motionless. It looked like it was holding something. Now that he got closer, he could see it was wearing clothes reminiscent of a nurse's uniform, but it was badly tattered, with large holes ripped in the fabric. Matt stepped between two spikes into the circle.
That proved to be a bad idea.
As the radio started playing static, the figure slowly turned around to face him.
It was holding the small body of a baby, dripping with blood. But the poor infant was still alive – straining his ears, Matt could hear its soft crying. He could also see his or her face and legs move slightly.
The Nurse-like figure itself was far more grotesque. Its features consisted of two eyes and a very strange mouth. The eyes were hidden by the pale eyelids, which seemed to be stitched up with … steel wire? Veins? Matt couldn't make it out. There was obviously some fierce REM going on behind the eyelids. The mouth (or whatever one could call that gross thing) was a vertical crack, stretched out from the middle of the forehead to the chin.
The rest of the body wasn't very different from that of a Nurse's, although the Midwife, which was what Matt had now guessed was standing before him, didn't wear gloves and wasn't armed with anything, yet.
"Holy. Fucking. Shit," he muttered.
Suddenly, the creature raised the baby above its head, walked up to the nearest spike and …
"NO! Don't …"
But Matt wasn't quick enough. Entrails fell from the spike and besmeared the floor's tiles with blood. A brief crimson fountain rose from the baby's chest. The soft crying stopped.
Then, the Midwife's attention returned to Matt, who had rarely, maybe never ever felt so sick before in his entire life. Its mouth broadened, revealing a lack of teeth and a cornucopia of veins stretched out between the "lips", as it let out a distorted cross between an angry scream and an orgasm-like moan. Literally coming out of thin air, menacing orange flames appeared at the spikes all around them, trapping them inside the circle.
Abruptly and with astonishing force, it jumped at Matt and pinned him to the floor. Sitting astride his body, it gripped the shotgun, wrenched it from him and shoved the weapon against his neck. Matt barely managed to thrust the creature off him before it pulled the trigger and the bullets flew up towards the ceiling.
Having missed its target, the Midwife let out another weird roar, stood and started taking aim at Matt. The latter's reflexes kicked in and he pulled the revolver out while hopping sideways in a pathetic attempt to dodge the results of the Midwife's imminent trigger-squeezing. The fire continued to lick the corpses of the babies along the circumference of the circle.
Shots rang out.
Matt fired four times, the Midwife two. The creature reeled, three bullets buried in its hip and thigh. Its opponent was still uninjured.
The Midwife made yet another screaming/moaning noise, leapt over the spikes, the heat blurring its legs for a second, and landed on the floor outside the circle. Matt was relieved; he thought the abomination was retreating, giving up the fight. Obviously, he didn't know how persevering the town of Silent Hill could be.
The monster's feet left the floor and suddenly, it was crawling like an insect along the wall. With awe-inspiring rapidity, it crawled up the walls and disappeared in the darkness two storeys above Matt.
He looked up into the black abyss hanging over him. He knew the pesky monster was sitting somewhere up on the ceiling, watching him. He could feel it staring down at him …
A shot rang out and a bullet cracked the tile next to his right foot. He drew back in surprise, nearly stepping into the flames, heard something land on the floor to his left and saw a movement in the corner of his eye ...
The twisted sniper scrambled to its feet after the fall and immediately fired the shotgun two times in the general direction of its target. Despite the element of surprise, it still didn't succeed in shooting Matt, who managed to get out of the way before the trigger was pulled.
The Midwife then jumped at Matt, pinned him down and shoved the gun against his neck again. Matt couldn't push the demon away this time; his hands were stuck under its knees. Uttering a triumphant roar, it pulled the trigger.
Click.
Click – click – click.
After pulling the trigger four times in vain, the Midwife realized it had run out of ammunition. Annoyed and still bloodthirsty, it struck its victim in the head with the shotgun and tossed it away. Matt let out a cry of pain and continued his futile attempts to pull his hands out from under the freak's knees.
Apparently, the monster now decided to forget about fancy weapons and switch to another plan. Its right hand found his nose and its left hand rested on his throat.
Then, the two hands began to squeeze.
Matt could only lie there and squirm while the life was throttled out of him. His eyes wandered from the ragged uniform to the infants to the floortiles. Slowly, relentlessly, everything began to go black and all kinds of thoughts and feelings flashed through his mind …
His right hand finally escaped from its confinement between the floor and knee, flew up to the nauseating face above him and fired the revolver. The Midwife made one last screaming-and-moaning-at-the-same-time sound and slumped down on him. He pushed the dead body aside and stayed on the floor for a while, taking breath and watching the flames die down until the only light-source in the hall was his flashlight.
With a red hand-shaped mark on the neck and bags under the eyes, Matt eventually stood. Only charred remains of the small dead bodies were left on the spikes and there was still an awful smell of burnt flesh in the stale air.
Remembering the ampoule from room S9/10, he reached into his backpack and pulled the container out. He didn't have much experience with doing jabs on himself, but did pull it off somewhat successfully, injecting the liquid into his arm. It didn't take long before he began to feel the relieving effects kick in.
After a minute of searching the dark hall, he found the shotgun that abomination had thrown away and picked it up. When he had reloaded it with the four shells left in his pocket, Matt decided he might as well leave the hospital. He couldn't see any reason to stay in this godforsaken building. "Why did I even come here in the first place? … Oh yeah, because of that stupid note I found in the church."
But when he tried to get back out to Carroll St., he discovered that the lobby doors were locked.
"Crap," he muttered, turned around, his back leaned against the door, and winced when he noticed Tommy standing in the middle of the circle of spikes and charred babies, apparently unaffected by the horrendous sights around him. He still had those bruises and scrapes that had dotted his body back in the coffin and his clothes were blood-stained, but he was standing right there, alive.
Oddly enough, a round dark hole, three feet in diameter, had also suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the floor before the kid's feet.
"Tommy? You … How did … I thought you were dead!"
The boy just stood there in the middle of the hall and stared at Matt with the odd combination of dismal eyes and a little enigmatic smile on his face.
"Hello? Is something wrong?" Matt said.
"What a stupid question," he thought, "of course something's wrong. Everything's wrong in this place. And if you've been killed by a supernatural creature, risen from the dead and gone mute, something is very, very wrong."
"Why won't you say something?" he asked, desperation in his voice.
Abruptly and still smiling, Tommy deliberately hopped forwards and fell into the hole.
"Fuck! Tommy …" Matt ran to the hole and looked down. An empty darkness stared back at him. Why had Tommy had to do that? And where had this stupid gap in the floor come from? It was like a dream, nothing made sense …
The most pertinent question was of course: Did he have the guts to let himself fall down there, too?
The hesitation lasted for a few minutes. A wealth of different ideas and opinions fluttered around in his mind. Eventually, one of the voices broke away from the others and asked him one question:
"Do you really think you have anything in particular to lose now?"
When he realized what the true answer was, Matt dropped down into the darkness.
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A/N: Whew, finally finished this stupid Midwife fight scene. Sorry about it getting all Valtiel-ish, with the wall-scaling … Anyway, honest feedback will as usual be appreciated, and remember to TINW. –E.P.O.