Chapter 16: Haunted
Further on in the Indian cave, Amamet started to pop up in the wall paintings. Some of the pictures depicted him flying above rainbows, with huge, brown feather-wings, like those of an eagle, instead of the tattered pieces of skin Matt had seen. His face was also different – it had a crude nose, a smiling mouth, black eyes. In one painting, he was riding on a white horse, the burning sword sticking out from his mouth.
The symbol from the suitcase in the plane was drawn on the walls and ceiling. A red triangle inside two red circles. What could it mean? "I'll bet this was a sacred area to them."
Of course it was. This whole town and the surrounding area was holy to the Indians who had lived around here – that's what it had said in the Lost Memories book at the library. "I wonder why? Did those Indians believe in these "Gods", or "Silent Spirits" or whatever?"
The moths continued fluttering around their stalactites. There were horizontal recesses in the walls where skeletons of the Native Americans were lying, holding various talismans and amulets. Some of them wore fairly flamboyant headgears, too – they were probably priests or war-heroes or something.
"I guess this was their cemetery," Matt mused.
He soon reached the other end of the cavern. For some reason, there was a rusty ladder on the wall leading up through the ceiling. Standing on the ground and looking up, it was impossible to see where it ended.
Nevertheless, Matt began the ascent; he didn't want to stay in that creepy graveyard anymore.
However, climbing up the ladder proved to be quite difficult. Firstly, it wasn't like the one in the hospital's office wing – this time, he had to climb upwards. And it was a long trip. As if that wasn't enough, the bars were wet and slippery.
After an aeon of climbing up the shaft, he could finally see the top of the ladder. Over that, the edge of a round hole, and above that, the black starless night sky. When the first breeze from above brushed against his face, he immediately started climbing faster.
A couple of minutes later, Matt pulled himself out of the shaft and onto the floor-grating of the first outdoor area he had visited since Carroll Street. Yellowish smoke – or was it just fog? – was floating lazily around in the warm air. There was a strange high structure to his left – "a rollercoaster?"
"So you found a way out of the prison, huh?" Amanda said. She was sitting to his right, on top of a wagon of sorts. It looked like it was supposed to sell popcorn, but there was of course neither clerks nor customers around. The popcorn itself didn't exactly look appetizing.
"Um, yeah. And how did you get out here? It's like you show up everywhere I go," Matt said and stood.
"It's a long story," Amanda replied and jumped down from the wagon.
"But why did you just walk away like that in the prison? It was … well, rude. And a little creepy."
"Sorry. I had to go to the bathroom."
"You could at least have told me that instead of just suddenly walking away. God, everyone I've met in this town, there's just something weird about all of you … Anyway, back in the prison I asked you if you knew this woman named Sophie. She's blonde, snub-nose, looks a few years younger than me … Well?"
"Nope, never heard of her," Amanda replied.
"Okay … So do you know where we are? It looks like an amusement park …"
"Yes, it's the only one in town. Lakeside Amusement Park. The Mountain Coaster's right there," Amanda pointed to the high structure behind Matt, then to the building to his left, "and there's the haunted mansion."
"Sounds like you know this place."
"Yeah, well, I've been here before," Amanda explained and started walking towards the mansion. "BorleyHauntedMansion" was written on a sign above the wooden door.
"You wanna go through the haunted mansion?" Matt said.
"Yeah. I think they're funny," Amanda said. "What's the matter?"
"I've got a bad feeling about it."
Amanda giggled. "You're not afraid of ghosts, are you?"
---
"Welcome to the Borley Haunted Mansion!" a man's voice emitted by some hidden speaker said when they set foot in the entrance hall. It was a large square room with a high ceiling and two doors – the one they had entered through and another one in the left wall.
"We're so glad you came. Please come inside and look around. When you feel you're ready, then go through the door," the voice continued.
Matt strolled up to the door in the left wall and opened it. Followed by Amanda, he stepped through. They walked up a narrow staircase with dusty portraits hanging on the walls. "You might want to be careful around here. The ceiling can sometimes collapse when you least expect it," the slow voice admonished. Of course, Matt and Amanda didn't really believe that – it was just something that guy said to scare them, right?
"What's that smell?" Matt asked.
"Dunno," Amanda replied and shrugged.
Then, suddenly, it happened. First, Matt heard the crumbling sound. A second later, Amanda's high-pitched shriek reached his ears. By the time he had turned around, the girl was gone, and only a hole in the stairs where she had been standing was left.
"Whoops! It seems the floor gave way. That happens a lot in this old building," the voice explained, "I hope you didn't lose anything valuable in the process."
Matt thought about dropping down there. After all, he had survived the trips from the hospital to the university, from the university to the prison and from the execution yard to the caverns. But there was something different about this pit. Somehow, it really appeared to be bottomless.
"You're not thinking about going down there just because of Amanda?" the voice said, as if it had read his thoughts. "There's nothing down there. Nothing. At. All … I wouldn't do it if I were you."
Matt chose to heed this advice and continued up the stairway. He couldn't mourn for Amanda – the whole situation felt too unreal and dream-like.
At the top of the stairs, he opened another wooden door and entered a small room divided into two by a rusty, three feet high fence. On his side, there was nothing interesting – just a short path to the door in the opposite wall. All the furniture was exhibited on the other side. It looked like a kitchen, with a stove, fridge, counters and closed white cupboards fastened to the walls and ceiling above the counters. The cupboards had padlocks on them for some reason. "Why would anyone want to bother locking their kitchen cupboards?" Matt mused and started walking across the creaking floor to the next door.
"This is the mansion's second floor kitchen," the voice informed. "It is rumoured that, when mrs. Maybrick lived here with her two daughters, she would lock them up in the cupboards whenever they did something ill-bred. It is also rumoured that everyone forgot about the daughters after mrs. Maybrick died in a car accident a few years ago, and the two girls were never heard of again …"
Matt reached the door. The moment he touched the handle, he heard a loud banging noise behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a few small drops of blood seep out from the bottom of one of the cupboards and land on the counter below.
The next room was probably a study. The desk in the corner was made of smooth black wood. Only a few empty envelopes and stamps were lying on it. The mirror hanging on the wall above the desk was cracked and a short message was written on it with almost illegible black letters: We are all tired of it now.
The slow voice returned: "Yes, I am sorry it was such a short tour you got."
Matt suddenly saw a quick movement in the mirror and felt a cold gloved hand grab his neck, then the horrible pricking sensation of the needle penetrating his skin …
"We really don't usually want these things sneaking up on our visitors."
Staring at the mirror, he could see the Nurse standing behind him, jabbing the syringe into his neck, injecting a mysterious white liquid. "White Claudia?"
"But this time, I'm afraid it was … how shall I put it … necessary," the voice continued while the white liquid ventured out of the syringe and into Matt's veins.
He struggled to escape from the Nurse's grip, and under "normal" circumstances, he probably would have been able to do that. After all, the Nurses weren't exactly the most powerful creatures around here. But now, a heavy torpor was overwhelming him and he could barely stand on his two feet anymore. Beads of perspiration fell into his eyes, a somewhat pleasant chill ran from his forehead to his toes and darkness devoured his vision.
---
Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but 't is not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
When he woke up, Matt was sitting hunched up in a wheelchair. He tried to get up, but his legs refused to cooperate. He was paralyzed. The only parts of his body he could move were his eyes and toes. "Must be because of the drug that Nurse gave me. Shit, shit, shit …"
He was sitting at the one end of a dark hallway. C1 was written on the door to his left and C2 on a door next to that.
"So I'm back in the hospital's first floor patient wing. Great."
Suddenly, the wheelchair started moving. Someone was pushing it down the hallway – or was the wheelchair moving on its own? It didn't matter.
When the chair reached room C4, the door was already open. Matt was pushed inside and parked in the middle of the room in front of the white screen on the wall. In the corner of his eye, he could see the old-fashioned projector was still there to his left.
Familiar footsteps echoed behind him; Amamet had just entered the room. The being walked up to the projector and placed a movie reel on it. Soon, flickering black-and-white images appeared on the screen. "What the hell? He wants to show me a silent movie?"
In the beginning, the images were blurred and indistinguishable. But then, they began to get sharper.
Matt could make out a hallway. White walls, grey doors, a floor with black and grey tiles. Despite the lack of colours in the film, he knew where this was – it was an apartment building in L.A. He had been there before.
A figure appeared on the screen. It had grey pants, a black t-shirt and grey hair. "That's me." The black-and-white Matt walked down the hallway until he stopped in front of door 515 and knocked. The paralyzed Matt now noticed that the black-and-white Matt was holding a black revolver.
The same revolver the Doctors were armed with.
Memories began to pop up in his head. Room 515 – that's where Sophie had been living after they …
The grey door was opened by Sophie. Her hair in the movie was milk-white instead of blonde. Frowning, she said something the paralyzed Matt could only hear in his mind ("Matt? What are you doing here? I thought you …")
The black-and-white Matt raised the revolver. A shot rang out in the paralyzed Matt's mind and a wound appeared between Sophie's neck and breasts. She died instantly. Black blood oozed from the hole and she slumped down, landing on the threshold between the hallway and her apartment.
Silence.
The black-and-white Matt drew back in horror, realizing what he had done. He bumped into the wall and dropped the revolver. It landed on a tile and made a quiet clicking sound he would never forget. With a face so pale it would still look white as a sheet if this was a colour film, he ran down the hallway until his blurred figure disappeared from the camera angle and the movie stopped.
Amamet took his reel and left the room.
Matt could only sit there. When the tears began to trickle down, he couldn't even raise his hand to wipe them off. He had rarely felt more pathetic and miserable before in his life.
All the memories he had repressed and replaced when he got on that plane in the L.A. airport were coming back to haunt him. How he had met Sophie at a library, and how the wedding had taken place about a year later. How they had decided to christen their two children Amanda and Tommy. How Sophie had starting drinking, and occasionally beating the kids. How they had gotten divorced and how obvious it had been that she was going to get the custody, with all those lawyers defending her and hinting that Matt was the one who had been beating their children.
That's why he had gotten on the plane to South Ashfield after murdering Sophie. He thought he could forget, escape and start a new normal life – and maybe he could have done that if the town of Silent Hill hadn't pulled him into its twisted realm. Of course he had never had any relatives to visit in South Ashfield. It was just a lie he had made himself believe to "replace the unpleasant truth", as it had said back in Neely's Bar.
Like so many other lost souls trapped in the town, Matt had committed his sin because he had thought it was the right thing to do. He thought it was the only way to protect Amanda and Tommy – maybe he was right, maybe it was just another delusion. The drawing on the "Protector" tablet in the prison had naturally reflected this self-concept. After all, he had recently read that the crow was a Japanese symbol of family love.
---
After what might only have been a few minutes, but had felt like two hours, Matt could move his legs once more. It seemed the effects of the White Claudia had worn off, although he did still feel a little dizzy when he got up from the wheelchair and left room C4.
His footsteps echoed throughout the silent hallway as he walked towards the office wing. There were two white cards lying on a bench at the wall to his left. They were reminiscent of the cards from the sin puzzle in the library. However, the words written on these cards were cardinal virtues: "Fortitude" and "Prudence". Matt tucked them into his pockets and proceeded down the hallway. He soon reached the other end and went through the double doors in the left wall, into the area where he had fought the Midwife.
It had changed. Again. The floor was gone and replaced by the calm surface of a dark indoor lake. Only the doctor's lounge floor was left, like a small island in the black water. Another bridge of strange, slippery flesh led from the door Matt entered through to the island in the middle of the hall. All the furniture was gone, too, except four small, closed fridges seated at the edge of the island. Daryl was standing on the island with her back turned to Matt, almost like the Midwife before the fight. She was saying something under her breath.
Matt hurried across the bridge, luckily not tripping and falling into the ominous waters. "Daryl?" he said when he set foot on the tiles of the doctor's lounge floor.
"WHAT?" she yelled and turned around. "What are you doing here?" She looked as angry as the lady drawn on the "Avenger" tablet.
Matt now noticed Stu lying on his back at the corner of the island next to the row of fridges. He looked terrible, with lots of bruises and a face that seemed to say "just kill me already".
The waters around them began to move.
"What the … Did you do this to him?" Matt asked the young woman.
"None of your business," Daryl said.
Waves started rolling around in an asymmetrical pattern on the water surface.
"But …"
"Shut up. Nothing you can say is going to change my mind," Daryl said and turned back to face Stu. She was holding her handgun.
"What are you talking about?" Matt said.
"I'm talking about justice." Her voice was full of hatred and loathing.
The waters were stirred up now, as if they were on a ship at sea, trapped in a storm. "Do you know what this guy did to my sister?" Daryl said, "to Jenny? I know. And I won't let him get away with it."
Matt's radio started to play static again.
Daryl's finger tightened on the trigger as she aimed for Stu's head. Before he could do anything to prevent the murder, Matt was washed away by a large wave that suddenly swept across his side of the island. He fell into the warm waters. Currents began tugging at the body that had just entered their territory.
Matt's head rose to the surface just in time for him to see the bullet plunge into Stu's forehead.
When the first drop of Stu's blood trickled beyond the edge of the floor and into the water, all the fridges opened at once and four skinny human-like monsters jumped out. Their legs were bent backwards in a very sickening way and their skin was bluish and gleamy - Matt didn't have much time to absorb the details. They threw themselves against Daryl, moving almost like deformed frogs, and tried gnawing at her legs. She screamed in panic, stumbled back, firing her handgun wildly …
"Now she can see them, too," Matt thought just before a strong current pulled him down into the depths of the waters beneath the hospital.
---
The four creatures were already dead when Daryl fired the last two bullets left in the weapon, still screaming. She continued squeezing the trigger. Click, click, click.
The gun fell from her hand and landed on the floor. Her gaze slowly moved from the empty fridges to the dead monsters to the blood seeping out from Stu's head.
"Oh my God."
"I'm … I … it wasn't …"
She turned around, closed her eyes, collapsed, opened her mouth wide and vomited. Sirens could be heard in the distance.
---
Matt awoke on the west shore of Toluca Lake. His clothes were soaked and his mind exhausted. He stood and glanced at the waters. The white mist hung low above the small waves; he was back in the foggy version of the town. "Everything looks so peaceful …"
After half a minute of wandering through the quiet forest, he reached Nathan Avenue and followed it to the north, towards the residential area. A butterfly fluttered around the trees to his left for a while, before it disappeared in the mist.
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A/N: TINW … Whew, I think that was the longest chapter so far! I promise Matt won't lose consciousness or jump down a single hole again in future chapters. -E.P.O.