Chapter 18: Decrepit Reality
Matt followed the hallway as it led him away from the safety and silence of the day care center. Sirens could be heard wailing somewhere on the other sides of the grey walls, on which photos of Matt's past were hanging, surrounding him, reminding him.
There were photos of Sophie reeling with a green half-empty bottle in her hand. Photos of himself sitting in the courtroom as it was slowly and relentlessly decided who should have the custody. Photos of Amanda sitting in a corner, crying and praying.
The sirens grew louder. "It's changing again. The town's changing …"
The walls were now completely covered in photos. Even the ceiling was filled with pictures of the couple on their first vacation in Silent Hill before they had even talked about having children, the elderly female judge sitting in the court, the smiling midwife after Tommy's birth.
Matt finally reached a wooden door at the end of the corridor, turned the knob and stepped through to …
The room with the pool of plastic balls.
He glanced at the other side of the door. "The Only Door that lEAds To Holy redemption" was indeed written on it. "But the hallway went straight forwards – I can't be back in the day care center …"
He winced when he saw the plastic balls to his left move. He stood still and stared intently at the spot where he thought the strange movement had occurred.
It happened again: the coloured balls rose slightly and the bulge quickly slid across the surface of the plastic sea, towards Matt. A kid's muffled laughter came from somewhere beneath, but in a place like this, it was hardly innocent children crawling around on the bottom.
Matt drew back and hugged the wall. The pool replied with more waves rolling fiercely around, showing that whatever was hiding down there was alive and kicking. Plastic balls flew over the edges of the wooden chest, landing on the rug, and there was also something else falling out along with the plastic balls, a red liquid …
"Only about ten feet to the exit. If you run, you can get out of here in a few seconds," a hopeful voice whispered in Matt's head.
He took a deep breath, then dashed for the doorway. Several little blood-smeared arms immediately emerged from between the plastic balls and reached out for him. Some of them managed to catch hold of his clothes and started tugging at them. He quickly broke away from the pale wet hands and sprinted onwards.
But when he reached the corner of the wooden chest and turned right, his feet slid on the plastic balls lying on the floor and he lost balance. He let out a short scream as the back of his head hit the chest's edge and the icy terror was momentarily replaced by red-hot pain.
The cold hands didn't waste any time – before his torso fell to the floor, they seized his head and pulled it up over the edge, down between the plastic balls and into the warm crimson sea hidden below. It didn't matter how much he squirmed and struggled; all the little fingers still kept squeezing his head and pulling him down. He heard hundreds of children laughing and whispering.
"Good night, dad …"
With his neck painfully bent back and his legs kicking the wall in utter futility, Matt tried the only solution he could come up with.
His right hand was still clutching the shotgun.
He lifted it up and clumsily shoved the barrels down through the layer of plastic balls behind his head.
"Daddy?"
He squeezed the trigger. Bullets plunged into the blood and the whispering children's voices turned into wrathful, unearthly screams. The hands released Matt and withdrew into the depths. He rose from the pool, filled his lungs with the acrid air and scrambled to his feet.
More arms were already bursting up through the plastic balls and eagerly stretching out for their prey. Matt ran past the twitching fingers and through the doorway to the room where he had solved the virtue puzzle.
It had changed, too. The paintings were gone and only an ordinary empty wall was left. The toys were all torn apart, the cars smashed and the dolls decapitated. The coathooks on the wall opposite the office had turned into large rusty iron hooks with mangled children's corpses hanging from them. The hooks had simply been driven straight through the backs of the skulls and into the brains …
"It's just the town's tricks. It's all a dream," Matt muttered to himself and walked through the room. Behind him, he could hear the creatures in the pool swimming slowly around and pushing a few balls over the edges. They had calmed down now that their prey was gone. Apparently, they were too lazy or just somehow unable to get up and chase him.
Matt stepped outside into the warm night and wasn't really shocked to see that Nathan Avenue had been replaced by metal net-grating suspended above bottomless darkness. This darkness was surrounding him on all sides – beneath him, around him, above him on the starless sky. It seemed he was utterly alone in the universe with the road made of metal net and the Stepford Day Care Center building, floating around in endless black emptiness.
"Well, looks like I'm not utterly alone."
Matt noticed his trusty companion throughout this journey into Hell, Amamet, hovering at the middle of the road in front of him. The angel held the burning sword out to Matt's left, pointing to the north – almost as if showing the sinner which way to go now.
He walked down the stairs and onto the road. It rocked slightly and made a strident, wailing noise.
Amamet suddenly flew off in the direction he had been pointing out with the sword. Matt didn't have any other choice – he ran after the guiding light and followed it past Nathan Avenue, up Sandford Street.
The heat was almost unbearable, and yet the ominous sky was shedding snow. The sensation of the cold snowflakes landing on his shoulders and waves of hellish heat rising from the depths beneath Sandford Street at the same time made him feel sick.
"So this is what it looks like when one's reality literally falls apart."
Matt's eyes smarted and a headache once more started growing behind the back of his skull. Dizzy and exhausted, he forgot all about following Amamet any further up Sandford St. as he went from sprinting energetically to staggering at a snail's pace.
"Might as well give up. I'll never get out of here," he thought, slumping down to his knees and staring down through the holes in the net at the pure nothingness. A moth fluttered around his head twice before it decided to take a break and sit on his ear.
Then he noticed the small photo lying there on the road. He had taken it himself about a year ago, when they were all on holiday in the town – him, Sophie and the kids. It was just a tiny snapshot of Tommy and Amanda riding in the teacups in the amusement park.
He slowly looked up to his right. There it was, a huge sign decorated with a clown's cheerful face in the upper corner: "LAKESIDEAMUSEMENT PARK – FUN DAYS FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY!" And below the sign, the old gates waited for him to push one of them open and enter the park.
Matt got up and felt the otherworldly energy return, a warm rush flowing from his heels to his fingertips to his head. The moth left his ear and fluttered into the sky. He looked at the simple happiness on his real children's faces in the photo one last time, then he ran into the park.
A pink rabbit costume with a big smile on its blood-smeared mouth greeted him. It was sitting relaxed on a bench to his right. Matt ignored it and went onwards through a wooden gate with "Souvenir Avenue" written on the sign above.
Not really sure why he was in such a hurry, he ran down the avenue, his shoes rhythmically pounding the rusty metal under them. There were restaurants and shops lined up to his right, a huge black pit to his left, and in the area between several Dolls floating around with their strings going up into the night sky where ancient Gods were undoubtedly having fun controlling the abominations.
Matt burst into a random souvenir shop and closed the doors behind him. A few blood-thirsty Dolls slammed into the doors on the other side, but he was safe from them at the moment. "Good thing those morons can't use doorhandles."
A lonely Cerberus that had been ripping up a rabbit doll at the back of the room suddenly noticed Matt and rushed across the shop to him. Matt raised the shotgun and fired. All three rudimentary heads howled in pain as the bullets sent the monstrosity flying back until it hit the counter.
Matt ran past the shelves with toys and candy, grabbed the cash register from the counter and dropped it on the dog. The radio stopped crackling.
Matt was out of breath, but he couldn't stop now. He was so close, he could feel it, so close to the exit …
There were two doors he could go through to get out of this shop, one in the middle of the right wall and another in the corner at the back. He chose the one in the middle of the wall, simply because it was the nearest, and went out to a large area divided by a metal net-fence to his right.
A ferris wheel spun slowly around on the other side of the fence. A few of those rabbit costumes sat in it, their wide smiles implying that they were enjoying the ride. There was a large building to his left with the words "Huey's Hullabaloo House" and a grinning horse's head painted on the sign above the double doors.
Matt ran towards the entrance, but stopped when he heard a familiar voice to his right: "Where are you going?"
Daryl was standing on the other side of the fence, her fingers holding the wires on either side of her head. Her clothes were torn and spattered with blood. Her wet hair clung to her face, partially concealing her bloodshot eyes. Bruises and gashes were visible through some of the holes in her clothes.
Matt walked up to the fence, frowning. "I … what happened to you?"
"The monsters," she mumbled.
"You can see them, too, now?"
"Yes. I guess you were right. They really do exist. I just couldn't see them at first … Oh God, I'm sorry about trapping you in the cafeteria. You sounded so afraid …"
"Yeah, well, it was the first time I saw a Cerberus," Matt explained.
"A Cerberus?" Daryl said.
"That's what I call them. They move like dogs and they've got three heads."
"Okay, I get it. Anyway, I'm really sorry about that. I thought that maybe you were insane and you'd start thinking I were a monster." She cocked her eye at the rabbits in the ferris wheel and the feeble ghost of a wry smile slid across her face. "Maybe you are insane. We're both insane and the monsters aren't really "monsters", just …"
"No, don't think that way. They're real," Matt insisted, although he couldn't help remembering what he had read about Charley Abramson in the prison.
"Okay. Err, what's with the rope?" Daryl asked, noticing the rope from the prison scaffold. It was still hanging around Matt's neck.
"It's a really long story," he said, pulled it off and tossed it away.
"Sure. You must be wondering why I did that to Stu," Daryl said.
"No, not really."
The avenger removed her gaze from the ferris wheel and stared back at the man on the other side of the fence. "What do you mean, "not really"?"
"I've kinda figured it out, I think."
Daryl took a few steps away and mumbled: "Jenny's still alive. But the things he did to her …" She brushed a thick layer of snowflakes off her shoulders and back, shivering. Then she turned around: "You must have done something, too, to end up here. I mean, this is Hell, right? It's only for sinners, like Stu, and … and me …"
"Yes, I murdered someone. My wife, Sophie. We got divorced, and she was going to get the custody, but she …"
"Stop. I don't want to hear it," Daryl said.
Matt understood. After all, they both had their own problems to deal with, and sharing their stories with each other wasn't going to get them out of this nightmare.
"It's sad how things suddenly change like that," Daryl muttered. "I was in the middle of another boring day in my boring life, then I heard what had happened to Jenny, and everything just changed."
"Life's weird," Matt said, quoting what Daryl had stated when they were wandering to the hospital. That was less than six hours ago, and yet it felt like a number of days had passed. But time didn't seem to matter much in this place.
"Well, I have to go now," Matt declared.
"What?"
"I've gotta go. I need to find a circus, Robbie's Circus."
"But why?"
"I don't know. I just have to be there right now. I can feel it."
"But you can't just leave me here!" Daryl kicked the fence, which was too high to climb over and impossible to squeeze through. "I'll go nuts if I have to spend one more minute alone in this place!"
"Sorry. Good luck," Matt said and started walking towards the entrance to Huey's Hullabaloo House.
"Goddammit, Matt, I don't think I can survive much longer around here … Please …"
Matt suddenly got an idea. He stopped, went back to the fence and reached into his backpack.
"This has been pretty useful to me. I'm sure you'll need it, too," he said, sticking the small red radio through one of the holes in the fence.
Daryl grabbed it and started fiddling with it, but she couldn't find any normal stations. "It's broken. What the fuck's useful about a broken radio?"
"When there's a monster nearby, it plays white noise."
Daryl's eyebrows rose.
"I don't know why or how, but that's what happens. Whenever that thing plays static, you need to be on your guard," Matt said.
"Okay. I believe you," Daryl said and tucked the radio into her pocket. "Well, you need to go find that circus, I guess … Good luck, Matt."
"Same to you," Matt replied.
They stared into each other's eyes for a few silent seconds, then wandered away from the fence. Both of them knew they would never meet again.
Matt pulled one of the doors open and stepped into the Hullabaloo House.
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