Art of Virgil has been added.

I know I said we were going to see what befell her this chapter, but I wanted to do this short one (well, short in the case of this story) first. Next chapter, I promise and I Guess what happened to Julia was not a shock.

I think…we've got nine chapters to go till this little tail is over…

Chapter 33: The in between

"OW!"

Jobe fell back into the car seat that had carried him all the way from Silent Hill and most of the way back again, staring in morbid awe at the bloodied slither of glass gripped tight between his index finger and thumb.

"Sonova…" Next to him, Grace crumbled into her hands, clutching at her face as she swore into them.

"What the hell did you do anyway?" Jobe looked up from the streaked shard that had been buried deep within her skin at the bent woman next to him. The question had been begging to be let free from within the confides of his mouth ever since he'd looked up from the wheel of the car as they pulled out of that misty car park and realised that the woman's face was a mess of clotting crimson streaks.

"Let's just say I tried to open a window and it didn't really work out…" She moaned from behind her criss-crossed fingers, still refusing to let go of her wounded face.

Jobe lent back in the cushy seat, tender from old age, and glared at the world beyond the windshield of the faithful, off-white car. He sighed, leaving Grace to recover on her own, loud way.

The pair had chosen to drive back to Brahms, the fog melting away behind them to reveal bright blue skies. It would be nigh on impossible for anyone to even entertain the thought that such dark events had taken place on what was turning out to be such a beautiful day. Anyone except for Jobe.

Needless to say, Grace had picked up on the fact that he was not the man who had dropped her off at the motel the previous night when everything looked as though it was finally taking a turn towards normality (heck, even something with as little empathy as an amoeba could tell there was something eating the man from the inside out) and made the fatal mistake of asking what was wrong.

That one, tiny, little increase in pressure was all it took for the fragile walls Jobe had built around himself to come crumbling down.

Grace had had to wrench the wheel from the man's hands, saving the car from ploughing into the edge of the road as Jobe lost control of everything. Seeing that that they weren't about to crash into the barrier that raced along the side of the tarmac strip, Grace cast a more than worried glance at Jobe as the man fell back into his seat, his eyes streaming as if the blood from those freshly inflicted wounds had found a way to escape through his tear ducts, oozing out in great torrents. For the first time that day, Grace chose to take the rational option and brought the car to a rolling halt on the side of the road.

It sat there, motionless under a sign that proclaimed in bold white print to the world that there was only another twenty miles to go until those who took this road crossed into Brahms.

Grace sat, trying not to listen to the man next to her as he cried, the bitter, long sobs turning her stomach sour. When he finally regained control and reined in the emotions that had so freely surfaced, she suddenly found herself whishing he hadn't stopped. The silence that leaked into the car from the cold outside made her want to let lose like a fog horn and scream and scream until all the burning pressure and conferment that polluted her innards like a toxin was out of the woman, leaving her blissfully empty.

"What is it?" God, did her voice really sound so small and broken in the dusty enclosure of this car? Jobe blinked slowly, coming out of the foggy plane of memories Grace's innocent question had created and looked at her, and she saw that the lively spark that had once inhabited his black eyes had been snuffed out. It was as if someone had gouged out those charismatic orbs and replaced them with soulless hunks of coal.

And so, for the second time since Angela had 'liberated' it from the hospital, the vehicle quietly listened as yet it absorbed yet another harrowing tale of bloody violence, but this time the narrative was supplied by Jobe himself. The man wrapped it up, hiding not one single detail from the woman, perhaps in some subconscious attempt to prove the twisted voice on the other end of the phone wrong. Murderer, yes, he'd had that title thrust upon him but he hadn't lied to anyone.

He came to an end and the air between the two filled with a pregnant silence. Jobe's eyes briefly flashed upon Grace's face, the action begging for her to pass judgment.

But the silence seemed to have finally converted her to its dumb religion.

Now, I must tell you that it wasn't fear or spite that clamped the woman's lips tight. It was inexperience.

Grace suddenly realised that she'd never listened to anyone ever before, not even in her un-educational and down right wasted school days. It was never she who lent a shoulder to cry on or an attentive ear, but forced the whole world to listen to her as she moaned about things that seemed so critical at the time yet fantastically trivial only months later.

It didn't make her feel any better.

Nor did the fact that she was letting this awkward silence spin out even longer than it already had.

'Say something!'

What?

'ANYTHING!'

"So… you killed her?"

Usually, it takes a second or two before a person realises what they said and gets that 'why can't the ground open up and swallow me?' feelings. Grace had it even before the words had left her mouth, wincing at the sound of her own damning voice. 'Wow, that was tactful'

She wouldn't blame the guy if he turned round and punched her there and then…

"She was already dead…that thing…" He paused, spitting the word as if it left a savoury tang in his mouth. " It wasn't her. That town…it did something to her and it's not going to stop. EVER! There's just no getting away from that damned place!" Jobe turned on the woman, bristling as his words cut the air. It was only when he saw how Grace had pressed herself into the car door in some desperate attempt to put as much distance between her and his rabid self that he realised he'd started screaming the words. "Sorry…" He sat back in his seat, sighing heavily and looked up into the heavens. The stained car roof blocked his view.

"What are we going to do now then?"

Jobe snorted through flared nostrils, leaving Grace to fiddle obsessively with the cigarette lighter that had miraculously wormed its way into her hand.

"We're going back."

There was a soft thud somewhere in the bowls of the car as the silver lighter slipped from the woman's suddenly deathly still hands.

"What?!" Had she heard him right? Did he say they were actually going to go back to that town after having more near death experiences there to last anyone with a shard of sanity a lifetime? He had to be kidding.

"After we get Virgil," His voice was horribly steady and it dawned on Grace that there wasn't going to be a punch line. "We're going to drive back there and find out just what it is those two had planed for us… and make sure it doesn't happen."

From the way his teeth gritted together, it would take an imbecile to not guess that Jobe had bloody murder on his mind.

"Oh, they're going to pay for what they did to us."

Grace felt the skin on the back of her neck rise up as the car sailed out of its tempary parking space and resumed hammering down the road to Brahms. She didn't want to do this, but then, the madman next to her was right. If they didn't do something, this was never going to end and she'd have to live the rest of her life in a fearful cycle. Run. Wait for the town to find her. Run. The cycle resumes…

Grace sighed as the sun dipped behind a cloud, leaving the world dull.

8 8 8

And so, that pretty much brings us back to where we started. Through a long, tedious process of elimination, Jobe and Grace had learnt that Angela was being held at Brahms's National Hospital.

They'd been sitting in the car park when Grace had caught sight of her face in the side-mirror and nearly passed out.

For someone with a face full of glass, she'd sure taken a long time to notice it.

Jobe had spent five minuets pulling each of the crystal splinters out of his companions face, turning a deaf ear to her violent screams and occasional death-threats; after all, you don't want to go into a hospital to look for someone when you look as though you deserve to be admitted yourself.

Even Before Jobe's eyes had adjusted to the harsh, neon lights that blared down from the hospital's spotless white ceiling, the man could tell there was something wrong. It was as if the air had overloaded with static.

"What the…" Grace hopped back as a nurse scuttled past her, nearly bowling the twiggy woman over in her panicky haste. She cast the woman a bitter look, but that melted when her eyes focused on the rest of the room. A strange menagerie of doctors, nurses and assorted staff members milled about the entrance hall, each one trying to out shout the other as they tried to get their message across. If one were to look up chaos in the dictionary, there would probably be a still of this scene right next to it.

Somehow, the two managed to keep together as they squirmed their was through the great living mass of white coats and make it to the reception desk in one piece only to find things were even worse.

"Can I help you?" on of the woman behind the counter glanced up, only half acknowledging their existence before the phone beside her screamed into life, the shrill ring joining the cacophony of pure noise that racketed through out the small space. Jobe strained his ears, trying to make out even a snippet of the conversation between the receptionist (who, to be frank, looked as though she was on the verge of having a cardiac arrest) and the caller.

"Hello?….don't know…..vanished, just vani…yes, but…."

Even in the over packed room, that familiar sense of dread had singled Jobe out, plunging its icy fingers into his neck.

"What did she say?" A very pissed of looking Grace turned her face up to his before yet another doctor smacked into her with his bony shoulder.

Jobe opened his mouth to answer but the hot air of the busy room only invaded his mouth for a blink of time before someone was shouting at him.

"Can I help you?!" The receptionist slammed the plastic phone down hard enough to shatter it and Jobe woundn't be shocked if she started foaming at the mouth anytime now.

"Uh, yes…we're here to see a friend of ours who was brought here last-"

"I'm sorry, but that won't be possible." Jobe frowned at the woman's snappy words.

"But, why?"

The receptionist rolled her eyes and sighed. How many times was she going to have to tell people this today?

"Some time last night, thirty people, that's staff members AND patients disappeared from the hospital."

Grace glanced at the woman from the corner of her slit eye.

"What d'ya mean 'disappeared'?"

The receptionist shot the woman a dark scowl. Clearly, this wasn't a question that she wanted to hear.

"They just vanished into thin-" But that was all that she got to say on the matter as the telephone next to her started squalling again.

"How much would you want to bet that this has something to do with our little problem?" Jobe just nodded in dumb response, his stony face fixed on some distant point. Man, if he stayed in here for just one more minute, this noise was going to drive him stark raving mad…

And that was when his ears picked up on a particular tone that pierced the humdrum of sound, a noise he had heard so long ago just before everything took a nosedive for the worst. Nervously, he caught sight of Grace as she shook her head.

"Man, what's that noise…"

It sounded like someone was dragging a piece of glass over a chalkboard and singing in a pitch so sharp, it made your ears want to bleed.

Grace stuck a finger in her ear, but that just made the searing hum worse, as if she'd trapped it in her head.

The receptionist looked up…if those two were still there with their self-important questions, she was going to stab someone.

But they'd gone, as if the very air itself had erased them from this plane of existence.