Chapter 3: Elevator Encounters
Nymph, n.
1. (Class. Myth.) A goddess of the mountains, forests, meadows, or waters.
2. Hence: A lovely young girl; a maiden; a damsel.
3. (Zo"ol.) The pupa of an insect; a chrysalis.
On the fourth floor of Lambert Hospital, Hooper Lake City, the only sounds were some muffled moans coming from room G17 and bare feet slapping down on cold tiles as Beth ran down the corridor, wearing a bloodstained gown and clutching a scalpel. One could say she looked as insane as the world she was trapped in.
Beth wondered how it had developed into this. How she had been walking down the street to get her breakfast at the bakery, and then found herself in a hospital with such aberrations crawling out of the beds. Once more, she recalled that odd proverb her grandfather liked: In the night all cats are grey. "Well, I sure am one ordinary, innocent little cat. So what the hell am I doing up in the middle of the night?" Beth mused.
She finally reached the end of the hallway and tried the door which should open into the stairwell, but the lock was broken. "Dammit." She pressed the button next to the elevator. The steel doors slid apart and a narrow interior with wooden panels and a mirror on the back wall was revealed. She stepped inside, pressing the button for the first floor, and the doors closed noiselessly. The lift descended through its shaft. Beth sighed. She didn't like taking an elevator alone; they had always given her the vague, but nagging feeling that the whole building would blow up if she pressed the wrong button.
The noise of the mirror cracking behind her caused Beth to flinch and whirl around, coming face to face with the same nine-year-old girl who had been screaming silently on that foggy street. She was standing below the mirror, bright grey eyes glaring up at the lift's other passenger between strands of brown hair. "Where did you come from?" Beth blurted out.
"I ... don't know." The girl bowed her head, almost like a gesture of embarrassment. "I don't know ..."
Beth frowned. She was sure the elevator had been empty when she entered it. "Did you just break that mirror?"
The girl nodded.
"Why?" Beth asked out of curiosity.
"I got angry." The girl's voice sounded thick. "It's cold in here." Her hands floated up slowly, almost like they were moving through water, until they covered her face.
"What's wrong?"
"I. Don't ... know. Oh God, I'm freezing ..."
The elevator stopped and Beth heard the doors slide open behind her. She reached out to put her hand on the girl's shoulder, saying "Just calm down. Tell me what's ---" But there, her soothing sentence came to an abrupt halt. When she was about to touch the child's shoulder, a migraine crushed her skull and drilled into her brain, filling her head with agony in the blink of an eye.
Beth uttered a feeble yelp and collapsed to the floor of the elevator. In the midst of the pain, she had a short, clear vision of a small old-looking bicycle lying on dark paving stones. Someone had cut the tyres open and ripped the chain off, rendering the bike utterly useless as a means of transport. Snowflakes fell on the vandalised cycle while one of the tyres still spun around, as if the culprits had just left the scene ...
And then, it was over, Beth was back in Lambert Hospital and the girl was gone. The lift had stopped at the first floor lobby, a bright hall with four massive square pillars. Whenever Beth had visited this hospital, the lobby had been crowded and busy. Today, it was abandoned and so silent you could almost hear the dust conquering the formerly impregnable surfaces of the benches, chairs and reception desk.
The woman stepped out of the elevator and gazed with profound fascination at the lobby's emptiness. The doors to the parking lot outside were located opposite the elevator and Beth walked straight through the lobby towards them. What had happened to the little girl, why this place appeared so desolate and what those monsters in room G17 were, she didn't know and would hopefully never know. But one thing was for sure: She wanted to get out of this building, and she wanted to get out right now.
When Beth was halfway through the lobby, the door to the parking lot swung open and a pale man in his mid-forties burst into the hall. His eyes widened when he noticed there was only a single other human being in here; they widened even more when he noticed this person was wearing a bloody gown and holding an equally gory scalpel. The door suddenly slammed behind him, and this time, Beth didn't bother telling herself it was the work of a powerful draught. She walked right past the stranger and struggled with the door, but to no avail. "Goddammit ..."
"Y-you can't open it?" the man said.
"Yeah." Beth turned around to face him. "Damn thing won't budge."
The man rolled his eyes. "You've gotta be kidding me. Let me try." He pulled the handles, but came to the same conclusion as Beth. "What the hell? Someone locked it? And ... what happened to you?"
"I could ask you the same question," Beth said, gesturing to the cuts and scrapes on the man's chest and limbs.
"I got in a car accident. Had to crawl through a broken window to get outta that mess. My name's Kyle Coppola, I'm a cab driver."
"Cab driver?!"
"What's the matter? You look sorta shocked."
"It's just that ... Well, I guess it wasn't necessarily you, but some cab hit me the other day and that's why I had to go to the hospital."
"Seems like we're both having a bad start on the new year, huh?" Kyle said; it was the beginning of January. Beth gave a wry smile. "Yeah, you could say that."
"Hey, you still haven't told me why you've got all that blood on you. And what's with the scalpel?" Kyle said.
Beth sighed and walked up to the reception desk. "It's hard to explain." A folded-up quadratic paper was lying on it. She started folding it out. "Would you think I've gone insane if I said that I've ..." It was a complete map of the hospital. "... been attacked by something ..." She rummaged through her vocabulary to find a formulation that fit the Bedridden. "... something neither human nor animal? If I've encountered something that just doesn't belong in this world?"
"Something like ... blood that falls upwards?" Kyle asked.
"...The fuck?!"
Kyle winced at this response. However, it wasn't addressed to him, for the woman had just noticed the words "First Recollection" scrawled down on room G17 in the hospital map. Beth showed it to Kyle. "What does that mean?"
"How should I know?" Kyle shrugged. "But there's more here ..." He pointed to room D5 on the third floor. "Second Recollection" was scribbled across it in childish handwriting, and "EXIT" across the locked lobby doors on the first floor. At the top of the paper, capital letters proclaimed that "WHEN THE FIRST THREE RECOLLECTIONS ARE FULFILLED, THE EXIT WILL OPEN".
Beth sighed and slumped down on a bench at the side of one of the pillars. "So we have to go to that room on the third floor now?"
"According to whoever wrote on the map, yeah. Or we could just ..." Kyle tried the doors again. Still shut tight. "... try another way out." There were two large windows on either side of the doors. Kyle picked up one of the lobby chairs. "I don't think that's gonna work," Beth softly advised.
The chair whizzed through the air and hit the window with a dull thud. The clinking noise of glass breaking was disappointingly absent. The chair fell to the floor with a broken leg, while the pane remained intact. "Shit!" Kyle leaned his palms against the window and glared out at the abandoned parking lot. "Where is everybody, anyway?"
Beth shrugged. "Uh, could I borrow your socks? My feet are killing me."
Kyle shook his head. "Not until you tell me what's going on here."
"I have no idea, okay? Let's just try to get outta here." Beth rose from the bench and started walking towards the elevator. Maybe she could snatch some footwear from the locker rooms on the third floor. "You gonna come with me?" she asked Kyle, hoping she wouldn't have to face this "second recollection" on her own.
"Of course. Who would want to be alone in a place like this?" Kyle said and followed Beth into the elevator, pressing the third floor button. "The mirror's cracked," he remarked. Beth nodded, not telling Kyle about the little girl who had appeared from and disappeared into thin air. "He just wouldn't believe me ..."
The doors opened and the duo found themselves at the corner of a deserted, dimly lit corridor. A solitary poster on the wall read "Involuntary urination? Do something about it!"
They entered the nurse's locker room and Beth donned a pair of grey wool socks and jogging shoes from one of the lockers. They felt a little too large, but she could live with that. Beth led the way further down the corridor to room D5's wide metallic door. Beyond it, the "second recollection" awaited them. She hesitantly wrapped her fingers around the handle and pulled ...
Locked.
"Just grea---" Beth didn't have time to utter the sarcastic response before gasping as something furry stroked her leg. Her eyes raced down to meet those of the grey cat from the fourth floor. "You again ..." The animal had a collar on this time. Beth was sure it hadn't been there when she encountered it in the hallway upstairs. "Huh? What's a cat doing here?" Kyle said. Looking at it gave him a strong feeling of déjà vu and a slight headache. Where on earth could he have seen it before? That grey fur, the wide green eyes – all so familiar somehow ...
"Looks like it's brought us a little something." Beth crouched down and removed the brown leather collar, holding it up so they could both see the silvery key hanging from it and what was carved there: D5 2nd. While Beth stood and unlocked D5's door, the cat trudged away and slipped into another room two doors farther down the hallway. Kyle and Beth ignored it and opened the door.
The room was far from sterile. In fact, the one word describing it perfectly would be organic. The floor was covered by some kind of pulsating flesh, the grey linoleum concealed by this reddish, vibrating mass. The flesh continued growing on the walls and had nearly spread across the entire ceiling, from which rudimentary limbs hung motionless like a travesty of stalactites in this moist cavern that was once a hospital room. A muscular human leg with veins strung out between the shin and thigh, bending the knee 90 degrees. An adult's arm with paperthin fingers as short as those of an infant. An overweight man's belly with something trying to break free through the navel ... no wait, that wasn't a belly. It was more like a ... Beth strained her eyes to make out the round thing growing on the far corner of the ceiling.
A pupa. An insect's pupa.
Beth and Kyle knew they had to get far away right now, and yet they felt rooted to the spot, fascinated by the oversize chrysalis. It bulged out in the middle and started to bounce up and down while a muffled voice laughed from within. Human fingers ripped through the gooey cocoon surface and a pus-smeared woman's face appeared in the opening, cackling psychotically. The pupa finally released its weak grip on the ceiling and fell to the floor with a wet smack.
This sound was probably what tore Beth out of her state of repulsed fascination and back to reality (or at least the reality of this highly unreal situation). She instantaneously realized they would either make their escape now or have their lives snuffed out by the unearthly inhabitant of the chrysalis. She turned to Kyle, who was still in utter shock, face pale and eyes wide with disbelief.
"RUN!"
It took a few seconds for Kyle's mind to recognize and understand the word. Then he slammed D5's door and sprinted down the hallway after Beth. "Head for the elevator!" the latter shouted, knowing they needed the safety of the lift's thick steel doors. She could see another little girl standing in there, smiling, while the elevator doors slowly closed.
Behind them, the Nymph uttered a deafening roar as it flung itself at D5's door and burst into the hallway, the entire female torso now protruding, the arms swiftly dragging the body and pupa towards its prey, leaving only a trail of yellowish matter behind. Its lips parted to reveal numerous lines of decaying teeth and its jaws dislocated with an audible 'crack' to open the mouth further. An acidulous stench filled the third floor and forced its way into Beth and Kyle's nostrils as they entered the elevator two seconds before the doors closed. The little girl's enigmatic smile broadened and the Nymph skid to a halt, letting out a frustrated scream, sensing its prey would escape this time.
The elevator started ascending. "What ... the hell ... was that?" Kyle said, scant of breath. "A Nymph," the little girl replied. Kyle didn't react. He just stared at his exhausted visage in the cracked mirror.
The girl stood in the corner opposite Kyle. She was a bit reminiscent of the girl who had broken the mirror, but she looked 14 years old, had longer brown hair and dark blue eyes instead of bright grey. Beth crouched down to reach the girl's eye level and asked: "What's your name?"
"Louise."
"Okay, Louise. We've gotta get out of here, the three of us. I don't know what happened or why, but it's dangerous here."
"I know. You'll get outta here."
"Uh, Beth? Who are you talking to?" Kyle asked, vaguely worried about Beth's mental health. "And what's taking this elevator so long?"
Beth ignored the man and assured Louise: "No, we'll get outta here. Together."
"Don't worry about me," the girl said, still smiling. "I'm safe. The monsters won't hurt me. They can't."
"But ... why?" Beth blurted out.
"Hey, cut that out. There's no one there. You're not going crazy, are you?" Kyle frowned.
"He can't see me," Louise said before Beth replied to Kyle's anxious question. "I don't want him to see me, so he doesn't see me. I can control all that ... but I need your help, Beth."
The doors slid aside, the lift stopped on the fourth floor. "I'll tell you more some other time. Right now, you should meet Dean Frost," the kid advised and stepped out of the lift. "You'll find him in room F2, south wing." She started walking down the corridor.
"Wait!" Beth was about to give chase when the elevator doors closed in the blink of an eye and she was trapped inside with Kyle. After a few seconds, the doors slowly separated again and Beth hurried into the hallway, but Louise was nowhere to be seen. "Oh, for crying out loud ..." She called out the girl's name a couple of times.
"Who's Louise?" Kyle asked, stepping out of the lift behind her. Beth spun around: "You mean you really couldn't see her?! Oh hell ..." As an excuse to refrain from meeting Kyle's distrustful glance, Beth studied the map. Louise had mentioned a Mr. Dean Frost in room F2, south wing.
According to the map, that wing was for patients with "serious illnesses of mental nature."
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A/N: Thanks for all those reviews. I have done some sketches and will upload them as soon as I get a scanner – probably in december or january. Until then, I must save the scant cash I have for christmas presents. And yes, I know creatures crawling out of oversize pupae is a cliché in this genre, but I thought it would fit the story and Silent Hill's theme of rebirth. Tune in next week, -E.P.O.
