Chapter 4: Revolt of the Otherworld

In the women's room on the third floor of Lambert Hospital, a 21 years old redhaired woman named Shelley Tate unlocked the door and stepped out of the toilet stall, making a beeline for the sinks to wash her hands and splash her face with cold water. The mirrors above the sink displayed her thin, pale appearance with merciless accuracy, but at least she looked better than three years ago when she had been admitted to the hospital.

Shelley reached her wet hands out below the drying machine. Usually, it would automatically start blowing warm air down, but it seemed to be out of order today. Shelley sighed and tried drying her hands on her blue jeans instead.

She walked up to the wooden door to the hallway and opened it. A disgusting, sourish smell immediately wafted in from the corridor. Shocked and repulsed, Shelley reeled back as if a professional boxer had just punched her face. This was a hospital and hence, the air never exactly carried a heavenly fragrance, but the air from the hallway was far worse than any stench Shelley's nose had ever had the displeasure of encountering before. It smelled like the apotheosis of all things stale and tainted.

Shelley lifted her dark brown sweater's collar to cover her nostrils. The fabric's smell soon replaced most of the stench, but a vague ghost of the hallway's acidulous reek remained, like a stranger that you can always see shadowing you in the corner of your eye.

Pressing the fabric to her nostrils, Shelley approached the doorway and peeked into the corridor, curious about the reason for the strong smell. The first thing she noticed was a trail of yellowish pus on the floor. It stretched from room D5's half-open door and down to the elevator where it stopped at a gooey, reddish heap lying in front of the lift doors. "Eeew, what is that?" Shelley muttered. "Some kind of ... pupa?"

The heap suddenly stirred and groaned as if waking up with one hell of a hangover. Shelley was starting to make out the characteristics of a human body inside the pupa, a bald female body. The head slowly turned around and two piercing eyes smothered in the yellowish matter locked onto Shelley's bright blue orbs. The creature's lips ripped apart with a horrible dry sound as if they had been glued together. Razorsharp teeth appeared from behind these shrivelled lips and the Nymph uttered a sadistic laughter, as if it were aware of and delighted at how this moment would haunt Shelley Tate's mind for the rest of her life.

Shelley wordlessly closed the door and leaned her back against it, staring at the women's room she had grown so familiar with during her three years living in the hospital. Now, she felt like she had just entered this place. It was a strange, alien area she would never get used to.

---

Dean Frost lay curled up in the corner of room F2, chin resting on his knees above his folded hands. The room was cold, grey and dusty, with the softness of those white walls saving him from the things Doctor wanted him to do once in a while.

How long had he been lying here? He couldn't remember if it had been minutes or hours. He wasn't even sure if he was lying down. Maybe that wall his feet were pressed against was the real floor and he was standing up, his side leaned against the corner wall. Time and gravity were no longer things he could rely on, they were mysteries. Strange, inscrutable mysteries.

From his position, he could keep an eye on the door to the hallway and fog swirling outside the solitary narrow window just below the ceiling. It was important that he kept watching those two areas of the room, since they were the most obvious ways for the town to get inside and take him away, like it had taken her away when he was a little kid.

But the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that it wasn't the town that was his enemy. The town was a façade (that was a fancy word Doctor used sometimes, but Dean wasn't sure what it meant), a façade hiding the real enemy – an enemy so powerful and ancient he would surely lose his mind if he tried to comprehend its true nature. Mister had said it, too – he had stated there was something else than the town, but he didn't want to think about what. Dean agreed with Mister on that.

Whatever this enemy behind the town could be called, it was here. That was an undeniable fact, and he had realized it the moment he heard those noises from the north wing. Metallic crashes and thuds, moans and birdlike screeches, a woman screaming "HELP!"

He had been sitting across the room, drawing a portrait of her. Doctor had been critisizing his work as usual, making incessant remarks about how ridiculously wrong the proportions looked and asking Dean why he even bothered when he could neither draw nor even remember her face. Mister had been far more encouraging, praising Dean's "impressive drawing skills", asking Doctor if he could do a better job himself. Doctor had answered "no, I could not, but that is beside the point" and was about to start a monologue on the unrealistic appearance of her lips in this doodling mess that could hardly even be called a sketch. But that's when the noises had begun and both Doctor and Mister had stopped discussing inside Dean's head, falling silent to listen to the ghostly moans. Two simple words had flashed through Dean's mind:

"SILENT HILL"

It was here. The power from the town where he had grown up and lost her. Here.

He had forgotten all about the drawing and the opinions of Doctor and Mister, dropping his crayon and rushing back to this corner where he was now laying still and curled up like a dead foetus. Strands of dark blonde hair fell into his brown eyes that raced back and forth between the window and the narrow pane of thick glass in the door.

"Well, it is good that you are keeping watch, but what will you do if the power does come in to take you away?" Doctor asked. He was whispering, afraid something out there might hear him if he talked too loud. Dean understood that something really was wrong if even Doctor felt scared. "You need a weapon, Mr. Frost."

"Nah, you can just punch that 'power' in the stomach, right Dean?" Mister suggested and tried to sound cheery and optimistic as usual, but fear had clearly crept into his voice as well.

---

"Are you sure there was someone in that elevator?" Kyle asked for what felt like the millionth time while they wandered towards the south wing. "Maybe they gave you some drug that gives you hallucinations like that?"

"I'm pretty damn sure what I've seen with my own eyes," Beth said.

"But I didn't see anything," Kyle reitterated. "You must've been hallucinating, it's the only explanation ..."

Beth spun around. "Oh yeah? Well, since you're so good at making up "explanations", why don't you explain just what the hell that thing in room D5 was?"

"Err ..."

"Are you gonna blame that on drugs, too? Because then the both of us would have to be pretty fucking stoned. And we aren't. That thing was real, Kyle. And so was the girl in the lift. You can believe that or not, but I'm gonna go to the room she mentioned if that's what I have to do to get the fuck outta here." Beth pivoted and proceeded down the corridor.

"Beth, I – I'm sorry," Kyle offered and followed her towards the dark green double doors to the mental illness wing at the end of the milky-white hallway. "I'm just so confused about all this. It doesn't make sense," he said. Beth nodded imperceptibly and reached out for the handles of the metallic doors.

The moment she pushed the doors open, an alarm went off. It sounded shrill and rusty, a continous screeching aural torment. Beth's hands instinctively flew up to cover her ears.

On the other side of the doors, the grey cat sat on the middle of the linoleum floor to bid her welcome to the west wing. It got up and started running down the hallway. Beth gave chase. Behind her, Kyle groaned and slumped down to his knees. "Agh, my head ... That damn cat ... I hate that cat."

Beth chose to ignore him and follow the cat, which was leaving small red footprints on the grey floor. The animal turned around a corner and disappeared from the woman's range of vision. The alarm grew louder and started to sound like air raid sirens. Beth turned the corner and saw that there was now someone else running next to the cat – the girl who had broken the mirror in the elevator.

The girl whirled around, her mouth wide open, but not the slightest sound coming out. Another silent scream of terror. The cat stopped, petrified. It was like they had been running away from some unspeakable abomination just behind Beth, but now they had realized there was no escape and simply surrendered. Beth turned around to see just what they had all tried to flee from, but before she could catch a glimpse of it, she felt something cold slam into her back and lost consciousness.

---

Kyle awoke lying on a warm, soft surface. It felt like soaked foam rubber. However, as his eyelids rose, he discovered it was the same pulsating flesh that had occupied the room where they found the Nymph. Little rivers of blood and pus flowed in an intricate labyrinth through the wrinkles in the flesh. He could feel it trickle against his hands and cheek. It was like lying on the tongue of a slavering giant.

"Urgh, fuck!" Kyle struggled to get up, but the floor didn't want to let go. It would seem it had grown onto the front of his body while he had been unconscious. It clung to him and slowly grew along the sides of his limbs towards his back, trying to bury him inside.

With a final exertion, Kyle pushed himself out from the grip of what used to be hard, cold linoleum. The man scrambled to his feet, silently promising to himself that he'd never fall down on that "floor" again.

Kyle could recall that Beth had opened those doors to the south wing and those weird air raid sirens had sounded. Then he had seen the cat and gotten a déjà vu feeling again (not one of those vague feelings people would tell exaggerated stories about at parties, a real déjà vu), along with a violent headache. He had thought something like "that damn cat", but he wasn't sure if that had been a mere thought or if he had said it out loud. Well, it didn't matter. He had just seen the cat, gotten a headache and passed out, waking up in this twisted version of the hospital corridor.

He scanned the hallway and realized that the light source from the ceiling was, in lieu of the fluorescent tubes from before, thick white candles hanging from the ceiling, their orange flames licking downwards, defying the laws of gravity like the blood that had trickled up across the taxi windows.

The flesh from the Nymph's room had spread out and infested the rest of the building. It covered every single square millimetre of the floor, walls and ceiling. A few legs and torsos hung out here and there. Some parts of the flesh bulged out in the familiar shapes of various human bodies, from skinny midgets to tall beheaded men, obese women, little girls, all hidden inside the flesh – but the sickening telltale bulges remained, clearly visible in the light from the upside-down candles. Humans trapped in these organic walls like insects in resin, preserved for eternity.

"Oh ... oh hell," Kyle whispered, fighting the urge to vomit. He held his hands out around his eyes like binoculars, trying to prevent himself from seeing the horrors around him and focus on the end of the hallway, but he could still hear miserable muffled sobbing and moans all around him.

He didn't even know where he was headed, which way would lead to the exit or if there really was any exit at all. Not long ago, he had been a taxi driver who knew the city he was driving in and the shortest route to his destination. Now he was a lost man staggering around in a strange realm, with no idea how he was supposed to get out. And that, without a doubt, is truly Hell.

---

The moment Shelley heard the air raid sirens, the drying machine fell off the wall. Shelley let out a scream of shock as the box clanked against the floor tiles. The young woman's hands that had been covering her nose with her sweater let go of the fabric and settled over her ears to muffle out the strident noise of the sirens and her own shriek.

And from the part of the wall where the drying machine fell off, blood spurted out. As if the room was a living body and the drying machine was a limb that had been cut off, thick blood sprayed through the air and spattered the black and white tiles with red puddles. Shelley considered grabbing that machine from the floor and replacing it on the wall to stop the scarlet torrent, but she probably wasn't strong enough. All she could do was to stand at the door and stare horrified at what was happening to the room.

The walls turned grimy, the air became dank and acrid. The overhead lamps vanished into thin air and were replaced by lit stearin candles hanging upside down. The sinks and toilets overflowed with blood that poured down like lava from volcanos. The puddles on the floor joined into one big lake and Shelley felt the warm liquid trickle into her shoes and drench her socks.

The stalls to her right melted together and transformed into one big metallic cage. The rusty bars were nailed together sloppily in a high rectangular shape along the right wall. And in the middle of this cage, a little old-looking blue bicycle was displayed with a mannequin sitting on it – or rather, slumped over it. It was a clammy child-sized mannequin with its head resting on the handlebars and limp legs hanging next to the pedals. A brown wig was placed on the head.

But opposite the cage, to Shelley's left, the wide mirror above the sinks was completely unaffected. It still showed a reflection of the restroom Shelley was used to – a clean, bright room void of this atrocious scenery. She took a few hesitant steps up to the mirror. For some reason, she felt afraid the reflection wouldn't include her own body. But that fear proved to be pointless, for her reflection was right there in the normal restroom, staring back at her with wide, nervous eyes. Shelley reached out and touched the glass with her fingertips, wishing she could slide through to the normal, familiar world on the other side. "What is this place?" she muttered.

In the reflection, there was a little girl with brown hair standing across the room behind Shelley. The latter turned around to find the same girl standing at the same spot in the nightmarish version of the room. The child was inside the cage next to the bicycle. The mannequin had disappeared – it was almost as if it had just done a Pinocchio, turned into a real human and gotten off the bike. However, this little girl didn't seem too human either. There was something disquieting about the cold, scrutinizing way she gazed at Shelley through the rusty bars.

She softly answered the woman's question: "It's called the Otherworld. That's what that guy said ... The guy Louise talked with."

Shelley was about to ask the girl what the hell the "Otherworld" was, when the mirror behind her shattered and a large greasy hand shot out of the gap, gripping her neck.

---

On the fourth floor, Beth stood in front of the door to room F2. After waking up alone in the corridor where she had fallen unconscious earlier, she was dumbfounded by the hellish redecoration it had gone through and her memories of what had occurred just before she lost consciousness. Luckily, she didn't need to wander far in these unsettling surroundings before finding room F2. According to Louise, there was a mr. Dean Frost in here – in the wing for mental patients. Beth had no idea who and how dangerous he could be, but as long as he was a human being, she'd be relieved to have him around. She couldn't stand being on her own in this place.

Beth took a deep breath and opened the door.

---

A/N: Argh, so many cliffhangers. Remenants: Actually, I haven't read the comics. Everyone seems to hate them, anyway. I'll try to keep Louise's character from getting 'gawd awful' ...Tune in next week, –E.P.O.