A/N: Listened to Massive Attack's "Black Milk" while writing part 1, and "Don't Cry" from the SH1 soundtrack while writing part 2.
Chapter 5: Mental Cases
Part 1: Dean Frost
A smell of old sweat and dust pervaded the room, which was about the size of a normal patient's room, though completely void of any hospital equipment or furniture. A single tube on the ceiling was supposed to light up the empty space between the white walls, but it wasn't working. The only light came from the doorway, streaming in around Beth's figure as she stood on the threshold and pushed the door wide open.
There was a window high up on the left wall, a black night sky waiting outside. But with the memory of Kyle's fruitless attempt to smash the lobby windows still fresh in her mind, Beth decided she would have to find another escape route.
Light poured in from the hallway and formed a long, bright yellow rectangle on the middle of the previously darkened floor. A paper and four crayons lay at the far edge of this rectangle. Beth left the threshold and walked up to the illuminated drawing. It depicted the face of a caucasian blonde in her forties or fifties. The features were quite well drawn, especially the blue eyes and broad smile, although the artist could have done a better job with proportions and shadows. Considering that the crayons only consisted of the three primary colours and a thin black one, Beth was impressed with the colouring on the portrait. Whoever made it certainly had a talent for mixing colours. A simple title was written with tiny black letters in the upper corner: "SHE".
Beth's fascination for the portrait was obliterated as a frightened whimper seeped out from the far right corner of the room, startling her. Her eyes left those of the blonde in the drawing and focused on the dark corner. She hadn't noticed anything there when she first entered the room, but now she could make out a motionless human shape curled up in the shadows.
"Hello?"
The figure's head tilted back and the eyes rolled up to look at Beth. "You're ... You're not from the town?"
"What town?"
The figure hesitated for a while, afraid to utter the simple trisyllabic answer: "Silent Hill."
Beth frowned. What did that have to do with anything? Although she'd never actually been there, she had heard about the town. It seemed like a nice place for a vacation, an ordinary rural town located at the beautiful Toluca Lake in northern New England. "No, I'm not from Silent Hill," she replied. "Why do you want to know that? And who are you, anyway?"
The figure left its fetal position and stood. "My name's Dean Frost."
"You're a patient here?"
"Uhm ... yeah."
"Did you draw this?" Beth asked, holding up the portrait.
"Gimme that!" Dean lunged out from the corner and into the light. Beth could now clearly see the details of his visage. He was a pale 29-year-old with brown eyes and the same hair-colour as the lady in the drawing. He wore a male patient's uniform consisting of a green t-shirt and matching trousers, with only a pair of black socks on his feet. He grabbed the portrait and withdrew to the shadows once more.
"Take it easy," Beth said, surprised at the rabid way Dean had snatched his work back. "I wasn't going to rip it up or anything. It's pretty good, actually."
"I told you that kid has talent, Doc," Mister said.
"Oh, shut up." Doctor hated being called Doc. "That woman probably does not know a thing about good art."
"Thanks," Dean said, ignoring Doctor's surly remark about Beth. "But it's not finished yet."
"Who is that woman?" Beth asked, gesturing to the paper.
"Do not tell her!" Doctor advised.
"Why not?" Mister asked.
"It is none of her business. She should not have seen that paper in the first place. In fact, you should not even have drawn it at all, Mr. Frost," Doctor said.
"It's her ... my mother. I haven't seen her for 19 years, so I can't really remember her face," Dean lied. He could remember her face perfectly, right down to the smallest mole and the slightest wrinkle. He just didn't want to remember it – Doctor said it was unhealthy to let things like that stay in your memory-store for so long. They would eventually rot like old food and spoil your mind.
"Who are you?" Dean asked.
"I'm Elizabeth Kalember, but just call me Beth. Do you know what's happened here? The whole building's deserted, there are these gross creatures out there ... And the hallways look so freaky all of a sudden. I've never seen anything like it in my whole life."
"It's Silent Hill's power ... It must've come here for some reason," Dean mused.
"What do you mean? 'Silent Hill's power'? It's just an old resort town. What does that have to do with this ... this nightmare?" Beth shuddered as she cocked an eye at the flesh growing on the hallway outside.
"I don't understand it either, but something's going on in Silent Hill. There's a cult there ... worshipping some weird gods."
"A cult? Weird gods?! No wonder this guy's in the mental wing," Beth thought.
"She does not believe you," Doctor stated. "Of course she does not believe you, but I think she will learn."
"Anyway, I have no idea how we're gonna get out of here," Beth admitted. "The lobby doors are locked, the windows won't break ..."
Mister suddenly remembered something: "Tell her about that room."
"Well ... I heard there's a room where they keep all the keys. I think it's called the main office. I don't know where it is, but maybe we should go there," Dean offered.
Beth studied the map and found two main offices, one in this wing, just a couple of corridors away, and one in the second floor's north wing. "Okay, there's one nearby. Let's go." She started for the doorway, noticing that the hallway's flesh had already crossed the threshold and was slowly invading room F2.
Dean was about to follow when Mister burst out: "The crayons!"
"Wait!"
Beth turned around to find Dean retrieving the four crayons from the floor. He then stood and walked up to the doorway, clutching the crayons in his left hand and the portrait in the other. His jaw dropped as he saw the corridor outside. He didn't say anything, but Mister and Doctor undoubtedly started a vehement discussion.
Part 2: Mirrored Delusion
The hand tightened around Shelley's neck like a relentless vice. It felt flabby and sleek, smothered in warm grease. It became harder and harder for the air to travel down her throat and reach her lungs. She didn't dare to use any of the precious oxygen to scream. Instead, she silently squirmed to get out of the greasy hand's grip, but to no avail. The fingers felt far from normal – all four except the thumb had grown together. It reminded Shelley of a winter-glove, but in this case, the skin formed the glove and the bones and flesh made up the fingers inside. Although she wasn't sure the thing had bones.
In the cage with the bicycle, the brown-haired girl squeezed through the vertical bars and walked up to the door to the hallway.
"Help ... me," Shelley whispered, tears in her eyes.
"I can't," the girl said, opened the door and stepped out of sight.
Shelley heard fragments of glass clatter into the sink as the gap in the mirror broadened and the owner of the gross hand emerged behind her, uttering a continous guttural snarl reminiscent of a lion. A wide, slobber-covered tongue started to slide slowly across her neck.
Shelley let out that high-pitched scream she had repressed for so long and her hands finally slipped into her jeans' pockets, looking for a weapon. They only found some gum and two quarter dollars. The frantic hands left the pockets and dove into the sink behind her, where the right one picked up the first piece of the mirror it could find. She raised the fragment and jabbed it back, hoping she'd hit the creature ...
And she did. The glass pierced oily skin and plunged into a soft, lumpy mass that Shelley assumed was the left shoulder. A pathetic squeal echoed through the room and the hand loosened its grip enough for the oxygen to pour into Shelley's lungs again as she took a few running steps away from the counter and whirled around to see her enemy.
It might once have been a human, but now it was nothing more than a bestial monstrosity, a glistening lump of fat relentlessly dragging itself out from the mirror. The obese body was smothered in weird liquids and oily substances, the eyelids stuck shut under this gooey layer. The mouth was freakishly oversized, stretching up past the part of the face where the nose should have been, wide open in an exaggerated yawn. Incredibly skew, dark yellow teeth lined the circumference of the mouth. The disgusting tongue dangled out between them, flapping around fiercely as if searching for the human neck it had just caressed. Gill-like slits adorned the cheeks and neck. The belly was enormous, and yet the ribs were clearly visible against the skin. Like an extention of the torso, the thighs had grown together all the way down to the knees, leaving only the shins to walk with.
Shelley stood petrified, staring at the Devourer as it wriggled its merged thighs through the black hole in the mirror and slid down across the counter, landing on the blood-covered floor, clumsily scrambling to its feet. The fragment of glass was still buried two inches into its shoulder. The Devourer merely grabbed the shard and pulled it right out. But instead of attacking Shelley with it, it crammed the glass into its mouth, chewed voraciously and swallowed.
Shelley dashed for the hallway, but the creature threw itself at the door before she could reach it, blocking the exit completely. The woman's eyes darted around like butterflies in jars, looking for another exit. She briefly considered going through the black gap in the mirror, but if that monster had come from the other side, who knows what horrors she'd find in there?
The Devourer started sauntering towards her in all its crookbacked obesity, its mouth gnawing blindly at the stale air. Shelley pivoted, ran up to the bicycle's cage and squeezed through the bars. The Devourer was obviously unable to go between any of the bars, so maybe if she just stayed here and didn't provoke it, the monster would go away ...
But no. It simply staggered up to the cage on its ludicrously short legs and leaned on the bars, causing the entire structure to creak and sway. The slaver-dripping tongue waggled like a dog's tail between two of the bars. Tears flowed from Shelley's eyes as she remembered the story about the big bad wolf trying to get into the house of the three little pigs. "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf," she murmured unmelodiously, "big bad wolf, big bad wolf. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf. Tra la la la la."
With a gruff "puff, puff,"
He puffed just enough
And the hay house fell right down.
In the second before the structure finally succumbed to the Devourer's weight, Shelley managed to slip out between the bars farthest away from the creature. With a deafening crash, the cage collapsed and buried the bicycle in a heap of rusty bars. On top of this heap, the Devourer lay, struggling to get back up.
But before it could stand once more, Shelley snatched a three feet long bar from the heap and bashed away at the abomination's head, with movements reminiscent of a golf-amateur who kept on trying to hit that elusive white ball. The bar's rusty metal repeatedly connected with the deformed lump and sent blood and chunks of flesh sailing up through the air. Even after the Devourer had uttered one last groan and stopped moving, Shelley kept beating the limp body, shouting in both terror and anger: "TRA LA FUCKING LA!"
Part 3: Records
The 4th floor main office was a quadratic room dimly lit by two white candles on a plain wooden desk at the far wall. There wasn't any other furniture apart from the swivel chair in front of the desk and a large metallic archive with 13 drawers at the left wall, probably containing medical records. It had taken Beth and Dean ten minutes to get here through the hallways, only encountering a single Bedridden, which they had easily run past.
Dean sat down at the desk and promptly started working on the portrait, using the black crayon to shade along the right side of her neck. Beth sighed and started pulling out the drawers, looking for the much coveted lobby keys. Each drawer was labeled with two letters, going alphabetically from A-B to Y-Z. In the A-B drawer, Beth found two documents – one about "Bandfield, Carter Linch" and one about "Barkin, Joseph". Beth examined Bandfield's record first.
18-year-old male, installed in room F16 on December 11. Was arrested for several seemingly unprovoked assaults and attempting to rape his sister, Catherine Linch Bandfield. His mother is an unemployed alcoholic with violent inclinations. Father unknown. Psychiatric treatment will start next week, but use extreme caution.
A black-and-white photo was attached to the paper. It showed a young, clean-shaven man wearing an ordinary white shirt and with his hair in a slightly dishevelled middle-parting. He looked personable and had a wry, charismatic smile. But there was something wrong with the eyes – they seemed to hide some deep hatred, maybe for the world around him, maybe for himself. It occurred to Beth that, apart from the menacing eyes, he looked like a pop-culture idol, the kind of guy you'd find in a boyband or a teen-movie, the kind of guy teenage girls would have big posters of hanging in their bedrooms. Beth shuddered and dropped the document back in the drawer, then read the record of "Barkin, Joseph":
47-year-old male, installed in room S14 on August 20. Has now been under treatment for three months and is showing no signs of recovery from his severe psychosis. Continues to believe he caused his daughter's death on August 18, despite being visited by her and the rest of his family on September 3. Seems to have withdrawn to a state of shy childishness, as displayed through his infantile speech pattern and feigned poor spelling. Possesses and protects a metallic box containing a single hair from his daughter's head. Note that we were informed of this by his friends among the other patients; the subject himself refused to reveal the contents of the box to our psychiatrists. Use caution and continue observation.
Something was wrong about Barkin's record. Beth studied the map of this hospital and discovered there was no room S14. In fact, there weren't any S-rooms at all. "Maybe this is from another hospital?" Beth checked the record again and found the words "Brookhaven Hospital" written in the upper corner next to an ink-smudged date.
"Brookhaven?" Beth muttered as she replaced the document and closed the A-B drawer.
"What did you say?" Dean looked up from his drawing.
"I found a patient's record from Brookhaven Hospital," Beth said. "What's that doing here?"
"Brookhaven ... That's in Silent Hill. I grew up in that town, but I never went to Brookhaven. Alchemilla's closer to where I lived," Dean explained before concentrating on the portrait once more.
Confused and annoyed, Beth looked through the rest of the drawers. In the third one, E-F, she found a document on "Frost, Dean":
17-year-old male, installed in room F2 on November 7. Was born in Silent Hill, New England. Father deserted the mother soon afterwards and left her to raise the child on her own (illness partly rooted in lack of father figure?). Mother died in a car accident when the subject was 10. Subject was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Midkiff here in Hooper Lake City. Due to signs of incipient schizophrenia and self-destructive behaviour, the foster-parents entrusted him to our care last month. Prefatory treatment has not procured any remarkable response from the subject.
Beth put the record back and closed the drawer, casting a sidelong glance at Dean. If he had been admitted when he was 17, and he looked about 29 now, he'd been here for 12 years. "That has to be enough to make anyone go crazy even if they're sane when they're admitted here," Beth thought.
In the S-T drawer, she found a fourth patient's record, this time on "Shelley":
18-year-old female, installed in room D8. Another case of Anorexia Nervosa. Was forcefed under Dr. Carlson's supervision. Counsellors and psychologists have made little headway regarding the exact cause of her disease. She arrived here on her own and refuses to inform us about her past home, family and surname. Note that the patient also has a severe case of climacophobia.
"Climacophobia? I wonder what that is ... Fear of the climate?" Beth pondered as she searched through the rest of the drawers. In the last one, labeled Y-Z, there was a single hastily scribbled note:
Randolph: I accidentally left my lobby key in F16. Could you get it for me? I have to catch a train right now! –Carlson
Beth shut the drawer, turned around and leaned against the archive-cabinet. "Great," she muttered. "Okay, Dean, I guess the key's not here. It might be in room F16. So ..."
She got a feeling Dean wasn't listening. Beth approached him and put a hand on his shoulder. He winced and finally let his gaze leave the portrait. "What?"
"We've gotta go. I read some guy named Carlson left the key in room F16," Beth reiterated.
"No ... I'll stay here. You can go." Dean started shading her head again.
"But we have to stick together," Beth protested. She had seen enough horror movies to know that the main characters always decided to split up for some dumb reason, and then got killed one by one. And this situation seemed far scarier than any movie she'd ever seen.
"Don't worry about me. I'll be safe here," Dean said.
"I'm not worrying about you, dammit! How safe do you think I'll be out there, alone?" Beth said, pointing to the door.
"Yeah, maybe you should go with her," Mister suggested.
"Come on, Dean. You can finish your stupid drawing some other time," Beth said and snatched the paper out from under Dean's hands. The crayon left a black streak across her dark yellow hair.
"Well, now it is completely ruined," Doctor grimly declared.
"NO!"
Dean's hands flew out, hitting Beth and retrieving the paper in two swift movements. He was soon trying to straighten the crumpled paper and colour over the black streak in her hair with the yellow crayon. He barely even heard Beth yell "fucking mental case" as she left the room and started walking down the hallway.
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A/N: Yep, the first chapters may seem a little influenced by Gothika, but I assure you this fic develops very differently. Speaking of hospital horror-films, I saw Session 9 the other day and WOW. Definitely a nice experience for those who enjoy being psychologically creeped out. Well, tune in next week. –E.P.O.
