DamnGlitch: Draught is synonymous with draft. Look it up if you don't believe me ... I know it's a somewhat old-fashioned word, but I like it. Anyway, if you find some really stupid misspellings, please alert me!

Chapter 6: Caliban

Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself

Upon thy wicked dam, come forth!

-The Tempest

Beth marched down the hallway, her hands shaking with anger. "Who does that guy think he is?" she grumbled. "Just who the hell does he think he is?" The memory of Dean's hand connecting with the side of her head was still vivid and repeating itself like an old record on the phonograph of her frustrated mind. A dull pain throbbed around her skull and it didn't look like she'd find any aspirins nearby.

The woman stopped in front of a metallic door with the number F16. The word "CaLiBan" was scribbled across it with fresh blood. Beth knit her brows – the seemingly random combination of letters gave her an ominous feeling of déjà vu. "Caliban. Ca ... Li ... Ban," she muttered. Hadn't she read that somewhere else?

She glanced at the crumpled note in her hand: "Randolph: I accidentally left my lobby key in F16. Could you get it for me? I have to catch a train right now! -Carlson".

"Let's just hope Randolph hasn't been here yet." Beth dropped the note and opened the door.

F16 was identical to Dean's room, with the exception of the furniture. While Dean's room had been completely empty, F16 had a bed against the right wall and a table at the left wall. The bed was surrounded by various electric equipment and leather straps were draped over the white sheet. Operating instruments and a tape recorder were seated on the wooden table. Near the middle of the back wall, a man wearing a white coat stood with his back to Beth. His head tilted back a little as if he was contemplating the fluorescent tube on the ceiling.

"Hi there," Beth said and walked across the room. The doctor stood still and didn't react to her greetings. "Hey, doctor? Hello?"

As she approached the man, she noticed that his feet were floating an inch above the floor, only the tips of the black shoes touching the grey linoleum. "What the...?"

Beth gingerly reached out and gave the body a slight push. The doctor slowly swung around like a pendulum. "Oh God," Beth breathed, seeing what was keeping the man suspended above the floor. One black string, hanging from the tube on the ceiling, had been attached to the coat collar with a paper clip. Displaying the same incredible dexterity, a second string hanging from the ceiling had been attached to the man's tongue with another clip. "That's ... completely impossible," Beth proclaimed.

Blood had poured down from the roughly pierced tongue and given the front of the coat a dark red colour, but you could still make out the name on the tag: Dr. John Randolph. His abdomen and neck were riddled with deep gashes and Beth didn't even want to imagine why the pants had been ripped down.

Suddenly, she realized what the word "CaLiBan" meant. It was an abbreviation of the name Carter Linch Bandfield. Her thoughts wandered back in her memory to the medical record she'd found in the main office:

Bandfield, Carter Linch: 18-year-old male, installed in room F16 ... Was arrested for several seemingly unprovoked assaults and attempting to rape his sister, Catherine Linch Bandfield ... Use extreme caution.

Beth searched through the pockets of the doctor's coat. Her plan was simple: Get the lobby key, then get the hell out of here. Forget about Kyle, Dean and those weird little girls, just get out of here. However, she had a feeling that would be far from easy. "Well, if that Caliban guy shows up," she thought, clutching the scalpel, "I'm going to use very extreme caution."

---

Dean carefully shaded the left side of her forehead. There was only a tiny stump left of the black crayon, but fortunately, he was nearly done now. The black streak in her hair was almost invisible, coloured over perfectly with yellow. "I still think you should've gone with that woman, what's her name ..." Mister had always had a hard time remembering names.

"Elizabeth Kalember," Doctor offered.

"Oh yeah, Beth. She seemed like a nice girl. And she was right; you could have finished the portrait some other time."

"That woman almost ruined your drawing," Doctor reminded Dean.

"So what? We all make mistakes. Why can't you just forgive her, Doc?" Mister asked.

"What next? Am I supposed to forgive Silent Hill for taking away her? Was the cult just making a mistake as well?"

Dean dropped the crayon and rose from the chair. "Shut UP! Both of you, shut the hell up! ... Doctor, where did Beth say she was going?"

"Why should I tell you?" Doctor grumbled.

Luckily, Mister could remember the answer: "Room F16, she went to room F16."

"I'm going there." Dean started towards the door.

That was when Doctor took over Dean's body and stopped him dead in his tracks. Doctor rarely left Dean's head to control the rest of his body, but when he did, it usually had painful results. "What are you going to do?" Dean asked, voice shaking with dread.

"Doc, please. The kid's gotta catch up with Beth," Mister implored, struggling in vain to get Dean's legs to move and take him closer to the door.

"No. She is not worth it; things will be too dangerous outside on your own. We have to stay here until the place is back to normal," Doctor replied.

"What if it never gets back to normal? We have to do something," Mister said.

"Yeah, and who knows what's happening to Beth out there?" Dean added.

"You hit her minutes ago, and now you want to play the hero and save her?" Doctor's voice was brimming with disgust. "You are nothing but a selfish HYPOCRITE!"

Doctor dragged Dean up to the archive-cabinet and pushed him down to his knees. Dean's left hand gripped a drawer and pulled it out. "Put your right hand in there," Doctor ordered.

"Fuck you!" A horizontal fountain of spittle sprayed from Dean's mouth as he yelled the crude insult.

Mister could merely watch Doctor force the man to place his shaking fingers inside the top of the drawer. As the right hand slammed the drawer shut, the unforgiving metal connected with the pale skin and sent waves of agony washing through the fragile fingers. Dean's head soon followed, smacking into the cabinet repeatedly like a fly unable to comprehend why it couldn't float right through the window-pane.

"Doctor. Stop it."

The man froze in the middle of his violent frenzy. Dean scrambled to his feet and turned in the direction of the soft female voice. It had come from somewhere around the desk ...

"Don't hurt my boy."

"Who's there?" Dean stuttered, even though he knew there couldn't be anyone there. There simply wasn't any room for someone to be hiding at the desk. At least not anyone human. Dean took a few slow, staggering steps up to the desk and asked once more: "Who was that?"

"It's me."

Dean looked down at the crumpled portrait on the desktop. "Mom?"

The woman's smile grew wider and two deep dimples appeared next to her thin lips. A brownish mole popped up on the cheek and a little, milky-white scar materialized on the chin. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes grew longer and the orbs themselves turned green instead of blue. Dean realized he had forgotten all these details about her face over the years and thus ignorantly omitted them from his work. "Sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be," the mother replied.

"But I forgot you ..."

"No, you haven't forgotten me. Not at all. Otherwise, you wouldn't have drawn this and I wouldn't be here."

"I missed you." Dean's eyes were rapidly flooded and the tears poured out.

"Don't cry. There's nothing to be sad about." The black streak in her hair slowly reappeared, seeping up through the layer of yellow colour Dean had covered it with. "No!" the man protested, "that's not fair!" He wished Beth had never pulled the paper out under his crayon in the first place.

"Once a mark like this has been made, it cannot be erased," the mother said with that soft, patient voice of a parent explaining to her child that the family pet had gone to Heaven and wouldn't be coming back. The black stroke started moving on its own, aided by neither crayon nor pencil, just continuing across the paper. It twisted itself in zigzag lines, elaborate spirals and childish doodling without any kind of drawing tool behind it.

As any passionate artist might do when seeing his or her greatest work dissolve and vanish, Dean screamed out his frustration and made a frantic attempt to colour over the black streaks with the four crayons. Alas, the blackness spread and covered up all other colours until only the woman's mouth was visible, uttering two last words to her son:

"Forget me."

---

"Flesh."

The muffled, croaking voice seeped out from the bed to Beth's right, causing her to flinch and pause the swift pocket-searching for a second of petrified shock. Was there a Bedridden in here? "No, they don't talk ... Besides, the ECG would have warned me." Shrugging the voice off as some figment of her imagination or coming from another room, she proceeded searching the pockets of the hanging doctor's white coat.

"Pure flesh."

The voice was obviously coming from the bed in this room and spawned from something far more hideous than her own imagination. Beth hurriedly checked the coat's left breast pocket and found a warm metallic object.

"More pure flesh."

Her hand flew out from the pocket and a small silvery key came into view. It had the words "LOBBY EXIT" carved on it. Beth thought she had never seen anything more beautiful than this key and the possibility it conveyed. "Time to get the hell away from this place." The woman beamed and jogged back towards the doorway to the corridor.

The smile retreated from her face as quickly as it had appeared when something shrivelled and dark brown shot out from under the bed and literally knocked her off her feet, causing her to land on the linoleum floor. In the painful moment of impact, Beth forgot about her prized key and her grip loosened enough for the key to slip out and fall to the ground.

"Flesh," the demonic figure repeated, scurrying out of its hiding place under the bed. Caliban's voice sounded disturbingly human, in sharp contrast to its fierce, animal appearance. The body looked lithe and rudimentary, with brownish skin slowly, but surely falling off in flakes. A long cloak that seemed to be made of human flesh and skin was draped over its shoulders, with the gory hood concealing its eyes. The mouth remained visible, though – a T-shaped crack stretching across the face, with sharpened teeth jutting out at unnatural angles.

Beth scrambled to her feet and held the scalpel out. It hadn't worked with the Bedridden, but she still tried intimidating the creature. "Don't take one fucking step closer or I'll ---"

"This flesh, now," Caliban interrupted, lisping childishly on each 's'. Its right hand rose and the lamp's yellow gleam glinted in the ludicrously oversize syringe clutched in the bony fingers. It was at least four times as large as a normal syringe and the needle looked several inches long. The yellowish liquid inside was ever so patiently waiting to flow out for an injection.

Beth didn't have time to react before Caliban's hand swung down and the needle cut into her thigh. She instinctively shrieked and jumped back as the cold needle left her flesh with a wet 'schlurp.' A few streaks of blood trickled down from the superficial, stinging slash and Beth silently prayed none of that yellow liquid had invaded her veins.

Caliban stood still and contemplated the now bloody syringe, clearly intrigued by the scarlet liquid dripping from the needle. "Just like Catherine's," he remarked through the T-shaped, fang-riddled mouth. "Beautiful. Pure."

Fueled by immense hatred for the syringe-wielding freak, but too afraid of the needle to get close, Beth flung her scalpel at it like she would throw a dart at a target-disk in the normal life she used to lead. The scalpel whistled past Caliban's head and clattered to the floor near the doorway.

Caliban let out a hoarse, panting noise vaguely reminiscent of scornful laughter. Its head lolled back and the hood of the organic cloak fell off, revealing two horribly bloated, bloodshot travesties of human eyes. The creature raised the syringe once more and started sauntering towards Beth.

The latter did the only thing possible in a situation where you're defenceless and trapped in a room with your enemy blocking the exit: She drew back. Unfortunately for Beth, she stumbled right into the hanged corpse, which fell off its strings and slumped to the floor. Beth screamed and her gaze briefly stayed at the corporeal remains of dr. Randolph, staring at the blood-caked abdomen and the shredded tongue. "Who knows what that freak might do to my body if I don't survive this?"

As if answering the woman's thought, Caliban said: "Make you ... even more ... more beautiful."

Beth came to an abrupt halt as she felt the wooden table pressing against the back of her legs. She whirled around, scanning the table for a weapon. Her eyes feasted on a long, shiny pair of pericardial scissors. She snatched it and turned around to face the creature with her newly acquired weapon.

"But ... don't you want to be beautiful?" the demon hissed.

Beth gave the blunt answer by stabbing the surgical instrument into Caliban's throat. The freak staggered backwards, uttering a long, furious roar before collapsing on the bed.

Its exhausted killer stood leaned against the table for a while, recovering her breath. The slash in her thigh smarted more and more, and a warm, heavy feeling spread out from it. Beth started limping through the room to pick up the lobby key still lying on the floor next to the bed. Looking through the doorway, she noticed that the candles hanging from the corridor ceiling had been replaced by fluorescent tubes once more. The flesh growing on the walls also seemed to be withdrawing into the nothingness it had come from. "It's all going back to normal again?"

Beth's legs gave under her and she collapsed on the blood-spattered floor. "Dammit," she murmured with a slow, lethargic voice that sounded completely unfamiliar to her ears, despite having emerged from her own mouth. "That gross bastard ... Must've injected some weird drug ..." Her movements looked far from graceful as her arms had to drag her fallen body up to the coveted key.

Beth's arms finally joined her legs in their complete limpness. Fortunately, her fingertips managed to pull the key into her palm before unconsciousness ensued. And with the key clutched in her hand, the woman went happily to sleep.

---

A/N: Yay for odd references to the picture book in SH4. Tune in next week, when we might find out what's happened to Kyle ... –E.P.O.