A/N: Happy Advent! Thanks for the review, Snikers. By the way, you should all check out this author's SH fic, Nythera. Pretty good stuff IMO ... Ahem, on to the new chapter.
Chapter 8: Back
Large steel drawers lined the walls of the safe-keeping room. They were labeled with the letters of the hospital rooms, from the first floor's A rooms to the fourth floor's G and H rooms. Beth remembered waking up at the G ward and thus started searching the G drawers.
Cold breezes wafted out each time she pulled a drawer from the wall. The chilly, stale air combined with the long, rectangular drawers made the room disturbingly reminiscent of a morgue. "Well, in a place like this, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a morgue nearby ..."
Most of the drawers were empty, although a few of them contained casual clothes or other ordinary belongings of the hospital patients. Beth found her own stuff in G8 and swiftly tossed the gown off to don her dark jeans, blue sweater and grey jacket. During the short moment when she was completely naked, she couldn't help imagining there was some perverted being hiding somewhere in the room, peeping on her exposed body. Needless to say, she felt relieved to be fully dressed again and headed for the only exit in the room, a wooden door in the wall to the left of the E-G drawers.
As she reached out for the knob, a low, familiar noise rumbled behind her. Beth recognized it immediately.
It was the sound of a drawer being pulled out.
The noise continued for what felt like hundreds of aeons. Still facing the door, Beth could only intercept that the drawer in question was located somewhere to her right. When the noise finally stopped, Beth procrastinated for a few seconds before slowly turning around with one hand holding on to the doorknob.
The room was still deserted. The F2 drawer was pulled out as far as it could get without falling from the cabinet. She couldn't see its contents from her position, but the message scratched into the side with large, inelegant scribbles was clearly visible:
YOU FORGOT THIS
"Okay, that could have been written before I came here. But who the hell pulled the drawer out? And … where are they now?"
Beth could have left the room there and then, but curiosity opressed her fear and forced her to approach the drawer.
It turned out to contain nothing more than a small, rectangular box made of black plastic. Beth gingerly picked it up and removed the lid. Several pencils and an eraser lay inside. "What would I need them for? … Well, I guess I'll just take it with me, anyway. Wouldn't want to disappoint whoever pulled the drawer out." Beth replaced the lid, slipped the box into her trouser pocket and closed the drawer.
She walked up to the door again and winced when she heard the drawer burst out for the second time. The scraping noise of steel against steel was much more shrill and loud than before. It only lasted for half a second this time, but when Beth turned around, the drawer seemed to have been pulled out even farther. Above the first one, a new message was scratched into the grey surface, undoubtedly concerning the contents of the black box in Beth's pocket:
GIVE THEM TO DEAN
A small, pale hand hung over the edge of the drawer, its nails several centimetres long. The index fingernail rested near the top of the N in 'DEAN', leaving no doubt as to who could have scrawled the four monosyllabic words.
"Maybe no one pulled the drawer open. Maybe it was pushed open from the inside ..."
Beth didn't even want to think about what the hand's owner could look like. She spun around, opened the door and dashed down the easily claustrophobia-inducing corridors. In this case, the old proverb 'out of sight, out of mind' didn't apply to Beth. She couldn't see that gross, chalkwhite hand anymore, but her imagination kept giving her twisted glimpses of what the drawer's occupant could have looked like.
These alarming thoughts were wiped from her mind like rain from a windshield as Beth came skidding into the lobby and saw Dean sitting on a bench against one of the pillars closest to the exit. He was contemplating a crumpled paper clutched in his hands. It was white on one side and utterly blackened on the other. The man looked up when Beth entered the hall.
"What happened to you?" Beth frowned. Dean's head now featured a number of dark blue bruises and cuts. His hands looked like they had been squashed in a vice a couple of hours ago.
"Doctor did it …"
"Who's Doctor?"
"Er … No one, forget it. I just …" Dean's sentence didn't get far up the tracks before running out of steam as he struggled fruitlessly to come up with an explanation.
"Look, I found this in a drawer nearby. I think it's yours," Beth said, cautiously approaching the schizophrenic to give him the contents of drawer F2.
Dean opened the box. "Now say thank you," Mister advised. "Thanks. I haven't seen these for a while," said Dean as he glared at the old pencils he used to draw with many years ago.
"Get me outta here …"
"It's allright, Shelley, just a few more steps now."
The muffled voices were coming from the other side of the stairwell door next to the elevator. Beth and Dean cocked their eyes at the door, which promptly burst open as Kyle and Shelley entered the lobby. The shivering woman made a beeline for the nearest bench and slumped down, panting heavily as if the short trip down the stairs had been the most exhausting experience of her life.
"Beth?" Kyle said.
"Yeah, it's me. You were … Kyle, right?" Beth asked.
The cab driver nodded. "Have you found out what the hell's going on?"
"No, not yet. I think that little girl knows, though. She said something about Silent Hill …"
"What little girl?" Kyle frowned.
"The girl I saw in the elevator - Louise. Anyway, that doesn't matter. I have no idea what this is all about and I don't care a damn," Beth declared, showing Kyle the lobby key she had found in Caliban's room.
"So … we can get out now?" Kyle beamed.
"Of course," Beth said and started towards the exit.
"I don't think you're going to get out just because you leave the hospital," Dean said tonelessly.
"Uh … who's he?" Kyle inquired, just noticing the motionless person sitting on the bench with his crumpled paper.
"I'm Dean Frost."
"I met him in the mental wing on the fourth floor," Beth said. "He's …" She lowered her voice to keep the mental patient in question out of earshot. "I think he's a schizophrenic."
"Great," Dean commented.
"And who's that, anyway?" Beth gestured to the climacophobic on the bench.
"Her name's Shelley. She saved me from that … chrysalis-thing," Dean said. "She's afraid of stairways, so getting down here from the third floor wasn't easy. The elevator wasn't working, so we had to use the stairwell … Let's just get out of here, okay?"
"Sure." Beth walked up to the exit and stuck the key into the lock. "Hey, Dean? Shelley? Are you guys coming?"
The patients shakily rose from the benches and approached the doors. Beth turned the key and grabbed the handle. She cast Kyle a brief, anxious glance, as if asking "what if Dean's right and the world outside has gone crazy as well?". Her fingers tightened around the handle and she pulled the door open.
The parking lot was crowded. Cars swarmed around everywhere, their tires carving intricate, erratic patterns in the slush ice covering the asphalt. A few doctors, nurses and patients' visitors wandered about in the swarm of cars. The street surrounding the parking lot was even more noisy and busy-looking, teeming with something Beth truly appreciated after her trip to Hell: The presence of other normal, sane human beings.
"We're … we're really back, aren't we?" Kyle grinned from ear to ear and looked over his shoulder at the room behind them. "We're really back!" The lobby was once more full of patients, visitors and hospital staff. The stale air, layers of dust and unsettling silence had simply vanished, leaving no traces of that opressive atmosphere behind.
Even the thick, grey fog seemed to have lifted the moment Beth opened the lobby door.
The astonished quartet stepped out of the building and away from the entrance to make way for all the busy people entering and exiting the lobby. A sign above the entrance proclaimed 'LAMBERT HOSPITAL – Proud to aid the people of Hooper Lake City since 1910'.
Having stayed inside the hospital for so many years, Dean looked hypnotized by the sensation of snowflakes falling on him. Passers-by couldn't help staring at the group's bruised, gory and (in Kyle's case) gooey visages, but no one actually bothered asking them what the hell had happened.
"So … what do we do now?" Shelley said.
"Well, I guess we can go back to our normal lives and try to forget about that creepy world," Beth replied.
"Uh, I'm not going back to the hospital. Not after … what I saw in there." Shelley shuddered at the memory of the Otherworld, the Devourer and the Nymph she had rescued Kyle from.
"Yeah, me too. I can't go back in there," Dean said. Doctor and Mister whole-heartedly agreed.
"Where are you going to live?" Beth asked.
"You could go back to those foster-parents - Mr. and Mrs. Midkiff. They were pretty nice," Mister remarked.
"Those 'nice' foster-parents are the ones who put you in this hospital in the first place. They only want to forget about you and move on with their lives," Doctor said. "You cannot blame them."
"I don't know," Dean replied. "I don't have any cash or anything."
Shelley shook her head. "Me neither. Maybe we should really go back to the hospital …"
"Look, the two of you can crash at my place," Kyle offered. "Just until you get a job, and then you can move out and get your own flats, allright?"
"Really?" Shelley was dumbfounded by the pleasant surprise.
"Well, you did save my life in there. I owe you one," Kyle said.
"Great! I guess we could get jobs as clerks or something. Right, Dean?"
"Yeah," Dean nodded with an absent-minded tone.
"And if we haven't moved out in a month or so, you can kick us right out," Shelley grinned. "So anyway, where do you live?"
"Hooper Lakeshore Apartments, across town on the south side. The rent's decent and I've got a couple of good couches the two of you could sleep on," Kyle said.
"Actually, I've got a flat in that building, too. It's got a small extra bedroom I hardly ever use. One of you guys could stay there, too," Beth suggested.
"Sure. We can figure out who's crashing where when we get there," Shelley said as they started walking down the parking lot towards the street. "We'll take the subway, right?"
"Of course," Beth said.
They walked silently down the icy sidewalk for a while. "Good to be back," Dean muttered.
Beth nodded, smiling wryly. The cool breezes softly stroked her face and felt so wonderfully different from the stale, acrid air of the Otherworld hospital. The wind playing with her hair confirmed to the relieved woman that she was back in the real world where nothing would ever cause her to question her own sanity.
Beth looked up at the sky of this beautiful January morning. There was no blood up there. No rust, no gore, no bizarre scenery of any kind. Just a clean, milky-white sky, from which countless snowflakes were about to descend.
It sure was good to be back.
---
In the main office on the fourth floor of Lambert Hospital, a 40 years old man stood at the window of the otherwise deserted room, next to the table where Dean's drawing had been ruined.
The man wore a dark brown anorak reminiscent of a monk's robe. His bald head was concealed under the jacket's hood and two intricate, red symbols were tattooed on his hands. They basically consisted of three circles arranged in triangular patterns inside larger circles. Rune-like letters lined the circumferences of the large circles.
"Whether this be or be not, I'll not swear," the man quoted as he stared out the window, watching the beaming quartet walk down the street outside towards the subway entrance.
"They think they're back," Louise remarked, stepping into the room from the desolate hallway outside.
"I know."
Louise walked up to the window and watched Kyle lead the way down the stairs to the subway. "Philip, I was talking to Beth earlier, just after the shift to this world. She told me she'd encountered Sharon."
Philip looked down from the window, interest piqued. "Sharon?"
"Yeah, screaming silently. How can Beth see her when I can't?" Louise frowned.
"I don't know. Spirits like her can be very inscrutable."
"I really miss her …"
Philip crouched down to reach the girl's eye level and gave a reassuring smile. "After the ritual, Sharon won't ever have to leave you again. God will make sure the two of you can live together happily for as long as you want. You have to remember that."
"God will take care of us?"
"God will take care of you."
"And no one's going to take her away?"
"No one."
A dreamy smile emerged on Louise's face.
---
In the women's restroom one storey below Louise and Philip, a huge lump of flesh and fat lay inside one of the stalls. Its obese body looked battered, lying in a pool of its own thick blood.
The Devourer stirred and let out a guttural groan as it stood on its deformed legs. It would seem impossible for this thing to survive after Shelley had thrashed it with the metal bar, and yet it remained alive. After all, a mere physical fight was hardly enough to get rid of it for good. The Devourer licked the blood and pus off its face with its hideous tongue and exited the stall.
The wide mirror above the counter was still there, and in the middle of the glass was the black hole from which the abomination had originally wriggled out. A quiet echo of Shelley's voice drifted out from the hole: "Sure. We can figure out who's crashing where when we get there. We'll take the subway, right?"
Hearing the voice of its sole reason for existing, the Devourer uttered a hungry roar, bolted across the room and through the gap in the mirror.
---
A/N: I promise not to introduce any more characters in this story. Philip's the last member of the cast. (counts) That gives me a total of 7 persons to keep track of. Yay! Tune in next week … -E.P.O.
