Chapter 20: Harpies
The pictorial art room was the largest classroom of St. Gilliam School. The only light came from the overhead lamps – the skies outside the windows had been reduced to inky darkness. The pupils' tables were covered under sketches and pencil cases, and the teacher's desk was filled with crayons, brushes and palettes. It looked like the whole class had just disappeared in the middle of a period.
An easel was put up at the blackboard. The canvas was white as pristine snow, apart from three arched streaks of fresh paint – one bright red at the top, a green one in the middle and purple at the bottom. It looked like an incomplete rainbow.
The room had fallen silent after Beth's apocalyptic prediction. Shelley was the first to break the silence. "If you really think that's what's gonna happen, then how do you want us to stop the ritual? We don't even know where Philip and Louise are."
"I think we'll find out soon," Beth replied.
"Maybe we're supposed to get the third key first," Dean said. "Beth and I've already found two keys – maybe you have to find the last one, Shelley."
"Iris is the spirit of the rainbow," Beth muttered. "That's what it said in the article I found in the astronomy room. The rainbow … Yeah, that's it." She looked up at Shelley and pointed to the easel at the blackboard. "You just have to complete the rainbow."
Shelley stood motionless for a second, frowning. Then, she walked up to the desk and grabbed a palette. "I seriously can't see the logic in this," she remarked and rolled a brush in the yellow paint.
In this world, however, Shelley was not supposed to see the logic. One could only catch a glimpse of it, out of the corner of one's eye. "Well, I think I'm starting to understand how things work around here," Beth said. "It's like one big nightmare, so we have to use dream logic to escape."
Shelley slowly nodded and turned her attention to the canvas. She painted a yellow streak between the red and green ones, then filled in a dark blue shade between the purple and green stripes. The finished rainbow was hardly an artistic masterpiece, but it would have to do.
Suddenly, the crude painting was ripped open by some invisible force. It split down along the middle and crumpled out in a parted sea of colours. A key fell from the middle of the rainbow, where it had apparently been hidden inside the thick canvas. The metallic surface was painted over in three stripes of the primary colours. The letters 'Is' were inscribed on it – 'Iris'. Shelley picked up the key and tucked it into her pocket. "Well, that was an easy one," she commented.
The school's intercom system crackled to life, and the old principal's voice seeped through the speakers again. He sounded angry this time: "Elizabeth Kalember, Dean Frost and Shelley Tate - report to the principal's office immediately!"
All three stood motionless for a few seconds, looking from Beth to Shelley, from Shelley to Dean, from Dean to Beth. Beth then ran out of the room and down the stairway, taking as many steps at a time as possible, as if there would be no tomorrow lest she didn't reach the office 'immediately'. Her two companions followed …
… but Shelley froze on the middle of the stairway. "What the hell's happened to those heads!"
She stared at the walls, where the painted papier maché heads and masks used to hang on display. They had been replaced by real Native American faces, sticking out from the walls like a relief made of flesh and blood. Real feathered headdresses and face paint adorned their heads, while they glared intently at the trio on the stairs with narrow, unblinking eyes. A deafening song echoed down the stairwell, a chant of war, intoned by chiefs and warriors of bygone days. Blood poured from their mouths and trickled down the wall, painting the stone surface in red and white stripes.
"Shelley, hurry up!" Beth yelled. "We have to stop Louise and Philip …"
Shelley tore her gaze away from the Indians and sprinted on down the stairway.
Beth stopped at the bottom. "Which way to the office?"
Dean led them down the hallway, past the short corridor to the astronomy classroom. Shelley glanced at the cabinets with glass panes. The stuffed animals on the shelves had somehow had their skin ripped off to show the sceletons inside, which naturally consisted of mere cotton wool. But despite looking far less lifelike than before, the animals were now fiercely jumping and crawling around, throwing themselves at the panes, fighting, slaughtering and devouring each other's obviously artificial entrails. The only parts of the original animals that remained were the beady, pitchblack eyes, rolling around madly in their cotton wool eyesockets.
The war chant of Silent Hill's Native American tribe continued. Shelley ran on, following Dean down the hallway, vaguely hoping that he would eventually lead the three of them right out of this madness.
But Dean came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the corridor. The war song trailed off.
A boy stood in front of them, 13-16 years old. He stared at the floor as if imploring it to swallow him up and take him away from this scary place. He wore an ordinary grey shirt and baggy jeans. He basically looked like your average teenage pupil – probably one of the school's popular boys – but right now, he seemed utterly lost. A stray child, far away from home.
For a moment, Beth forgot about the dangers of the imminent ritual and the school's Otherworld transformation. Her confusion and dread was briefly washed away by pity for the strange boy. She had never had a son of her own. Even if she could find a husband, she doubted she could handle the challenge of giving birth to and raising a child. But if one were to blame her following actions on a specific part of her personality, it would probably be the maternal instinct.
"Hey," she said, stepping forward. "What are you doing here, kid? It's not safe here …"
The boy looked up from the floor and met Beth's gaze. His wide, nearly tearful eyes only invoked more pity in the woman.
Pity replaced by confusion, as the boy's lips parted and curved up in a grin of pure, childish amusement. He looked from Beth to Shelley to Dean, his smile rapidly broadening.
Laughter.
A loud laughter reverberated down the corridor – not one of relief or happiness, and definitely not that of an innocent child. It sounded utterly scornful, brimming with the glee of mockery.
"Wh-what's so funny?" Shelley asked.
But only the wordless laughter answered her query. Within seconds, the boy's voice had risen from a snicker to a guffaw. His mouth opened ludicrously wide, and cracks spread from the corners of his mouth, across his cheeks. The fissure broadened and split his face from ear to ear. Blood splattered from the gash and drenched his shirt. Beth screamed and drew back.
And then, the arm emerged.
Through some impossible anatomic system, a bare arm shot out from the boy's mouth like an elongated tongue. The index finger stuck out from its chalkwhite fist, pointing at Beth. With a loud crack, the boy's jaw jaw fell to dangle over his chest like a grotesque medallion, only a few shreds of sinew and flesh still connecting it to the rest of the head. The deafening laughter continued, not even muffled by the arm jutting out under the boy's lip and shattered teeth.
"… what are you looking at, Sharon?"
"Nothing, I just …"
"Little weirdo."
"Shut up!"
"Ooh, I'm so scared."
"Yeah, now she's running off to her sister again …"
"They're so pathetic."
"SHUT UP!"
Beth heard herself scream the two words at the bully. She recognized her own voice, but the words had not come from her mind. A cold shiver trickled down her body.
The back of the boy's shirt was ripped open, and wings unfolded from the spine. At first glance, they resembled those of some ludicrously oversize bat with a three-metre wing span, but their front surface was riddled with human veins. In the glistening red surfaces between the blue arteries, human mouths grinned. Or rather, lips and teeth were curved up in broad smiles throughout the wings, but the mouths – along with the tongues, palates, throats – were all missing. Ironically, an arm protruded from the one part of the body where the child's real mouth should be.
The Harpy flapped its wings and rose into the air.
Beth raised her shotgun and squeezed the trigger, but before she could fire a single shot, the winged freak reached out its right arm and took the weapon in a surprisingly strong grip. Beth could merely watch as the shotgun was wrenched from her hands and flung across the hallway, landing in a windowsill.
Satisfied with having rendered Beth unarmed, the Harpy raised its laughing voice to new heights of aural torture. It flew towards Beth, wings stretched out in a voracious embrace. The grinning mouths all snapped fiercely at the thin air, eager to find their victims. Even though they had no tongues or throats to taste and devour with, they simply longed to rip flesh apart.
Beth ran across the corridor to retrieve her shotgun. Dean hurriedly pulled the top off the blue plastic can he had found in the chemistry room. "I told you it would prove useful," Doctor remarked, proud to have suggested taking the can half an hour ago.
Dean dropped the screw top and swung the can forward. A clear liquid poured out, splashing onto the Harpy's face and its three arms.
For a second, the creature hung motionless in the air. Then, it felt the smarting pain as the acid began to corrode its body, trickling into its eyes, down its throat. The Harpy's laughter turned into a scream of confusion, agony, anger …
… a call for help.
The three doors in the left side of the hallway burst open, and numerous Harpies rushed out of the classrooms. Children, teenagers, of all perplexions, ages and genders. All laughing, arms protruding from their mouths, fingers pointing at their prey, grotesque wings flapping. Some of them were armed with various improvised weapons from their classrooms – scissors, table legs, baseball bats.
Beth picked up her shotgun from the windowsill and followed Dean and Shelley down the hallway. As he sprinted along, Dean let the plastic can hang over the floor, pointing downwards in order to pour acid over the red stone tiles. The Harpies flew after them, spreading their cacophony of laughter.
At the end of the hallway, green steel doors led to the main stairwell. Dean skid to a halt and turned around again. He searched through his coat and trouser pockets, but didn't find anything useful. The Harpies drew closer in a billowing cloud of wings, arms and hideous, blood-soaked bodies.
"Hey, what're you standing there for!" Beth yelled, panic shaking her voice. She glanced from Dean to the can's 'Highly Flammable' warning mark to the trail of acid on the hallway floor.
The sunlight of realization didn't simply dawn on Beth – it burst up from the morning horizon in the blink of an eye.
She ripped a lighter up from her pocket, held the silvery box down over the pool of acid and fumbled frantically to produce a flame. Breaking her thumb nail in the process, she managed to get a slight spark out of the lighter. The liquid instantly endorsed her attempts and spawned an ocean of fire. Flames spread through the corridor, growing, rising, licking the walls, the ceiling, the Harpies.
But the creatures kept laughing, as if they actually enjoyed the heat consuming them. Beth stared with wide, smarting eyes as the Harpies seemed to completely forget their prey. Their laughter turned into shrieks of joy. The arms protruding from their mouths now hung limply over their chests. In a state of complete ecstasy, they danced through the fire like a travesty of redeemable souls in Purgatory. A reek of burning flesh flooded the fiery corridor. The sprinkler system kicked in, and water sprayed from the ceiling. The fire alarm's wailing filled the school, entering one's ears with the softness of a hot scalpel.
"Come on," Shelley said. "Let's go before they start chasing us again."
Dean led the way down the staircase. Papiér mache-models of butterflies used to hang from the ceiling here, but they had now been replaced by real, oversize moths. The insects hung from thick ropes attached to their wings. They fluttered and struggled furiously to swoop down. Beth shuddered and looked down at the hallway ahead.
The trio reached the first floor hallway and turned right, around a pillar, down another narrow corridor. "Principal's office should be right down there," Dean informed, running out of breath. Beth and Shelley followed him. Their six feet pounded against the stone tiles, but the noise was drowned out by the cacophony of the shrill fire call, laughing Harpies and the Native Americans' war chant.
Beth felt a headache erupt within her skull. She could hear Sharon again, gasping for air, sobbing. The sprinkler system drenched her clothes. Strands of wet, brown hair clung to her face.
"Brown? But my hair's black …"
The fire alarm grew louder and more strident, starting to resemble an air raid siren. Beth vaguely sensed the sprinklers' water attaining a dark red colour and turning warmer, thicker. "Blood."
"What the fuck is happening to this place!" Shelley screamed, not expecting an answer and not getting one. Blood continued to pour from the sprinklers, as if the building was a living body and the steel pipes were its arteries.
Dean ripped a door open in the right wall of the corridor, and they entered an ordinary, dry, brightly lit room – the principal's office. Dean closed the door behind them.
Safe.
Home.
Sharon closed the front door behind her. The entrance hall was dimly illuminated by a dull, grey afternoon light seeping in through the three panes in the door.
"Sharon? What's happened to you?" Louise said and rushed up to her younger sister.
"The … the kids at that new school," Sharon sobbed. "I was just on my way home, and then … they came and threw snowballs. You know, the hard ones with ice and rocks inside … I told them to stop, but they wouldn't listen. I had to run all the way down Rubin Street."
With tearful eyes, she glanced over Louise's shoulder at a framed photo on a chest of drawers. The blurred image showed the two sisters sitting on wooden swings in a backyard, beaming at the camera. It had been taken five years ago at the Barkin family's old house in Silent Hill.
Sharon walked past Louise and picked up the photo. She held it out to her older sister. "Remember back when we were all living together there, and everything was okay? Me, you, mom and dad … Why did that have to change?"
Louise sighed. "I don't know, Sharon." She replaced the photo on the chest of drawers. "Sometimes, I just don't know."
"But why are those kids so mean to us?" Sharon said, tears blending with the melting snow on her cheeks. "They keep laughing at kids like us, just because we look a little different. Why won't they just leave us alone?"
"I don't know," Louise repeated. "They're just … They're just really stupid." She gave a wry, reassuring smile and hugged Sharon. "Come on, let's get you some dry clothes."
"For fuck's sake, snap out of it!"
Beth opened her eyes and found herself standing leaned against a cabinet beside the door to the hallway. Shelley and Dean stood in front of her. "What just … How long was I …" Beth's sentences trailed off as she noticed the angry and concerned looks on her two companions' faces. She looked down at her feet. Her clothes were soaked in the blood from the sprinkler system. The strands of hair clinging to her face looked black once more. Her shotgun lay on the dusty, milky-white carpet. Beth picked it up and frowned. She didn't remember dropping the weapon.
"You were standing there for about a minute," Dean said. "You just stood there and said all these weird things …"
"Weird things?" Beth asked.
"Don't you remember?" Shelley said. "You were talking about 'mean kids' from your 'new school' throwing snowballs at you. And you kept crying. What was that all about?"
A/N: SlapDash: Oh great, I've created a Mary Sue … And I think anyone could last longer than five minutes in Silent Hill. After all, the town calls you because it wants to torment you, not to kill you as soon as you've arrived.
Wrath: Really? I thought it sounded a wee bit cheesy. Then again, I'm always bashing my cliffhangers … Tune in next week, -E.P.O.
