Motels clustered along Forest Green Boulevard at the I-55 exit in Brahms,
and from among the selection, Augusta chose a Ramada Inn. The desk clerk
was a pretty and cheerful young Asian woman, and she and Augusta chatted
while the front desk computer decided whether or not Augusta's credit card
could pay for a seven-night stay. The clerk, whose name was Amethyst, was
pleasantly surprised to learn Augusta had once lived nearby and had come
all the way from North Carolina to visit old friends and familiar places.
"Where in Toluca did you live, Ms. Jackson?" Amethyst handed the registration and a pen to Augusta and pointed to the various lines she needed to sign.
"Silent Hill. North Silent Hill, actually, where all the row houses are. By the time I moved, the city was trying to dress up the neighborhood's name a little bit by calling it the "Windowbox District," because so many houses had windowboxes full of flowers on their window ledges. They were gorgeous in the springtime, all in bloom... I actually had a couple of boxes of those bright orange daylilies in my windows..." She looked up from the registration to see that Amethyst's smile had dimmed.
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing," said Amethyst, "I used to live in Silent Hill too, in South Vale. My parents ran the Lucky Jade Chinese restaurant –"
"I used to eat there all the time! Their food is wonderful!"
Amethyst smiled sadly. "Yeah. It sure was. After what happened though, they moved over to Ashfield and opened up there, and from what folks tell us the food still is wonderful. The insurance was just enough to cover the costs. They didn't keep the name though, because it made them sad. I understand, though, because it makes me sad to think of Silent Hill, too. I miss it."
Augusta blinked, stunned, and couldn't find her voice. She stammered for a moment before she was able to say, "You miss it? What do you mean? It's only about ten miles away... isn't it?"
And it was Amethyst's turn to be surprised. She stepped back from the front desk and clasped her hands under her chin. To Augusta it looked as though she were praying.
"Well, I mean..." Amethyst began, "Surely, you know about what happened... Don't you?"
"No... I was living outside the country before I moved to North Carolina," Augusta quickly lied and tried to remember anything that could have happened to Silent Hill. Anything at all that could have been so destructive as to make the desk clerk sad to remember the town, and force her parents to start a new restaurant in a new town. Something she might have seen on the news or read in a newspaper... and nothing came to mind.
"So you really don't know..." said Amethyst. "I don't know how to tell someone about something like this. Would you mind if we sat down for a bit to talk?" She gestured to a breakfast area across the lobby, where tables and chairs clustered on two large Oriental rugs around a giant potted ficus tree.
"Sure," Augusta said, uncertainly, and reached for the key Amethyst had laid on the counter, "Let me just go and put away my things and I'll be right back out."
*
When she returned to the lobby, she found Amethyst, the desk clerk, sitting at a table, studying the potted tree. Amethyst turned and smiled sadly as she approached and took a seat.
"Well, Ms. Jackson, let me first say it's always nice to meet another Silent Hillian. We're scattered all over now, it seems, and we so rarely get together."
"Wait, that's not quite right. There's actually a club for people who used to live in Silent Hill, in Ashfield. We meet every couple of months or so. But if someone who lived in Silent Hill ever leaves Toluca County for someplace bigger or better, that's when it seems they don't come back very often. And it's understandable. Silent Hill was a really great town, and I guess to come back brings too many painful memories."
"But what happened?" asked Augusta. "You keep referring to it in the past tense. And when I came up the Interstate, I didn't see any signs for anything there. The Tourism Department still looks like it's going strong because I must have seen billboards for everything else there is to see and do in this county, but there wasn't any mention of Silent Hill at all! And there's no exit anymore. Used to, you'd exit at Silent Hill to go to the park or Pleasant River, but there's just nothing there! And I noticed when I came back down to Brahms, that you get off the Interstate here now to get to Paleville National Park and Pleasant River – and it never used to be like that!"
"Well," Amethyst sighed, "That's the way it is now. You can't go to the park or Pleasant River, or anywhere else, via Silent Hill because Silent Hill doesn't exist anymore. It's gone."
"Gone? What do you mean it's gone? How does a town of 20,000 people go anywhere?"
Amethyst laughed breathily and closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. "Well, it's not that Silent Hill went somewhere, it's that about two or three of the biggest hills up above it, around the reservoir, went somewhere. Actually, they moved south. Very quickly and very violently. When did you move away from here?"
Augusta thought back, and answered, "It must have been February or March of 1999," and didn't want to think about why she had moved away, but couldn't help herself. She and Joseph had fought the last time toward the end of February, and Augusta had packed her things and left immediately, either during the last week of February or the first week of March to stay with friends back in Hot Springs, and then her grandmother invited her to Asheville and she finally had made that move that winter, just before Christmas.
She realized, if something serious had happened to Silent Hill any time in 1999, she would have been oblivious, too depressed to follow the news or watch TV, and almost too depressed to hold a job.
As if in confirmation, Amethyst said, "That would explain it. If you were out of the country by September, you wouldn't have heard anything about it. I doubt it would have been important enough to make the news on another continent."
"Gosh, it's even sad to think about it," Amethyst looked away, then back at Augusta. "That summer there was a fire in the park. A bad one. It didn't do much damage to the town itself, not like that fire back in 1992, but it must have destroyed a hundred or more acres of the park, including about fifty or sixty acres on the south side of City Reservoir. That was a terribly dry summer."
She sighed. "And then it wasn't dry anymore. Toward the end of August it started to rain. And rain. And rain. It rained for a solid week before it let up to a drizzle a few times, and then it went back to a downpour for a few more days. The rivers and creeks filled up, and the lake started to rise, and as you can imagine with the trees burned away from the reservoir, there was a lot of erosion."
An awful picture began to form in Augusta's mind.
"By the middle of the second week of rain, Silent Hill was evacuated because the county engineer said the dam at the reservoir was unstable because of the erosion and the rain. The only people who remained were those who physically couldn't be moved, like patients at Alchemilla or Brookhaven, plus some staff there and some police and firefighters. Plus, I guess there were some people who just didn't want to go. I heard there were a lot of people up in Wrightwood – you remember where that was I'm sure; north and across the Interstate from Old Silent Hill – who stayed."
"And the county engineer was right. The dam broke on a Sunday. I remember my parents and I were staying at this very hotel, and we heard about it on the news that evening. The station out of Springfield, as I recall, but they didn't know the full extent of the damage until the next day."
"That's when they were reporting it on TV that there just wasn't much of Silent Hill left."
"A mudslide?" asked Augusta.
"A flood and a mudslide," Amethyst corrected.
"But they rebuild from things like that all the time! Places all over the world recover from floods and mudslides!"
"Well, not Silent Hill. But then again, it was worse than you might expect right from the beginning. By the fifth or sixth day of really hard rain, sinkholes started opening up here and there around town – I mean you remember how it wasn't just the rivers we could see that flow into Toluca Lake. There were an awful lot of underground streams under the town, flowing down from springs in the park. When those swelled, they ate away at the rock they flowed through. And of course, as the rain went on, more holes opened up. They were swallowing up entire houses, and opening up big pits in the streets. It looked like the entire town was being struck by meteors or something; there were craters everywhere. I've never seen anything like it."
"When the dam went, I don't know how many millions of gallons let loose, but the reservoir was more or less completely drained, and all that water caused three big hills that had been eaten away by erosion, south of the reservoir, to let go too. They collapsed, and all that mud and rock and water went the only direction it could go..."
"Straight south," said Augusta bleakly, "Right into Silent Hill."
"Like water down a drain," Amethyst nodded, "downhill along the path of the Toluca River between Old Silent Hill and Central Silent Hill, and along the path of the Illiniwak River between Central Silent Hill and East Silent Hill. You remember how Barker's Ridge sort of formed a northern boundary between North Silent Hill and East Silent Hill and the park? There were only a couple of gaps in the ridge. There was that one between the ridge and Wrightwood Hill, where Wrightwood was, where the Toluca River flowed through, and that other one where the Illiniwak flowed through, between North and Central Silent Hill and East Silent Hill."
"I remember them. Between the Toluca and the Illiniwak, it was West Barker's Ridge and over the Illiniwak and onward, it was East Barker's Ridge, and the Interstate went north through the park between Wrightwood Hill and the Toluca River."
"Yep," said Amethyst, "All the mud and debris backed up and dammed the water for a few minutes at the Toluca and Illiniwak gaps, and then let loose again, so what happened more or less, was one wave of water and mud swept down the rivers, into the lake, then a bigger one came through a few minutes later. There were a couple of survivors at Brookhaven Hospital who were able to describe it."
"All that water and all those rocks, and all that mud buried what they didn't sweep away, and when the whole mess all hit the lake, it sent a wave straight south, and all along the shoreline. Paleville didn't get hit too badly, but South Vale was washed away. By the end of it, there were just a couple of places that weren't obliterated. That was Wrightwood, up on Wrightwood Hill, and Paleville, which was damaged by the wave but not as badly as South Vale. And, I guess you also could count that part of Nathan Avenue by the Interstate. It suffered some flooding from the Green River, but not damage from the dam break."
Augusta gaped, dumbstruck.
"I know it's a lot to take in," Amethyst was on the verge of tears, "and I'm sorry you've come back here to it all. Silent Hill was a great town. A really beautiful place."
"I had no idea. I couldn't imagine anything like that. I hadn't heard anything at all about it!" Augusta felt hollow inside, and sick with confusion and loss, as she thought about a town she had loved and about the card in her room in her backpack. "There wasn't an exit from the Interstate, so I came down here instead... I was wondering what had happened, but I never would have dreamed of anything..."
"The National Park Service annexed the land," said Amethyst, wiping her eyes, "And technically it's part of the park now. The land where Silent Hill used to be is being used to study natural reforestation. There are some ruins there, and abandoned houses and stores in Paleville and Wrightwood, and there are a lot of abandoned stores and motels by the interstate on Nathan Avenue... but that's all that's left."
Suddenly Augusta was on her feet, and bolting for a nearby bathroom, where she violently spewed what little remained of her lunch eaten hours ago into the toilet, then fell to her knees on the cold tile floor, her empty stomach still heaving. And she wept. A moment later, Amethyst knocked gently on the door, then entered, hearing Augusta sobbing. She knelt beside her and put her arm around her, and Augusta let herself be held like a child.
Amethyst, the pretty young desk clerk, held a fellow Silent Hillian and said gently, "I know, I know... I'm sorry to have been the one to tell you. It was home to me too."
"Where in Toluca did you live, Ms. Jackson?" Amethyst handed the registration and a pen to Augusta and pointed to the various lines she needed to sign.
"Silent Hill. North Silent Hill, actually, where all the row houses are. By the time I moved, the city was trying to dress up the neighborhood's name a little bit by calling it the "Windowbox District," because so many houses had windowboxes full of flowers on their window ledges. They were gorgeous in the springtime, all in bloom... I actually had a couple of boxes of those bright orange daylilies in my windows..." She looked up from the registration to see that Amethyst's smile had dimmed.
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing," said Amethyst, "I used to live in Silent Hill too, in South Vale. My parents ran the Lucky Jade Chinese restaurant –"
"I used to eat there all the time! Their food is wonderful!"
Amethyst smiled sadly. "Yeah. It sure was. After what happened though, they moved over to Ashfield and opened up there, and from what folks tell us the food still is wonderful. The insurance was just enough to cover the costs. They didn't keep the name though, because it made them sad. I understand, though, because it makes me sad to think of Silent Hill, too. I miss it."
Augusta blinked, stunned, and couldn't find her voice. She stammered for a moment before she was able to say, "You miss it? What do you mean? It's only about ten miles away... isn't it?"
And it was Amethyst's turn to be surprised. She stepped back from the front desk and clasped her hands under her chin. To Augusta it looked as though she were praying.
"Well, I mean..." Amethyst began, "Surely, you know about what happened... Don't you?"
"No... I was living outside the country before I moved to North Carolina," Augusta quickly lied and tried to remember anything that could have happened to Silent Hill. Anything at all that could have been so destructive as to make the desk clerk sad to remember the town, and force her parents to start a new restaurant in a new town. Something she might have seen on the news or read in a newspaper... and nothing came to mind.
"So you really don't know..." said Amethyst. "I don't know how to tell someone about something like this. Would you mind if we sat down for a bit to talk?" She gestured to a breakfast area across the lobby, where tables and chairs clustered on two large Oriental rugs around a giant potted ficus tree.
"Sure," Augusta said, uncertainly, and reached for the key Amethyst had laid on the counter, "Let me just go and put away my things and I'll be right back out."
*
When she returned to the lobby, she found Amethyst, the desk clerk, sitting at a table, studying the potted tree. Amethyst turned and smiled sadly as she approached and took a seat.
"Well, Ms. Jackson, let me first say it's always nice to meet another Silent Hillian. We're scattered all over now, it seems, and we so rarely get together."
"Wait, that's not quite right. There's actually a club for people who used to live in Silent Hill, in Ashfield. We meet every couple of months or so. But if someone who lived in Silent Hill ever leaves Toluca County for someplace bigger or better, that's when it seems they don't come back very often. And it's understandable. Silent Hill was a really great town, and I guess to come back brings too many painful memories."
"But what happened?" asked Augusta. "You keep referring to it in the past tense. And when I came up the Interstate, I didn't see any signs for anything there. The Tourism Department still looks like it's going strong because I must have seen billboards for everything else there is to see and do in this county, but there wasn't any mention of Silent Hill at all! And there's no exit anymore. Used to, you'd exit at Silent Hill to go to the park or Pleasant River, but there's just nothing there! And I noticed when I came back down to Brahms, that you get off the Interstate here now to get to Paleville National Park and Pleasant River – and it never used to be like that!"
"Well," Amethyst sighed, "That's the way it is now. You can't go to the park or Pleasant River, or anywhere else, via Silent Hill because Silent Hill doesn't exist anymore. It's gone."
"Gone? What do you mean it's gone? How does a town of 20,000 people go anywhere?"
Amethyst laughed breathily and closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head. "Well, it's not that Silent Hill went somewhere, it's that about two or three of the biggest hills up above it, around the reservoir, went somewhere. Actually, they moved south. Very quickly and very violently. When did you move away from here?"
Augusta thought back, and answered, "It must have been February or March of 1999," and didn't want to think about why she had moved away, but couldn't help herself. She and Joseph had fought the last time toward the end of February, and Augusta had packed her things and left immediately, either during the last week of February or the first week of March to stay with friends back in Hot Springs, and then her grandmother invited her to Asheville and she finally had made that move that winter, just before Christmas.
She realized, if something serious had happened to Silent Hill any time in 1999, she would have been oblivious, too depressed to follow the news or watch TV, and almost too depressed to hold a job.
As if in confirmation, Amethyst said, "That would explain it. If you were out of the country by September, you wouldn't have heard anything about it. I doubt it would have been important enough to make the news on another continent."
"Gosh, it's even sad to think about it," Amethyst looked away, then back at Augusta. "That summer there was a fire in the park. A bad one. It didn't do much damage to the town itself, not like that fire back in 1992, but it must have destroyed a hundred or more acres of the park, including about fifty or sixty acres on the south side of City Reservoir. That was a terribly dry summer."
She sighed. "And then it wasn't dry anymore. Toward the end of August it started to rain. And rain. And rain. It rained for a solid week before it let up to a drizzle a few times, and then it went back to a downpour for a few more days. The rivers and creeks filled up, and the lake started to rise, and as you can imagine with the trees burned away from the reservoir, there was a lot of erosion."
An awful picture began to form in Augusta's mind.
"By the middle of the second week of rain, Silent Hill was evacuated because the county engineer said the dam at the reservoir was unstable because of the erosion and the rain. The only people who remained were those who physically couldn't be moved, like patients at Alchemilla or Brookhaven, plus some staff there and some police and firefighters. Plus, I guess there were some people who just didn't want to go. I heard there were a lot of people up in Wrightwood – you remember where that was I'm sure; north and across the Interstate from Old Silent Hill – who stayed."
"And the county engineer was right. The dam broke on a Sunday. I remember my parents and I were staying at this very hotel, and we heard about it on the news that evening. The station out of Springfield, as I recall, but they didn't know the full extent of the damage until the next day."
"That's when they were reporting it on TV that there just wasn't much of Silent Hill left."
"A mudslide?" asked Augusta.
"A flood and a mudslide," Amethyst corrected.
"But they rebuild from things like that all the time! Places all over the world recover from floods and mudslides!"
"Well, not Silent Hill. But then again, it was worse than you might expect right from the beginning. By the fifth or sixth day of really hard rain, sinkholes started opening up here and there around town – I mean you remember how it wasn't just the rivers we could see that flow into Toluca Lake. There were an awful lot of underground streams under the town, flowing down from springs in the park. When those swelled, they ate away at the rock they flowed through. And of course, as the rain went on, more holes opened up. They were swallowing up entire houses, and opening up big pits in the streets. It looked like the entire town was being struck by meteors or something; there were craters everywhere. I've never seen anything like it."
"When the dam went, I don't know how many millions of gallons let loose, but the reservoir was more or less completely drained, and all that water caused three big hills that had been eaten away by erosion, south of the reservoir, to let go too. They collapsed, and all that mud and rock and water went the only direction it could go..."
"Straight south," said Augusta bleakly, "Right into Silent Hill."
"Like water down a drain," Amethyst nodded, "downhill along the path of the Toluca River between Old Silent Hill and Central Silent Hill, and along the path of the Illiniwak River between Central Silent Hill and East Silent Hill. You remember how Barker's Ridge sort of formed a northern boundary between North Silent Hill and East Silent Hill and the park? There were only a couple of gaps in the ridge. There was that one between the ridge and Wrightwood Hill, where Wrightwood was, where the Toluca River flowed through, and that other one where the Illiniwak flowed through, between North and Central Silent Hill and East Silent Hill."
"I remember them. Between the Toluca and the Illiniwak, it was West Barker's Ridge and over the Illiniwak and onward, it was East Barker's Ridge, and the Interstate went north through the park between Wrightwood Hill and the Toluca River."
"Yep," said Amethyst, "All the mud and debris backed up and dammed the water for a few minutes at the Toluca and Illiniwak gaps, and then let loose again, so what happened more or less, was one wave of water and mud swept down the rivers, into the lake, then a bigger one came through a few minutes later. There were a couple of survivors at Brookhaven Hospital who were able to describe it."
"All that water and all those rocks, and all that mud buried what they didn't sweep away, and when the whole mess all hit the lake, it sent a wave straight south, and all along the shoreline. Paleville didn't get hit too badly, but South Vale was washed away. By the end of it, there were just a couple of places that weren't obliterated. That was Wrightwood, up on Wrightwood Hill, and Paleville, which was damaged by the wave but not as badly as South Vale. And, I guess you also could count that part of Nathan Avenue by the Interstate. It suffered some flooding from the Green River, but not damage from the dam break."
Augusta gaped, dumbstruck.
"I know it's a lot to take in," Amethyst was on the verge of tears, "and I'm sorry you've come back here to it all. Silent Hill was a great town. A really beautiful place."
"I had no idea. I couldn't imagine anything like that. I hadn't heard anything at all about it!" Augusta felt hollow inside, and sick with confusion and loss, as she thought about a town she had loved and about the card in her room in her backpack. "There wasn't an exit from the Interstate, so I came down here instead... I was wondering what had happened, but I never would have dreamed of anything..."
"The National Park Service annexed the land," said Amethyst, wiping her eyes, "And technically it's part of the park now. The land where Silent Hill used to be is being used to study natural reforestation. There are some ruins there, and abandoned houses and stores in Paleville and Wrightwood, and there are a lot of abandoned stores and motels by the interstate on Nathan Avenue... but that's all that's left."
Suddenly Augusta was on her feet, and bolting for a nearby bathroom, where she violently spewed what little remained of her lunch eaten hours ago into the toilet, then fell to her knees on the cold tile floor, her empty stomach still heaving. And she wept. A moment later, Amethyst knocked gently on the door, then entered, hearing Augusta sobbing. She knelt beside her and put her arm around her, and Augusta let herself be held like a child.
Amethyst, the pretty young desk clerk, held a fellow Silent Hillian and said gently, "I know, I know... I'm sorry to have been the one to tell you. It was home to me too."