Augusta awoke with a startled snort from what might have been the most
vivid nightmare she had ever endured. She couldn't remember ever having a
stranger dream – she had met her daughter, who looked exactly as she had
always imagined she would, only to lose her to a horrible creature that
just materialized behind her and pulled her away into the darkness... and
then the same creature, with its hundreds and hundreds of night-black arms
had come for her and ripped her apart as it pulled her through the woven
cable grate of the "Welcome" sculpture that blocked Wiltse Hill Tunnel.
Wiltse Hill Tunnel.
Something was wrong. The light seemed to have gone out of the day, and she knew that even if she had dozed off against the rock with the plaque attached to it, she surely couldn't have slept for more than a few minutes – so why did it seem as though dusk had come? And why was it so much colder now than it had been just those few minutes ago?
And why was she lying face down on the pavement? She sat up, rubbing her arms and remembering her terrible dream, where she had watched her arms break. And felt them break – her right forearm in two places and her left at the elbow and forearm. Could you feel anything in a dream?
Something was wrong. She was on the wrong side of the grate, she thought, as she climbed to her feet and looked out. Her truck still sat in the observation deck's tiny parking lot, with the public bathrooms behind it, and Toluca Lake down a steep hill to the left. She should have been able to hear the lake washing against its shores, and heard the birds singing, but the day had gone silent. It seemed to have sickened. She should have been able to see sunlight sparkling off the lake, but couldn't. Clouds had moved in, and fog, which drifted in listless wisps up from the water. The air seemed dead, motionless, and as she watched, a single snowflake, somehow stark and white as bone against her bright red truck – even with its colors washed out in the mist – drifted out of the mist and melted when it hit the pavement.
A snowflake? Snow in May wasn't unheard of in Illinois, or even back in North Carolina, but it had been warm and pleasant when she had drifted off to sleep. Warm enough to sit on the pavement with her back to a boulder and enjoy the breeze and eat candy. Candy – M&M's, the last few in an old package – she pressed herself against the grate and strained to see the rock she had sat against, now to her left. She saw an empty bag, an M&M's bag, lying on the pavement. She gasped, and her hands flew to her chest, inspecting for broken ribs. She had felt them all break, one by one, but none were broken now. Her skull was whole, her arms and legs unharmed, though she had felt them all break and felt the awful, strong hands pulling and straining, crushing her and tearing her into pieces.
It had been a dream. It must have been. She had died and felt every split- second of her death. Had seen her daughter – a girl who had never even been born! Had seen her daughter dragged away screaming and begging her mother to help her, borne away into the tunnel. And here she was, safe and sound and whole with not so much as a bruise, even on her neck, where those cold black hands had closed like a noose around her throat. So, if she was unharmed and very much alive, it must just have been a nightmare.
But she was on the wrong side of the grate, those cables, so artistically woven into a grate, like a cage, by Pleasant River metalworker Alana Vacchs (with those expertly painted ceramic tiles crafted by South Ashfield potter Sung Yoo Ling), and her candy wrapper was out there, in the fog, where she had dropped it when she first heard the little girl running toward her through Wiltse Hill Tunnel.
Her candy wrapper was on the right side of the grate, in the fog, under the clouds, in the damp chill, through which drifted another snowflake as she watched.
This couldn't be happening. She turned, noticing for the first time the comforting bulk of her leather backpack weighing against her shoulders. The tunnel stretched away into shadows, with only the faintest milky light trickling in from the far opening. A ghost of a breeze that smelled of dead leaves caressed her cheek and was somehow alive – not, not alive; dead and not only dead, but decaying. It was obscene. She shivered and wiped at her face.
She was on the wrong side of the grate, and this was wrong and couldn't be happening. If she was on the wrong side of the grate, she had been pulled through it, just like in her dream. There was no other way she could be here.
She began to tremble. Her knees buckled and she hit the pavement, hard, and suddenly the darkness of Wiltse Hill Tunnel seemed a living, evil thing. It seemed to fall around her like a cloak, touching her everywhere with its cold and damp. It was wrong. Everything was wrong. The world she had gone to sleep in was not the world where she had awakened. She looked behind her, with her hands to her face, and saw only snowflakes falling slowly, gently, so white against her red truck. White like bone and red like blood. Bone and blood – she twitched violently and rubbed her arms furiously, and they weren't broken. She had never broken a bone in her life. Even the warmth of her skin and her flesh and her blood coursing through her veins seemed wrong. It seemed wrong to be alive...
Her right hand stung and throbbed, she noticed. In her dream, as the thing with its arms had dragged her daughter away, Kitty's fingernails had scratched her and left their marks. She looked closely at the back of her hand and discovered dried blood there, and four parallel scratches. It hurt when she moved her fingers. When her knuckles bent, the cuts opened up. When she relaxed her fingers the cuts pressed closed and clotting blood squelched out, but they seemed close to scabbing over. She should probably wrap a cloth around her knuckles until she could wash out the cuts and properly clean and bandage them –
And it came to her and hit with shattering force that rocked her back on her heels – if she was on the wrong side of the grate, with slashes across her knuckles, her dream might not have been a dream. That meant, somewhere a little girl – her little girl – might be alone and afraid, and probably hurt. If the monsters of her dream were real, so too was the angel who had raked her nails across the back of Augusta's right hand. So, nothing else mattered. This situation, this insane impossibility – this thing that was all wrong – was no longer important. It didn't matter if she had died and been pulled in pieces through a grate. It didn't matter that she was now alive and feeling not only well but refreshed, as though she had awakened from a deep and much-needed sleep. It didn't matter whether she had dreamed a dream that seemed to have made itself real or had experienced something real that seemed to have made itself a dream, and that somewhere in the space between sleeping and waking, or dying and living again, the world outside had snapped its moorings and drifted into a snowy, foggy dusk. Nothing mattered except the fact that if the rest of it was real, so was the little girl in her jeans with the bright red hearts and her Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt. The little girl named Mary-Elizabeth, called Kitty. Just like Augusta's mother. The girl who looked in person just as Augusta had always pictured her with her beaming smile and dark skin and braids.
The little girl who had called her Mama, and who had sent her a Mother's Day card. She was out there, somewhere, wherever she had been dragged away to by the killing black arms with their strong, cold hands.
Augusta stood. Her skin tingled and her muscles twitched with an overpowering sensation that the entire world had somehow... slipped. But there was no time to think of that now. A little girl was out there, somewhere, and needed her. She would think about everything else later. She took a step and nearly fell, as though the ground was tilting. A flash of dizziness, just an instant, exploded like a flare as it seemed that everything around her, in front and behind, was superimposed against itself for a moment. Something false draped over something real. She took another step forward and the vertigo passed. She stepped forward. The ground felt solid and level, though pocked with potholes where, over the course of five Illinois winters, water in the old tunnel had frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed, and heaved up the pavement in chunks like fat puzzle pieces. Her foot sank into a hole full of cold, stale water, and the feeling of unreality that cloaked the world was ripped apart. Of course, it was still cold and gloomy and things – the darkness and damp and cold air – that should not feel alive still felt alive with an intelligence that was wrong. And she was still on the wrong side of the grate.
But somewhere, her daughter might need her, might be waiting for her to find her and save her from God only knew what. So she walked on through the tunnel.
*
At the far end of Wiltse Hill Tunnel, she stepped into a world of mist, where the silence was overpowering, but at least there seemed to be more light, if only a little. The damp and mist pressed in on all sides, and seemed to be inspecting her, observing her with the drooling lechery of a rapist. Her muscles twitched again. The feeling of being watched was overpowering, made worse because she could barely see more than a few yards ahead. The fog and falling snowflakes blotted out the world.
East of the tunnel, the ground on which Highway 26/73 rested was much higher than that on the tunnel's west side, where Nathan Avenue had once observed the South Vale neighborhood of Silent Hill from a lofty perch atop a stone causeway that gently descended to the level lakeshore and South Vale's small grid of streets. The Wiltse Memorial Greenway, and tiny, narrow Vacchs Road passed beneath Nathan Avenue, cutting through the causeway walls with large archways. As she walked along, straining to see and hear in this world of swirling damp, Augusta wondered what she would see if the fog were gone. Mud flats, with ruined walls protruding like broken teeth here and there? A field of saplings and bushes perhaps? There was a town here once. A thriving city of more than 20,000 people. It was gone now. What was left?
Nathan Avenue was pitted and worn, and crumbling. Vines heaved themselves over the causeway's railings like invaders breaching the walls of a castle, and sprawled in the roadway. To her right, a sign loomed suddenly, as if it had reared up on its own accord, the dead springing back to life.
WELCOME TO HISTORIC SILENT HILL
Founded 1828
Large round wooden seals bearing the logos of Silent Hill's various civic groups ringed the sign. There was the Elks Club logo and the Lions Club, the Civitans and Jaycees, Knights of Columbus, and a dozen others.
There was a town here, thought Augusta. It's gone now. The sign and the clubs' seals looked battered, and were strangled with vines. The feeling of unreality rose up again in a wave. Augusta stopped, struck motionless by vertigo. Her ears rang with the silence, and she closed her eyes and drew in a dozen deep, long breaths until the feeling of motion sickness passed. What was going on here? She sighed and stood and looked at the sign with its vines dangling limply in the mist. Then she walked on, following the slope of Nathan Avenue. Not far past the sign she passed over the Wiltse Memorial Greenway. Though barely visible below in the fog, it seemed in remarkably good condition, a mulched path threading between the trees alongside Toluca Lake. The park service must maintain it now, August thought. There had been a sign pointing to campgrounds and a ranger station and the reforestation project back at the observation deck, after all. But the trees seemed larger than only five years' growth would allow. Maybe the wave hadn't knocked them over.
Further on, Nathan Avenue, passed over Vacchs Road, another narrow trail that was more a walking path than a road. Descending toward the lakefront, Nathan Avenue was lower now and Augusta's view of Vacchs Road through the fog was clearer. Like the Wiltse greenway, it too was deserted, nothing more than an empty path between the trees, which seemed too large to have only been growing since that terrible September. If the wave had been damaging enough to devastate South Vale, wouldn't it have been strong enough to tear through the trees as well? Why were they so large? These trees looked as they had when Augusta moved away long ago; they were large and majestic, and lush. Nearer the tunnel, their branches had pressed against the roadway, and here they arched overhead, but Nathan Avenue was as pitted and pocked here as it was in Wiltse Hill Tunnel. It clearly had been severely damaged, then left to decay. Fat, leafy vines hung from the trees like tattered veils, as if they too had been growing undisturbed for decades, like the branches from which they dangled.
The vertigo came again and even the mild downhill slope of Nathan Avenue was suddenly too much for Augusta, who stumbled, tripped, then fell to her knees, then onto her side. Her head spun. Had there been anything other than a few ounces of chocolate in her stomach she might have thrown up. The world suddenly seemed very false, as though if she waited a few more seconds, it would evaporate, and the sun would come out and bring with it sound and warmth, and stunted trees and a wasteland of rock and mud. Instead, the fog and silence remained, but the feeling of the ground swaying beneath her feet faded. She stood with a groan and rubbed her forehead, breathing deep to chase away the nausea. If nothing else, this cool, wet air was somewhat refreshing.
She stood still as the mist drifted past and noticed, as she looked to her left, that a building had appeared not far ahead, dim and vague in the fog. Nathan Avenue was almost level now with the low-lying basin where South Vale spread its homes and businesses along tree-lined streets. A short distance ahead, if she remembered correctly, would be Lindsey Street leading away to the south, and beyond it Martin Street, then Neely Street. She stepped forward and then, with increasing steadiness, walked. As she approached, more buildings loomed in the fog. Their edges and details were indistinct and dulled, wiped away by the gloom and mist. Here and there, though, the sickly dusk light reflected off window glass.
Perhaps the damage to South Vale hadn't been as severe as Amethyst had said.
Wiltse Hill Tunnel.
Something was wrong. The light seemed to have gone out of the day, and she knew that even if she had dozed off against the rock with the plaque attached to it, she surely couldn't have slept for more than a few minutes – so why did it seem as though dusk had come? And why was it so much colder now than it had been just those few minutes ago?
And why was she lying face down on the pavement? She sat up, rubbing her arms and remembering her terrible dream, where she had watched her arms break. And felt them break – her right forearm in two places and her left at the elbow and forearm. Could you feel anything in a dream?
Something was wrong. She was on the wrong side of the grate, she thought, as she climbed to her feet and looked out. Her truck still sat in the observation deck's tiny parking lot, with the public bathrooms behind it, and Toluca Lake down a steep hill to the left. She should have been able to hear the lake washing against its shores, and heard the birds singing, but the day had gone silent. It seemed to have sickened. She should have been able to see sunlight sparkling off the lake, but couldn't. Clouds had moved in, and fog, which drifted in listless wisps up from the water. The air seemed dead, motionless, and as she watched, a single snowflake, somehow stark and white as bone against her bright red truck – even with its colors washed out in the mist – drifted out of the mist and melted when it hit the pavement.
A snowflake? Snow in May wasn't unheard of in Illinois, or even back in North Carolina, but it had been warm and pleasant when she had drifted off to sleep. Warm enough to sit on the pavement with her back to a boulder and enjoy the breeze and eat candy. Candy – M&M's, the last few in an old package – she pressed herself against the grate and strained to see the rock she had sat against, now to her left. She saw an empty bag, an M&M's bag, lying on the pavement. She gasped, and her hands flew to her chest, inspecting for broken ribs. She had felt them all break, one by one, but none were broken now. Her skull was whole, her arms and legs unharmed, though she had felt them all break and felt the awful, strong hands pulling and straining, crushing her and tearing her into pieces.
It had been a dream. It must have been. She had died and felt every split- second of her death. Had seen her daughter – a girl who had never even been born! Had seen her daughter dragged away screaming and begging her mother to help her, borne away into the tunnel. And here she was, safe and sound and whole with not so much as a bruise, even on her neck, where those cold black hands had closed like a noose around her throat. So, if she was unharmed and very much alive, it must just have been a nightmare.
But she was on the wrong side of the grate, those cables, so artistically woven into a grate, like a cage, by Pleasant River metalworker Alana Vacchs (with those expertly painted ceramic tiles crafted by South Ashfield potter Sung Yoo Ling), and her candy wrapper was out there, in the fog, where she had dropped it when she first heard the little girl running toward her through Wiltse Hill Tunnel.
Her candy wrapper was on the right side of the grate, in the fog, under the clouds, in the damp chill, through which drifted another snowflake as she watched.
This couldn't be happening. She turned, noticing for the first time the comforting bulk of her leather backpack weighing against her shoulders. The tunnel stretched away into shadows, with only the faintest milky light trickling in from the far opening. A ghost of a breeze that smelled of dead leaves caressed her cheek and was somehow alive – not, not alive; dead and not only dead, but decaying. It was obscene. She shivered and wiped at her face.
She was on the wrong side of the grate, and this was wrong and couldn't be happening. If she was on the wrong side of the grate, she had been pulled through it, just like in her dream. There was no other way she could be here.
She began to tremble. Her knees buckled and she hit the pavement, hard, and suddenly the darkness of Wiltse Hill Tunnel seemed a living, evil thing. It seemed to fall around her like a cloak, touching her everywhere with its cold and damp. It was wrong. Everything was wrong. The world she had gone to sleep in was not the world where she had awakened. She looked behind her, with her hands to her face, and saw only snowflakes falling slowly, gently, so white against her red truck. White like bone and red like blood. Bone and blood – she twitched violently and rubbed her arms furiously, and they weren't broken. She had never broken a bone in her life. Even the warmth of her skin and her flesh and her blood coursing through her veins seemed wrong. It seemed wrong to be alive...
Her right hand stung and throbbed, she noticed. In her dream, as the thing with its arms had dragged her daughter away, Kitty's fingernails had scratched her and left their marks. She looked closely at the back of her hand and discovered dried blood there, and four parallel scratches. It hurt when she moved her fingers. When her knuckles bent, the cuts opened up. When she relaxed her fingers the cuts pressed closed and clotting blood squelched out, but they seemed close to scabbing over. She should probably wrap a cloth around her knuckles until she could wash out the cuts and properly clean and bandage them –
And it came to her and hit with shattering force that rocked her back on her heels – if she was on the wrong side of the grate, with slashes across her knuckles, her dream might not have been a dream. That meant, somewhere a little girl – her little girl – might be alone and afraid, and probably hurt. If the monsters of her dream were real, so too was the angel who had raked her nails across the back of Augusta's right hand. So, nothing else mattered. This situation, this insane impossibility – this thing that was all wrong – was no longer important. It didn't matter if she had died and been pulled in pieces through a grate. It didn't matter that she was now alive and feeling not only well but refreshed, as though she had awakened from a deep and much-needed sleep. It didn't matter whether she had dreamed a dream that seemed to have made itself real or had experienced something real that seemed to have made itself a dream, and that somewhere in the space between sleeping and waking, or dying and living again, the world outside had snapped its moorings and drifted into a snowy, foggy dusk. Nothing mattered except the fact that if the rest of it was real, so was the little girl in her jeans with the bright red hearts and her Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt. The little girl named Mary-Elizabeth, called Kitty. Just like Augusta's mother. The girl who looked in person just as Augusta had always pictured her with her beaming smile and dark skin and braids.
The little girl who had called her Mama, and who had sent her a Mother's Day card. She was out there, somewhere, wherever she had been dragged away to by the killing black arms with their strong, cold hands.
Augusta stood. Her skin tingled and her muscles twitched with an overpowering sensation that the entire world had somehow... slipped. But there was no time to think of that now. A little girl was out there, somewhere, and needed her. She would think about everything else later. She took a step and nearly fell, as though the ground was tilting. A flash of dizziness, just an instant, exploded like a flare as it seemed that everything around her, in front and behind, was superimposed against itself for a moment. Something false draped over something real. She took another step forward and the vertigo passed. She stepped forward. The ground felt solid and level, though pocked with potholes where, over the course of five Illinois winters, water in the old tunnel had frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed, and heaved up the pavement in chunks like fat puzzle pieces. Her foot sank into a hole full of cold, stale water, and the feeling of unreality that cloaked the world was ripped apart. Of course, it was still cold and gloomy and things – the darkness and damp and cold air – that should not feel alive still felt alive with an intelligence that was wrong. And she was still on the wrong side of the grate.
But somewhere, her daughter might need her, might be waiting for her to find her and save her from God only knew what. So she walked on through the tunnel.
*
At the far end of Wiltse Hill Tunnel, she stepped into a world of mist, where the silence was overpowering, but at least there seemed to be more light, if only a little. The damp and mist pressed in on all sides, and seemed to be inspecting her, observing her with the drooling lechery of a rapist. Her muscles twitched again. The feeling of being watched was overpowering, made worse because she could barely see more than a few yards ahead. The fog and falling snowflakes blotted out the world.
East of the tunnel, the ground on which Highway 26/73 rested was much higher than that on the tunnel's west side, where Nathan Avenue had once observed the South Vale neighborhood of Silent Hill from a lofty perch atop a stone causeway that gently descended to the level lakeshore and South Vale's small grid of streets. The Wiltse Memorial Greenway, and tiny, narrow Vacchs Road passed beneath Nathan Avenue, cutting through the causeway walls with large archways. As she walked along, straining to see and hear in this world of swirling damp, Augusta wondered what she would see if the fog were gone. Mud flats, with ruined walls protruding like broken teeth here and there? A field of saplings and bushes perhaps? There was a town here once. A thriving city of more than 20,000 people. It was gone now. What was left?
Nathan Avenue was pitted and worn, and crumbling. Vines heaved themselves over the causeway's railings like invaders breaching the walls of a castle, and sprawled in the roadway. To her right, a sign loomed suddenly, as if it had reared up on its own accord, the dead springing back to life.
WELCOME TO HISTORIC SILENT HILL
Founded 1828
Large round wooden seals bearing the logos of Silent Hill's various civic groups ringed the sign. There was the Elks Club logo and the Lions Club, the Civitans and Jaycees, Knights of Columbus, and a dozen others.
There was a town here, thought Augusta. It's gone now. The sign and the clubs' seals looked battered, and were strangled with vines. The feeling of unreality rose up again in a wave. Augusta stopped, struck motionless by vertigo. Her ears rang with the silence, and she closed her eyes and drew in a dozen deep, long breaths until the feeling of motion sickness passed. What was going on here? She sighed and stood and looked at the sign with its vines dangling limply in the mist. Then she walked on, following the slope of Nathan Avenue. Not far past the sign she passed over the Wiltse Memorial Greenway. Though barely visible below in the fog, it seemed in remarkably good condition, a mulched path threading between the trees alongside Toluca Lake. The park service must maintain it now, August thought. There had been a sign pointing to campgrounds and a ranger station and the reforestation project back at the observation deck, after all. But the trees seemed larger than only five years' growth would allow. Maybe the wave hadn't knocked them over.
Further on, Nathan Avenue, passed over Vacchs Road, another narrow trail that was more a walking path than a road. Descending toward the lakefront, Nathan Avenue was lower now and Augusta's view of Vacchs Road through the fog was clearer. Like the Wiltse greenway, it too was deserted, nothing more than an empty path between the trees, which seemed too large to have only been growing since that terrible September. If the wave had been damaging enough to devastate South Vale, wouldn't it have been strong enough to tear through the trees as well? Why were they so large? These trees looked as they had when Augusta moved away long ago; they were large and majestic, and lush. Nearer the tunnel, their branches had pressed against the roadway, and here they arched overhead, but Nathan Avenue was as pitted and pocked here as it was in Wiltse Hill Tunnel. It clearly had been severely damaged, then left to decay. Fat, leafy vines hung from the trees like tattered veils, as if they too had been growing undisturbed for decades, like the branches from which they dangled.
The vertigo came again and even the mild downhill slope of Nathan Avenue was suddenly too much for Augusta, who stumbled, tripped, then fell to her knees, then onto her side. Her head spun. Had there been anything other than a few ounces of chocolate in her stomach she might have thrown up. The world suddenly seemed very false, as though if she waited a few more seconds, it would evaporate, and the sun would come out and bring with it sound and warmth, and stunted trees and a wasteland of rock and mud. Instead, the fog and silence remained, but the feeling of the ground swaying beneath her feet faded. She stood with a groan and rubbed her forehead, breathing deep to chase away the nausea. If nothing else, this cool, wet air was somewhat refreshing.
She stood still as the mist drifted past and noticed, as she looked to her left, that a building had appeared not far ahead, dim and vague in the fog. Nathan Avenue was almost level now with the low-lying basin where South Vale spread its homes and businesses along tree-lined streets. A short distance ahead, if she remembered correctly, would be Lindsey Street leading away to the south, and beyond it Martin Street, then Neely Street. She stepped forward and then, with increasing steadiness, walked. As she approached, more buildings loomed in the fog. Their edges and details were indistinct and dulled, wiped away by the gloom and mist. Here and there, though, the sickly dusk light reflected off window glass.
Perhaps the damage to South Vale hadn't been as severe as Amethyst had said.