Augusta sighed and remembered a long conversation she had once had with her
friend Rafaela Flores, a nurse at Western North Carolina Community Health
Services, a free clinic specializing in HIV treatment, in a revitalizing
neighborhood of old houses, big trees, and elderly brick store buildings in
West Asheville. Rafaela mourned the death of every patient at WNCCHS,
especially when a death could have been prevented.
"Some HIV medicines have nasty side effects," she had said over sundaes at an ice cream shop downtown, "and people quit taking them because of it. Other times, patients recover from their initial symptoms and think they don't need any more medicine, and quit taking it. Either way, that's when their health starts that downhill slide again. I can't stand it. There are other medicines out there that won't have the side effects. And to maintain that good health, they need to keep taking whatever it is they're on. It's not hard to do."
"But if they stop their medicine regimen for whatever reason, and let their bodies process the residual medication out of their system, often they can't take the medicines they were on anymore because they won't work again. HIV is a mean little fucker – it will adapt if you let it, and it will build up its defenses to a medicine if you just give it half a chance. We lost another one today because he just quit taking his medicine because he was feeling fine. A year later his HIV escalated into AIDS – that's when the T-Cell count; I know I've told you, but that's a special kind of white blood cell – drops below 200 per milliliter of blood, and won't rise again. A person without HIV's T-Cell count should be anywhere between 500 and 1500."
She had paused, watching gaggles of delighted tourists walking past the ice cream shop's windows on their way to the museums at Pack Place. Then she turned back to Augusta with fury in her eyes.
"But goddamn! You can keep yourself healthy even if you've got AIDS though! But when most people get that diagnosis they think their life is racing toward a brick wall, and they get an urge to "have a little fun" before the crash. This guy did drugs, drank enough to float the Battleship USS North Carolina, slept around, and God knows what all else, and this morning, two years after he stopped taking his medicines, they found him dead in Dupont State Forest. The detective talked to his doctor at the clinic, and she talked to me – said it looked like he'd used the last of his strength to hike to Hooker Falls and died there on a little beach by the river, facing the waterfall. I can't remember the last time I heard anything so sad."
"Sometimes I wonder what I'm even doing," she had said. "Sometimes I just want to quit, and go work for a doctor somewhere else, some GP who treats diabetics and people with high blood pressure – people who have diseases that aren't regarded as the modern black plague. Some doctor who treats people who'll do what they're supposed to and take their goddamned medicine!"
*
Augusta looked back at the man on the couch. He was sallow and slick with sweat, and breathed shallowly.
"I know that quitting taking my medicines was a stupid thing to do, but it's a little late to fix things. I just want to get this over with and find out what I'm supposed to learn by coming here before I die," he said quietly.
Augusta shushed him. "You need to rest."
He ignored her. "You know, you hear rumors all the time. Lots of people come here, and go into the park, and don't come out. Since 1999, the number of missing persons cases in Toluca County has tripled."
She looked at him.
"Some people do come out, though, but they're never the same as when they went in. They say they've seen things, and heard things, and felt things here in Silent Hill. If you talk to enough of the people who come out, they tell you they were all called here by someone who shouldn't have been able to call them here. Like I told you, some get letters, and some get emails, and some get phone calls – and they're always from dead people."
Her heart began to beat faster. Don't show fear, she told herself. Don't upset him.
"They'll always tell you they were called here to made amends for something they did wrong. Some person they've hurt – usually killed, actually – brings them here to make them face their sin and atone for it. I just can't figure out why I was called here though... I didn't do anything wrong. He gave me this disease."
He seemed to be talking to himself now. "You know something else that's funny? Lots of those people who come out of the park commit suicide. You almost never used to hear about anyone committing suicide in the hotels around here, but now hardly a month goes by when someone doesn't shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or poison themselves, or slash their wrists in the bathtub."
"They're always people from somewhere else," he said.
"How do you know all that?" she asked. He seemed to be drifting away into some secret place, and she needed to bring him back.
"Ever since I got too sick to work, I've been living off unemployment and disability benefits, and I get some help from the Capital Area AIDS Assistance Project. They bring me meals twice a week, and one of the ladies who delivers the food works as a detective in Brahms. She never gives me any details she shouldn't, but she tells me the news."
"There's something wrong here," he said, "and this town... Silent Hill... There was a town here. It's gone now. It only appears when it's called someone to it to suffer for their sins... But I don't know why I'm here. And I don't know why you're here..."
I do, thought Augusta. I killed my daughter – but she's alive and well here. I saw her in the tunnel. You're right... there's something wrong here. Probably more wrong than anything you or I know. And you're right that there was a town here, and it's gone now – that's all I've been able to think about since I got here and saw it standing there.
He said again, "I don't know why you'd be here. You've been kind."
He closed his eyes, and Augusta listened to his breath rattling up from his clogged lungs until a violent, wet cough exploded in the quiet. He turned his head to look at her.
"You're right... I need to rest. So, can you please do something for me? That note on the mirror said I needed to come here to read something. I don't know what because the last word was smeared, and trailed down from the mirror and onto the counter into a big, bloody handprint. The only thing I can think of to read in a doctor's office would be medical records. Can you go find my ex-boyfriend's file?"
She couldn't refuse. He was dying.
"Sure," she said, "What was his last name?"
"Quinn. Hayden Quinn." He sighed and closed his eyes again.
Augusta stood and searched for a door with her light. She found it, next to a reception counter sealed off from the waiting room with glass partitions shut tight. She walked to the door – it was an antique, like most of the fittings in this building, made of dark oak with a large, smoked glass window. The knob was tarnished brass and turned easily, and swung silently into the blackness beyond.
*
The offices of Dr. Prahdeep Ghosh and his associates were lined up in a row beyond the door, facing examining rooms, rooms full of diagnostic machines, bathrooms, and labs across a long hallway. To her left was the reception desk that looked into the waiting room. Computers sat silent and dead on the counter and two swiveling desk chairs were abandoned. From the fabric seat of one chair grew a large toadstool.
Abandoned for five years in the dark and the damp, thought Augusta. She wondered if Dr. Ghosh and his associates were practicing medicine somewhere else now.
Every door was thrown wide, revealing rooms full of dust, cobwebs, and rust that speckled every metal surface. There were sites on the Internet that chronicled in pictures the investigations of massive abandoned buildings of every kind, including hospitals. Augusta was fascinated by the thought of such a thing, and explored such sites frequently. She had seen pictures of dozens of forgotten hospitals across the country, and while the photos were eerie, they usually showed graffiti and vandalism, at least some sign that people had come and gone even after the building had been left to rot. This was eerier, because everything seemed untouched. In one office a pencil still rested where it had been left on a yellow legal pad whose paper had been wrinkled by the damp. In another a family's smiling faces peered out from a framed photo on a desk. The examining rooms were still stocked with rubber gloves and disinfectant hand wash. Test tubes still stood in racks in a lab. A printer and an x-ray machine, and diagnostic equipment whose functions Augusta couldn't guess squatted in some rooms, their buttons and dials glued in place by moisture.
In the darkness beyond her light things moved. Rats, mice, roaches, spiders, beetles, she thought. She remembered the candy in the window of J. Porter and Sons' and wondered what there might be to feast upon in an abandoned doctor's office – then decided she would rather not think about it. She spotted a refrigerator in one room with a sign on the door reading, "SPECIMINS ONLY! NO FOOD!!!" and didn't dare open it.
The last room on the right at the end of the hall was full of file cabinets. There were dozens of them, all once painted a bland institutional gray, all now bearing scabs of rust. As she searched the room with her light, prowling from one aisle of cabinets to another, she thought that it probably would have been easier to look for a patient's medical records using the office's computers – were they not ruined by the same wet air that had nourished a toadstool on a cloth chair, and rusted the metal cabinets before her.
One drawer of one cabinet was open. She walked to it and inspected it, and saw that it was festooned with dusty cobwebs, as though the drawer had been open a long, long time. And perhaps it had. With its information inside, perhaps it had been waiting for the man on the sofa, or for her.
No, not for her, she told herself firmly. She wouldn't know anyone whose records might be inside.
Quade, Nancy S. Quadrine, Alfred A. Qualk, Ronald V.
Two Qualls, a Quam, a Quarle.
Quattrochi, Joseph E.
She reached further back. The file folders felt chalky under her fingertips, and were green with mold. Spores billowed up with every file she pulled forward, looking further back.
She passed over Queen, Quick, and Quigley, then Quijosa.
Quinn, Alice U. Quinn, David S. Quinn, Hayden A. She lifted it from its place, and marveled that it seemed untouched by dampness or time. There was no mold, no mildew, and the papers inside the folder were still crisp and white, as if it had been protected all this time, then specially set aside for someone.
For her? For the man on the sofa in the waiting room? She shivered, and suddenly felt as though she was being watched again. Clutching the file, she walked quickly out of the room, and hated the shadows closing in behind her. Halfway down the hall she broke into a run, then forced herself to stop at the waiting room door, forced herself to calm down, forced her breathing to return to normal, steady cadence. It felt as though something in the dark had come to life and was moving, but in her light there was nothing.
The dark, rotted hallway was still and silent. But still it felt as though something, much larger than a mouse or a beetle, was moving in the dark.
God, help us please, she prayed. There's something bad here, in this place, and I don't know what it is. Please help me find my daughter. Please show mercy to that man in the waiting room.
She felt behind her and fumbled for the doorknob, then found it and turned it and stepped backward through the open door into the waiting room, never letting her eyes leave the hallway. She was glad to close the door on the darkness, and turned. The waiting room was calm, and from the sofa came the sounds of the man still battling to breathe through thick phlegm.
"I think I've got what you're looking for," Augusta walked to the sofa and kneeled down.
The man looked at her. He seemed weaker than before. She wouldn't be able to get him up to her truck at the observation deck by herself, and would need help. He needed help, as quickly as she could get it for him.
But what about Kitty?
"Can I see it please?"
"What? Oh... the file... I'm sorry," she said, "Here... let me see if I can find what you need in here, okay? Just lay back and rest."
She smiled and hoped it was reassuring. "Besides, I've got the flashlight."
"I had one. But I lost it in the stairwell. It rolled away and fell. I don't know where it went..."
She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and opened the file.
And the air was suddenly full of swirling paper. There had been no noise, no rush of air, but pages from Hayden Quinn's medical records reached the ceiling and drifted down, rustling softly as they descended. Augusta yelped her surprise and reared back. The eyes of the man on the sofa went wide and he gasped. He tried to shield his face but was too weak, and his arms dropped limply onto his chest.
Pages noisily fluttered down, landing here and there. Augusta looked up and saw them drifting through the air like ghosts of doves. Her heart pounding, she looked down to see one page left in the folder, and as sheets of paper fell around her she reached to retrieve it. She lifted it up and trained her light on it, and began to read aloud.
"December 19, 1992: Revealed diagnosis to patient, who became quite distressed. Interviewed patient as to possible source of infection – patient claims to have been drugged and raped by boyfriend while on trip to see concert in St. Louis. Patient claims no other sexual partners. Patient did not report incident to police, fearing embarrassment and discrimination. Patient will be placed on antibiotic regimen to fight existing bacterial infections, and will given drug to prevent pneumonia. Patent will begin anti-viral medication regimen in three weeks. Patient requests prescription for nightly sedative – claims likely difficulty falling asleep. Advised patient to try over-the-counter sleep aid until counseling session with Dr. Wong can be scheduled – patient may be suicidal, and I do not feel comfortable entrusting patient with prescription sleeping pills. – Dr. PG"
The words were precisely typed and marched across the page with a horrible, calm detachment. The next entry, from January 1993, detailed the patient's reaction to the antibiotics (exhibits slight rash, mild fever), noted that he and his boyfriend were no longer together, and that patient would be sent home with initial dosages of anti-viral medications. The third entry, last on the page, dated from June of 1993 and reported the patient had not experienced any significant health problems in the last six months and was in fact thriving on his medications.
"Patient reports noticeable drowsiness and constipation attributable to HIV medications, is not significantly troubled enough by side effects to consider switching to another medication. Patient's health and mood are markedly improved. Recommended patient try over-the-counter laxative. – Dr. PG"
Augusta closed her eyes and swallowed, paused and steeled herself, then opened her eyes and looked up at the man on the sofa. He had gone rigid with horror.
"No..." he whispered. "It's wrong... that can't be how it happened..."
Augusta bit her lip.
"Oh God... no..."
"What happened?" Augusta asked, and laid her hand – not the hand with its scabbing cuts across the knuckles – on his. "I read it exactly as it was printed."
"I'll tell you what happened," said a voice from the darkness.
Augusta gasped and spun toward the source of the sound. Her light fell on a dead thing in the corner, near the door to the outer hall. She screamed and the man on the sofa made a strangled, helpless noise deep in his throat.
It had once been a man. The face was pale and bloated and sat atop a body a stained and tattered suit strained to cover.
Moss grew on the suit coat in feathery green tufts and pillowy clumps. A tiny lizard emerged from the folds of a handkerchief in the breast pocket – it might have once been white – and scuttled up and over the dead thing's shoulder, out of sight and out of the beam of Augusta's flashlight. The dead thing opened its mouth to speak again, and revealed a writhing mass of tiny white worms and bugs.
These were the things that fed on a corpse. Augusta felt close to fainting.
"I'll tell you what happened," the dead thing said again, in a voice that was choked and oily, mumbling around the worms in its mouth.
"You got yourself infected when you shared the wrong needle with your drug buddies over in Bloomington back in 1989, didn't you, love?"
A dead, fishy smell began to permeate the waiting room, and Augusta gagged. The man on the sofa gaped in wordless terror.
"And remember how we got into that argument during the drive over to St. Louis? Remember how you thought you'd show me who was boss when I said I wasn't going to fuck you that night, and you slipped that little something special into my Dr. Pepper at the restaurant where we ate dinner?"
"Isn't it funny, how I can remember what I had to drink, but not where we ate – you know I think I remember having chicken fingers and fries that night after the show," said the thing.
The man on the sofa whimpered, and Augusta stared, rapt with horrified fascination.
"And then, remember how when we went back to the hotel, I could barely walk and when I passed out on the bed, you fucked me? You fucked the hell out of me, actually, love... just like you always wanted to. You liked it rough, didn't you? And that time I couldn't say no or tell you to slow down or take it easy..."
The dead thing's eyes were closed, and hadn't opened, and Augusta saw why. There was nothing behind the eyelids, which were sunk in and crusted over. A slop that had once been the thing's eyes had oozed from beneath its lids and dried on its cheeks a long time ago.
"That was the first time we'd had sex since you used the wrong needle... Remember now? We'd had a fight – and you started it, love – and we hardly spoke to one another for a month. You went up to Bloomington so much more than you used to and you shot up with your friends there so much more than you used to, and you brought me back a gift... Is it coming back now?"
"And all that time you thought I was cheating on you, when all I was doing was having coffee or dinner with friends because you wouldn't pay much attention to me... You know what I think it was? I think your brain was so fried that it made you paranoid. That's what I think."
Something was moving behind the glass panel in the door leading to the hallway that sliced through the offices of Dr. Prahdeep Ghosh and his associates who were, together, your family doctor. It slapped wetly against the glass, and rattled the tarnished brass knob, but Augusta wouldn't let her light leave the face of the dead thing. She couldn't.
"Can you imagine it?" said the dead thing that had once been Hayden Quinn, "You didn't get any disease from me. You got it from your buddies up in Bloomington, and you raped me and gave it to me. And then we broke up and life went on and then..."
"LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO ME!" It screamed and spew of worms flew out and fell to the floor, where they writhed and twisted and folded over and over and over themselves.
The door rattled in its frame.
"But here's the best part," the thing said quietly, and more clearly with fewer worms in its mouth, "Everything's been set right now, and everything's back to the way it should be. And I can go on to where I need to go, and you... oh, this is indeed the best part, love... you can go to Hell."
Something heavy thudded against the door, and it rattled again in its frame, louder this time, and Augusta heard the sound of cracking wood. She forced herself to turn, and darkness fell over the dead thing, and with her light she saw behind the smoked glass something huge. It writhed and moved with a profane quickness, and seemed to be made of long, wriggling stumps. But the shape was only a shadow, indistinct behind the glass.
She swung her light around to illuminate the corner where the dead thing had stood, but there was no one there. There were only the tiny white worms on the waiting room carpet and a clump of moss that had fallen from Hayden Quinn's suit, and the lingering stink of a corpse seven years dead.
"Please don't let it get me. I can hear something," the man on the sofa begged. His chest rose and fell as though something inside were fighting to get out, and a puddle of sweat had soaked the cushion under his head, leaving a large dark spot.
"I can hear something behind the door," he gasped.
Augusta searched with her light and saw nothing but the worms and the moss. The thing that had been Hayden Quinn was gone. She turned back to the door and heaved herself to her feet. The thing behind the glass had gone still.
And then the glass exploded outward, and Augusta fell backward and landed on her ass on the waiting room carpet.
It seemed to be made of arms, and moved like a snake. It was white, though, unlike the thing that had taken Kitty and pulled Augusta through the grating back at the tunnel. The odor of death blasted into the room with the thing, and Augusta's stomach heaved. The man on the sofa screamed weakly.
It was more than arms, she saw. There were legs, and torsos, and heads. The heads' eyes were open but were clouded over saw nothing. Their mouths hung open, with their lips peeled back from the teeth. From some, long strips of flesh hung down in rotten tatters. An arm dropped off. It wore shards of broken glass from the door.
It slithered across the floor, a massive, fat caterpillar of fused dead white men, toward the sofa. It swatted aside an end table, and the table and the lamp and magazines and box of Kleenex that had set atop it went flying. It rose up, and smacked against the ceiling and crushed a light fixture that fell down to the floor along with bits of plaster.
Augusta screamed, and the man on the sofa screamed and tried to rise up to get away, but fell back and the thing fell upon him and wrapped him in a stinking embrace and yanked him back through the space in the door where there had once been a big, square panel of smoked glass. The glass had been an antique, like the door. Like most of the fixtures in this old building, which had been completed in 1902. The man who had lain on the sofa's arms and legs slammed against the frame where the smoked glass panel had once been, and were sheared off and fell to the floor with thick, wet thumping sounds. Behind the door he wailed, and there was the sound of something huge thrashing about in the hallway. Then nothing. The only sound was that of blood dripping down from the empty frame in the old oak door.
And Augusta was alone in the waiting room.
"Some HIV medicines have nasty side effects," she had said over sundaes at an ice cream shop downtown, "and people quit taking them because of it. Other times, patients recover from their initial symptoms and think they don't need any more medicine, and quit taking it. Either way, that's when their health starts that downhill slide again. I can't stand it. There are other medicines out there that won't have the side effects. And to maintain that good health, they need to keep taking whatever it is they're on. It's not hard to do."
"But if they stop their medicine regimen for whatever reason, and let their bodies process the residual medication out of their system, often they can't take the medicines they were on anymore because they won't work again. HIV is a mean little fucker – it will adapt if you let it, and it will build up its defenses to a medicine if you just give it half a chance. We lost another one today because he just quit taking his medicine because he was feeling fine. A year later his HIV escalated into AIDS – that's when the T-Cell count; I know I've told you, but that's a special kind of white blood cell – drops below 200 per milliliter of blood, and won't rise again. A person without HIV's T-Cell count should be anywhere between 500 and 1500."
She had paused, watching gaggles of delighted tourists walking past the ice cream shop's windows on their way to the museums at Pack Place. Then she turned back to Augusta with fury in her eyes.
"But goddamn! You can keep yourself healthy even if you've got AIDS though! But when most people get that diagnosis they think their life is racing toward a brick wall, and they get an urge to "have a little fun" before the crash. This guy did drugs, drank enough to float the Battleship USS North Carolina, slept around, and God knows what all else, and this morning, two years after he stopped taking his medicines, they found him dead in Dupont State Forest. The detective talked to his doctor at the clinic, and she talked to me – said it looked like he'd used the last of his strength to hike to Hooker Falls and died there on a little beach by the river, facing the waterfall. I can't remember the last time I heard anything so sad."
"Sometimes I wonder what I'm even doing," she had said. "Sometimes I just want to quit, and go work for a doctor somewhere else, some GP who treats diabetics and people with high blood pressure – people who have diseases that aren't regarded as the modern black plague. Some doctor who treats people who'll do what they're supposed to and take their goddamned medicine!"
*
Augusta looked back at the man on the couch. He was sallow and slick with sweat, and breathed shallowly.
"I know that quitting taking my medicines was a stupid thing to do, but it's a little late to fix things. I just want to get this over with and find out what I'm supposed to learn by coming here before I die," he said quietly.
Augusta shushed him. "You need to rest."
He ignored her. "You know, you hear rumors all the time. Lots of people come here, and go into the park, and don't come out. Since 1999, the number of missing persons cases in Toluca County has tripled."
She looked at him.
"Some people do come out, though, but they're never the same as when they went in. They say they've seen things, and heard things, and felt things here in Silent Hill. If you talk to enough of the people who come out, they tell you they were all called here by someone who shouldn't have been able to call them here. Like I told you, some get letters, and some get emails, and some get phone calls – and they're always from dead people."
Her heart began to beat faster. Don't show fear, she told herself. Don't upset him.
"They'll always tell you they were called here to made amends for something they did wrong. Some person they've hurt – usually killed, actually – brings them here to make them face their sin and atone for it. I just can't figure out why I was called here though... I didn't do anything wrong. He gave me this disease."
He seemed to be talking to himself now. "You know something else that's funny? Lots of those people who come out of the park commit suicide. You almost never used to hear about anyone committing suicide in the hotels around here, but now hardly a month goes by when someone doesn't shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or poison themselves, or slash their wrists in the bathtub."
"They're always people from somewhere else," he said.
"How do you know all that?" she asked. He seemed to be drifting away into some secret place, and she needed to bring him back.
"Ever since I got too sick to work, I've been living off unemployment and disability benefits, and I get some help from the Capital Area AIDS Assistance Project. They bring me meals twice a week, and one of the ladies who delivers the food works as a detective in Brahms. She never gives me any details she shouldn't, but she tells me the news."
"There's something wrong here," he said, "and this town... Silent Hill... There was a town here. It's gone now. It only appears when it's called someone to it to suffer for their sins... But I don't know why I'm here. And I don't know why you're here..."
I do, thought Augusta. I killed my daughter – but she's alive and well here. I saw her in the tunnel. You're right... there's something wrong here. Probably more wrong than anything you or I know. And you're right that there was a town here, and it's gone now – that's all I've been able to think about since I got here and saw it standing there.
He said again, "I don't know why you'd be here. You've been kind."
He closed his eyes, and Augusta listened to his breath rattling up from his clogged lungs until a violent, wet cough exploded in the quiet. He turned his head to look at her.
"You're right... I need to rest. So, can you please do something for me? That note on the mirror said I needed to come here to read something. I don't know what because the last word was smeared, and trailed down from the mirror and onto the counter into a big, bloody handprint. The only thing I can think of to read in a doctor's office would be medical records. Can you go find my ex-boyfriend's file?"
She couldn't refuse. He was dying.
"Sure," she said, "What was his last name?"
"Quinn. Hayden Quinn." He sighed and closed his eyes again.
Augusta stood and searched for a door with her light. She found it, next to a reception counter sealed off from the waiting room with glass partitions shut tight. She walked to the door – it was an antique, like most of the fittings in this building, made of dark oak with a large, smoked glass window. The knob was tarnished brass and turned easily, and swung silently into the blackness beyond.
*
The offices of Dr. Prahdeep Ghosh and his associates were lined up in a row beyond the door, facing examining rooms, rooms full of diagnostic machines, bathrooms, and labs across a long hallway. To her left was the reception desk that looked into the waiting room. Computers sat silent and dead on the counter and two swiveling desk chairs were abandoned. From the fabric seat of one chair grew a large toadstool.
Abandoned for five years in the dark and the damp, thought Augusta. She wondered if Dr. Ghosh and his associates were practicing medicine somewhere else now.
Every door was thrown wide, revealing rooms full of dust, cobwebs, and rust that speckled every metal surface. There were sites on the Internet that chronicled in pictures the investigations of massive abandoned buildings of every kind, including hospitals. Augusta was fascinated by the thought of such a thing, and explored such sites frequently. She had seen pictures of dozens of forgotten hospitals across the country, and while the photos were eerie, they usually showed graffiti and vandalism, at least some sign that people had come and gone even after the building had been left to rot. This was eerier, because everything seemed untouched. In one office a pencil still rested where it had been left on a yellow legal pad whose paper had been wrinkled by the damp. In another a family's smiling faces peered out from a framed photo on a desk. The examining rooms were still stocked with rubber gloves and disinfectant hand wash. Test tubes still stood in racks in a lab. A printer and an x-ray machine, and diagnostic equipment whose functions Augusta couldn't guess squatted in some rooms, their buttons and dials glued in place by moisture.
In the darkness beyond her light things moved. Rats, mice, roaches, spiders, beetles, she thought. She remembered the candy in the window of J. Porter and Sons' and wondered what there might be to feast upon in an abandoned doctor's office – then decided she would rather not think about it. She spotted a refrigerator in one room with a sign on the door reading, "SPECIMINS ONLY! NO FOOD!!!" and didn't dare open it.
The last room on the right at the end of the hall was full of file cabinets. There were dozens of them, all once painted a bland institutional gray, all now bearing scabs of rust. As she searched the room with her light, prowling from one aisle of cabinets to another, she thought that it probably would have been easier to look for a patient's medical records using the office's computers – were they not ruined by the same wet air that had nourished a toadstool on a cloth chair, and rusted the metal cabinets before her.
One drawer of one cabinet was open. She walked to it and inspected it, and saw that it was festooned with dusty cobwebs, as though the drawer had been open a long, long time. And perhaps it had. With its information inside, perhaps it had been waiting for the man on the sofa, or for her.
No, not for her, she told herself firmly. She wouldn't know anyone whose records might be inside.
Quade, Nancy S. Quadrine, Alfred A. Qualk, Ronald V.
Two Qualls, a Quam, a Quarle.
Quattrochi, Joseph E.
She reached further back. The file folders felt chalky under her fingertips, and were green with mold. Spores billowed up with every file she pulled forward, looking further back.
She passed over Queen, Quick, and Quigley, then Quijosa.
Quinn, Alice U. Quinn, David S. Quinn, Hayden A. She lifted it from its place, and marveled that it seemed untouched by dampness or time. There was no mold, no mildew, and the papers inside the folder were still crisp and white, as if it had been protected all this time, then specially set aside for someone.
For her? For the man on the sofa in the waiting room? She shivered, and suddenly felt as though she was being watched again. Clutching the file, she walked quickly out of the room, and hated the shadows closing in behind her. Halfway down the hall she broke into a run, then forced herself to stop at the waiting room door, forced herself to calm down, forced her breathing to return to normal, steady cadence. It felt as though something in the dark had come to life and was moving, but in her light there was nothing.
The dark, rotted hallway was still and silent. But still it felt as though something, much larger than a mouse or a beetle, was moving in the dark.
God, help us please, she prayed. There's something bad here, in this place, and I don't know what it is. Please help me find my daughter. Please show mercy to that man in the waiting room.
She felt behind her and fumbled for the doorknob, then found it and turned it and stepped backward through the open door into the waiting room, never letting her eyes leave the hallway. She was glad to close the door on the darkness, and turned. The waiting room was calm, and from the sofa came the sounds of the man still battling to breathe through thick phlegm.
"I think I've got what you're looking for," Augusta walked to the sofa and kneeled down.
The man looked at her. He seemed weaker than before. She wouldn't be able to get him up to her truck at the observation deck by herself, and would need help. He needed help, as quickly as she could get it for him.
But what about Kitty?
"Can I see it please?"
"What? Oh... the file... I'm sorry," she said, "Here... let me see if I can find what you need in here, okay? Just lay back and rest."
She smiled and hoped it was reassuring. "Besides, I've got the flashlight."
"I had one. But I lost it in the stairwell. It rolled away and fell. I don't know where it went..."
She sat on the floor, cross-legged, and opened the file.
And the air was suddenly full of swirling paper. There had been no noise, no rush of air, but pages from Hayden Quinn's medical records reached the ceiling and drifted down, rustling softly as they descended. Augusta yelped her surprise and reared back. The eyes of the man on the sofa went wide and he gasped. He tried to shield his face but was too weak, and his arms dropped limply onto his chest.
Pages noisily fluttered down, landing here and there. Augusta looked up and saw them drifting through the air like ghosts of doves. Her heart pounding, she looked down to see one page left in the folder, and as sheets of paper fell around her she reached to retrieve it. She lifted it up and trained her light on it, and began to read aloud.
"December 19, 1992: Revealed diagnosis to patient, who became quite distressed. Interviewed patient as to possible source of infection – patient claims to have been drugged and raped by boyfriend while on trip to see concert in St. Louis. Patient claims no other sexual partners. Patient did not report incident to police, fearing embarrassment and discrimination. Patient will be placed on antibiotic regimen to fight existing bacterial infections, and will given drug to prevent pneumonia. Patent will begin anti-viral medication regimen in three weeks. Patient requests prescription for nightly sedative – claims likely difficulty falling asleep. Advised patient to try over-the-counter sleep aid until counseling session with Dr. Wong can be scheduled – patient may be suicidal, and I do not feel comfortable entrusting patient with prescription sleeping pills. – Dr. PG"
The words were precisely typed and marched across the page with a horrible, calm detachment. The next entry, from January 1993, detailed the patient's reaction to the antibiotics (exhibits slight rash, mild fever), noted that he and his boyfriend were no longer together, and that patient would be sent home with initial dosages of anti-viral medications. The third entry, last on the page, dated from June of 1993 and reported the patient had not experienced any significant health problems in the last six months and was in fact thriving on his medications.
"Patient reports noticeable drowsiness and constipation attributable to HIV medications, is not significantly troubled enough by side effects to consider switching to another medication. Patient's health and mood are markedly improved. Recommended patient try over-the-counter laxative. – Dr. PG"
Augusta closed her eyes and swallowed, paused and steeled herself, then opened her eyes and looked up at the man on the sofa. He had gone rigid with horror.
"No..." he whispered. "It's wrong... that can't be how it happened..."
Augusta bit her lip.
"Oh God... no..."
"What happened?" Augusta asked, and laid her hand – not the hand with its scabbing cuts across the knuckles – on his. "I read it exactly as it was printed."
"I'll tell you what happened," said a voice from the darkness.
Augusta gasped and spun toward the source of the sound. Her light fell on a dead thing in the corner, near the door to the outer hall. She screamed and the man on the sofa made a strangled, helpless noise deep in his throat.
It had once been a man. The face was pale and bloated and sat atop a body a stained and tattered suit strained to cover.
Moss grew on the suit coat in feathery green tufts and pillowy clumps. A tiny lizard emerged from the folds of a handkerchief in the breast pocket – it might have once been white – and scuttled up and over the dead thing's shoulder, out of sight and out of the beam of Augusta's flashlight. The dead thing opened its mouth to speak again, and revealed a writhing mass of tiny white worms and bugs.
These were the things that fed on a corpse. Augusta felt close to fainting.
"I'll tell you what happened," the dead thing said again, in a voice that was choked and oily, mumbling around the worms in its mouth.
"You got yourself infected when you shared the wrong needle with your drug buddies over in Bloomington back in 1989, didn't you, love?"
A dead, fishy smell began to permeate the waiting room, and Augusta gagged. The man on the sofa gaped in wordless terror.
"And remember how we got into that argument during the drive over to St. Louis? Remember how you thought you'd show me who was boss when I said I wasn't going to fuck you that night, and you slipped that little something special into my Dr. Pepper at the restaurant where we ate dinner?"
"Isn't it funny, how I can remember what I had to drink, but not where we ate – you know I think I remember having chicken fingers and fries that night after the show," said the thing.
The man on the sofa whimpered, and Augusta stared, rapt with horrified fascination.
"And then, remember how when we went back to the hotel, I could barely walk and when I passed out on the bed, you fucked me? You fucked the hell out of me, actually, love... just like you always wanted to. You liked it rough, didn't you? And that time I couldn't say no or tell you to slow down or take it easy..."
The dead thing's eyes were closed, and hadn't opened, and Augusta saw why. There was nothing behind the eyelids, which were sunk in and crusted over. A slop that had once been the thing's eyes had oozed from beneath its lids and dried on its cheeks a long time ago.
"That was the first time we'd had sex since you used the wrong needle... Remember now? We'd had a fight – and you started it, love – and we hardly spoke to one another for a month. You went up to Bloomington so much more than you used to and you shot up with your friends there so much more than you used to, and you brought me back a gift... Is it coming back now?"
"And all that time you thought I was cheating on you, when all I was doing was having coffee or dinner with friends because you wouldn't pay much attention to me... You know what I think it was? I think your brain was so fried that it made you paranoid. That's what I think."
Something was moving behind the glass panel in the door leading to the hallway that sliced through the offices of Dr. Prahdeep Ghosh and his associates who were, together, your family doctor. It slapped wetly against the glass, and rattled the tarnished brass knob, but Augusta wouldn't let her light leave the face of the dead thing. She couldn't.
"Can you imagine it?" said the dead thing that had once been Hayden Quinn, "You didn't get any disease from me. You got it from your buddies up in Bloomington, and you raped me and gave it to me. And then we broke up and life went on and then..."
"LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO ME!" It screamed and spew of worms flew out and fell to the floor, where they writhed and twisted and folded over and over and over themselves.
The door rattled in its frame.
"But here's the best part," the thing said quietly, and more clearly with fewer worms in its mouth, "Everything's been set right now, and everything's back to the way it should be. And I can go on to where I need to go, and you... oh, this is indeed the best part, love... you can go to Hell."
Something heavy thudded against the door, and it rattled again in its frame, louder this time, and Augusta heard the sound of cracking wood. She forced herself to turn, and darkness fell over the dead thing, and with her light she saw behind the smoked glass something huge. It writhed and moved with a profane quickness, and seemed to be made of long, wriggling stumps. But the shape was only a shadow, indistinct behind the glass.
She swung her light around to illuminate the corner where the dead thing had stood, but there was no one there. There were only the tiny white worms on the waiting room carpet and a clump of moss that had fallen from Hayden Quinn's suit, and the lingering stink of a corpse seven years dead.
"Please don't let it get me. I can hear something," the man on the sofa begged. His chest rose and fell as though something inside were fighting to get out, and a puddle of sweat had soaked the cushion under his head, leaving a large dark spot.
"I can hear something behind the door," he gasped.
Augusta searched with her light and saw nothing but the worms and the moss. The thing that had been Hayden Quinn was gone. She turned back to the door and heaved herself to her feet. The thing behind the glass had gone still.
And then the glass exploded outward, and Augusta fell backward and landed on her ass on the waiting room carpet.
It seemed to be made of arms, and moved like a snake. It was white, though, unlike the thing that had taken Kitty and pulled Augusta through the grating back at the tunnel. The odor of death blasted into the room with the thing, and Augusta's stomach heaved. The man on the sofa screamed weakly.
It was more than arms, she saw. There were legs, and torsos, and heads. The heads' eyes were open but were clouded over saw nothing. Their mouths hung open, with their lips peeled back from the teeth. From some, long strips of flesh hung down in rotten tatters. An arm dropped off. It wore shards of broken glass from the door.
It slithered across the floor, a massive, fat caterpillar of fused dead white men, toward the sofa. It swatted aside an end table, and the table and the lamp and magazines and box of Kleenex that had set atop it went flying. It rose up, and smacked against the ceiling and crushed a light fixture that fell down to the floor along with bits of plaster.
Augusta screamed, and the man on the sofa screamed and tried to rise up to get away, but fell back and the thing fell upon him and wrapped him in a stinking embrace and yanked him back through the space in the door where there had once been a big, square panel of smoked glass. The glass had been an antique, like the door. Like most of the fixtures in this old building, which had been completed in 1902. The man who had lain on the sofa's arms and legs slammed against the frame where the smoked glass panel had once been, and were sheared off and fell to the floor with thick, wet thumping sounds. Behind the door he wailed, and there was the sound of something huge thrashing about in the hallway. Then nothing. The only sound was that of blood dripping down from the empty frame in the old oak door.
And Augusta was alone in the waiting room.