At the rear of the dining room, where the staircase led down, a spume of flame erupted, spitting cinders. The Little Baroness shuddered violently and Augusta lost her footing, tumbling to the floor with a gasp. Around her tables tilted and fell; china, crystal, and silver hurtled through the air, shattering on the parquet, thudding on the carpets. Above, the crystal pendants and beads in the chandelier and every light fixture sang out as they chimed against one another. The massive birthday cake on its platter slid to the edge of its table, tilted like a falling tree, then cascaded ponderously to the floor.
Augusta lay on one of the lovely green and gold rugs, dazed but vaguely aware she could no longer feel or hear the Little Baroness' engines. It meant one of two things; either the boat had been split in half by the explosion and was soon to sink, or else the explosion in the kitchen had damaged the nearby engine room enough to stall the engines. Which meant the boat had probably been damaged badly enough to sink it.
Reeling, she climbed to her feet and picked up her shovel, looking over the dining room. From its orderly elegance before it had been shaken into a maze of overturned tables and chairs where broken glass and china crunched underfoot and the crystal chandelier swung wildly overhead, painting the room with sliding shadows.
The bodies of Joshua Blackwell's family were still strewn about the dining saloon, she realized and swayed on her feet. There's no one to mourn them, and as if it agreed, the Little Baroness voiced a sorrowful groan of bending timbers.
Augusta looked at the floor, blinking. Was it her imagination or had the floor begun to tilt ever so slightly downward, back to the stern? She turned to search for a path to the door, and rebounded off a table fallen on its side. She rolled it aside and stepped forward. Forks and spoons on the floor bent under her weight, graceful and delicate silverware ruined as she stepped on it.
She looked to her left and saw, beyond the windows and their green velvet drapes, shapes slipping very quickly by in the fog. The Little Baroness must be gliding along the shore, but she couldn't tell where it might be along the Toluca lakefront. Although... she thought the shapes might be trees, at intervals as though planted in a row.
Which would mean Jesperson Park, stretching along the downtown Silent Hill lakefront. Like Rosewater Park in South Vale, Jesperson Park's main feature was a long brick promenade walling off the park's lawns and flowerbeds from Toluca Lake. Trees grew in planting squares along the promenade, where they had shaded strollers and lovers, and dropped their leaves in the water every autumn.
Further on, halfway along the downtown lakeside, a wide brick pier jutted out from the promenade into the water like a fat, blocky peninsula. All along the promenade and pier there were benches and at regular intervals atop brick columns, giant Victorian cast-iron planters shaped vaguely like elaborate trophies and overflowing with flowers. On the pier itself stood the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Bell. It was huge, copper, and weighed more than a ton. Once used to alert the town to trouble, such as fires, rising waters, or accidents at the small coal mines that had once tunneled through the hills surrounding Silent Hill, it had been renamed and rung one hundred times on the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination every year since 1865. Once it had hung in the town square in the shadow of Silent Hill City Hall, but had been moved to the park upon the promenade's completion in 1899.
Moved to the broad brick pier. Augusta felt herself go perfectly still. If the Little Baroness was racing through the water this close to the Jesperson Park promenade, it would soon slam into the pier where the Lincoln Memorial Bell hung.
"Oh crap," she whispered.
How soon would the boat collide? The pier was located halfway along the waterfront, with a long, shallow slope between the promenade and the streets and buildings of downtown Silent Hill. At the top of the hill, up from the pier and promenade there were five blocks to the west and five to the east. If the Little Baroness had sped by this much of the promenade already, how much more was left? How many more blocks?
How many more seconds? Augusta was shouldering her way through the upended tables. The dining saloon had only one exit, the double doors with their oval windows. What would happen if she couldn't get through the doors and around the upper deck to the other side of the ship to leap off before it collided?
Maybe the collision wouldn't damage the ship very badly. Then again, the Little Baroness was old and made of wood, and ramming into the Jesperson Park promenade might grind it to splinters. And it wasn't her imagination: the floor had developed a definite slope. The Little Baroness was sinking.
And how the hell would she get off the boat anyway? Jump from the equivalent of a two-story building onto the bricks? What if she jumped and caught her foot in one of the planters? She would probably lose her balance, fall back, and crack her skull on some part of the Little Baroness as it glided by – or wedge herself between the promenade and the ship and be ground into so much raw meat as it moved on without her.
Why was she heading toward the doors? There were plenty of windows to her left and all she need do was smash one open for a way out.
The Little Baroness, she discovered, was much closer to the promenade than she had thought – it slammed suddenly into the promenade, crunched and ground its way along the bricks, and rebounded, throwing everything aboard to the left, then to the right. Augusta struggled to stay on her feet and watched tables roll past. How in hell was the boat moving so quickly? The damn thing was sinking, and sinking fast, for God's sake.
She cut a path toward the windows, shoving tables aside and kicking chairs away. Her feet tangled in a wadded lace tablecloth on the floor and she nearly fell. Trees were still slipping by outside the windows. She stepped over a body, that of the old woman whose head had finally pulled free of its tendril of skin and rolled away to God knew where. Any second now the boat would hit the pier and the floors and decks would peel back on themselves in a fury of flying chunks of wood and metal.
Any second now. Broken glass crunched on the floor. Was she running? She thought so and heaved a table aside. Only a few more feet to the window. The floor was tilting more sharply now and everything in the dining room was beginning to slide back toward the kitchen – the piano slid off the stage, playing an ominous chord as it dropped down a step the floor.
She stepped over an overturned chair and smashed a window with her shovel. The window exploded outward, and the shovel blade rode in a cloud of shards into the air outside. She didn't have time to brush aside the jagged chunks of glass before climbing through and felt the ragged window frame pick at her jeans as she scrambled through.
Outside the deck was slippery with moisture from the fog and she nearly lost her footing again, spinning as she fought to keep her balance to see bits of glass sliding away toward the stern. The Little Baroness, however, did not appear to be riding low in the water, and for that she was glad.
She looked forward to see the promenade pier probably no more than a block away in the mist, and turned and bolted toward the rear of the Little Baroness where she discovered the water had risen to what she guessed was halfway up the walls of the lower deck. The engine room had to be flooded, and the kitchen as well, and the water was probably spouting up through a hole blasted in the floor.
She wondered if the oven with Joshua Blackwell's head inside might have dropped through such a hole and sunk to the bottom of the lake.
As the boat's momentum carried it along, the water pulled at the dark green paddlewheel and spun it lazily as though the Little Baroness was adrift on the lake on a calm summer day. Augusta looked back toward the bow and the approaching pier; she braced herself against the railing and one of the support columns spaced evenly along the rail and painted the same forest green.
She waited.
When the Little Baroness collided with the pier, the impact was even stronger than Augusta had expected, and trying to hold onto the railing and pillar, she wondered if her arms would pop out of their sockets. The front of the boat disintegrated – the lower deck simply stopped as though it had hit a wall, with its cabins and compartments compressing against themselves, crumpling and exploding in bursts of wood and glass. The upper deck seemed to peel free of the lower deck, stretching forward as if to bridge the pier and splash down in the water on the other side, but slamming down to collide with the brick pavement. It tore the trees to shreds, demolishing benches and planters before finally falling to pieces and washing the pier in dust and broken boards. Broken bits of wood and twisted pieces of metal struck the Lincoln Memorial Bell and rang it again and again, as though playing a funeral dirge.
The boat shook furiously, like a toy in the hands of a malevolent child determined to smash it to bits against the floor. Augusta heard screaming, but momentarily realized she was only hearing herself.
The Little Baroness sank lower and lower as it disemboweled itself on the pier and water rushed in to fill it. Augusta looked toward the promenade and saw the black iron balustrade as it seemed to rise up to greet her. She threw her shovel – how had she held on to it, she marveled – and as soon as it seemed safe, jumped, landed and slipped on the wet bricks, fell and rolled onto her side to watch the ship die.
Still churning onward, the Little Baroness was nearly half gone, its bow chewed to pieces that were thrown up and then fell down, flailing at the air. It skipped in the water, jumped up over the edge of the pier, then rolled over like a sleeper in the throes of a terrible dream. It exposed its white belly, dripping and slick, then capsized, and finally it seemed its momentum was exhausting itself. It spun, upside down in the water and sinking quickly, and the paddlewheel slid past, nudged the destruction on the pier and dropped out of sight beneath the water.
A final ragged chunk of torn wood fell and struck the Lincoln Memorial Bell, playing a sad note as waves slapped against the promenade and pier. It was over.
And Augusta was just fine, she discovered, except for what would probably be one hell of a bruise on her hip where she had fallen on the bricks. She checked for broken bones and felt none, checked for cuts and scrapes and found none other than those Kitty had left across her knuckles. Not even a twisted ankle, and she wondered if she should dance an elated jig or break down and bawl.
If I get up and dance, she thought, I'd probably just fall down again, and I don't have time to cry. Have to be prepared for whatever might come next. Have to find my daughter.
She stood, bent and retrieved her shovel, then straightened and took a deep breath. Mist swirled around her and snowflakes still fell, and still melted as they hit the ground. She wondered what to do now, thought about it, then smiled. Have to be prepared for whatever might come next? She would be.
As Augusta walked up a broad staircase leading away from the promenade to the street at the top of the hill, she noticed that Jesperson Park was as overgrown as one would expect a park abandoned for five years to be. Was Rosewater Park this choked with weeds and wildflowers? She hadn't noticed. Along the way uphill, the staircase opened onto wide landings where trails led away to either side; the trails were nearly blocked by the bushes and trees that lined them.
Why were there so many flowers? At one landing, each corner was marked with a planter and benches. The planters spilled over with black-eyed daisies, huge bundles of colorful flowers drooping down onto every bench. Black-eyed daisies didn't bloom in North Carolina until the height of summer, almost certainly later in Illinois. The next landing was planted with a perimeter of rosebushes, all in bloom in blood reds, snowy whites, and delicate pinks, their scent lingering in the fog.
Roses in the South weren't in bloom until the beginning of June. Augusta saw sunflowers, heavy-headed under crowns of yellow petals. She saw daylilies in red, yellow, and orange. There was a bed of marigolds and an abstract tapestry of dahlias in every color. Dogwoods blazed in pink and white.
And still the snowflakes fell here and fell there and still they melted. It didn't make sense.
Neither does anything else here, though, she reasoned. She didn't know who the flowers might be for, but doubted they had bloomed for her. If a person was summoned to Silent Hill, they probably didn't deserve flowers, she thought, and she certainly hadn't done anything worth a bouquet.
She walked on. At the top of the stairs, she looked to her left, then to her right, to get her bearings. Straight ahead was the foot of grand Jackson Avenue, whose wide median planted with trees and flowering bushes divided downtown Silent Hill in two, and running east and west was King Street. A wide, tree-lined sidewalk led away in both directions along King Street, while across the street on either side of the intersection, antique brick buildings loomed in the mist, their windows like milky, blind eyes behind another colonnade of trees. Ruined awnings hung in shreds from their frames above a hundred show windows, and one window – she strained to read the store's sign through the mist and the screen of branches that partially obscured it – at an electronics store had been smashed, the merchandise behind it vanished. Someone, apparently, was taking advantage of Silent Hill's riches left behind.
It figures, she thought, but she had somewhere to go and began to walk along the sidewalk, the shovel over her shoulder.
Downtown Silent Hill had been a pleasant district labeled on official maps as "Central Silent Hill" and made up of more than fifty blocks of varying sizes peppered with parks and small squares. The largest churches in town made downtown their home, along with city government buildings, the largest city cemetery, the Public Art Gallery, which had been the city's small art museum, and the main branch of the town library, amid a fine collection of Victorian brick buildings housing an impressive selection of boutiques, nightspots, and restaurants.
Like South Vale, downtown had suffered through the lingering illness of urban renewal, and had lost some of its treasures to modernization, including an stately old textile factory building that had fallen to make way for the Silent Hill Town Center mall. But mostly, downtown looked, felt, and was old enough and ornate enough to steal tourists' hearts by the thousands. In the fog, however, it looked menacing and surly. The feeling of being watched returned, and Augusta wondered if perhaps Weeping Mary was preparing to make another appearance some time soon.
Augusta's destination, the main branch of the Silent Hill Public Library, lay east of Jackson Avenue on the side of downtown centered around the town square, Burke Square, where City Hall, the Robert Black Memorial Auditorium, and two huge churches waged a friendly face-off to determine who could look the most majestically imposing.
Or perhaps a giant sinkhole had swallowed up Burke Square and everything nearby, and maybe the library had fallen into the Illiniwak River. But, she thought, it was worth a try. If the monsters of Silent Hill's past were going to come crawling out of their slime after her the entire time she was here, she had to know who to expect next. She remembered scores of details from "An Unwanted County" but what if she had forgotten something important?
Maybe a serial killer had once haunted the streets of Silent Hill and would be coming for her next, no matter how long he had been dead. Or maybe someone in the past had slaughtered their family, who would cry out to be set free. She wanted to know, and to know, she would have to refresh her memory.
Something rose to mind – something else usually mentioned in the same breath as the Little Baroness, equally inexplicable, but all she could remember of it was the year it had happened. 1939. What was it?
Downtown was so deathly still it was unnerving. The only sounds were her shoes on the sidewalk and her breathing. She felt the same way she had in South Vale – that the city was dead around her, its buildings rotting. She knew the apartments she saw above the stores were still full of furniture, left undisturbed since their tenants fled to safety that September. Every store was still stocked but would never again be ready for business because everything inside had been decayed by five years of abandonment.
To her right, a brick wall rose and fell like waves drawn by a child, rising to points where lampposts stood useless and lightless in the dim daylight, before swooping downward again. Beyond the wall stood the trees of Jesperson Park, dripping and wet. To her left the buildings fronting King Street stepped aside to make way for Bishop Street, which ran parallel to Jackson Avenue, then shouldered up to King again.
They all looked alike – rotted awnings, bleary windows, dark bricks. Along their rooflines, most sported dormers or decorative peaks, and a few even had gargoyles, but they all looked dead. Augusta couldn't stop herself from imagining the apartments above every shop filled with rotting corpses, suddenly dropped dead in the middle of the day as they had gone about their business. Rotting on sofas in front of televisions. Rotting on toilets with their pants around their ankles. Rotting on kitchen floors with refrigerator doors thrown wide on snacks and produce and milk and tea and sodas decayed and spoiled away to black sludge. Rotting at dinner tables with meals before them reduced to dried crusts on plates.
A mother perhaps, rotting on the bathroom floor by a bathtub, the body of her toddler long since reduced to a soup of hair and bones stinking of death in what had once been the bathwater.
Stop it. Oh God, stop it, she commanded herself with a shiver. She couldn't stand to think of anything like that. And besides, she knew the buildings were empty. The trappings of lives were everywhere in Silent Hill, but the lives themselves had run away five years ago. The people who had lived here were still alive somewhere else, she told herself. They were probably scattered to the ends of the country and the earth, she thought, but they were still alive.
The next street down from Bishop was Wallace, and in the intersection of Wallace and King sat a car that looked as though it had slammed into a wall at full speed. Augusta looked at it from the sidewalk, then stepped into the street and approached, curious. She hadn't seen another wrecked car anywhere else in Silent Hill.
It was a Nissan, painted white and looked fairly new – perhaps a 1999 model. Which would make sense, she thought. Bits of glass, plastic, and metal littered the street and the front of the car was smashed in almost all the way up to the windshield, its crumpled hood hanging open like a scab peeled up from a wound. The windshield, though shattered, still hung from its frame largely intact, and was marred by two crystalline spider webs, one large and one small – both were stained dark near their centers.
Augusta stepped aside to peer through the driver's window. There was no one inside, though she saw tufts of hair caught in the splintered windshield. The darkness on the glass was blood, she saw, and the inside of the car was splashed with it.
In the passenger seat was a baby's car seat laying on its side as though it had been thrown forward then bounced back. From the smaller glass spider web hung enough hair to tell that the child, probably a toddler, who had sat in the car seat had been a curly blond. There was something else there as well, though, a wizened scrap of leather that might have been that child's scalp. The blood was long-dried, and there was no point in checking to see if either the child or its mother – probably its mother because there was an open pocketbook spewing its contents on the driver's side floorboard – had survived or might be nearby. If they were nearby, they were dead, and though she had already seen much worse, Augusta didn't want to see that. Seeing that nameless little girl missing her head aboard the Little Baroness, and seeing Billy and Miriam Locane brutalized and suffering fifty years after their deaths had been too much to bear. She stepped away from the car, feeling as though her heart had been swallowed up in a snowdrift.
Why had that been there, she wondered. A lump was forming in her throat, and she swallowed hard to force it away. Why had that been there – for what purpose other than her own heartsickness?
At Jones Street, next down from Wallace, a sinkhole had opened up just past the intersection. Trees lay toppled in Jesperson Park to the right, tangled and fallen to form a deadfall of branches and trunks. The brick wall along the sidewalk crumbled away into the pit, and a lamppost pointed at an odd angle toward the sky. Augusta followed the lip of the hole across King Street, listening to the sound of gurgling water deep within.
At the corner of Jones and King, buildings led away up the left side of Jones Street to Koontz Street, the next up from King. On the right there was only the open plain of Summerland Cemetery, which extended north two blocks from King Street, past Koontz to Sagan Street, and ran east along King Street two blocks to the Illiniwak River, where it turned north and followed the river to the first bridge connecting downtown to East Silent Hill.
The sinkhole at the intersection had eaten its way through Summerland's tall wrought iron fence, which was tipped with spikes and marked along its length by regularly spaced tall iron poles topped with brass globes. Two spiked lengths sagged downward as though straining to support one of the taller poles teetering over the hole, but hadn't given way and fallen in. The brass ball however, had fallen away and was gone. Past the fence and into the cemetery, the pit had consumed a handful of graves, including one whose headstone still stood erect. In the mist six feet down beneath the stone, barely visible, a coffin had spilled halfway out of its crumbled vault and hung in the air, looking as though the slightest movement of air or of a footfall on the ground above would send it crashing down.
Augusta turned away to walk up Jones Street, with the cemetery to her right and buildings glowering at her from across the street.
She passed trees planted every few yards along the street and signs that forbade parking, and it almost looked normal. Almost. As though she were out for a walk on a foggy spring day, in the quiet time before the tourists really began pouring into town. But the silence... the dead, unnatural silence.
Behind its fence, Summerland sprawled along beside Augusta as she walked past. It was the oldest and also the largest cemetery in Silent Hill and had been in use since before the town's founding, at least since 1812, when the area had been inhabited only by a few scattered farm families. It boasted the resting places of the first settlers of the town, in a crowded quadrant where the tombstones were packed so tightly it was impossible to tell where one grave ended and another began, as well as, further out, spacious burial plots that had been added as the cemetery grew into one of the magnificent "garden cemeteries" that became popular as the 19th Century wore on. Except for the oldest section of the cemetery, Summerland was almost a park, with flowerbeds and artistically places trees and groves, winding gravel carriage paths and trails studded with marble benches where strollers might rest and contemplate, and tombs, especially those in the wealthier family plots, that were openly competing to outdo each other in grandeur.
Soon, as the intersection of Koontz Street yawned in the wall of buildings to her left, the grand front gates of Summerland Cemetery opened on her right. She paused and looked in. Rather than walking up to Sagan Street and turning there to get to the library, the cemetery might make a nice shortcut, and would be a handy route if Sagan had opened up in pitfalls. Then again, it didn't seem wise to brave a cemetery in Silent Hill. Not now. Not anymore.
She turned away to walk on, thinking that God only knew what might be crawling loose in the cemetery. The words of the man who had lain on the sofa in the Ridgeview Clinic echoed in her mind: there were things that didn't exist in Silent Hill now. She had seen some of them, and didn't want to see what among them might make itself a home in a cemetery.
But as she passed the gates there came the sounds of a far off struggle, and a tiny voice cried in the mist. A scream from far way, reduced to a whisper by distance and fog that swallowed sound. But still she heard it and in an instant her heart was in her throat.
"Mama – Mama, help me!"