PLEASE NOTE: As usual, I was in a hurry to finish that last chapter, and due to that, I think it ended up a little barebones, so I added a few paragraphs here and there. A reread might be in order. And here we go with this new chapter! I'll probably decide it's too barebones as well and add more later. In the meantime, I hope it gets the images and the point across. I anyone feels compelled to review it, I'd like to know if you think things are progressing logically. Augusta's suddenly having more than a few epiphanies and I'd like to know if they're realistic deductions. Thanks for all the feedback, and thanks for reading!

By the time she heard the rasp of scales across pavement, and a long, airy hiss, it was too late and Weeping Mary, with a sweep of her talons, had picked up Augusta and hurled her against the vine-draped cemetery fence. Dazed, Augusta slid down the fence, feeling vines tear and watching sparks drift across her vision.

Weeping Mary's face was still lovely and framed in springy, glossy black curls, though now she wore a look of predatory hatred, her mouth twisted into a snarl beneath her sunglasses.

To her waist, her body was still normal, except for the giant claws, so large it seemed they must break her arms, sparkling with the crystal blisters of innumerable jewels. The skimpy top with its hungry parrot still strained to cover her breasts, though below the tan flatness of her midsection, her legs had been replaced by a coiled serpent's tail as thick as a tire. The diamond-shaped markings, brown on tan, were those of a rattlesnake, and as if to shake off any remaining doubt, Weeping Mary raised the tip of her tail, where a huge rattle like a chain of noxious brown tumors clattered threateningly. Gold, and chips of gems, nestled glittering in every crevice of the rattle.

"How," she said, and her voice had become a sound like metal scraping on stone, "is such a silly woman as yourself able to so bedevil a god like me?"

"And how," Augusta could feel Weeping Mary's voice against her teeth, and vibrating through her bones, "does a silly woman expect a queen to rule her kingdom when the silly woman keeps spiriting away her subjects?"

"I don't know what you mean," Augusta said in barely more than a whisper. She pressed herself against the fence, as far away as she could get from the thing addressing her.

No longer encumbered by her legs or her waist, Weeping Mary struck like a cobra, her claws sparking as they skipped along the sidewalk. Augusta yelped and in her surprise, banged her head against the cold iron bars of the fence behind her. Now, her face less than a yard away from Augusta's, Weeping Mary cocked her head and grinned.

Behind her lips, her teeth had become a double row of fangs, and a forked tongue flicked in and out between them.

"Oh, but you do, my darling dear," she hissed. "I told you once before I rarely have little ones to play with, and that's why I so treasure the ones I'm able to keep. And yet, today alone you've snatched four away from me. And your scarred god's whore whom you've befriended has taken yet another – she's taken your little one from me."

"I no longer have your child, my dear, and because that breaks the deal I'd held with the man in the black tomb, ordinarily that would mean my quarrel with you is done. I'd leave you be to the mercy of the creatures of your heart's own darkness. But you've taken the children from me. And you've taken others from me as well today, including not only a good many Innocent, but two fine soldiers in my army."

"And that means..." Her giant claws shot out, tearing through the morning glories to grasp at the fence beneath them. She clenched her fists, and metal shrieked as it bent. "...you've made an enemy of me, love."

She unclenched one fist, extended a claw and stroked it along Augusta's cheek. Augusta squirmed with revulsion, eyes wide, breath wheezing in and out in little gasps. She could see her reflection in Weeping Mary's sunglasses and thought that her dark skin must have gone ashy from fear.

"I feed on suffering. Did you know that? And this town is built on suffering – I rode here in the magic of my people, and they nourished me for many a year. And even when there was hardly one left to worship me further, I still flourished because I've built a nest for myself in this town. I built it out of pain – over the years this city has stood, I've collected twigs for my nest, and there were always more to gather. I know because I planted the trees on which they grow, one in every heart. Do you understand what I mean?"

"No," Augusta whimpered.

"I feed on suffering, you fool! And I create suffering to feed on! I trap souls and suck them dry, and over time I've amassed an entire army to inflict the pain that nourishes me, torturing those souls. You've taken away some of the souls I feed upon and because of that..."

She snarled and pounded a fist into the sidewalk nearby, shattering the cement. Tiny, sharp stone chips spat into the air.

"I'll take your suffering. To replace what you've taken from me, I'll feed on you. I'll wring every drop out of you before I shit out your withered husk, woman, and there's nothing your scarred god or his whore can do about it. Now do you understand me?"

Augusta understood.

"Yes, I do," she said and was pleasantly surprised at the firmness of her voice, "and I don't care. You can do whatever you want with me if you'll only leave my child alone. She doesn't deserve any of this. I do. I'm the one who sinned."

Weeping Mary giggled. "You'll live to regret those words, dearest. You'll live much, much longer than you'd care to, and besides... I'm not and never was the only one who could hurt your child. Don't be so foolish to think she's safe with your god's whore. She's only safe from me."

She pushed herself away with her claws, reared high in the air, then slithered away into the mist, laughing. Augusta stared into the fog after her, not daring to move, afraid that if she did, Weeping Mary would hear and hurtle back toward her out of the mist, grinning her terrible, sharp grin. Her heart pounded.

She sat trembling for what seemed like several minutes, the cold of the cement seeping through her jeans, until she was sure Weeping Mary was truly gone. When she finally stood, her knees buckled and threw her against the fence, and she slid down to the sidewalk again. Dried, dead crumbles of leaves sifted down around her and she looked up, surprised, to discover the morning glories on the Summerland Cemetery fence were dead. All of them, except for the tiny patch where her back had touched the wrought iron tines.

"Oh, God," she sobbed.

Then she thought, a deal with the man in the black tomb? What kind of deal had Weeping Mary made with Joseph? And she realized, with the vines brown and dead, there was probably nothing to keep Joseph inside the boundaries of Summerland Cemetery, much less locked in his tomb.

So she got to her feet and ran away on unsteady legs.

It seemed more important than ever that she make her way to the library, Augusta thought as she jogged along Sagan Street. Weeping Mary's words screeched at their own echoes in her mind.

"I rode here in the magic of my people..."

Who else in Silent Hill had ever had ties to any sort of magic at all, but the first settlers of the town? The followers of a strange religion deemed threatening even by the most dangerous magicians and sorceresses of New Orleans, driven out of that city to wander until they found their haven in the swamps of Toluca County.

"...a god... a queen to rule her kingdom..."

She was the evil god they had worshipped, their queen, and this had been her kingdom. Silent Hill and all its people, all these years, had been watched over by a monster.

"...you've snatched four away from me. And your scarred god's whore whom you've befriended has taken yet another..."

Miriam and Billy Locane. That made two. The girl whose head had been chopped off, lying dead on the floor of the dining saloon aboard the Little Baroness. Three. Who was the fourth child? Maybe Deanna Blackwell's unborn baby. Or maybe there had been another murdered child aboard the ship, one she hadn't seen. As Augusta had – punished? – their murderers, she had set them free, and they had gone away, out of reach of the monster who fed on their torment.

Your scarred god's whore? Who could that be, and what the hell did that mean? Who had she even seen since arriving? Silent Hill was almost utterly deserted. There had only been the man who had lain on the sofa, and the ghosts, and... the Blue Lady. Maybe her. The Blue Lady seemed a benign presence, and one of the paintings onboard the Little Baroness had depicted, among other things, the Blue Lady as an angel with majestic wings of peacock feathers, filling the sky.

And a scarred god would refer to the marks of the Crucifixion. The holes in Christ's hands, feet, and side, the welts of the scourge, and the marks of the thorns on His scalp.

Weeping Mary was a demon, the Blue Lady an angel. Augusta thought she was beginning to understand her nightmare. And of course the two would call each other nasty names, because they'd hardly be enemies if they didn't.

"...the deal I'd held with the man in the black tomb..."

It was somehow not surprising. Maybe Joseph had actually expected Augusta to bring Kitty along for the ride. He wanted only to torture her, and to take away her child... Augusta thought, you couldn't find a better way to torture a mother if you stayed up late to think about it.

Except she'd never been a mother, because she had murdered her child. Except in Silent Hill, it seemed life and death had little meaning now and could twist and warp themselves, meld and pull apart, in the most amazing ways.

"...two fine soldiers in my army..."

Walter Sullivan and Joshua Blackwell, and God only knew how many more because Silent Hill had never been known for its remarkably low crime rate.

That was Weeping Mary's fault. She had admitted it – she fed on suffering and created suffering to feed on. What was suffering but a little boy raped to death and a girl with a cold steel blade stabbed deep inside, and an entire family hunted down and killed one by one by a monster with an axe? Their victims were the Innocent, and they were the soldiers in Weeping Mary's army, entrusted with the duty of stabbing or raping or tearing apart their victims time and again through the years to nourish her. How many more could there be? How large was her army?

Augusta thought of Toluca Prison, where thousands of Confederate soldiers had been tortured to death, and whose brutality had afterwards been the stain on the Illinois state prison system, long collapsed and sunk beneath the lake

"I'll take your suffering... I'll feed on you."

That needed no explanation. She had to get to the library. Weeping Mary had an army. It would be helpful to know who the soldiers were.

Weeping Mary was a demon once worshipped as a god, and it would be helpful to learn how that had come to be.

So Augusta ran on along Sagan Street, past Summerland Cemetery and its fence buried beneath dead vines. Something else Weeping Mary had said echoed, and it terrified her.

"Don't think she's safe... She's only safe from me."

That meant someone else could harm Kitty, probably Joseph. If he wanted to hurt Augusta, to make her scream and plead and beg, there would be no better way than to hurt her daughter.

Maybe Joseph was a part of Weeping Mary's army.

Why not?

Sagan Street ended just ahead at a sharp right angle where Glover Avenue launched itself northward. Summerland Cemetery followed the curve and ran north for another block before halting at Massey Street and the bridge that carried it over the Illiniwak River into East Silent Hill. The library would be just north of the bridge, along the riverbank with the water to one side and the shorter edges of three rectangular downtown blocks to the other.

Except that a sinkhole had opened up in the street just ahead, a crater eaten across Sagan Street. Like the others she had seen, it stretched across the street, into the cemetery to her right and under a building across the street to her left. She turned. The building was a bank housed in squat brick building. Its windows were shattered, but it looked otherwise untouched – take another step closer though, she thought, and the whole thing would topple forward into the hole. She sighed her frustration through gritted teeth and turned back. She had to hurry.

Augusta crossed the street and as soon as she could, turned north, onto Olson Avenue. Just ahead would be Burke Square. The old brick buildings of downtown Silent Hill sagged in the fog, their windows smeared and cloudy, their awnings shredded. She passed a café with wrought iron chairs and tables rusting on the sidewalk outside its doors. The rust had run down the legs of every table and chair, and blotched the sidewalk.

It looks like bloodstains, Augusta thought, and walked on.

Only to find a canyon stretching across Olson Avenue short of its intersection with Massey Street. The hole had tunneled through the building to her right, on the east side of the avenue. Most of the first floor had collapsed, leaving the second floor perched atop a giant, ragged archway. The windows in the apartment on the second floor looked untouched. Augusta shook her head in amazement.

Across Olson Avenue, an enormous building loomed unharmed, with the canyon reduced to little more than a wide crack snaking under its walls. Augusta recognized the building, with its dark brick and tall pointed windows as the Robert Black Memorial Auditorium. Regularly spaced along its walls, brick columns shot skyward and narrowed to points like tiny church spires high above the roof, but from where she stood, the mist obscured even the roof, and the fancy brickwork at the tips of the pillars was invisible.

She crossed the street and discovered that even at its narrowest point, the sinkhole in Olson Avenue was still too wide to jump across. She cursed, and was thinking of the walk back toward Sagan Street, and back toward Summerland Cemetery, when she noticed an alley running between the auditorium and the neighboring building. Unless it too had collapsed somewhere along its path to Jones Street, the next street parallel to Olson Avenue, she could use the alley to find, hopefully, a clear path north to the square then east to the library.

Augusta began to run. Without the vines and flowers to hold him, Joseph could have already found his way out of Summerland Cemetery, and might already be coming for her, or Kitty. She had to get away, and get to the library to learn more about the people who had once worshipped Weeping Mary, and about those, the murderers and torturers and rapists, whom she had claimed for her own throughout Silent Hill's history.

And if she was very lucky, she might come across the Blue Lady, and Kitty, and finally be able to take her daughter home, get away from Weeping Mary, and away from this evil place.

And if I'm very, very lucky, she thought bitterly, I might grow a pair of wings myself and the fog and the snow might clear up, and I could just search from the air. Wouldn't that be nice?

Weeping Mary could come for her at any moment, or send her army marching out to put her through the same hells they had inflicted on their victims. And she knew Joseph was already probably on his way to get her, and Kitty. There was no time, and as she darted through the alley, Augusta realized an open pair of metal doors had slipped by on her right. She skidded to a halt, almost panting, and stared at the doors for a moment.

She was familiar with the auditorium and could easily find her way through the building to its grand front entrance on Burke Square. It would save time, and if she slammed the doors shut behind her, and locked them, it might slow down anyone or anything following.

Then again, there might be something inside as dangerous as anything she would find outside on the streets of Silent Hill in the mist and falling snowflakes. She debated, clutching her shovel, and finally decided she would feel at least somewhat safer with a locked door between her and Joseph.

So she stepped inside and closed and locked the doors behind her.