As she sprinted down Denyer Avenue, the sound of flesh scraping over pavement behind her resolved itself into a muffled slapping. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw Joseph in pursuit like a ghoulish millipede. In an instant she saw it all: below his waist his body had become a long, thick tail of black flesh studded with arms – God only knew how many – all along its length. The slapping she heard was the palm of each hand smacking the pavement. Ripples flowed along the tail as it whipped back and forth.
Augusta thought of a caterpillar; she thought of a millipede.
Joseph laughed, and called out to her, "I can tear you apart again! Sometimes you need to die to get into Silent Hill, and if you do, when you die again, that's when it's really over!"
The intersection of Denyer Avenue and Massey Street was no more than a few yards ahead. If she went right she would be running back toward the heart of downtown Silent Hill. If she ran left, the Massey Street Bridge would take her across the Illiniwak River and into East Silent Hill.
She heard a grunt behind her and then came the sensation of something heavy passing by not far above her head. Joseph spilled into the intersection in coils; it was like watching a cobra strike, then coil again. He blocked the right side of the intersection, leaving only the bridge.
He hovered in the air, his body weaving from side to side dreamily, hypnotically, as he sneered at her.
"Ah, ah, ahhh..." he cautioned mockingly. "Don't you want to see a little more of the city? You know that natural curiosity of yours wants to see it all! We can't have you backtracking now, can we?"
She was already running toward the bridge.
"That's it, sweetie-pie! That's the way, darling! Get on the bridge! You can't go left and you can't go right if you're on the bridge! It might as well be a tunnel, and I'm coming in right behind you, and when I catch you, I'm going to play with you, sweetheart!"
He began to laugh, hysterically, blotting out the sound of the river flowing below. The slapping began again, though now it sounded more hollow, and soon it was replaced by the twanging of cables being plucked and the sound of a thousand hands smacking metal.
Massey Street crossed the river enmeshed in a frame of metal beams knotted together by steel cables. Behind her, Joseph had leapt up onto the frame, and passed himself along from hand to hand. Rust flaked down with every handhold.
The Joseph-thing's blood was drying on her face and arms, tightening.
"Get away from me!" she screamed and was rewarded with a peal of laughter.
"I'm coming for you!" he sang out.
The Massey Street Bridge was beginning to shake beneath her feet, Augusta realized with horror. As she ran it quivered. Why?
Floods. Five years ago, in the time of the rainy September, Silent Hill had drowned. The rivers filled up and lake began to rise, and springs chewed their way to the surface. How high could the Illniwak River have gotten? How strongly had it pounded and thundered against the bridge?
The pavement beneath her feet was cracked, fragmented, and in places was missing altogether, revealing sturdy metal mesh. She noticed for the first time that the railing to her left looked bent and battered. How badly was the bridge damaged? Her mind seized on the question and began to chant it like a mantra. How badly is the bridge damaged? How badly is the bridge damaged?
A cable popped behind her, whistled through the air, and snapped against the pavement. Joseph roared in pain.
The furious sound. Joseph roaring was the furious sound she had heard in Summerland Cemetery. She ran on; the bridge shivered. A rhythmic grunting behind her was Joseph crawling after her, reaching for her, one of his arms broken and dragging.
She felt a flare of hope – if Joseph could be hurt, he could probably be killed.
The bridge had begun to twist. The roadbed was sloping downward to the left, toward the side where the roaring waters had battered and beaten and eaten away at its supports. Cables snapped behind her, singing like harp strings through the air. Cracks chased one another across the unbroken slabs of pavement ahead.
Joseph grunted and panted, and when a beam tore away with an offended scream and fell, he roared again.
As pieces of the bridge broke away and tumbled through the mist to the water below; the sounds of splashes rose up. The Toluca River was wide. The Illiniwak River was wide. So wide. Too wide. Each was as broad as two, maybe two and a half, city blocks.
A grinding roar exploded behind her, and the tilt in the bridge suddenly reversed itself, tossing her to her knees. The span behind her had collapsed and with its weight gone, the span before her rocked back into place.
"I'll still get you," called a voice. She turned and saw Joseph caged by bent beams not far behind. "I'll still come for you, bitch!"
She backed away, then turned to run.
Joseph screamed from behind, "Go ahead! Run! You'll have to face me sometime! Come home and face me, if you want to try to get out of here, bitch!"
Come home and face me. Augusta ran away. Come home and face me, if you want to try to get out of here. He had summoned her here, and facing him might be the way to get out. She was planning to try anyway – he had hurt her child and for that he had to die, and if he could be hurt, he could die after all, she thought.
She would go to the place that had once been her home. Joseph would be waiting there. If she fought him there and won, maybe she could leave, and finally take her daughter to the place that was now her home. Weeping Mary be damned. Weeping Mary was damned.
Joseph roared a last time behind her.
Metal complained, groaning and creaking, as she crossed the bridge, and when she finally stepped onto the ground again, she felt her legs quivering, and tried to will them to stop. A tear escaped and slipped down her cheek. She shrugged to wipe it away on her upper sleeve, and cringed as the smell of the Joseph-thing's dried blood rose up.
Come home and face me if you want to try to get out of here. Joseph was silent behind her, though the Massey Street Bridge still mumbled to itself. Weeping Mary would try to keep her here, but maybe, if she could kill Joseph that would still be just enough to tear the fabric of this hell, and let her step through to the real world again.
Weeping Mary couldn't hurt Kitty while she was in the care of the Blue Lady, and with Joseph gone, who was left?
So. She had to find bullets. Lots of them, and if she happened to stumble across something more powerful than her gun, that would be fine as well. An earlier thought rose up again: if she couldn't kill Joseph, maybe she could at least blow him apart. Then, maybe she could separate the pieces and he wouldn't be able to pull himself back together.
Maybe the worst part about all this was still being unable to say for sure just what the rules of this place were. Some things died and stayed dead. Others died and came back. Others came back, and were harder to kill than ever before. They staggered on missing a heart or with their heads blown to pieces.
Augusta sighed and peered into the fog. East Silent Hill's commercial district was a ribbon of shops and restaurants running north to south, gathered on the street that faced the riverside park and the Illiniwak beyond that. Beyond, the grand Victorian mansions looked down on the squares, and to the north, lines of 1920's bungalows unrolled along the streets to the edges of Paleville National Park. A handful of tiny corner groceries were scattered among the houses.
Silent Hill High School and Borden Street Elementary School stood in this neighborhood too, she remembered.
Would any of these stores have .45-caliber bullets? East Silent Hill was the most upscale part of the city, where the wealthy lived in their Victorian palaces, and the upper middle-class in their eighty-year-old bungalows. Augusta wasn't sure she would find a sporting goods store or a gun shop in a neighborhood like this.
Actually, she realized, she could only think of one sporting goods store in town, at the mall downtown. Which meant if she couldn't find anything here, she would have to find her way to the Silent Hill Town Center and see what might be there.
But, she thought, I'm here so I might as well start looking.
"Okay," she breathed. Massey Street ran straight ahead through the Victorian district to the edge of the national park, eleven blocks away. She stood in the middle of its intersection with Pickton Street, and to the south along Pickton, the commercial district ran for eight blocks, most of them very narrow, to a small plaza facing the lake. Eight blocks, most of them wide, to the north, Pickton Street curved and merged with Ireland Street, which bridged the river between East Silent Hill and the Windowbox District.
She turned to walk south.
The same dark brick buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above that filled the rest of the city's commercial areas clustered side by side along Pickton Street. The same trees, large and with only a bare sprinkling of fresh new leaves, stood at attention along the street, though Augusta noticed the flowerbeds at the base of each tree foamed with blossoms. Above the storefronts, boxes of flowers sat on the sills of many apartment windows. They were alive with color and greenery. From one, Augusta noticed garlands of beavertail cactus dangling limply and studded with blinding bright yellow and red flowers.
Beavertail cactus didn't bloom until June or July , but nothing else made much sense in Silent Hill either.
The stores she passed looked forlorn behind their dirty show windows. She passed by the shops, almost all of them art galleries, of one long block, then crossed Rogers Avenue. The merchandise in every store was filthy, old, and decayed. A shop that sold "fine wines," the bottles coated with dust and displayed amid scattered dead insects, and a shop with leather jackets in the window that had all grown white, furry coats of mold. At a jewelry store, the display windows were shattered and lay in splinters on the sidewalk. She paused to look. A diamond necklace was still draped around the neck of a bust made of black marble.
She looked closer. Lines of scum had tricked down from the eyes of the bust, and dried on its cheeks. It looked like old blood. More necklaces, along with bracelets and rings, had been lifted from their beds of moldy black velvet, but had been dropped on the ground among the shattered glass from the windows.
There were smears of blood on the sidewalk. They looked old. Someone had broken the windows of the jewelry store, then for whatever reason, crawled away on all fours, their hands bleeding. Augusta frowned and studied the smears, then cautiously followed them around the back bumper of a parked car, tracked them across the pavement of Pickton Street, then stopped short, reared back, and made a sound, a startled squeak like an aborted scream, in the back of her throat.
A body lay in the middle of the street, on the yellow lines that divided the northbound lanes from the south. It was impossible to tell if it had been a man or woman, though its clothing looked like that of a man. Its flesh was gone, reduced to a few patches of gluey brown sludge. It lay sprawled as though it had died making a snow angel, except its arms below the elbows were missing. The bones didn't look as though they had been cut through, but rather as if they had dissolved. A large metal stake was driven through its forehead, pinning it to the ground. Impaled on the stake, nailed to the skull, was a small wooden plaque with a single word burned into its surface.
THIEF
Nearby stood a large wagon heaped with rusted VCRs and a couple of ruined televisions, Playstations and other video game players, and scattered video games and movies. They looked as though they had been sitting in the wagon, in Pickton Street in the mist, for a very long time.
She remembered the looted electronics store on King Street. Thief indeed. Something had happened to this person when he or she, probably he, had touched the diamonds behind the broken windows. Augusta didn't want to think about what that might have been, but an image immediately sprang to mind; the man, pulling the large wagon behind him, searching for something even more valuable than repairable electronics. He would steal them, leave Silent Hill, and sell everything, but maybe keep a Playstation or a nice ring.
But when he grabbed at the necklace around the slender neck carved of black marble, his hands had begun to burn and the skin to bubble. Had the graceful lady's head, blank-eyed beneath her carved black curls, begun to cry then?
His hands were dissolving, a wretched odor rising up from sizzling flesh. Tiny bands of muscle peeled up, blackened, and melted. The bones began to show, then the marrow inside them. He had fallen and tried to crawl away, his hands dripping blood. When his hands were gone, his wrists were next to go, then bit by bit, his forearms. All the way up to the elbows, and when he finally lay in the middle of Pickton Street, whimpering, his throat raw from screaming, Weeping Mary, a mallet and stake and little wooden placard in her hands, had leaned down with a happy grin, carefully centered the plaque, then the stake, and then she gleefully pounded it through his skull.
Horrible. Augusta turned and walked away. Her skin crawled at the images her mind had thrown at her and she shivered violently.
Intersection – Pickton Street and Beufield Avenue. Coffee shop, bistro, Silent Hill Unitarian Universalist Church. Intersection – Pickton Street and Glatman Avenue. Glatman Photography Studios. Elizabeth's Bathtub: Fine Soaps, Oils, and Beauty Supplies. Denyer's Pet Land. Intersection – Pickton and Panzram Avenue.
The blocks here really were very narrow, usually only three storefronts wide, roughly six long. The next block fronting Pickton was entirely taken up by the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration. Beyond the church, there were only two more blocks to the plaza.
Augusta walked past the church, crossed the next street, Schaefer Avenue, then passed three clothing stores that all featured stylish outfits decaying on the mannequins in their windows. As she crossed Hilley Street, she looked at building, six stories tall and a tower in comparison to the other buildings on Pickton Street, on the next block and sighed. Berkowitz's Department Store. She had forgotten about it.
It would have bullets in the sporting goods department. She couldn't help herself, and smiled.
Berkowitz's occupied the entire block, half with its building, the other half with its parking lot, though once upon a time there had probably been houses behind the store where the lot now sprawled. Augusta hurried by giant show windows to the front door, pulled at the handles, and discovered they were locked. She couldn't see a broken window anywhere along the front of the store, and though the doors that opened onto the parking lot at the rear of the building might be unlocked or a window facing the plaza on the next block, across the next street, might be broken, somehow she suspected nobody had ever gotten into the store. That meant it would still be fully stocked, down to the boxes of bullets in the sporting good department.
The show windows were easier to break than the thicker glass of the doors, she learned, when the shovel bounced off the lower glass panel of one door, leaving nothing more than a scratch. So, she swung at the nearest window until it shattered and fell away in an avalanche of crystal crumbs and the stink of mildew belched out like the smell of an opened grave. The mannequins in the window in their moldy dresses were little more than abstract human shapes of clear plastic like ice sculptures, but Augusta still tried not to touch them as she stepped up and into the display. There was something about their hands placed jauntily on hips, or raised to their eyes as if scanning the horizon that was just... creepy. Augusta had never liked mannequins.