Augusta's heart immediately began to thrum in her chest. Everything had changed, and Becky would notice. She would thunder down the stairs any moment now, shotgun booming, which meant Augusta had to hide.
The stairwell was to her left, a pair of restrooms on her right. She ran for the bathrooms, instinctively toward the women's room, stopped herself, chose the men's room. She remembered, vaguely, that Becky Taylor had first stopped to reload her guns in the girls bathroom. Neither had a door, but rather a tile wall that blocked the view from the hallway. She bolted through the doorway, around the wall, and into the bathroom, where sinks lined up beneath mirrors to her left, with a row of urinals between steel partitions standing along the wall beyond them. Toilets filled a row of stalls to the right. She chose one, hurried inside and closed the stall door behind her, then climbed up on the toilet to wait, careful that nothing – a shoelace, or the sweatshirt tied around her waist – hung down where it could be seen in the gap between the floor and the stall door.
A sturdy steel pole was bolted to the stall wall to her right. She gripped it, and reached forward with her left hand to lock the stall door. The lock clicked terribly loudly.
The gun rode snug in the holster beneath her left arm. Augusta reached for it, bracing herself with her left arm against the wall, and tugged it free. Any minute now... Becky would hustle down the stairs, shooting, and she would search the bathrooms first. She might search the ladies room first, or maybe not, but either way, when she stormed into the mens room she would kick the stall doors open one by one, and when she kicked the door to this stall, and it didn't fly inward, Augusta would empty her gun through the door before Becky had time to raise up her weapon and shoot.
Maybe. Augusta waited. Warmth spilled from a vent overhead. Water dripped in a sink. The bathroom smelled of stale piss and unflushed toilets brimming with shit. There were hints of cigarette smoke and cologne, pungent cleaning chemicals, and years' accumulations of dead farts.
She looked down. Old tiles. Hexagonal, some of them cracked.
A taut wire of dread suddenly snapped inside her, whipsawing and singing an ugly note like a broken guitar string. Her head jerked upward, her mouth falling open.
Her shovel. She didn't have her shovel. She had left it outside leaning against the wall, when she had first dropped down to a crouch beneath the windows in each door. Just in case Becky might see her through the wire mesh glass and shoot to kill.
Left it leaning against the wall. Hadn't picked it back up.
Shit. How do you not notice you left behind something as big as a shovel?
Irritation flared. She would have to go back outside to get it. But what if Becky saw her leaving? What if Becky was coming down the stairs right now? What if Becky were right outside the bathroom door, preparing to step inside in just another split-second...
She was furious with herself – leaving a weapon behind in a place like this. Stupid. She needed every one of her weapons. But, she reasoned... I still have my gun, and that's got a lot more stopping power than a shovel.
You still have your gun.
Should I save my bullets for Joseph?
You have four hundred of the damn things. You can spare a few. You can spare a lot. You were going to shoot the hell out of Becky Taylor before you realized you left the shovel outside. If nothing else, you can go back to Berkowitz's and get some more.
The bathroom was still thick with unpleasant odors and silence. Silence. Becky Taylor hadn't entered, wasn't shooting in the hall outside.
Well, what now?
A thought flitted across Augusta's mind: maybe the school always looked like this for Becky Taylor, and so maybe she hadn't noticed when Augusta came inside.
Maybe it did. Miriam Locane had seen her parents' grocery store where a TCBY stood on Nathan Avenue. And so, maybe for Becky Taylor, the florescent lights forever burned and the halls were always strewn with papers, books, and bags dropped by panicked students, and were endlessly dripping with the blood of the wounded.
Which meant maybe Augusta could, unnoticed, quietly sneak through the doors, grab the shovel, then come back and hunt Becky down.
She stepped down, carefully unlocked the stall door, and opened it a crack to peek out. Nothing. An empty bathroom much abused by teenage boys. She stepped out, crept along the stalls to the wall, peered around it toward the doorway, and saw the hall outside and the stairs across the hall.
Becky was nowhere to be seen. Augusta headed for the door, reached the doorway and looked out carefully, just in case, then stepped out and turned toward the entrance. Gun or not, she would feel much safer with another weapon. Her other weapon.
She jolted as if slapped. The doors at the end of the hall, the doors that led outside, were blocked by chains that drooped from the weight of heavy padlocks. Chains. So many that it seemed a wall had been woven of them across the doorway. Augusta stared, agape, then holstered the gun and ran forward, grabbed a rope of metal links and gave an experimental tug. It rattled, but nothing more.
Well, this just sucks, her mind noted grumpily. I can't go outside, probably not until I've killed this wretched bitch from hell, and that being the case, I guess I'll have to kill her with my gun. That will set her victims free and then I'll go outside and get the shovel, and go kill Joseph and maybe then I'll finally be able to take Kitty and go home.
Home. Augusta felt a rush of heat that gave way to prickles of sweat as she wiped her wrist across her forehead and thought, this isn't me. Killing people – but they're already dead. Revenge for a little girl who's dead but alive, against a man who's dead too. This isn't me. Is any of this really happening? Am I really here?
Is anything ever going to make sense again?
This is going to make me lose my mind. They'll put me in the state mental hospital at Broughton and I'll spend the rest of my life in a straitjacket, chewing at the straps and trying to beat myself to death against the walls. I've thought I've gone insane two or three times already today.
And she wondered if she would be thinking any of this if she had not forgotten the goddamn shovel outside.
In the hallway, she was exposed, so she hurried back to the bathroom and around the tile wall where she leaned against the cool ceramic and chewed her lip while listening for Becky. She needed a plan.
Becky Taylor would be upstairs, and if she wasn't coming down, Augusta would have to go up to her. But first, she thought, I'll need something I could use to lure her out. A distraction – it would be handy to have something she could use to distract Becky. Something that would give her an advantage – something she could use to lure Becky into a trap or could use to buy at least a little time if Becky surprised her and there was no place to run.
A fire extinguisher hung from a hook on the wall nearby. Augusta stared at it, then grabbed it, thinking, perfect. Instant smokescreen. An instant way to hide. She studied the instructions – pull a pin, clutch the grips together in her fist, and there was even a little metal ring that could be slipped around the handles to hold them together. Wonderful. She could set the damn thing and run away, and it would still fume and spew and mist out behind her. Best of all, there would be more! If she used one up, there would be another just down the hall.
But there was still a monster upstairs with a gun, and August realized she knew where Becky would be – the home economics kitchen where she had made her last stand, probably – but she didn't know where on the third floor that would be. She needed a map.
When she had attended Hot Springs High School, she remembered, every year each student was issued a student handbook that listed school rules, resources, and all the teachers' names, with a map on the inside back cover. Maybe Silent Hill High School... She glanced around the wall, through the doorway at the empty stairwell across the hall. Still no trace of Becky, who must either be oblivious or somehow unable to come to Augusta.
Or possibly very stealthy. Augusta set the fire extinguisher on the floor, snuck to the door, checked the hall again, then looked down at the papers and books on the hall floor.
She saw it riding the crest of a wave of books and papers spilling out of a backpack nearby. It looked as though it had been stuffed in the backpack since the school year began in September, and was wrinkled, its cover torn, and stained by several months of jostling in a bag against uncapped pens and loose pencils. But there, unmistakable, was an image of the Silent Hill Sentinel, the school mascot.
Silent Hill High School Student Guide – 1993-1994
And beneath, "SHHS: Where Excellence Stands Guard."
Augusta stepped out, knelt and took the student handbook, then ducked back into the bathroom. Flipping through, searching for a school map, she found it as it had been at Hot Springs High, on the inside back cover, with all three floors diagramed in a vertical row.
She studied the third floor. Typing, computer programming, art, band, chorus, dance... Home economics, a little less than halfway along the third floor hall on the west side of the building. The problem was that unless doors to other classrooms where unlocked, there was no place to hide, and no shelter in the third floor hall. Like the other halls, it ran straight as a string from north to south.
It wouldn't be wise to trap Becky Taylor in a corner, because she had been shooting continually for ten years and wouldn't be any closer to running out of ammunition now than then.
There were four spots along the wall of each hallway marked with tiny x's inside circles. More fire extinguishers. One in each bathroom and two hanging on the hallway walls, plus two in the cafeteria and two in the kitchen. Maybe, if she could shoot one from the shelter of a stairwell, the fire extinguisher would explode, and if not explode, at least the bullet would probably puncture the extinguisher. Either way, it would make a hell of a noise that would lure Becky out of the home economics kitchen, into the hall where she could be shot, and either way, Becky would step out into a cloud of extinguishing chemicals that would disorient her, maybe blind her long enough for Augusta to empty her gun.
Good idea? Bad idea? She didn't know, but it was all she could think of. She picked up the fire extinguisher from the floor, walked to the doorway and looked out, then stepped into the hallway, heading for the north stairwell. From the stairs at the north side of the building, one of the hallway fire extinguishers was closer and easier to shoot – she wanted to keep the one she had taken from the bathroom for use as either a smokescreen or an emergency bludgeon. If Becky surprised her, she would be ready.
That, and from the north, the home economics kitchen was slightly more than halfway down the hall, which would mean a longer time in the hall for Becky, and more time to shoot for Augusta.
The first classroom she passed, according to a tiny plaque on the wall beside the doorway, was that of Mrs. Ellroy, whose lecture on The Wasteland had been interrupted ten years ago. The door was open and heat flowed out into the hall, carrying an odd wet odor. Augusta stopped and checked behind her, then stepped forward to peer through the doorway.
She dropped the fire extinguisher and shrank away as her mouth dropped open and her skin began to crawl with revulsion.
The room was crowded with a tangle of fleshy tendrils like vines, thousands, wrapped tightly around everything they touched, spilling fatly across desktops, crawling up the walls across posters and windows and bookshelves and across the blackboard, squeezing around chair legs and desk legs. They entwined in a grotesque web that glistened pink beneath the florescent lights from pus that ran and dripped, and had dried in a sludgy crust on every surface. Beneath a vent in the ceiling, a sagging clutch of tendrils quivered from the force of hot air billowing out.
In the center of the room, suspended and held fast by the web, was whom Augusta presumed to be Mrs. Ellroy, her arms and legs stretched out and coiled in runners of flesh that looked like pink mucus. The right half of her face seemed normal, though the left side had been overtaken by lumpy white scar tissue, like cancerous growths. Her right eye stared forward.
And blinked. Augusta sucked in a breath and tried not to scream.
As she watched, the trapped Mrs. Ellroy suddenly bounced up and down twice, then hovered, quivering and ensnared in the web. Three seconds later, it happened again.
Like a heartbeat. Augusta stepped back, feeling ill.
Her heart pounding, she stumbled through her options, backing away until she collided with a bank of lockers, choked down a shriek, recoiled, turned, then spun back to face Mrs. Ellroy's classroom. She hadn't been able to help the dead students in Berkowitz's Department Store, but she wondered if she could help this person. At least take her away from that horror that must surely have the power to pulverize a mind. At least take her away from it until Becky Taylor could be stopped.
She crept forward, until she could reach the fire extinguisher on the floor, terrified she would get too close and something inside would wriggle out to grab her and pull her in. She yanked up the fire extinguisher and threw herself away from the doorway, landing hard on the floor.
Dry chemical fire extinguisher. Ammonium phosphate and ammonium sulfate plus a few other complicated ingredients that all sounded poisonous. She wondered if she could spray it on the ropy worms of flesh and kill them, looked back at the label and saw a caution to clean up all surfaces touched by the chemicals "to prevent corrosion."
Promising. Pulling the fire extinguisher pin, she stood, aimed the short rubber hose at the open door, squeezed the handles and watched a jet of white powder explode outward, puffing up in clouds that slowly settled and sank.
Augusta gritted her teeth and snarled. Wherever the powder touched the tendrils of wet flesh, after it had lain a few seconds, the flesh turned an angry red and began to ooze huge beads of pus.
She sprayed until the fire extinguisher was empty and hissing its last gasps of compressed air. The flesh did not shrink away; it only festered and quivered. Then, it shifted. There was a wretched sucking sound as tendrils pulled away from surfaces, then the sound of wet things slithering. For a moment, Augusta was certain they would surge out through the doorway, wrap around her and pull her in to keep company with Mrs. Ellroy until her sanity shrank to a pinpoint, then died away altogether.
Instead, the tendrils drew away from the door, writhed in a mass to the left, then to the right, and the door was heaved forward with a savage shove that scooped up wide curls of dried pus from the floor. The door slammed shut, and behind its square window, fat snakes of wet flesh smacked themselves against the glass.
Augusta sank to her knees on the hall floor, trembling in frustration, disgust, and fury. Ten years. That woman in the classroom had almost certainly been strung up in that hideous, oozing web for ten years. She'd had a husband, and possibly children. She'd been somebody's wife, maybe somebody's mother; she'd had friends and relatives, and had come to work on the last day of her life to do what she always did – to teach, to inform. To present the beauty and complexity of the language of Shakespeare and Maya Angelou and Harper Lee.
She'd come to work, and had been murdered by the monster on the third floor, and ever since had been trapped in her own private hell by another monster, one that lived in the dark places of this town.
Becky Taylor had to die, again, and if Augusta survived this, she was going to pray every night for Weeping Mary to be wrenched out of this world and sent back to Hell.
This was so wrong. Augusta stood, gripping the fire extinguisher. Even empty, it was still heavy and solid, and would make a fine club. She checked behind her and saw the empty hall, then walked onward, toward the north.
A few classrooms along the hall from that of Mrs. Ellroy, was a room whose plaque read Mrs. Harris. The door was closed, but its window was slimed with pus and ropes of flesh slithered across the glass. From the fatter tendrils branched smaller and smaller worms until they spread out, fine and dispersed like the hair of a drowning victim. Another victim in another private hell. Augusta wondered who it might be.
There was so much blood on the floor. So many people had been injured. Eleven had died. If every victim in the school was trapped in a web of slimy flesh, that meant there were nine private hells in the building. The two dead students across the street at Berkowitz's were lucky, in that they only had to lay on the floor in endless agony, the boy with his brain popping out of a hole in his skull, the girl forever choking on her own blood.
Beyond the first floor classrooms were the school offices. Outside of one a wide trail of blood was smeared on the floor, leading away from scattered chunks of flesh and bone and what might be brains, past the offices to a pair of wide double doors. They were opened on the cafeteria and kitchen beyond, but as Augusta walked closer, she saw that not much farther past the doorway, the large open space of the cafeteria was filled with a stinking, runny jungle of fleshy tendrils. They pulsed in time to the silent heartbeat. They coiled tightly around chair legs and table legs, sprawled across tabletops and smothered every wall, every window and door, spilled down the fronts of a pair of soda machines. They snaked through trays full of food that still steamed, and to the far right, they filled the kitchen. Augusta could barely make them out through thousands of crisscrossing runners of oozing pink flesh, but there seemed to be a few large shapes caught in the web. Three victims. Maybe four. She turned away.
Her nerves, in their disgust, fired contradictory messages to one another and flashes of dizziness fluttered drunkenly in her skull as she passed the offices, then the classrooms, including those of Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Ellroy, on her way to the south stairwell. Before climbing up, she pulled the Ruger from its holster, checked the stairs and found them empty, and started up.
From the stairs she stepped out into the second floor hallway, and ran down the hall toward the north staircase, leaping over abandoned backpacks and books, leaving papers fluttering in her wake. Some classroom doors were open, others closed, and behind one open doorway and one closed door, the ropy flesh pulsed and throbbed and smeared itself foully with pus.
Seven or eight victims, plus two at Berkowitz's Department Store. That left at least one more still in the school.
At the north stairwell, tendrils filled the stairs between the first and second floors, but those leading up to the third floor were clear. Augusta climbed up, and discovered another victim in the third floor hall.
She sucked in her breath. In the distance, the end of the hall looked as though it had been walled off with a pink screen. She couldn't see the shape of the person trapped inside, but knew it was there, and guessed the grotesque web filled the last third of the hallway, probably all the way to the south staircase.
God in Heaven. She wondered how many shots it would take, then considered for the first time if the thing that Becky Taylor had undoubtedly become could even be killed. She couldn't kill Walter Sullivan – a red devil had to kill him for her. She didn't know if she had killed Joshua Blackwell, remembering the seal – the Seal of Metatron – that had scorched itself into the porcelain oven door. She couldn't kill the Joseph-thing.
But she had no other choice, and couldn't think of any other way to do what had to be done. Stepping to her right, she braced herself against the stairwell wall, sighted on the fire extinguisher marked on the school map, and fired.