As she holstered her gun and checked her flashlight, which seemed unbroken, she thought she probably had a concussion. Almost certainly, actually, what with the ringing in her ears and her bloody nose. She leaned against the nearest wall that didn't look as though it would be next to fall, and tried to take deep breaths of cold, wet air. It helped the dizziness and nausea, though when she moved her head or neck, it hurt.
But, it could have been worse, and she thought that was one of the nice things about life. Most things could usually have been worse. When the kitchen door split in half and blew out it could have easily chopped her in half. She could have lost an arm or leg. Her concussion, if she had one, could have been much worse.
But none of it had been, and she thought, I'll survive. I'll survive, I'll get rid of Joseph, and then once she's finally safe from him, Kitty and I will go home. I'll finally get to leave this place.
She put a hand to her forehead, wanting to ask again questions whose answers she already knew. It seemed to help keep her sanity intact. Why was this happening? Why to her? Why did she have to see all this? Why was it up to her to help so many suffering people – was there no one else at all? She just wanted to find Joseph and give him what he deserved for trying to hurt her daughter. Give him what he deserved for talking her into killing that child in the first place and what he deserved for luring her here to try to torture her with her own guilt. And then, when Joseph could no longer hurt her or threaten her or menace that beautiful little girl, she just wanted to go home. She never wanted to set foot in the state of Illinois ever again.
She sighed. Why? Why any of it?
The answer was the same as before: because. When your child is threatened, you must fight to eliminate the threat. When your child is hurt, you must take away the pain, then take away the threat. When people around you are suffering, you must work to ease their suffering. Why? Because you must.
She so wanted to go home and rest.
Regardless, she thought, if she wanted to leave, she needed to move, and looked down to see the orange extension cord still laying like a dead snake on the floor. Self-pity took too much time, and so it was time to go, which meant it was time to be practical again. She thought the cord might still be a good thing to have. She bent, and nearly fell when hot nails of pain shot through her skull, closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath, then opened her eyes and reached for the cord. Winding it, when she had finished she picked it up, looked at the fat coil, and wondered how she would carry it and her shovel both, then turned and walked toward the south stairwell. Her skull vibrated with pain in time to her footsteps.
When she had almost reached the stairs, she felt a breath of heat from the dark and empty stairwell ahead. Something seemed to be moving across the floor and walls. She blinked. Blurred vision, another symptom of a concussion, seemed to have passed her by, so what was this?
Dark threads that looked as thick as liquid streamed across the floor. One joined another and another, growing into trickles, then streams, then rivers of moving shadow. She heard a sound like thick cloth being pulled across the floor, but the flowing threads had no substance. They passed under her shoes, not parting, then spilled away behind her.
She drew her gun as she carefully turned and looked back down the hall, then remembered she had unloaded all her bullets into the monster that had been Becky Taylor. But there might be time to reload. She dropped the cord, squirmed until her left arm was free of its backpack strap, then swung her backpack around and unzipped it, and reached for the nearest box of bullets.
In dim gloom she could barely make it out, but there was a definite patch of shadow much darker than all the others in the ruined hallway. It seemed to be growing, absorbing every flowing shadow, and hovered, a giant black mass outside the open doorway of the home economics kitchen several yards away.
Augusta looked down and saw the last trailing threads pass beneath her feet and draw away like the edge of a ragged shawl down toward the mass. She scooped out a handful of bullets, then ejected the Ruger's clip, refilled it, and popped it back in, then zipped up her backpack and slung it behind her and out of the way.
A sound, almost a crackling, like a thick muddy liquid being poured out. She looked up and saw the mass forming a shape, the distant silhouette of something she thought she ought to recognize. A mound, with another shape protruding from the top. Augusta didn't dare switch on her flashlight for a better view – then realized that even if her flashlight looked unharmed, she didn't even know if it would still work anyway.
The shape took on color and form, visible even in the darkness, washed out in what faint light spilling in with the snowflakes through the hole in the kitchen roof and walls.
Weeping Mary, her hair falling down in a wave, wore her parrot top over a long and bulky skirt of raggedly sewn-together leather patches.
There was just enough light to see... not leather. Not leather. Some of the patches had tattoos, others shriveled nipples, others human faces with their eyes and mouths sewn shut.
Augusta stared straight ahead, breathing hard through her mouth, trying not to scream. She could never run away, she realized. The pain in her skull would buckle her knees, so she tried to back away quietly as she aimed her gun straight ahead. If she could reach the stairs...
There was more light suddenly. Weeping Mary did not wear her sunglasses, and from her empty eye sockets blood pumped in furious spurts. That, and tongues of flame licked up and over her forehead, never singeing or burning her hair.
The air began to hum with energy that spilled across Augusta's skin in crackles like static electricity.
"I know you're here," Weeping Mary seemed to speak with a dozen voices that all scraped against one another. "I know you're here, but I can't see where. That's good for you, my dear, because if I knew where you were I'd tear you to pieces right here and now, suffering or no."
She looked down the hall, away from Augusta, as if searching.
"You just cause trouble wherever you go, don't you? You and your little friend."
Weeping Mary turned her gaze to Augusta, who jumped and gasped. She can't see me, she can't see me, she can't see me... Her hand tightened on the handle of her gun. She can't see me... shouldn't let her know where I am. Augusta thumbed the safety and jammed her gun back into its holster. Can't shoot. Shouldn't shoot.
"Well, that is about to change... Do you hear me! We'll have no more of you running hither and yon getting into trouble. It is past time for you to start giving back what you've taken."
The bleeding, burning, empty eyes whipped away again.
"You've not even begun to suffer yet, but I know of just the place for you to go. It's special. There's no hope there for anyone like you."
What did that mean? Augusta's heart pounded.
The floor vibrated beneath her feet and from far away she heard the shriek of tearing steel. It sounded almost dreamy. Down the hall, everything around Weeping Mary began to change. The walls, the floor, the ceiling... it seemed as though something was burning through to the surface... rusted metal grating... ruin... Anger pulsed in waves from the spot where Weeping Mary stood snarling and clenching her fists. Fury. Hatred... It fluttered across the surface of Augusta's skin like the wings of a dying bird, gently but horribly.
"I will get my meal out of you yet, woman," she growled, "Make no mistake about that. If it weren't for your scarred god's whore, you'd have been dead hours ago. Others like you have come here and I've had my fun with them and then left their carcasses for the rats and the roaches. Others like you have come before and caused their trouble and gotten away. I don't much care for that."
Her hands exploded into the heavy, jeweled claws that she stabbed forward into the nearest banks of lockers. When she wrenched them away, she held giant fistfuls of torn metal, then threw them away with a shriek that seemed to scrape through marrow.
"Bitch, I will get you, do you hear me? I will get you. It's time to suffer, darling, and you've got somewhere very special to go now. Go and suffer."
Weeping Mary vanished with a quiet pop, and Augusta was left alone to stare at the spot where she had stood, heart hammering. The third floor hallway of Silent Hill High School rotted quietly in the damp.
Augusta sagged, nearly fell, but caught herself. She didn't want to know what place Weeping Mary wanted her to go. And, what the hell would it have to do with anyone like you. That sounded... she didn't want to know what it sounded like. It would be something horrible, and there was no shortage of horrible things in Silent Hill.
Why? Because.
She knelt carefully to pick up the cord, then turned, walked to the south stairwell, and began to descend.
On the first floor, the chains that had bound the door were gone, as she expected. She couldn't stand to look back, pushed open the door, and was greeted by the sight of a corridor, walled and roofed with chain link, leading down the steps and away into the mist. It was like... an animal pen, she thought, and looked to her right, where she remembered leaving her shovel. It waited for her, leaning against the chain link, inside the cage. She grabbed the handle and felt cold steel in her fist, and hefted it over her shoulder. Having it with her again made her feel a little better.
She stopped to stare at the cage around her, into the mist and gently falling snow, thinking. She'd had no intention of going anywhere Weeping Mary wanted her to go, but apparently now she no longer had a choice. No more running hither and yon. The cage ran ahead until it disappeared in the fog.
Where did it go? A caged path. Joseph said he would be waiting for her in the house they had once shared in the Windowbox District. Did it lead there? Probably not – Augusta supposed it would take her to some place where something truly awful had happened in the past, something that had to do with anyone like you. Which meant...
People like her. Women? Black women? Black people? A place where something horrifying had happened to black people.
Oh, dear God. Where? What? She searched her memory, thought back to An Unwanted County, or anything else she might have ever read. Surely she would remember something like that, but hadn't thought about it in so long...
A lynching. They stood out like the murders of Billy and Miriam Locane had stood out, and for the same reason, because of her natural horror at what had occurred, and her natural pity for the victims. She hadn't thought about them in years because she didn't want to think about them. Them. Which lynching? There had been more than one in Silent Hill's history. One knee gave way and Augusta dropped into a kneel and pain crashed in her skull like a breaking wave. Her muscles clenched in a violent shiver.
There's no hope there for anyone like you. How true. Nobody wanted to think about a lynching, although Augusta knew they had occurred in forty-three states over the years. From 1882 to 1962, exactly one hundred had been committed in North Carolina, the state where she now lived – two in Asheville alone, the last in 1906. Thirty-seven in Illinois. Two hundred and eighty-four in her birth state of Arkansas. Men, women, children. Burned alive, hung from trees, thrown bound and gagged from bridges. Shot, tortured, dragged behind wagons and, later, cars.
March 19, 1906. Chattanooga, Tennessee. The victim was a black man named Edward Johnson, spuriously suspected of the rape of a white woman. He had addressed the gathered crowd before being hanged from the Walnut Street Bridge and shot hundreds of times.
"I am not guilty and that is all I have to say. God bless you all. I am innocent," were his last words. A note was pinned to his dead body as it lay on the ground beneath the bridge. Addressed to a local judge, it read: To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now.
In Mississippi in 1904, a black man named Luther Holbert was suspected of murdering a wealthy white landowner. He attempted to flee his home with his wife, but both where chased down by a mob. They were bound to a pair of trees, and their fingers and ears were chopped off. The victims were then tortured with a corkscrew produced by someone in the mob, and finally the Holberts were set afire while still alive. A photograph of the incident records a crowd of at least six hundred enjoying a picnic lunch while the bodies burned.
The ears and fingers were later sold as souvenirs.
In May of 1907, a black man named Sim Padgett was lynched in Reidsville, Georgia for "aiding a criminal." For good measure, his wife, son, daughter, and "another black person" were also killed.
The phenomenon of lynching, of course, were not limited solely to anyone like you. Hundreds of Mexican immigrants were lynched in the West, Japanese immigrants were hanged in Hawaii, and Japanese scientists studying the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 were stoned by an enraged mob. Chinatowns in Denver and in Santa Ana, California were burned to the ground.
Nevertheless in 1904, a man from the Congo was put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York, and in 1923, the black town of Rosewood, Florida was set afire after its residents were chased out, or chased down, beaten, and killed.
Augusta's stomach lurched. To have been born, and been born black, in the South, was to know one's history and to live with it every day. It was to acknowledge that you and everyone around you in your Southern community had a thousand squalling little demons trailing along in their shadows. People in other parts of the United States had the luxury of forgetting that fact, even though their history was every bit as bloody.
Illinois did not share the stigma of violence that painted Mississippi or Arkansas, despite its race riots – in Springfield in 1908, East St. Louis in 1917, and in Chicago in 1919 and there again in the 1960's. When one thought of a lynching, one thought of the South, not Illinois, despite thirty-seven having happened there.
Yes indeed, thought Augusta. Thirty-seven, including three in Silent Hill. Now that she thought about it, that wasn't at all surprising. So, which one of the three was she preparing to relive?
"I can't do this," she said, "Anything but this."
Murdered children, mutilations, creatures that didn't exist, including one that looked like Joseph and another that had dragged away the man who had lain on the sofa. School shootings. People suffering and dying in every way imaginable, trapped in their sufferings to feed a demon. But, she couldn't face a lynching.
She dropped the cord and set her shovel on the ground, and put her head in her hands.
Someone needed her help. The lynching victim, whoever it might be. That person, whichever one of the three people who had been lynched in Silent Hill, needed her.
I can't. I can't do this. I can't face it. I can't.
Not long ago, the YMI Cultural Center, Asheville's African-American history and culture museum, had hosted a traveling exhibit called Worlds Apart: Photographs of Segregation. She'd gone to see it, not because she especially wanted to, but because she felt she should. Personally, she had never experienced any overt racism, and had certainly never experienced any violence and so to witness that committed against others seemed the least she could do.
She had seen the picture of the Mississippi picnic, hundreds of people eating deviled eggs and sipping lemonade while pointing and laughing at burning bodies lashed to nearby trees. She'd seen other pictures too. Bodies hanged from telephone poles, a minister – a white minister – from Michigan who had been branded after giving a sermon denouncing the Ku Klux Klan, a black family – husband, wife, and two little boys – hanging from a bridge. And plenty more.
She'd had a panic attack and when she tried to flee the museum, one of the volunteer counselors on hand for the exhibit had to restrain her and calm her.
And those were just pictures, she thought. I can't do this.
So now what? Sit here, caged in chain link and thirst and starve to death? Go back through the school and try the north entrance? She turned, carefully, to see the doorway behind her vanished behind a cement wall. That had happened once before, in the Ridgeview Medical Clinic building. Weeping Mary seemed to excel in trapping and caging her victims.
And why not? Augusta sighed. Hell, for most of Weeping Mary's existence as a "god" she had sustained herself through the suffering of a captive of pain.
"That's much better, darling," said a voice from above, and Augusta looked up to see Weeping Mary leering at her, and screamed. She threw herself forward, tripped, and fell against the chain link, and her vision blurred as she slid to the sidewalk of Ferris Street. Pain in her head pounded an alarm.
"I still can't see you, but I know you're here, and I know you're afraid." Blood poured from her eye sockets, splashing onto the pavement. "I know what makes you afraid."
She licked her fingers, which oozed with familiar red sludge, and smiled meanly. "You're in pain, too, I see, and that's good. I'll feed off that as well."
She chuckled grotesquely, jumped into a squat, then leapt away into mist and disappeared.
Augusta grabbed her shovel and the wound cord and painfully jogged away. She wanted to be somewhere else. When Weeping Mary made an appearance, Augusta wanted to go away, wanted to be anywhere but any place that Weeping Mary had tainted with her presence. It seemed that Weeping Mary left a corruption wherever she went. Even in a dead, evil town, it seemed that wherever she stood, the ground oozed pus and whatever she touched grew scabs.
Augusta wanted to be away.