The chainlink cage crossed to the far side of Ferris Street, where it turned right to lead northward just short of the sidewalk. By the time she followed the path to the intersection of Ferris Street and Hilley Street, she had managed to curdle her fear into a simple resigned dread. This was a death march and she knew it, because at the end of the path the worst of all waited. Weeping Mary would settle for nothing less, and Augusta didn't have a choice. The path would lead where it would lead. If she gave it too much thought she would panic, and if she panicked, she would go insane.
Would that be any better? She trudged on, trying not to think about anything, concentrating instead on her aching head and on putting one foot in front of the other.
Did she want to search her memory for details of the Silent Hill lynchings? No. I don't want to think about anything. Nothing at all. One foot. Head hurts. The other foot. Head hurts. And so she followed the trail, inside walls and beneath a ceiling of chainlink. She walked the block between Hilley Street and Schaefer Avenue in silence. Mist rolled in one direction and then another.
Between Schaefer Avenue and Panzram Avenue, a sinkhole swooped in from the east side of Ferris Street, where it must have swallowed the houses filling the block there. The mist was too thick to tell but there was the feeling of empty space. The caged path continued across unimpeded, like a bridge, and Augusta refused to allow herself to be surprised. Surprise would invite thought and thought would invite panic. March the death march. One foot. Head hurts. The other foot. Head hurts.
Past the pit, between Panzram Avenue and Glatman Avenue, cars lay on their sides in the street, as if the cage had sprung up from the pavement and tossed them aside. No surprise. No thought.
One foot. The other foot.
Head hurts.
Was it still snowing? It seemed that only the rare snowflake now fell to earth to melt on the pavement. And it seemed they only drifted down from her right, no longer directly from above.
The trees planted along the edge of Ferris Street had burst to life, each with thousands and thousands of summer-green leaves hanging limply, melting the snowflakes. Water droplets fell.
No thought. Refuse to notice.
Death march.
At Beufield Avenue the cage turned again, to the east, deeper into East Silent Hill, which should be surprising.
Why should it be surprising? Augusta refused to think about it.
The houses here were grand. Magnificent Victorian castles that had been painted all manner of bright colors five years ago. One house, painted gray, with hot pink shutters and trim, would sit next to another painted bright blue, with sunny yellow shutters and scarlet trim. Few residents of East Silent Hill settled for anything plain.
The paint on every house was peeling; the wood beneath warped and rotting and slowly turning silver. Bushes in yards had grown up to scratch at porch railings. Trees that were planted when the houses were new drooped branches into the street. Colors of flowers shouted to be heard against quieting mist. The cage ran down the center of Beufield Avenue, passing trees and the occasional abandoned car. Cook Street ran parallel to Ferris, and between the two a wide crevice not quite another pit wound its way from one side of Beufield Avenue to the other. The caged path bridged it and continued.
At Cook Street, the path turned left and continued northward. The intersection of Cook Street and Rogers Avenue came and went, but between Rogers Avenue and Massey Street, a sinkhole had apparently opened up beneath a large house on the right side of the street. Part of Cook Street had caved in as well, and what had been the house's third floor tilted precariously out over the spilling, broken pavement, with its shattered windows level with the ground. A round tower with a conical roof seemed aimed toward the sky as if ready to launch to the west, over the Illiniwak River to land in the heart of downtown. The house and its tower were painted purple with white trim.
Past Cook Street's intersection with Massey Street, one of the squares of East Silent Hill opened up on the left. Some of the squares hid fountains or statues at their heart. Others held playgrounds or flower gardens. It was impossible to tell what lay in the square here. All Augusta could see were trees so heavy with leaves that it might have been July, robbed of their colors and edges by fog.
On the right, two gigantic houses filled the block facing the park, peeking out between tall trees planted along the sidewalk. One was made of brick, while the other was painted a bland, snowy white. The path turned sharply to lead between the trees and antique lampposts in a row along the street, up the stairs and onto the broad veranda of the white house. Augusta stopped to stare, trying to ignore the dread that came to life and tried to writhe and thrash an alarm. Her head hurt.
If she didn't go forward now, she never would. She would flee and run back and forth in the cage until she dropped dead of exhaustion, and so she forced a foot forward and then another. The stairs came down to the sidewalk, and fat azalea bushes blazing with color had been planted long ago on either side, all along the front of the house. Someone standing on the porch would have to lean down to pluck a blossom. The house loomed. It imposed. It lorded over the street. It rose up three floors beneath an attic, with a round tower to the left that climbed up one story farther above that.
A tower room was the sort of thing you always found in Victorian houses in novels for children, where the characters lived lives that were vastly more interesting than yours, in houses that were grander than anything you would ever live in. As a child, reading such books, Augusta had always thought it seemed unfair.
She climbed the stairs. The chainlink cage crossed the porch to the doorway, where it molded itself precisely to an archway that sheltered a pair of wide double doors. A view through the small oval window in each door was blocked by curtains pulled tight. To the left and right there were shapes of furniture. Dark wicker rocking chairs and couches. On either side of the doorway, lush potted plants stood in polished brass pots. This house had not been left to the mercy of five years of mist. Whatever had happened here, and whenever it had happened, was waiting patiently for her to open the door and step into the midst of it all.
The doorknobs were bulbous and looked antique and heavy. More polished brass. So were the hinges. In her hand one doorknob was frigid, but it turned easily and the door swung inward. She stepped inside and the let the door swing shut behind her, as she knew it would. It wouldn't have done any good to leave it open, she thought, because where could she go? Why bother to even try to run?
She noticed the heat first, and then long slants of shade-mottled sunlight spilling in through every window, including those in the doors behind her. Outside, it was a misty May day. Inside the house it was a stifling summer afternoon. She stood in a broad entry hall, where a spindly brass chandelier with a dozen glass globes hung from the ceiling high above. The walls bulged in the corner to her left, in the shape of the tower she had seen from outside. A huge potted plant basked in sunlight there.
Ahead and to the left a staircase began its ascent, paused at a landing and doubled back on itself, then rose higher to the second floor. Beyond the staircase was an archway that revealed a parlor crowded with new antiques, and to her right a door stood open to show a dining room filled with dark wood chairs and table, cabinet, and sideboard. Furniture in the hall, as in the parlor and dining room, was huge and looming, dark and ornate. Patterned rugs that looked far too expensive to stand on sprawled on every floor.
On tables stood electric fans with grills more than large enough for a finger to slip inside to be butchered by blades that likely wouldn't stop spinning and would slice that finger to pieces. They, and the occasional lazily spinning, and bizarrely antiquated-looking, ceiling fan above did little but stir hot air.
She could see a fireplace in each room and knew there were more elsewhere. Large dingy oil paintings of landscapes decorated every wall. There were lamps with stained-glass shades, and porcelain figurines of dancing people on shelves and tabletops. Potted ferns basked by windows atop fussy brass plant stands. In the parlor ahead she noticed what first appeared to be a cabinet, but was instead a giant radio.
All in all, this was the typically lovely house of a well-off family. A doctor's perhaps, or a banker's or lawyer's, and Augusta guessed she was seeing this house as it had appeared some time in the 1920's. A newspaper lay open on the dining table to her right, but she didn't want to look at it. She didn't want to know.
She looked at the grand house around her, grimly, calmly. This was where Weeping Mary had wanted her to go, so what now? In the heat, sweat began to prickle her scalp.
It seemed wisest to try to avoid being seen. She looked forward toward the parlor, then to her right into the dining room, chose it, and crept inside. She made her way around the furniture to a door standing open on the far side. Through it she could see a pantry and beyond that through another doorway, a large kitchen.
The pantry was full of boxes, tins, jars, and cans on shelves, most of them bearing quaint, ornate labels. There were even a couple of familiar brands, including a slender brown glass bottle of Crisco cooking oil.
There was no one in the kitchen, and no one in another, smaller and friendlier, dining room beyond. They probably called it a breakfast room, and when the house was built, it might have been called the servants' dining room. A tiny sun porch past the breakfast room was being used as a laundry room, with a washing machine and dryer that were hardly recognizable, and a large glass jug of Clorox, among other items, on a shelf. There was a French door in the laundry room that opened into a backyard as flooded with sunlight as the room itself. The sunlight seemed too bright, even, like a psychotic's grin.
The door was locked; its knob refused to turn. Augusta considered kicking it, decided it would make too much noise and attract the attention of whatever or whomever might be locked inside with her, then decided she didn't have a prayer of surviving whatever was waiting for her here and kicked it anyway. It was like trying to break through a wall. The French door didn't budge, and its glass panes didn't so much as crack.
She set down her shovel and wound cord, drew her gun and fired, and watched a spray of sparks as the bullet bounced off a pane of glass. The side of a tin of soap flakes caved in as the bullet struck it and embedded itself in the wall behind. Better the soap than the Clorox. Few things burned worse in the eyes and nose than spilled bleach.
So much for that. She hadn't expected anything less, and put her gun away, picked up her shovel and cord, and walked back through the breakfast room. Another door stood open to her right, with the giant formal parlor beyond. It seemed that every door had been propped open to let air flow through the house. That was all one could do in the heat and humidity of a Toluca County summer before the advent of affordable air conditioning. In every house, every shop that could, and in all the grand hotels like the Lake View and the Iroquois, the windows and doors were left standing open in hopes of a breeze, while fans inside stirred the air in the meantime.
In a house like this, perhaps nobody was home, because every window was shut tight, leaving only the fans to try, and fail, to cool the rooms and halls. Wouldn't that be nice?
Augusta thought bitterly, but if you're going to hope for the impossible, why not go for broke and wish for a pony?
Here and there she passed doors that probably opened onto closets. She left them closed. Back in the front hall, it was time to go upstairs. There was something somewhere in here she had to see, as much as she dreaded it.
The staircase led to a large room that might be a sitting room, filled with bulky leatherbound chairs and a long sofa, but there were the same dark wooden tables topped with lamps with glass shades, and here was a cabinet filled with prissy figurines protected behind a glass door. The same dark paintings hung on walls between windows where heavy drapes drooped like rain-laden storm clouds. As they had downstairs, in a far corner, walls swelled to accommodate the tower, where a padded bench curved beneath a line of windows. An open door ahead revealed a room whose walls were lined with bookshelves, with a scattering of large chairs and a desk in a corner.
To her right another set of stairs rose up again to a landing, doubled back and rose higher to the third floor.
She saw more fireplaces, and more potted plants, and more ceiling fans and table fans spinning uselessly. The heat here was worse than downstairs.
To the left, an open door in an archway showed a vast bedroom. Large bed, a pair of armoires, dressers, a matching set of chairs and sofa. The master bedroom, certainly. Another fireplace, more plants and grim, ugly paintings. Cautiously, she walked to the door and looked in. In one wall another door opened on a bathroom larger than her apartment's living room. She saw a claw-foot tub big enough for an adult to float in. There was no one in sight.
The stairs to the third floor deposited her in a narrow hallway with doors opening on both sides, three each, and another straight ahead at the end. Of the seven, she counted two closed doors, the one at the end, and the right-hand door nearest the stairs, which rose up another story into darkness. The attic lay up there, or perhaps servants quarters. Maybe both.
The heat here was worst of all, and she felt a bead of sweat roll down across her forehead. On the third floor, light flowed only into the rooms, bedrooms from what she could see, and the windowless hallway itself was darker than anything downstairs. Only a few wall fixtures and lamps on tables would light it at night, but on a lovely and hot summer day from the 1920's, sunlight fell in broad bars through open doorways and showed a sloppy mess on the dark wood floor. She saw a long, wide and dark smear that led from one closed door down the hall to the other.
She heard the buzz of flies, and saw them rise up, float through the sunlight, and settle again, and when she stepped forward, black clouds took to the air, indignant at the disturbance.
The stain on the floor was blood. Augusta avoided it, careful not to step in it, and decided to check the open rooms first. The first, to her left, must be a girl's room, full of frills and quilts, and vases packed with flowers. The second was probably reserved for guests, and was elegant in a plain way. So was the third. She could look into rooms across the hall and saw more bedrooms there. One appeared to have been turned into some sort of artist's studio, with an unfinished painting on an easel, and others, unframed, leaning against the walls. The other was another guest room. Every room was deserted.
That left two closed doors, and whatever rooms lay behind them. Until now, the entire house might as well have been deserted, but there would be something...
What? Someone hurt. Someone else.
Goddammit. This entire time she'd been afraid of her fear, trying not to think and not to feel, and to do that, she had to force the thought of someone's suffering to become abstract and unreal. Here it was, as real as flies and blood, and she was wasting time trying to keep herself together when somebody else needed her.
Dammit. She was here, and somebody needed her help. Dread of what was coming was crushing, but she'd seen terrible things all day, and she could have died already a dozen times.
I am not a scared little bitch too afraid to do what has to be done, so why am I acting like it? Forget being afraid. Try being angry. Fuck this. Here at the end of the hall, she stood close enough to reach the knob of one closed door, so she grabbed it, turned, and flung it open.
She felt her face go blank as the door swung wide, struck a wall and bounced forward, slowed, and stopped. She was staring a bathroom that had once been white – white tiled walls and floor, white sink and toilet, white bathtub, white towels stacked on white-painted shelves, with a small, octagonal window of frosted glass at the end and a brass light fixture blossoming like a strange flower on the ceiling above.
The white bathroom dripped and ran with blood and was alive with flies. None of the blood had dried. Like that in the hall, every drop and smear was fresh.
On the wall by the bathtub something had been scrawled and dribbled down the tile wall. Two words:
YOUR FAULT