She fled the house, down the stairs to the second floor where it was slightly cooler, and down the stairs to the first floor, where it was cooler still. Old furniture in an old house, baking in old heat from sunlight eighty years dark. In the front hall she threw open the door and stepped out into cold mist, and the door slammed shut behind her hard enough to shatter the glass in its windows.
She looked back, mouth set in a hard line and saw curtains pulled tight. If she looked in, she knew she would see the house as it had appeared in 1999, on the eve of Silent Hill's demolition by the wave of mud and ruin and water sweeping down. Turning away, the chainlink cage still trapped her, and as it had led her to the house, it would lead again wherever it would lead, and she had no choice but to follow.
It swept down the stairs, between old trees and pretty lampposts into Cook Street but instead of turning south, now it blazed its trail straight ahead through the square. Augusta followed, and coming closer, she saw this square enclosed by a tall iron fence, with lush trees towering behind. Azaleas as colorful as those along the front of the house behind her pushed through between the fence tines, crying out in purple, white, and red, and blaze orange. There was a large open gate where the path passed beneath an arch, and Augusta found herself in a forested park . A plaque affixed to a granite plinth nearby read Wesson Square Park.
In the center, the path curved neatly around a fountain, still splashing, with water tumbling from tier to tier to tier, festooned with vines and moss. Emerging on Ferris Street, it turned north, then left, to the west, at the next intersection. The commercial buildings of Pickton Street made their appearance, then receded back into gloom as the path crossed the street, then rose up into space, up over the riverside park, and then the Illiniwak River.
Beneath her feet the chainlink clanged and quivered. Far away to her left, the mangled Massey Street Bridge was a vague shape, almost lost, and halfway across the river it disappeared. That was the part that had fallen as she ran across, she realized, and shuddered. Joseph had been tangled in fallen beams there, and now he must be gone. He would be waiting for her at the house in the Windowbox District, if she lived to meet him there.
Which she wouldn't, but someone had to help Michael John Riley and Roddy, and there was no one else to do it.
I accept it.
Far below her, the Illiniwak River flowed on to Toluca Lake uninterrupted and calm. She wondered what it hid because after all, Silent Hill's houses and shops, its schools and theaters and libraries hid terrible things, and the rivers and lake had been a preferred way to rid the city of bodies in the epidemics of the past. There was even a monument in Rosewater Park to commemorate those whose bodies had been sunk in the lake when there were simply too many to bury at one time. That, and sometimes boats and swimmers and even small planes just sometimes went missing over Toluca Lake, and were never heard from again. What lay beneath the water? Probably nothing good, because she had learned there simply wasn't much good to be found in Silent Hill.
She crossed the river in mist, and when the cage finally alighted again, it came to rest north of the library, in the embrace of tree branches lush with leaves. Then it ran ahead, across a sidewalk and into an intersection where one street ran north and south and another ran straight ahead. She paused to get her bearings. Buildings to her south, a park to the north that bulged up from the riverside greenway. This was Finney Street, which ran along the north edge of Burke Square, two blocks away. If the path ran straight ahead along Finney Street, it would take her past the front steps of First Baptist Church, and beyond that it would run between Silent Hill City Hall and the Hotel Iroquois, and then on through downtown Silent Hill to the Toluca River where it would cross on a bridge and run all the way to the edge of Old Silent Hill on the far side.
Augusta suddenly realized that at the farthest end of Finney Street lay Settlers Park, with I-55 cutting through, and north, across the park from Old Silent Hill lay Wrightwood. In 1999, Wrightwood was where the artists and bohemians lived. In 1920-whatever it was the neighborhood where poor people and black people lived, and was unashamedly called Niggertown. It was the neighborhood where Pearl and her family, including Roddy, would have lived.
Would the path lead there? Had Michael Riley's father done something to his housekeeper's family? Augusta couldn't recall ever reading about anything like that. Racial violence in Silent Hill seemed, as far as she could remember, to be restricted to those three lynchings and the common, million little slaps of segregation, which had thrived every bit as much in the North as in the South.
Walking along Finney Street she passed the park. A tiny block of shops stood to her left, a street appeared, and then she passed between two more narrow blocks, one on either side before the intersection of Finney Street and Glover Avenue appeared. Silent Hill First Methodist Church in all its glory of muted golden brick and white marble hulked into view across Finney Street. She followed along in her cage as tall arched windows kept pace beside her.
The trees were so green, their leaves hanging limply, even as snowflakes fell and melted. Olson Avenue appeared, the church backed up to its sidewalk, and Burke Square unrolled in open space to her left, while First Baptist Church reared up to her right. She saw the poplars in their groves, and saw now they were far from dead. They were bursting with life. Silent Hilda atop her fountain was an indistinct dark shape in the center of the square among its lawns and paths. Across the square, the Robert Black Memorial Auditorium had completely disappeared in the fog.
She stopped and stared up at First Baptist Church. She thought again that she had gone to church here. It was enormous, and had been a mark of pride for Silent Hill when it was finished in 1928, a sign the resort city on the shores of Toluca Lake was a modern capital of leisure, just as trendy and chic as it could be. Rumor had it a mobster from Chicago had financed its construction.
Help me, she prayed again as she had before. You've been by my side the whole time I've been here, or else I'd be dead or stark raving insane. Please walk with me. I need You because otherwise I don't stand a chance. Please hear me, and please guide me, and please be with me. Amen.
She walked on in the quiet. There were flowers everywhere, at the base of every tree, and in huge pots on the church's front portico. It seemed Silent Hill was slowly being overtaken by plant life. The longer she stayed, the greener it got, no matter the falling snow. It probably meant something, but she didn't know what. Maybe something good, as it had been in Summerland Cemetery, and wouldn't that be a refreshing change of pace?
Dear God, help me. Help me do this, whatever it is. I didn't think I could before, and I'm still not so sure now, so it's up to You. Don't let me have come this far for nothing.
She didn't want to leave the church behind, but as she walked along, Silent Hill City Hall emerged on the left, with all its turrets and towers stabbing at the mist, while across Finney Street stood the Hotel Iroquois in all its grandeur. It filled the entire block north of City Hall with its beautiful building, its gardens, its swimming pool and tennis courts. A drive curved in a crescent from Finney Street up to the entrance and back to the street again, and to Augusta's shock, the chainlink cage turned to follow it.
The Hotel Iroquois? What the hell?
The only thing she could remember about the Hotel Iroquois was that it had caught fire and burned to a shell of itself...
...some time in the 1920's.
But what did that have to do with anything? A fire? It had been a disaster, and people had died, and if Weeping Mary had anything to say about it, the people who had died were probably still dying in there to feed her. But what did any of it have to do with Michael John Riley and his friend Roddy? She stared up at it.
Outside, it had been abandoned for five years and left to rot since 1999. On the inside, though, as she had found the Riley house, it would be another hot day eighty years in the past. Outside along the roof the name was spelled out in steel letters attached to a scaffold, but by 1999 the Days Inn sunburst had also glowed in the night in metal and plastic on the building's portico, where once carriages, and later cars, had pulled up to the entrance to spit out their passengers. Inside, no one had ever heard of Days Inn, and the magnificent Hotel Iroquois had never burned down, and never been rebuilt, never faltered and finally failed in the 1970's, never been bought in the 1980's and restored as a modern and clean, but substantially less glamorous choice among Silent Hill's array of lodging.
Inside, it was still by far the most luxurious place to stay when down from Chicago or over from New York or Hollywood to enjoy the delights of Silent Hill. Outside, that mantle had passed back to the Lake View Hotel twenty years ago. Joseph had talked about it often.
Did the fire at the Hotel Iroquois have to do with Michael Riley's father? Had she ever read anything about it? Could she recall anything about it?
She couldn't, and sighed. Whatever it was, she'd either forgotten it or had never known it at all, and why not? There were probably any number of things that no one knew about Silent Hill. The hotel was intimidating and looked back at her with a hundred blank, black windows, the rooms dark behind glass. Some drapes were pulled, she noticed, while others were flung wide. Some windows were open, other closed. The rooms behind open windows would be nothing more than soggy, mildewed ruins now, she thought. Along the first floor arched windows in two long rows on either side of the door looked in on an exercise room and a modest restaurant, abandoned and lightless.
To her left as she walked along the semicircular drive, the front gardens exploded with colors and blossoms. A couple of paths wound randomly through the flowers, and benches placed here and there were engulfed in great clouds of butterfly bushes. To her right a desperately overgrown lawn swept up to bushes and small trees planted along the front of the hotel. Beneath her feet, chainlink struck cracked cement and rattled as it shivered.
Up under the portico, the cage turned abruptly toward the entrance and molded itself to the doorway like the mouth of a parasitic worm. Augusta saw bland glass doors, grimy now, but once they had been made of wood, with a doorman standing at attention to open them with a smile.
She wondered what a doorman in 1920-whatever would have said to her, because while black men and women were permitted to clean the hotel and work in its kitchens and dining room, they would not, under any circumstances, have been permitted to stay there as guests.
She also wondered what a doorman would have worn in the heat of a summer long ago.
What had An Unwanted County said about the fire at the Hotel Iroquois? When had this hotel burned down? It had something to do with the boilers and the water heaters in the basement. Some malfunction...
She couldn't force herself to believe that in reliving torture that had occurred in the 1920's, it wouldn't be connected to another tragedy from that decade.
When she grabbed the handles and pulled, the doors opened only grudgingly, a few inches, then a few inches more, and more, and each time she had to yank at them with a grunt. Pain encircled her head like an ugly crown. Rust flaked down from the door hinges. She stepped inside to find herself in a glass-enclosed vestibule with a pair of luggage carts rusting to one side across from a broken vending machine filled with ruined snacks and a large bin of brochures that had turned to soggy mush. She heard the squeak of a door sliding closed on oiled hinges behind her, turned, and saw a polished, gleaming oak door swinging shut. It had brass handles and hinges, she noted, turned, and the glass box of the vestibule was gone, replaced by an ornate wooden nook with plush padded benches to either side.
Just a little space to baffle the cold or the heat or the wind when the doors were opened.
Again, she thought. It's happening a-fucking-gain. I'm always going back and forth. A giant elegant clock standing in the middle of the lobby was winding backwards, she saw. The hands of all four clock faces swept along faster than she could track them. A bronze statue of Atlas, long since turned green from damp and age, strained under his burden of time in the center of a circle of wooden benches topped by thick velvet cushions.
Augusta walked toward it all, staring at the clock atop the statue, crossing an intricately tiled floor. Bands of color wound back and forth. In 1999, the lobby had been carpeted, and she saw that all the comfortable but blandly modern furniture had been replaced with the sofas and chairs and potted plants of the 1920's. In weak light from the windows they seemed to be waiting for... something, and suddenly crystal chandeliers above and sconces on the walls flared to life.
All the while the silence was broken only by the incessant grind of the clock hands spinning backwards. Augusta turned, watching the lobby change. Straight ahead beyond the clock, a massive wooden check-in desk replaced one of Formica, and grew a stained glass canopy supported by bronze eaves crafted to look like tree branches.. In the rear, a triplet of elevators stood to the left while a staircase swooped down in a graceful curve from the right. Polished bronze doors with some sort complicated pattern replaced plain dulled brass at each elevator.
She saw utilitarian glass walls to the left and right replaced by sets of wide double doors and intricate leaded glass windows set inside archways as the Days Inn's workout room gave way to the Hotel Iroquois's ballroom, and as a plain, modern restaurant was dissolved by an elegant fine dining room that could have been transported from Paris at the height of the Belle Epoche.
Lamps on tables glowed beneath colored glass shades, and rugs unrolled on the floors.
And at last the clock began to tick again, and the statue of Atlas that held it up was polished and new again. She looked up at the clock face and saw that it read 3:17, certainly in the afternoon, in the hottest part of the day, and she suddenly noticed that muted sunlight poured in through closed drapes that had replaced fiberglass blinds. Ceiling fans above, which hadn't been there before, studded a carved plaster ceiling and spun to throw the air against itself. A cool breeze flowed through the lobby.
She thought that if she had stepped into this lobby in 1920-whatever, a black woman in bloody clothes, looking and feeling as though someone had beaten her, a clerk would have summoned the police immediately. Come to think of it, the same thing would have happened in 1999. She looked like hell. The only difference was that then, she would have been thrown in jail. Now, someone would have called an ambulance.
Where now? She was now in a time when someone somewhere in this building was suffering. Dad was killing Roddy somehow, somewhere here.
Where? The clock ticked, and against the tile and wooden walls and plaster ceiling, each tick echoed.
If Roddy had fled the Riley house, why would have come here anyway? How would he have gotten in?
The back door. Some sort of service entrance, but she still didn't know why a young black man looking to hide from a white man angry enough to kill him would have tried to find shelter in a place like the Hotel Iroquois.
Maybe someone he knew worked her – a relative or friend. That would make sense. Who and where, though. The hotel had laundry rooms and kitchens and handyman's supply closets, and they would all be in the basement or toward the back of the building, so that was where she needed to go.
She still didn't think she would survive this, but broke into a run. She didn't know where she would find a door that would lead into the halls and rooms meant to be hidden from the public, and didn't care to look. There was a door behind the front desk and that would do. If it was locked, she would break it down. She ran to the front desk, tossed her shovel and cord across, then clambered over and picked them back up. Her head pounded, and she nearly lost her balance, but managed to stand.
The door wasn't locked, and opened onto a dim hallway lined with glass-walled offices where lamplight glowed between the slats of wooden blinds. Not very far away, the hall intersected with another and there were signs on the wall there pointing the way to the ballroom and kitchen. She hurried ahead to the intersection, and looked left and right to see a hallway stretching ahead to the far ends of the building. Along the way she noticed old-fashioned glass cases set into the walls that would hold fire hoses coiled on metal frames , and saw that at each end there were large doors like those of a cabinet that probably opened onto laundry chutes. There were more doors that must open onto storage. To her right toward the restaurant and kitchen were doors that looked to be those of refrigerators and freezers.
She hesitated. Would Roddy have been thrown into a freezer? Should she check? It didn't seem brutal enough, and worse, back in 1920-whatever, such an act would have interrupted dinner preparations. If Roddy was here, he was somewhere else.
To her left, farther along was an open door. She trotted toward it, the pain in her skull pulsing every time her feet hit the floor, to see a black shaft with cables hanging down through empty space. A small brass plaque on the door read Maids' Elevator. Below her in the basement would be the laundry room. It must be there because there was nothing large enough to hold it here. Other doors nearby were marked as storage rooms. When she pressed one of four buttons in a brass plate beside the elevator door, nothing happened. Another plaque on another door nearby read Staircase in elegant script.
She stood for a moment, thinking. What else might be down below? The boiler room, perhaps? You could torture someone exquisitely if you had access to a hot boiler, but in the heat of summer why would you need a boiler? Maybe to heat the hotel's bath water. She didn't know, and opened the door to the stairway.
A set of utilitarian metal stairs led her to a huge room where towering shelves were stacked with sheets, blankets, and towels, and where gigantic, archaic washers and dryers were fit in amid a forest of metal columns supporting the floor of the ballroom above. To her surprise, she found that almost all of the washers and dryers were churning and tossing loads of linens inside. Some sloshed behind glass doors in sudsy water, others tumbled through hot air. It felt like a furnace down here, but large fans spun behind grilles, most of them turned toward a ventilation shaft. They seemed to be trying, but failing, to force the hot air toward the vent, whose shaft likely ran all the way up to the roof. The service elevator, its door standing open and a fully loaded brass laundry cart wedged in the opening, halfway into the elevator car, was nearby.
There was no one here, and she turned to see a wall dividing the room. The basement was split into two large rooms, and in an archway in the wall, two vast doors were closed tight. If opened, the doorway would be large enough to let a truck through. Augusta ran to the doors, which looked medieval, made of thick wooden planks bound with strips of wrought iron and opened with a pair of heavy iron rings.
She pulled, but the doors refused to budge, and an uneasy thought came to mind suddenly. She had seen two laundry chutes upstairs, one at either end of the hall, but only one actually opened into the laundry room, which meant the other was reserved for what? Garbage? A garbage chute might make sense if there was a way to remove heavy loads of garbage from the basement and then the hotel while keeping it out of sight of delicate, well-heeled guests who would object.
She yanked at the doors again. They didn't seem to be locked, only stuck, the wood swollen by the laundry room's humidity.
Or if one chute was meant for garbage, that meant there might be a way to get rid of some of that garbage in whatever room lay beyond these doors. How, though? A crusher? An incinerator?
An incinerator. Dear God. She braced herself with a foot, grabbed one ring with both hands and wrenched it back and forth, nearly screaming from the effort and from the pain rocketing from side to side inside her head. It felt as though her skull was cracking.
And finally the doors burst open, throwing her backward onto the floor where the throbbing pain of her headache flared in a silent white scream that sent tears spilling down her cheeks. She had to use her shovel to brace herself and climb to her feet, and by the time she stood up everything around her seemed to drift back and forth through a watery blur. Panting and leaving on her shovel, she waited until it passed.
If I pass out, I die, she thought. I can't die without at least trying to do something. She raised her head and looked up through the doorway.
Ahead, another vast room was filled with machinery. She saw enormous, convoluted-looking generators, and ranks of water tanks and boilers standing on metal struts. A forest of pipes criss-crossed overhead. A wide aisle ran between them to the far end. Each massive water tank was marked with a warning painted in red. CAUTION: HOT WATER.
At the end of the room, below a large open door in the wall, was a snowdrift of garbage – paper and broken glass, and a broken chair waiting for their turn in a large, evil-looking incinerator nearby beyond the boilers. Volcanic heat rolled out in a lazy billow.
She counted six people grouped in the room. Three white men and a teenaged girl, and two young black men, one of whom was dressed in a waiter's tuxedo and was being held, his arms pinned behind his back by two of the white men, while the other lay on the cement floor trying to shield himself from blows raining down. The third white man was beating him with a pipe. The girl and the young black man in the tuxedo were crying and screaming. The young black man on the floor pleaded and begged. The white man with the pipe shouted as the pipe rose and fell, while the other white men watched in stoic, stony silence. They were clearly not happy at having to touch a black man, as if the color might rub off on their hands and dirty them.
Augusta watched in shock for a moment, then shifted her shovel from right hand to left, reached, and drew her gun. She rushed forward, and in the doorway, hit a wall. When she connected, an iridescent sheen flashed outward in an oily bloom, then faded. She tried again, and watched another rainbow bruise blossom and vanish in the air.
She holstered her gun, grabbed her shovel and swung it back, then hefted it forward. The shovel blade bounced backward, and she had to fight to keep her grip. Over the din from the boiler room, she couldn't be sure, but thought she heard a hum every time the iridescence appeared.
Trying to shoot through the doorway couldn't possibly be a good idea. The bullet would probably just bounce back. Maybe. She didn't know.
She snarled in frustration, watching the beating go on and on. The pipe rising and falling, the young black man in the tuxedo struggling, the girl with her clenched fists begging the man to stop, but afraid to intervene herself.
Augusta looked around her and saw nothing that would help, and finally in desperation, she hid behind the nearest support column, set the shovel down and drew her gun, aimed and fired, and yipped in surprise when the bullet ricocheted and whined past her ear. Iridescence flared, brightly this time.
She holstered her gun and ran back to the doorway, watching helplessly. There was no way to stop it, because she couldn't go through the door.
So, what about the garbage chute? Staring ahead, her heart pounding, and her head throbbing in time, she thought that at least it was another way in. It would be suicide to try it though, but wasn't it suicide to be here at all?
A thought – maybe she could use the chute another way, and turned and bolted for the stairs. At the top she turned and looked down the hall toward the garbage chute and saw a glass case with its fire hose, protection against a blaze in an age before sprinklers. She ran for it, tossed down her shovel and cord, then wrenched open the glass cabinet door.
The hose was heavy and much larger and longer than she expected, and she struggled to lug it to the garbage chute, where she pulled open the chute door, and dropped the hose down into darkness. She ran back to the cabinet set into the wall and pulled the rest of the hose out, watching it hit the floor with heavy thumps.
At the back of the cabinet was a large brass valve, and Augusta reached in to turn it. If this hose sprayed as much water as a modern hose, the beating couldn't continue. It couldn't because everyone there would have to run or else risk being swept off their feet and slammed into boilers or hot water tanks. The valve squeaked and squealed as it turned, and suddenly the hose went rigid as water filled it. Augusta spun the valve until its brass wheel refused to move any further, then looked down to see the hose had inflated and flung out its kinks and bends, as much as it could, and was piping what looked to be a vast amount of water down the hall and then down the chute. She could hear it spraying, and could hear the hose nozzle clanging as it thrashed back and forth inside the garbage chute.
She shivered and panted, swallowing, as she retrieved her shovel and the wound cord. It would have to stop now, she thought.
God help me.