Augusta stood, listening to the hose nozzle slamming against the sides of the garbage chute, and stilled when the sound suddenly became muffled, then gasped when a wave of water washed out of the chute and swept down the hall. She looked down to see it spilling over the tops of her shoes.
What? What the hell was this? It couldn't possibly have filled the basement, so was the chute blocked? What could possibly block it completely?
Shit. This meant she would have to go back downstairs and try something else. She wanted to scream, but thought that if that something else involved shooting, she needed to reload her gun, so she swung her backpack around, unzipped and plucked a few bullets from the first box she could reach, and packed the Ruger's clip. She replaced it in its holster and sighed.
As she zipped it closed and slung her backpack around, she thought that the water flowing around her shoes was cold. Very cold, actually, and her heart siezed as she realized that if cold water hit the hot boilers below, they would explode. She slipped and almost fell as she fumbled for the valve to shut off the water, turned it as fast as she could, and watched the hose deflate. Fucking hell. How stupid had this been?
Too bad I can't think of anything else. What will I do if I really can't stop it? What will I do if all I can do is watch?
She ran for the stairs, splashing through water on the floor, following it downstairs, where it had poured down the staircase and swept across the floor of the laundry room. She saw it flowing toward a drain in the floor, drew her gun as if it would do some good, and ran for the huge open doorway. The shovel bounced on her shoulder as she ran, and the wound cord slapped gently against her side.
Sweet Christ, my head hurts. Please, can You do something about it?
At the doorway, she skidded to a halt and stared ahead, gaping, because in the boiler room everything had stopped – frozen in place, including a white sunburst of water erupting from the garbage chute at the rear. Augusta blinked. Her nose suddenly itched, and she brought up a wrist to wipe it, and it came away flecked with tiny bits of dried blood crust. When had her nose stopped bleeding?
She held out a hand, tentatively, to find that whatever had blocked the doorway before was gone now. Stepping inside the boiler room, she held her gun out. With as much of a kick as the Ruger had, a two-handed grip would be better, but she had to keep hold of her shovel.
I don't even know who to aim for.
The teenage girl, who looked the most harmless, stood closest to the door, and Augusta remembered seeing a girl's room in the Riley house. Who was this? Michael's sister? Why would she even be here? Her face was frozen in a scream. She had been begging her father to stop. Augusta circled her carefully, studying her, then turned. Three white men who looked to be in their forties, and two young black men, but something had changed. Before, Michael's father had been beating the young black man, who Augusta presumed to be Roddy, with a pipe. Now, he had tossed the pipe aside and was bending over, halted in place like everything else, as if lifting something heavy. He blocked her view, but she could see the door to the incinerator standing open.
Augusta bolted toward the rear of the room, passing boilers and hot water tanks, and skidded between the men who held the young black man in his tuxedo, and Michael Riley's father. She spun and saw that he was indeed bending to lift something heavy. The other black man, who wore only a pair of dirty khaki pants, had already been shoved halfway into the incinerator. His arms were flung over his head, and his eyes were open, but showed only whites. His mouth hung open slackly, and he could have been dead, but was more likely unconscious. His torso, slender and muscular and beautiful, gleamed with sweat and blood.
Or perhaps he was wide awake and still alive, but had stopped in a moment in time that made it hard to see which. Augusta stared down at him, eyes wide, breath gusting in and out. Beyond the incinerator's open door was a furnace of frozen flames, wrapping around Roddy's legs and bare feet.
He had run all the way here from East Silent Hill on bare feet.
Augusta jammed her gun in her holster and tossed her shovel aside, leaned against a wall beneath a metal sign that read: USE CAUTION! Overloading the incinerator can cause fires!
How true. Perhaps this was the reason the Hotel Iroquois had burned down – because someone overloaded the incinerator. She reached down to pull Roddy from the incinerator, bent to grab his wrists, and was blasted back through the cold suspended water bursting from the garbage chute. She screamed, reeling from a swirling storm of images that flooded her mind. Her mouth filled with water, and she turned, staggered out of the hanging cloud of water, and spat it out.
She held her hands to her head, feeling water run from her hair.
Images: Roddy – Radames Abraham Hodges – son of Pearl and Cyril Hodges, naked on a bed with Michael John Riley. They are fucking, but not fucking – it is love, and "fuck" is a nasty word that can't describe what they are doing. Roddy loves Michael and Michael loves Roddy. In the heat of the day, sweat trickles across their skin, and they each taste the salt of the other. In their kisses, their tongues search for one another.
Michael's sister, Annette, bursts through the door of Michael's room. She knows what they do in private, and while she has misgivings, in the end she figures that anything that makes her brother so deliriously happy can't be wrong. Now and again she even joins in their conversations, which they hold while Pearl cleans the house, about how New York or Chicago or Detroit or London or Paris or Berlin would offer a good and happy life to two men who love each other. She doesn't know of any other men who act the way her brother and Roddy act. What she does know is that if she were to ever even consider marrying or bedding a Negro man, her father would beat her to within an inch of her life and send her to boarding school, as far away as possible from Silent Hill.
She also knows that another option would be to accuse the Negro man of rape. In fact, that's all you have to do sometimes, if you want a Negro killed, especially if you don't want to spend the money to send a child away to a far away school. It's worse in the South, of course, but it happens here too. It happens everywhere.
That's how Harrison Sinclair, who was slightly retarded and who never harmed anyone in his life, got himself hanged two years ago. Marcie Gerber, a suspected prostitute and confirmed slut, saw him walking down the street as she drove by in her Ford, picked him up and said she would give him a ride home to Niggertown and then ran from the car screaming rape.
Just wanted to see what would happen, she said, and what happened was that bewildered Harrison Sinclair was taken downtown and put in the jail, and then turned loose by the smirking chief of police to a gathered mob who beat him senseless with a baseball bat someone was carrying, then hanged him from one of the trees on Koontz Street, right in front of Alchemilla Hospital. Then the men in the mob took turns hitting him with the bat, a contest to see how far they could make him swing. The winner got a dollar.
Annette knows all these things, and she knows her father, president of the First National Bank and Trust of Silent Hill, was part of the mob. And so, when she hurls open the door to Michael's room – turns away at the sight of their nakedness – to announce their father has come home unexpectedly, she knows that Roddy had better get himself covered and get himself hidden, or all hell will break loose. She doesn't even want to think about what might happen if their father discovers that not only is his son a Nancy boy, but a nigger-lover – in the most literal sense – as well.
Unfortunately, their father has begun to suspect that something untoward is going on, mainly because Roddy Hodges spends, in his opinion, entirely too much time at the Riley house. He's even there oftentimes when Pearl is not. Mr. Riley bounds up the stairs. He came home because he forgot a sheaf of legal papers in his library, but when he saw the startled fear on his daughter's face, he knows something is wrong.
Annette isn't fast enough, and before she can hear her father coming up the stairs, whirl and slam Michael's door shut, he sees his son and Roddy naked, sweaty and slick and gleaming in the sun coming in through a window. He is stunned, and for a moment he and Annette stare at one another in wide-eyed horror. Behind the door, Michael and Roddy stare at one another, abject terror on their faces.
Mr. Riley's shock turns to rage and he storms to the door, hurls his daughter aside, turns the doorknob and heaves open the door. The knob punches a hole in the plaster when it hits. Roddy is scrambling to pull on a pair of pants, the same filthy pants he wears to his job. In the summers he works with a mechanic in Wrightwood. A nigger, and the only one in town willing to fix the other niggers' cars when they break down.
All Michael can think to do is burrow under his quilt to hide his nakedness. His father rages into the room, but before he can reach Roddy and beat him until his skull splits open, Roddy has sprinted past him, into the hall and down the stairs, leaving his shirt, his suspenders, his cap and shoes and underclothes behind on the floor. Michael watches his father turn slowly toward him.
"You, I'll deal with later," he says with quiet threat, and turns on his heel. He can't look at his son right now. Can't even stand to think of what he's just seen. In the hall he grabs Annette by the arm.
"You knew about this, didn't you. I can see it on your face. Come with me."
Annette resists, and her father squeezes her arm hard enough so that she thinks he might break it.
"Come with me," he says again, and he drags Annette down the stairs.
"I have an idea where he's going, and so that's where we're going. You are going to say he tried to rape you, and we'll get this taken care of before it gets much farther along."
It's almost frightening how quickly the idea came to him, but it's a good one and he'll use it.
Roddy's brother, William Shakespeare Hodges, works as a waiter at the Hotel Iroquois, and Roddy will likely try to find shelter there, with his brother. Lots of niggers work at the Hotel Iroquois. The place crawls with them. They're all alike, and they'll try to hide one of their own, no matter how despicable a crime he commits. Thankfully, Mr. Riley knows the hotel's owner and manager well. They will help him, especially if Annette will say what he wants her to say. The notion of white womanhood violated is enough to boil to the blood of any man who would call himself American.
Michael Riley in a bathtub running with blood that never dries, where the flies swarm and drone and buzz endlessly in the heat. He feels this is his fault.
Annette Riley watching her father kill, wrapped in boiling guilt because she said what her father wanted her to say. She feels this is her fault.
Willy Hodges watching his brother being beaten to death, watching him shoved alive into the incinerator. He couldn't help him because there are only so many places to hide in the hotel, and the owner and manager, and Mr. Riley know them all. Willy feels this is his fault.
Roddy Hodges burning in the incinerator. He's alive and conscious, frozen in the split-second between screams. It makes him look deceptively at peace. He thinks again and again, Michael I love you. Michael, I'm sorry. If I go to heaven I'll wait for you.
He knows this is his fault. His burning body – his flesh and what little fat there is on his body – is too much for the incinerator. It was never designed to burn something as large as a human body. It was never designed to burn the grease and oil a body can generate, which creates too much heat, which creates a crack, and a bolt pops out, and the whole thing explodes in a vast cloud of flames that search out every vent and shaft, racing through the hotel to set it ablaze in minutes.
And then, upstairs are all the guests of the Hotel Iroquois who burned to death. They don't know what happened, and never will. All they know is that they're burning, although one man who tried to escape the flames in a full bathtub is boiling.
Augusta blew out her breath in a scream, and hadn't realized she had clutched two handfuls of her hair in her fists. She looked up – and when had she sunk to the floor? – her mouth open, her bottom lip quivering.
Mr. Riley stood over Roddy, his face stretched into a gargoyle's rictus of hate. Augusta drew her gun as she leapt to her feet, and shot him once and then again. Hollowpoint bullets entered through tiny holes and exited from gaping craters, just as they were designed to do. Most of Mr. Riley's head disappeared in a burst of red. When blood and bits of flesh hit the incinerator, they sizzled.
Nothing changed. Augusta holstered her gun and reached down to try again to pull Roddy from the incinerator.
Her fingers touched his skin. Michael I love you, Michael I'm sorry. I love you. I'm sorry. She pulled and nothing happened. It was like trying to bend steel girders. She tried again, and still nothing.
"DAMN it!" she wailed through clenched teeth, and stood. She turned toward Mr. Riley and stared at him. Why wasn't this over? She had shot him in the head, and then reminded herself that she had shot a lot of things in Silent Hill, and killing things in Silent Hill was never as easy as it seemed.
So, what now? And, what the hell was that? What's happening?
Something, a thick black liquid, was flowing from the holes in Mr. Riley's skull. As she watched, black trickles emerged from his nostrils, dripping over his lips, joining a stream pouring out between his teeth. A black tear spilled from his right eye, and then another from his left, tracing dark lines down his cheeks. There was more of it coming from his ears.
She looked down and saw a black puddle growing on the floor, looking like spilled oil. She shuddered and felt goosebumps prickle along her arms, even in the heat.
Nothing else moved in the boiler room. Annette, Willy, Roddy, and the owner and manager of the hotel stood motionless, stopped where they stood. Augusta sidestepped between the puddle and the two men who held Willy Hodges's arms pinned behind his back, then turned to back away, taking care to keep the oily black puddle in view. Whatever this was, it couldn't be good. Dear God, how much of it could there possibly be? Now it was pumping from his wounds, splattering the incinerator and running down its surface to the floor. Unlike blood, it did not sizzle.
It was time to find some way to get rid of whatever it was before it did something. Her shovel would help – maybe she could scoop it up and toss it in the incinerator – but she had left it leaning against the wall, and she would have to go back to get it. She hesitated for a moment, then ran forward and leapt across. The puddle was growing quickly, and slid around the shoes of the hotel manager and owner, and Willy Hodges.
She grabbed her shovel, turned, and bent to scoop up the mess on the floor.
It shied away from the shovel blade, parting in a wide crescent. A ripple passed over its surface.
This is not good. She tried again and black puddle neatly slid away. She pulled the shovel away, lifted it, and lay it across her shoulder. Time to find something else. She would have to jump over it again, because here she was backed against the wall and the water in its frozen spray.
She took a deep breath, stepped back and prepared to jump, leapt, and crashed to the floor when something grabbed her ankle and squeezed. Hard. She lay on the floor stunned, spots dancing across her vision. Her skull throbbed, and seconds passed before she could even think to yank her foot free.
When she pulled, the thing clamped around her ankle only squeezed harder. She kicked at it, turning to see a hand emerging from the puddle, its fingers slick and black, wrapped tight.
"Oh, Jesus." The puddle rippled and flowed, and a shape rose up from it slowly, looking vaguely like a hooded figure. The hand rose with it, still clutching her ankle, pulling her along, across the floor and up into the air. Black liquid still spurted from Mr. Riley's shattered skull, and ran in sheets across his clothes, down the front of the incinerator, and across Roddy's still form.
One leg in the air, she lay on her back looking up at shiny blackness taking shape. A head and two arms, glistening, took form, but below what should have been a torso, the shape was anemic and thin. Augusta thought of Weeping Mary outside of Summerland Cemetery, with her upper body that of a woman and a long, fat snake's tail below. She snarled and thrashed, trying to free her foot.
Abruptly, the oil pouring from Mr. Riley's wounds stopped, the last black drops running down to the floor. The shape pulled the puddle from the floor into itself as ripples, almost tiny waves, raced up and down. Augusta yanked her foot, but couldn't free it, and drew her gun.
Features began to form on the head. She could make out a nose, and twin hollows for eyes. A slit for a mouth opened wide in a grotesque yawn, and she saw that it had teeth.
She shot it in what should have been its chest. The bullet passed through, throwing out droplets that hung in the air for a moment, then flew back into the mass, as if it couldn't bear to part with even the smallest bit of itself.
It began to blanch and, spreading out from the hand with itsgrip like a vise,harden, slick oil thickening into something like leather. The head turned toward her, and two eyes opened, showing white. The mouth formed a smile. Black to brown to tan to the pale of a white man's skin. The face was familiar, that of Mr. Riley.
"Hello, Pearl," it said. "Do you know what your son's been up to today?"