When a single fluorescent light buzzed to life overhead, the feeling of vast space vanished. Augusta recoiled as she saw why.
She looked around the small room, feeling sweat jell on her skin. There was the furnace in a far corner, the trunk from which branches of pipes and ducts curled away to wherever it was they went. There was the long sturdy table in the center, with a collection of flowerpots scattered on its top. She saw shelves crammed with junk and tools, and a few pieces of old furniture. She saw the washer and dryer, by far the newest objects down here. She saw the steep staircase leading down along one wall.
She had always hated that staircase. It was too steep, and hauling full baskets of laundry up and down had always been an exercise in dread. Would this time be the time she would trip and break out her front teeth when she slammed into the concrete floor at the bottom?
It had been one of the few things she had ever disliked about the brownstone on St. Germain Avenue.
The basement was cool, but the drying sweat on her skin made it cold. Why was she here? How was she here? The Hotel Iroquois had disappeared, and if this really was the basement of the house she shared with Joseph, it was several blocks to the south.
I don't understand. I don't understand what's happened here.
But I didn't understand it when I stepped through a picture frame on a riverboat that sank in 1918. What else is new?
Another thought – if this really was the brownstone, Joseph might be upstairs. He told her he would wait for her here. Then a realization – if he was here, she would have to kill him, and that would finally end all of this. With no threat left to her child, she could take Kitty home. She could leave Hell.
She reloaded her gun, noticing the blue rose lying atop boxes of bullets inside her backpack. All things considered, it was faring well, which seemed important. Zipping up her backpack and slinging it back into place, she holstered the gun.
It might be close to over. It really might be... Everything she'd had to endure since she parked her truck and stepped out. All the pain, all the suffering people, and the evil thing that relished it all and fed upon it.
Time to go upstairs, but the weight of the shovel on her shoulder reminded her – this house was old, its rooms were somewhat small and full of furniture. Throughout most of the house, there wouldn't be room to even swing the shovel without it impacting a wall.
So, she would need another weapon, something smaller that wouldn't take as much time or space to use. She had the gun, but it hadn't done much to prove its worth yet, though, she thought, hope does spring eternal after all.
Along with the flowerpots, she saw a few of her old gardening tools lying on the table. She had used them to cultivate her windowboxes with their lilies, all her potted plants, and the flowers she grew in the tiny scrap of yard in the back.
One caught her eye – it had four metal tines that looked something like a bony hand frozen into a claw. She walked to the table and grabbed it, feeling its weight and the plastic handle cool in her hand.
There was so much she would think of later, she considered. All these people with all their pain. Fear for herself and for her child, and here and there just a bit of hope. The Blue Lady and Weeping Mary helping or hindering as she ricocheted through a nightmare.
Later. Now, all that mattered was that she was close to the end if she really was here. She didn't know how she had gotten from the hotel to here, but however it was, it saved time and that could only be a good thing. Once rid of Joseph, with the one thing that could hurt her child dead and gone, the Blue Lady would give her back her daughter and she could go home. The angel who had protected Mary-Elizabeth all this time could finally let her go.
The stairs did not creak as she climbed, because they, like the rest of the house had been built to last. The house had been so sturdy, she could hardly believe it had been destroyed along with the rest of Silent Hill. At the top, she opened a door and stepped into the kitchen.
Everything around her had taken on the hazy, almost narcotic quality of a dream, and so she didn't jump, didn't gasp, didn't scream when she saw the Blue Lady standing at the head of the kitchen table, her back to Augusta.. The placemats and salt- and peppershakers had been swept aside and lay scattered on the brick floor. One placemat lay draped across the back of a white-painted wooden chair.
A man lay on the kitchen table, pinned by what could only be a sword, like a butterfly to corkboard. The hideous choked gurgling Augusta heard seemed to be coming from his open mouth, which worked, but failed, to make words. In one hand he clutched a large knife and waved it weakly at the Blue Lady.
Perhaps clutched wasn't the right word, she thought. It looked like his skin had melded around the knife handle, his fingers and most of the handle hidden in a lump of pale flesh.
For an instant the kitchen blurred, and its fixtures and appliances switched places with those from another era, much older. Hard winter sunlight replaced the mist rolling by outside the windows along the far wall straight ahead. Only the fireplace, ahead and against the wall to her left stayed the same. For an instant, and then the mist returned outside, while a modern white range and refrigerator bathed in the light of high-wattage bulbs inside.
And there, of course, was the midget fluorescent light, its glow slightly tinged with purple over one window. Her grow light, and she'd almost forgotten it. She saw a row of African violets lined up on the sill, each planted in an oversized coffee cup.
The Blue Lady wore a short, pale blue dress with a pattern of large blossoms – roses, it appeared – in darker blue. She wore a sheer, short-sleeved silk shirt the color of the sky, open like a jacket. On her feet were a pair of high thick-heeled sandals the color of faded denim. Her hair was pinned up and held in place by a complicated collection of pins set with sparkling sapphires, the same jewels that winked from each earlobe when she turned.
Her features blurred when she moved, as if viewed through a sheet of water. Everything blurred. When she spoke, the room vibrated. The power of her voice was tightly contained. If let loose, every bit of wood in the house would burst into splinters, every brick and block of stone would be ground to dust.
"Daughter, when you fight in my name, you strengthen me. When you come to the aid of the suffering, you strengthen me. When you pray, and when you hope, and when you struggle onward, you strengthen me. Before, all I could do was protect you, and keep your child safe and away from all this. Release another suffering soul, and I will fight for you. I will hold you in the palm of my hand."
Augusta reeled against the force of the Blue Lady's quiet voice. If she pitched backward, she would fall down the stairs. It's like a trance, she thought. She's hypnotizing me. Or something. I wish I knew what it was.
The Blue Lady extended her arm, balancing a large box wrapped in old-fashioned Christmas wrapping paper on her open palm. It hadn't been there before.
Augusta stared at the box. The wrapping paper had a pattern of silly cartoon Santas printed on it, and was tied with a fluffy green velvet ribbon that blossomed into a giant bow.
"Free the Innocent trapped here, and we will reach the end. The guilty suffer in this place, but those without guilt suffer most. You've suffered enough."
Who doesn't have guilt, Augusta wondered. I've got plenty. My child is dead because I killed her years ago.
"You asked, and forgiveness was given to you freely. You have no guilt."
Augusta flinched as her mouth dropped open.
The Blue Lady regarded her calmly, arm outstretched. Behind her, the kitchen changed and changed back. Snow and fog to sunlight. Sunlight to snow and fog. New to old to new again.
I'll think about it later. I'll think about what she just said later. Why do I feel so dazed? It's like trying to move underwater – why is that?
As she set her shovel down and left it leaning against the wall, she realized she could hear her pulse, calm and steady, in her ears. It seemed to take too long for the gardening tool, so like a tiny rake, to hit the floor when she dropped it. She reached forward and took the box.
"Take it upstairs. Someone's been waiting for it there since 1939."
1939 – the year an epidemic of a particular horrific birth defect struck Silent Hill. She'd read about it at the library.
She had read about something else there, too – in the list of crimes, the record of violence that seemed to roll on forever. A stabbing death the day before Christmas Eve on St. Germain Avenue... Had it been here, at this house? She wondered, glancing at the man with his hand melted around a knife, because the realtor never mentioned anything of the sort. But then, it was a long time ago.
She was walking, doing what needed to be done, going where she needed to go. The box in her hands was heavy. Something inside was moving weakly, and thumped against its walls from time to time.
How many times had she mopped this floor? The mortar between the bricks always took longest to dry. She crossed the kitchen to a swinging door that opened onto the living room.
The fireplace, a sofa and loveseat and enormous plush chair all in a pattern of red with gold stripes, or gold with red stripes depending on how you wanted to describe it. The big-screen TV and VCR, and a bookshelf stocked with nothing but movies to watch on cold nights and rainy days. More plants, lovingly tended. The grandfather clock belonged to her. She had bought it with her own money, so why had she left it behind? Framed maps hanging everywhere. Joseph and Augusta both loved maps.
The staircase was to her left. The living room as she remembered it looked superimposedagain for just an instant. The furniture was different, heavier and looming, creations of dark wood and leather. A Christmas tree stood in a corner, lightless but blanketed in ornaments of all kinds and colors, a mound of wrapped gifts heaped beneath. Flames consumed a pile of logs in the fireplace, which suddenly went dark, and the living room returned to normal.She and Joseph had made love on so many occasions on the rug in front of that fireplace.
Sometimes in the summer they would turn the air conditioning down as cold as it would go, so they could start a fire when they both came home from work and let the fire warm their naked skin. Augusta remembered Joseph's hairy chest, and the little curls of black hair in a line down across his stomach to...
She was climbing the stairs now. The runner changed from the design she remembered to a busy floral pattern and back again. At the top, the stairs deposited her into a hallway that split the second floor in half. Two bedrooms and a half-bath opened up on her right, a giant full bathroom and the master bedroom to her left. Of course the person waiting for this box would be in the master bedroom. Where else would they be?
The door was the farthest down on the left. The maps hung on the walls here became grim-faced portraits a century or more old, and then the maps returned. The thing inside the box kicked weakly and made a mewling sound. It was alive, obviously, but wouldn't be alive much longer, it seemed. Either that, or it shouldn't be alive at all.
This is what they mean when they say someone's in a reverie, she thought. I'm not under my own power here at all. This place is filled with the Blue Lady, and its as if the entire house is holding its breath. I'm like a burst of electricity moving along a wire. I started there and when I get here, something explodes.
The bedroom door was open, and what lay inside was not familiar. The bed was far too small, for one, and had a beautiful wrought iron headboard she had never seen before. The bureaus and dressers, and a table with a chair were all unfamiliar. And of course the woman in the bed didn't belong there either.
A knife had been driven like a stake through her heart, impaling her, and her throat was slit to the bone, which showed white and slick amid the red of her open throat and all the blood that poured from it. She wore an old-fashioned nightgown, and her hair was pinned up the way it always seemed to be on actresses in World War II movies. Her arms rose weakly, hands flutteringthen dropped. Blood had soaked the mattress and fallen in a cascade to the floor, where it had pooled on a large Oriental rug. When Augusta walked across the floor it sounded as though she were walking on spongy-wet grass.
The woman tried to turn to look at her, her head lolling too far from one side to the other. Her mouth shaped two words, the same two words over and over.
"My baby," she tried to say, but no sound emerged.
Augusta set the box on a table beside the bed, where a fancy lamp spilled soft light over a heavy water glass, and a framed black and white portrait of a smiling couple. She brushed them aside to make room, then untied the bow, slit the wrapping paper around the lid with her thumbnail, then lifted off the lid to look at the monster inside.
Ichthyosis fetalis – harlequin fetus.It was described in the book Laws of Other Worlds at the library. In locations suspected of unusually high levels of supernatural energy, strange things were known to happen often. In Silent Hill, not only did the Little Baroness vanish in 1918, but in 1939 more than a dozen babies were born, in a single month, with a birth defect that ordinarily presented in next to none of the population.
Considering that ichthyosis fetalis had no external causes, it was theoretically possible for nineteen women to have had an affair with the same man, all gotten pregnant, and all given birth to a grossly deformed baby, but the chances of every woman carrying the gene that would allow it were beyond astronomical. It wasn't possible, but Augusta thought it must have been what this woman's husband, what this baby's father, had concluded. And the result of that conclusion was a killing rage.
The creature inside was covered with yellowish plates of nail, and in every spot where a newborn's skin would dimple or bend, the plates were broken open and had scraped the tender flesh inside raw. The eyes were red pulp, and the mouth, pulled open into a parody of a grin, was little more than a raw red hole. Pus oozed from every crack, and the baby had a familiar wet, metallic odor.
Augusta stared at it grimly. It had been stabbed in the chest, likely with the same knife its father had used to kill its mother and nearly lop off her head. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female.
It made a sound, a strangled mew, and kicked. Two plates of its keratin shell clicked against one another.
Augusta reached inside the box and picked it up. Warm pus oozed across her fingers as she saw a wet patch on the floor of the cardboard box. Had she taken much longer to reach the bedroom, pus would have begun soaking through cardboard and wrapping paper and ribbon, onto her hands as she carried the box along. She bent, and the woman in the bed followed her with her eyes. Tears spilled across her cheeks.
"My baby," Her mouth formed the words as her arms reached. She was trying to rise, but the knife prevented it. Augusta cradled the baby in one arm and yanked out the knife with her free hand. The woman rose up immediately and her head flopped forward. The ragged edges of her throat met with a slap. She reached for her baby, and Augusta laid it in her arms.
The woman hugged it tight, closing her eyes.
Augusta stepped back. Echoes screamed at each other.
"You're wrong! It's not like that – that's not what happened! Please, can't you just let it be? It's bad enough – It's bad enough, please don't make it worse by saying I did something I could never do. How could you even think that, Louis?"
"I know what happened, so don't try to feed me this bullshit nonsense. All these women having all these things... You know, if a bunch of white women around town were having black babies, why wouldn't you think they'd all fucked a black man?"
Crying. "Don't. Just don't. Please."
"This thing is diseased, and some man out there is carrying around whatever blood or germs or whatever the hell causes this, and you fucked him. This is not my child. It can't be."
More crying.
"You did this. It's your fault, and I will not stand for it. When I'm done with you, I'll find whoever it was who helped you create this thing, and I'll give him a Christmas present. He'll surely have more use for it than me."
"What?" Alarmed. "What is that? What are you going to do?"
Screaming. "No, don't! Louis, don't!"
Stabbing sounds. A choking sputter as her throat was cut. The baby made a sound, and he stabbed it too. Then came the vicious sound of the knife being driving through her chest, into the mattress beneath.
Louis made a sound of disgust and said, "I can barely stand to touch the goddamned thing."
The echoes faded away. When they were gone, the woman and her baby had disappeared.