She was still wrapped in her trance, but recognized the bedroom as the one where she and Joseph had slept. The bed was familiar, as was all the other furniture. The floor was carpeted now, no longer hardwood covered in a bloody rug.
Joseph's postcards hung on the wall. Wherever he traveled, or wherever his friends traveled, Joseph collected postcards, and now they hung in a band at head height all the way around the room. There were more than a hundred, each framed behind glass, and the frames were made of wood or metal, plastic, woven straw, and even a few of bone or seashell. Augusta looked at them, the expression on her face vaguely sad.
New York, Seattle, Sedona, Key West, Cancun...
The room began to vibrate, and the framed postcards rattled on their hooks. Some swung gently from side to side.
Cape Hatteras, Boston, Winnipeg, Montreal...
This was Joseph's space. Not hers.
Playa del Carmen, Banff, London...
Joseph had a broken music box that he treasured. When it had worked properly, it played John Lennon's Imagine. After it broke, it only played part of the first verse before it turned back on itself and repeated, over and over again. Imagine there's no Heaven... played by plucking metal tabs as the coil unwound. It was made of glazed ceramic, and the sculpture that turned slowly atop it as it played was the word "peace" spelled out in blocky letter stacked atop each other in a column.
Juneau, Charleston...
The music box began to play. She knew where it was – sitting atop the dresser against the wall across from the foot of the bed. Lying in bed, you could see it. It sat beside the television.
Imagine there's no Heaven... Imagine there's no Heaven... Imagine there's no Heaven...
Silent Hill...
The room bucked; furniture jumped an inch off the floor and crashed back down. The music box continued to play as the post cards flew from the walls. Some flew out in straight lines, others in arcs to smash against walls, and the ceiling and floor. Those that flew at her seemed to hit a barrier and exploded in bursts of glass and shattered frame that rained down on the carpet. The postcards, colorful pictures on thin cardboard followed, drifting down like dying autumn leaves.
The wallpaper had a pattern of leafy curlicues in wide vertical stripes, a very pale green against a beige background. She saw something dark bleeding through, forming shapes that she recognized as letters, and then as words.
Maybe it was paint, but more likely blood.
HERE'S A LULLABY TO CLOSE YOUR EYES...
IT WAS ALWAYS YOU THAT I DESPISED...
I DON'T FEEL ENOUGH FOR YOU TO CRY...
SO HERE'S A LULLABY TO CLOSE YOUR EYES...
GOODBYE
Lullaby. It was a lullaby for a dead child. This was simply more twisting of the knife. He hated her, which wasn't a surprise. After all, he'd said as much.
Imagine there's no Heaven... Imagine there's no Heaven...
He'd loved that damn thing. He thought it was funny, how it broke in just such a way to play just that part of the song. Augusta had never liked it because it made her feel a little uneasy, how it had broken like that.
The scent of perfume was suddenly in the air. The words on the wall were beginning to run and ooze. Augusta turned to see the Blue Lady looking back at her with a slight smile on her face. She stood by the dresser, holding Joseph's music box in her hands.
"He fills this house," said the Blue Lady. "His hatred bleeds out through the walls."
And the music box exploded. Shards of ceramic and bits of metal fell to the floor, where they clattered against shattered glass and broken picture frame.
Before the last piece fell, the top floor of the house disintegrated. For a moment, a storm of bricks and shattered boards and broken pieces of furniture raged around her. Dust and nails, chunks of wood and masonry whirled around her as if she stood in the middle of a tornado, watching the world come apart around her. Wind tore at her and at last the seashell comb that had held her hair in place all this time let go. Her hair unrolled stiffly, then separated into ropes that lashed at her face.
When the dust cleared, Augusta blinked in sudden blinding sunlight. She looked up, as did the Blue Lady, to see the clouds high above swirling around a tight opening of blue sky. Augusta thought it looked like a hurricane spinning around its eye. Sun shone down in a single slant like a spotlight, only on the ruins of the house and on its small backyard. At the edges of the cone of sunlight, wind roared, and mist and snowflakes spun in a furious whirlwind.
Augusta realized she could hear things breaking and tearing apart. Trees splintered and roofs took flight. Windows burst and cars were thrown end over end down St. Germain Avenue. Inside the sunlight however, there was only a stiff breeze.
The Blue Lady pointed at Augusta, indicating something behind her. She turned to look and saw, with the mist tearing around it, a wall of slick, glistening mud frozen in place and towering above her, edging into sunlight.
"Everything north of here is gone," said the Blue Lady, and Augusta knew what this was – the wall of mud that had obliterated Silent Hill five years ago. It was all the water contained behind the City Reservoir Dam, the shattered dam, rocks, dirt, and twisted trees. That, and all the buildings between here and the edge of the national park.
A long time ago, Amethyst, the desk clerk at the Ramada Inn in Brahms, had said two large hills were swept away when the dam broke, and they were in there too. Augusta could only guess at how many millions of tons of debris and water were simply standing still, halted in their sweep toward Toluca Lake.
All it would take, the Blue Lady seemed to indicate, would be a single word, a single action, and in an instant Silent Hill would be wiped from the map again. It would leave Augusta's nightmares and rise again in someone else's. Pieces of debris, some of them very large, were hurled into the wall of mud, each hitting with a loud smack.
"Let's go now." What remained of the second floor collapsed onto the first, flattening everything below. To Augusta, it felt as though an elevator had dropped a few feet, or as though she had tripped on a stair.
To her right, across the remains of the house was the backyard, bathed in sunlight and teeming with flowers of all kinds. Augusta recognized her rose arbor and azalea bushes. She saw her butterfly bushes, lilies, and gooseneck flowers. There were only two trees in the backyard, one a towering poplar, the other a myrtle tree that with all its blooms looked like a red cloud. A tall brick wall blanketed in flowering vines ringed the yard.
In the center of it all, crowded by flowers was a brick patio a little less than ten feet by ten feet, home to a small table and a few plastic chairs.
In one corner, shaded by a waving curtain of roses dangling down from the arbor, Mary-Elizabeth sat at a small table with a handful of stuffed animals in tiny chairs. There was a plastic pitcher, and plastic cups and saucers on the table, along with a small plate heaped with cookies. She was having a tea party.
"Take the rose from your backpack, and the seal from your pocket. Now is the time to use them."
At the library, Augusta had torn a page with the Seal of Metatron drawn upon it from a book, folded it and put it in a pocket of her jeans. Now she dug a hand in to retrieve it. Then, she swung her backpack around, unzipped it and plucked out the blue rose from inside, from the spot where it rested on boxes of bullets. She shrugged off the backpack and dropped it. Everything inside spilled out to clatter on the patio bricks. She held the seal in her left hand, and the rose in her right.
The trance still held. Augusta wanted to hurtle across the patio and scoop up her daughter. Instead, she flicked her left hand and tossed the seal down on the brick patio. The stiff breeze caught it, but it sank toward the ground and when a corner of the folded page touched down, a pattern of phosphorescent blue flame raged to life across the bricks. In their corner, the small table and its chairs were hurled skyward, drifted toward the raging wall of mist, and were snatched away.
A Seal of Metatron ten feet square burned on the patio, where, in the center, a mound was growing and pushing up bricks. One by one bricks lifted up, shot upward and were thrown away to disappear. A fountain of thrown up soil followed, and then Weeping Mary, like a movie zombie bursting out of its grave.
Mary-Elizabeth remained oblivious. She lifted a cup to a teddy bear's yarn smile.
Weeping Mary snarled her fury and looked much the worse for wear as she fell to her knees. Her parrot top had been ripped away to show that her breasts were missing. They were cleaved off and gone, and blood ran from twin raw wounds the size of saucers. One arm was broken, and the bone had burst through the skin. Half of her hair was gone. Part of her scalp was peeled down and flapped in the breeze.
Her sunglasses were gone as well, but no blood poured from her empty eye sockets. They were no longer empty, even, Augusta saw. Now they were packed with dirt.
"You bitch," she growled at the Blue Lady. "You held her back, otherwise I would have had her. I was waiting for her to walk across so I could grab her. You've helped her this entire time. I thought I'd tied you tighter than that this time."
The Blue Lady replied calmly, "She belongs to me, and when those who belong to me and Mine stand against the likes of you, my chains are loosed."
"I'll just get another one. I threw everything I had at her and she STILL made it through, but I'll just take others. I always have and I always will. You haven't won. I'll get back what she took from me." Weeping Mary jabbed a finger at Augusta. "And you haven't won either. Don't make the mistake of thinking otherwise. I'll haunt you until the day you die. You'll see me in your dreams, woman."
Dirt and broken bricks blasted out of the hole as she threw herself into the air, leaping up before she flung herself into the wall of mist and vanished from sight.
After a moment of quiet, another shape began to emerge from the pit Weeping Mary had dug. It was rectangular and blocky, and Augusta recognized it as Joseph's elegant coffin. It rose up, fell over, and the lid popped open to reveal Joseph whole and untouched by decay, glaring at her.
The expression on his face melted from rage to confusion, and then to fear. He was looking past Augusta, at the Blue Lady.
"Your patron has deserted you, Mr. North, and I'm all that keeps you here now. Speak your piece and you'll be on your way."
Hate washed over his face. His coffin lid slammed shut, and after a pause the coffin rose up on end and flew at Augusta, the lid flapping open and shut like a hungry mouth.
Augusta held out the rose. The coffin touched and exploded and Joseph flew backward in burst of wooden shrapnel and twisted gold fixtures.
He was splayed on the brick wall, hung in place by several larger chunks of wood and gold that had punched through his body and the vines, and into the wall.
"Hate only goes so far, Mr. North. It's not enough to carry you through."
He ignore the Blue Lady and instead screamed at Augusta, "YOU RUINED EVERYTHING! YOU'RE THE REASON I'M DEAD!"
Augusta flinched.
"You never loved me," he said, "The only reason you stayed with me was the money I made. You wanted things. You wanted a house. You never wanted me."
The Blue Lady said nothing. Augusta found she could speak again.
"That's a lie. I did love you. At the beginning, it was like a star flaring to life. You wanted your money and you wanted your career. That's why it faded and died. I stayed with you, and let you carry me along because I wanted it to come back. I wanted to figure out what I'd done wrong and fix it."
She spoke calmly and quietly, as though she'd spent hours reasoning out her words.
"We've had this fight before, just before I left you, so why are we going through this again? I did love you, but you said you never loved me."
"Liar."
"It's not," she said. "I did, but you pushed me away, and kept pushing. Why? What did I ever do wrong?"
He stared at her.
"You're cold," she said, "You're cruel. If you thought I was just with you because you'd take care of me, why did you take it out on that child? That little girl didn't ask us to be her parents. She didn't ask for me or you."
"You only got pregnant so you'd have a way to keep me under your thumb. Pop out a kid and you'd have had my wallet in your pocket for the next eighteen years."
She looked at him mournfully. "It was an accident, but I never cared about the money. Yes, it was nice, and yes, I liked being taken care of, but in the end I was waiting for you to love me again. That's all. Our daughter was innocent, and you lied to me to get me to do that awful thing. You said we weren't ready. You said that later on we could have a child, after you got where you wanted to go in life. You gave me hope, and it wasn't worth the air it took to say the words."
"You took everything from me, Augusta. I couldn't rebuild my life in Hot Springs because of you. I had to go somewhere else."
"You did it to yourself when you lied to me. You set this in motion. The only thing I was ever guilty of was wanting something from you that you wouldn't give me. I don't know why and at this point I don't even care why you stopped loving me. All I want is to take my child – she's not yours – and go home. I want to leave this place and never come back. I don't want to talk to you anymore. All I want is to go home. You can go to hell or heaven or wherever else. I don't care. I'm not yours anymore. You can't hurt me anymore."
"I never hurt you."
"Yes you did. You never hit me, but you liked having someone you could control. You liked fucking with my head. That isn't why I'm here. I'm not as weak as I used to be. I'm not here so you can control me. I only came here to find my daughter. You can go to hell."
"YOU'RE WHY I'M HERE!" He screamed. "I WOULDN'T HAVE DIED IF I COULD HAVE COME BACK TO HOT SPRINGS!"
"She is not the reason you are dead, Mr. North. The one and only reason you are dead is because you were driving drunk. Your hate bound you to this earth, because you're afraid of the hell waiting for you. Your time in this place bound you here, in a place that's neither of this earth or upon it, and so you've had a respite. You could have even repented and saved yourself. However, the truth of the matter is that she sinned and so did you, Mr. North. Your sins are greater, because you hated, and hate is the gravest sin of all. I have heard enough of this, and have had enough of you. The suffering ends now."
The rose exploded in a burst of blue, and the petals traveled against the wind like swarming bees to alight on Joseph, who began to scream. Every place a petal touched, a bright blue flame flared to life. His clothing burned first – the white shirt, black pants, and abstract tie. His flesh burned next as he continued to scream. He was screaming still when the flames danced on nothing but bone.
Then the bones were consumed and there was nothing left on the brick wall but a patch of scorched vines.
Augusta dropped to the ground, landing hard on her knees. Her mind reeled. This was all too much. Now it was over.
Mary-Elizabeth got up from her miniature chair, skirted the pit and scattered uprooted bricks, and ran to her mother. Augusta looked up to see her, and her heart leapt into her throat. She couldn't breathe and couldn't move. Then she couldn't see, when tears bathed her face. All she could do was hold out her arms, and wait to embrace her child. She was crying too hard to do anything else.
She held her for an instant. She felt her tiny arms inside her sweatshirt. Heard her heartbeat. Then, the scent of roses warmed by the summer sun washed over her, and she was lost in a cloud of petals, a storm that boiled around her. She felt their kiss wherever they touched.
The petals were falling like snow, when the Blue Lady knelt before her and took Augusta's hands in her own.
There for a moment and gone. Where was she. Where had she gone? Petals landed on her cheeks and stuck in the tracks of her tears.
"Where is she?" she gasped. "Where did she go? She was here – what happened to her?"
The Blue Lady knelt, and took Augusta's hands in her own. "Your daughter went back home."
"No..."
"She's home now. You'll see her again some day. It won't be for a long time to come, but some day."
She screamed. "NO!"
Then, "Why! I came all this way and I fought through so much to protect her and get to her. All I wanted was to take her home with me. All I wanted to was to get out of here and go home with her!"
"Yes. You did come all this way, and yes you did fight. You fought for people you'd never met and never knew, and for that you will be blessed. But... the child you fought for does not exist."
"But I saw her! She was here–"
"She never lived in your world. She can't join you there."
Augusta yanked her hands from the Blue Lady's grasp and beat her fists on the ground, shrieking. Weeping.
The Blue Lady took hold of her wrists with a grip like iron. Augusta hung her head and sobbed.
"Why? What was the point? If I can't make it right, why can't I just die? Why did I fight? Why did I do any of it if I can't save my child?"
"Why? Because you are a good and noble person. Your soul is clean. Go and know that. Know also that you will be blessed. It is promised to you."
Augusta snapped to attention. She didn't care about that, but a thought had burst into being.
"Take me. Take me instead. Can she live if I give up my life? Can she live instead of me? I'll do anything. I don't deserve to live. I killed her. I let him talk me into it. Take my life and give it to her instead."
"I can't. It can't be that way."
"WHY NOT!"
"Because you have a life to live, and it's time to let go of everything that kept you from living it these past five years. You are noble and good. You fought like a hero for people who had nothing to do with you. You brought goodness to a terrible place. You never gave up. Take that, if you take nothing else from your time here. Go now and live your life. Live it well, and be proud. You will be blessed."
"No... no, my child... My daughter..."
Vertigo swept over her, and she fell on her side.
"Mary-Elizabeth... Kitty... Please no. Let me..."
The wind picked up. The sound of buildings blowing apart grew louder, into a roar that drowned out all other sound. Mist and snowflakes washed over her. Patio bricks beneath her receded beneath a layer of moss-covered mud. Saplings sprang up one after another, in between rocks and broken pieces of masonry. The world seemed to pull apart, then come together, pull apart again. Superimposed on itself, tearing apart.
The Blue Lady knelt, watching her, until dizziness overtook her and she lost consciousness.