Chapter Fifteen:

"Handwriting on the Wall"

I don't know where I was.

It was bright, yet it was dark. Strange to say out loud, and strange to hear, no doubt, but it's the only description that works. I was seeing things, flashes of memory, flashes of hopes and dreams given brief visual life just long enough for me to recognize them for what they were. I saw Dad, as I remembered him in my childhood. Steel eyes, jaw set in a perpetual position that always looked like a stillborn scowl. The pale brown hair already peppered with snowy signs of age. I saw Mom, too. She looked as young as I remember, too, but that's the only way I can ever see her. She was only just past her thirty-eighth birthday when the cancer finally took her away. I saw flashfire snapshots of the times we had together, and of the long four years when Mom fought for her life, a fight she was ultimately destined to lose.

Then, I saw Mary. Sweet little Mary Sheperd, seventeen years old, just a freshman at University of Massachusetts, already knowing she wanted to be an English major, already knowing she wanted to be a magazine columnist. She would achieve one of those dreams, and come close to achieving the other, close but not quite there.

Our first date at the Northstar Drive-In. We saw Back to the Future that night. We had a wonderful time, and it was all set up by Phil Garzman, my best friend and her classmate in Classic Lit. He would end up being my best man eighteen months later when his matchmaking skills paid off.

I gave her the ring on Christmas Eve. We had dinner at her parents' beautiful old Colonial in Malden. I even managed to get Dad to come along. It was something I wanted him around for. It was a larger get-together than I was used to. We had her parents and my dad, Mary's two brothers, Nick three years older, and William, three years younger, and Grandma Sheperd, who was one of the liveliest eighty-year old women I think I'll ever see.

The good times. Mary graduating. Buying our home. Moving into that home, and buying a brand-new bed the day we did so. How many times we made love in that bed I'd never be able to count. I had a job I loved, a wife I loved, and the future was so bright it made my eyes tear. I suppose that the best part about it was that we didn't know how short the good times would be. A mercy that we didn't know how quickly and abruptly they would end, to be replaced by the very worst of times.

And they were just that, no two ways about it.

Now I saw Mary hunched over the toilet, dry-heaving because she hadn't eaten in three days and there was nothing to vomit up but saliva and blood. The first trip to the doctor's office, an ignorant prick named Dr. Lawrence, who made several hundred dollars telling us that he had no clue what was affecting my wife. I like to think that the insurance paid the bastard to dole out some kind of pills and recommend a specialist, a specialist we didn't end up seeing for another two weeks because the fucking idiot didn't brush up on Mary's medical history enough to realize that she had a severe allergy to a particular ingredient in the stuff. I don't remember what the pills were called, or even exactly what they were supposed to cure, but I do remember very well what they did to her.

She swallowed two of those pills, as directed. Two hours later, her face was red as a stoplight and she was struggling for breath because the pills made her esophagus swell like a mass of bee stings, reducing her windpipe to a pinhole and making each breath a titanic struggle.

I rode with her on the ambulance, and while it didn't end up being the most heartbreaking moment of my life, it was probably the first genuine one. They had given her a cortisone shot and had an oxygen tube going in her nose. It was helping, but it was only temporary, as is the nature of most such treatments. I held her hand the entire time, and she was crying, crying and coughing and trying to tell me how sorry she was. I held her hand, stroked it, told her it was okay, everything was going to be okay, please don't cry.

That was our first visit to the St. Jerome Medical Center. Our first of many, of too many. We got a ride home the next morning from Nicky Sheperd. Wasn't the last of those, either.

My mind flashed through the many visits to doctors, specialists, surgeons, even a faith healer once, when the general situation was desperate going on hopeless. All of them expensive, all of them clueless, all of them useless. No one knew exactly what was ailing Mary, but all of them agreed that it was killing her, slowly and painfully. Her cream soft skin paled, turned a sickly gray as it showed increasing numbers of scabs and sores, all saving their worst for her face. Her hair thinned almost to a baby's fineness and then just simply started falling out. She lost a lot of weight, and she looked skeletal when she fell beneath 85 pounds. It was horrifying, in so many ways and on so many levels. Mary didn't deserve this. Good people, good people who love God and children and their husbands don't deserve to go like this.

The memories and recollections blurred more and became faster and indistinct. They were almost a total washout. I was able to pick out only one with any sort of clarity, and that was me giving her a kiss as she lay dying on her bed. It invoked a terrible sense of futility and something else, something I couldn't even begin to explain, except to say that it felt like I was being punched in the gut repeatedly. It felt like a full-body beatdown. I was sore. I was in pain. I cried out.

Cried out.

Things faded.

My eyes slid open like the windows of a car, slowly and jerkily. Things were still fuzzy, and at first I thought that perhaps I was still lost in my memories, but as consciousness came back to me, so did my nerves, and a great many of them had loud and colorful stories of pain to deliver to my tired brain.

I pushed myself up into a sitting position, and rolled over to get myself off of a pile of rocks that I had apparently been lying upon. Slowly, recollection of what led me to this point trickled in. Yeah, that's right. I met with that red pyramid thing again. Somehow he followed me from the apartments, or maybe there was more than one. That thought was followed by one even worse, a mental flash of a group of Pyramid Heads surrounding me, backing me into a corner as he had already done once. Me, cowering on the floor and just waiting for them to finish me off, because I know there's no fighting them off and there's no breaking through them. I shuddered, and removed the thought from my mind by sheer force of will.

I scooted over to the wall and pulled myself to my feet, grunting as I did. My right leg throbbed and there was a tear on my jeans on the back of the calf. Blood soaked some of the fabric, blood from a shallow wound that was already drying. I pulled up my sleeve and saw at least four bruises in various stages of development. There was a big, nasty knot on the back of my head. I ached all over but considering that I had been knocked off of a roof and fell through a concrete ceiling, I came out remarkably well. Bumped, bruised, sore, but nothing broken, nothing gouged. Someone up there must like me. My pipe lay on the floor a short distance away, and I retrieved it. Even though it originally belonged to something that shouldn't logically exist, even though it had been used to nearly decapitate me, the feel of it in my hand was reassuring, giving me at least a slight sense of safety.

Certain that I was going to be okay, I took stock of my new surroundings. I was in a small hallway, one I hadn't come across yet. There were four doors, spaced sparingly apart like the solitary rooms, but there were only four here. One had a note taped to it, the paper yellow with age. Written in black marker was a single line.

If Joseph looks calm, he can be taken out of his cell.

I opened it.

Now, if there had been any doubt whatsoever as to the nature of this particular hospital, the room I found would have definitely put it to rest. Ladies and gentlemen, we had ourselves one of those sterling trademarks of the mental health business, the padded room. It would be more accurate to call this a padded cell, honestly, for it was quite tiny. The floor was covered about as much area as the bed Maria was now resting upon. And whoever Joseph was, he must have looked calm, because he sure wasn't in here.

The strangeness of the room was only amplified by its macabre décor, which I smelled before I actually saw. It was old and dull, but it was still rich and coppery. Blood. It soaked the left wall of the cell, a large splash that looked as though someone threw a bucket of the stuff at it.

The center had been wiped clean, which was a matter of degree really. And at first I thought what I was seeing was just random splashes, but I looked closer and I saw that they were anything but. They were numbers, four of them. 9595. Numbers painted in human blood. How artistic. I guess it went to show how much I had seen today in Silent Hill that made this grotesque display seem less abhorrent then one would expect.

I looked closer and I saw that someone had added a message to it, this written in marker of a color that was close enough to blood that one might easily mistake it for such. It was a simple message.

TERN TERN TERN THE NUMBERS. BETTER NOT FORGET THEM. SO I'LL RIGHT THEM DOWN HERE. THE OTHER ONE, MY SECRET NAME.

Cryptic, to say the least. It made no sense to me. I got out of there, and I was glad. The smell was starting to really get to me.

I tried the doors on both sides of the bloody cell, but only the last one opened. The moment it did, my radio sprang to life, hissing like a cornered cat. Over that, I heard a piteous wail, and it was one I recognized even without seeing its source. I quickly pulled the door shut and backed away from it, nearly tripping over some rubble on the floor. There was one of those demon nurses in the cell, and it pounded on the door with its inhuman fists, and I also heard something metallic striking the door, which I assumed was a pipe like the one I had. I assumed that the cell doors couldn't be opened from inside, it wouldn't make sense for that to be possible, and I wasn't even sure if they could open doors, but I had no desire to stick around and find out. There was one last door, opposite of the cells, and mercifully, it did open.

More merciful still was that it led me into familiar surroundings, or at least, into a location I could recognize. It was the third floor hallway. I was back. But, for what? I hadn't accomplished anything. I hadn't found Laura. All I found was a diary with impossibly familiar handwriting, a fall through a roof, and a bloody fresco in a padded cell.

Ding!

The cell, the numbers. Tern the numbers. It couldn't possibly be true, couldn't possibly be that easy. Yet, I was in the solitary hallway, practically jogging all the way to S16 because I just had to try it. I was all out of leads. It seemed inches away from likely that whatever that box held would be of any use in locating the kid, but even if you had nothing left, you had enough to manufacture a little hope if you needed it badly enough.

I passed through S16's door and went straight to the box. The wheel lock waited, and I took it, turning its numbers. 9595. What a simple combination that was, certainly not one I would want. At least, not under normal circumstances. Right now I was happy enough to have it.

The lock clicked and popped open proudly, as if to fanfare. I felt a queer sort of excitement as I lifted the latch and opened the box.

If there was a smile on my face, it evaporated the moment I looked inside of the box, like water hitting a hot griddle. I could almost hear it hiss, or maybe that was my breath.

The box was empty. Not empty, exactly, but filled with cotton fluff, stuffing. And, can you believe it, hairs. Strands of human hair, long blonde ones. I almost wanted to laugh. I guess it was just a product of the environment. A crazy man just might place hair in a strongbox and secure it like that.

I pulled out the cotton fluff, hoping against hope that the immediately visible contents weren't the only contents. I wasn't totally disappointed, because I did find a piece of paper at the bottom, but I can't say I was thrilled, either. The paper had some poorly-scribbled handwriting on it in pencil, and whoever wrote it pressed so hard on the pencil that he tore the paper and broke the pencil tip.

Louise! I'll take care of you four ever. It is my destiny!

I dropped the paper back in the box, then I replaced the stuffing. I was about to close it when my thumb felt something on the inner rim of the lid.

Well, if that don't beat all…

There was a key. I pried it off. The box's owner fastened it to the lid with chewing gum, gum so old it cracked when I applied pressure. The key had a small piece of paper scotch-taped to the base with WEST ELEVATOR written in black ball-point. I couldn't believe how bizarre this was, but I was thankful to regain a little focus, and I left room S16 and its lonely treasure box.

There was an elevator about halfway down the hall. I inserted the key into the hole and turned. When I did, I heard a whirring sound, which I assumed was the sound of its motors starting. I heard some kind of deep, booming growl from far below, which sounded a lot like a generator kicking to life. About ten seconds later, I heard the sound of a bell, and the elevator opened. Fully lit and all. Must be a hell of a generator they have going on down there, because I hadn't seen any electricity working here at all until now. I stepped inside, squinting my eyes thanks to all that light.

There were buttons for the first, second and third floors. The button for the second floor had apparently fallen off, so I pressed the first floor button. The elevator shuddered as it came to life and began its descent. As it took me down, I prayed that the generator didn't decide to blow before I got there.

Someone listened, I guess, for it ended its descent where it was supposed to, with a hiss and snap. Then, the doors slid open to admit me to the first floor.

It was actually filthier than the others. Age-old crud lined the floors and actually built-up to give it a rough, disgusting texture. It smelled like old sewage, but the radio was silent. Apparently the monsters were equally repulsed. I started walking these halls to see if there was anything to see.

And there was. There was a set of doors lining the hall, like the row of padded cell rooms but these were considerably larger in size. The intent was to try the doors one by one, but one door, labeled in white as C2, was wide open. I figured that was as good a place as any to start.

C2 was very large. There were several beds and gurneys stacked around haphazardly, this having been their unexpected last home. It was a mess, and no mistake. However –

I heard something, from the back. I didn't even take the time to try and identify it. Instead, my hand flew straight to my radio to make sure it was working. It was, but it was giving nothing but soft white noise. I shone the flashlight in its direction and approached. As I did, I heard the noise again, clearer, and I realized what it was.

It was the sound of a small child humming.

I leaned over, hoping that it really was a child I found. I was not disappointed. It was indeed a child, a girl with straw-colored head of hair. She was playing with several different teddy bears, giggling and humming and having a good time. When she noticed the light, she turned to me, and I found myself looking directly into her deep cornflower eyes. They widened when the saw me, widened first than became a cold stare. It was one I was becoming well-acquainted with lately.

I found what I came for, for the girl sitting on the floor with her bears was familiar.

I found Laura.

6