Ryan walked back towards the elevator. His footsteps echoed through the empty hall as he stepped on the rusted metal. There was another room that he hadn't tired besides the boiler room. He didn't think that there was anything of interest in it. But the morgue however, he hadn't gone in there yet.
"There is no way that I'm going through that door" he thought to himself.
Then his mind started to twist and turn.
"Remains of the present, remains of the present. What does that mean? Remains, remains. Of the present. Aw damn it"
He was going to have to go into the morgue. Why? He didn't know. He could just walk away and get out of this hell hole of a basement. But something was drawing him to the morgue, pulling him there, compelling him to inspect it. Ryan knew that he wasn't going to like what he was about to see behind the door. Clutching the shotgun tightly in his hand, he turned the door's knob and stepped inside. As he set foot inside the room he noticed a light switch on the wall next to him. Then all of a sudden, the light on his shotgun went out, plunging him into the pitch black. It was then that he noticed the terrible smell in the room. Like something had shat, thrown up on itself and then died.
"Shit" he said as he smacked at the flashlight.
The batteries must have gone out on it. He shouldn't have been so surprised. The light had been going non stop for hours. Ryan sighed to himself as he thought of what to do next. There was no way that he could navigate the room in this condition. He would have to find another source of light. Or he could just walk right back through the door he had come through. He opted for the later and did an about face. It was no skin off of his back whether or not he checked out death central. Besides, it smelled horrible in the room. That's when he noticed a faint buzzing sound coming from the wall next to him. It was so familiar, yet he couldn't quite place it. His memories swam until they clicked into place. There was power being pumped into the room. All he had to do was flip the switch. Turning to the wall, he flipped the switch while putting an arm to his nose to block out the horrible smell.
Instantly the room was flooded with the dull light of a dying bulb. Ryan immediately shut his eyes as the fluorescent lighting burned into them. A few seconds and blinks later, he was able to welcome the light to his eyes. He turned around to face the room and his heart stopped.
"Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God…!" he said as a new form of terror overtook him.
Unable to cope with what he was seeing, Ryan fell to his knees. He started to hyperventilate while simultaneously dry-heaving. He had nothing left to expel from his stomach. Although he wished that he had. It was just insane. Nothing he had seen this night could have prepared him for what was lying in the room and hanging from the walls and ceiling. Forcing himself to look, he tried to deny what was in front of his eyes.
There had to be at least several of them. The bodies were strung up along the walls and ceilings, like morbid Christmas lights. They were all an incredible shade of dark brown. The blood had dried up ages ago, so it was safe to assume that they had been in the room a very, very long time. The skin was completely removed from each corpse. Ryan could even make out the remains of tendons and ligaments on the bodies as well as exposed bone. They each resembled the monstrosities from the Hellraiser films. Just skinned bodies, which dangled before him. But what was even more disturbing was how they were presented.
Each of the bodies was wearing a hospital gown. The garments were draped around their bodies like capes. They dull white was a stark contrast to the muscle that they lay upon. The lips of each of the corpses had been removed so that they each smiled a permanent, evil leer. And the final nail in the coffin was the eyes. The eyes of each of the bodies were still intact. From where he was standing, Ryan could swear that the eyes were still fresh. An audience of the dead stared back at him as his mind bent and twisted to the disgusting horror which lay before him. Monsters in a scary town he could take. They bled and died and didn't get back up. Whoever had done this had to be one sick asshole.
"Oh God. Please tell me it isn't true" he said as he came to a shocking realization.
At least three of the corpses were smaller in stature. It took him several more seconds to figure out that they were the bodies of children. Tears formed in his eyes and trailed down his face. The small faces grinned back at him.
"Why?! Jesus Christ, why?!" he moaned to the floor.
He tried to get up and get to the door. Grabbing the knob and trying to turn it, he found that it wouldn't budge. He was locked in the morgue with the things. Ryan's mind was snapping under the pressure. He wished that he had never set foot in the room. He wished that he had just walked away. These people didn't deserve this. And he didn't deserve to be looking at it. It was just crazy and wrong and it didn't make any sense at all. He looked away and cried for a few more minutes before looking up again. In the center of the room, laid out on a mortician's table was another body, the pale skin of feet poked out from under a simple sheet. Fighting to regain his sanity, Ryan got up and slowly walked over to it, shaking in fear. If he was lucky, he'd walk away from this with post traumatic stress. If he was lucky.
"Nothing to be scared of. Just a corpse. A corpse in a morgue. Which is currently in the most fucked up hospital in an even more fucked up town" he said, moving towards it.
He was no stranger to the dead. But seeing it in this setting sent shivers down his spine.
"Why am I even here right now?" he wondered to himself "All I wanted was a nice vacation. Now I'm in a morgue that was redecorated by Jeffrey Dahmerr"
'Remains of the present'
The words flashed into his mind as he neared closer to the body. They were starting to make sense in a sick and twisted way. With his hands shaking, he removed the sheet. Ryan saw that the body was of an elderly man, naked, with his eyes closed. He didn't know who it was and he didn't particularly care. All he wanted was to understand why he had been led to and locked in this room.
"God I wish I had spent more time with those guys in the morgue; playing poker on a dead guys' stomach." he thought as he struggled to keep it together.
He noticed that there was a long, stitched incision down the dead man's torso. An autopsy must have been performed on him recently. Then they would have sewed him back up again.
"Jesus, shit" he breathed to himself. He didn't know how much longer his mind could hold out.
Answers to the past, Remains of the present.
It was starting to make sense. As crazy and out of place as the riddle had seemed, in the room he was standing in, it all started to come into place. Ryan desperately looked around the room. There didn't seem to be any equipment lying around. And there was no way that he was going anywhere near the bodies. So the question was, if there was something important inside the body on the table, how would he get into it? He would need something…
"Sharp" he thought as he reached for the katana on his back.
His hand closed around the hilt and he jerked the weapon out of its sheath. Bringing the sword around to the front of his body, Ryan pointed the blade towards the corpse. He took several deep breaths. He knew the man was dead, but it was still wracked his nerves knowing what he was about to do.
"I can do this, I can do this…" he said as he drove the weapon into the corpse's abdominal region.
He grunted and started to saw through the dead man's torso, along the stitches. The bodies in the room watched him with horrible glee as the torso tore open. Looking inside, Ryan saw that the man's organs had been removed. It was completely hollow inside the man. The only thing keeping his chest up was the rib cage which had been put back together. But he saw something resting within the rib cage that made him do a double take.
"What… the… shit?" he said as he reached into the corpse, his own chest pounding.
Ryan's hand closed around the object and he took it from its resting place. Curiously, he inspected it. It was a VHS security tape. Why the hell was it inside a corpse? Was it someone's idea of a really fucked up joke? He couldn't be sure. Ryan just looked over the tape and found a label with some writing on it.
Garland, security footage, Ma…"
The rest of the label had been scratched out.
"Garland? Lisa…Garland? Julia's aunt?" he pondered as he held the tape.
It seemed impossible, but the little piece of paper was right. There were answers to the past within the remains of the present. He put the sword back in its resting place on his back. Turning towards the door, Ryan took one last look at the bodies on the walls in disgust.
"Now to get out of this…room?" he said as the knob magically started to turn in his hand. "What the…?" he said as he looked at it. The door wouldn't budge a few minutes ago.
It was a moot point. He could leave the room and it was all that mattered. He turned off the light and his shotgun's light magically came back on again. Ryan just shook his head and closed the door behind him, vowing never to return to that room again. He hoped the hospital would be blown up in the near future.
III
Julia didn't know what was tougher on her. The fact that she was being pursued by monsters in hell or the fact that she was on her own. It had been so much simpler when it was her and Ryan. It was easier knowing that someone had her back and that she didn't have to suffer by herself. But now, that one person was gone and she had to push herself not to break down and give up. The trip up to the third floor, as short as it had seemed, had been an emotionally long journey. She regretted coming to Silent Hill. It was the worst decision that she had ever made. And to make matters worse was the fact that perhaps her mother had been right all along.
"Aunt Lisa" she said as she choked back tears. "Where are you?"
She pounded up the stairs and collided with the stairwell door. She had made it to the third floor. Looking back down the stairwell she couldn't see or hear anything coming up after her. Julia didn't care why she wasn't being pursed. The monsters were gone and she was safe. Relatively at best, but still safe. Pushing open the door, she found herself in a near identical hallway to the one she had been standing in one floor below.
There was no sign of immediate danger. Perhaps it was that fact more than anything else that unnerved her. Julia slowly made her way through the hallway, the wood creaking underfoot. She gripped held onto the pistol in her hand. After everything that had just happened, its weight was starting to feel noticeable. She was more tired and scared than she had ever been in her whole life. Julia didn't know if she could go on any longer.
"You have to"
Ryan. His words flew into her head. He may have been gone, but he still wanted her to finish what she had started, get the answers that she was looking for. Against all odds, Julia mentally pushed herself to continue with her searching. She had come this far. It would be a sin to give up now. As she moved around the hallway, she noticed that it was eerily quite on the last floor of the hospital. She kept expecting something to happen. Something to come out of the shadows and attack her. But still she searched and still she remained unharmed. Unharmed, but nonetheless frustrated.
In what seemed to be a recurring theme in the hospital, many of the doors were either locked or had their knobs busted off. This limited the number of areas that she could investigate. As she passed each of the doors she noticed that they were denoted with numbers. Most likely patient rooms. She tried each of the doors but found that the only one which would open was 302. Carefully making her way inside, Julia noticed that it was somewhat lit. While it was just as filthy as the rest of the hospital, she saw that it was at least furnished with an old bed and a desk. To her surprise, there was also a fairly modern 15" TV sitting in the room as well. A dust covered VCR sat underneath it.
"What's this doing in here?" she thought as she flopped down on the old bed, its springs creaking underneath her weight.
Julia let out a big sigh. She needed to stop and take a break or else she was going to break. If she didn't stop to collect herself then she was certain that something bad would happen to her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the photo of her aunt. Staring at it, a flood of memories came back to her. Tears welled up in her eyes and Julia cried into her arms as the nights adventures took their toll on her. Would she ever find her Aunt Lisa? Would she ever get out of this place alive? And even more importantly, would she ever be able to look at the world and her life the same way ever again?
III
Ryan stepped back into the basement hallway. He was still shook up from his experience in the morgue and knew, no, expected to have some really bad nightmares in the weeks to come. The second he started walking to the elevator, a clicking sound rang out in the small hallway. His heart turned to ice as he slowly turned around, pointing his gun down the hallway.
"No! No, that's not possible!" he thought as he saw what was sharing the hallway with him. "How did they get down here?!"
He had just been in this hallway. There was no way that anything could have come from anywhere he had just been. But they were still right in front of him. Flesh and blood and looking right back at him. The nurses from the second floor stared back at him as he shinned his flashlight on them. Their numbers had to be at least the same ten or eleven as before. They took up so much space in the cramped confines of the basement hallway. In the dark, he couldn't see as to whether or not they were armed. Regardless, he didn't doubt that they would still be able to kill him. They twitched and sputtered as they became fixated on the light.
"RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWRRR!" came the same horrible scream as before.
Ryan aimed the light a little higher and saw the Blood Nurse standing in the far rear, like a general leading his troops. He could see the ax dangling from one of her arms as the other raised and pointed strait at him. Blood dripped off the creature's outstretched arm and onto the metal grating of the floor. It seemed to ooze off the creature in sheets, like the monster wasn't made of clothes so much as blood. The other nurse monsters started to advance on Ryan and he pointed the gun at them.
"Screw you!" he said as he pulled the trigger, sending a round into the crowd.
He pumped the handle but something went wrong. The spent shell that he had just fired got lodged in the chamber of the shotgun. Figuring that it was just an empty container, Ryan pulled the trigger again. The gun exploded in his hands as the slug blew back into the weapon.
"AH SHIT!" he said as he dropped the smoking gun to the floor, shaking his hands out.
Looking at his arm, he saw that he had a mild burn. He counted his lucky stars and was glad that the entire thing hadn't blown off his hands. Glancing down at the weapon, he saw that it was charred and slightly twisted. There was no way that it would function properly. But the flashlight was still intact. Running to the weapon, he tore the light from the barrel and tossed the gun into the crowd of nurses. One of them was nearly on him and it reached out at him with long, vein ridden arms. It was like a drunken girl coming on to him. Except instead of making out with him, it wanted to tear his still beating heart out of his chest.
Ryan stumbled back and swung at the nurse monster, cracking it across the face. The creature fell back but was replaced with one of its sisters. He figured that he had had enough of this. He turned his back on the advancing creatures and quickly made his way to the elevator. Skidding to a stop in front of its doors, he pressed the button repeatedly with his thumb while looking back at the advancing monsters. At their rate, they would reach him within seconds.
"Come on…Come on…" he said as he tapped the button.
He forced himself to look away from the monsters as he waited for the elevator to come down. He was sweating bullets. His brow and arms were slick to the touch. For the umpteenth time in the evening, his heart rate sky rocketed. Finally he heard a sound that he could have mistaken for an angel's call. The elevator came to a stop with a "ding". But the doors didn't open.
"No!" he said as he pried at them with his hands. They were impossibly strong. Something as simple as this should have been able to be opened.
"OPEN UP!" he yelled as he struggled with the doors.
Looking back, he saw that the nurses were two feet away and closing in on him. Grabbing at the katana on his back, he shoved the blade through the doors and started to use it as a lever. Little by little, the doors parted ways.
"Almost" he grunted as he felt cold, delicate fingers on the back of his neck and shoulders.
If it had been under any other circumstances, he would have enjoyed the attention from the female advances. But he was in hell and these creatures wanted to murder him. That was the incentive he needed to use all his force against the sword. With a heavy grunt and a lunge, the doors popped open enough for him to get through. But the nurses were already on him. Before he could make a step towards the inside of the car, the nurses grabbed him, pulling him back into the hallway.
"NOOOOOOOOOOO!" he screamed as he reached for the doorway.
It was no use as the inhuman monsters encompassed him en mass. They pulled him back towards them, their arms wrapping around his neck, torso and limbs. They would smother him or stab him to death. He was going to die at the hands of these demonic bitches. He was going to lose his life in this hellish town. But even more disturbingly was the fact that Julia was still trapped in the hospital somewhere. She was probably alone, scared and huddled in a corner for dear life while her ammo ran low. He lamented over that fact above even his own death.
"Noooo! Julia!" he screamed through the mass of bodies.
All of a sudden, the nurses let up on him unexpectedly. Even though they were all around him, he found that he was able to break free from them. With a tremendous tug, Ryan ripped from the monsters hold, sending them falling to the floor. They screamed at him as he ran into the elevator. Ryan instantly started to press the button for the doors to close but the process was ridiculously slow. He looked beyond the doors and saw that the nurses were getting back up. He punched the button again and again, praying that the door would close in time.
"Come on!" he said as the nurses fought back to their feet and started to advance on him.
Soon the doors started to close, the monsters just outside of it. Ryan leaned against the doors as the rumbles of them pounding on the doors rang out within the car. He was safe inside and that was all that mattered. Nothing was going to hurt him now.
"RAAAAAAWWWRRR" came a scream from outside the door.
"SEEEEECRAAAAAAAWWWWWSHHHH"
The sound of twisted metal ran through the car as a bloody arm shot through the doors and grabbed Ryan by the face. The Blood Nurse had gotten its arm into the elevator car. It screamed at him again as it latched onto his face in a firm grip. He could feel the blood against his face as it left a horrible hand shaped stain on his skin. It was cold and slimy and made him want to recoil in fear. Then he heard the Blood Nurse scream out again. He couldn't be sure but it almost sounded like it was forming words.
"STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!"
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" he screamed as he punched the button for the 3rd floor.
It was too much, he couldn't handle it. The elevator started to move and the Blood Nurse retracted its arm and screamed through the hole in the doors. Ryan's eyes rolled into the back of his head as he started to black out. Darkness stole his thoughts away as he fell to the floor of the elevator. The last thing he remembered hearing was the hum of the elevator gears, taking him up and away from Hell.