Unbearable stench…
Stopping to gag for what felt like the hundredth time, she was glad she had remembered the sewers in one respect. It was interminably long and dank and dark and smelt like…well like a sewer. But, able to follow them to Paleville, she would soon be at the lake to resume the search for Cheryl. If she had survived the last twelve hours in the freezing, wet conditions that is…best not to think that way…besides, the girl could walk on thin air…weather shouldn't be a problem for her.
Cybil evidently hadn't been the first person to realize the sewers offered access to the resort. The padlock on the gate to the waterworks had been smashed off and someone had cut a hole in the fence. Hoping to apprehend Harry before he got too far away, she had moved quickly underground. There hadn't been any sign of her fugitive friend…but she had not made the journey alone.
They were built like men, but carried themselves like insects. Difficult to make out in the dark, they had been formidable adversaries. The scratches, bruises, bites and gouges she carried, the pain she felt – it made it hard to consign them to her imagination. And she was so desperate to banish them there. If this was the end of Silent Hill then so be it. But she couldn't accept that God would take a young life like Louise Barkin or an innocent out-of-towner like Roberta Morgan. This situation, these creatures…this was the work of mankind. This was the work of Leonard Wolf, she was sure of that…but how…how to explain the unexplainable. Perhaps white claudia had something to do with it. PTV was a very powerful hallucinogen. But she hadn't taken any, not that she knew of. Though just a whiff had been enough to affect her in Wolf's garden. And even that could not explain the marks she gained on her arms and legs as she struggled to fight the creatures off.
More trouble with God was the last thing she wanted. There had been enough of that when Alice went missing. Having people sympathetically trill 'she's with God now' or 'our prayers are with you' didn't help somehow. Standing by the headstone with no body beneath it…that was the only real doubt she ever had. Ed, ever the atheist, regarded her return to the church as some sort of personal betrayal…from which they never truly recovered.
When the tunnel seemed that it couldn't get any gloomier, there was a brightness away in the distance, filtering down from above. A ladder, offering a way out, led to an uncovered maintenance hole. As she closed in on it she could see something by the ladder…she wished that this, more than anything else, could be imaginary. But this was no monster, ready to attack. It wouldn't cause any wounds – though it might open a few old ones…a dirty rag doll. It had belonged to her daughter. Cybil had been unable to find it after Alice disappeared. She hadn't thought of it since. Perhaps it had sat there, undisturbed, for seven years. Perhaps this was where she died. Perhaps she drowned.
If this had been any other day, any other circumstance she could have organized a search. Got the whole team down here. Find something. Anything.
Not knowing what had happened had always been the hardest part. What she went through…if she suffered…if she got caught in the fire…
…Oh God…
…she found herself crying, really crying – for the first time in years. On her knees in the filth, weeping under dappled daylight. Picking up the doll, she tried to stem the flow of tears. They wouldn't help Alice…she passed a long time ago.
She stood, composed herself and climbed the ladder out of the gloom.