Chapter 7

I saw a crimson light glowing above me, around me. My body felt heavy, with needles filling my arms and legs. Blinking, I realized I was pretty much curled up in a fetal position on the floor. If Panic was as wasted as I was, He didn't wait to stick around for the after party. As far as I could tell, I didn't feel His presence… the coward must have taken off and left me to find my own ride home. The pipe felt cold in my hand—

The pipe!

"Shit!"

My head immediately started pounding as I bolted upright. Memories rushed back in flashes, flooding me. I remembered the elevator crawling downwards as I screamed and screamed, wanting it to stop. I remembered when the obnoxiously bright fluorescent bulbs had become possessed strobe lights for my little shindig with Panic. I remembered Dr. Richard yelling to me that she'd find me, that I'd be okay.

Then I remembered the voice…. His voice.

The voice I was never going to hear again. Only I did. Which is beyond insane because that voice was forever dead.

But…. He said he and Mary were here in Silent Hill.

Could they…. Could they really be here?

"They're dead! They're both dead, they're not here!"

Okay, screaming again was stupid. My throat was already shredded and now my brain was going to rip itself apart. Letting the pipe go, I balled my hands into fists against my temples, willing the pounding to stop. I just wanted it to stop. After some time, the pain eventually ebbed until it became dull. Unclenching my fists, I clutched the pipe as I got to my feet, slowly this time.

"How long was I out? And where the hell am I? Is Dr. Richard okay?"

The empty elevator didn't answer my questions, the bitch. I moved to hit the buttons but stopped. The button for the first floor was lit up. All the other buttons were dark and did nothing when I finally hit them.

That's not possible. Like Dr. Richard said, that's not possible.

How the fuck could I be on the first floor? I remember freaking out when the elevator started to descend but after the button for the basement lit up, it just kept going. Panic and I had performed our twisted duet that went on for… for I don't know how long. I don't even remember blacking out. I shook my head, which again, was stupid, because it sent a small spike of pain impaling straight into my brain.

I don't know how I could be here but I was here. And Dr. Richard was waiting for me. If I let Panic back into this elevator, I think He would send me to the brink and take that final plunge into the dark water. So I made a plan. It wasn't a very thought-out one but it was the only one I had. Find Dr. Richard and escape from this hellhole. Easy enough, what could possibly go wrong? Other than the minor inconvenience of dying of course….

Taking my phone out of my jacket pocket, I was met with a black screen. Holding down the power button, I prayed to sweet baby Jesus or any other deity who would deign to listen, and held my breath. Nothing happened. I guess whatever gods were here in this town didn't have it in them to help out, just this once. Figures.

I released my breath, pissed now. Okay, new plan. Find a flashlight or a candle or a Goddamned torch if I have to, then find Dr. Richard and escape from this hellhole. If I couldn't tick any of those boxes off then I should kiss any chance I had at finding James goodbye. I shoved my phone back in my pocket, thinking about the phone call.

It was his voice… I know it was.

"Wake the hell up Laura, it wasn't James. He's dead. Like you'll be if you don't get out of here."

Shivering slightly, I shook the possession of Dr. Richard from me and listened to my own voice of Reason. Hopefully She was a better singing partner than Panic. I clicked the Open Door button and maybe the gods were on my side because the doors actually opened. I stepped out of the elevator quickly but the blood-red emergency light couldn't penetrate the entirety of the dark hallway. No monsters greeted me with bloody smiles so I took that as a good sign. I glanced to my right and left and realized despite there being no zombies nearby, something was wrong.

Very wrong.

Everything looked… dead. The paint on the walls was peeling in dripping strips and black mold had grown unchecked in large patches, everywhere. The linoleum floor tiles were disgusting and covered in layers of grime, and in some spots with what looked like dried…. Even the ceiling tiles were falling down, exposing the pipes up above. Everything was just… dead. It looked like this place had been abandoned for the last hundred years and suffered everything from plagues to floods.

Which wasn't true. Which could not be true. It just… couldn't be.

I had walked this very hallway with Detective Holland only a week ago to go see the corpse of my murdered father. I walked down this very hallway only hours ago, annoyed by the squeaking of my boots. And yet here it was before me, aged, dead and darkened. If I stood here any longer, Reason would flee from this nightmare and leave me alone. I needed Her, desperately. If none of what I was seeing was reality, then I guess it was time to step out into my nightmare then.

Gritting my teeth, I took a single step forward and the second I did, the doors closed, leaving me in total darkness as the gears whirred suddenly. Before I could even finish turning around, the elevator was already ascending, per the little triangle light above the doors.

"Well shit, there goes my ride."

If I ever step foot inside of an elevator again….

The prickling needles of blood dissolving back into my extremities started to feel hot, like little needles of fear and grief. No, there'd be enough time for that later. I've already cried my bleeding little heart out and I just don't have any tears left. I had to go and find Dr. Richard, she's the only one who has been any sort of help in this hell. My pain and fear and loneliness would be with me the rest of my life and I'd like that life to be longer than tonight.

Listening for another heartbeat, I heard only silence. I could feel the blackness pressing on me, heavy like a blanket. It smelled like a dead wet dog in here but I managed to keep down my breakfast. I gripped the pipe with both hands and held it to my chest, as if that would protect me. I took a few steps to my right and instantly bumped into the wall. I could feel the cold dampness even through my jacket and I hopped away, not wanting to get that disgusting mold on me. I turned my head to look down what I thought was the hallway and saw nothing but black.

That mold….

When I was a kid in the hospital, there was a boy a little older than me, maybe about ten or eleven who was getting his tonsils taken out. He was only there for a few days but he was kind of a jerk. He'd make fun of me and liked to scare me with creepy stories right before it was our bed time. I'd beg him not to but he wouldn't listen. In our room there was a huge dark water stain on the wall by the bathroom door that had started growing mold. Nurse Rachel had made several complaints to the hospital's maintenance staff but no one ever did come in to fix it, not until it was my very last week before heading back to the orphanage.

On his last night, this jerk, whose name I can't even remember, told me that once we had fallen asleep, a shadow person made of that same dark mold would crawl its way from the water stain, looking for humans to infect. Once it had found its victim, it would evaporate and be breathed in, turning its poor host into a zombie controlled by nothing but mold spores.

I had screamed so loud the night shift nurse had come running as if I was dying. I cried as I told her what he had said to me but when she asked for his side, he of course denied it and said I was lying. When she was done yelling at me, she told us both to go to bed and turned off the light as she stormed out. As we lay there in the dark, he called me a brat for trying to get him in trouble. I tried to ignore him and go to sleep but he spent the rest of the night yelping and pretending as if the mold person was standing next to me, waiting to get me the second I opened my eyes.

I may have forgotten his name but I never forgot what that little punk did. It was all I could think about as I wandered blindly in the dark, in yet another hospital except this one had been silently abandoned and somehow covered in an eerily similar mold. And now it wasn't just a scary story.

Now there really were zombies out to get me.

Just as Panic was reaching out to grab Reason and toss Her into a cage, I looked behind me and realized I actually could see something. A faint red Exit sign. Weird since lights and electronics didn't seem to work in this place, at least not consistently. Hey, it was worth a shot. Slowly, I made my way down the empty hallway. Halfway down I nearly tripped on a large broken patch of linoleum but other than that nothing exciting happened. I finally reached the door beneath the Exit sign and tried the handle.

Locked.

"Of-freakin'-course!"

I couldn't help it, I didn't even care if a monster heard me. This is such bullshit! Just when I think I've gotten a break, something stupid like a stupid locked door handle —

A noise from the door behind me made me snap my body around.

Shit.

Maybe something did hear me. Maybe it was a shadow mold person finally come to life and once I opened the door—

"Don't be stupid, it was just a story."

Even saying it in a normal tone sounded too loud. After a minute of gripping my pipe until I thought my fingers would break, I forced myself to move towards the door. When nothing came barreling through to kill me, I pushed on the push bar and kicked the door open.

Oh my god, the noise it made was loud enough to wake the dead. I was the one who barreled through the door, ready to attack. The door swung shut behind me and I whipped to my left, then right, my pipe raised high.

There was no one there.

No zombies, no mold people, no humans, no Dr. Richard.

Nothing.

"What the fuck?"

This time I was at least smart enough to whisper. It took my brain way too long to realize I could see. I could see waiting room chairs and rolling hospital beds shoved in a corner to my left, half covered by dirty sheets which used to be white. I could see more patches of that damned mold spreading all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Something shining on the floor caught my eye.

It made me inhale sharply.

Unlike back at the elevator, this blood was fresh. So fresh it hadn't even congealed yet. Following the streaks in it, I realized the bright pool of red turned into a trail, leading away into the dimly lit hallway. The same hallway Dr. Richard and I had met our first Dr. Zombie. It looked as if a body had been dragged, the blood smearing and streaking along the way. Maybe something had finished it off? But then what the fuck could've dont that? My breath quickened when I saw where the light was coming from.

Every door on either side of the hallway was closed, some even wrapped in what looked like big strips of the same dirty sheets. All doors but a pair of steel ones, all the way down. They were wide open, with light pouring from the room beyond.

The doors which led to the morgue.

What if… what if James was in there? I know I just buried him this morning but nothing that's happened since then could keep me from believing he couldn't be standing there, alive and breathing.

Without thinking, I followed the sparkling blood, trying to avoid stepping in it. Every fiber of me wanted to run down that creepy-ass hallway as fast as I could but I didn't. The last thing I needed was to slip in this blood, draw attention from whatever was hiding behind these closed doors, and then … game over.

So I walked, slowly and carefully. There were no other sounds than those of my boots, of my ragged breathing. If it smelled like a dead dog before, all I could smell now was that unsettling tang of iron. Just as before, nothing happened. The bloody trail led me straight to the morgue without incident. I finally stopped about ten feet away. I knew I had to go in there but something was holding me back.

Do it, for James.

I don't know where that voice came from. I mean, obviously it was my voice inside my head but I don't know why I thought that. The only reason I'm even standing here by a blood-smeared trail in a dark hospital in an abandoned town filled with monsters, was for James. The voice was right, I had to go in. I had to.

I walked the last ten feet to stand in the doorway, where even the bloody trail stopped. Everything looked exactly as it had the last time. No mold on the walls, no stained bed sheets, no peeled up linoleum. The cold light overhead illuminated an empty morgue.

Only it wasn't completely empty.