[Silent Hill] Five of Pentacles
The fog is starting to turn a pale shade of straw when they pass by Rosewater Park. Even in these dire circumstances, she can spare a moment to remember pity and appalled disgust for the parents who gave their boy a loveless home and hopeless life. But she's not the kind to flip this innocent representation of them the bird, nor would she have the energy if she were. Keeping Abernathy in sight without getting killed takes focus. We can't have that, not in the least because making Henry Townshend write her a eulogy, find an apartment for one instead of two, bring flowers to lay before her headstone next year would probably deal nearly as much damage as his parents had managed to. And there's also the mounting worry, sick freefall feeling in her stomach, from noticing that her watch is running counter-clockwise.
Aberanthy's frame eventually disappears from the road, and as she nears the point of loss, she doesn't like the look of the place where he's disappeared into. The cars in the lot look like collision victims, too, but more concerning is that another blood trail leads towards Jack's Inn. A double-trail, this time, two of them side by side, as though someone's open bleeding heels had been dragged over the pavement. The trail stops abruptly in the middle of the lot. From her hiding place around a corner, she hears him call out the other name that's been on her mind these last several blocks. "Lynn, are you there?" There is no answer, just the creak of a door and the click of a handle as he shuts it behind him. 104, she peeks around long enough to catch a glimpse of.
She crouches and waits, pinching her nose shut against the wafts coming from the rotten-smelling garbage can a couple feet away. But Abernathy takes a long time coming back out, and she hears no sound from within. A very long time.
Too long.
What if something happened to him? Just because she didn't hear a scuffle doesn't mean that something didn't get him without a fight, and with the door closed, she may not have been able to hear a thump as he fell. She should check on him, though the thought of opening that door to a bullet burning into her gut fills her with dread.
She wipes her hand over her face, takes a deep breath, and tiptoes along the wall, watching the door to 104 like a deer in the crossroad just waiting for those headlights to turn into a semi's grille. Forcing herself to actually open the door, once there, is even harder. So many corpses she could be, thirty seconds from now. Belly-up on the sidewalk with chunks of skull cooling on the pavement. Slumped in the doorway as her heart explodes onto the insides of her ribs and pumps all that's left of her out onto shaking hands, weeping the names of people who can't help her anymore. Will she wind up back in the real world to be buried, like Walter's victims did? Or will they never know what became of her? How long will they keep looking, this ti-
Enough. She reaches boldly for the knob, but peers into the room with considerably more caution. Her pulse calms a little when she sees no one inside and there's no crack of gunpowder or muzzle flash to greet her. No, bizarrely, there are just strings. Dangling everywhere, slung from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, tied off to furniture and bedposts and windowsills, like the whole place was meant to be booby-trapped but somebody forgot to keep the things taut. They're all quite slack enough to be brushed aside and carefully stepped over, though she really doesn't appreciate the feel of them drifting gently along the side of her face as she sneaks through.
And the reason why the place looks empty quickly becomes apparent. Part of the wall has crumbled, leaving a gap into the hotel room next door. She holds her breath, hardly daring to disturb the fine layer of dust, and creeps carefully over to the hole. The adjoining room is free of the mess of strings, being instead extensively decorated with something quite different.
Photographs. She half expects them to depict something inhuman and grisly, each and every one, and bile rises in her stomach as she approaches one under the spell of that expectation. But that's not it at all, they are only pictures of people. A blond woman on a bench. The same blond woman with a cocktail in hand. Leaning over the seat of a car. Normal posed shots.
She looks so damn familiar, and Eileen's hands clench into fists when she realizes from where. A different vast collection of photographs across town, different subject matter, same woman. Eileen has seen her before, but last time, she was always dead and dying, impossibly so, nobody could die that many times in that many places and in that many ways. Those falsified photographs beneath the theater, they were of this woman, too. And everything becomes so clear as she moves from frame to frame in this room. In some of the shots, the woman stands with Troy Abernathy. Julianna. This must be Julianna. His mourned wife. And some of these pictures, like this one here on the bedstand, Julianna with another man, his face cut out of the photograph...
It awoke such blind fear and terrible shame in her, hearing that woman cry out from behind the door, she can hardly stand to think of it. Two bloodstains on the floor, when they got through. It was not her ghost crying out that night, not her past driving her half-mad. Troy Abernathy's wife had been screaming and crying and falling under blows, and the other bloodstain, the other body, the dead man in the room, could not have been Troy, no...
No, Troy is the one who sends her crashing to the floor when he brings something hard down against the backs of her knees.