[Silent Hill] Tower
"Wait... wait, I... I'm not ready yet." When she'd lowered herself to sit on one of the bottom steps, it had been with all the speed, grace, and dignity of an 80-year-old foot-bound feudal peasant. She could jokingly boast at parties about her bad-ass threshold for pain tolerance that had her back in action on a nasty sprained ankle, but there are some things which no human body, even hers, was ever meant to endure. Everything hurt, it was all she could do not to burst into tears from it, broken bones and ink-black bruises and jagged-edged gashes and something awful pushing into her skull and just the mileage. She could feel her pulse in her feet when she took her weight off of them, and in a development she would've been way more grossed out about in any other environment, could see the flesh puffing up around the openings in her poor bloody shoes like muffins starting to rise.
But even all of that wouldn't have been enough to do her in and stop her in her tracks right then. The physical abuse was vicious to endure, but dread, that is another animal entirely. She slumped like an old woman because she was hurt, but she spoke because she did not know how to walk through that door, was afraid of everything that it could hold. 302, just like Henry's, it could be the end of the line. It could be the end of a lot of things. It could be the end of everything. She shook in weakness, her visible eye growing moist as she looked up at their destination and considered the slaughtered animals and spread-legged mannequins and dangling baby dolls just behind her. Nothing is getting better, everything is getting worse everywhere they go, they've had to impale their own tortured neighbor and she doesn't want to know how the Devil is going to up the ante next. She just doesn't want to know what she is about to lose. "Can..." Embarrassed by her cowardice, she bowed her head and flicked her hand towards the door, the chain she held rattling over itself. "...can we just...?" ...stay?
Henry looks like he'd ask her forgiveness, if he could, and she sees an echo of her fear in his eyes when he looks back at her. He swallows, opens his mouth, but doesn't bring himself to say no. Instead he walks back across the landing to her, shoes squeaking on tile that matches that in their hallway, and hesitantly holds out a hand, asking, "Can you walk?"
The exit signs are illuminated in red, leaving the stripped and bloated walls looking not so different from the gore-splattered ones outside. Panting for air, Eileen pushes herself weakly away from the sagging desk they'd pushed in front of the door to cover their backs against anything oozing and vicious that could try to follow them. With an affirmative response from Henry to another "Are you okay?" and the static from his radio died back down to plain white noise, she tucks her gun back away.
Three rounds left in her weapon of the original five, their found clip's contents having been equally divided between them. A slight limp now, the twist from that thing that grabbed her by the ankles to try and drag one item of prey safely away from the other, divide and conquer. Or maybe that's too much intelligence to ascribe to it, and really it just preferred having dinner indoors. But coming away from that gauntlet with only a smattering of scrapes and bruises, clothes that smell like corpses and a nightmare-wracked mind, she counts that as an incredible run of luck. Gratitude for their lives exists in stark contrast to the urge to curl up into a ball and scrub the inside of her skull out with steel wool, or to split a bunch of logs in indignant rage. This can't be fair, she could just scream feeling bloodied and helpless, seeing pain lining Henry's face too. It can't.
Looking around the reception lobby, she finds that it's not just their clothes that smell like dead things. A corpse sags in the receptionist's chair, dripping and long since dead, skin flayed away. A noise of dismay punches its way up out of her throat, and she draws nearer with a hand held over her nose and mouth, but closer inspection shows that this girl couldn't be the remains of the one they're looking for. This was probably not a girl to begin with, the front of the skull being flat and devoid of facial features, and the bones in her hands where they're exposed are not bones at all, but looped wire hanger, like a shop project fashioning human form out of the slop of rotting muscle rather than paper maché. The squirm of young fly maggots just under the surface don't seem to mind.
But the experience of having the vision of that body seared into her brain cannot possibly compare to the shock of walking through the only door with a glow filtering out beneath it. The overhead lights are off in the archive display room, but tiny little spotlights set into the edges of a pedestal are still on, shining upon the centerpiece attraction. It could've been a scale model of a planned expansion for the Gazette's office building, maybe, but the details on the fake little building are too precise to go unnoticed. U-shaped, one wing shorter than the other, three stories, even the tiny plastic foliage lining the walk up to the front door exactly matches her memory. She doesn't even pay attention to the old newspapers on display on all four walls around them, the article clippings framed atop filing cabinets filled with old issues, only stares transfixed at the scale model of their old apartment building. "W-what is this doing here?" Marching closer to it, she sees that all the windows are opaque, save for those matching one apartment in particular on the top floor. Those windows are boarded up with tiny balsa wood planks. "What the hell is this doing here? First the date, now the building?!" Though she sounds upset, she only looks scared, declining to raise the question that's clanging like an alarm bell now. What if they weren't unlucky victims of circumstance, or punished for their abandonment or granted the opportunity to save lives, what if they really are here for exactly the same reason that they were in a parallel Hell three years ago? She has no idea how, with Walter Sullivan and his world destroyed, his power destroyed, if he'd even had the power to command the Otherworld proper in the first place, but something or somebody obviously wanted them to see this.
But even all of that wouldn't have been enough to do her in and stop her in her tracks right then. The physical abuse was vicious to endure, but dread, that is another animal entirely. She slumped like an old woman because she was hurt, but she spoke because she did not know how to walk through that door, was afraid of everything that it could hold. 302, just like Henry's, it could be the end of the line. It could be the end of a lot of things. It could be the end of everything. She shook in weakness, her visible eye growing moist as she looked up at their destination and considered the slaughtered animals and spread-legged mannequins and dangling baby dolls just behind her. Nothing is getting better, everything is getting worse everywhere they go, they've had to impale their own tortured neighbor and she doesn't want to know how the Devil is going to up the ante next. She just doesn't want to know what she is about to lose. "Can..." Embarrassed by her cowardice, she bowed her head and flicked her hand towards the door, the chain she held rattling over itself. "...can we just...?" ...stay?
Henry looks like he'd ask her forgiveness, if he could, and she sees an echo of her fear in his eyes when he looks back at her. He swallows, opens his mouth, but doesn't bring himself to say no. Instead he walks back across the landing to her, shoes squeaking on tile that matches that in their hallway, and hesitantly holds out a hand, asking, "Can you walk?"
The exit signs are illuminated in red, leaving the stripped and bloated walls looking not so different from the gore-splattered ones outside. Panting for air, Eileen pushes herself weakly away from the sagging desk they'd pushed in front of the door to cover their backs against anything oozing and vicious that could try to follow them. With an affirmative response from Henry to another "Are you okay?" and the static from his radio died back down to plain white noise, she tucks her gun back away.
Three rounds left in her weapon of the original five, their found clip's contents having been equally divided between them. A slight limp now, the twist from that thing that grabbed her by the ankles to try and drag one item of prey safely away from the other, divide and conquer. Or maybe that's too much intelligence to ascribe to it, and really it just preferred having dinner indoors. But coming away from that gauntlet with only a smattering of scrapes and bruises, clothes that smell like corpses and a nightmare-wracked mind, she counts that as an incredible run of luck. Gratitude for their lives exists in stark contrast to the urge to curl up into a ball and scrub the inside of her skull out with steel wool, or to split a bunch of logs in indignant rage. This can't be fair, she could just scream feeling bloodied and helpless, seeing pain lining Henry's face too. It can't.
Looking around the reception lobby, she finds that it's not just their clothes that smell like dead things. A corpse sags in the receptionist's chair, dripping and long since dead, skin flayed away. A noise of dismay punches its way up out of her throat, and she draws nearer with a hand held over her nose and mouth, but closer inspection shows that this girl couldn't be the remains of the one they're looking for. This was probably not a girl to begin with, the front of the skull being flat and devoid of facial features, and the bones in her hands where they're exposed are not bones at all, but looped wire hanger, like a shop project fashioning human form out of the slop of rotting muscle rather than paper maché. The squirm of young fly maggots just under the surface don't seem to mind.
But the experience of having the vision of that body seared into her brain cannot possibly compare to the shock of walking through the only door with a glow filtering out beneath it. The overhead lights are off in the archive display room, but tiny little spotlights set into the edges of a pedestal are still on, shining upon the centerpiece attraction. It could've been a scale model of a planned expansion for the Gazette's office building, maybe, but the details on the fake little building are too precise to go unnoticed. U-shaped, one wing shorter than the other, three stories, even the tiny plastic foliage lining the walk up to the front door exactly matches her memory. She doesn't even pay attention to the old newspapers on display on all four walls around them, the article clippings framed atop filing cabinets filled with old issues, only stares transfixed at the scale model of their old apartment building. "W-what is this doing here?" Marching closer to it, she sees that all the windows are opaque, save for those matching one apartment in particular on the top floor. Those windows are boarded up with tiny balsa wood planks. "What the hell is this doing here? First the date, now the building?!" Though she sounds upset, she only looks scared, declining to raise the question that's clanging like an alarm bell now. What if they weren't unlucky victims of circumstance, or punished for their abandonment or granted the opportunity to save lives, what if they really are here for exactly the same reason that they were in a parallel Hell three years ago? She has no idea how, with Walter Sullivan and his world destroyed, his power destroyed, if he'd even had the power to command the Otherworld proper in the first place, but something or somebody obviously wanted them to see this.