Chapter 18: Working As Intended

The men followed a trail of slowly closing doors. They charged across the hall overseeing the foyer and through to the east wing. Harry seized the vertical bar handle as the door to the guest rooms almost shut and flung it open. James ducked past him to be the first at the bend, and the author staggered after him. They studied the blackened hall, Harry catching his breath and the resident unmoved by the dash.

The combined power of the flashlights weren’t enough. In Silent Hill the dark worked differently, but in this particular instance it felt denser, and controlled. It devoured the cones meant to improve the field of vision and compacted them into tight circles. They crept guardedly down the stretch. Step by step the morphed spotlights cast menacing shadows across the back of a girl facing the solitary window.

One of the beams shuddered over her. The little girl wore her thick blonde hair in a high ponytail gathered by a hot pink scrunchie. The tail hung to her shoulders, brushing the snug blue plaid dress pulled over a pale pink knit sweater. She stood unevenly on a pair of feet that were missing a mate to a pink Mary Jane shoe, ending the mystery of her odd stride, and so exposed the dirty sole of the white socks that reached her calves.

James heard Harry’s breath hitch and hollow. The sight of the girl affected them both. James maintained his composure, and subconsciously, noticed his ward’s restraint had gotten better. Good. He depended on Harry’s will to keep it together.

Neither wanted to get too close. They stopped a collective four rooms away; close enough to engage, and edging the best distance for an escape. As though sensing the tension over her shoulder the girl rotated, revealing features that both men did, and didn’t, recognize. She smiled. “You’re really bad at hide and seek,” she cheerfully reprimanded as she swiveled side to side. “ I thought I was gonna have to make it easier. Next time you get stuck like that just call ‘olly-olly-oxen-free,’ okay? It gets really boring if you can’t use your brains.”

She proved to be a sassy little punk and her voice came sweeter than candy. For each man she gave a unique, cruel gift: the individual experience of hearing her words and tone in the perfect imitation of the little girls they once knew. It kept them shocked and silent. The child stopped her fidgeting, and her smile quickly vanished, then brightly returned. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she chirped, striking jolts of fear into her pursuer’s hearts. “I’m having a really great time with you.” Her voice welded the two distinct renditions of two different girls. Her ensuing call shifted the corridor into a reverberation chamber, converting tangled noise into a thunderous growl.

From James’s damp hair ushered the first beads of water, and knotted anguish forced a full-body, lasting shiver in Harry.

They heard their names. They heard them simultaneously clear as day and as an impure mash. The radio in James’s pocket earnestly gasped to life, and its too-belated warning did nothing to move them. Narrowed beams from their flashlights wildly strobed across the scourged child and witnessed a faithless transfiguration.

From head to toe her appearance rapidly cycled through no one and everyone. The father and murderer confronted their merged lifetimes of women whose lives had somehow impacted their own, and were projected as the little girls they formerly were. It didn’t matter if their childhood had been foreign to them or not. She was all of them instantaneously, and in her dizzying carousel of strangers and familiars, James and Harry independently recognized every single one they knew.

commissioned work by @heather-garland