Silent Hill: A Pale Reflection Chapter 1, a silent hill fanfic

Silent Hill: A Pale Reflection (by Elliot Bowers)

Silent Hill: A Pale Reflection

by Elliot Bowers

"End of May"

music and vocal by Keren Ann

Chapter 1

…

Feeling sick as Hell and weak all over, the girl awoke at sunset—even if there was no good reason to wake up at all in this damned place. Sundown, sunset, it always seemed to be either dark or getting towards dark around here. Looking at the girl, one could see the play of lean musculature beneath the skin of her tender neck as her head turned to look across the hard room. Over there by the opposite wall, blood-colored light from the sun glowed through the barred window to cast this place in soft reddish tones. No artificial lights were on just yet even though this place had electricity. How they still got electricity to this place was a wonder, given what the world was like outside. Where did the electricity come from? Were there still enough of those maintenance people out there to keep all of those overhead electric cables maintained? This was still assuming, of course, that there were real people running the machines and what-not. A person had to wonder if there was anybody alive out there at all. Then again true was how the creatures that ran this place were smart enough to find out how to supply electricity with their own strange machines, dark and strange engines churning in hot little rooms operated by creatures one wished only existed in nightmares. If only this was just a nightmare…

Never mind that, thought the girl to herself.There was nothing the girl could do about what was happening—nothing about what was happening in this hospital-prison, nothing about what was happening to the world outside. It was all just not her problem at the moment. A person in her position was probably better off not following that path of thought at this time. Too many problems existed just here and now.

Sunset meant a lot of vaguely good things. It was the end of the day, for one thing. Meaning, it was the end of yet another space of measurable time in this place, having lived through it. Another day had come to pass in which they failed to do what they wanted to do to her. It was another section of time the girl lived through. They would not let her die. Her death would mean that they failed.

Who were they? They kept her here. They said it was for her own good at first—the ones that could pass for human, sitting behind desks and telling her father that all would be well here. They were the ones who ran this imprisoning institution. The unseen and omnipresent they, it was they who had control. It was they who kept her locked up.

It was not as if this girl was declared a prisoner or anything. It was nevertheless an awful lot like incarceration in some ways. People thought and said this was a hospital. Sure, it's a hospital…where they kept her imprisoned. They lock people up in jails too. So it may as well be prison. The girl knows the deal—having done spates of time in institutions for maybe pocketing things in stores that maybe weren't hers. Well okay, so maybe it was a little shoplifting? That's done, okay? The girl also used to smoke. Shopkeepers sold to her because police in her neighborhood aren't there to catch the act.

Smoking, shoplifting, There was truth in how both those habits were equally tough habits to stop. Now the shoplifting part of the deal got her in the local pokey more than once, kept until her dad picked her up. Again, the girl knew what being locked up was all about—didn't make this time any damned easier.

They at least let her have some amenities and privileges, like some old religious books to read and some notebooks to write or draw in. Those items were kept at a desk and a bookshelf, both also allowed in this room. The writing materials were atop the rectangular metal desk in this room. It was over there in the corner, left of the window—the barred window, more to keep her trapped in than keeping things out. The desk they had in here was a big old industrial-looking gray metal chunk that looked as if it came from the 1950s or something. It was like the thing was made to be like part of a tank. That wasn't surprising since how people from back then thought that ducking under office and school furniture would protect them from world-ending nuclear warfare. (Sure! Hide your scared ass under this sucker, and it'll keep you from being vaporized by a blast hotter than a gazillions suns put together!) The chair came from the same nuclear-warfare school of design—looking just as clunky and big as the armored-looking metal desk.

Next to the desk were the bookshelves. They were bolted to the wall and were a perfect metal compliment to the retro-military office hardware. In fact, other than the bed and the office chair, all the furniture in this place was bolted to the floor or bolted to the walls as if they were afraid the patient-inmate would do something ultra-violent like start throwing those things about. A desk with chair, a bed, some shelves, and that was just about it in this hard-tiled room, cast in tones of a dying sunset…

Was the girl violent? No, they generally need not worry as the girl was not feeling especially empowered enough to do anything destructive at the moment, at least not physically. This girl was not feeling up to doing much of anything for a while now other than breathing and thinking. This was maybe the third day the girl just wasn't feeling like getting out of bed and not do anything.

Didn't matter, because they do things to her sometimes—with our without her cooperation. They sometimes force-fed her foods that barely looked fit for human consumption. What do they care? Those ugly jokers weren't human. Sometimes they dragged her into a wheelchair and took her to the shower room where they scrubbed her body in chemical-smelling water. As dirty as they were, they insisted on keeping her body clean and passably well-fed. Never-mind it if the harshness of the chemicals was starting to make her feel a little dizzy. Creatures, what do they know about what's good for people?

Well, maybe they should care. It was about more about her body than her mind. They didn't care what happened to her mind. But if her body sickened and died, it would all be over for their screwy plan. They would probably not let her die, letting her end her life.

But her life was not over today, though, since this day was done as sunset darkened into night. All the things in here seemed even more shadowed and vague as the weak sunset was fading and dying. A dying sunset in a dying world… Yes, that was probably very appropriate.

Her sickness-blurred eyes barely focused enough to look at the soft darkened shapes of the metal furniture in this room as so her mind could imagine things being better. Soft gloom and obscuring shadows made it easier to pretend that this was really her bedroom back home. The girl could pretend that the shadowed hard-tiled floor was wooden instead of the square hard-tiled flooring of an institution. That metal desk could also look wooden in the gloom. And just maybe, some of her favorite plushie toys from childhood were just laid in the shadow of that desk. This place was maybe just a bit larger than her room at home, but it was close enough to just barely pretend. This was excepting the times when the girl thought there were…things in the shadows. Something was maybe…sitting slumped against the desk. A person could perhaps barely see a shadowed shape.

Yes, it was a thing—a big oversized head atop a little torso, two atrophied arms and two legs attached. Maybe the shadow-thing was breathing just a little, too—taking in air and taking on life even if the thing was not really alive in the normal sense. It liked staying here even if this wasn't its world. Mmm, yes, it liked sharing the girl's air in this room, breathing the same air that passed through her delicate throat, held in her delicious lungs, breathed back out of her body. This shadowy being would also so much enjoy keeping female company, sweet delicious female company, to feed off of her in some way. It loved her fear too, making her air taste all the more sweeter. Maybe the rest of her is also sweet and delicious Let's have a bite of her firm young flesh and find out, hmm?

"N-no…" came her voice, snapping out of that reverie. The shadowy creature was gone as easily as it had appeared—a figment of the shadows playing on her imagination, maybe. Hopefully... Hope in this place, that's not a likely thing.

Quivering fear prompted her to sit up in bed, making her aware of her body's weakened and altered condition. The girl did not need light to know what her appearance was like now, which was her not looking to be in the best of health. One could see just how physically wasted away the girl looked.

If that young female was slender before, now this was her looking downright skinny—not too good. Her once well-toned legs were slimmed thin, going into lean hips and torso. Too-slender arms and shoulders were getting towards being more bones than flesh. A narrow neck and prominent throat, a broad-cheeked face with a small pouty mouth and sunken hazel eyes that looked so dark these days. Hazel eyes, witch hazel—went a thought. Framing her face was her straight dark hair. Once upon a time, the girl used to style it be fluffy and blonde, but her hair had since gone back to its straight dark ways—night-colored hair that was kept cut short by them.

In addition to their hackneyed fashion-sense in cutting her hair as the blondness grew out of it, they gave her a long, thin-gray shirt-thing that clung to her body and barely went below the double-curve of her butt. Nothing was worn underneath since they didn't let her keep underthings. Panties were a thing for modesty that had her initially worried, and going without a bra could have been a problem support-wise if her tits were big enough to be of concern. Why the lack of underthings? It made things easier for them when it came to their examinations and a real nuisance for her at first. Then came her no longer caring. They did whatever they wanted in the end when it came to running things.

Yesterday or the day before—so hard to tell because time oozed along sometimes—some of the nurses come in while the girl was lying down. They stripped her as so the doctors could look at her naked body and put their rough, hot, inhuman hands to her abdomen—an abdomen which remained defiantly flat despite their efforts at making it swell with child. If her body showed any signs of developing pregnancy beyond just conception, they'd be able to track the size of the development at a glance.

They were trying to get her pregnant through some ways other than sex, doing things to her body. The girl knew what they wanted, didn't want it to happen to her. Behold the power of thought. It only made sense. After all, shadowy things could sometimes come to pass just by thinking about them.

Though the girl wanted to refuse the truth of it, nevertheless true was her being able to understand their language, hearing them talk about her giving birth. The girl knew what they said and thought. The girl knew what they wanted.

They wanted her swollen with child and just wouldn't shut up about it whenever they got to babbling, which is something they didn't do too often, thank goodness. No way, freaks, thought the girl. No way am I going to get preggers with one of your kind.

Preggers, Hell! They wanted the center of her body infested with something. Of course, just willpower alone could not stop normal pregnancies with normal people. For her, it was working. So there.

Whoever said this pregnancy was supposed to be normal? They were not normal. And just maybe, the girl was not quite a normal person herself—the girl herself not quite part of everyone's everyday idea of what a person should be. The girl just didn't fit, damn it. No wonder why so many people in the local neighborhood wanted to be rid of her. Why…?

…

It was a long time in coming… Yup, they were bound to send her to the loony bin eventually, just to give themselves peace of mind. More like they were people who only thought with pieces of their minds—their emotions getting the best of them with all the new troubles happening in town. And they just knew the girl had something to do with those troubles.

The things that happened in the past, what the girl had done in the past, those things led to now. It is the past which gives birth to the present, and the present leads to the future. There was no going back to change what happened, so today couldn't be totally changed. Her today couldn't be changed because her yesterdays brought her here. And it was not really likely they were going to let her out in the future. Past, present, future, the three are locked together in one unholy circular trinity.

Some of things that happened around the girl also caused her father to look wrongly upon her. These were aspects of that girl which people kept trying to ignore in her presence but whispered about later. It wasn't that the girl could control all aspects of herself all the time. Things just happened, okay? So went the occurrences, so went the whispers, Stay away from her. The girl can do things with her mind.

And if a person could come to accept that, they would also have to accept what was going on with the rest of the local landscape. Look at what was going wrong with the television and radio stations. TV was damned important to a lot of folks. So was radio. Now half the stations couldn't be picked up—nothing but hissing static snow on too many channels. Don't stare into that staticky snow though, because people were saying they would catch glimpses of stuff nobody ought to see.

The remaining channels had too many news reports about not going outside at night and evacuating immediately if the wrong kind of fog started rolling through town. That's not news. Everybody knows about fog. To Hell with the reporters' tomfoolery about evacuations and crap. So long as a person avoided the messed-up animals and strangers that came with the fogs, everything was fine.

So people kept saying everything was just fine. As long as people had gas enough to put in their cars to get to and from work, had beer in the fridge for after-work and could sit in front of their televisions, everything was still just fine—not as dandy as candy, but still just fine anyway. Work, beer and television, that's the mainstream holy trinity of reality. It was how the way things were, the way things are, and the way things are supposed to be forever, amen. To Hell with the reporters, and to Hell with any weird crap that happened otherwise.

But people still had the underpinning idea that everything was maybe not a-okay. About those animals… Messed-up animals started appearing in people's back yards. Okay… And wherever there those messed-up animals, people that weren't really people starting coming into town, going away as soon as they came, neat as you please. Yeah, we can deal with that.

Then it was as if the highways—those arteries of transportation—were being clogged off or severed by those fogs. The trucks that used to transport foods and fuels to the big stores and warehouses, they weren't coming around as often. Police cars and state troopers would sometimes go out of town and not make it back in a timely manner. Then there were the animals…and more of that damned fog to mark it happening …

Alright, alright…that's enough of that bull-crap. Forget about it. Just sit down in front of the television every day after work and knock back a few bottles of Bud in front of the teevee until dinner-time. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we work again. Don't start up any of that talk about messed-up animals and weird people who don't quite look human. And shut up about the fog, too. Only crazy people talk about that. Crazy people get locked up, like that little blonde-haired working girl, weird skinny little bitch…

The girl just couldn't help being short-short on money sometimes, short in height all the time. Between her part-time job and her dad's income—he wrote books and stuff—the girl most certainly had enough to keep clothes on her back and food to eat. Her appetite was normal enough (even if the girl just wasn't normal herself), eating the occasional bout of junk-food at fast-food joints…and still a lean thing. Something wasn't right about that, as if all of that food going into her was going into fueling some hidden other part of herself, probably the same hidden part that caused stuff to happen around her.

People noticed how the girl was able to conveniently be walking the other way or crossing the street to the opposite sidewalk just before some of those messed-up animal-things showed up. It was like something about her could tell when those things were coming, or the girl was causingthem to come around and knew where not to stand when there was animal trouble. And don't call 'em anything else but animals, or they'll lock you up in the crazy house too... With her.

Other kinds of things happened around her. It wasn't like lightning bolts started flying or laser-beams flew out of her eyes or some crazy superhero crap like that, although some people who were quite a few bottles into weekend-night drinking sessions suspected that to be the case. It's little things. Clocks started showing wrong times in her presence. Lights would flicker. Some people looked at her face, her eyes, and said they started to feel kind of funny in the head. (Not that head. Get your minds out of the gutter!) Those light hazel eyes, it was like those eyes of hers could look into a person's mind and see what was going on. It was especially uncomfortable because some of the local men-folk could not help but to want finding out for themselves what the girl looked like beneath those clothes of hers. The girl was officially nineteen, but her slender petiteness and her delicate facial features made her seem too much like grade-school jailbait.

Who knows. Maybe that was lesbian jailbait, because they never saw her with male company on a social level. They never saw her with any company. Or maybe daddy kept her satisfied? His wife a lot of years back, people found out. The man had to do something about that urge, and something young and pretty was living with him already.

Nasty talk, foul talk… People talk. People talked like that. They talked like that a lot. They began to talk about her, calling her a weird girl at best and other things at worst-all too often nasty words that parents tell their children not to say but with parents using those same words when talking about the girl. Along with that went jailbait regardless of her official, legal age. The older female neighbors are some of the worst, snickering at her, calling her a closet lesbian, little slut-witch… The girl was the talk of the town, not in a good way.

That talk had effects regardless of their falsehood. Neighbors in the apartment building started stepped over to the opposite side of the hall with her around. Outside of the apartment, at stores, cashiers would glance furtively at her and tried not to make eye-contact. People avoided her direct stare even while looking at her from shadows and out of sight.

Some people with too much free time nowadays had nothing better to do than look out their windows, spreading word about sightings of her and such by using their telephones. That is, for those telephones that still worked well enough for local communication. It was like some kind of unofficial busybody network. Instead of being called the Neighborhood Watch, they ought to call themselves the Witch-Watch. Witch-Watch, after all, is shorter than Weird Girl Closet Lesbian Slut Witch-Watch.

Witch-Watch seemed to start right after her taking the bus home after her daily part-time job—the bus because the subway trains were one of things not coming around anymore. Some of those too-much-free-time people would get things started. They look from building windows and pull down window-shades, as if the short aging buildings of this town had lots of square eyes, and they were pulling square eyelids shut just enough to give the illusion of sleeping. Then the blabbermouths in the buildings, the people living worm-like in those old aging structures, start blabbering away about her being on the block.

Since her father's job pretty much involved him making his own hours in front of computer keyboards when there was working electricity and an old-fashioned typewriter when there was not, he could actually sit around and wait for her to get home every day. He was waiting for her that day just like always. Except one day, there was a big difference.

The girl and her father were at the circular wooden table near the big-glass sliding doors, listening to her father her father say it. Maybe the girl knew what was going to be said. Expecting it, even. It still didn't make things any easier.

I'm sorry, he began in that too gentle but serious voice of his. I cannot live in the same house as someone who could be so dangerous. Maybe you'll hurt me. Maybe you'll hurt yourself. You're my daughter, and I love you. What you need are people that can help you. Whatever is wrong with you has to be fixed. I've already called the hospital. They were waiting for your case, given what other people have been saying.

…

That was then. This was now, her still being here. The misery of that conversation echoed in her memory and brought tears to her eyes even now. Dad, thought the girl, giving a loud sniff in this quiet and darkening room. Her father had her taken here…in the care of them. That was just too long ago. It was maybe a few months, maybe weeks. They didn't let her have a calendar, and with her not bothering to make any effort to count the days and nights as time stretched on into one long drawn-out malaise, a long taste of forever went nowhere physically but just kept going chronologically.

Click-clackety… So came the thick mechanical workings of the metal door. They were coming, this time in the form of nurses. The girl was able to sense their presence. They always made her feel just a little sick inside just by being close. They were now here to do things to her.

One of the nurse-things snapped on the light switch, a pasty corpse-colored hands using crisp fingers to do so. The light flickered on and stayed on—a circular light fixture set way up in the ceiling. This made the girl squint since it was so gloomy in here for so long. Did it have to be so darned bright all the time? Maybe they wouldn't care if someone somehow unscrewed the light bulb later.

Nope, that light fixture was set high in the ceiling and out of reach by ordinary means. That was as so a certain someone couldn't tie a bed-sheet to it and hang herself. It was also because a person could maybe think about suicide given the company. After all, the passably human nurses were not the best of people to be around. Hah, as if they were people.

They only looked like nurses. The girl didn't know what the Hell they really were otherwise, not sure of what they called themselves in whatever nasty world or alternate universe or time they came from. These thin and severe beings came in quickly and officiously, seeming so perfectly human in appearance at a glance. All of the nurses wore those tight white uniforms that resembled dresses, belted tightly at their slim waists and stopping at mid-thighs. The skin exposed by their uniforms, of legs and arms, was just too bleached white to be real flesh. Straight-cut hair framed their corpse-white and inhumanly flawless faces.

Now that was just their appearance at a glance. When a person stared at them, one came to notice things that were just not quite right—other than the fact that their uniform dresses were tad bit too revealing for people involved in the medical profession. They were nominally nurses, yet details were wrong. The Devil is in the details, as the saying goes.

"Lie down!" rasped one of the nurse-things, her pale and stiff mouth barely moving. It wasn't that the nurse was sick or anything. They usually sounded like that, as if speaking through dead throats that did not quite belong to them. Squealed that same nurse, "Cooperate!"

Details… Bad details became visible to the girl once more, details that a person came to notice. The nurses' otherwise dead-pale skin was just a little bit bluish-gray in tinge. Faint spidery lines of blackened blood vessels existed just beneath the surface. Blue blood vessels—the veins—are visible in healthy people, human people, especially those with really light complexions. Light skin complexions? Heck, these nurses looked vampiric. The webs of blood vessels beneath their skin looked as if they carried some kind of dark oily other fluid instead of blood.

"Cooperate! Now!" hiss-rasped the same nurse-thing that rasped before. If at first you don't succeed, as in succeed with getting the girl to cooperate, rasp-rasp again.

"Alright already," began the girl, still looking at these nurse-things. "I'm cooperating. So… What the Hell do you ugly guyshave in mind for me today?" The girl laid herself back in the bed and put her hands atop thighs, knees together. Any other concessions to modesty were just not worth doing. Having gone without panties for this long just made her used to it. So they left her naked underneath this flimsy thing. So what? They were probably just going to strip her nude again anyway. Nude, clothed, whatever. They always did what they wanted to her. Besides, the girl just didn't have the energy to be bothered. "When are we going to get down to business, huh?"

The nurses had a way of communicating without talking and knew when to do what, as if they were all thinking with the same unseen mind. When they were sure of the girl being cooperative, another nurse knew to come in. This nurse—looking exactly like a clone of all the other pasty corpse-like nurses—was slightly hunched over in pushing a metal food-cart of some strange roundish design. If the food-cart itself looked odd, then the food atop it was odder still. More on that later. This other nurse was something else. One could notice a slight shape in her upper back. It wasn't an especially gigantic shape, not exactly like that hunchbacked bell-ringers from Notre Dame or anything. It was nevertheless something. The girl once had the idea that if a person smacked that humpy shape in the nurse's back, maybe something very bad would happen. Bad for the nurse, that is.

But that idea of physical shenanigans was pushed aside when this nurse pushed that cart closer. Off came the cover atop the cart's topmost shelf. "This is food!" hiss-rasped this nurse with the weird upper back, sounding worse than the others.

As to why a person had to be told what was on the cart, it was because being told was necessary. That nurse called it food even if a person couldn't quite tell what the fork that stuff was. It's like how kids draw weird abstract shapes in crayon and then add arrows from words labeling what the shapes are supposed to be, because such shapes were unrecognizable otherwise. Some arrows and words scrawled in crayon would be a big help right about now. Food,would go a label with a green arrow pointed.

Some other indication of what the stuff was would be a help because the girl didn't even know what it was otherwise. Atop the cart were big fleshy tube-things—hand-sized—that were blackened and coiled on the outside, with stringy red exposed ends. Along the sides of the tube-things were lots of little stumps that could have once been where thin legs or branches once stuck out. Right about now, the girl couldn't tell if those things atop the cart's tray were from something animal, vegetable, mineral or something weird in between.

They actually expected her to eat that? Yes they did. Last time, they served her small ball-like stuff that had stiff circle-parts at one end, almost like…large eyes. At least the things currently on the tray looked (ha-ha) sane enough, almost looking like tubular eggplants, stretching the word almost. Maybe this time, the so-called food wouldn't make her throw up either.

The girl wasn't really hungry, but that wasn't on account of the food that didn't look quite like food. The first few days of living here and all of the weird, stomach-twisting foodstuffs were a pain to deal with, anything being served worth eating just because the girl was hungry. But after a while... Food sort of stopped being a priority. It was just easier to just let things go for a while. People once made bad jokes about bad hospital food in the past, but this was ridiculous.

"You eat," rasped the same nurse. Oh joy. Then again, nobody said that the nurses here had to be the most articulate bunch in the world. Or just maybe, even using just a sparing vocabulary was enough to wear out the insides of their seemingly diseased throats. "E-e-ergh, ach!"

"No way am I gonna take that stuff!" was the girl's response. "Vegetarianism is looking like a pretty good idea right about now." This was assuming the stuff was actually meat. Her eye-focus drifted to the odd morsels on the tray. The more the girl looked at it, the more animal-like the food seemed—though the girl had never even heard of whatever the Hell kind of animal that meat came from. "In fact, the threat of having to eat that actually makes anorexia look like a good idea."

"E-e-ergh-ai-i-i…!" wailed the most talkative nurse. The other nurses began to quiver and shudder, their bodies beginning to quiver. It was fairly obvious that the nurses did not take too kindly to her culinary commentary. They were quite unused to food critics attending this fine institution and were reacting accordingly! Or, it was just full and proper human beings that gave them problems. Flick-flicker.The light-fixture overhead also seemed to agree—going on the blink.

Oh great. Here we blow again, went the girl's thoughts. By again, this was not the first time the girl had seen the nurses' illusion of humanity begin to shimmer.

Their white-hatted heads began to quiver as their sexy bodies began to quake. Sexy as they were, what happened with their faces was not so appealing—heads beginning to shake and shimmy, beginning to vibrate. In that blurry vibration were quick little eye-blink appearances of gap-fleshed visages that made a person sick to one's stomach. Being sick to one's stomach would come to pass even if one didn't sample the local fare.

Flick-flicker… The overhead light-fixture was really messing up, really going wrong. Now the girl began to worry. Her sassy confidence was all fine and dandy when it came to the general shenanigans put on by those nurses and the doctors. So what if the liked to give them an occasional bit of wit from a sharp tongue? Yet every so often, her antics perhaps went a tad bit too far. It was the powers-that-be in this hospital that reacted to her rebelliousness.

The nurses were just meat-puppets of that unseen presence. That unseen presence, that abstract force behind everything in this place, it was now going to make things happen no matter what the girl was going to do or say. Blinkety-flick-flicker! The lights became more erratic, and so did those so-called nurses. Now those once-human things weren't even trying to be human. Flickety… As the lights went crazier and crazier still, the nurse-things put their dead-cold hands on the girl's ankles and wrists. Their grips were too strong and too cold.

In came one of the doctor-things. Yet, to call that thing a doctor was probably like calling a chainsaw-swinging maniac a cosmetic surgeon. And let it be known that a chainsaw-swinging maniac is not a cosmetic surgeon, unless one considers the removal of head and limbs by chainsaw to be effective weight-reduction surgery. But any way you slice it, that thing which walked on into here was not really a doctor. Doctors are supposed to be human, damn it, and that thing just wasn't.

Though its body was dressed and covered in a once-white getup befitting a person of the medical community, its face was not hidden, the creature not even trying to hide its inhumanity. Its face was actually a jagged, bloody hole in a lumpy head—as if the center of its face was eaten away by disease and cancers. This was assuming the thing had a face to begin with. It had two arms and two legs—a human-shaped body clad in a grimy lab-coat smeared with pus—thoroughly unprofessional in a medical sense. That was why it was once-white and white no more, all of that nasty crap on it. This doctor thing also had breathing problems, like the nurses. Either their organs were too compromised for normal breathing, or they didn't take too kindly to breathing human air—perfectly good human air eating away at the not-so-good mouths and noses of these creatures. All the medical staff had breathing problems.

Then there were the doctor-thing's hands. The doctor-thing's chitinous hands looked as if they belonged on a cockroach instead of a valid practitioner of medical science. Those nasty hands reached for her.

Things happened quickly. Thin black needles poked out from the doctor-thing's insectile fingers and began dripping with a nasty dark fluid. Those needles at the ends of fingers pierced the flesh of the girl's abdomen.

The resulting pain came with an intensity that seared her body inside and even her mind—an intense, burning feeling that spread from her midriff and outward, overcoming her completely. The girl writhed in pain, unable to lie still as the physical, psychological and spiritual agony overtook her completely. Her body writhed in reflex while her mind wished to be somewhere else. Writhe and resist as much as the girl tried, there was…no escape, at least not in the physical sense. Darkness began to close over her vision as the madness of this moment. Everything did hurt. Everything was so full of suffering and fear. Pain and suffering were two demons that dragged her into an unconsciousness that was a welcome escape from everything that was her reality at the moment. That was an escape enough…

…

Some time ago, when the girl was living her life before all of this, there was a nice little radio in her room. It was kept on top of the raised desk where the girl had her things for writing and drawing. A little radio was better than trying to buy one of those expensive portable electronic things that most young people her age owned. And music on the radio is free. A person can also record some of the better tunes that some of the not-so-mainstream stations played.

On the two days of the week when the girl doesn't have to work, the thing to do was sit atop the tall stool at the raised desk, listening to music from the radio waves or from recorded cassette tapes while reading. The girl liked reading silly nonsense tales of the occult—about ghosts and witchcraft, monsters and such. And when not reading, the girl took to doing some writing in her diary. The girl used to do a lot more drawing before, but this year saw her tendencies more towards penning her thoughts instead of drawing them.

There was this one time when the radio played this really nice song which put a nice smooth beauty to her mood. It was this tune that was just so sad and so relaxing at the same time. The lyrics just played in the background, the woman on the radio singing…

Close, your eyes

…and roll the dice

Under the board, there's a compromise.

If after all

…you only live twice.

Which lies the red road to paradise?

Don't say a word

Here comes the break

…of the day.

And white clouds of sun

…raised by the wind

…of the end

…of May.

Close, your eyes

…and make a bet.

Face to the glare of the sun-set.

This is about

…as far as we get.