Silent Hill fic: Outbreak - Chapter 4: Crystal

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 4: Crystal goes to work for the closing day at Lakeside Amusement Park.

Monday, September 05, 2016 (Labor Day)

Crystal did not feel well.

As she hung up with her boss, she already regretted agreeing to come in. He’d just sounded so desperate… Well, at least she had three hours before she had to be there.

Max had suggested that she try to get a little more sleep before coming in for her shift, but she knew that she’d never get back out of bed if she let herself fall asleep again. Instead, she took a long shower, made some of the weird herbal tea her mom insisted she drink when she got sick, and took some of the generic cold medicine she found buried in the bathroom cabinet. Then she collapsed in front of some marathon of a police procedural, willing herself to stay awake.

Amber texted her around 10, which gave her something to pay attention to for a little while. She tried to really get into passing on the “dead mascot” urban legend: the one about the employee who went to work sick, and then died in costume. Of course, no one realized he’d died for hours and hours, and—as the legend had it—people had been posing for photos with him for the whole day, having no idea there was a dead man in the suit.

Crystal wasn’t sure if she believed the story. Every new employee at the park got hazed with some variation on the tale; Crystal had gotten locked in a supply closet with an empty Robbie suit after she’d been told the story. And Amber had a point—the same story, with minor variations, had been circulating since they were kids, whispering it in the dark at sleepovers and under the slide on the playground.

Generally, stories like that didn’t freak her out. At least not in the daytime. She had scared herself into a near-panic one night when she’d been in the park long after they’d closed, and she had to cross to the main gate to get to her car. Lakeside looked near-abandoned once the rides were shut down, and every noise was suddenly some monster lurking just out of sight.

If there were any monsters lurking there today, they’d probably be trampled by hordes of guests. Hell, she was likely to be trampled, and at this point she’d welcome it if it meant she’d be sent home. She hadn’t even left her house yet and she was ready to be done with the day. She indulged in a few more minutes of self-pity, then dragged herself up off the couch and to the bathroom to change into her uniform.

---

By the time she showed up at Lakeside, she was even less sure that she wanted to be there. It was the last day of the season; what would Max do if she was a no-show? Fire her? But she liked Max, and didn’t really want to fuck him over.

She just sat in her car for a few minutes, staring at the gates, trying to gather the energy to actually go in. She wondered idly if she had a fever; it felt like she might. Her skin felt swollen and tight, and everything seemed vaguely unreal. Glancing away from the park, she stared at the lake stretching to the south and the east across the road. With how uncomfortably hot she felt, she half wanted to just walk to the lakeshore and dive right in, even knowing how cold and miserable the water would be.

Crystal groaned and thunked her head against the steering wheel. She had to quit metaphorically dragging her feet. Finally, she headed in, passing a growing crowd of guests waiting in line for the gates to open to them. At least she wasn’t going to be stuck at the admissions window.

---

There were only two of them in The Sweet Factory Store, when usually they’d have three. On a day as busy as closing day, they should have had four. Fortunately, her sole coworker was Emma, who was extremely efficient and a good worker. A little older than most of the hourly employees, she could generally be counted on to pick up the slack if you were having an off day.

Emma took one look at Crystal when she walked in and declared, “Yikes. I’ll handle any of the sample trays, and any of the orders that require touching the single candies. You just help people find stuff on the floor and ring people up at the register. You look like hell, girl.”

“Thank you,” Crystal said, more in response to the division of labor than the ‘looking like hell’ comment. But her shoulders slumped in relief. Touching food, even with gloves on, seemed like a bad plan.

Emma put the finishing touches on the central display of Rosewater Chocolates, and shooed Crystal to the stool behind the register to wait until the hordes descended.

---

Crystal was able to put on an only partially convincing act once customers started coming in. The Sweet Factory Store wasn’t one of the busiest stores, even when they were understaffed. That was probably why Max had stationed her here.

Still, they had a steady stream of people from about fifteen minutes after the gates had opened. Most were just browsers and window shoppers, some of whom might come back at the end of their day, but weren’t interested in buying anything yet. (Crystal had never entirely understood someone wanting to buy a bunch of chocolate first thing in the afternoon. If you didn’t eat it all, it would be a melted mess by the time you headed home.)

Ordinarily, Crystal worked a booth or a ticket counter because she was friendly and outgoing and great at customer service. Today she didn’t even bother to engage anyone who didn’t directly have a question or need to make a purchase. Of course she was polite, but had no interest in initiating any contact she didn’t have to.

Time crawled. She tried to break her shift into increments: noon to six, six total hours, each hour split into four fifteen-minute intervals. Every fifteen minutes split into three fives. Watch the minute hand on the clock, each five-minute segment that passed moving her five minutes closer to going home.

She tried to busy herself with neatening displays in between handling customers, but even that didn’t make the time move any faster. Emma kept fetching her cups of water and trying to get her to stay seated on the stool.

Eventually Crystal gave up even trying to be productive, and just sat like a lump behind the register, waiting for the minutes to tick by.

There was a small rush around 2:00. That was about the time people started wanting some kind of snack, even if they’d eaten lunch before they came to the park. And when people were spending the day at an amusement park, candy became a completely reasonable meal. The funnel cake and “astronaut ice cream” stands had to be doing even more business at the moment, so she was grateful not to be stuck out there. Around 2:20 the rush died down, leaving only a few browsers at the other end of the shop, and Crystal slumped forward over the counter.

Emma came over to check on her once she’d verified none of the current customers needed assistance. Crystal sat up and stared dumbly at the splatters of blood on the counter.

“Jesus!” Emma yelped. “You’re bleeding! Tip your head back…”

Emma grabbed a handful of the little waxed tissues they used to handle the single chocolates, shoving them into Crystal’s hand. They weren’t in the least bit absorbent, but they were better than nothing. Crystal did as she was asked, clutching the crinkled paper to her dripping nose, cringing at the disgusting feel of blood dripping down the back of her throat, and the metallic tang of it on her tongue.

Emma unearthed the paper towels from their spot under the counter and handed several of those to Crystal as well. Crystal stood up, and swayed on her feet as her vision started to go white around the edges.

“Lightheaded?” Emma asked, grabbing Crystal’s shoulders to steady her before steering her out the “employee only” door behind the counter to the little hallway that led to the maintenance areas. There was an employee restroom back there.

Crystal was grateful to the other woman for supporting her on the way back; she wasn’t completely sure that she could have made it on her own. Emma left her leaning over the grungy, chipped porcelain sink.

“I’ll send Max a text and let him know that you aren’t feeling well and absolutely can’t be with customers at the moment. After you’re done in here, how about you go lie down in the locker room for a bit? If you feel better you can come back to the floor, all right?”

Crystal nodded slowly, holding the mess of bloody paper towels to her face one-handed, supporting her weight against the sink with the other.

Emma hesitated a moment. “Come get me if you need anything, all right? I have to go back out.”

Crystal nodded again. They weren’t supposed to leave a store unattended for any reason, even for a few minutes. Too much of a theft risk, or even just the risk of dumb kids coming in and knocking down the displays. She’d feel better once her nose stopped bleeding, anyway.

“Go,” she said, the word a bit muffled by the paper towels. “Sorry about this.”

“No worries. Just feel better, okay?” Emma darted back up the employee hallway.

Crystal pulled the paper towels away from her nose. Like removing a dam from a river, a stream of blood rushed out, and splattered into the sink. The faucet was leaking anyway, but Crystal turned it on low, watching the blood wash down the drain. After the first gush, the bleed settled into a steady drip, and she stared at the blood swirling with the water as it gradually slowed. She knew the advice was always to tip your head back, the way Emma had told her to stand at first, but swallowing that much blood made her queasy, and she already felt like she might throw up.

Finally, the slow drip stopped entirely, after one disgusting blood clot came out. Crystal groped for a new handful of the rough brown paper towels in the dispenser to the side of the sink. She wiped away the splatters of blood in the basin, as well as the spots where her fingers had smeared it along the side and the handle. She wetted a few more towels and started cleaning off her face.

The mirror was old and yellowed, and there was only a single fluorescent bulb in the ceiling, so it presented a less than flattering image under the best of circumstances. Even given that, her skin had taken on a distressingly ashy appearance, and sweat stood out on her forehead and neck.

She carefully removed the blood from around her nose and lips, and where it had gotten on her cheek, maybe when she’d had her head down on the counter. She spared a brief thought to cringe at the health hazard presented by bleeding on the same counter they set food on, but she shrugged it off, knowing Emma would have gotten it cleaned up.

After the last of the blood was gone from view, she ran a wet paper towel over the rest of her face and neck. She’d felt uncomfortably warm from her maybe-fever for most of the day, but it had cooled to a clammy, chilled feeling now. Her initial thought was that she needed to get back out onto the floor. She groped into her jeans pocket for her phone—2:47. She’d been in the bathroom for almost half an hour.

She shut off the sink, leaving only the slow trickle of the leaking faucet, and turned toward the door, only to be hit with another wave of dizziness. The light above seemed to flicker, though as she steadied herself against the wall, everything went back to normal. Crystal decided she’d better take Emma up on the suggestion that she go lie down for a while. She wasn’t especially confident that she could even manage to sit on the stool at the register without falling over.

The “locker room” that Emma had referred to was the main costume room at the end of the employee hallway. Any of the workers who dressed as the mascot characters had to change into costume once they were already at the park, for obvious reasons. So while most employees could show up in uniform and stash a purse or wallet somewhere near their station, there had to be lockers for the mascot actors, who often had bags or coats with them.

It wasn’t a delightful room, and it always smelled kind of musty and damp (or like weed, though most of the employees knew better than to risk getting caught smoking on the job), but there was a long wooden bench she could lie down on, and it would be quiet for a couple more hours.

Crystal kept a hand on the wall the entire way down the hall, a bit dismayed at how weak she felt. Her hand shook when she let go of the wall, and she was practically considering just collapsing on the floor to take a nap. One foot in front of the other finally got her to the locker room, and she sat heavily on the bench. She checked her phone again, and saw a text from Max:

Emma sed u got sicker and u were going 2 lie down. If u feel better u can go back 2 work, but if u need 2 rest do it. Sry u had 2 come in.

She sighed. Max’s lackluster texting skills aside, at least he had always been a sympathetic boss. He probably wouldn’t have had any issue with her staying home if it hadn’t been for so many other people calling off of work. Crystal was too tired to even sustain irritation at them, though she was fairly sure that however sick any of the others felt, they couldn’t be this ill.

She was back to feeling flushed and hot, which could have been a mild blessing, considering how damp and chilly the locker room usually felt. The dingy bare concrete walls and floor, the weird off-yellow dented metal lockers, plus the harsh fluorescent lights, certainly did nothing to make the place feel warm or inviting. Crystal couldn’t care right now. She sprawled flat on the smooth wooden bench, a bit relieved when the cool wood started to leach some of the heat off her skin.

She grabbed someone’s discarded hoodie and balled it up as a pillow. She wasn’t sure whose it was, but it didn’t stink, and they could deal with her borrowing it.

With a struggle she managed to set an alarm on her phone to wake her in an hour. If she wasn’t feeling better by then, she’d just have to go home. But maybe she’d be able to at least help manage the evening rush if she got some rest.

As bone-deep exhausted as she was, she didn’t drop off to sleep immediately. Glancing around the room, her attention was caught by a couple spare Robbie costumes hung up on the bar along one wall. Robbie was the main mascot for the park, so while there were the other characters—Kathy the Kitty, Dawn the Duck, and Huey the Horse—they always had more people dressed as Robbie. And so there were more spare Robbie costumes as well.

The empty costumes always had a vaguely creepy look to them, since they had a little bit of shape to them, but couldn’t stand unsupported and just had to hang there. The big heads seemed even more out of proportion when they were mounted above the empty-but-bulky suits, and the boneless quality of the costume body went from cartoonish to disturbing.

Crystal regretted a bit that she’d recounted the “dead body in costume” urban legend to Amber earlier. She’d thought she was immune to being freaked out by it anymore, and yet…

Finally she dropped off, completely out of energy.

---

When she woke some time later, it was quiet, and the light seemed dimmer than it should. She didn’t feel any better, and in fact felt worse. Still shaky, and the feverish feeling had faded back to the miserable clammy, chilled sensation, which was probably what had woken her up. Tentatively she touched the area under her nose, but her fingers came away clean. At least the nosebleed hadn’t started up again.

She swung her feet down to the floor and sat up, judging that she wasn’t in immediate danger of fainting. She groped for her phone; she felt out of it enough that she could have been asleep anywhere from twenty minutes to having slept through her alarm. The dim lighting seemed wrong somehow, but nothing else in the room had changed, so it wasn’t like the park had closed. There was no way she could have slept through people coming through the room to change out of costume, and even if she’d managed that, she couldn’t believe that no one would have woken her up.

She pushed the other buttons, and when that didn’t work, held the power button down, in case it had somehow turned itself off. No reaction at all.

“Shit.” She hadn’t noticed the battery being low, but it wasn’t like she’d been focusing on much. Now she really did have no idea how long she’d been asleep.

She staggered to her feet, that same lightheadedness coming over her again. The white spots around the edges of her vision retreated, and she turned to head back down the hall. She needed to borrow a phone or something. She had to go home; this felt like the worst case of the flu she’d ever come down with, and there was no way she was going to be able to just power through it to finish her shift. If Max wanted to flag her as unhire-able for future seasons, he was welcome to. (Though she doubted he would.)

The lights in the hallway, always dim, seemed even more drastically so. She squinted in the barely lit hallway, and kept a hand on the wall in case she got dizzy again. The weak fluorescents above flickered, and Crystal frowned. There was a small splash of stronger light fairly far ahead of her, coming out of the open bathroom door.

She walked a little faster, though the aches in her joints made it a struggle. Crystal had never considered herself overly superstitious, but this was an eerie atmosphere, and she wanted to get back to the brightly-lit candy shop and Emma and a phone she could use to call someone for a ride. She didn’t think she was safe to drive.

When she hit the halfway point between the locker room and the bathroom, the hallway lights went out entirely.

Crystal stifled a reflexive scream. She took a deep breath and tried to talk herself through it. Probably a power failure. A busy day, everything running all at once, old wiring in this part of the building… She should really just be hoping there was no power failure at any of the rides; no one wanted the crisis of having visitors stranded on the Ferris wheel or the roller coaster. She shook her head. Probably just a single breaker or something; the bathroom light was still on ahead, and without turning around she could still see some faint light from the locker room behind her.

As Crystal started to slowly stagger forward toward the light from the bathroom, she heard something behind her. It was such a soft sound that she almost didn’t notice it, until it repeated. A quiet, shuffling type noise, like something being pulled or dragged along the floor.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she felt her heart rate spike as she saw a Robbie costume slumped next to the doorway to the locker room. From this distance it was hard to tell whether said costume was empty or not. Regardless, she would have had to pass it on the way out, and she was certain it hadn’t been there. It was against the rules to leave the costumes on the ground, anyway. They were expensive as hell to clean.

Her mind ran through the available explanations. In her fevered, sick state, she could have just failed to notice it. Or someone was playing a prank on her, which was a shitty thing to do to someone who was sick. Either way, it was not her job to deal with the costume.

“Hell. No,” she said aloud. If it was someone trying to prank her, hopefully they’d get the message that she was not in the mood to deal with their shit.

She continued toward the bathroom light, and the dragging sound didn’t immediately resume. She breathed a slight sigh of relief. But another ten feet or so down the hall, she heard another shuffle. She paused, shook her head, and continued on. It had to be some asshole trying to scare her—maybe Tommy, he was always a real dick—and she was not interested in giving him any satisfaction. A few more steps down the hall, every step now accompanied by some soft noise in the hallway behind her.

Leaning her shoulder more heavily against the cool concrete wall, Crystal took a deep breath. She was ready to snap at this douchebag, even if she probably couldn’t take a toddler in a fight, not while feeling like this. As she turned around, the angry expletive she’d been preparing died on her lips.

The Robbie costume was now standing about halfway between her and the locker room doorway, utterly motionless. Maybe it was her fever, but there seemed to be something wrong with the costume, beyond some jerk trying to freak her out. It was standing, so it had to have someone in it, but it was too still. The costumes were heavy—anyone standing in one would naturally shift their weight, even slightly, but this could almost have been a statue. Yet it felt like there was someone there.

As Crystal breathed in a new lungful of air, a new smell became obvious. Beyond the damp odor of the hallway, there was an air of rot, like the smell when a squirrel had died in their chimney when Crystal was little. She stumbled backwards, an unconscious instinct to get away.

And the locker room light went out, plunging that whole section of hallway into blackness.

This time she couldn’t entirely stifle the sound as she cried out, the Robbie costume suddenly gone from view. She turned and tried to run, but could only manage a limping shuffle. Her joints, her bones, her muscles, her skin, all of it hurt so badly that even the adrenaline couldn’t overcome it to let her move faster. But getting to the bathroom, to that tiny bit of remaining light, was suddenly the only thing that mattered. The shuffling noise started again behind her.

She got to the pool of light cast by the open bathroom door, and rushed into the room. The single-occupancy room was thankfully empty, though it looked dirtier than she remembered it. The sink and the toilet were both coated in grime, and there was stale, grey water pooling along one wall. Some of the cheap linoleum tiles were peeling up, the space under them and between tiles completely black. A glance in the mirror—had it been cracked along the side like that before?—revealed that her nosebleed had started again, and half of her face was covered in bright blood, dripping from her nose and her chin.

The door to the bathroom was open outward into the hallway. Suddenly she didn’t care that it would trap her in the tiny, dirty bathroom; she wanted that door shut. Returning to the hall, intending just to grab the handle to slam the door shut, she found herself face to face with the Robbie the Rabbit costume, standing just to the side of the doorway, blocking the door itself.

Crystal yelped, backpedaling into the room. Maybe it was just the fact she had blood all over her own face, but she would have sworn the costume’s face had looked bloodstained too. She backed all the way against the wall opposite the door, and collapsed onto that disgusting, filthy floor. She landed with a faint splash; the grey water was continuing to pool, covering the whole floor. She heard a shuffle from the hall again, just before the bathroom light flickered and went out.

Crystal screamed.

---

“Crystal? Crystal!”

Someone was shaking her shoulders. Crystal opened her eyes, focusing on Emma’s worried hazel eyes.

“Jesus, honey, you are covered in blood. What happened? I heard you scream,” Emma said, reaching up to grab a wad of toilet paper and starting to wipe at Crystal’s face. “Did you fall? Have you been in the bathroom this whole time?”

Crystal shook her head, taking the wad of toilet paper from Emma and scrubbing at her own face. She started to speak, but her throat felt raw from screaming. She swallowed and tried again. “I fell asleep,” she finally choked out.

“In the bathroom?” Emma asked.

“No… locker room. There was a costume,” she tried to explain, suddenly having a hard time describing what she’d seen. “Everything was wrong, dark. Robbie…” She knew the words weren’t conveying anything meaningful, though finally she managed to string together a question. “Did the power go out?”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “No. Did the light go off in here? I know these old bulbs are sometimes terrible.”

Emma stood up, pulling out a small stack of paper towels from the wall dispenser and holding them under the faucet for a second before offering them to Crystal. They were a bit more effective at getting rid of the blood.

It felt like an inane thing to focus on, but Crystal was relieved that the bathroom looked to be in its normal state of slightly dirty disrepair; nothing like the filth and decay she last remembered seeing.

“What happened to your arms?” Emma asked, sounding horrified.

Crystal glanced down. Her bare arms were both covered in small bumps, each about the size of a pencil eraser. They didn’t look like mosquito bites so much as blood blisters: red-purple welts obvious against her skin. She didn’t think those had been there earlier. She would have seen them when she woke up in the locker room… if that had even happened.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“We are calling someone to come pick you up,” Emma said. “There is no way you’re able to work, and I don’t know that you can get yourself home safe.”

Crystal just nodded dumbly.

---

Crystal’s mother came straight from work to pick her up, and was appropriately horrified by Crystal’s symptoms. Initially she wanted to take Crystal straight to the ER, but Crystal begged her not to. It was a halfhearted excuse, but Crystal blamed the marks on the arms on some kind of allergic reaction, and the rest of it on the flu. Her mom seemed skeptical, but agreed just to take her home, on the condition she went straight to bed.

As soon as they made it back, Crystal made good on the promise. At first she’d been afraid that the nightmare—or fever dream, or hallucination, or whatever it had been—was going to keep her from falling back to sleep, but she was almost unconscious by the time her mother came in with extra blankets.

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