Chapter Text
Adam.
Could you really be here, waiting for me?
Lawrence tightens his grip on the sink in the public bathroom. It’s a small rest stop that has no toilet paper, no workable stall doors, let alone any recent maintenance to keep it functioning.
It was the only stop just outside Silent Hill.
Lawrence hasn’t been here since —He hasn’t been here for three years.
It’s a hardship to look himself in the eyes, in the mirror that’s half-broken, half-unusable. The parts that aren’t ruptured are smudged with dirt, grime. Dried blood, if he has to hazard a guess. Masking his reflection. Still, unfortunately, he can see the shape of himself. And that’s enough.
To fuel his contempt.
He wipes a hand over his tired features, watching them warp with the firm movement of his fingers. There are bags under his eyes, his skin is paler than when he’d been dying of blood loss. There’s a wild, untenable look in his eyes that he finds himself afraid of, so he glances away.
Then, exits the bathroom into the cool, autumn air.
It’s been three years since he’s been capable of entering a bathroom without suffering a crisis of character. That may sound dramatic to some, but he’s tried everything. Therapy, pills.
The whole nine-yards.
Just to get over this…it’s not a phobia. It’s damn close.
Bathrooms remain a trigger, as in, he cannot unsee the horrors of his past when he’s inside one. No matter how dissimilar it appears to the game he was forced to undergo, with nothing but a stranger. Adam Stanheight, who hasn’t felt like a stranger since Larry held his face and promised.
Then there’s the matter of mirrors.
Lawrence hasn’t been able to look at himself without flinching, not since then either. He sees himself and fills up with hatred enough to chain him to the worst pits of hell.
And there’s always mirrors in these places.
Cramped or spacious.
Gazing at the thick expanse of forest, stretching beyond his eyesight into the fog, he clutches the crumpled shape of the note in his coat pocket. Unable to help himself, he takes it out and reads it.
Again.
On the envelope, a name is scratched on;
Adam
He peels it open easily, as the glue has been torn through already.
Lawrence unfolds the note, steeling himself from the pangs of loss the words will make him feel.
In my restless dreams, I see that place.
In Silent Hill.
You promised you’d come back for me.
But you never did.
I’m alone here now.
In that “special place” which is the most meaningful to us.
Waiting for you.
Adam Faulker-Stanheight died three years ago in that bathroom, in Silent Hill. It was reported by the news, the information relayed to him by FBI agents and his ex-wife alike. It was everywhere.
And yet.
He received this note days ago.
Since then, Lawrence has been pouring over the scant details of the letter with scrutiny to rival a detective’s. The ‘special place’ line implies the bathroom, however, there were many meaningful places that Adam could be referring to, if the person who wrote and sent this letter is really him.
It could be a prank; he’s considered this.
Just like any consideration he’s had that doesn’t conform to an ideal outcome, he dismisses fairly quickly. The handwriting is like chicken scratch, just as he imagines Adam’s handwriting would be.
And he can’t ignore the intent.
Waiting for you.
Lawrence has felt things beyond guilt that he prays nobody in the world may suffer. Merely because he could not tell the authorities where Adam was in time. He woke up days too late, unsure of how he avoided bleeding out in that sickly green sewer's corridor he’d crawled into.
Clutching the note shakily, he turns it over to find the map he drew before driving across state lines to get to the border of Silent Hill. It’s a rough sketch he made of the town before he left.
Places he and Adam frequented together, never fully colliding until that bathroom.
He’s circled ‘special places’ — The parking garage, the sleazy motel, his own apartment. Adam’s apartment, though he imagines he’ll have trouble getting in there to check it out.
In the corner of the notepage, he’s written: Bathroom?
The public was never informed of the location of the bathroom. He’s drawn arrows to the police station, perhaps in the hope that if he visits they may tell him, a victim of Jigsaw, where it is.
For now, he pockets the note, and abandons his car.
With no other option, he heads toward the fog.
If Adam is waiting for him, alive—It changes everything.
The ghosts of his past— their past, his and Adam’s—that he sees behind closed eyes are what separated him and his wife. Are what estranged him from his own daughter. Are what makes sure Larry maintains those dark circles under his eyes, and the phantom pains from his missing foot.
If Adam is alive, perhaps he can sleep at night without turmoil.
If Adam is alive, perhaps he can…perhaps Adam will accept an apology, and care to know him in a way they were never allowed to know each other. He would do anything, just for the chance.
In my restless dreams.
Lawrence wants to know what Adam sees behind closed eyes.
If it’s anything similar to the horrors he witnesses
Lawrence emerges through the heavy fog and soon registers the worn sign welcoming him:
Entering Silent Hill.
It feels like he’s been walking for hours.
On his prosthetic, it takes longer than it would anyone else.
In truth, it’s likely only ten or fifteen minutes.
He traverses through the woods, passing by an old well, entering into a pathway gilded by two, length brick walls. It converges into a wide patch of dry land, scattered with mossy headstones.
A graveyard.
One of his grandfathers is buried here, he remembers vaguely.
He doesn’t care to visit him.
That’s not why he’s here.
He grows weary as he treks on, the graveyard expanding further than he could have ever expected. A slight chord of relief rings through his concerns when the shape of a woman starts to filter through the grey fog. Her hair is choppy, her t-shirt a bright red. She’s wearing baggy pants and is crouched before a headstone that he’s too far away to read. He approaches her cautiously.
She startles when she notices him, jumping to a stand.
“Hey, sorry,” Lawrence greets, pausing as he recognizes her. “Wait a minute, you’re—”
“Dr. Gordon?” the woman, Amanda, he believes, questions. “I met you at the station. Years ago.”
“That’s right,” Lawrence says, eyeing her head to toe. She looks different, and it’s not just the hair style. There’s something about the way she’s carrying herself, the weird, faraway glint in her eyes. The defensive aura emanating off her. “You’re…forgive me…Amanda Young, was it?”
One of Jigsaw’s only survivors at the time.
And she looked like a survivor at the time.
Now, she looks like a warrior.
A subtle change only another survivor would notice, a survivor like Lawrence.
“Yes.”
She turns halfway towards the headstone again, drifting back off into a reverie he’s not privy to.
“I’m on my way to the town square, aren’t I?” Once Lawrence is there, he’ll know where to go. But as of now, he’s a bit lost. “I never come through from this way, or I never used to, that is.”
It’s been so long.
Everything and nothing is familiar to him.
“There’s one road from here,” Amanda explains. “It’ll take you where you need to go.” She eyes him calculatingly. He’s distracted by the church behind her, consumed with so much fog it appears as a giant, dark creature. “You don’t want to go back to Silent Hill, Doctor,” she warns. “The town, it’s…not like it used to be. I would suggest turning around while you still can.”
Lawrence frowns.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Aren’t we all,” Amanda muses, matching his frown. “It’ll be dangerous.”
Dangerous because of Jigsaw? Or something else?
Lawrence regards her, taking a few steps forward to read the gravestone.
Whoever is buried here doesn’t share her surname.
He wonders if they’re related or if she even knows them at all.
Angelina Acomb
“I suppose I don’t really care if it’s dangerous or not,” Lawrence tells her, decided. “I’ve outweighed the cost of my wellbeing in my mind, and I’m aware of it. It’s not good for me to be back here, but what I’m looking for— who I’m here to find—is far more important than all that.”
“Who are you looking for?” Amanda asks, tilting her head.
Something gives Lawrence the impression he shouldn’t tell her.
Not that he doesn’t trust her, he doesn’t even know her.
Yet Adam’s potential survival feels like a reality that will shatter if so much as one other soul gets their hands on the knowledge that has since kept Lawrence awake, feeling alive, for days.
“He’s very important to me,” is all he says in response. Surprising himself with how honest it feels to say, he adds, “I would do anything…absolutely anything…to see him one more time.”
Amanda nods, taking that in.
She stares down at the headstone, and nods again.
“I understand. I’ve been looking for people too, family. I haven’t seen them in a long time, I thought…” She startles, as if she’s seen a ghost, staring at some undesignated spot in the fog.
Lawrence glares through the mist, finding nothing.
The silence stretches between them.
Lawrence considers walking away.
“Last I heard, you escaped Jigsaw,” Amanda says then, her eyes hardening on him, small pinpointed pupils penetrating through his skin. “And the news was quicker to follow your whole divorce scandal, rather than ask you about how you got out. How it felt to…win your game.”
“Just as they were more quick to follow your drug habits?”
Amanda scoffs. “Right.”
“My wife and I separated amicably,” he lies. Because part of him will always enjoy spiting Alison by diminishing the absolute catastrophe of a divorce that consumed the first year of his survival, his freedom. For two years, however, he’s come to terms with how satisfied he feels to be on his lonesome again. “Unfortunately, my daughter got caught in the crossfire…I haven’t seen her for years. I don’t think she would want to see me, either.” His eyes turn to the ground.
The grass beds feel frozen under his feet.
“They still live here?” questions Amanda.
“No. Nobody I know lives here anymore.”
Not even his co-workers. Last he heard, Angel of Mercy hospital had been shut down for unknown reasons. He intends to visit, see what remnants of his past he can find, if anything.
“I hope you find them,” Lawrence tells her, sincere. “The people you’re looking for.”
Amanda digs her foot into the soil, dredging up dirt.
“Thank you. You too.”
Lawrence leaves her be, watching out of the corner of his eye as she crouches back down on Angelina’s grave, reading the engravings. Watching the headstone as if it’ll somehow overturn.
He heads past the entrance of the church, which is heavily padlocked.
Finding the singular road to town, he treks down it.
The fog is thicker now, so much so he can nearly feel it on his skin.
He clutches the letter in his pocket to ground himself .
Soon, the trees surrounding him dissipate. The tops of buildings peek through the grey. Not quite skyscrapers, Silent Hill never had that.
It harbored an excess of buildings, though, warehouses, shelters. A thousand little places Jigsaw could conceal himself and his machinations. A thousand little places their bathroom could be.
Lawrence hastens his pace to town.
Where is everyone?
Silent Hill was never a loud town, coincidentally. But it was never this quiet. An overbearing silence that overtakes the entire space. Like nobody has ever — let alone will — ever lived here.
He unravels the letter from Adam now that his map matches his location, and treks onward towards the town square. From there, the parking garage Adam first took pictures of him in shouldn’t be far off. It’s connected to the hospital. He should be passing that sleazy motel on his way there as well, and maybe he’ll stop there first. Just to see it, see if there are any clues Adam left for him. There’s fear that he’ll find nothing but huge piles of rubble at all of these places.
That this letter will become another thing to haunt him in the night.
Movement catches in his peripheral vision.
Lawrence skids to a stop in the middle of a street, right by an abandoned car with its windows smashed in. Dust collects on the leather upholstery, but he doesn’t let himself focus on that.
He grows closer to the moving shape in the fog, gasping when it forms into his view.
A tall, faceless creature with black hair and swirls on its cheeks saunters jankily in the opposite direction of him, streaking blood across the ground, or what Lawrence can only assume is blood.
It’s smaller than him, but so surreal, it makes him freeze.
Out of fear, out of curiosity.
It’s all becoming the same, really.
Lawrence follows it, without volition. He needs to see what it is, where it’s going.
It’s a mistake because the moment he gets a foot too close to the monstrosity, it turns on him. Hissing incoherently and muttering inaudibly. It’s not human, that’s for sure, but it walks like one. Brokenly and abnormally, yet mimicking enough of the qualities of a humanoid to pass.
Lawrence grabs a glass shard from the ground, right by where the car sits, and slashes it forward as the thing swings for him. He catches it in the face and it crumbles to the ground like debris.
Then, skitters closer to him on its stomach.
Lawrence jumps back, mortified, and stomps on its head on instinct.
This crushes its skull —o r where he imagines a skull would be if it were of human makeup — in. Lawrence pants, letting out a stressed, solemn exhale when he realizes he got blood on the note.
He folds it back into his pocket to keep it safe, and keeps onward.
If there are any more monstrosities to come across, he may be forced to filch a weapon, because glass shards won’t cut it. It felt strange to defend himself like that, hold something razor sharp in his hands again. He’s surprised he didn’t cut himself, but then again, where his foot is missing throbs now almost as if he has. The pain matches the likeness of what he felt when he sawed it off.
He hobbles a little on his way through town.
The sleazy hotel appears much the same.
The sign is off its hinge slightly, though there is a light on in one of the windows. Perhaps Silent Hill becoming a ghost town was all in his head and he’ll find the answers he’s looking for inside.
He enters through the lobby.
There are no lights on in here, which is odd.
He rings the bell at the front desk but no one comes.
He does find a flashlight there, by some keys, and takes a handful of them along with the light just in case. He heads up the stairs, trying to remember which room he’d adjourned to with Carla.
There’s an off-center appearance to the hallways.
Everytime he takes a step, he expects to tilt sideways, pushed by some unseen gravity. He’s not; he walks straight, though begins to feel a sensation he can probably closest describe as vertigo.
Lawrence enters the doors that are unlocked, of which there are few.
The hotel rooms are empty, even of beds most of the time. The first few rooms he enters have nothing to show for the time he’s putting aside to explore this place, but then he comes across a rusty pipe, lying by itself on the barren shelves of someone’s kitchenette. He takes it with him.
There is a mannequin in another room, covered in blood. It wears a black floral shirt, transparent and dipping down in a revealing V-neck. It’s too caked in blood to fully see the details of, however.
He examines it, startling when he notices a body behind it.
It’s not a creature, but someone. He nearly gags at the smell that suddenly overwhelms his senses, falling to his knees beside the corpse. His foot throbs alongside his burning throat.
He’s so preoccupied by the sight, he doesn’t notice the monstrosity creeping up on him.
A gunshot has him scrambling backward on his palms, cowering beneath a looming figure in the shadows wielding a gun at the monstrosity. The monster crumples beside him, like before, and the gun fires off again, landing a kill shot. A burly hand is extended towards Lawrence, human.
Lawrence takes it without thinking, and is lifted up.
The man is as off-putting as he is stunning, though he gives away the type of vibe that he’ll bite if you get too close. Lawrence brushes the muck off his clothes, though there are some stains that are definitely not coming out. “Thank you, I guess,” Lawrence says. “I have no idea what — ”
He gestures at the lifeless creature.
“Don’t ask me,” the man voices deeply. “I wouldn’t know either.”
Says the man who killed it like he does it for sport.
“Then why are you here?” When the man doesn’t answer, choosing to purse his lips and continue staring, Lawrence continues to say, “Someone’s been killed…do you think we should call — ”
“No.”
Suspicion immediately arises in Lawrence.
The man seems to clock that, because he elucidates,
“I didn’t kill anyone. That said, you didn’t see me. You should get out of this town.”
“People keep saying that,” Lawrence mutters. “I’m not going anywhere. I can’t, not until I find what I came here to find.” He hesitates before adding, “I’m Lawrence. Lawrence Gordon. I’m a doctor.”
“Mark,” the man greets, taking a step back. “Hoffman. You sound familiar.”
“Jigsaw survivor. I’m sure they’re racking up in numbers.”
“Not as such.”
“No?
“Jigsaw’s been dormant for over a year,” Mark explains. “That doesn’t mean this town is safe.”
“I had no idea,” Lawrence admits, which is the truth. He has avoided news of Jigsaw like the plague. Somehow, no unwanted news got back to him. For years, he’s been drifting in ignorant bliss, if you call experiencing daily nightmares and being haunted by your past decisions bliss.
Mark turns to leave, muttering, “That pipe won’t get you far.”
Then where do you find a gun? Larry wants to ask.
Instead, he says, “You’re from here?”
“Yes…and no,” Mark murmurs, keeping his back turned. “Something brought me back.”
“Me too.”
“Be careful.”
“Alright.” When Mark’s halfway out the door to the hotel room, he adds, “Thank you.” He thinks the man is too far away to hear him. It doesn’t matter; he has to keep going. Must find answers.
This town appears to have a draw.
A magnetization circling people in and out, polarizing in the positives and the negatives.
Everyone is here for a reason, but no one can quite admit to that reason.
And nobody seems to fully grasp the otherworldly happenstances going on right under their noses. Lawrence gazes at the body, noting with his doctor’s background that they’ve been dead for weeks. It’s rotted through, maggots crawling all over it. He grasps his pipe tight and leaves.
Mark is nowhere to be seen.
Lawrence has been winding around in circles for hours.
Finding key after key that leads to room after room.
And no answer, no ability to access the room he accessed with Carla.
He doesn’t even remember the room number.
The flashlight in his hand flickers and he swallows hard.
He presses on.
There is a gate separating one half of the hotel to another. He sees a key lying just beyond it. He can squeeze his arm through the bars and grab it, he just needs to be careful as he lies across the floor to do so. As he’s reaching, he freezes up when he sees shoes pad up right before the key.
Glancing up from the floor, he sees an old man —John Kramer, a former patient.
“Impossible,” he whispers. “John.”
“Hello, Dr. Gordon,” John Kramer greets. He bends down and slowly hands Lawrence the key. “You’re looking for this?”
“Thank you.” Lawrence reads the engraving on the key. 4-300. He remembers the room number now; this just happens to be the key to the hotel room he’s been searching for, all these hours.
It abruptly strikes him.
“John, you were…terminal, how are you…”
It’s been three years.
Unless a miracle occurred, there’s no way he should still be breathing.
John’s lips twitch, and slower than Lawrence can account for, and yet so swiftly and suddenly, he turns and leaves. Heading into the shadows of the corridor behind the grate. Lawrence grabs the bars of it and shakes, trying to open the damn thing. It just rattles, not budging more than that.
“John!” he calls out.
Nobody answers.
Lawrence pockets the key and tries to find a way to the other side of the hotel.
It takes another hour, an odd maneuvering of a pack of eight sodas, and another trip outside to round back across the hotel to the other side, and a second run in with a stinking corpse that has him wincing. Once there, he heads up to the fourth floor and down to the furthest door at the end.
Room 4-300 opens with a click of the key.
It’s the same as he and Carla left it, eerily so.
While the rest of the hotel is disintegrating, this room remains untouched by decay. The bed is made, there is a lamp illuminating a warm, orange glow from the corner. The colors of the wall and floor are saturated, making him a little dizzy. He sits on the bed, the mattress still creaking.
The phone rings.
Lawrence’s breath dies in his throat.
He lets it ring three times, stalling, then picks up.
An unrecognizable voice whispers through the phone;
“What do voyeurs see when they look into the mirror?”
“Who is this?” demands Lawrence.
“Are you going to watch yourself die today, or do something about it?”
The line beeps, one long note.
Whoever called hung up.
Lawrence sets the phone back down on the receiver. He recognizes the words; they’re from Adam’s tape. In their game. When Jigsaw explained to them both why they woke up there.
His heart beats faster, at the thought of who —No, it can’t be.
But why else am I here if not to believe.
There’s a shadow outside the sole window that draws Lawrence out of his trance. He stands up, shakily on his prosthetic, and goes over to the window to draw the curtain apart. A woman is in the hotel, or building, next door. Pacing in front of her window. She’s brunette, and — Amanda.
There is only a few feet of space between the buildings.
He could jump to that window easily.
Lawrence inspects the room one more time, finding nothing else, and decides his work is done. He’s done his due diligence within this location. There’s nothing more he can derive from here.
He cracks the window open, the cold air slamming into him unpleasantly.
Amanda’s figure is gone from the window.
He hopes she hasn’t left the room.
Lawrence jumps, stumbling face first into the ground of the new room, groaning as he pushes himself up on his palms. The floorboards are hard, unforgiving. He’s never been used to this new body, either.
Amanda’s hands are on him, helping him up.
“Dr. Gordon, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
The room is unusually green.
There’s one chair in the center of the room; he has no idea what this building could be made for.
She’s in a new outfit, a purple long sleeved shirt with some of the fabric cut out of her sleeves. A black skirt, fishnets. Her hair even appears longer, but not by much. He glances around the room.
There is writing on the wall, engraved by a knife it seems.
If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it
But if you give up your life to me, you will find true life.
“Did you write that?” Lawrence inquires, confused.
Amanda is more waspish now, pacing the room again like he’d seen through the window. She shakes her head, pauses, then says, “This time, I did.” He doesn’t know what that means, and doesn’t ask for elaboration. Her tone turns defensive. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I didn’t. I saw you from the hotel.”
“That old dump?”
“The person I’m looking for has a history with me there.”
“Oh.” Although it sounds like she doesn’t care, she says, “You know, you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for if you actually voice who it is you’re here to find. Otherwise what’s the point? You’ll just be going in circles, looking at places that don’t have faces anymore. Nothing here, geographically, makes sense these days. It used to make sense to me when I wasn’t…”
She stops herself for some reason, cracking her neck.
Lawrence sighs, heart leaping into his throat when he sees what she’s holding tight in her right hand. A scalpel, with dried blood on the tip of it. Maybe it’s a weapon to defend herself from the monsters, he thinks, and finds it interesting he hadn’t seen a weapon on John Kramer. Not one.
“Adam Stanheight,” he confesses. “He sent me a letter.”
Amanda stares at him, unreadable.
“A dead man sent you a letter?”
So, she knows him. Lawrence half-expected that.
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“I don’t know.” Amanda shrugs. “This place is crazy. Maybe I’m the wrong one.”
“What do you mean?”
She wanders over to the only chair and sits in it, scratching at her hair, plucking at loose skin under her chin, her cheeks. As if there’s a box strapped all around her head, constricting airflow.
Her eyes peel open and in an odd voice, she requests,
“Hold onto this for me, will yah?”
She hands him the scalpel.
He refuses it for now, shaking his head.
“You need it more than me.”
“The fuck does that mean?” Amanda surges up out of her chair, rearing up on him. He takes a step back, nearly stumbling out the damn window. She doesn’t notice. “Think I’m not strong enough to defend myself? Is that it?” She raises the scalpel between them, almost threatening.
“I meant, I already have a weapon,” Lawrence insists evenly.
“I’m not giving it to you for you to defend yourself, that’s stupid. This wouldn’t do shit.” She pushes it into his palm, folding his knuckles around it with a surprising gentleness. “It’s important to me, and I might lose it.” Her eyes betray a vulnerability that he sympathizes with.
“You can come with me.”
“I’ll slow you down, Doc. Besides, we aren’t going to the same place.”
“Where are you going?”
“To find my dad,” she admits vaguely. “I think he’s here somewhere. He wouldn’t say. He never says, he just does.” Her eyes go glossy, faintly vacant. “He’s not actually my father, you know.”
“That’s alright,” Lawrence says. He understands family doesn’t always come from blood. His own daughter had felt no more family to him than a brick would, or a dog. Which sounds cruel and unnecessary to admit, but if he doesn’t admit it to himself, that would be the truer cruelty.
“I should go to the parking garage, the one attached to the hospital. Do you know the quickest route to get there?”
Amanda grinds her teeth together, scratching at her head in that strange way again.
“Behind this building, through the back of the gas station.”
“Right. Thank you.”
Amanda glowers at the scalpel she’s handed him, then scatters from the room, like she’s seen another ghost. Lawrence opens his mouth to call after her, however, notes that she’s probably escaped the corridor now. Gone from his sight. He pockets the scalpel, gulping with difficulty.
Then, heads out of the building.
In this new space, it’s hard to navigate.
He’s unsure whether he’s in an office space, a hotel, an apartment complex.
Another monstrosity with spiraled cheeks hobbles fast after him on the first floor. It chases him out of the lobby and he manages to strike it several times with his pipe as he emerges outdoors.
They’re getting easier to kill.
He’s becoming more numb to the way they crumple like animals hit by a car. He steps over its writhing body and hopes it’ll die of blood loss as he treks beyond the building towards the gas station behind it. The fog has lightened up slightly, so he can see the gas pumps and red roofing.
Angel of Mercy stands tall before him, connected to a several-storied parking garage he remembers intimately. He takes in the sight, sighing heavily before strolling up to the gate.
He’s shocked to find John Kramer there, leaning up against the brick wall.
His outfit is clearer now, a black and red hooded cloak.
Odd fashion choice, Lawrence notes but doesn’t speak.
“Dr. Gordon,” he greets again. “Couldn’t find what you were looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Lawrence answers, not trying to give anything clear away. “How in the world did you do it, John? I gave you a two month death sentence, at least. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Cancer isn’t undefeatable.”
“Death is.”
“Are you sure about that?” John pushes off the wall, a ghostly quality to how he walks past him. Lawrence follows him with his eyes, craning his neck backwards. He catches sight of the written letter in John’s hands and grabs his wrist before he can think against doing so. Kramer stops in his tracks.
“What is this?”
John doesn’t quite smile at him.
Lawrence vaguely remembers how he does that, managing to look smug without changing more than an infinitesimal muscle on his face. With surprising strength, John tears his hand away.
John is continuing to walk, heading off towards the bend of the wall, leading onto another street. Lawrence follows, but not swift enough.
“I am not at liberty to inform you,” Kramer confesses, voice like softened gravel in Lawrence’s ears. “Adam did not want you to see this note, Dr. Gordon. And I intend to keep my word.”
Hearing the name ‘Adam’ triggers a reaction unlike any he’s ever experienced.
He tenses up all over, wielding his pipe without volition.
“Adam?” he exclaims. “Adam gave you that note?”
When? Why? How does Adam know John?
“I am late, I’m afraid,” Kramer murmurs, disappearing behind the wall.
Lawrence rushes up to the turning point, shouting, "Come back here!" with eyes bulging when he realizes Kramer has vanished. Into thin air, but there has to be another explanation. He roams around the vicinity, looking in every direction, but the roads fork off into too many options. He’ll never find him this way.
He kicks the wall surrounding the hospital aggressively.
Brick dust puffs into the air, blending into the fog.
The parking garage isn’t hard to enter.
He hops over the turnstiles, careful not to trip over himself as he enters a darker space. He turns on his flashlight again, only able to see a few inches of light with it. With every step into the abandoned place, he worries that he’s completely off-base. That he won’t find Adam here.
Why would Adam come here of all places?
But this is one of the few leads he has.
Aside from Kramer, who just became more of an enigma to Lawrence than ever before.
He strides onward to the second floor, then the third.
Searching the parking lots up and down, finding nothing.
When he emerges onto the roof, there are a few empty vehicles parked in a vastly dispersed manner. Just as there were on the other floors. He doesn’t know to whom they belong, or why they’re here. He doesn’t have time to ponder the questions arising in his mind either, because—
He sees a dark haired man, short in stature, leaning against the rails separating the roof of the parking garage to the edge. He’s staring down at the foggy streets, back turned to Lawrence.
He’s wearing a plaid shirt, jeans.
He’s a spitting image from behind, no, he is.
Lawrence's legs take him closer, until he’s feet away.
When the man turns, he gasps.
“Adam?”