Villains ➵ bill skarsgård a.u.

thirty six

Entry by: Rhea Allison Smith from Stadscirkel Hillside, Pennsylvania.

Summer of 2017 at a midnight. I was doing my nightly town patrol over Hillside; checking to see if any drunkards or druggies were roaming the streets. It was just a normal night, not too eventful nor boring, a usual scene with being a town cop. A few calls about domestic abuse problems which I directed immediately to the station and that’s it. I would rather have much worse calls as much as that’s fucked up, but I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of death and violence. Main reason I took criminology in college in the first place. My parents say it had something to do with growing up in the cursed land, I just saw it as something brought by years of horror movies. Overall, I never really thought seriously about it. It just kinda became this inside joke between my colleagues and I.

Drugs had always been a massive problem in Hillside, mainly among teenagers and honestly I can’t blame them. People are fucked up naturally, but when you’re not, you get a hard time fitting in, and there’s absolutely no way to get through such a thing sober. I’ve had my fair share of illegal substances in senior year. A few grams of crack here and there, hiding behind school grounds for the sake of smoking weed. The works. Of course it’s beyond illegal and wrong, but as long as nobody found out, I was good. Now all my coworkers know what cocaine tastes like to the core, and I can’t say they don’t do it anymore because that’s usually something we don’t talk about other than shaming other people for doing it. Speaking of which; there had been multiple rumours going around the station that another reason we couldn’t find junkies in the streets were because they’ve found a sanctuary in the hospital.

Hillside Cross Station to be more specific. I didn’t believe it of course. It was way too far fetched to be true. Other than that, no one in their right mind would risk scoring some inside that damned place for the sake of intoxication. I know I didn’t. The worse thing I’ve done for grams is secretly sell my mom’s phone. However, that was 10 years ago, and times have changed. I thought, just because I didn’t, doesn’t mean other people didn’t. So that’s exactly why I accepted the task to roam town at 3 in the morning for nobody else wanted to do it; using all sorts of excuses to get out of the shift. It was extra 50 dollars so I took it, I wasn’t wasting money for laziness.

So I got in the office-issue car we normally use to patrol town, circling blocks for any sign of trouble. There was none to my boredom, but I guess that’s better than recieving murder calls every second. When all was clear I finally began my drive to the hospital. Surprisingly enough, I haven’t actually been there before. My old college friends have once invited me to do some sort of a seance inside and I wasn’t able to go, so you can say I’ve been forever curious about what everyone has been saying about it. At this point I could care less about the junkies potentially in the area. I was going there out of pure curiosity.

The drive to the hospital took me exactly one hour. Hillside was small, but going anywhere could take you up to an hour or two. Some people say it also has something to do with the location of the town, at the very edge of Pennsylvania, away from all the modernity of other cities, but at this point that was something I didn’t pay attention to. By the time I got there it was close to 3 a.m. I got out of my car and shone my flashlight over the ground, only dim yellow lampposts lit up the entirety of the road, and there wasn’t any proper parking space to put my car on, so I just stopped driving right as the woods began. 

I lit my flashlight across the extensive lines of trees, the woods seemingly never-ending as the light only kept on extending farther. Now, I didn’t believe in ghosts, something you don’t see a lot with people on Hillside, but I’ve had my fair share of hoaxes to even believe anything lately. However, something about the pitch black ahead brought chills down my spine. I didn’t know if it was because of the chilly breeze getting to me, or the constant reminder in my head that I was about to enter somewhere I haven’t been in before.