A/N: I don't own Silent Hill. But you knew that already.

Ghost Town

Henry woke on the crudely linked grating of his hallway to find no one else around him and nothing wrong at all. This was a relative statement, of course, and he was thinking comparatively; he didn't know when he had begun to accept the dried-blood peel of sloughed scabs as his wallpaper or the creak and groan of haunted staircases as fact—didn't want to know, certainly, in tiny ways—but right now he felt tranquil, unperturbed. Almost at ease. A man's heavy footfalls shuffled along somewhere down below.

For the first time in a long while, his head didn't hurt a bit.

It was like Henry to concentrate on the present moment and live there with a kind of half-bemused dispassion day by day, which then filtered sedate light into the current retrospective he leafed through in his head and made him figure that this, this was the reason why he'd taken it all as well as he had. It just wasn't in his nature to feel extremely. Even now, the dense chainlink bit figure-eight grooves into his palms as he propped himself up, and the pain thereof was more obtuse than acute.

Voices, then. Human ones, along the corridor below him, and one more in the room down the hall.

Eileen? Eileen.

The door closed in like a camera zoom, numbers panning into view one by one, backwards: three, then oh, then three. It stood cracked, no lock-on-chain or deadbolt to bar him entry. With something resembling a frown between his eyebrows, he nudged it open and floated in slowly.

Her apartment had that clean woody smell of a new pencil; it was tidy and sacrosanct and feminine, none of which were affections he'd attached to it the first time. But now the day outside her window shone bright and gray, colorless, placid, and a few stilted notes of a song he didn't know wafted in from the bedroom.

"Eileen," he called experimentally. His voice made an awkward cracking sound around the second syllable.

She stopped humming, and for a second everything in the apartment froze in time. The first thing Henry heard was her ragged attempt at guessing his name as she breathed out a hot Hhh—

"…Henry?"

"Yeah," he ventured, finally wandering in and seeing her, as if for the first time, face to face. She sat on her bed, legs tucked up under the gauzy white of a nightshirt. Everything was a little whiter than it should have been, from her sheets to her ransacked dresser to the sleek purple dress and tiny roads made of plaster and bandages that lay abdicated on the hardwood floor. The cool seasonless light from her window haloed her head, and she smiled a smile of grateful relief at the sight of him.

"Oh, God," she said, "I knew you'd come eventually."

The corner of his mouth twitched up a perfunctory fraction. Her head bowed, shoulders hunching with the admission: "I woke up right here about a hour ago. I think. But I was afraid to leave the room."

"I," Henry began. Vaguely shook his head. The light was… unfamiliar. "Don't know what happened."

Well, he knew what happened to Eileen. Shredded, ripped to strips with one final, thready cry jerked out of her black and green and purple throat. And then he cleaved savagely at Walter with the axe, feeling muscle split under every strike, tendons, slicing Walter apart fiber by fiber and struggling to pull the blade free as it lodged itself in bone—

And then a blur, and then pain, and then nothing. And then here, he guessed. And then Eileen's bedroom.

"Henry."

This wasn't Heaven.

"Are we dead?"

There were no holes anymore. That was the first thing Henry noticed when exploring this world. No holes, no monsters, and no ghosts.

But there were people.

"All things considered, I…"

They sat in front of South Ashfield Heights' front door, gazing into the pale and derelict city.

"I'm glad to be outside again."

Henry imagined that Joseph hadn't felt this good in a while.

Eileen had left her apartment after he'd come. He stirred atop her salt-scented sheets, feebly reluctant to leave the dreamless stupor he would later come to accept as sleep. As he blinked away the last cobweb suggestions of fatigue from around his head, a tearing howl split the air and sent him clamoring up and rifling through the room for a gun, a knife, God, anything until he realized that the sound's source came not from the bedroom, but from the tiny hole at his feet. Pressing his eye to the wall, he mused that Eileen could have seen him after all, if she'd wanted to— or at least the single moist iris that passed as Henry in such dire straits.

It was him. It was Walter. Walter on his knees in the diseased living room and god was he glad he never decided to go back in there and shouting with everything he had at the ungodly rotting relief above the couch viscous rusty-dark matter sliding and slopping off the ceiling in wet chunks while the little boy sniffled and sobbed somewhere beyond his line of sight.

"What is it, Mom? Goddammit, why don't you say something?"

God help him Henry almost felt sad for the man no the boy no the entity pulsing walls puckering and turning black all around him.

"Wake the fuck up, Mom—!"

Everything about him was erratic and disintegrating and his voice crackled all raw and razor-edged with hysteria in his throat and Henry thought that just maybe it wouldn't do to dehumanize him with a term like "entity" with a wailing boy in the corner. He lowered his head and let it rest against the wall, eyes straining at the sudden overexposure of Eileen's bedroom.

"I'm sorry."

No.

He peered back in just in time to see Eileen glowing barefoot Eileen in her long white men's dress-shirt cross over the filth between old Walter and unseen little Walter and bend down to touch old Walter's quaking shoulder-blade I'm so sorry she said and Henry looked away.

Then, as gently as she could, so Henry could barely hear, "but it wasn't gonna work. Even from the beginning, it wasn't gonna help you, d'you know that? But I'm so, so sorry…"

Little Walter hiccupped.

Henry wanted to yell out a warning but couldn't and found himself fighting against his own impulses for reasons he couldn't even begin to fathom because Eileen was going to die subsumed in the curdled brownpink slop that tried to pass for carpet if he didn't do somethi—

"You can't understand it," Walter said, and he sounded only slightly bitter, like going the whole distance was somehow too exhausting a task. "You'll never… quite understand it."

"I think I do," Eileen soothed, luminous arms rising slow and enfolding resistant Walter in an embrace that Henry did not look at but realized. Walter twitched and jerked in her grasp, Walter sniffled cautiously on the chair near the wall, but Henry saw neither pair of eyes to know what he could be thinking in that moment.

She pulled away and gradually stood, holding his hands in hers and pulling him along until they both disappeared from the rounded periphery of Henry's neglected scope of vision.

"I'll be your mommy from now on," drifted her voice, soft and warm like blankets or honey, "if you want."

Little Walter stopped crying.

Henry never saw the child again—heard, rather—but from then on Walter followed Eileen like a shadow, peculiarly introverted, peculiarly silent. Room 302 rotted noisily a few days more before he finally banished it all away and to Henry's knowledge, never spoke of it again.

There was still no way Henry was ever going back in there.

One day he took a walk through empty Ashfield, ruminating on the picture-perfect clouds in the sky. Just a nebulous veneer between earth and Heaven, never lifting, never raining down. Walter could probably make it rain, he thought with a swell of antipathy, if Eileen wanted him to.

These weren't nice thoughts running through his head, and that generally ended up a bad idea. He never got that hungry anymore, never had to use the bathroom, only rarely felt tired. He suspected that given long enough to test the theory, he wouldn't age, and in his sporadic talks with Joseph they had decided together that they were all, in fact, dead. Dead and everlasting—presumably all twenty-one of them, though Henry had only seen the three familiar others so far. Once he thought he saw Richard slogging around on the other side of the complex, but he and Eileen had been sitting in her room alone and his fingertips had skated along the curve of her hip as they talked of pithy and eternal things, so he didn't care. Then she stood and opened the door into the decaying hallway because she felt Walter coming, and then Henry ceased to exist and left.

In his reverie he had only narrowly missed hitting a lightpost, giving him pause enough to stop and actually look at his surroundings. Subway stairs.

And then Cynthia, walking out of the lonely haze. When she saw him she didn't walk, but ran, colliding and clinging tight to his arms with pearly red nails. The fever in her eyes made him back away a bit, not used to such violence of emotion focused on him exclusively.

"Henry! Henry, it's me! Cynthia, remember? Do you see me?"

"Yeah, I see you," he insisted. Good lord, and he remembered: all that hair had been—

"Thank God! I thought I was going crazy for a while. I saw you again in the subway and a couple of times after that, but you always just ran away… like I was diseased or something," laughed Cynthia, apparently relieved. Henry thought he noticed the crude jags of numbers on her breast for a second, but when he looked harder her flesh was smooth and marked only by the soft brown of a furtive areola, and she glimmered knowingly under his scrutiny.

"You kept running away like that… Made me kinda sad, you know? I just wanted to give you that favor I promised."

Henry suddenly couldn't do this.

At Eileen's behest, the apartment was flawless and sterile in a way he hadn't known in what felt like years. It was pleasant, definitely, but almost… harsh, after so long. Very, very tentatively, Joseph had ventured back into room 302. But never once did he close the door. This was where Henry sat at the moment, perched tensely on the edge of the couch while Joseph disappeared into the bedroom in search of writings or pictures or some other thing that shouldn't logically be there.

A sick, raw moan split the stillness, muffled by the wall. Grimacing, Henry peered through the peephole.

All he saw was the bottom half of Eileen's body overlapped by Walter's torso, legs hanging suspended over the edge of the bed. He made out gentle shushing noises and the stroke of one benevolent hand over Walter's hair as he burrowed his face into her stomach, she pacifying him with a velvety "it'll be okay, honey…"

Henry did not sleep in her bed that night. But then, he never did.

Old habits die hard, so every day Henry came back to the hole in the wall while Joseph's back was turned.

Eileen sat where she always did, alone, and for a second it was like it used to be with her unfurling without knowing right before his greedy eyes. Walter's whims dictated that the day was frozen to stillness, and she wore something heavy and shroud-like that exposed absolutely nothing, save for two soft white calves made skinny by comparison with the coat's bulk.

Walter's coat. Obstinate Walter, who couldn't care less about anyone he'd pulled into his dimension, save for one woman—for whom his fondness consisted of a tug-of-war between vehement, smothering affection and vaguely perplexed emotional distance. So Henry saw it. Through his peephole.

Eileen and Walter standing, talking. She had just finished saying something, but Henry couldn't make out what. Walter studied her long and hard, eyes narrowed. Then he softened, and in one movement that made him look too small for his body he leaned down and kissed her cheek.

Eileen, getting dressed. Breasts soft and goosebumped in the chill of the faux-morning. Henry placed an errant hand on the front of his jeans before catching himself and pulling it away.

Eileen and Walter, or their legs, anyway, or something that resembled their legs underneath the thin exposure of the sheet stretched across the bed. Eileen holding onto him with her fingers in his hair, Walter swallowing down on throaty groans of her name and things that made sense only to him and probably Eileen too, hands fisting inconsequentially in the sheets.

Henry woke to another day-that-was-not-a-day and propped himself up against Joseph Schreiber's couch cushions. He yawned a little, even though he didn't need to and hadn't needed to once since coming here (he didn't need anything: not food or toilets or probably even air though he would breathe in and out anyway since he was used to doing it but certainly not affection and certainly not sex), and then strolled out the door without a word.

Eileen greeted him with a smile when she opened the door. Wet hair, no Walter in sight. When in walking through her apartment Henry successfully ascertained his absence, he sat on the foot of her bed, looked down at the carpet between his knees, and tried at last to smile back. She sat just far and just close enough for it to matter to him. A respectable distance, one might say.

"It's been a while since I've seen you around, huh," she lightly ventured.

"Yeah," he said.

"Where've you been?"

"Right here."

Silence.

"Next door."

"Yeah."

Eileen fell back with a sweet little puff of shampoo (that he must've only imagined) and lifted her hand to her forehead. Henry knew better than to follow. "Never thought this would be it," she murmured to the window above. She meant It. "But I guess it's not so bad."

Henry said nothing, then replied with a hollow "yeah."

A hand crept up his back. As far as he could tell, it was Eileen's. It slid over the body-warmed cotton of his shirt with a delicate hiss, up and down and in small circles until he realized that she was attempting to comfort him. Save him from some perceived misery. Eileen was insightful like that. Eileen was beautiful like that.

He turned to her and did his very best to hold her gaze. "Yeah."

Her forehead touched his when she sat up. He let out a tiny breath that he hoped wasn't quite so heavy with feeling as it felt, and tried not to close his eyes.

"Eileen," came his brittle, upturned sound. Eileen smiled a smile that hurt to watch, and laughed thickly at his inadvertent nuzzle to the bridge of her nose before she kissed him.

Letters began to seep out from under the door. An A, a Q. I missed you. It's been forever. No; don't think in terms of forever. Don't think in terms. We've been here a long time. We've been here a thousand years.

Some time later Henry laid his cheek between Eileen's breasts and thought that Walter had probably been watching her for years after his death.

Henry traveled.

"You honestly believe a moronic thing like that? That we're dead? And that comes easy to you? No way. Forget it. Just forget it. Now give me my goddamn gun back before I actually kill you."

"You just left me again the other day! Don't you like me, Henry? …Don't you like girls? Oh, hey. Guess what I found."

"I c-c-couldn't've as-asked for more."

He couldn't bring himself to go into the Water Prison. If he had, all he would've found was Andrew DeSalvo in the basement kitchen, struggling eternally against the sword through his diaphragm.

The Lynch and King Street lines were running. They just didn't go to Lynch or King. The first time Henry followed Cynthia, they emerged from a staircase that should never have been there, rooted into the cold earth, leveling off in the thick of trees and light autumn fog. The highway up above advertised Silent Hill, three miles west. They didn't go any further; Henry thought he would go insane with loneliness.

Taking the other line brought him to what he could only assume was Pleasant River. Cynthia did not accompany him.

But Walter was there. His dark shape sat perched in the distance atop a small campus hall, legs dangling boylike over the edge of the roof. Henry would have turned back, should have, and could not. Walter's coat was gone. It embraced Eileen's shoulders back there in the place he just managed to call home.

"Eileen wanted me," Henry said, "to tell you to come back soon."

Walter said nothing. Henry let out a soundless breath, half-pivoted, then stopped at the sound of his voice.

"Ei-leen."

The Pleasant River campus was situated oddly in the midst of a field of golden-gray nothing-grass. Apparently it was the only thing in the town that Walter had ever deemed at all valuable, because the buildings jutted from the earth like monoliths in an otherwise barren landscape. The subway stairs descended awkwardly into the depths of a hillside some ways behind him.

And it was still and silent as a vacuum, and its stillness wanted to pull the flesh off Henry's bones and toward the heavy gravitational center that was Walter on the rooftop. Henry shuffled in place a few minutes more while he waited for Walter to finish his thought. When it didn't come, he allowed his legs to carry him a bit closer to the building.

Walter wore a black shirt.

"Mother."

"Walter," Henry interjected carefully. "Do you really think that—"

"I didn't understand," Walter said, continuing as though he hadn't heard Henry at all, "what it meant for her to be The Mother Reborn. I thought it was something different."

"Walter," Henry tried again. Walter's words were slow, gentle, and a little laudatory. Like they always were.

"But it's not. Mother is awake now. She doesn't live in the room anymore, though. She lives in Eileen."

Henry thought the air had gotten thicker in the last minute or so, somehow. He turned and looked back to the subway entrance, as though to make sure it was still there.

"Maybe that makes you my father."

Henry froze. A sick dread crawled its fingers up his gut and into his throat, and he turned back to find Walter's dark shape on the ground, silhouetted against the brownstone.

"Do you think so?" he asked, faintly. He felt cold, threatened, a vague recollection of that twisting and mutilated almost-corpse spasming brokenly from the apartment lobby ceiling bubbling up and over in the haze of his long-neglected memory.

"Do you know what Eileen told me, Henry?"

Henry tried to take a step back but found he couldn't. They stood close enough to touch now, and Henry believed that although Walter couldn't kill him, he could still inflict a considerable amount of pain without the fond, old comfort of death lying in wait beyond that threshold.

"What?" he asked in hopeless wonder. Walter's expression was calm and vacant and terrifying.

"She told me to be nice."

He knew that Walter knew. He didn't know how or when or why, but he knew that he knew. Had to have known, to say such awful things.

Eileen wanted them to make peace. Eileen wanted them to get along. A caduceus, the two of them together: two snakes wound around her unyielding and tireless radiance, grasping with hungry mouths for her wings.

Henry lowered his head for a time, and then opened his mouth to speak.

"Henry," said Cynthia. "This isn't a dream, is it?"

Eileen sitting on her bed, white light streaking through the window in bands around her messy hair. An indeterminable but lengthy stretch of time had passed by and away in this place, or so Henry believed, but her hair had always stayed the same, hadn't ever strayed an inch past her chin. He thought now, in his madder moments, that he had still only just arrived. The broad and abominable temporal floodplain called death; a lonesome space called maybe but perhaps not so.

Eileen stroking the top of Walter's hand while Henry looked away to the purple dress on the floor of her open wardrobe, looking for all the world that it had never been worn. All he wanted was to touch it and touch it in the way Eileen did Walter, because he could never be so cruel as to ask her to put it on again.

Eileen underneath him, murmurs and pleased sighs floating out from some arcane place inside her, gripping his hips with white thighs and arching again and again and again.

Eileen and Walter fucking, he thought, in that graceful way they had about them.

Eileen.

Eileen smiling with a sleepy benevolence from the chair on the other side of her cold bedroom, naked under Walter's coat, watching from over her tucked-up knees as Walter swallowed Henry down like his body was devoid of substance, made of nothing. Walter, obedient Walter, deadly focused Walter…

Henry exhaling hotly against Eileen's soft shoulder, gaze locked on the juncture of her body and Walter's body, right hand working just within his field of vision below. Eileen tried to encompass everything and everyone, nails with their chipped polish scratching softly in his hair. It was then that Henry paused to wonder just who they were anymore, where, and why.

Henry, pressed under the crushing weight of forever and slowly breaking.

Walter laboring atop Henry laboring atop Eileen. Henry believed the man happy for the first time ever, then ceased to believe just as quickly, then wondered what had happened to make him so secretly bitter.

Henry with a broad palm on his waist and breasts against his back and his face buried in his own hands, lying in an aberrant knot of limbs as mother, father, son. He squashed an abrupt wave of nausea with a brutality he didn't know he was capable of, curled up a little tighter, and tried his very best to pretend he didn't think he'd lose his mind one day.

Walter slept. Eileen woke and touched Henry. Henry woke and thought he might be okay.

Walter woke.