The sign stood tall, looming over him through the fog. The green and yellow paint was aged and weathered, cracked and peeling away, but still it read so clearly.
Silent Hill.
The name was foreboding in itself, but even then it drew him in, and his dark eyes stared defiantly at it, questioning rather he truly wanted to pass it, to raise to it's underlying challenge, and set foot in the town. But the fog, hung around him so thick it was almost suffocating, gave him the vague sense that he'd made it too far to leave now. The bus had dropped him off before it hit the fog and would go no further, so he had walked. He had no money on him even if he made it back to the bus stop, but something told him there wouldn't be anymore buses, and he wondered if the one he'd rode in the last three hours had even been real.
What was he thinking? How could it not be real? It had moved him from point A to point B with relative ease.
Taking a careful breath, he rested a gloved hand on the tarnished butt of the revolver he had carried for... how many years? He couldn't remember clearly, and his mind felt as fogged as the atmosphere around him.
Forgive me, Father. He had never uttered the words in his life, played himself out as a good man, but he hadn't set foot in a church since he had got his gun... that he remembered clearly. But still, there was another weight, countering the weapon, on just the opposite side of his hip. He diverted his black, emotionless eyes to the Book. His Bible, old and worn, just as he was on the inside.
On the exterior, he was yet a young man, maybe thirty-five, but incredibly pale from spending too much time indoors or only coming out at night - his mother had once joked that he was a vampire, but he had no inclination to drink blood. - and his ebony hair was a stark contrast to his pallid skin.
He looked away from the Bible. Knowing his past, it almost burned him to look at it, and his eyes were drawn to the sign once more. He readied himself, looking into the fog but he could see little more than a few feet ahead, and he took a step in. Later he would remember having the distinct feeling he wouldn't walk back out.
