Disclaimer: Do not own Silent Hill. Would love to. Do not. Am not making money off of this. The song lyrics used are from the soundtrack of Silent Hill 3.

Explanation: (You can skip this and go to the story, especially if you know what a multiple is.)

25 pages into this, my best friend and co-writer convinced me that more than just the two of us could see this and possibly like it. I hope so. I wrote it for us, but if more people like it, then that's fantastic. *worries that it will be weird/terrible/disastrous* First off, a definition: a multiple is someone who has—surprise—multiple personalities. Formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, it is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. And yes, I really do have it. If you wish to seek out more information, I encourage you to do so. If you wish to read good books on the subject, I recommend "When Rabbit Howls", "First Personal Plural", and the graphic novel "Cuckoo". Moving on. So you know, Boyfriend, whose name is changed to respect his dignity at being included in a fanfiction (sorry…) really is that awesome. He really does have those blades. And he is that good with them. Best Friend really is that awesome, too. Also that crazy. As am I. (Best Friend would like to point out that being psychotic is not as fun as you might think. I second this wholeheartedly). And those are not what-if personalities. Several days ago, the evil one was out. Fun for everyone. As revenge, he has been put into fanfiction. Take that, asshole. Also, this is not me being like, omg, if Boyfriend, Best Friend and I went to Silent Hill, what if—oh no. This is pretty much exactly how it would go. A depressing amount of thought has gone into it, including our psychological issues as manifested as monsters, our individual characters and speech patterns, and the things we do in fact carry on our person. Best Friend really does carry spoons (uses them to whack hallucinations. You WISH you knew someone this awesome.) I really do carry knives. Boyfriend really does carry swords. Questions, comments, flames, all welcome!

Sometimes it doesn't matter where you're trying to go. Sometimes a place along the way, or a place a world away, decides that you're not going anywhere until it's done with you. Sometimes a demon hijacks your body and decides to drive you into an abandoned town with ever-burning coal fires. Sometimes friends should really know not to let a multiple navigate the annual road trip.

I'm not calling this my fault. At least, not initially. After all, I was used to the dreams.

The night before we left, I saw him in the distance. Fog wreathed the trees, winter trees, black trees, reaching in stark contrast to the whiteness enveloping the world. Fog, darkness, it didn't matter. I would recognize him in any dream, in any reality, senseless. A child stood by his side, distant. It wasn't Lena, which was odd, because they were nearly inseparable.

I would ask him, then. I made my way through the pavement, faded and overgrown with weeds. Desert-like fauna twisting its way through cracks and grabbing at my ankles. It made for slow going, but I was desperate to reach them. I stumbled my way through, feet burning. Burning? I looked down. Around my bare feet, smoke curled up from somewhere far beneath the surface. I began to run; the plants snagging my toes, ensnaring my heels. I wasn't getting any closer. I could never avoid the plants. The fog hid them until it was too late. Inevitably, I fell. The ground shuddered beneath me. When I looked up, the fog was beginning to recede, revealing several more. Then several more, then more, until there was an army of misshapen, hunching figures, all looking at me. All perfectly still. There was no reason to fear them. They weren't advancing. They didn't seem to have any desire to use the crowbars, the planks, the chainsaws in their hands. I opened my mouth, paralyzed with terror, and all that I could manage was a faint hissing noise, even though my vocal chords strained with the effort to scream. They stood. They watched me scream.

I woke up.

At first I saw fog. I saw hordes of deformed, silent people listening to me hiss and breathe in all my desperate attempts to scream some sort of warning to the world.

The scream worked here. Here in my bed with my best friend who sat up almost as quickly as I did. I tore off the covers, scrambling to get out of bed, and stood poised, ready to run, ready to hurt things. Wide eyes stared back at me, the grayish-green of the girl I'd met eight long years ago. We were silent; two frightened creatures somewhere between predator and prey, ready to attack or run if threatened.

"Sorry," I breathed. My voice was hoarse, and not from sleep.

"Oh, sweetie," she said, lifting back the covers and padding over to me on bare feet. "What happened?"

"Nightmare" seemed self-explanatory. "I don't know" was true, but unhelpful. But after a night terror, it was the best I could do.

"I don't know. Nightmare," I said, still breathing hard. My heart beat like it was trying to get free of my ribcage. "Night terror," I added after a moment.

"Do you want a hug?"

"No," I said. "Nope." The terror still clouded me, but embarrassment was beginning to break through. I was hoping the rest of the house hadn't heard me. I paused. "What time is it?"

She checked the clock, glowing in the semi-darkness. Damnit, darkness. My heart sunk. Darkness meant I would have to try and sleep again. Darkness meant more medication, more attempts to sleep, eyes wide open.

"It's 4:30 in the morning, love," she said, almost apologetically.

"Shit."

We were quiet for a moment. I didn't want to go back to bed, and she knew it. I doubted either of us could after that. But neither of us said this out loud.

"Come on," she said gently, returning to the large bed and holding out a hand. I took it and climbed back over the rumpled comforter. I wanted to pull the blankets so that they covered every inch of me, hid every inch of me. But with cold hands and a heated body, that wasn't going to be comfortable. Fuck it. Comforters make me feel safe. Illogical, but true. I pulled them up to my neck—Maggie mimicked me on the other side, so that we faced each other like two children waiting for the sun to rise.

"So. Tell me about your dream."

I was quiet for a moment. "Didn't really make a lot of sense."

"Well, it's a dream. It doesn't have to, love bug."

I tried, but I had no real desire to explain this one. I rarely did. It was too new. Too much a part of me. Too weird.

The good thing about Maggie and I is that we rarely experience any kind of failure to communicate. I don't know why. Maybe we understand each other. Maybe we've experienced similar realities.

Softly, she began to sing. Ever since I've known her, Maggie has sung in the car, on the sidewalk, in the stores, in the house. A clear, sweet voice. "The wind…howling at the window—the love, you never gave, I give to you—really don't deserve it. But now…there's nothing you can do. So sleep, in your only memory of me—My. Dearest. Mother. Here's a lullaby to close your eyes…goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye."

Through half-closed eyes, I whispered, "Why did you choose that song, Maggie?"

She paused. She often paused, in no particular hurry to rush whatever went drifting through her mind. "I don't know."

"We're going on a trip," I whispered, after a moment. Most things should be whispered at 4:30 in the morning.

"Perhaps we'll leave our dreams behind," she said, in that far-off manner she sometimes has. I don't think it's the psychosis. I think it's Maggie.

"We?"

"I've been having some curious dreams myself," she confessed.

"What about?"

"Oh…you know," she said dismissively.

We lay there for some time, thinking. She hummed quietly to herself, tracing patterns with her fingers on the comforter, drawn so close to both of us.

It wasn't yet late enough in the spring that the sun would be rising soon. There was still that quiet, soft darkness when we made the mutual decision to get up. The stars were still there, faint, dimmed by the paleness of the horizon. We did everything in quiet accordance with this light, the rich smell of freshly ground coffee filling the kitchen. I made a somewhat successful attempt at cooking pancakes. They were lumpy, yes, but the recipe (from Maggie's mother) was hard to ruin. Even I had trouble doing that.

We brought the food back into her bed, turning on the light, with only the sound of a fan whirring softly. Bea, a lovely, if somewhat dense cat, made a leap for the bed, dragging her weight up by her claws. Maggie picked her up and flipped her upside-down, holding her in her lap and stroking her head as she ate. Contented cat noises filled the silence.

"Maybe we should just leave early," I suggested, when we'd gathered our bags, fully dressed and awake. The sun still hadn't risen.

"Ian…might be awake," Maggie conceded. "But you get to call him."

"You call him," I muttered, tying my boots. I hate phones. I hate bothering people more.

"He's your boyfriend. He can kill you if we wake him up."

"Maybe we should wait."

She'd been dialing his number—she held the phone to my ear. I glared at her, the dial tone loud in the silence. It ended abruptly. A rough voice answered. "Yeah."

"Oh. Hi. We're up early," I said, because I am excellent at relaying obvious information. "We were just wondering if you wanted to start the trip early."

Silence. "Yeah, okay."

"Did I wake you up?"

"No, I've actually been up for a little while. Give me...say, ten minutes and I'll be over."

"Cool. See you then."

"Bye."

My favourite phone conversations last for less than fifteen seconds.

"Yay, we're going on a trip," I said, still trying to shake off something, probably the dream, and get in an appropriately excited mood.

"Yay!" Maggie said. "We're going nowhere!"

"Yay!"

And it began as simply as that. See, we live in New England, rural New England, and with the exception of Ian, we don't travel much. (He can only stay in our state for so long before he winds up half way across the world.) Finally, we'd found a time when we could all run away. We had a few weeks—enough time to take a proper tour of the States. I wanted to see what Ian did in the South; Maggie felt an inexplicable call to Pennsylvania. Ian had been in one place for too long. Simple at that. I was taking advantage of my own momentary sanity to do something enjoyable for once. When you're crazy, you have to do that. Yes, I'd been having some weird nightmares lately, even for me, but bizarre dreams didn't count as insanity. I'd had enough of those by this point that they were a natural part of the sleep process. The nightmares, the night terrors—just dreams. Fine, so the sleepwalking was new. The part where I wake screaming wasn't.

But it was early morning now, and the dreams were beginning to fade from my mind. It started off clear and only got brighter, even as we drove in the opposite direction of the rising sun. I hate sunrises. They inevitably mean that I haven't slept nearly as much as I should, or often that I haven't slept at all. Least, that's what I tell myself when I'm not seeing one. Once I catch a glimpse of the bloody coin rising, shining in the east, casting the tops of the trees golden and gory, I change my opinion of them.

We all started off somewhat muted, as though none of us wanted to speak too loudly or say too much. The kind of mood most people adopt in the drizzling, freezing rain. We brightened as the sun died, however. Conversations started, maps were opened, fast food was eaten. A trip mentality set in. Coffee helped. Maybe it's because we're all somewhat nocturnal. Practically speaking, as bipolar people, our serotonin levels rise at night. Something like that. Also why we tend to get manic at night. This is Maggie and I—bipolar with psychotic features and I'm a multiple to boot. Crazy people seek each other out. Don't know what happened with Ian. He has…Ian-ness. Oh, he isn't normal by any stretch of the imagination, but he's depressingly sane. Yet somehow, we get along.

Perhaps it felt like a long time, perhaps it felt like nothing at all, but the sun began to set, until we were driving into its violent rays. I had to hold up an arm in the passenger's seat; Ian managed to drive half-blind. We switched off at the next stop so he could have a break and I could take the night shift. Maggie and a host of Irish music served as sufficient background. Somewhere around midnight, though, this too died out. Silence overtook the car. Maggie stared out the window, in her own trance, as Ian slept, willing to drive in the morning. I wasn't about to see the sun again for a long time to come. I was going to attempt sleep once my natural energy ran out—around 5 or 6 in the morning. The map lay unfolded, creased in Maggie's lap.

After a while, I began to feel as though I knew the way. This should have been the first, if not the third tip that something was about to go terribly wrong. I never know where I'm going. I get lost on the way to my classes, much less to a state I've never been to. Maggie must have felt something similar because the map was simply ignored. The competent sane person was asleep. Perhaps he felt the same way, though, to trust us to go the right way. In fact, that too was strange. He knew we'd never been along this way and he rarely needed to sleep, in any case. If this had been even a semi-normal trip, he would have stayed awake to make sure that we knew the way. And I would have been alarmed that I felt I knew where I was going.

That my hands just seemed to glide across the steering wheel, long-fingered hands, pale hands that made even the most mundane action graceful, controlled. I thought I was smiling. I had no mirror to tell me that it was more of a smirk, flashing incisors and some trick of the light that made my eyes look silver. It was too subtle, even for someone who knows the signs all too well. A person who never knew where she was going.

But someone else did.

The trees were not yet green here, black winter trees with dry dead branches. A month later, this place would be bursting with life. Darkness would fall on greenery, rain would fall on thick leaves, and all to the melody of minute frogs.

But not yet. The chill of winter may have faded, but it had given way to air thick with moisture, heavy on the skin and almost too thick to breathe. There was a light fog here, snaking along the black road. No sound but the quiet roar of tires on pavement.

My hand snaked out, animating the radio. I hated the radio. But I had turned the radio on all the same; probably looking for something to fill the silence.

I liked silence.

I frowned, and the muscles in my face wouldn't comply. That would have made me frown harder, except that they still didn't seem to be connected to my intentions. Fact was, I felt rather far away. Shoved to the side, if you will. Diminished by sleep deprivation and too much driving, most likely. I needed to eat something, but there hadn't been any buildings for a long time now. My eyes flicked to the side of the road, presumably searching for some sign that would point me toward the nearest imitation-food stop. They found nothing. Nothing but road and trees.

The radio popped and snapped at me, crackling out something that was a far cry from music. Static. My hand changed the stations, flipping through them like pages. Static. Lower static. Higher-pitched static. All static, until it emitted a piercing sound that cut straight through my skull. Desperately, I tried to turn it off, but all my hand would do was rest on the steering wheel. My body relaxed, my mind screaming for the noise to stop.

Eyes flicked up the road just in time. An animal crawled across it, limbs all wrong. Dragging itself by its curled hands, it turned its neck to look up at me and the hair was wrong, too. A child. I tried to swerve, I tried to locate the muscles that made my arms work, but nothing did—a moment of blackness, a voice, and then a flash of reality, a fence of interlinked metal suddenly much closer than it should have been, and we collided with a crash of metal on metal, screaming metal that whined and broke in protest. My body didn't touch anything for a moment, until the seatbelt snapped into place, and my neck snapped with it, smashing my forehead into the steering wheel. A voice, or nothing at all.

More silence.

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