SILENT HILL: SHATTERED OVARIES
Harry Mason sifted through the sand on the beach. As the fine grains poured through the gaps in his fingers, a lone tear streaked his face. A small hermit crab pinched at his wingtip. He lowered himself to meet the angry crustacean.
"I'm looking for a little girl. She turned seven last month." His broken face bore a grimace. "She has... short... black... hair."
The hermit crab scampered away.
"She was... my daughter."
A sports utility vehicle peered down the steep, curved streets of a pacific northwestern town. The driver shouted in his phone, barely paying attention to the hazards that awaited him.
"What do you mean no market for 'fan fiction?!'
"What the hell do I pay you for?!"
"No!"
"Well, you're a shit agent!"
"YOU'RE FIRED!"
The SUV bored off the road, colliding violently with a stretch of fence. The sight of a small, black haired child flashed through the driver's vision as she passed through the shattered windshield, then blackness.
Harry Mason came to. He was strangely unharmed by the accident. He checked for his cellphone, but remembered it was the 80's. He felt the strange sensation that he was forgetting something, or someone. Forget it. Not important. He needed to find a pay phone so he could make up with his agent, and report the accident, if he has the time. He also needed to find a bar, pronto.
"There's one thing you need to understand," Harry spoke to the barroom slut. "Being a fanfickton author is serious business. We have standards we need to adhere to."
She looked bored, but Harry ignored her signals.
"We create what others cannot. We realize lost possibilities, create new ones; we realize the true intent of the authors!" He twitched, nervously.
"I'm going back home. My husband is probably getting worried, and my kids aren't going to feed themselves."
"Dear god, woman! Do you never shut up!"
She left, and Harry ordered another two fingers of whiskey.
Thoughts ran through his head. He was responsible for something. Someone? A pet, perhaps? Was it important? His bitch of a wife had pushed his daughter on him for the weekend while she attended her mother's funeral. Harry thought about the time he wanted to attend Furcon but couldn't because his wife had influenza. It made him angry. The woman was always standing in the way of his art. Then he remembered Cheryl. He was watching her, wasn't he? Maybe he was. Maybe she was… even in the car with him. Oh god! Cheryl! She was the only thing holding his marriage together, his only shot at his wife's sweet inheritance.
"I've got to call the police! Cheryl!" Harry fidgeted with his wallet. "There's no time for change," he declared, tossing a wad of bills on the bar.
"What the hell is your problem?" A rough voiced inquired from across the bar. She looked like a cop, but sexy. Harry just assumed she was one.
"My daughter is missing! You've got to help me find her!"
"I'm a stripper."
"Shut the fuck up, woman, and help me find my daughter!"
"I don't like your tone, mister."
"Listen, officer, my daughter is out there, and I'm responsible for her. She fell out of the window when I crashed my car. She's probably out there somewhere, in the cold and the dark, and we can't sit around here drinking while she is probably out losing my inheritance!"
"Here's a gun. Go find your daughter. I'll radio for back up."
"Thanks, officer. I see things are done right here, in the town of Silent Hill."
Everyone screamed and hit the deck as Harry loaded his gun and shoved it in the waistband of his jeans. The stripper seemed especially afraid, which made Harry angry.
"Don't hurt me, mister! I don't want any trouble!"
"What are you talking about?! Radio HQ! I've got a daughter to rescue!"
Harry surveyed the wreckage. He wondered why the tow truck had yet to arrive. "What a strange town." He thought, wondering why his SUV laid ruined in the back lot of a junkyard.
There were no traces of Cheryl.
The city streets were covered in a dense fog, making it difficult to navigate. Harry consulted a map he had scavenged from a gift shop. He wrote liberally on it with a red marker, marking streets with arrows and squiggly lines, drawing Sawnick and his friends in the margins.
He saw a dark alleyway and decided to have a look around, thinking about negroes shooting craps in some 20's period piece. He wondered if Cheryl was with them.
The horrible fleshy midget latched onto his legs. He wondered for a moment if it was Cheryl, but remembered she had a face.
"Get offa me, you filthy halfbreed," Harry shouted, stomping on its scarred, fleshy torso.
Two of its friends jumped him from behind, and he knew he wouldn't be invited to their craps game.
"Yerrop! Squeerk!"
Foreigners!
"Rrrrreeeeurp!"
Unhand me!
Harry woke up at the bar. The female cop was there, straddling him, trying to find his wallet.
"Officer, I'd like to report a mugging."
The radio hissed along with Harry's head. Through the white noise he remembered the strange, foreign midgets that accosted him. Burn victims, he thought. Filthy victims of ethic cleansing. He'd read about it in the papers. It made him angry to think about.
When the pterodactyl burst through the window he went into a full blown rage. Its sinewy, undulating body reminded him of its mother. I provocatively circled the room, gracefully crashing into shelves, spilling alcohol onto the ground. Harry thought about Vietnam.
"Listen, you… THING! I'm looking for my daughter! She's short! Very short! She has black hair! The bitch got away from me, and now I've got to get her back! Daddy doesn't like when people run away!"
The beast roared and it aroused Harry terribly. It was teasing him. He unzipped his pants and thought about Sawnick.
Harry Mason was a bad man. He thought about it. Thought about the things he'd done. His wrist hurt and his ass was on fire. He didn't know if the sex pterodactyl was dead or not, and he didn't care. He needed to find his daughter before the immigrants did. He had many enemies, none of them known for their restraint. He aimed his gun at a nearby crow, perched high upon a sign, and fired. Target practice.
Harry scribbled madly in his notebook. An enraged Sawnick took his frustrations out on a heavily restrained Knucks. He loved this pairing, but only when Sawnick was a top. He felt his erection twitch in his pants, and he thought about freeing it. He killed a midget today. It tried to stab him. He never felt so alive. He spent the rest of the day writing, falling asleep on the greasy floor of a service station. He felt like a god, and this was his creation.
The school was empty. It was dark, dank, molding. He remembered his own childhood. All of the sex, the violence. The shadow creatures crept into view, and he asked them if they saw his daughter. They laughed. He banished them from his mind.
"This otherworld is fascinating," Harry thought. The chain-link fence stretched on for miles. He passed a wall corpse and had lewd thoughts. He wondered if this was how a god felt. He read a poem about some birds and instantly knew its meaning. He played a piano and the door was opened to him.
The beast's face was like a huge, gaping vagina. It made him think of birth, rebirth. He felt a strange sense of salvation, and crawled inside. His radio blared in his ear, sweet static, white noise, a symphony of chaos. He didn't care about Cheryl, or his agent, or his bitch wife and her fortune. He felt like a hero, like Sawnick defeating Eggman for the first time, for every time, eternally, the savior of Mobius.
The creature mewled happily, and he caressed its sensual walls. "I love you," he whispered, its insides smelling like feet. "I'm coming home."
Harry Mason crept carefully on Dean Koonz St. He scanned the horizon for adversaries. It was so dark.