Resident Hill

A.N: Ahhh, talk about a work-in-progresses. This is the bastard-child of my inability to settle down with a solid project and his partner, my new obsession with certain games and their characters... A strong candidate for bullying then perhaps but I think I've been in this biz of ff writing long enough not to care very much. It may be carried on, in fact there is a strong chance it will carry on, but its uprearing could be slow, depends on how the parents get one. (I'm quite enjoying this spew of metaphors...) Anyway enjoy what's here if you chance to read it, and I'll try drop another chapter in the near future. Reviews are appreciated but not necessary for my motivation.

Telaka

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I don't sympathise, but often feel a terrible and uncanny similarity to the mindless, irresistible urges of the infected, which drives them poor and relentlessly to living flesh. Only I have no nose for what they do. In fact, I've been informed that my sense of smell is failing at best. (Sometimes you have to laugh at yourself to get through the worst.) No, instead I have a tragic affair with the lost, and an incurable disease of my own which curses me to look for them. And look. And search until I can now count on half a hand how many times I myself have become the trapped and endangered one as a result of my explorations.

The sense of self-inflicted doom has become a common companion on my shoulder and I guess pretty soon that situations such as the one I'm in now will become my clique, my catchphrase something like 'Claire Redfield and the Impossible Situations.'

It's misty as I walk now, to a point of blind ridiculousness. If I stretch my arm out as far as it will go then my hand becomes a ghost, its outline a whitish grey shadow and its bulk just a bygone of my imagination. I can see the path and its safe tread for as far as about three steps then it too drops to a phantom, then nothing at all perhaps three more strides ahead of that.

So far the terrain is stable and natural; hard-packed muddy ground that cuts through long, unshaven grass and a spattering of trees. Birches. I only note the dominant breed of tree specifically because it is a favourite of mines. These ones in particular – perhaps because of the swarming fog – boast a handsome silvery hue to their bark, more prestigious than the usual beige white. As I continue to spot them through the cut-off landscape I use them as footholds for my conscious, an anchor of calm. If I did not focus on their simple, natural presence then I think I would have screamed and ran back a long way before.

I urge my cold feet into a constant rhythmic step along what must be a fairly simple downward path. As to current I've had to suffer no sensation of twisting and curling and tying up my instinctive compass, only the ease of going downhill along a steady southern dip. Though it is quiet and the landscape (or at least what I can make of it) quite natural, the air is hung with an insane tension. I feel (though I try to suppress it) all my instincts screaming Racoon City. Even behind my only allies, the Birch trees, I see fog flickering into bodies of reanimated dead. I spin and suddenly mutated dogs turn back into rocks. Schools of fallen leaves caught in the seasonal wind become swarms of disease carrying rats and it is all I can do to grip onto my map and march forward, as if I know what I am doing, as if I have some canny sense of purpose and direction.

The map. I found it on the ground at the other side of the bridge. Unusual, I suppose, but then I'm used to picking up first-aid kits and bullets and all assorts of weapons as they come unexplained in these types of situations. Maps and memos with unobvious relevancies and wisdoms only seem to come with the job of being a brother-seeking moron.

It has now quickly become a little bit of stability, just as the Birches, only no moaning corpses come hallucinating to life from behind the map every time I hold it under my nose, which is every few dozen steps at the least. As I hold it now to my side, so tightly I can feel it burying grooves into the bases of my fingers, I have to sedate the need to look at it only once more. I know this path is about to lead me to a graveyard. It leads nowhere else, and how could it when all it seems to be capable of doing is leading down and straight south. The map has given me all the council I think it possibly can, except for that beyond the graveyard and beyond a little more path after that, it promises me what I am looking for: The town of Silent Hill.