Welcome to Silent Hill
Welcome to Silent Hill
The sky was already starting to fog over, and the light was fading. That was one thing Hannah always hated about Silent Hill; the damned fog. It was still midday and yet Hannah was forced to turn on her lights, the fog getting thicker the closer she drove to lake Toluca. She grunted in frustration, tapping the wheel impatiently. The pine woodlands either side of the road faded into the boring grey. She grunted again. The fog was heavier than she had ever remembered, and it was pissing her off.
Her assistant riding next to her in the squad car shifted uncomfortably. Sergeant Marcus Bennet; possibly one of the most annoying men on the planet, at least to Hannah, and whom she was sure the captain had assigned to her in this investigation with her opinion of Bennet expressly in mind. The sergeant was a horribly pitiful man. He lacked confidence, second-guessed everything he did and had the irritating habit of fidgeting constantly when not doing anything else. He was currently playing with the cuffs of his suit jacket, the metal on the cuff links clicking together over and over until Hannah could barely stand it.
"Detective…are you alright?" His face showed he was oblivious to his own annoying conduct. Hannah simply glared at him for a moment and changed subject.
"We've almost reached Toluca Lake. We'll make our way to the local department and pick up the files on the case from there." She concentrated on the road as she spoke. The fog was getting unbelievably thick and she was determined to spite it. She could barely see twenty feet ahead of her, but she kept up the speed. This wasn't her first time to Silent Hill after all so she was confident she could predict the turns.
"Has the local force been contacted about our arrival, detective Chou?" Marcus warily dipped his hand into his jacket to get his phone. It was horribly presumptuous of him to think that she had not contacted the local force, a fact she had been relying upon to cover up the fact that she had not been bothered to call them. She muttered under her breath some half-hearted excuse about paperwork and let the sergeant dial the number.
Dial tone.
Marcus dialed again. As he tried, a whining came over the radio. Hannah absent-mindedly turned the volume up a little to try and identify the chatter. The static remained. She turned it down again. As she flicked her eyes back to the road she saw the 'Silent Hill Exit' signpost pass on the right.
"What the hell?" The afterimage of the sign flashed with a dark shape darting into the pines. "Is something wrong, detective?" Marcus had looked up from his phone. She could hear the dial tone again.
"Nothing's wrong. Don't worry about calling them. I'm sure it will be a pleasant surprise for them. Not like they get much action around here." Marcus put the phone back and settled back into fidgeting.
The turn off into Nathan Avenue came sooner than Hannah remembered. The avenue thinned as they moved away from the highway and soon turned into the quiet road flanked by the thick wood that Hannah remembered.
"Detective, don't you think you should slow d-" The car skidded suddenly before Marcus could finish. Hannah turned the wheel frantically to try and regain control of the squad car, but the thin road let the car veer off into a ditch. The wheels screeched, Marcus cried out, and the car groaned as it crashed. Hannah's face landed uncomfortably in an airbag and the seatbelt lashed against her chest. Within seconds everything had stopped, the engine spouting steam and the rear wheels spinning and squeaking, suspended in the air.
Stumbling from the car and falling from the unexpected drop to the bottom of the ditch, Hannah attempted to gain her bearings. The squad car lay behind her looking rather worse for wear. Her hands were covered in mud, as was her trench coat. She stood slowly and attempted to brush the mud off, slightly dizzy from the impact but soon righted. Checking herself, she found nothing missing. She still had her gun, wallet, badge, everything.
The hacking cough from the other side of the car alerted her to the fact that her partner was all right. Part of her resented that reality. She scaled the ditch to the roadside and fixed herself up. Her dark hair had come undone from its bun and her shirt had untucked itself and lost a button; she corrected these.
Marcus unceremoniously heaved himself from the ditch. His jacket was torn, his face and hands were dirty, and he had numerous bruises and cuts over his face and arms, but he was otherwise fine.
"Get your phone out, sergeant, and call the local department again." Marcus patted himself down before realising he must have lost the phone in the car. He clumsily edged down the ditch supporting himself on the car to get to his door, managing to slide down at the last moment and dirty himself again.
Hannah surveyed the scene. The fog was thick, and there was nothing but pine and scrub on either side of the road. She could only see about ten feet all around her, however from what she could judge the turn onto Sandford Street was about a hundred feet or so ahead anyway, which would bring them into Silent Hill proper. Transit between South Vale and Paleville was always decent, so she figured they had a chance to get a ride with the help of their badges.
"Errrr…detective? The phone isn't responding to anything. The only thing that works…" Marcus' head popped out from behind the car, holding aloft two walkie-talkies triumphantly "…are these. Got some spare batteries too." He scrambled up the ditch again and offered a radio to Hannah. She gave him a look of scorn before walking in the direction of Sandford Street. A disappointed Marcus followed on, clipping the radios to his belt.
"Sooo…uh…detective…what was it that jumped out in front of us back there?" Hannah had been puzzling over that point since she had crawled out of the ditch, and Marcus' illumination of it hardly helped her confusion. Just before the crash, some huge shadow had lept in front of the car and, for all Hannah could tell, bounded off into the woods on the other side of the road. She couldn't tell what it had been. The closest thing it could have been was a bear, but it moved so fast and was so huge, plus the fact that few bears wandered these woods, that is was difficult to conceive that it was, in fact, a creature at all.
"Ignore that for now. We'll contact local rangers or something when we get the phone fixed. For now let's concentrate on getting a ride into town." She strode ahead of Marcus.
"Wait…detective…Detective Chou wait!" Marcus had to jog to keep up with her. He was not a terribly impressive man, nor very energetic, so he was puffing once they arrived at the intersection of Sandford Street and Nathan Avenue.
The silence was unnerving. All there was in the air was a slight stirring of the wind and the distant washing of the lake's water. No birds, no cars, no rustling of trees. It was terribly strange to Hannah that there was absolutely no traffic on either road. They waited a few minutes at the intersection, but there was no sound. She didn't voice it, but she could swear the fog was watching them from behind, closing up and becoming a solid wall. On the other side of the road they had just walked down lay the sign facing the way they had come, reading 'Welcome to Silent Hill'. Hardly welcoming.
Marcus, who had wandered over to the sign, waved Hannah over.
"Detective, I think you'd better see this." His voice was quavering a little and sounded confused. Annoying though he may be, Hannah would think he could at least read a sign. She walked over, not bothering to look both ways across the road. A little nagging voice in her mind ticked her off for jaywalking as well as speeding on the way here and failing to indicate when turning. She tallied up what she would owe in fines and then disregarded it.
She stopped dead as she followed Marcus' eyes to the sign.
"TURN BACK"
The sign had been smeared all over with the writing. The writing itself was written in red paint, or what Hannah hoped to be red paint. It looked like someone had used their whole hand to wipe the letters onto the sign; red hand prints blotted in odd areas so that one could only just make out the actual letters of welcome beneath. The writing also remained unfinished, the 'K' at the end incomplete, and a deep gouge in the sign made by some clawed beast near the letter.
Hannah turned to Marcus. He was squatting, looking at the grass near the base of the sign. Looking at the damp ground, the grass was spattered with the 'paint'. Marcus followed the trail away from the road, and halted at the ridge of the ditch that served as a barrier, following with his eyes the trail until it disappeared into the woods beyond. He made to follow but Hannah's hand on his shoulder halted him.
Hannah shook her head. "Look at it all. It's been dry for a while now. The best we can do is call the rangers when we get to a phone."
"But, detective, why the warning? Do you think it was just an animal?" despite Marcus' supposed protest, he had turned and hung his head submissively.
"Probably delirious with fear or from blood loss." Hannah looked back at the sign. The image wriggled a little. She blinked a few times to fix her eyes. A little mark she didn't remember seeing before was on the corner where the claw mark lay. It was not drawn in the same way as the warning. It was small and neat, but still drawn with the dark red. It was a waxing quarter moon with a cross on its edge, an epsilon drawn out from the eclipse lay inside the eclipsing moon. Hannah scrutinised it before waving to Marcus. "We're moving on now, sergeant." With that she began walking up Sandford Street.
Hours of walking through the endless fog, not a word exchanged between either person, not a car to be heard, just the lapping of the invisible lake to the east and half-glimpsed shadows in the woods and on the road. Marcus was clearly on edge; every now and then the radios on his belt would spit out meaningless static. He would tweak them until he saw a shape in the fog, and then walk a little closer to Hannah until the static died. Half an hour into the empty fog of Sandford and he was pulling his gun from the holster and pointing into the fog in the middle of the road behind them.
"W-what the hell is going on?" His voice was trying to hide the fear, but it did so unconvincingly. Hannah came into his view as Marcus looked into the fog with wide, unblinking eyes. She placed a hand on his shoulder and slowly pushed his quivering hands down to lower the gun.
"Calm down, its just fog. It tricks your eyes sometimes and makes you see things. Happens all the time when I come over here, now pull yourself together and turn off the damned radios, they're making you jumpy." She was lying. She had never seen the fog act like this, neither had she seen Silent Hill so quiet before. She looked about the street as Marcus holstered his gun and turned off the radios, still edgy. She could make out a gate a few feet into the dim fog on the side of the road, and a gravel driveway. She walked over to it and found it to be the entrance to some kind of country home, with a long driveway winding uphill through the pines and into the mist. A sign on the fence proclaimed it to be Graycliff Estate, with an additional sign beneath it showing that it was a bed-and-breakfast for the tourists.
"C'mon Bennet, they'll have a phone up here." She nodded her head to the gate and moved up the driveway without waiting. Marcus paused. Shadows in the woods occupied his mind for a moment before he bolted to keep up with Hannah.
The Graycliff house was something to behold. A large, English style mansion with two floors, a small car park out the front, an elegant if rustic charm, and not much room between the mansion and the woodland surrounding it. The climb had taken the breath out of Hannah, and she attempted to catch it at the summit of the uphill slope while appraising the mansion. Marcus was lagging behind, puffing and wheezing much more than her. She noted two cars in the tourist's car park, as well as, when she walked a little closer, two more in the open garage on the right side of the building. Looking up at the main building, she saw that all the windows were boarded up, and rather badly at that. As Marcus reached Hannah's side, doubled over and wheezing, she looked down at him and smiled at his pathetic, retching form, chuckling a little and thanking herself for all that time spent in the gym.
"Alright, lets see who's home." She plunged ahead, invigorated by his lack of fitness and her own superiority. Marcus attempted to call out for her to wait, but was unable to find the breath to do so, raising an arm to get her attention before realising the futility of it, and stumbling after Hannah.
By the time Marcus reached the door Hannah was already getting impatient. She knocked for the third time but there was no sound from behind the large wooden doors.
"Ashfield County Police, open this door!" Hannah rapped at the door until her knuckles were red. It was painful enough knocking on solid wood when it was so cold with the fog out, but she was getting tired of the fog and Marcus. The lack of response of the occupants was increasingly agitating to Hannah. Marcus propped himself up against one of the walls in the little alcove the front door was set in and tried his best to speak coherently.
"Perhaps no one's home, detective. The windows were boarded up. They might be out the back for all we know, or have abandoned the house." Hannah took a step back to consider the facts at hand.
"They also have at least four cars here. I would think there was at least one person looking after the house at this time of day. And why would they abandon the house and leave signs out front and cars in the drive?" Settling on her conclusion as the right one, Hannah grabbed the doorknob and turned. The door opened easily and Hannah followed it as it swung in.
"Hello? Ashfield County Police, anyone here?" Hannah strode more confidently into the spacious, hollow foyer of the mansion. Twin, curving staircases dominated the room, leading to an upper balcony. The walls were decorated with numerous paintings and sculptures on tables. All in all it was quite a nice set up. The whole place was very dark. The only light Hannah could perceive was from the door they had just opened. It was like the place was abandoned, but Hannah still couldn't see why they left without cars or taking the signs down.
Marcus lingered outside, catching his breath. He was trying to avoid looking anywhere other than at the ground or the wall. Out on the road he had been seeing shadows in the fog, and he knew that if he looked out there again, he would probably see something; whether real or something concocted from his mind's own certainty that he would find threatening shapes in the shifting obscurity of the fog. He stared intently at the granite doorstep. Just the step, look at nothing else, just look at the granite and the little flecks of white in the dark stone, nothing else.
Without realising it, his eyes turned back to the outside. A bit of movement caught out of the corner of his eye caused him to cast a glance out into the fog. Part of him disciplined his head not to follow the look, every muscle in his body tensing to keep his head from following his eyes. He could not see well in the fog, but he could see to the drive and the shadows cast by the woods beyond it. There was something out there, he knew it. If he listened to the fog carefully, he could make out the sound of the gravel of the driveway being trod. The steady crunch of the grains transfixed his eyes on the shadows. He strained to look a little further, just a little bit so he could see what was going on there clearly and disprove what he was hearing, what he might be seeing. He registered movement down the drive. The shadow of the tree line thickened a little. It was at the very limit of what he could distinguish as real and not. The crunching stopped, as did the shadow. Marcus paused, frozen stiff.
The sound rippled from nothingness to a volume that defended him either through its weight or his fear. It came from right next to his ear, yet he knew that it came from the shadow. It was a low, guttural, decaying growl that tore at Marcus' skin as he shivered. His muscles loosened and he suddenly had grabbed the door, tossed himself inside the mansion and slammed it shut, plunging Hannah and himself into darkness.
