A/N: Silent Hill doesn't belong to me. Just a note: this story takes place on November 7th, 1993.

It started, as most things do, with a letter.

Or a note, rather, not a letter, scrawled on a sheet of lined paper and left on the counter next to the telephone. It said:

"Dear Vasya I will be home late from work today. Please do not be worried. Love Yuri."

That was it. It was a perfectly normal note, and Vasilisa had gone about her day without thinking of it once. She ate breakfast, went to work, came home, said hello to the lady who lived in the apartment next-door, ate leftovers, went to class, came home, read a book, and finally tumbled into bed. All in all, a perfectly normal day.

The next morning, when Vasilisa awoke, the apartment was empty and the note was still sitting on the counter next to the telephone. The only dishes in the sink were her own, and her father's bed was still neatly made, hospital corners and all. She felt a little twinge of worry but managed to rationalize - perhaps he had forgotten to throw away the note. Perhaps he had done his dishes already. Perhaps he had made his bed before he left for the mines. Perhaps he had left early to grab breakfast at the diner down the street.

Vasilisa showered and dressed - button-up shirt, skirt, nothing special. She wasn't extraordinarily attractive, but she wasn't extraordinarily unattractive either. She was merely average. While her father fit the Russkie stereotype to a T with his big burly build and his general gloominess and his miserably cold grey eyes, Vasilisa looked and acted nothing like the devilish Russian femme fatales that pranced around on the television. She was short, thin, and relatively flat-chested; her hair was light brown, not quite light enough to be called blonde, wavy but not wavy enough to be called curly. That morning she braided that wavy brown hair while it was still wet and wrapped a threadbare towel around her shoulders to keep her shirt from getting damp. The apartment was chilly and her hair felt like ice against her skull. The dark pseudo-wood flooring that the whole apartment was panelled in was unpleasantly and unusually cold too - only October and already everything was starting to feel really cold. It was Maine autumn cold though, not Russian autumn cold, which was a blessing.

Next door, Mrs. Upton was carrying a pink bakery box with a newspaper balanced precariously on top and fishing in the pocket of her housedress for her keys. "Hello, dear," she said, still focused on extricating her keys.

"Hi, Mrs. Upton. Have you seen my dad around lately?"

Mrs. Upton found her keys. "No, I haven't," she said as she unlocked her door. "Is there a problem?"

"I-I . . . don't know. He didn't come home from work last night. You haven't heard anything about any mine accidents, have you?" Her voice caught on the last sentence.

"Well, I haven't heard anything. I'm sure he's fine. If he's not back in a couple of days, you can file a police report." She turned and offered Vasilisa a small smile. "Just holler if you need anything, dear."

"Okay, I will."

She never did.

. . .

Vasilisa dreampt of the mines.

They were a labyrinth, a house, a network of veins and arteries and capillaries that fed the towns of Brahms, Shepherd's Glen, and Silent Hill.

They were old, very old, almost as old as Silent Hill itself.

She had never seen them, but she could imagine them - black and enormous and miserably cold, black as night, black as the coal that her father and the miners brought up from their depths, black as the very bottom of Toluca Lake, cold as hell, cold as the prisons in Siberia, and so vast that when she was little she thought they crossed the whole earth. How easy it would be to get lost in those tunnels, in those hallways, how difficult it would be watch all of that blackness close in on you and suffocate you and swallow you whole, how difficult it would be to know that you would die alone and your flesh and your eyes and your brain and your bloody bones would be eaten up by the water and worms. Two-hundred and thirty-two sets of bones rotting in the dark, soon to be joined by the two-hundred and thirty-third set . . .

Vasilisa awoke and realized that she was staring at the white ceiling of the apartment.

"Please do not be worried."

Surely if Yuri had been lost, one of his fellow miners would have spoken to her.

What if they didn't notice?

They had radios. Surely . . .

She eased herself up. Her hair and skin and nightclothes were sticky-damp with sweat but her mouth was dry and tasted like sawdust. Dreams, she told herself, were just the day's thoughts and worries distilled and bottled up by the mind. And dreams . . . dreams couldn't foretell the future.

"Please do not be worried."

It had been seventy-two hours. She would go to the police station today and file a Missing Persons Report, and everything would be just fine. She kicked the blankets away from her legs and stood, the fold-out couch she slept on creaking as she did so. The apartment was dim, despite the fact that the curtains were open, and very quiet. The clock on the microwave said that it was seven-thirty in the morning, although for some reason it felt much earlier. Vasilisa stared blearily at the refrigerator, wondering if she ought to eat anything. Her stomach flip-flopped at the very idea of food, and thus she decided against it. She showered instead, but the hot water ran out early. She shut it off as quickly as she could, but the damage had been done and she was left dripping and shivering in a deathly cold, colourless bathroom. Still, she braided her hair and dressed herself in another blouse and skirt, determined to look presentable for the police if nothing else. It was nice to have clean hair and clothes, and after about half-an-hour her stomach had stopped flip-flopping enough for her to eat two pieces of dry toast.

The note was still sitting on the counter. Vasilisa had looked at it several more times over the past few days, checking and double-checking, making sure that it said what she thought it said and that the writing hadn't been spirited off the page. It never changed, although she never really expected it too. After putting on her raincoat and shoes, she went to fetch it, assuming that the police would want to see it. The note was still there with its message unchanged, but what sat beside it made Vasilisa's stomach lurch.

It was Yuri's two-way radio.

A sudden coldness crawled up Vasilisa's spine, all of the way up her back and into her skull. Her breath caught in her throat; the kitchenette blurred and the floor fell away from her feet. She blinked, caught herself, and found herself looking at her perfectly normal kitchenette with the slightly odd note and extremely odd radio. It had not been there before this morning, she was sure of it. After class? No, it had not been there yesterday evening either. At night, maybe . . . she didn't even want to consider it. It had to be a joke, a cruel, cruel practical joke. It had to be a trick. There was no other explanation. Gaslighting, that was what they called it. Driving her mad . . .

Vasilisa swallowed and glanced across the room towards Yuri's bedroom. The door was open wide, and the bed inside was still neatly made.

Something told her to take the radio to the police. She did - the black plastic was cool - not that she expected anything else. Her skin crawled. She then pocketed the note, which was much more comforting, locked the apartment up, and left.

The radio bumped against her hip with every step she took – it seemed that it didn't want to be forgotten. It was silent, which Vasilisa supposed was a good thing. Maybe. The whole of Blue Creek Apartments was quiet, deathly so, and she would have welcomed some human voices. Usually somebody was out and about at this time of day. She ought to have at least heard voices (living ones) if nothing else. The walls were thin enough that people in the apartments could be heard by people in the halls. But there was nothing, nobody, no sound but her own footsteps. It was almost as if everyone had -

Her hand went to her pocket, searching for her note. Just to make sure it was there (it was). Weak light dripped through the window at the end of the hall, spilling out over the windowsill and across the floor. It was overcast outside and freezing cold inside; her breath came out in little white clouds even though it couldn't have possibly been that cold inside. Strange, very strange. Perhaps the heater had gone out. If that was the case, then somebody would be downstairs bitching at the super. But there was nothing - no voices, no sound, no -

The radio shrieked and Vasilisa's heart nearly stopped. She fumbled in her pocket for it, withdrawing it just as the dreadful shrieking quieted to a low buzz. She listened intently, waiting for a voice. And then, finally through the static - numbers. Someone - a young-sounding woman, she thought - was counting, but not in English. She was counting - slowly, deliberately, enunciating each letter - in Russian. One, two, three, four - she took a deep, shaky breath - five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. A pause, another deep, rattling breath. In English – "The message will not repeat. Please listen. Thank you."

It was her own voice.

A long pause, and then a repetition of the message, this time in Russian. What was she – if was her – saying about the message repeating? It made no sense – not that any of this made any sense. And then - no more words, just the crackle of static.

Vasilisa stood, clutching the radio, staring wide-eyed, her knuckles white and her face whiter. Just when she was sure that there wasn't going to be anything else, the radio then gave another ear-piercing wail, and Vasilisa nearly dropped the damn thing. She suppressed a giggle - this whole situation stuck her as oddly funny. A voice burst through the static - not her own, thankfully. It was her father's.

Her heart lept.

"Vasya," he said. He sounded harried, out of breath. In Russian: "Malyshka, please listen." She hadn't heard that name in a long, long time.

"Papa! Can you hear me?"

He didn't seem to hear. There was an edge to his voice, a strangeness that she couldn't quite put her finger on but didn't like at all. He coughed and said "If you can hear me, know that I'm okay. I'm safe. Everything will be all right. I love you so much. So much." His voice cut out as abruptly as it had come in and was replaced with the crackle of static.

He was alive. If nothing else, he was alive. He was a terrible liar - something was wrong, but he was alive, and that was what mattered. She tucked the radio back into her pocket, her heart a little lighter. Of course, she had no idea where he was and there was still the question of where the radio had come from and where everybody else was, but even that seemed a little less troublesome now.

She continued, her steps a little higher and her pace a little brisker. Blue Creek Apartments was small, only three stories tall, and thus had no elevator. It had little stairs tucked away in a dark stairwell, which she took. The stairwell smelled wet and mildewy - not that the whole building didn't smell wet and mildewy, the stairwell just smelled more so. The staircase that led to the third floor was blocked off; a crumpled piece of paper explained that it was unfit for human habitation. A corner of the roof had fallen in last winter, and while that had long since been patched up, some water had seeped into the walls and provided a nice safe place for black mold to grow. Why the lower two floors hadn't been evacuated, Vasilisa didn't know, but the third floor had been blocked off and its residents evacuated. Yuri, of course, spent several months grumbling to himself about how he'd left the Soviet Union to escape this govno. The dampness aggravated his perpetual cough, so she supposed he had more of a reason to complain about it than she did.

Even the lobby of the building was empty and painfully quiet. Maybe it was just the poor lighting, but everything looked worn and weary and faded. The colours were vaguely washed out, the blues were nearly grey. The heating wasn't on at all, and neither were lights, even though outside it was dark and heavily overcast. Vasilisa's skin prickled, but she didn't know why - this was her home and had been since they'd moved here. Somehow though, something was -

The radio hissed and Vasilisa took out of her pocket. She didn't expect another message from her father, but she certainly hoped for it. There were, however, no voices at all this time. She considered smacking it - maybe some good old percussive maintenance would make it shut up - but something sent her stumbling to the ground before she could so much as raise her hand.

She yelped and shot back up, clutching the still-shrieking radio. A tall and impossibly thin man – or not, it barely looked human – stood before her, rocking slightly on splayed, bony feet, cloaked in black moth-wings. His proportions were not that of a human man's; his legs were extraordinarily long and thin as matchsticks, only paper-white skin stretched over bone - he had nothing between those stick legs and no nose (not even nostrils). He had eyes, black, beady, ratlike things, set wide and low on his hairless white head – his mouth was wide and leering and the colour of fat red snowberries. He took a step – his gait was awkward, almost a limp – and then another, twitching madly, grinning widely. Impossibly widely -- it looked less like a mouth and more like a big crescent-shaped hole that somebody had carved in a white pumpkin, only with big teeth that looked like bleached bone needles inside. Vasilisa danced around it (if nothing else, she was faster than it), searching for something, anything, that she could use to defend herself or escape or somehow otherwise save herself.

There was something - a gift from God. Or so it seemed. There was a huge hunting rifle on the desk, sitting on top of the papers and the junk. Vasilisa didn't know how to shoot, but she'd either figure it out somehow or end up just bludgeoning the moth-thing to death with its butt. She darted behind the desk and grabbed ahold of it, the wood and metal peculiarly warm and familiar in her hands. She took aim as best she could, poked at it and then pulled the trigger back once, twice, three times. It bucked in her hands and she stumbled backwards and slammed against the wall.

The moth-thing, however, stopped grinning. There was a swath of dripping red on his chest, impossibly brilliant against his black, crumpled wings. He swayed, and then collapsed collapsed fully like a house in a hurricane, blood puddling around him, soaking his papery wings and spilling across the blue linoleum.

When it had lain there for a while with not so much as a twitch, Vasilisa stood shakily, still holding the rifle like it was her last salvation, her ears ringing. The adrenaline rush had worn off; her legs felt wobbly. The radio, which had fallen to the floor in the confusion, was quiet. The moth-thing too was quiet. Vasilisa turned it over with the end of her rifle and kicked it savagely in the head, jerking back in disgust as she felt its skull crack beneath her trainer. Something was painted in scarlet on its wings - how she had not noticed before, she didn't know.

On its wings was an insignia of some kind, a complicated trinity-within-a-circle-within-a-circle marking interlaced with runes and markings that appeared to have been painted with a careful hand. Vasilisa had seen it before, although she couldn't remember where. It was a religious insignia, she remembered, but no more. A thought crossed her mind - maybe the moth-thing was like a Golem, and this was like the name of God. Another God, obviously, but - no, that was silly. Then again, something like this ought not have existed at all . . .

As if Vasilisa needed yet another reason to go the police. Maybe she ought to skip the police altogether and just check herself into Brookhaven, she thought. She was having an exceptionally vivid nightmare, or she was hallucinating. If the latter was true, she hoped to God that the thing she had killed wasn't . . . wasn't a real person.

Vasilisa turned and retched.