Author's Note: A short Silent Hill 2 piece. SH2 is probably my favorite video game of all time, and whenever I play I seem to get little narratives in my head because I'm a huge dork. This most likely just sprung from me thinking about the game. And James rowing across the lake with his bad self. Muahaha. Written: 02/02/2006.
Wrong
Few traipsed these fog-polluted streets before him. A lone man, shoulders slouched, head down. The cool air swirled at his feet, shifting the mist ahead of him.
He was on a dock, one of the only ones in town, out on Toluca Lake. The fog hung just as heavy over the water as it did the streets. It reminded him of the mornings he would wake up early beside his wife, the spring dawns outside the window, with their lazy haze and their cool breezes.
His wife.
Mary.
And he was closer to finding her.
"Dead people don't write letters," he had told himself, mere hours earlier, as he stood at the rest stop which overlooked the town from a high vantage point.
The dock creaked under his feet as he stumbled towards the rowboat anchored at the end by a thin rope. His hands found comfort in the pockets of his jacket, the fingers of his left hand curled around the letter from his wife.
Across the lake was the hotel, the Lakeview Hotel. Where she said in the letter to meet him.
Our special place.
Part of him wanted to leave the town and never come back, another part wanted to just put himself out of this misery -- and this horrible existence.
But what James Sunderland wanted most of all was the truth.
He'd been through loudmouth Laura, homicidal Eddie, deranged Angela -- along with numerous creatures and beings too sick to describe. Not to mention the pill-popping temptress Maria, whom James instantly took a sick, arousing liking to. She looked too much like his wife, she even smelled like his wife... James knew she was something different when he saw her.
But he didn't know what.
James thought he was the only sane one in the town anymore. He thought he was the outsider to the group of lunatics he had met on his trek through the dismal streets of Silent Hill. He thought he was the normal one. He was on his way across the lake -- on the way to find out that normal was something he was far from.
As the silhouette of the hotel loomed through the fog over James, who was rowing towards it, he could only whisper one thing.
"I'm coming, Mary."