Hola! I wish to thank everyone who reads this, whether you review or not. If you know me for my other fics, you know I haven't been consistent with updating. So, I apologize to long-time viewers and welcome new ones. C:
This is not like my regular parody fic. It's darker, and the subject matter is heavier than the Silent Hill characters searching for butter cake or the nurses hunting down an iPod. YEE HAVE BEEN WARNED. Also, spoilers.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
The click of the old wall clock, a plain disc with black Roman numerals and a missing hour hand tapped at Alex's psyche, triumphantly tocking away as he cupped his grungy face in his hands. His legs were gashed to hell, sliced up by the horrors the people in the seedy town of Brahms were blissfully unaware of, said horrors residing literally right next to them in that town... Silent Hill.
His father, Adam Shepherd, had always firmly ordered Alex to stay away from Silent Hill. It was a bad place, where innocent young minds were corrupted by a vicious cult known as the Order. Drugs were openly sold and used by the hospital staff, and violence thrived in the sleepy community. Of course, as a ten-year-old, Alex had not known any of this. Only after he passed the evergreen sign, ominously creaking as it swung on its chains in the wind, did he learn this. He just had to learn the truth, the awful truth that forever would shadow him. The truth looked an awful lot like a lake with no moon reflected on its surface, only ripples and bubbles where a little boy disappeared. And it sounded a lot like a sickening crunch, the break of a bone cracking on a sharp point of wood, a splash of an object falling into the water, and the anguished wails of parents holding a broken, drenched body.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He realized how many better options he had than to return to Shepherd's Glen, his hometown-turned-ghost town for reasons unclear at the time of his arrival. Little did he know, the area across the lake from Silent Hill was taken over by the evil kept at bay by the blood of sacrificed children, and it was all his fault. He should've been sacrificed. He shouldn't be here, in this old lice and bedbug-infested motel, weeping away the layers of dirt and blood on his palms. Shepherd's Glen would still be the happy neighborhood it used to be before his foray into a mental asylum. Josh would romp happily in the yard, never knowing where his big brother and playmates Nora and Joey had gone, which would nag at him for a time, but he would soon forget it and buy into the lie that they just went off to school somewhere further west. He never would disobey his parents and seek the truth- and Alex- in the nightmarish land yonder. His parents would still be alive.
He fondled his trusty gun, memories flashing in his mind like a demented picture show. His mother, hitched to a device somewhat like a Medieval torture contraption by her wrists and ankles with leather straps, stretched out painfully. Alex tried everything to get her down, but she screamed each time he so much as brushed her softly. In only a few minutes, a metal piece would pull up, effectively snapping her back and pulling her apart.
"Alex, please," she begged for the bullet in her brain to spare her a terrible death.
The ring of the handgun as it fired echoed in Alex's brain, growing deafeningly louder and louder, though the only external noise was the whir and chop chop chop of a ceiling fan in its dying throes before repair was needed. The TV was on, but it was muted as a cheery blonde reported the weather.
He remembered feeling the spray of blood and squishy matter when his father was brutally cut in half by the Bogeyman; in fact, a dark scarlet splotch adorned his breast pocket. He was grateful he had summoned the humanity to forgive his father for his previous wrongdoings before Adam was lost forever, another victim to the unforgiving machine that was Silent Hill, and that would continue chewing up and spitting out more people like Adam, Alex, and Lillian. How did the rumors go? Cybil, that female police officer, had met an unknown fate in the fog and falling ash, if the gossip of Wheeler was to be believed. That man that went missing searching for his wife... the guy that went insane and started murdering to complete a satanic ritual, or rather, an Order ritual. The trucker he'd met also hid a dark secret he hardly let slide in a four hour-long ride hitched by Alex. Alex shuddered, macabre logic telling him he was but another civilian who took his turn in the town, coming to face a dark past amnesia had thankfully allowed him to regret. How many more would enter? How many wouldn't return?
He cried even more bitterly replaying Elle's gory death at Curtis' circular saw, split in two while Alex could only watch from behind a door like the coward he was. All that stood between him and her safety was a simple lock that he couldn't be bothered to attempt to break, and she was the only one who suffered, not matter how grotesque the sight was to Alex.
Coward, he berated himself. You called yourself the hero once?
In a daze, Alex coiled his finger around the handgun's trigger, a hollow husk of what he used to be. He was broken beyond repair, mind fractured by seeing terrors incomporable to gunshot wounds in war. The reality of what he had done was too much to bear, and he could not see the point in living in this world anymore. Before, it was impossibly huge and full of opportunities. Now it was a hostile house where he was an unwelcome guest, and in a way, the land of monsters was his only home. He fit right in, a beast just like Bogeyman. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks, leaving trails in the dust.
Closing his eyes, he cocked his head back, opened his mouth, and never paused to think twice about his decision, because if he did, he would traipse to Toluca Lake and hurl the gun into its depths, as well as that damn family ring that started all this, his father's dog tags, and any trace of his old identity.
He pulled the trigger.
And Silent Hill claimed another.
Well.
Asking if you enjoyed this feels wrong. So, I wish you a good day, and a safe New Year.