I had a brother, once.
He died.
My brother's name was Edward. He was a big, gentle, man, the kind of person who's strong enough to easily push others around, and yet nice enough to know not to.
He drew comic books for children, the Excellent Adventures series. Maybe you've heard of them. In fact, you probably have. They were really huge a few years back. He made...I'm not quite sure it was millions, because of some licensing issues, but it was a load of money, anyway. Then, one day, he packed it all up, and drove off, without telling anyone.
His body was found, in broad daylight, on the streets of a large town somewhere in Maine. His throat had been cut. The official verdict was suicide.
The name of the town was a name I'd always known, although only then did it take on any significance to me. Silent Hill.
I mourned for my dead brother, I wept for him. Life continued.
At least, until he came back.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with loss. Some people turn to drink, or drugs, some take out their anger on other people. For me, it was routine. After Edward's death, I slowly settled into a funk, going through the same motions each day like clockwork. Wake up, have breakfast, go to work at the library in Brahms, come back to the apartment, have dinner alone, maybe a read a book or two, go to sleep. Day in, day out, that was my life, occasionally punctuated by the odd meeting with my few friends or, if I was feeling particularly daring, a trip to the cinema.
In part, I think this came from my naturally anti-social disposition, but, mainly, I was just that determined to prove a point. Or, shit, I don't know. I can't psychoanalyse myself. I barely even know what I was doing then anyway. It sure as hell wasn't anything that can be classed as 'living'. I know earlier I said that 'life continued', and it did. I just wasn't much of a part of it.
It'd been another nondescript day in the thrilling life of Essie Hodges when it started. I climbed the stairs to my homely apartment, on the third floor of the building, bags of shopping weighing me down. I was thinking nothing much in particular about anything, except maybe which easy microwave meal to prepare myself for dinner. So it came as a surprise to me when my front door wouldn't open.
I had stuck the key in the latch, and turned clockwise, as normal. But there was no click, to signify the retracting of the mechanism, and it remained locked. I tried again, but still there was nothing. Frustrated, I placed my shopping onto the ground, in order to focus more on the door. Maybe I'd got it wrong in a moment of ditziness. Maybe it turned counter-clockwise. So I tried that, and to my surprise it turned that way as well, but still with no click. It was as if someone had somehow gutted the locking mechanism, not quite removing it completely, but doing just enough damage to keep the door firmly shut permanently.
I frowned, puzzled. It was probably just another cock-up on behalf of my landlord, Mr. Reed. The old bastard had just been too cheap to buy a proper lock, that was all.
Leaving my shopping outside my room, I set off down the stairs, ready to give Mr. Reed a piece of my mind.
The stairwell seemed cold, colder than it should've been. I shivered, and before I could stop myself I had sneezed all over my hands. Shit. It was definitely colder than it should've been. And I'd left my jacket in the apartment. I soldiered on, regardless.
As I reached the ground floor, I noticed something else odd. Where were the usual drunks, the addicts that lay sprawled around the stairwell as if it were some kind of second home? In fact, where was anybody? I hadn't seen a single person since I'd entered the building, although considering the kind of people who usually hung around the area, I was too busy taking it as a blessing to consider that maybe something weird was going down.
I located Mr. Reed's office, next to the elevators, and rapped on the door sharply. There was no reply. It was very unusual for Mr. Reed to ever leave the fortress he considered his rudimentary office to be. Was he ignoring me? I knocked on the door with more force this time. Still no reply. Irritated, I thumped the thing, and it swung open with unnatural ease. The locks on this door were bust too?
Inside Mr. Reed's office, things became even stranger. The entire room looked as if it'd been hit by a hurricane, and I'm not exaggerating. It was like the entire destructive force of such a deadly storm had been focused into a single small point, an epicentre that just happened to be my landlord's office.
The desk was split in half lengthways, with each of its drawers removed and summarily shattered by some unknown assailant. Mr. Reed's prized stacks of legal documents, as well as pages of what looked to have been a manuscript he'd been writing, weren't just scattered across the room; they were literally everywhere, even, impossibly, on the damn ceiling, and most of them looked to have been scrawled across with thick black marker fluid. The window was broken, naturally, and the shelves of military miniatures seemed to have been taken off of the walls and simply smashed against each other into a tangled mess of painted plastic and wooden splinters.
I stood there and stared for I don't know how long. Reed had never been the most amiable of people, but he wasn't the sort of man stupid enough to make enemies. At least not enemies who were capable of things like this.
"Mr. Reed?" I called, in the foolish hope that maybe he was just buried, unconscious, beneath the debris, and would rouse himself at my voice. But that didn't seem too likely. Anyone nuts enough to be this thorough on a single room surely wouldn't let their assumed quarry leave alive.
It was then that I noticed something. Although the bulk of the paper had at least some marker fluid on it, there were a few scraps that seemed to be missing, as if they were holes in a jigsaw puzzle. I looked up again at the paper on the ceiling, and then back at the paper on the ground. There was something more to this. Then, it clicked; there were patches and holes on the ceiling where there was paper on the ground, and vice versa.
It was a ridiculous idea, but the situation almost seemed like some kind of puzzle...I sighed. Edward had always loved puzzles like this. If he were here right now, he'd know what to do. But he wasn't, and so I set to work, as stupid of me that might seem. But the set-up was just too perfect.
If I could move the ceiling papers onto the floor, I was sure I would have a completed message. I cleared some of the other debris from the floor, and thought. Maybe some of the pieces not arranged in this meticulous pattern would suffice for filling the gaps. I leafed through them, and, sure enough, some of them were identical to the ones on the ceiling.
It took me at least a good fifteen minutes of going through piles of marked paper, but eventually I found what looked to be the correct ones. I placed them on the ground, glancing up at the ceiling pattern to make sure I was doing it right, and then, sure I would have some kind of an answer, like in a bad detective story, I stood back and looked at the completed message. It wasn't very neatly written, and the letters were almost an illegible squiggle, but after a few seconds I got it:
OUT
Although this situation was still utterly surreal, I could sense the urgency behind those letters, and I knew just when an order was an order. It was like some great supernatural presence was shouting the word at me so loudly it pierced my skull and echoed around my head. I dutifully left the room, and that was when the shit really began to hit the fan.
Mr. Reed was lying in the middle of the lobby, splayed out like some kind of gigantic starfish. His limbs were outstretched in a position no corpse could've possibly held unless it had been placed that way, and on his face was an expression of what looked to be dreamy contentment. There was a gaping red hole where his stomach had once been, and his intestines were wreathed around his corpse like morbid garlands.
That was when my calm, lucid mood was shattered like a house of glass. Oh, God, the stench! I fell down onto my knees, scuffing my palms on the plastic floor, and promptly began to gag and retch. I tried to suppress the urge to vomit as much as I could, but I couldn't stop myself from expelling my breakfast straight onto the floor.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, and tried to calm down. Whatever was going on here was serious, and if I didn't oh god fucking shit someone's murdered reed and next it'll be me jesus i don't like this i want to go home oh edward where are you please oh god i can't cope this is too much the sound of a slap echoed around the lobby, and I took a long, deep breath. I. Had. To. Stay. Calm. Be logical, be detached. That was my thing.
I lifted myself up. Ok. So Reed was dead. And, it seemed, someone had wanted me to see it, judging by the message in his office. They must've placed the corpse there while I was rearranging the papers. So where were they now?
That didn't matter. What did matter, in my mind, was that I got the fuck out of there as soon as possible. Something incredibly messed-up was going on here, and I didn't want to be a part of it, no sir. Cross my name off of the list, Mr. or Mrs. Murderer, I'm outta here, no more games for me.
Trying as best as I could to ignore the earthly remains of Mr. Reed, I practically ran to the main entrance and forced open the doors, exiting as hurriedly as I could.
Of course, then I began to think that maybe it'd be safer inside. The reason? I couldn't see a damn thing. Thick white fog enveloped everything, and I could only make out vague shapes at a distance of anything more than a metre. I recalled a novella I'd once read with similar fog, and suddenly felt incredibly vulnerable. Slowly, uneasily, I proceeded through it, in a direction I knew lead to the nearest bar. I had just seen a man with a hole in his torso the size of a cannonball and his guts wrapped around his body. I needed a drink, badly.
I'd only gone a few metres, not even enough to reach the other side of the road, when I heard a noise.
A voice. A human voice. Only, it wasn't. Too deep. Too quiet. I froze in place, afraid to move, and then, again, I heard it. Like a distorted hiss. Again. There it was. It was saying something, vocalising some phrase. But what?
As I stood there, glued to the spot out of terror, I heard it again and again. Like some kind of demonic snake. But there was a human quality to the sound. It was saying something. I gulped. I really needed a drink now. It grew louder, slowly, and I could almost make it out, or a single word of it, anyway. Essie.
I suddenly didn't care what the fuck the voice was talking about. I sped across the road, blind panic taking control, and then I didn't even know where I was going. The fog had disoriented me, but I sure as hell didn't want to stop and converse with the mystery voice, so I kept on running blindly, praying for this damn fog to end, for things to start making sense again, and then oh god edward please come and help me i dont know what to do i dont care how just help help HELP HELP HELP-
I was airborne for a brief second, and then I smacked down against the tarmac, hard. I lay there for a good few minutes as I tried to get my brain back into gear, unnerved just as much by my own sudden panic attacks as by the ghostly fog. I sat up, slowly, and to my dismay the seemingly omnipresent fog was still there, its sheer presence exuding an aura of tension. At least the mystery voice had gone now. That was a plus.
I looked back. I'd tripped over a roadblock in my frantic retreat, it seemed. It was now lying sideways a few metres away, its black and yellow stripes looking faded and dated. I still needed a drink.
I stood up, and tried to get my bearings. I'd landed pretty close to the sidewalk, and could just make out 'McKee's Parts and Repairs' on my right hand side. From what I knew, that meant I was on Edgar Street.
Forget the bar, I'd decided. The time had come to forget Brahms altogether. Whatever the hell had happened here, it could sort itself out. I walked over to the nearest car, an old Ford. I knew nothing about hotwiring cars or anything like that, but...I'm not entirely sure what I was trying to do. Either way, I never did go any further than that, because, then, I heard another noise.
This wasn't a sinister voice, however. This sounded jolly. Singing. It was unbelievable, but amidst all this weirdness I could hear singing! People having a good time! I was as close to overjoyed as you can come under such circumstances.
It wasn't English. I could tell as much, even with my limited experience with other languages. It sounded...German. German singing? In New England? Unlikely, I knew, but I also didn't care much. The thought of other people, and maybe safety, was enough to cancel out all other doubts.
It was coming from a building just behind the Ford. 'Curly's Tavern' was emblazoned on the front in large letters. I couldn't believe my luck. Human company, and alcohol? It was everything I need to get over today.
Without thinking, I practically skipped towards the entrance to the building and almost threw open the door, thinking, to hell with this fog and whatever other shit happens, I can just stay here and drink my way through the madness.
I don't need to tell you that I was catastrophically wrong.
