A/N: Three quick things:
I changed the title from "Dib's Forsaken Memories" to "Dib's Restless Dreams." This is because for the life of me I couldn't think of any good memories for Dib to forsake.
I rated this "T," but that is from my perspective. I know that I am a wildly jaded person, and that my T rating could very well be someone else's M. If anyone feels at any time that this story crosses that magic line between T and M, please tell me so I can change the rating. Thanks.
And finally, thanks to MadeUpFigmentQueenLola, and Nikooru-Chan for the reviews.
Act I, Scene ii: Diving into the Dream
"Here we are! The little town of Silent Hill, the home of some of the most disturbing paranormal events in American history. Yes, this is it; the zenith of weirdness! The apex of insanity! The nadir of normalcy! ...And where the hell is everybody?!?" Dib shouted at the empty streets of Silent Hill. He hit the 'off' button on his video recorder, no need to waste the battery on useless footage.
This was starting to weird him out. He'd been walking for almost a half-hour now, and he hadn't seen so much as a lone squirrel. He could understand that people wouldn't want to walk around in this mad fog, but come on! At least let there be a stray dog somewhere!
Scratch that, after the 'bologna incident' Dib didn't want to see another dog for the rest of his life.
"Heeelloooooooooo!" Dib called into the fog for what seemed like the hundredth timeand for the hundredth time got no answer.
"...Useless" Dib muttered, as he pushed his way further into Silent Hill's business district. He was getting frustrated; there was no one around, the fog was hiding almost everything from his sight, and he was extremely lost. He very well might have been walking in circles, it was nigh impossible to distinguish one building from another. Seriously, Dib thought, would it kill them to have some variety in the architecture? That's all-
WHACK
Lost in his thoughts, Dib had run face-first into a parked car. Rubbing his sore head, he used the offending vehicle to pull himself back to his feat.
"Who put a car here?" he asked, shaking the last of the shock from his brain. He looked it over; a Honda Civic, white, kinda rusty. Dib walked around the car, looking for any sign that the owner might be around. Upon closer inspection, it seems that to doors were unlocked.
"Oops" Dib said unconvincingly as he 'accidentally' opened the car door. With speed honed from years of sleuthing, he checked every nook and cranny of the vehicle. He opened the glove compartment, and found exactly what he needed: a map of the town.
He set the map against the hood of that car and studied it. Silent Hill was built around Toluca Lake, the main street of the old tourist town hugged the west edge closely, a bridge over a narrow portion of the lake connected the south and north sides of the town. Dib was in the business district on the north-most end.
With a quick glance to the nearby street corner to get his bearings, he found that he was on Koonts St in the southwest side of his current region. He used his finger to trace out a path to the Lakeside Amusement Park; the first area he wanted to check out. It didn't seem like to bad of a walk; a couple of turns, some bridges, and he was there.
Dib pocketed the map and looked up. It seemed the fog had cleared a bit; he could now see the edge of the opposite sidewalk.
"Things are finally starting to look up," Dib said to himself as he began his trek through Silent Hill.
"Ok, this whole 'no one's here' thing is starting to freak me out" Dib muttered to himself as passed the fifteenth shop with locked doors. It was barely four-thirty on a Friday; everything should have still been open. He walked farther, checking more doors. All locked. He remembered reading of a plague in the early 1700s that wiped out most of the town, but an illness of that magnitude in this day and age would at least be reported in the news. Right?
Dib, once again lost in thought, was torn from his reverie (just inches from a lamp post) by a strange crackling sound. Thoroughly curious, and hopeful that noise meant people, Dib oriented himself in the general direction of the sound and marched forward.
A building emerged out of the fog; a police station.
brr...zkzz
"Yes!" Dib yelled, moving forwards to the building; the promise of people behind the doors making him break up into a run.
brrkzzkkrrrkk...kbkkbk
That crackling sound got louder, rising to an almost deafening pitch. With a quick motion, he checked the doors. Unlocked! Joy swelling in his organs, Dib burst into the station.
BKKKKRRRRRRRKKKZZZZZZZKK
Dib's heart dropped as the doors closed behind him; there was no one inside the police station either.
BBBRRZZZZFFKRKRRKKKKRRRRRZZZZKZKK
"What the hell is making that noise?" Dib had to almost shout to hear himself over that sound. A sweep of the room revealed the culprit to be a single police two-way radio dangling from a hook. Dib slid over to it, desperately trying to turn it off before his ear drums burst. He managed to find the volume switch, and immediately cranked it down until the sound of the static was just above a murmur.
"I... guess it's broken or something" Dib said absently to himself, looking over the odd little police radio. He poked it, shook it, and even smacked it lightly against the wall, but to no avail; it was still sputtering white noise. Dib wondered if the town had suffered some sort of electro-mag-
THUMP!
Dib jumped, spinning to face the mysterious sound; on top of the secretary's desk, in the corner of the room, stood some thing.
Dib fell on his rear as he looked over the monstrosity before him. It was slightly shorter than Dib, slimy, and a greyish colour, like dead flesh. Its body was maggot-like, no legs, but with stubby little arms featuring warped fingers at their ends; the pointer finger was twice as long as the other digits and had a claw on the tip. It had no face, but rather a massive vertical mouth that took up the majority of its head; smaller, secondary mouths were spread seemingly at random all over its body.
Dib gagged when it screamed. The noise, making the spazzing radio sound almost lyrical, was like a hyena being kicked in the balls; a high-pitched, warbling, squeaky laugh. The sound hit Dib like an ice pick, piercing into the back of his brain and flicking the tiny switch marked: 'Run! Run for your life'
Dib sprung up from his sitting position and threw himself at the door he had come through. He pulled at it, but nothing happened. He remembered the doors swung inwards, but even so he gave a few experimental shoves just to make sure it hadn't turned into a push door. No luck; it still wouldn't budge.
Dib came to a sickening revelation. The door was locked. It must have locked after it had swung closed; the noise of the radio drowning out the 'click' that cut Dib off from his freedom.
The sickening sound of something wet dragging itself across the floor caused Dib to turn his head. The thing had climbed from the desk and was slowly crawling its way towards him, the mouths snapping hungrily, and loosing the occasional laughing shriek.
The option of flight gone, Dib fell back on the only remaining way to survive. Fight. He scanned the room for something, anything, that could be used as a weapon. The majority of the interior of the station was empty, but there seemed to be a hole in the wall a few meters from his left. He stumbled to it quickly, the sounds of the laughing maggot-thing moving closer spurring him to move faster.
There were a few wooden planks around the hole, some even had nails in them, but they looked far to flimsy to be of any use. Looking inside, his face broke into a smile despite the situation. In the hole, propped up against water pipes and support beams, was an iron pipe. It was long, easily as long as Dib's arm, and had a dull metallic shine; not even a speck of rust on it.
Grabbing the pipe, Dib turned to face the creature; only to find it has crept up on him, its head barely a foot away.
Dib cried out in panic, bringing the iron pipe down on the monster. The weapon struck the thing's head with sickening force, producing a dull, wet, thud. There was no satisfying 'crunch,' despite the power of the blow; the thing didn't seem to have any solid skeletal structure.
The wounded monster staggered, then let opened its mouths and made another laughing shriek. Dib hit it again.
THUD!
...The creature wobbled, and opened its mouths once more.
THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!
Dib kept hitting it until the multi-mouthed demon stopped moving, and collapsed in a pool of its own blood. Dib collapsed against the wall, hands shaking so badly that they could barely grasp the pipe that saved his life. He didn't know if his trembling was from fear or because his adrenalin was wearing off; either way he didn't care. He had to get out of this freaky town before it killed him. He had completed his objective anyway; he came in search of the paranormal, and he got it. Once he got that creature's corpse back to civilization, no one would ever doubt his claims again; they'd all finally realize his genius, and he'd never be ridiculed again.
Smiling, he turned to his slightly battered prize – and was greeted by empty space. The thing was gone. It was dead, Dib made sure of that, but even if by some unholy miracle it had survived the beating, Dib distinctly remembered that it had collapsed in a pool of its own blood. The floor was clean. Upon inspection, his iron pipe was clean. It hadn't moved, it was simply gone. Dib had taken his eyes off it for an instant, and it had disappeared.
No evidence.
Dib's spirit plummeted, but a little voice in the back of his head spoke words of encouragement. Sort of.
Don't worry, it said, there will be more of them. There are always more, that's how the universe works. It's always darkest before dawn, and it's not even dusk yet. You have a camera. You have a video recorder. What does it matter if they go away after they die? Just record them while they live
Dib's inner voice was right, he could feel that this wasn't the end of the weirdness, and he resolved to stay in that town –monsters or no- until he had definitive proof of the supernatural. To hell with his fear, he was prepared, he had the equipment, and he had the know-how. Nothing was going to stop him from getting a sample of something bizarre and proving his sanity to everyone.
After collecting his thoughts, Dib started to search the police station; never wondering why his inner voiced had seemed rather... feminine.
His search of the station had been almost fruitless. The few doors that weren't locked lead to useless rooms, or worse: rooms with puzzles for door keys. Who puts puzzles in a police station? Dib thought to himself, and they call me crazy...
Dib had so far solved two simple number puzzles, one featuring simple multiplication for the code of a touchpad, and the other featuring a number-and-letter combination lock to a safe. After some thinking, he had found out that the numbers for the lock were 1-20, and the letters represented the numbers after that; a21, b22, and the like. That little brain game had earned him the key to the rear exit of the police station. A map he had found (courtesy of the multiplication puzzle) showed that the rear exit connected to a side street that leads to the bridge that connected to the residential district.
From there it was a quick jog to the amusement park. There was a street that lead out of Silent Hill near his destination, so he could make a quick getaway if need be.
He reached the exit, they key fit perfectly into the lock, and with a click it swung out into the foggy Silent Hill air. The walk to the bridge was fairly quick and uneventful. Dib was grateful for the temporary period of calm. His encounter with the mysterious disappearing laughing monster had shaken him, leaving him on edge; while he was searching the police station he had jumped at every tiny squeak of his shoes and every creak of the building. There was something about the fog that seemed to soothe him; the swirling white mist almost made him feel as if he were walking in a dream. There were no monsters nearby; the radio wasn't going crazy, nor did he hear the distinct laughing-cry of the maggot things.
So Dib walked. He twirled the iron pipe absentmindedly, occasionally tossing it into the air like a baton. Once he became bored of that game, he started to play around with the radio again. It was a two-way police radio, after all, and he thought that maybe he could get in touch with some cops; both to have witnesses to the happenings in Silent Hill, and for the firepower. If he could twist the antenna in just the right-
Drip
"...Drip?" Repeated Dib, turning his head in the direction of the sound.
He immediately, truly, really wished he hadn't.
He had reached the bridge; it was stone, two large square pillars stood at the two visible corners of the construct. Purely for decoration, they rose almost five meters straight up, and were a meter in diameter.
Pinned by two huge rusted metal spikes, a corpse hung on the pillar to the right. Above it, in letters written in blood:
NO ESCAPE
The head had been completely decimated, what little remained made Dib gag, struggling with all his might to keep his stomach from emptying its contents on the street. Slowly regaining his composure, he looked over at the dead body once more. He couldn't tell the gender, there was too much damage. Realizing that this scene may very well be considered strange enough to be supernatural, Dib snapped a few quick pictures with his camera before taking a few tentative steps forward to better see the corpse. The first metal spike was embedded in the upper chest, securing the poor victim to the stone pillar. The person's torso was torn apart with cuts that looked like claw marks; they were deep and straight.
The second spike was embedded in the right wrist; holding it firmly in place away from the rest of the body. Grasped in the dead hand was a black book with silver writing on the cover; Dib couldn't read if from this distance. Working up some of his courage (and grasping his iron pipe firmly), Dib inched closer to this macabre landmark.
Dib had gotten very close, when a revelation hit him. The cadaver didn't smell. That meant that it was extremely... fresh. Dib looked around once more, double checking that no one, or no thing, was going to jump out at him. Confident that he and his wall-buddy were alone, he moved up and snatched the book form the corpse's hand.
The Notes of James Kilroy was the title of the book. Dib moved back to the sidewalk opposite of the carcass and flicked the book open.
To his great disappointment, it seemed that most of the pages had been ripped out. He skimmed the ones left, and was disappointed again. They were the daily notes of this 'Kilroy' person, what he ate, where he slept, stuff like that. The only points of interest were the first and last pages.
Page 1: Introduction
The following will be my notes and theories on this town of Silent Hill. We arrived here not long ago, but the signs are already pointing to our painful deaths. We lost almost half our number to that red devil in the first few hours. The rest of us are holed up in... -the next few lines are illegible, as they are smeared with blood –
...And it is my endeavour as a future man of science to record the strange happenings here, so that if we survive this horror (or if someone else finds this journal) then my knowledge can be passed on.
The last two pages were stuck together, Dib decided to try and pry the pages apart as he walked across the bridge; that corpse was starting to make him feel queasy.
He worked the pages carefully apart, slowly separating the delicate sheets of paper in order not to damage them. Dib finally worked them open, and found out why they had been stuck together. Another message, again written in blood, was inside the journal.
Welcome to the Nightmare, Dib!
The radio began to crackle, and Dib tightened his grip on his pipe.