Whatever the thing was, as soon as she turned around it was gone. No corpse, no blood: the blue linoleum was clean, and it was as if it had never existed. Even the blood on the sole of her shoe was gone.

There was, however, a scrap of paper where the body had been. Vasilisa reached out gingerly and took it, her hand shaking like a dry leaf. Somehow - something - she couldn't even begin to explain. The paper was thick and stiff, not plain typing paper but something heavier, maybe cardstock. On the front was a miniature version of the insignia that had been on the moth-thing's back. The insignia wasn't made of paint, as she had first thought - no, it was something else. Not blood; it was too red. And who on earth would paint such an elaborate thing in blood? It made her head ache, and a thought, unbidden, came to her -

Like something's groping around in my skull.

A man, gone, lost somewhere - how did she know that?

She turned it over and found that the back was blank - who had made the thing? She wondered if she ought to take it with her. It seemed, for some reason, wrong to leave it, but she didn't want that sign anywhere near her. Superstition, she told herself, but she dropped the card on the floor and went to get her radio and gun. She was definitely going to have to do something about the latter - she didn't know how to reload it, and she didn't know how many shots it even held. Or what the correct terminology was, for that matter. It had her fingerprints all over it, so she couldn't just leave it, but . . .

And what if something else appeared?

She frowned and with one hand held the rifle, and with the other, the radio, which was still silent and cool. Surely someone was out there - there would be help.

Surely.

Outside, the greyish-bluish mist was so heavy that Vasilisa found herself struggling for a full breath; the mist felt like a fist, one whose skin was damp and grey and clammy with prolonged illness. She could see the town and the trees rising up from the never-ending greyness, but it was as if she was looking at the world through thick glass - everything was surreally blurry and seemed to be somehow out of perspective. Everything was dark and shuttered, signs turned to closed. There were no cars and no people in the street, and while she obviously wasn't able to see inside the buildings, she had a feeling that they were all empty too. The fog sucked all of the colour from the place: Silent Hill was and had always been a very grey-and-red-and-green town, all concrete and red brick with kitschy green

shutters and scattered shrubs and trees bent by weather and time, but today it seemed pale and desaturated, as if someone had run the whole town through the washing-machine too many times. Everything was darker too, the roads and buildings and foliage blackened by the pervasive wetness. True to its name, the town was as quiet as a snow-covered field in the middle of nowhere, save a mournful whooping foghorn that sounded very far away. No birds, no dogs, no people, no wind, just a nothingness so complete Vasilisa wanted to scream just to break it.

She hummed a few lines of some folk song she had heard a long time ago, and while the lyrics were lost to her, she remembered the tune. Her voice was weak and tremulous - it was almost more unsettling than the empty silence, so she stopped. If nothing else, the police station wasn't very far - right around the corner, across Katz Street and down Neely, right next to some seedy bar she had forgotten the name of. There had been a presentation in elementary school once, she remembered, given by the police, something about "stranger danger" or the like. She had been only nine then, and her English had been so poor that the policeman's words sounded like impenetrable gibberish. Nine-year-old Vasilisa did catch the directions he gave though, and for some reason she had not

forgotten them twelve years later: right-right-down.

The town was no longer beautiful. It looked so lonely and so tired, rising like a ghost in the fog, like Pripyat. It was beginning to rain a little and the wind was picking up, scattering dry leaves across the pavement, stirring up scraps of paper and dust. The sky was flat and endless and the colour of gun-metal. Maybe - and she laughed at this - this really was Pripyat or something like it and some nuclear reactor had blown its top. As if such a tiny town would even have a nuclear reactor! This was a dream, and she didn't want -

All alone in the centre of the street was a little girl. She had not been there before -

Vasilisa stopped but the girl beckoned her forward. She was smiling softly, not at all maliciously. Vasilisa, with caution, drew closer and saw that she was also vaguely blurred, somehow intangible-looking - a ghost? A spirit? She couldn't have been more than seven or eight and was quite pretty. Her hair was deep black and her eyes dark brown, her skin pale but rosy; her clothes, a blue-checked jumper-dress with a pink sweater underneath, seemed oddly outdated but were clean. She appeared to well-cared for and happy - maybe? She was smiling still. It was a smile that was too old for such a little girl. She smiled as if she knew something Vasilisa didn't.

"Sweetheart?" said Vasilisa. Her voice sounded funny. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she said. "Are you?"

Vasilisa nodded, puzzled. "Oh - yes. Are you all alone? Do you have a mom or dad?"

"I'm looking for my daddy."

"Me . . . me too." Vasilisa took a step forward; the girl took a step forward as she did so. A perfect mirror. "I'm going to the police station. D'you want to come?"

"No, I'll be okay."

"I can't just leave you, sweetheart - it isn't safe out here."

"I know." She smiled. It was almost motherly. "I saw what you saw in Blue Creek."

Vasilisa opened her mouth to say something and found herself at a loss.

"Don't worry," said the girl. "It will be okay."

"What do you mean?"

She shrugged and her smile faded. "This town is much bigger than I am. I'm not what I used to be - I can't help you. But it will be okay, even if you die."

How reassuring. Vasilisa had given up trying to make sense of everything. "What's your name?" she asked.

"Cheryl," said the girl after a moment of thought. "I have a lot of names."

"Nice to meet you, Cheryl," Vasilisa said and found herself lying flat on her back on something frigid and hard and staring up at a flat sky the colour of gunmetal.

. . . .

It was such a departure from the reality she had previously existed in that she sat up and gasped. Her head spun and her limbs felt stiff and leaden, and she stood, stamping her feet in an attempt to get the ache out of them.

"What?" she said. "What?" She half-expected somebody to answer, maybe the god-damned Cheshire Cat. But, of course, there was nothing.

Vasilisa was in the same part of town that she had collapsed in, a small consolation. As for the time, well, she couldn't tell. It had snowed, she knew that - inches and inches of the stuff had fallen! The buildings were cloaked in a hard grey-white, their signs nearly illegible. Spindly black evergreens and the decidedly blacker skeletons of deciduous trees stretched to a blank, grey sky. The road was nigh indistinguishable from the buildings or, for that matter, the sky, and the snow that covered it was unmarred by car tracks or animal tracks or people tracks. The only sound was the sound of her blood in her ears - a dull, hollow, roar, the kind of sound that creeps in only when everything else is very, very quiet. The air was still. The world was still. Oddly enough, she was a bit chilly but not cold. Her legs

were bare below the knees - she ought have been literally freezing, but she for whatever reason, she wasn't.

How long had she slept? There was no snow on her. It was - or had been - early November when she collapsed, which was a bit early for snow but not terribly unusual. But this . . . this was much too much snow for late November or even December, let alone early November. For all she knew, she had died.

She had nowhere to go. The police station was surely closed - was anything else open? The shops and homes that lined the street were all dark and hollow, empty of spirit and of occupants. She had to get out of the cold; despite her lack of feeling, standing out in thick, deep snow in canvas tennis shoes and a skirt and a thin raincoat couldn't have possibly been good for her. Besides, walking was difficult as her legs sunk into the drifts with every step. Maybe she could find some snowshoes somewhere - not that she could walk in them, but she could learn. Just as she was about to make the arduous trek back to the sidewalk, she remembered something - her rifle! It was nowhere to be found, and had probably been buried beneath the snow. Vasilisa didn't feel much like looking for it, but she

wanted something to hold on to, if nothing else. Who knew what could appear.

Vasilisa dropped to her knees and dug. She must have looked ridiculous, she thought, as she was digging like a little puppy, scooping up handfuls of snow with her bare hands and tossing it behind her. Eventually, her hands hit metal instead of snow and she laughed almost giddily. She pulled the rifle from the snow and continued, clutching at the rifle as a means of support. The coldness of the air, which again she did not feel, was making it difficult to breathe. Maybe, she thought, she wasn't

dead but dying. She remembered reading somewhere that death by hypothermia was actually almost pleasant, and that those who were dying of it actually felt quite warm and comfortable as they departed. But her mind was sharp and clear as ice.

Every single shop was locked. She supposed that she could break one of the picture-windows, but some civilized part of her mind noted that that would be illegal, so she continued along the strip, trying to open a door, any damn door - at last she found one. The front door of Ridgeview High School was unlocked. Such a stroke of luck. She pushed it open and stumbled inside, trying as best she could to shake the snow from her shoes. It was cold inside as well, but thankfully no where near as cold as it had been outside. It was almost as quiet, but in here her footsteps clacked on the linoleum tile and echoed in the hall.

Vasilisa had only seen the school this empty once or twice. It was rather surreal. The last time she had been in this school was when she was eighteen and ready to graduate. She hadn't planned on seeing it again for the rest of her life, let alone a mere three years later. It looked pretty much the same. The linoleum was still blue and maroon, the walls were still greying white and speckled with thumbtack wounds. Even the posters - silly, inspirational things with catchy slogans - were still up. She recognized nearly all of them. The lockers were still blue and dented in places. The whole place was still cold and damp and still smelled of dish soap. There were no students and no sign that students studied there or had otherwise been in the school.

"Hello?" she called, again not really expecting anyone to answer. She had no idea why she kept asking.

Her radio, however, answered with a pop of static - she had almost forgotten about the thing. Last time it had sounded was when - oh, hell. She froze and cocked her rifle.

The moth-thing was back. She had killed it, no - a brother? Was it still alive? Its eyes, if it had them, were still covered up and it was grinning again, even more widely this time, opening its terrible jaws to swallow her up -

She fired, hitting it squarely in its bald white head. It bayed loudly like an injured dog and staggered back a few inches before toppling over backwards, and Vasilisa laughed. It was a nervous laugh, shaky and uncomfortably loud, but she laughed and laughed as she never had before. Relief, exhaustion - she knew she must have sounded crazy. She was pretty sure she was crazy. Before her eyes, the moth-thing twitched and was silent. She strode over to it and gave it a swift kick in the head. It stopped twitching but did not disappear as it had before. Maybe it couldn't if she was looking at it - thus she turned. When she turned back, the corpse was still there. Dammit. What was different this time?

When it was clear that it wouldn't fade or even get back up again, she sighed, realizing that she had been holding her breath. She ought to give it a name, she supposed. It was the least she could do - it hadn't tried to kill her, nor had the one before. But if she had given it the chance, would it have hurt her? Mora. That was its name. It was from a story that Yuri had told her a long time ago, a fairytale that had left her sleeping with the lights on for months. The Mora were moth-creatures that came in nightmares and sucked the life from sleeping people, or at least that was how he told the story. She remembered that, for about six months, she had to have him kill any moth that came within twelve feet of her. It was almost funny now. Almost.

Vasilisa kept walking, even though she didn't really have anywhere to go. It felt better than standing still and she wanted to get as far away from the Mora's corpse as possible.

Vasilisa had no idea what to do now. She was alone, lost in a strange, snowy in-between. Her father was gone - was all of this strange scenery connected to his disappearance? Surely there was someone else here! Someone also connected to her father (maybe?) or lost. Maybe he or she had willingly entered this place. How? Someone else -

Cheryl. The little girl had disappeared when Vasilisa had collapsed. She wasn't normal - maybe not real - but she hadn't crossed over to the snowy other-world. Maybe she had, she just had gone elsewhere by the time Vasilisa woke up. She knew something, Vasilisa was sure of it. Maybe Cheryl was dead. Silent Hill had lots of ghost stories and skeletons in its closet. Not that Vasilisa believed any of them, but a dead girl's ghost was about the most logical thing in this place. Cheryl. Had a girl named Cheryl ever died in Silent Hill? Weren't ghosts unquiet dead, as in those who had died violently and never had been properly put to rest? Hundreds had died terrible deaths in this town - mine accidents, car accidents, boat accidents, disease, suicide, murder. That's why there were so many stories. Who knew if one of the corpses had been named Cheryl?

Vasilisa stopped. Someone was walking around in a room upstairs; she could hear their clunking footsteps overhead. Probably a man, and almost certainly human. Oh, thank God, she thought. She wasn't completely alone. The room above her would be . . . 2H, if she remembered correctly. A science classroom. She tucked her gun behind a trash-bin on the first floor - didn't want to scare the poor man - and took the staircase up to the second. Yes, the room was 2H, and yes, it was a science classroom. Old Mrs. Brunswick had taught there but had retired the year after Vasilisa graduated, she heard. She didn't know who taught there now. The door was shut, but, as Vasilisa found out, unlocked. She pushed it open and was greeted with a shrill but undeniably male cry.