"Silent Hill… it's a resort town." Annie explained between sips of coffee.
Well, not coffee—soy mochaccino. Whenever ordering the beverage, Annie would enunciate the second word with great care.

It was a daily ritual for her to visit the Crazy Bean coffee shop immediately after her shift ended, so when William approached her needing to talk, she simply asked him what he was doing after work and then, without waiting for a response, proceeded to pull him along with her.

"I went there a few times with my cousin when I was little," Annie continued, gripping her cup with one hand and running the other hand back and forth across the series of metal Xs which collectively formed the top of their table.
"He seemed to like it. When he got married, he and his wife went over there, and she was especially fond of it."

William stared at her from behind his own cup as he took a deep sip of coffee—just regular coffee, devoid of any sort of title which always had to be spoken cautiously.
After setting his cup down, his hand jolted upright along with the rest of his arm, his index finger outstretched as if to say "eureka!"
Anticlimactically, he unfolded his hand and looked up at the umbrella-like fixture hovering over the table. Annie eyed him curiously and his head dropped into its previous position.

For a second, the two just glared at each other blankly. William gradually lowered his opened hand and once more lifted up his cup to his face, his wide eyes peering out from behind it, beckoning for Annie to say something else about the town.
Something strange or frightening.

There was an odd clanging noise as Annie pulled her chair closer toward the table.
"In fact, Silent Hill was the last place he went with his wife before they both disappeared."
She took what was presumably the last drink of her mocha-thing and took aim for the nearest trashcan, poised to launch her cup. It bounced silently off of the side of the bin.
A man who was discarding his own trash bent down and picked it up. He mouthed the word "why" and shook his head before properly disposing of it.

"It was all over the news for a while. Channel 6 interviewed me." Annie persisted.
Suddenly, inexplicably, William became incredibly attentive.
"I'm pretty sure I remember that," he spoke. "What was your cousin's name?"
Annie's head drooped slightly.
"His name—"
She stood up halfway through her sentence.
"—was James."


A sense of melancholy pervaded William as he unlocked his car door, and his environment somewhat reflected his demeanor—at the exact moment the car's roof covered his head, the clouds covered the sun, casting unusually dark shadows across the urban landscape.

By the time William rolled through the front gate of his apartment complex, the air was like ink.
India ink, he mused, studying the space his headlights illuminated as he pulled into a parking spot. He stepped out of the vehicle, looked down, and smiled. The car was perfectly parallel to the lines.

Looking back up, however, elicited a frown—the main entrance appeared abnormally far from the center of the parking lot, almost as if the ground beneath him was attempting to stretch itself.
His march to the door was accordingly tiring, and as he passed through the doorframe and began ascending the three flights of stairs (which, that evening, was an odyssey of its own), he resolved to actually sleep once he reached his bed.

Approximately thirty seconds later, William arrived at his door, which protested noisily as he opened it, creaking in such a manner that William swore he could almost hear it saying "leave me alone."
Before entering completely, he stopped at the door and nearly slammed an outstretched arm into the inside wall, searching for the light switch. He found it and continued his trek, bringing the door with him.

Suddenly, he was compelled to once again cease movement—the atmosphere didn't feel quite right to him. A quick study of his surroundings confirmed his suspicions: the entire apartment was grey, save for the area surrounding his bedroom door, which was a gradient from the medium grey to a sickly shade of light green. Closer observation of the walls in the green area revealed a small strip consisting of a multitude of miniscule, haphazardly connected lines drawn onto the wall in a darker shade of green.

William automatically recognised the pattern followed by the lines.
They were the veins of a human arm.

"Oh, hell," he muttered before strolling past the patch of green back in to the grey, making his way to a hopelessly unorganised desk. Even nearly a year after his diagnosis (and subsequent prescriptions), it wasn't uncommon for the environment—or really, his perception of the environment—to arbitrarily shift into such a state.
Learning that these changes were probably in his head did however alleviate the fear he once felt when they occurred. They now merely annoyed him.

He sifted through the grey mass of paper and books which had accumulated on the desk, and dug out a moderately-sized book containing illustrations of the circulatory system. All of its illustrations were similarly achromatic.
He came across a high-resolution shot of all of the veins and arteries in an arm, mentally blocked out the arteries to focus on the veins, and drew a quick comparison between the photograph and the lines on his wall.

"Everything's in place," William found himself speaking out loud, "median cubital, basilic, median antebrachial…"
The book closed with a dullthud, and he placed it back on the desk, prepared to ignore any bizarre qualities his apartment was exhibiting so that he could finally sleep.

Fate seemed to have other plans, however; another thud resounded from behind him as he took his first step toward the bedroom.
He spun around on one foot to face the source of the noise, only to notice that his tiny "kitchen" area was spewing some sort of mist, which he initially thought to be smoke.
His certainty disintegrated right before he decided to run into the hall to find the fire extinguisher, as the mist reached him and he felt its cool moisture.

William then came to find he had a new problem, for just as the mist's feeling was cool, its stench was rancid.

Like death.

Nearly choking, and wary of the mist's threat to envelop him, William pulled his shirt over his nose and mouth before grabbing a penlight from a holder on the untidy desk.
He assigned himself the mission of determining the cause of the mist, then raised and turned on the penlight.

The narrow beam of light pierced the obscurity of the misty kitchen, though still all William could see were shadows.
Shadows were good enough, he supposed, just as he witnessed another shadow materialise… a shadow shaped like an impossibly thin man.

As startled as William was by this, his level of shock was nothing compared what it was when the mist suddenly dissipated.

The man was not a man. At least, not anymore.
It had the appearance of being starved to death: essentially a skeleton wrapped in leathery skin which was about the same shade of green as the walls near his bedroom door, standing awkwardly with buckled knees and its hands held up to its chest. Its skeletal legs ended in toeless feet which had both nearly been cut in half, giving the impression of the figure having hooves.
William's eyes widened when he caught sight of the hole in the creature's stomach, and gasped a second later when he realised the hole wasn't a wound—it was a mouth. Almost as if the stomach mouth sensed William's eyes upon it, it snapped shut and bared its teeth to him.

The creature's head was the only thing that truly frightened William. A crooked, practically flat nose sat between two sunken eyes, bloodshot and lacking pupils, while its lipless mouth hung agape, ridiculously wide, so that its chin fell a few inches past the start of its sternum.
Thin poles made of some unknown material seemed to be prying its mouth open to that width, forming a mouth-cage reminiscent of William's childhood nightmares.
Trapped behind the poles, much to William's horror, was a bat.
A small human skull sat in place of the bat's head.

"Silent Hill," came a garbled voice from the creature's direction.
William responded with the first words he could think of:

"Holy shit."