"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."
