Sorry it took so long to update. I'm hoping you'll like this new idea for this story. After watching Silent Hill, I had an epiphany: make the two movies sort of 'coincide', in a matter of speaking. Anyway, on with the chapter!

Chapter 4: Emotional Torture

Merry jumped awake as the door to the dungeon opened. A large Uruk stepped inside and yanked him to his feet, leaving Pippin behind. Merry was taken to Saruman's chamber and thrown down onto the cold, stone floor. Merry shakily stood up and saw Saruman sitting on his black throne.

"What do you want of me?" Merry asked.

"I merely want you to tell me the whereabouts of the Ring." Saruman said.

"Then you're wasting your breath, I would rather die than tell you." Merry spat.

"Oh, I've heard that story a million times before...but you'll find that I have a way of getting what I want out of my prisoners." Saruman said.

Saruman stood up and pointed his staff at Merry. He closed his eyes and chanted a spell in a low, mysterious voice. Merry suddenly found himself spiraling through space and time...falling...and finally landing. He hit the ground and groaned as he did so. He stood up and found himself in a strange place. He was in what looked like an old, abandoned school-house. Everything was dark, but he could see. He was in what looked like the front hall of the school. All the walls were made of wood and they were rotting and decaying. Everything seemed to have a blackish-red tint to it.

Merry suddenly heard Saruman's voice echoing through the air: "Find your little friend in the right amount of time, or you'll both suffer a thousand deaths."

Reality suddenly hit Merry like a speeding bullet: Pippin was somewhere in the harsh, cruel world that Saruman had devised as some sort of torture contraption. He began running down the hallway, he turned when he saw a small room that housed a tall stairway leading up to several other floors of the school-house. He climbed the stairs and found himself in another long hallway. He sprinted down the hallway to a room at the end, something inside his mind was telling him to go there. He cautiously opened the door and stepped inside. It was an old bathroom. Just like the front hallway, it was decaying and had a foul smell to it. He slowly stepped toward to first wood-walled stall and pushed the door open, he saw nothing. He went to the next one, nothing. He looked in each of them and found nothing...until he came to the last one. He pushed open the door and what he saw made his blood run cold.

The skinny body of Pippin was hanging there, bound in cruel chains of rusty barbed wire. The sharp barbed wire was tightly wrapped around his arms, legs, torso, and neck. Blood oozed from the harsh wounds left by the barbed wire. Merry gasped and fought the urge to scream. After getting himself back together again, he rushed forward and reached out to free his dear little cousin, but when he tried to touch him, his hand went right through Pippin like he was a ghost. Merry was disturbed by this and he tried to touch him again, but he went right through him. Merry yelled in fear, what was happening to them?

Although Merry hated to leave Pippin, he thought this was probably a hallucination. He ran out of the room and ran down the stairs to the front hallway. As he tried to catch his breath, he heard what sounded like a loud, Orcish horn blowing. He looked around to see where it was coming from, but it seemed to be coming from all directions. As the echo of the horn faded away, something very strange happened. The floor, walls, everything started to sort of flake apart and the pieces float up into the air. Everything started to grow dark and cold. Merry yelled in fear and ran out of the school house.

He saw what looked like and old, abandoned ghost-town. All of the buildings were made of old, rotting wood. The whole town was flaking away and the flakes rising up into the air. Merry was terrified and he didn't know what to do. He merely froze and all grew dark. He fell to the ground and drifted off into a world of feverish, dark dreams...

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A/N: I hope you liked it. PLEASE R&R!!!!!!!!!!!! I really want to know what you think about it. I will update as soon as I can.