Midnight Illusions

Chapter Four

Arthur stared at the sign before him. Silent Hill, the very town where he use to spend his pleasant days with Alfred. He frowned, wondering how the Hell he could have been in one country and had arrived in another. Before he had jumped through the hole in his bathroom he had been in England, and now he had arrived in America, to the very place he had been thinking of traveling to only a short while earlier. Arthur could not help but feel suspicious, unable to believe it could be a coincidence he had arrived at the same place he had desired to go and had been reminiscing about only moments before.

'Maybe this is all just a dream…it has to be,' Arthur thought. There was no way on Earth this could be possible; it was like something out of the Twilight Zone. He must still be snoring away on that couch with a hangover back in his apartment and has yet to wake, his front door completely unchained. He tried pinching himself, but it failed to do anything. 'I guess…. I'll wake up eventually,' Arthur thought as he took his first steps into Silent Hill.

Seeing as his mind and body were refusing to return to the waking world just yet, he thought he may as well see what this dream had in store for him until he decided to come back to reality. However, he was not exactly sure if dreaming about the past would be a bad thing or a good thing. On one hand, it would mean Arthur would get to live in and experience all the good times he had with Alfred within his memories. He had done so many times before. On the other hand, when he did wake up he would feel nothing but loneliness and his heart sinking at the fact it was all just a dream and not real.

Usually when Arthur had dreams about Alfred, it would make him feel depressed and he would turn to alcohol for comfort. He would make himself drunk enough to forget all about Alfred and the past. People whom encountered Arthur on those sorts of days usually judged him to be a depressed alcoholic, but Arthur really did not see a problem with it. After all, everyone had a way to try and escape from reality every now and then, and Arthur's tools for escapism were with mainly alcohol.

'What's with all this fog?' the male wondered as he gazed around him. The dense mist hung over the world like a white sheet over a corpse. It felt like he was cut off from the world, almost suffocating. Arthur had never known the lakeside town to be so badly foggy before. The entire lake would have had to evaporate to create something like this…

As Arthur pushed through the countless water vapors that swirled through the air, he noticed the buildings were slowly emerging from the fog and rising into his view as he walked further on the deserted road. The only sound heard consisting of the echoes of his footsteps as his shoes made contact with the concrete. There were no birds twittering, cars being driven or townspeople as they went about their daily lives. Arthur looked around him and even peeked into a nearby shop window with the hope of seeing somebody – anybody. Yet the area was completely void of any signs of life, like a ghost town. It made Arthur feel uneasy at how desolate and silent the place was.

He could not seem to shake off the feeling of being watched. 'What happened here?' Arthur wondered anxiously. He decided to continue down the street with the hope of seeing some signs of life in the seemingly dead town. He considered perhaps heading to the orphanage to get some information on the whereabouts of Alfred; if he could remember where the orphanage was. He hoped they had not moved after the fire incident.

He had arrived at the corner of the street, and before him on the road lay suspicious looking puddles of a red substance. Arthur's green eyes grew wide at the sight as his mind linked it to a word. 'Oh God… is that blood!' He screamed in his head, swallowing hard. Something had definitely gone wrong in this town. His gaze rose from the blood and stared into the fog. Barely visible within the mist, he saw what looked like the silhouette of a walking human figure. Perhaps he could get more information from he or she about what had happened to Silent Hill and where Alfred was.

Arthur began pursuit of the stranger, his feet kicking into a run. However, he had not been running long when he was suddenly forced to abruptly stop, realizing he was at the edge of the road. It was as if a giant had torn out a chunk of it, leaving nothing but a destroyed road and a long drop down into the fog covered abyss. Arthur had to quickly stop himself from taking a step before he would end up falling over that very cliff himself, managing to regain his balance just in time. He took a few paces back away from the cliff's edge, looking in bewilderment upon the damage.

'Good Lord…what the Hell happened here?' However, Arthur had no time to ponder the abnormality, abruptly remembering the person he had seen in the fog. He looked around, wondering where the person had disappeared to, when he noticed an alleyway between two buildings. It was located fairly near where the cliff edge was. Believing that might be where the person he had seen had gone to; he headed into the alley and heard the distant creak of what sounded like rusted hinges on a gate being opened.

As he started to run again, Arthur was certain he could hear what sounded like an air-raid siren in the distance. As he ran down the long pathway of the alley, having to turn a few corners here and there, he could hear the siren growing louder and closer, followed by a strange rumbling noise that reminded him of thunder. 'Is there a storm coming?' Arthur wondered with slight concern as he arrived at a gate and opened it. As he entered the other half of the path, the sky above him appeared to be getting darker as the sound of the siren carried on. Thankfully, it did not become so dark as to make it extremely difficult to see where he was going. There was still enough light in the sky to help him and guide his way.

'That's strange. Why the Hell is it getting darker?' Feeling apprehensive, Arthur carried on in his journey through the alley. Suddenly, a strange odor reached his nostrils and made him gasp and gag. It was an overwhelming smell of copper and metal with a hint of rust and salt mixed within; creating a reek that was awfully sour. Overall, it smelled horrible to Arthur; it was not a pleasant scent in the least. Yet, it was somewhat familiar to the Brit. To him, it smelled a bit like the aroma of blood (from being in fights, he had grown accustomed to what the smell of his or someone else's blood was like when it stained his clothes), only it was worse.

As he journeyed deeper, the odor grew stronger and became so powerful that he even started to retch slightly from the horrible stench. Suddenly, he came near the end of the path and saw before him a blood-stained stretcher with a pool of blood surrounding it. Arthur's eyes grew wide in horror at the sight, his apprehension increasing significantly. Where were the police? Why hadn't a resident reported this? Despite the unusual and unnerving scene, Arthur carried on, taking the pathway to his right and following it, discovering more streaks of blood along the way. He swallowed, hoping there was a perfectly innocent explanation for so much blood. Perhaps the person he had seen in the fog had been badly injured.

Turning a corner, he continued to follow the path only to stumble upon more large pools of blood. Arthur suddenly stopped in his tracks as another foul smell crashed over him, gagging hard on it. He recognized the smell of blood, but there were other odors in the air that were a mystery to his olfactory senses. The young man took a few more steps forward and he instantly realized what the odors were, freezing in his steps.

Before him lay the torso of a person.

The skin and hair had been completely stripped off and the face had been horribly disfigured. Arthur gasped in shock as his hand flew up to his mouth at the gruesome sight, swallowing hard to try and keep the small amount of food he had in his stomach as his breathing became more rapid. Now he knew what the other smells had been.

It was of decaying bodies and death.

His eyes then rose up and he saw at the end on the pathway, hung up against the chained fence that blocked his way was another dead body that resembled a warped crucifix. The feet and hands looked as if they had been torn off from the body, the skin had been burned in places, marks caused by weapons of torture littered the skin, and some parts of the flesh were decaying. Above the waist it seemed all flesh, muscle, and organs had been removed from the torso, leaving nothing but a bloody spine and a cracked rib cage. The eyes had been gouged out, leaving nothing but two large, black holes where the eyeballs had been with dried trails of blood staining the cheeks and the lips of the mouth had been painfully sewn together. Like the other body, the head had no hair, but instead it looked like the flesh had been torn away, leaving nothing but a yellow-white skull for the top of the head where visible cracks could be seen.

Feeling extremely disturbed and unable to withstand the gruesome, bloody sight, Arthur quickly kneeled as he felt the familiar sensation of something rising up and released the contents of his stomach onto the dirty, bloodied ground. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, noticing that his hands were trembling badly.

'Oh my God…oh my God…What the Hell… how did…What kind of person would do this?' Trying to regain his composure, he slowly regulated his breathing and got his emotions under control. After a while, he carefully straightened up and decided it was best to leave the premises as quickly as possible before he would suffer the same fate as the unfortunate souls he had just encountered. He wondered where the person he had seen earlier had disappeared to. He didn't think it was possible for the person to have been the crucified body in such a short amount of time it had taken for him to arrive. The passage was a dead end and Arthur was certain he hadn't seen any side streets, so there was no way the person could have escaped. 'Could it have been my imagination?'

Arthur turned around and was about to backtrack out of the long alley when he suddenly noticed tiny movements within the shadows around him. They emerged from the darkness, revealing small, child-like, faceless beings that made strange noises, each chillingly sounding very much like the wail or cry of an infant. They resembled human children, but only in the most basic of ways. Their skin was jaundiced, wrinkled, and stretched, as if they were wearing leather. Where their faces should have been was merely a gaping, bloody hole, and they had long talons where fingers should be.

Arthur's emerald eyes grew as large as saucers, his pupils miniaturizing in shock and terror upon sight of these strange, disturbing creatures. Fearing for his life, Arthur started to run around the small group of grey children just as the one closest to him made a cry and lunged forward in an unsuccessful attempt to grab at his waist, the man escaping just in time.

Suddenly, he felt one of the other grey children grab at his waist, underestimating the creatures' amount of speed and in effect dooming himself. Arthur cried out in alarm as he felt its cold arms wrap around him, feeling its long nails trying to dig hard past his garments and into his flesh. His heart pounding hard against his chest, Arthur desperately tried to remove its arms from him, discovering it had a hard grip on him.

"Get off!" he demanded almost pleadingly, forgetting completely that they might not even understand him at all. The fear was clear in his voice as he tried to get away. More of the grey children began surrounding him, trying to grab at his body.

He was forced to turn to the last resort, something he did not want to do because of their infant cries. 'Remember, they aren't human, they aren't human!' he kept telling himself over and over again. He turned his hands into fists and punched the first grey child that had attached itself to him. It stumbled from the hit and fell to the ground, releasing him instantly. Turning his attention to the rest of them, he elbowed and punched anymore that were clinging to him.

Suddenly, he felt a terrible pain in his stomach, causing him to stop in his tracks. He looked down and realized that one of the grey children had stabbed a knife into him, the warm blood staining his sweater vest at an alarming rate. The grey child then removed the knife, causing another wave of pain to wash over him, and thrust it in another place, this time higher than where the previous wound had been.

Arthur cried out loudly as he felt the cold blade pieced through his flesh, his muscles and perhaps even his organs. He blinked back tears as he felled his knees, unwillingly falling onto the ground as his body became weak from the loss of blood. Despite this, he was still determined to fight off the creatures with all the strength he had remaining, pathetic has it might seem to some.

However, he felt another knife dig into his flesh yet again, only this time it was stabbed where the heart would be. His body throbbing painfully and feeling weak and dazed, he collapsed fully onto the ground, feeling the long claws of the grey children tearing through his clothes and digging into his skin so hard it drew blood. Yet he hardly felt the pain anymore, strangely numb at last.

'Oh God, I'm going to die…I'm going to die!' His vision was blurred by tears, though he told himself it was because of how much blood he had lost.

There had been so much he had wanted to do with his life…. so much he had wanted to see…. but now it had all been wasted…

He knew now that this could not be a dream. Never before had he felt so much pain in his dreams and never before had his unconscious mind managed to conjure up such disturbing yet vivid images.

Slowly, Arthur felt his mind and body slip away, everything around him becoming black as he breathed his last breath.

'…Is this what death feels like?'

Author's Notes:

Don't worry folks! If you guys have played the first Silent Hill game (or have watched the walkthrough on YouTube like I have) you will know what happens next! And if you haven't…well, I don't want to say anything in case it ruins the next chapter for you…oh, and there shall be another Hetalia character in the next chapter! 8D

And a big thank you to 15animefreak15 for beta reading this chapter for me!~

EDITED: 04/01/12

I've decided to change the story round a bit, but hopefully not too much. Just explaining the reason why you might see this on your e-mail notification because I've edited this chapter. I'm also going to edit the other chapters too. So yeah, don't worry, I haven't abandoned this! I felt the story needed a revamp after plotting over things and reading things that have given me new ideas.