November 12, 1997.
He sits there spent, drained, exhausted and glowing with a lover's post coital sheen. The gauze like texture of the carpet dimples the pale bare flesh of his thighs and buttocks. As he regards his exhausted, flaccid member and the few silvery strands drooling from its tip he feels suddenly overcome by a sickly numbing haze.
"I'm goin' now Ryan. I love you."
She rises, pale and naked and beautiful, her marble curves refusing to yield to middle age she moves slowly yet lithely. Her hair forms a shimmering trail behind her as though she were walking through water. He tries to rise but his movements are sluggish. His instincts scream at him through a dopamine fog.
"Wheeereyeegoan?", he slurs.
Shakily he finds his feet and the world cartwheels beyond the span of his comprehension. He crashes to the ground and somewhere beneath the mist that shrouded his perception he chides himself for getting this drunk. He stumbles clumsily through blackness as the bedroom around him melts into nothingness.
A moment passes.
He sits on the floor now, reading the book about Medieval England his uncle had given him for his twelfth birthday. A chilly draft creeps through the floorboards on which he sits and he remembers that he really should find out where that draught was coming from when he grows up and gets a place of his own. All about him toys lie scattered. He picks up the GI Joe that lay face down next to him.
Stupid, stupid toy!
He smashes its stupid head repeatedly into the bare floorboards of his bedroom in the house he grew up in. The house that was demolished twelve years ago. GI Joe's head breaks clean off.
Sadness. And loss.
Ryan's eyes snapped open and his left leg shot out, connecting sharply with the stool opposite causing it to topple over and clatter noisily onto the hardwood floor. The hand that had cupped his chin and supported his head scythed across the table causing several pages of his notes to sail through the air. The inevitable moment of panic one experiences when waking up in unfamiliar surroundings quickly subsided. Consciousness trickled back into his brain like the translucent brown drips of coffee falling through the filter into the first pot of the day.
He had awoken early that morning after a fitful night's sleep. The academic in him was ravenous and could not be placated by the domestic bliss he had experienced in that first night as a family in that house on Munson street. It scratched at the bars of its cage, howling at him to make a start on his book.
It had long been a tradition of his before rolling up his sleeves and digging into his research to find a good coffee house, start a tab and brainstorm for a few hours amidst the aroma of freshly percolated coffee and background jazz.
At 6:45am he resolved to honour that tradition, settling on Café Mist on Katz St if only because it looked like the only place that was open this early outside of the peak season. As he pulled the car up outside the elegant and unassuming front he planned his onward journey, prepared and fully caffeinated he would later round the corner onto Nathan Avenue and divert his undivided attention to the untold treasures of the Silent Hill Historical Society.
It was a glorious November morning, the sky clear and pale as he drove and the cold in the air that bit his cheeks as he left the car and pushed open the glass door made the warmth and aromas of the café all the more welcoming when he entered. The walls were tastefully papered in a warm cream colour and a few inoffensive contemporary prints adorned the walls here and there. From a door at the far end which presumably led to the kitchen the unmistakable tune of "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash drifted toward his ears. Not his first choice in background music but the place had a charming ambience nonetheless. He had chosen the table at which he had just now jerked awake, pulled out his leather holdall containing all his notes and then…
Now as he walked around the table to retrieve the fallen stool his brain struggled to fill in the gap between sitting at the table and waking up confused and bewildered. He had absolutely no recollection of falling asleep at his table or even feeling tired. Surely he wasn't getting that old.
A palpable sense of danger crawled, slow and serpentine down his spine as he hand came away from his fallen chair smeared with crimson grime.
It occurred to him as he glanced around the room that something inexplicable and elusive had caused a change in his surroundings during this curious gap in his memory.
Outside the window the clear crisp day that he remembered upon his entry into the café was now completely enveloped in a dense fog. Even his car which was parked less than six feet away was reduced to an anonymous charcoal grey smudge. The walls within the cafe had lost their welcoming lustre, becoming pale and blotchy with mildew in the corners and below the coving where the wall met the ceiling. Steadily his senses relayed to him increasingly distressing information leading to the conclusion that something was amiss.
Eyes, ears and nose became traitorous harbingers of dread and fear.
The smell of coffee and freshly bakes pastries that had welcomed him upon his entry into the shop had been replaced with a rank, stale odour of rotting food punctuated by the pungent overtones of burning meat. The music that had assailed his ears was now replaces by the menacing hiss of static from the unseen radio in the kitchen.
And it was cold.
Really cold.
As Ryan's breath unfurled in visible clouds before him he whispered comforting denials to himself through chattering teeth while wondering why he hadn't noticed all these enormous changes immediately upon waking.
And then it occurred to him. This change was still happening.
The blackish green mildew on the walls was slowly but steady spreading, bleeding down the length of the wall causing lumps of festering plaster and wallpaper to slap wetly onto the ground. Registering as something brushed lightly against
his shin Ryan looked down to see half a dozen clipped together pages of notes skitter across the floor, curl up, blacken and crumble to dust as if incinerated by some invisible blaze.
It was at this moment that the academic became acutely aware of the high pitched keening sound being emitted from the unseen radio. Immediately after the sound registered the harsh, nauseating odour of burning, spoiled meat scratched its way into his nasal passages, clawing at his sinuses and causing him to gag. As his hand clamped itself over his mouth he found his feet treading clumsily, unbidden toward the ajar door to the kitchen from which tendrils of steely grey smoke now began to creep.
As he advanced toward the door he felt a strange sense of detachment, the human instinct for denial clamouring over the panicked voices in his head to reassure him;
This is just another dream. Walls don't rot instantaneously, rooms don't transform before your eyes.
He swallowed hard, the saliva burning slightly as it scored a sleek, wet track down his smoke parched throat. He was now but a few steps from the door.
Keep walking, let it pan out. Open the door and you'll wake up scared and sweaty but-
Above the intermittent squawk of the radio a long, low but unmistakably female moan resounded through the door, causing Ryan to freeze in his tracks.
Moments passed. Ryan began to feel an indistinct sense of menace exuding beyond the door he faced, as cloying as the smoke that continued to snake around the door growing thicker and darker scratching and tickling at his nose and throat.
He took a tentative step forward, an unsteady hand raised up to push the door open.
Got to see it through. Nothing to fear. Either I'm dreaming or there's a rational explanation, either way it's-
His train of thought was cut short as the moaning returned, followed immediately by a muffled, rhythmic clanging. He stood for a moment, his fingertips lightly pressed against the door as his mind tried to place the sound within a context.
It did. And the images that it conjured up were less than pleasant.
Images of metal on meat and bone.
Oh God, Oh Jesus Fucking Christ, this isn't a dream, this is real and there's a woman in there, a cook or a waitress and she's hurt. Maybe seriously hurt. I have to-
His sense of chivalry would not allow his mind to ponder a moment longer. He slammed his palm against the heavy door which swung back abruptly allowing him entrance to the kitchen.
The smoke was thicker than he had expected and its intensity underscored by the putrescent meaty scent made his stomach lurch. He waved an arm to clear his view.
The kitchen was small, cramped and in a terrible state of disrepair. The presumably once white tiles were a smoking room yellow brown, smeared with brownish crimson in places. The surfaces, sink and utensils were caked in flaking brown rust as was the stove from which the smoke now billowed.
But however distressing the state of the kitchen, it was no preparation for the sight of the figure that stood astride the stove.
At first he had imagined it to be once creature, now he realised it was in fact two. The pulpy, tumescent mass sprawled atop the stove looked vaguely human, possessing a semblance of arms and legs, bloated and flabby beyond the extent of human obesity though they were. Its skin was pale and waxy, greyish in hue and scored by greenish black veins across its length. From underneath its blubberous mass the smoke continued to rise, fat and blood spitting out from beneath the folds of its doughy torso.
Astride it sat an even more disturbing creature, though its appearance was unsettling for very different reasons.
At first glance it looked like a woman, its form shapely and svelte and clad in a stained and faded waitresses uniform which must have once been pink. The body beneath the uniform though shapely was the same waxy grey colour as the bloated creature beneath and marbled with the same blackish veins. It was completely bald and its scalp was scabrous with peeling blackish lumps of dried blood. He could discern no face from its profile but he felt it safe to assume that its eyes (if eyes it had) were not upon him.
More unsettling than the creature's appearance, however, was the act in which it was engaged. It sat astride the flabby creature's unseen head, rocking it's pelvis spastically back and forth, thrusting its crotch into its face with inhuman force and causing the oven to rock creating the clanging noise that had drawn it into the room.
Ryan could only look on speechless as the heavy door swung back around and thumped him in the side. He stood half in, half out of the kitchen as the demon waitress' thrashing became faster and more frenzied. As if in sympathy the whine of the radio escalated to a harsh shriek, joining this perverse spectacle in terrible climax.
The smoke had by now become unbearable and Ryan coughed convulsively, hot tears falling from his stinging eyes. The demon waitress turned sharply to face him and its face, or lack thereof caused Ryan's testicles to attempt to leap into his stomach which in turn attempted to leap into his throat.
In the absence of a mouth and nose there was only a puckered, fleshy hole in which blackened teeth jutted here and there like ancient mooring posts on a blackened and slimy road. Within this wet tunnel of brownish flesh writhed a long black tongue that fluttered obscenely at him, seeming to taste his presence.
Its head began to twitch with inhuman speed and severity and again it emitted that low moan, starkly unsettling in its ambiguity for it straddled the line between a sound or rage, pain and the orgasmic sighs which he had heard drift from Mairead's lips less than twelve hours ago.
The demon waitress stood and in doing so revealed, protruding from its short skirt, spiny, snapping labia like the hungry jaws of a Venus fly trap. Mercifully they quickly retracted into the confines of the brown and crimson stained garment dropping chunks of grey flesh onto the stove as they did so. Ryan looked down at the blob like creature still sizzling and smoking on the stove and saw that its face had been reduced to a ragged, loosely assembled mass of flesh by the macabre pseudo sexual act. His disgusted reverie was interrupted, however as the demon waitress hopped down drunkenly from the stove and lurched toward him.
Panic stricken Ryan tumbled back into the dining area, almost colliding with an arrangement of chairs.
He had just reached the door he had entered the café through as the demon waitress emerged from the kitchen, its hips thrust forward in a grotesque and menacing parody of sexual allure. Frantically he shoved at the door.
It wouldn't budge.
