Silent Hill: Family

Chapter 1: Accident

The trip from Los Angeles to South Ashfield was long. Very long. Matt Hardt, a 41 years old Caucasian veterinarian with brown hair, regretted that he hadn't brought any books he could read during the journey. He sighed and stared out of one of the windows of the airplane.

His parents and a few other relatives of his were living in South Ashfield. He hadn't seen them for several years now and couldn't wait to meet them again. "They'll probably want to hear all about my life in L.A.," he thought, smiling.

He turned his gaze away from the window and began staring at the female stewardesses in the plane. Their blue uniforms matched the carpet they were walking on and didn't leave much to the imagination. He could see the smooth, white skin on their arms as they sold snacks and refreshments to the many passengers.

And while he thought about how beautiful the arms of the stewardesses were, he fell asleep.

Matt rarely dreamt while sleeping, and when he did dream, the dreams were  extremely boring (the most boring one he had ever experienced was simply about him standing in the kitchen of his apartment, drinking a glass of milk). It was as if his subconscious was saying "Sorry, pal, but you don't have any inner demons or stuff like that".

But what he dreamt that day, on board that plane, wasn't boring at all.

He was walking, surrounded by fog. He looked down and saw a brown path. Dirt. Grass. Mud. He looked to his right and saw a forest. Trees. Bushes. No animals, not even a tiny mosquito. He looked to his left and saw more trees. He could also spot a big lake, far away from where he was right now. Where was he right now, anyway?

Suddenly he was back in the plane, and it seemed it was about to crash. He looked out of the window and watched in horror as it fell towards … a town? Matt could see buildings, roads, a lake …

… and then he was back in the forest, following the path. He heard strange sounds coming from all around him. "Animals? No, not animals. This is something else," he thought and began to walk faster.

As the plane whizzed down towards the lake, he observed that it was snowing outside. "Snow? In the beginning of June? What the hell … This must be a dream." The other passengers made a cacophony of screams and prayers, but Matt was the only one who wasn't going nuts or preparing himself to meet God. His calm mind was undisturbed by the situation. He knew it was all just his imagination, just a bad dream.

Back in the forest, he reached a sign that said "Welcome to Silent Hill, the most peaceful town in the world!". After reading that, he proceeded and soon entered a small town, which resembled the one he had seen from his seat in the plane. The eerie sounds of the forest had stopped. It was quiet. Too quiet.

"I guess whoever made that sign wasn't being pompous when he wrote that it was so peaceful here," he mused.

 Another weird thing about this place was the fog. It was everywhere - a huge, white wall of mist.

Then, everything became black and the dream ended. Matt was sitting in the plane again, his eyes closed, his body relaxed and with a little smile on his face. It had all just been a dream. A weird one.

But then the smile disappeared as he realized that none of the other passengers were talking and not a single stewardess was footing it around in the plane. Or maybe he had just suddenly become deaf? Whatever the explanation was, he couldn't hear the slightest sound.

Matt slowly opened his eyes and gasped.

The plane had crashed after all. All the other people who had been onboard appeared to be dead. Red gore covered parts of the walls. Cold water had made its way inside, only a couple of centimetres high in Matt's side of the plane, but drenching the dead bodies in the other side of the plane because of the odd position the wreck was lying in. Maybe it had landed in a pond.

The disgusting smell of death reached Matt's nose and his face became very pale. "Oh my God!" he managed to yell before he fell from his seat, landing on the floor, and vomited.

After that, he slowly stood and started to walk gingerly around in the plane, trying to feel the (unfortunately non-existent) pulses of the other passengers to find out whether there were any other survivors.

There weren't any.

"Oh my God," he whispered.

Then he heard a noise coming from the cockpit.

Of course! The cockpit! He hadn't checked that out yet – maybe the pilots had somehow survived this horrible accident.

He ran into the cockpit only to discover that there was no one there. The black computer screens had been stained with blood. "Well, that's strange," he said to himself. In fact, this whole situation was strange. Why had the plane crashed in the first place, why was he – apparently – the only survivor and what was that weird noise he could hear? It sounded like the white noise made by a broken TV or a radio …

Then he noticed it. A very small, scarlet, portable radio, on one of the chairs of the cockpit. "So that's what's been making this noise," he thought and picked it up from the red chair where it had been camouflaged.

As Matt carefully examined the radio, the annoying white noise seemed to get louder and louder, until he heard a muffled groan and several splashing sounds behind him, as if something was sprinting through the plane towards him.

He quickly turned around to see what it was.

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