Keep On Knocking
Well, I'm here again.
Huh?
Again?
I've never been here before.
But the presence of familiarity hangs thick over this place.
It's as if I know this place in some dark corner of my memory, but there's a smokescreen there.
Guarding something.
Huh? Guarding what?
Guarding something that probably should be left far behind.
* * * * *
Chapter One
Daniel found himself staring at the dense fog that appeared to dance upon the surface of the murky lake as he suddenly felt his wandering mind fall back into his head like a coin dropped into a well. He pulled himself to his feet and turned away from the jetty on the lake, and began to walk on the loose gravel road which connected to Bachman Road.
Daniel's recount of what happened and how he got there was vague. All he could remember was that he had been walking along the barriers of the highway, not a single car had passed him for hours. Why he was walking along a highway to a place unknown at that time of night, he did not know, but he recalled it was almost hypnotic. He remembered clearly, however, that he heard sirens calling out in the distance, and he had suddenly blacked out. When he had come to, almost four hours had passed on his watch, and he found himself in a small rowboat, rowing across the dark lake in the thick mist, and discovered that he had come to the resort town of Silent Hill. Though one thing was for certain: something beyond the mere whims of human desire and impulse had drawn him to this place. It was as if his fate was no longer in his control; like something from a long, distant past wished to reveal itself, and it seemed in everything that had currently happened, Silent Hill was part of it. He was somehow connected to this town; he felt it.
Daniel could feel a distant heart beat pulsating in his head as he advanced toward the town, the pulse growing stronger as the gap was closing between him and a force that would ultimately unveil itself in Silent Hill. He sometimes questioned himself now whether he was actually going crazy, whether this wasn't all just going on inside his head.
The gravel road finally met the sealed tar road just around the bend, and Daniel came to a halt. The sky was still gloomy, the fog continued to obscure any light that would even attempt to cut through the gloom.
Before him on the other side of the street was a line of small houses, old wooden style homes painted in a variety of dull blues and greys.
I used to live in a house like this.
The thought flashed before him like a blinding wall of white light, and it had caught him off guard.
But he knew that his own mental voice was right. He had lived in a house like these that he saw when he was young.
Daniel didn't remember much of his early childhood. His only memories were the ones that always would remain so close and he would not even notice it. His mother had disappeared from all knowledge when he was three, and his father has died when he was six, and the trauma of these incidences were the most likely reasons why all other memory of his childhood was obscured. Yet, despite all this, why, he wondered, would he have remembered a home that he had resided in when he was a child.
Suddenly, the fog that swirled around him began to dissipate, and a bleak darkness began to envelope the sky again, like a solar eclipse. Daniel's vision that had been previously dulled by the fog had been momentarily restored, and though at first he thought that his interpretation of the buildings had merely altered due to the prior obscurity, but soon realised that in a way that he could not quite put his finger on, the buildings had changed. Physically, they had not changed, but there was a significant difference in them. He could feel it.
Out in the distance, the sirens beamed out again, the sound approaching as if it were travelling down a tunnel that connected to the inside of Daniel's skull. Daniel grabbed his head as the sharp sudden pain began to stab from the inside, and he fell to his knees.
His vision began to blur as if he were feverishly delirious, and then as he felt the last foundations of his strength crumbled, he collapsed, his body slumping to the ground, and darkness covered his eyes.