Author: Panika feat. Pyres

Music: Die Prinzen - Popmusik

Notes: Sorry, I took my time again. I've just been busy with school and everything. It seems like I have less and less time to read and write fics… And I love this fic because it's my first horror fic and I'm really putting a lot of effort into it. If you like this one, read The Swans Sing When They Die as well. I've been into one-shots a lot lately, so I think there'll be more of them too…

Reviewers: Thank you so much for your comments!

Simon: Well, I haven't played the original, but I've seen them compared to each other on IGN. You'd never believe it's the same game! And it has some extra plot too about Trevor's daughter Lisa.

Selphiefan 89: Me too! I can't stand spiders! Did you know that more than 80 of people are more afraid of spiders than death? Amazing!

JoJo10: I hope I can make her believable; writing about insanity is not easy, especially if it's a lock pick she's talking to… And Chris… He might be alive, but I can't say that yet…

SniperR: Thank you! Yup, I didn't like it either that they didn't react to their friends' deaths. The only part where Jill showed some emotions was on the balcony where that dead man tried to attack her, but I can't remember his name.

Salem Saori: Thank you so much, it's always great to hear that I'm succeeding in portraying her feelings. I always try to distinguish myself from others, that was the base when I started writing; I wanted an original writing style, like no one else.

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"Barry!" Jill rejoiced as she saw something glitter in front of an old mirror and realized it was ammo. Without a doubt she thought it was Barry, who had walked in that corridor and thought about her as he had went. He had placed the ammo on the floor, hoping that she would find it. She glanced at the lock pick resting on her hips and smiled thankfully. She was afraid to talk to him, knowing that only crazy people talk to objects, but she had to thank him just in case he really was there, inside the lock pick somehow.

When she got up, she noticed a golden arrow on a pedestal, it had a beautiful green head, it reminded her of an emerald, but it surely wasn't one. She couldn't name the specific stone in her mind, but it didn't really matter. She was pretty sure Barry would've known, but she was a little afraid to ask, because then someone might hear her and think she's crazy. She took it, wondering if she would find it useful later.

She walked to the other end of the corridor, finding only locked doors.

"Dammit." Jill cursed as she tried to open the locks with the lock pick. Sadly the lock was too complicated for the lock pick to open it and she hissed frustratedly: "Come on, Barry, give me a hand!" Right after that she covered her mouth with her hands, glancing quickly around to see was anyone there to laugh at her. Maybe Chris was there, following her around, watching how she went crazy, little by little in the madhouse.

Maybe he was behind a mirror, hiding in her image, knowing that she wouldn't care about the mirrors while she was trying to get out. Maybe he was standing there behind the corner, watching how she was doing, using her as a shield against the zombies, those living deads that walked around the house of hell.

Her thoughts drifted more and more away from the lock she was trying to pick. She was sure Chris was there, behind the mirrors, watching her like a pervert in the bushes watching little girls go home from school, their little skirts showing a little more than what's appropriate. She knew Chris was decent, but the thought was disturbing. She closed her eyes, grimacing. The lock pick wasn't working; it made her irritated; as if she didn't have enough problems already trying to survive with the zombies.

She dropped the lock pick on the floor, cursing and ran back, shouting:

"Chris!! Stop playing around with me!" She shouted, not realizing that her own imagination had created the idea of Chris spying on her. When she got to the other end of the corridor where the dead man lay, she turned around many times to see was Chris hiding somewhere, maybe behind a wall or a mirror. "Chris! This isn't funny anymore!"

She took her gun and shot the mirror in front of her and it broke into millions of pieces, raining on the floor, reflecting the dim lighting of the room around as their death cries. Jill looked through the empty mirror frame at the dirty yellow wall, Chris wasn't there. She narrowed her eyes and ran to the next mirror and shot it into pieces as well, enjoying watching the shiny pieces rain down to the floor like flower petals when flowers die.

She growled as Chris wasn't there either. She ran to the next mirror in uncontrollable anger and jumped against it, breaking it with her body. As the glass broke, she could feel the shards cutting her face and hands and then she hit the wall behind the mirror, all the mirror pieces only embedded deeper into her skin. For a while she held herself against the wall, realizing what she was doing; looking for Chris, who was dead.

Jill sat down on the mirror pieces, pulling her feet against her chest and rocked back and forth, muttering something calming. She was really going crazy. She had just broken all the mirrors because she had thought a dead man had been hiding behind them, watching her go around. She sat there for a while, staring emptily in front of her, trying to accept her mind slipping away from her, but it was so hard. She knew she was going crazy, but she just couldn't stop it or at times she couldn't say when she was doing something mindless.

She sighed as she got up, her hand and face ached like hell, she could feel the pieces inside her skin as she tried to touch her face with her bleeding hands.

"I'm going to kill myself at this rate." She said as if she was predicting her own future. Then she took her emergency bandage from her pocket along with the herbs she had found. She ate some of the herbs, feeling their healing effect on her tingling wounds right away; first came numbness as the pain disappeared, then she started to feel very calm and relaxed. She tied her hands with the bandage and tried to get the biggest mirror pieces off them and her face, but couldn't do much without a mirror.

Still bleeding, Jill walked to the locked door where she had lost it for a while. She picked the lock pick from the ground very gently, avoiding touching it with her nails not to scratch it. She asked if it was okay in her mind, but was afraid to say it out loud after all she had done in the corridor. She placed it on her hips, patting it reflexively when she started to walk back towards the main hall to find some other rooms to go into.

She closed the large doors, sighing. Once again she was in the main hall, not knowing where to go. She sat on the stairs leading to the second floor and looked at her feet with a solemn expression, wondering how she could prevent or slow down her insanity. If she could somehow force the horror away from her mind, she would be safe from insanity, but there was one but in that plan; what if she couldn't erase those thoughts after getting out of the mansion? She would be trapped in her fairyland for her whole life, unable to tell truth form stories.

Jill dismissed that idea. It was no use trying to deny facts. There were rather gross dead people walking around, but the bright side of it was that they weren't fast or intelligent as they hunted for human flesh. She encouraged herself with the thought that she could always run away from them, because she was smarter than them and she was faster than them. She stood up, filled with determination once again.

"Barry, let's kick ass!" She declared like a school girl, pointing at the ceiling with her finger, new energy and hope running in her veins. But she still had no place to go.

Jill tried all of the doors at the first floor, but they were all locked and on their locks were carved different kinds of symbols, representing a sword, a shield, a helmet and armour. She immediately knew that she would need all kinds of fancy keys to get into those rooms, but as she thought of that, she also realized that they weren't locked for fun. Every time doors are locked, there's a reason to it.

There might be something even more hideous than those corpses roaming on the corridors, raised from the dead. She could imagine some other human-eating monsters, huge alligators that had grown in the depths of the sewers underground, their sharp teeth ready to bite off her hand if she got too close.

She tried to laugh at her thoughts to lighten the mood, but her laughter was crackling with fear. She knew that Barry wouldn't definitely like her talking about scary things while they were fighting for their lives in a scary mansion full of undead, walking carcasses. She patted him again on her hips and continued up the stairs. She almost passed one door, hidden poorly in a painting.

As she opened it, she could feel cold night air gushing in, she could smell the rain, but it wasn't really raining. She pushed the door completely open to get outside and inhaled deeply, almost devouring the fresh night air. She closed her eyes and could feel the wind cleansing her lungs and her thoughts, washing away the monster called insanity in her mind. She felt good.

When she finally opened her eyes, reality stroke back and it stroke hard. A graveyard opened in front of her. It was like from some horror film, gloomy and dark; some of the gravestones were leaning and covered with moss. Hay grew everywhere; no one had taken care of it in a very long time. Jill couldn't help the fear crawling up her spine like a snake, its cold touch freezing her muscles.

She took a deep breath once again, hoping that their coward pilot would fly over the mansion and see her there, waving her hands and waiting to be rescued. She ran down the stairs and gazed into the sky, waiting for a sound or a light. But it was cold and the cold made her shiver even more than the fear she was experiencing. She waited for a long while, warming herself by jumping around and blowing hot air on her hands, but then she decided that she would need to go inside and help herself.

She noticed a large tomb in the end of the graveyard and walked towards it, wondering if it would lead to a secret passageway out of the cursed mansion waiting for her to come back inside, glaring at her back with its thousand dark windows. She glanced over her shoulder at times to make sure it wasn't going to eat her while she examined the beautiful carving on the tombstone.

There was an angel, a plump child with wings, readying his bow to shoot an arrow without a head. On the arrowhead's place was a triangular recess, matching the arrowhead on her golden arrow. She ripped it off the golden arrow and threw the arrow on the ground, placing the green arrowhead in the recess. Almost immediately the tomb started to change, revealing stairs going deep underground. A dim, but homely fire burned in the small torch on the wall.

Jill hesitated for a long time, it was cold and down there it looked warm, but the stairway down was narrow and caused her to wait for something horrible to come out of there. But nothing came, no matter how long she waited, her hand resting on her gun on her hips. She started to descend to the grave slowly, jumping every time the fire crackled in the torch.

She came to a cave-like place, where fire raged in a large heater, creating dancing shadows all around the gloomy room. On the wall to her left were four faces, each one of them was missing something, one didn't have a nose, one didn't have a mouth and so on. On the floor under them was a piece of paper and she picked it up, wondering what it was.

V-ACT

Under the heading someone had written in a shaky handwriting: I stole this from the laboratory, never ever use the masks, Ada, escape and protect your loved ones.

She frowned, but read the paper that looked like a report of something.

There is now evidence that when the host loses consciousness, the body
goes into a dormant state. During this time the virus becomes active
and rapidly transforms and reconstructs the basic composition of the
body.

The host eventually mutated into a humanoid creature. (We call them V-
ACTs)

Its speed and amazing muscular development are particularly noteworthy.
After transformation, it becomes more agile and aggressive.

Already four of our researchers have died from trying to feed it,
turning the place into an instant blood bath. (Ever since this tragic
and barbaric accident, we have decided to call its kind "Crimson Heads")

That dangerous and precious prototype specimen can't be left there. We
have to figure out a way to deal with it. Termination is definitely not
an option.

We finally decided to freeze the specimen and confine the body inside
the basement of the backyard cemetery.

She lifted her gaze from the paper, realizing now what was going on. The Umbrella corporation had a laboratory somewhere in the mansion and they had been doing experiments on animals… or could it be humans? Her eyes widened and she read it once more with growing horror; no one could do something that inhuman! But it could explain the zombies walking on the hallways in the mansion, wanting to eat her. She swallowed nervously, almost seeing the laboratory in her eyes, the white walls, the hospital beds, the men in green handling surgical instruments, the screams echoing in the hallways where no one cared about the victims' fates.

She could hear the screams in her head, they tore her heart apart. The screams had gone unnoticed, no one had cared about the test subjects' lives or families as they had operated on them, done their inhuman tests. But what had they tried to create? Only zombies? Or were the zombies only tests gone horribly wrong?

Jill felt the fear overcoming her and she gasped, burying her face into her hands, trying to smother the loud sobs she couldn't help. She was panicking because of what she had learned. Those zombies had once been humans, used as test subjects against their will. She fell on her knees, trying to control herself, but at the moment it felt impossible. She put her other hand on the lock pick on her waist, whispering comforting words to Barry although she knew he wasn't there, but it helped her.

She took the lock pick in her arms and pressed it against her chest, hoping that Barry was there to comfort her. Even more than that, she hoped that Chris would walk down the stairs and tell her he was alive and well. Then she would run to him and hug him and kiss him and she would tell him that she loved him over and over again, never wanting to let go of him. But there was no one to comfort her, only the cold lock pick in her hand, its metallic touch was cold against her skin.

After a long while she got on her feet, finally wondering who had left the report there and written the text. The one who had written it had mentioned someone called 'Ada' and she had no idea who that was, there was no one in the Alpha or Bravo team named that. So it had to be someone who had been here and had had access to the reports, maybe a scientist; the only sane one. And that report was proof someone had tried to escape the madhouse. She put the report into her pocket and looked around a bit more. In the end of the basement was a pedestal and above it was a coffin hanging from the ceiling with four chains.

Jill tried to think that she was only going crazy, but the coffin wouldn't disappear. It seemed to wait for her to come closer, close enough to be devoured by the rusty lid. Or by something hiding behind the lid, so monstrous that the scientists had been forced to seal it there.

She looked at it for a while with fear, hoping that it wouldn't fall on her when she went to the pedestal to see what was on it. The coffin hung from the ceiling peacefully as if it was empty as she got to the pedestal and took the book, still looking at the coffin. It made a squeaking sound as she took the book and she screamed, running all the way back to the mansion and closing the door behind her.

Jill breathed heavily as she closed the door, feeling safer. She promised to herself that she would never in her life go back there again unless she had no other choice.

"Never again… never…" She said to to the main hall, it seemed empty, but she could feel it living, watching her behind its kind façade. Now that she knew its horrible secret, it seemed as if it was watching her even more closely, locking its door tightly to avoid her escape. Gladly she still had Barry with her, he would make everything good again.

"He's a lock pick, a lock pick, a lock pick! Barry! Oh, Barry!" She said frustratedly, but covered her mouth with her hand again, not wanting to say out loud what she was thinking. She would do everything to hold onto her sanity.

Jill looked around with a scared expression as she went to the stairs and sat down on one of them, examining the book she had got from the basement. It was purple and had lots of decorations on the cover and the name; Book of Curse. She hesitated for a while before she tried to open it and noticed a key on the book's back. When she removed it, the book opened. She examined the key first, it had a sword symbol on it; maybe it would help her to the other rooms in the mansion. She put it into her pocket and started reading the book.

The four masks,
a mask that speaks no evil...
a mask that smells no evil...
a mask that sees no evil...
a mask that cannot speak, smell, or see evil...

When all four fall into place,
evil will awaken.

It didn't make any sense. Or was it about the four faces in the basement? Then it would mean that she would need to go back there to put those masks on the faces and face the evil it spoke of. But on the report someone had told that 'Ada' never to use the masks. She sighed, closing her eyes, not wanting to let her imagination take over and show her images of her fears, taking deep breaths.

Suddenly Jill felt something grab her from behind, but before she got to fight back, two hairy legs squeezed her hands against her sides so tightly that she had to hold her breath to stay alive. She screamed as she saw them, realizing immediately that they surely didn't belong to any human, they were a spider's legs.

Jill screamed, fighting against the spider effortlessly, feeling how it's furry fangs embedded into her neck and poison ran into her veins freely. Then the spider let go and crawled to wait for her to go unconscious to the roof, watching her with its red eyes. She took her gun and shot it, after a few misses she hit it and it staggered before falling on the ground where she kept shooting it until it twitched for the final time and died. Then she put her gun on its place on her hips and fell down the stairs, unconscious, the poison spreading calmly around her body.

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Yet another chapter done. Thanks for reading, your reviews would be great!