Chapter 40: Thesis of an angel

The street was deathly still, save for the banks of off-white fog that eternally milled aimlessly in the stagnate air. Not a sound dared to break the oddly peaceful scene and at this particular moment, this was one of the few places in the world that truly did live up to its hideously appropriate name…

But then something shifted in the mist, destroying the illusion of timeless. The shadow lurched up the road, moving with an erratic stiffness as its footfall chased away any renaments of silence.

Jobe walked on without a doubt in his mind as to where he was going. Already, he could visualise the church in his mind's eye. He could remember the feel of its age-old door under his fingers, the smell of varnished wood that had clogged his nostrils and the warm, welcoming air that had embraced him like a hug as he'd entered. How funny, to think that he'd actually been right to suspect that the supposedly holy building and those within it were hiding their true agendas behind smiling masks.

He'd been well and truly manipulated by all of them, like a puppet forced to oblige every whim of the jerking hand that hovered above it. Parker had posed as his friend, and along with Claudia, the pair had been forcing him down a carefully laid out path that would ultimately end in his destruction. They'd wanted him to see every mind warping horror in hope that he would re-member the equally horrific truth. Again and again, they'd forced him to re-live his crimes and now they actually had the ordacity the think he'd embrace them and their beliefs. How could they think that he'd be willing to surrender the few shreds of humanity he had left to truly become nothing more that a monster in order to save a world that was doing just fine as it was…

Jobe trudged onwards on feet that no longer felt the tarmac beneath them, the now ownerless kantana gripped loosely in a numb hand. The blade was surprisingly heavy; Virgil had always made it look as though the obscene weapon was as light as paper-

Virgil…The thought stung bitterly. That child-like girl had seen him through so much and he'd failed so hard in re-paying her. He'd just sat there, praying that it would all end as she dangled from the ceiling, suspended by a rope that was relentlessly drawing her throat to a close. She hadn't deserved to die like that, hell, no one did but especially not her after all she'd been through.

And then there'd been Grace…

The man was just about to start torturing himself with the memories and rub salt into these particular wounds when a voice snapped him from the limbo of his mind.

"Jobe?"

The man stropped, bile churning in his gut. It- it couldn't be…

Jobe turned with a deliberate slowness to face the person who'd addressed him, only to come face to face with a supposedly dead girl he'd been mourning only seconds before.

"I-I-I called for you but you didn't stop…" Virgil trailed off, the look on Jobe's face killing her voice. The man was staring at her as if just by standing there, she was defying the laws of logic, physics and any other particular set of unbreakable rules that happened to governed the world.

"Did- have I done something bad?" She asked, hands wringing together in a nervous knot. Her fingers grew all the more frantic when Jobe's expression of horror still clung stubbornly to his face.

"No…" He muttered, stepping back. "This- this just can't be possible. I…" the girl cocked her head to the side as the man took another step. "I watched you die."

The girl stiffened.

"What?"

Jobe ducked his head, his features contorted with anguish as his brain feverish tire to salvage some sense of reasoning.

"This isn't possible. You can't be standing here because you're dead. You're back in the water station hanging from the ceiling with a noose round your neck." His grip on the sword tightened. "I saw it happen… so this can't be possible."

Virgil was looking at the man with an expression of utterly lost confusion, a hand groping at her neck as the man continued raving.

"Just what the hell are you anyway? God damn it, you were DEAD! Nothing could survive that long without air…this doesn't make sense…" he grabbed a handful of stale and crusty hair. "None of this makes any sense." Jobe looked back up at the girl, about to launch into another rant but stopped when he saw how still she'd suddenly become. The hand had stopped worrying at her neck, gripping it tightly.

"…"

Jobe squinted, trying to make out the silent words that slipped from her lips.

"…ot now…not again, please…"

Jobe allowed himself to forget that he was refusing to acknowledge her existence in a vain attempt to preserve some precious sense of logic.

"Virgil?"

Her hand arched into a claw, digging deeper into her skin but then, as if some nerve had been severed, it dropped limply to her side.

"You know what I am." Her voice rasped as she muttered into her chest and answering a question Jobe had almost all but forgotten he'd asked.

Despite the little voice screaming that no good was going to amount from this conversation, Jobe stood his ground.

"Honestly, I can't say I do…"

"But I'm just the same as you." The trademark apprehension had dropped from her voice, leaving it as cold as the air that swirled between the two.

"And what's that meant to mean?"

The girl took a slow step towards him, moving sluggishly as if the mist had been replaced with thick water.

"Along time ago, I wanted to forget and run and hide, just like you…" She took another step forward, walking in a gradual, straight line towards the man. "And, just like you, I found myself here instead; the last place on earth that actually wants, no, needs us. This place, it gives people like you and me a reason to go on." Another step. Even through the fog that roamed the gap between the two, Jobe saw the crimson droplet of blood fall from her bowed face and splash against the black tarmac. "But now that we have to face what lurks beneath the surface, there's another question that arises; do we really want to continue?"

Jobe flinched at her words. This might as well be a stranger coming wondering towards him, for those words sure as hell didn't belong to the girl he'd met all that time ago in the sewers.

"Who are you?"

The figure stopped dead at his question.

"You know my name." She echoed in a voice that lacked any feeling.

"Virgil?"

"No, that's the name you gave me…"

"Angela."

"My real name Jobe," She looked up, the trail of blood that leaked from her nose traced the lines of the sardonic leer on her face. "What is my real name?"

Jobe gasped, for when she lifted her head, the answer came to him immediately. This was no stranger before him. He'd met this person a time that felt so long ago, just before they snatched the wheel of a van he'd been naively hoping he could escape from the town in and rammed it straight into a brick wall.

"Wrath…" It closed its eyes at the sound of its name, grinning like a demented Cheshire cat. "But…how?"

"I told you, I'm just the same as you-"

"But I'm not some kind of monster, not like you." His stomach churned as the image of the beast sprawled across the bonnet of a car dyed red with blood and riddled by shot sprung to mind. Jobe took a step back as it lurched forward, trying to prolong the lifespan of the rapidly closing distance between them.

"HA!" It laughed, rocking its head back. "Do you honestly still believe that crock of shit you're force feeding yourself? You self righteous bastard…" It threw a hand back, gesturing to the vast depth of milky air around them. "Do you honestly think you would be here if that was true?"

No reply. Jobe dropped his head. He wasn't like her-

"You did something, didn't you?" It rasped at the silent man, grinning as it slowly ripped the sense of soothing self assurance away from beneath his feet. "You just listened to that little voice that told you to go ahead and do the right thing, huh?"

Since when was bloody, selfish murder the correct course of action?

"It wasn't right!" Jobe's head snapped up and he glowered at the beast before him. For a moment, nothing longer than a split second, he could swear that his gaze had been met by those cruel, silver eyes staring out from a truly monstrous visage but when he blinked, it was just the girl.

"Yes it was! At the time, didn't it seem like the just think to do?" It shook its ragged head, hissing through clenched teeth. "That pig…he didn't deserve to even breathe. She was always too weak, but I made her take that knife and do what she should have done a long time ago." Jobe suddenly got the feeling that this wasn't about him any more as he watched it rant on. "But then, who would everyone else see as the person in the wrong?" It lifted its almost mournful eyes, meeting the man's bemused gaze. "Dear old daddy? No, that fucker would get off because he was dead, but her? She'd be the one who they'd point the finger at and call the monster just because she'd done the right thing and listened to me." The last word was nothing more than a bitter hiss as it pounded its chest with a clenched fist. For a moment, it paused before taking up its piece again. "Now, I've come to realise that it's stupid to try and dodge what this town intends for us to do. Don't you see? It's recognised our potential for doing the right thing and we, out of everyone out there have been chosen to go on to do something wonderful. We can't leave, how could we knowing what it is we've been chosen to do? Anyway, even if we could, we'd just go home to a witch hunt."

"But dose she agree with you?" The man asked, interrupting the beast's repertoire. It looked up at him, as if the question mildly surprised it.

"The girl? Of course not, you know that yourself. It's only because she's too weak, too afraid to take on the responsibility of bringing about this new beginning. Instead, she insists on hiding in some dark, dank corner and pretends that she can still run away…"

It let out a bark of laughter as if it had just let rip a wondrously hilarious joke. Jobe missed the obscure punch-line if there was one.

"It's funny, but if you think about it, she's the real monster here. Don't you think that delaying man's salvation just because you're so afraid is a greater sin than gutting one single man? Even now she's hiding from me, you and everything else that might look at her in some other lonely level of this place."

'Nowhere'

"But I guess," It went on, peering at Jobe from the corner of its eyes. "You're just as afraid as her, huh?"

It smirked at the sneer Jobe shot it.

"No I'm not." He curtly snapped back. It was a very convincing performance.

"So why is it you continuously refuse to embrace what it is you are, even after you know the truth?" The man averted his gaze, scowling at the tarmac with a glare hash enough to scold a hole right through the black surface. "Just face it; you've got nothing left and nowhere to go so why run?"

There was no reply from the man.

"Answer me!" The goading tone had given away to frustration but still, there was no answer. The beast's lip curled in anger and it stamped the ground with its merciless foot, not flinching as the shards of solid tar bit into its skin. "Damnit, why don't you accept what you are!?"

Its teeth nearly went straight through its lip when the man turned its back to the seething creature.

"Because I can't just can't bear to live with what I did and if I accept it…well, then I really am nothing but another monster. Onto of that, I don't want to play a part in creating some hell like this either…" And with that, he walked on and continued along the road that would enviably lead him to the church. A second past and the sound of the creature's laughter came chasing him up the street.

"Oh god, you really are as stupid as she is! You think you can just walk in there and kill them and everything's going to be a-okay? Do you still think you can get out of all this?"

Jobe's back, slowly being erased by the fog as he slipped further and further into it, gave no indication of heading her words.

"You're a fool!"

He stopped.

"At least I'm not delusional. Guess that doesn't make me as big a fool as you, huh?" He retorted dryly. Jobe didn't bother to turn to see what effect his words had on the thing that had been festering away beneath Virgil's fragile surface. He didn't have time to carrying on arguing with the obnoxious sin, especially when he was finally so close to those who had been tormenting him all this time-

Something sliced into his ear with the sharpness of a razor blade. Jobe cringed, dropping the kantana as he slammed his hands over his ears.

'The hell?'

It had been a sound, though nothing Jobe had ever met on god's green earth could produce something as painfully shrill as that. Maybe it you were stupid enough to hold your ear over a crack in a high pressure steam pipe, you might just be able to stimulate the same effect, but who in their right state of mind would want to try that?

"Gah!" Ever through the plug formed by his fingers, the noise was still able to seep into his ear hole and corrode his brain as it sunk into each and every craves of the organ it could find. He twisted his spine sharply as he glanced back down the street at the epicentre of the barrage of sound.

No prize for guessing where it was coming from.

Its head was back, allowing it to pump the foul scream that tore its way out from its mouth directly into the grey air. Jobe could see the cords in its neck twist and bulge as it roared, the veins running under the tattered skin pumped up like cords of iron.

Jobe felt himself cry 'shut up' but the words were effortlessly absolved by the roar that threatened to shatter his skull through sheer volume. He slammed his eyes close, muttering a volley of inaudible curses as his knees hit the black and artificial ground. The man brought himself to glower at the bellowing monstrosity but almost let the fingers drop from his ears when he saw the thing standing in Virgil's place. It was as if in the space of time it had taken him to blink, she'd been wiped clean form this existence and replaced with that monster.

It met his gaze with glassy eyes and the man shuffled back as the tip of its sharp foot clicked on the tarmac with its advancing steps. It was still screaming, the torrent of unrelenting sound pouring from a gaping maw crammed with more than capable teeth as its wings unfurled. It beat them once, twice, cracking like a gunshot each time they hit the heavy air as Jobe scrabbled even further back with the trembling sword pointed at the monster, praying that it would do some good if the creature chose to dive at him. It hovered in the air for a moment as the sails of tattered flesh and webbed membrane held it suspended above the ground, still baying its warped song…

…and then it launched itself forward.

Jobe saw it coming and the ghost of courage left him as it rapidly chewed up the precious meters between them. He yelped, dropping the sword and hugging the wet tarmac for all he was worth. Oh god, in a few seconds, those hideous travesties of feet were going to gut him like a-

A torrent of empty air passed over him.

Jobe opened his eyes, the creature's dirge already dying in his ears. There was no pain, no blood and defiantly no hellish bat stooped over him with its spear-like extremities stuck in his chest. It…it has gone straight by him.

The man staggered to his feet, staring in dumb wonder at the bank of mist that had swallowed the beast as his mind flashed back to the other sins he'd encountered. Had they all been people once who just hadn't been able to contain their urges before being dragged here and forced to play their part in some freak show? No, that couldn't be it…those things, they were monsters. After all,

(how dose that explain what you just saw happen toVirgil?)

how could they be

(and what dose that make you?)

human…

Jobe heard the dry crack of his argument falling apart and collapsing into a cloud of imaginary dust. It still didn't make sense and Jobe only succeeded in making his exhausted and assaulted brain reel with in his skull. Oh well, there were still two people still alive who could explain all this to him…

With a tired laugh, Jobe gripped the sword tighter than ever and trudged off into the mist, chasing a monster's trail to the church of Silent Hill.

- - - - -

A/N: we are inching towards the end, but I don't know if you belive me about that by now… As for that particular little revelation, yes, everybody probably saw this one coming from five miles off and I must appologise for the misspellings in this and the rest of the story. I would like to think the spell cheker and I get most of them, but more than a few slip through.

Thank you again for reading and sticking with it this far.