E.P.O. : My first reviewer! Have a cookie. Yeah, I guess the whole car crash bit is a tad overused, but a SH fanfic without it is like an Ahnold movie without a body count, or an Olympics competition without steroids! Too much to expect, particularly from me. Glad to hear your thoughts.
I also have bad news for anyone else reading this. If you notice that the writing seems somewhat primitive, that's because I'm writing this - and I assume all future chapters - in Notepad rather than Microsoft Word. For some reason, seems not to like my Word files - entire sections in italics and stuff like that. I apologize for any inconvenience.
CHAPTER TWO
"Uuuunnnggghhhh."
The woman blinked, slowly coming to. She opened her eyes, a terrible pounding in her head. She shifted and assessed her condition: leaning against a seatbelt that appeared to have done it's job rather well, and staring at the steering wheel, which had done a much poorer job deploying its airbag. The woman blinked a couple more times, trying to clear her head (which felt like it was filled with cotton balls, pressing against the sides of her skull with dull throbs emanating at the rate of her heartbeat). Her eyes slowly moved up to the windshield, and the spiderweb of cracks that had materialized there. She turned her eyes back to the steering wheel and noticed that it was coloured with a few spots of blood. Not many - little enough so that she had missed it the first time she'd looked, just barely conscious - but a few, three or four crimson spots on the gray covering. She spent a second wondering exactly where they had come from before a realization struck her, raising at hand to her forehead and brushing at it with her fingers. It was sticky and moist. The fingers probed further upward, under her bangs. An inch above her hairline, She gasped lightly as a knife of pain flashed out from under her fingers and lanced across her skull, traveling down her spine and making her cringe.
She reached up and grabbed the review mirror on the windshield. It was currently showing the road to the rear of her van, a dozen or so feet of black asphalt before being swallowed up by billows of gray fog. For the first time in about twelve years or so - the time she'd had the van - she adjusted it away from the rear and inspected her own reflection.
Her entire forehead was swallowed up by semi-dried blood whose origin seemed to be about the location of the wound she had brushed earlier. The blood narrowed into a trail at her eyebrows, a stream circling the left eye while her right remained clean. The bloody trail continued, cutting into several small rivets that crossed her cheek and brushed her nose until they came to the end of her chin. She looked down, and noticed that the area just under her neck was spotted by a half dozen or so red spots that looked bright enough to be fruit punch, but she knew to be blood.
"God damn it," she muttered, closing her eyes and pinching her nose. She shot another look out the windshield, and was suddenly struck by the fact that she hadn't heard another van on this road, as well as that it was unbelievably foggy. She tried to remember if it had been like this before the accident. She couldn't.
As a matter of fact, she couldn't remember anything about the trip. Or why she was in the van. Or what she had for breakfast this morning.
The woman began to panic, knew it, and crushed it. She forced her breathing to stay steady, and closed her eyes. She held out her hands and began counting off things with her fingers.
"Okay. My name is Rachel Paula Jones. I write novels for a living and doing okay, though I'm still waiting for one to go bestseller. I bought this van, uh...a decade ago or so...twelve years? I live in the town of Kiren. I was born in raised in the U.S. I have British, Ukrainian and...a little bit of Brazilian in my family background. I'm thirty-six years old, thirty-seven in five months. I'm agnostic, although I went to Catholic school in my youth. Um - I take showers rather than baths, sometimes for an hour at a time 'cuz I like showers. My shoes are steel-toe..."
Okay, Rachel, murmured her brain reassuringly. You don't seem to have any major personal memory loss. Not the big bits, anyway, but you're going to have to look at what details you've got. Let's see if we can find out how far back your amnesia goes, hmmn?
"Okay," she mumbled, "start close - " She grabbed the nearest memory. "Noon. August the twelfth. Just eaten a sandwich for lunch. Sat down to write. Managed to get a full chapter done, pretty good - looked up and saw I'd spent three hours just sitting there writing, my wrist was really sore. Told myself I'd go over the chapter tomorrow, but since I'd done so well in one day I decided I'd treat myself to a movie. Went out and caught some zombie flick. Wasn't very good, plot was thin, tried to be an action plot but couldn't even get that. Thought they could substitute tits for writing. At least the theater was empty. Fight scene at the end sucked. Walked out, refilled my drink, but the mall started to crowd up and I got out of there. Went home to my apartment, uh, I think it was...six o'clock then. Made myself some macaroni and cheese, ate it out of the pot while watching the news. Uh, I think I spilled some on my shirt. Uh..." it was getting harder to remember. Her mental images were sketchy, ideas rather than total scenes forming in her head. She strained. "I said something like 'damn' or 'hell' but minor, not anything more than that. At about eight o'clock I decided that the next day would be a good day to drive...someplace, so I had better get a good night's sleep. I...showered, got into bed. Still tired from the writing, so I think I got to sleep rather soon. And...the next day..."
Nothing. To the best of her knowledge, she had woke up the next morning in her crashed van. There wasn't any soap opera fuzzy flash of memory, or anything just out of reach - any memories she would have had were just plain gone. She spied her digital watch, on her left wrist, and checked the date. The date, apparently, was '13'. Unless she had forgotten a whole month, which would be a whale of a coincidence, all she had lost was today. She breathed a sigh of relief.
...where the hell was everyone?
Normally Rachel would have been thankful, but she was just in a car accident and someone should have helped. She cast an annoying look out the window to her side, seeing gray fog. She opened the door and stepped out.
The only other object she saw besides the rolls of cloud was that which her van had crashed against, some sort of sign. She pushed it up with her hand and read what she could. It was partially obliterated by the crash, but she could make out most of the words.
WELCOME TO SILENT HILL, it said in an unimaginative script. Below this was the half word POPULAT before the rest, and the number that would have followed, were taking by the splintering of the sign against the hood of her vehicle. Rachel let the sign drop and frowned. Silent Hill. She knew that name - from where, though? Silent Hill, goddammit, she knew that, she -
Rachel snapped her fingers. Of course! Silent Hill was just off of Brahms! Rachel had spent hours poring over maps, trying to find a way to Brahms, and she remembered that Silent Hill was some little place barely a little ways away. Like a half hour drive or so. Explained what she was doing here, too, and what drive she was going to take - she was probably taking that much-planned trip to Brahms before she got lost (probably in this damned fog) and...crashed, somehow. Rachel still didn't have the memories of earlier today, but she could piece at least this together. She still didn't know how she crashed, though. It wasn't as if the sign could explain that.
Rachel frowned and cast an eye over her van. It didn't look too bad, but the front was crumpled and it sure wasn't going to drive again, not without repair. Rachel sighed, got back into the van, and opened the glove compartment, reaching for her cell phone.
Except it wasn't there. Rachel frowned heavily, annoyance covering her features. There were the road maps, a half empty pack of gum and yes, a pair of gloves - but no cell phone. Where could it be? It wasn't as if she was calling her pals every ten minutes. Hell, this was the one sole purpose she had the thing, to call for help in the case of an accident!
Rachel exited the car, leaned against the side, and pinched her nose. "Ah, Rachel, you ditz..." Okay, so it was gone. She'd most likely had one of her absent-minded episodes again, which tended to happen, especially when she was thinking about her writing. She'd probably been charging it in preparation of the trip and forgotten to take it with her this morning. "I'm such a stupid ass."
Sighing, she pushed herself off the car and looked in the direction of the sign, townward. "Oh well, could be worse," she mumbled, "at least I'm on the edge of a town. Just have to walk a bit, that's all."
She began to walk. The fog swallowed her whole without a sound.
Rachel rubbed her arms. It was chilly, which was odd, given that it was mid-August. The woman gave an eye to her digital watch, confirming her suspicions. Night was falling. Also, she had been walking for over an hour.
Where in the hell WAS everybody?! Silent Hill wasn't exactly state capital, she knew, but she was some miles into town and hadn't spotted so much as another human being. It was like the fates themselves had intervened to hamper her. All she wanted was a tow, was that too much? Maybe a cop that could help her figure out how she had crashed, or a doctor to make sure she hadn't knocked something serious loose in her head. But this was like a bad joke. She had passed by several parked cars but none driving. She'd also spotted a few pay phones, but there must have been a problem with the phone lines; every one she picked up had thrown out nothing but static.
By this time, at least, some of the cotton had been removed from the inside of her head and she could at least form some complex thoughts, though she still had a killer migraine. She cast another look to her right. She'd finally entered the town proper - she had seen some buildings before, but they had mostly been abandoned warehouses with all the windows smashed, or rickety barns with caved-in roofs. Now, though, there was a row of suburb homes to her right. They didn't look much better off, but at least they had cars in their driveways. Rachel wanted to walk up to one, but had this terrible taboo feeling, as if actually knocking on a stranger's door was a good way to get herself run out of town, and slash or killed. She was covered in blood, right? Maybe they'd think she was some sort of psychotic killer. Maybe if she started running up someone's walk, they'd think she was going to attack them, take out some shotgun and blow her away...
No, that's a lie. Her mind was hissing at her, that supposed voice of rationality that could speak independently of whatever she was really thinking. You're afraid of knocking on someone's door because you're afraid of talking to an actual person, aren't you?
It was probably true. Her parents - Mr. And Mrs. Jones, if they were actually married and that was actually her last name - shouldn't have been allowed to take care of themselves, let alone a child. She'd never gotten the full story, but apparently there was some sort of drug problem and she'd been taken away after three months. She'd been passed through foster home after foster home, never spending more than a few months in each, never - as she'd later been able to surmise - forming a lasting relationship with parental figures. No friends, no siblings...
Long story short, Rachel didn't like people. Never got a chance to. Even when she'd hit eighteen and was legally capable of actually staying in one place for over a year she just - couldn't do it. Stay in one place or make friends. Rachel was a loner, a recluse. People scared her, made her feel vulnerable, like they were peering at her, examining her like some sort of specimen in a petri dish...
But you know that isn't true. It's all in your head. And when you figured that out, that's when you decided, didn't you? Not to be a slave to this sociophobia any longer. Not to let it control you. Do you want to let this disorder run your life? Because if a car accident isn't enough to get you to knock on a door, that's what it is. A controller. You're its slave. If you want to beat it, you're going to have to take the first step and knock on one of those doors.
Stiffly, she turned off the road and began to walk up towards the house directly to her right. Its black windows stared out at her from its white front like weasel's eyes, the front door - hanging open - like some dumbly gaping mouth. "Not gonna let it win," she mumbled without realizing it, feet stepping into the stiff grass that rustled as it snapped under her weight, "Not stronger than me. Atta girl, Rachel..."
She hesitated in front of the open door. Why would anyone leave their door open? Not in this fog. Was there a problem? It was odd, you didn't do that, not in Kiren at least -
letting it control you you're letting it control you being its slave
The door opened inward. Rachel put her hand through the doorway and knocked on it, the sound of her knuckles hitting wood tiny and insubstantial. Fidgeting, Rachel looked around the wooden edge of the portal. No doorbell. There was no answer to her pathetic little tapping either. Suddenly, before she could think the thought through, she stuck her head into the doorway, leaning in, and barked out words:
"Hey! Is anyone home? I was in a car accident!"
No answer. Rachel looked around, wondering who would leave their door open when they weren't home, and saw something on the left wall. Handprints, in blood. It was bright red - fresh. Eyes widening, she took a step inside. Dust flew up from the brittle hardwood floor under her sneaker's rubber sole, but she didn't notice. The handprints were well defined and unsmeared, as if someone had pressed their palms against the wall, at face height. A few trails dribbled towards the floor from under the heels of the palms. The prints were close together, as if their creator had expected them to be seen and had deliberately placed them so - though, for what possible reason, Rachel couldn't possibly imagine.
Her eyes wandered, and the woman noticed that the blood went further than just a pair of handprints. A few feet further inside the house, along the wall, was a smear of blood - as if something had sprayed the liquid in a quick spurt, as if from a water gun or artery. Rachel crept forward, transfixed, following the smear. The line of blood petered out after about six feet or so, but about a foot or so later there were several large spatters of blood on the wall, closer to the ground. Her eyes followed as the spotty trail went still further, and still closer to the floor, before they finally met the hardwood. It kept going.
There were about a half dozen or so spots of blood on the hardwood, before the hardwood itself gave way to tile. The hallway had opened up into a kitchen, black and cigarette-stain-yellow checkers on the floor. A few more spots of blood, increasingly tiny and infrequent, led across the tile until a large puddle of red sat at the foot of a wooden, four-legged table. Rachel had no clue as to the origin before the puddle jumped as a droplet fell into it. Her eyes raised up to the table, where a tiny solid trail of blood led to the edge. The trail could be led halfway across the table to its source: leaking out of the end of a barrel of a gun.
The woman just stood there, mouth agape, staring at the gun. She honestly could not think of any appropriate reaction to make to finding out she had followed a trail starting with bloody handprints to a bleeding gun. She cocked her head to the side, studying the firearm. She wasn't exactly an expert on guns, although she had an idea as to how they worked, and had never even liked them much. It was a long, black and blue semiautomatic, looking somehow graceful and deadly at the same time. Why it was bleeding was, though, a total mystery. In any case, she sure wasn't going to take it - she didn't need it, she didn't own it, and she most certainly did not want it. She yanked her eyes away, and spotted something moving out of the corner of her eye.
She took a step backward in shock before realizing she was looking at her own reflection. Over a dull stainless steel sink at the edge of the kitchen stood a mirror, and through the dust on its surface Rachel could vaguely make out her shape, moving identically to herself.
She walked over and used her sleeve to wide the dust off the mirror. In retrospect, it was a good thing she hadn't run into anyone. She was even bloodier than she had been able to make out in her van's review mirror. It practically covered one side of her face. It was even in her bangs! Rachel grimaced, then shot a look down to the sink, then back up to her face, then to the sink again.
Well...why not?
The water drummed loudly against the bottom of the sink. Rachel's hands, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, rubbed against each other, cupped some of the cold liquid and brought it to her face. She rubbed against the dry blood, causing the water to splash down pink.
After a few minutes she looked up and gave a small smile of relief. The blood was more or less gone and she looked normal again, if a bit red from rubbing. She'd even managed to get out the bit of blood that had been in her bangs. Hesitantly, she brought her fingers up above her hairline again, probing a few inches past her bangs...
Touch brought pain, although she was expecting it and didn't gasp this time. Carefully, she probed with her fingers - a clotted gash, probably caused by her steering wheel and itself the cause of her migraine and memory loss. Rachel lowered her hand and leaned forward, hands clutching the edge of the sink and her forehead touching the cool glass of the mirror. Had to get a doctor asap, no doubt, that kind of thing was no laughing matter. Maybe if she -
Crrrrrk.
Rachel's train of thought flew off the tracks and her attention shifted. "Oh, shit," she murmured, very quietly. Someone was home - the type of someone to leave a gun on their dinner table - and she was in their house, unannounced. But she had a reasonable explanation, right? The door was open, the wall was covered with blood - she'd thought there was trouble, etc, etc. Rachel found herself staying silent all the same - she just needed a second, figure out exactly what she was going to say - when she looked up at the mirror and saw movement coming into the kitchen behind her. "Showtime," she mumbled to herself as she turned around.
"I - " she started, then stopped dead, staring at the thing that had entered the room. The bottom could have passed for a hunched over man, in dim light. Bloody, shapeless pants led to swollen, rotting shoes or boots - it was difficult to tell with their level of degradation. Above the pants, was what could possibly pass for a shirt or a jacket, a dull red-brown colour, hanging limply open. The arms ended in meaty hands, the left one holding a two-by-four. The head, if you could call it that, had no face, rather something like a tumor; lumpy and bulging. A mop of black fur represented the hair.
That was the more normal section of the creature. The reason it was stooped over was the aberration on its back. A woman's naked and starved-looking upper body, only gray and apparently skinless, rose from the back, attached at what would have been the waist by one stump and several attacked strands of skin. Muscles stood out clearly on the streamlined form, abs and biceps in clear view. The bald head seemed connected with the right shoulder by multiple strands of skin similar to its waist. Its head shook and twitched as if attempting to tear itself free. Its eyes were empty sockets, and its mouth was open. It gave out a long feminine moan as the creature shambled forward.
"Buh - buh - I - " Rachel's mouth worked, but her brain was elsewhere, watching the female half thrash on the male section's back as its bloody clothing flapped about. "I - I - I - was in a car - car crash, I'm not a thief I - " That was when the thing sung its two-by-four into her, hitting her in the side and throwing her to the floor.
She scrambled back on hands and knees, eyes wide with panic. "Stop! I'm not going to hurt you! Stop! I'm not - " She got to her feet as the thing swung its two-by-four again, hitting her in the gut and knocking her backward. She hit the table, crashing to her back on the wood, gasping for breath. The table cracked at her weight and the entire thing crashed to the ground. Rachel's eyes opened and she saw the black pistol six inches in front of her. She snatched it up, scrambled back from the hermaphroditic creature and pointed the handgun as she got up, back against the wall. The monster was between her and the room's only exit.
"Get away from me!" She shouted, both hands gripping the gun still wet from the sink. "Stop it now! Just let me out, or I'll shoot, I swear to - "
The female half made a loud wailing sound as the creature lurched forward. Rachel's arm twitched and she fired reflexively. A hole appeared in the left side of its gray, twitching chest, spraying some reddish-blackish-greenish substance onto the opposite wall. Still it came forward, and Rachel fired again, and again, and she wasn't even thinking or even there in her own body as the handgun went off over and over - somewhere far away, some whirling kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and confusion - until she suddenly snapped back and she was once again standing in the stale dusty kitchen, deathgrip on the pistol that clicked pitifully as she pointed it at the body of the hermaphroditic creature lying still on the ground.
"Uh - uh - I - uh...muh..." Rachel blinked as her arms slowly lowered, handgun pointing at the floor before it fell out of her nerveless fingers and clattered against the yellow-black tile. She started to move very slowly, going in as wide a circle as the room would allow to avoid the monster's corpse until she came to the other side of the room, backing down the hall for a few steps before she turned and sprinted as fast as she possibly could, heading out the door and clearing the steps as her mind could only focus on getting the FUCK out of this town.
I also have bad news for anyone else reading this. If you notice that the writing seems somewhat primitive, that's because I'm writing this - and I assume all future chapters - in Notepad rather than Microsoft Word. For some reason, seems not to like my Word files - entire sections in italics and stuff like that. I apologize for any inconvenience.
CHAPTER TWO
"Uuuunnnggghhhh."
The woman blinked, slowly coming to. She opened her eyes, a terrible pounding in her head. She shifted and assessed her condition: leaning against a seatbelt that appeared to have done it's job rather well, and staring at the steering wheel, which had done a much poorer job deploying its airbag. The woman blinked a couple more times, trying to clear her head (which felt like it was filled with cotton balls, pressing against the sides of her skull with dull throbs emanating at the rate of her heartbeat). Her eyes slowly moved up to the windshield, and the spiderweb of cracks that had materialized there. She turned her eyes back to the steering wheel and noticed that it was coloured with a few spots of blood. Not many - little enough so that she had missed it the first time she'd looked, just barely conscious - but a few, three or four crimson spots on the gray covering. She spent a second wondering exactly where they had come from before a realization struck her, raising at hand to her forehead and brushing at it with her fingers. It was sticky and moist. The fingers probed further upward, under her bangs. An inch above her hairline, She gasped lightly as a knife of pain flashed out from under her fingers and lanced across her skull, traveling down her spine and making her cringe.
She reached up and grabbed the review mirror on the windshield. It was currently showing the road to the rear of her van, a dozen or so feet of black asphalt before being swallowed up by billows of gray fog. For the first time in about twelve years or so - the time she'd had the van - she adjusted it away from the rear and inspected her own reflection.
Her entire forehead was swallowed up by semi-dried blood whose origin seemed to be about the location of the wound she had brushed earlier. The blood narrowed into a trail at her eyebrows, a stream circling the left eye while her right remained clean. The bloody trail continued, cutting into several small rivets that crossed her cheek and brushed her nose until they came to the end of her chin. She looked down, and noticed that the area just under her neck was spotted by a half dozen or so red spots that looked bright enough to be fruit punch, but she knew to be blood.
"God damn it," she muttered, closing her eyes and pinching her nose. She shot another look out the windshield, and was suddenly struck by the fact that she hadn't heard another van on this road, as well as that it was unbelievably foggy. She tried to remember if it had been like this before the accident. She couldn't.
As a matter of fact, she couldn't remember anything about the trip. Or why she was in the van. Or what she had for breakfast this morning.
The woman began to panic, knew it, and crushed it. She forced her breathing to stay steady, and closed her eyes. She held out her hands and began counting off things with her fingers.
"Okay. My name is Rachel Paula Jones. I write novels for a living and doing okay, though I'm still waiting for one to go bestseller. I bought this van, uh...a decade ago or so...twelve years? I live in the town of Kiren. I was born in raised in the U.S. I have British, Ukrainian and...a little bit of Brazilian in my family background. I'm thirty-six years old, thirty-seven in five months. I'm agnostic, although I went to Catholic school in my youth. Um - I take showers rather than baths, sometimes for an hour at a time 'cuz I like showers. My shoes are steel-toe..."
Okay, Rachel, murmured her brain reassuringly. You don't seem to have any major personal memory loss. Not the big bits, anyway, but you're going to have to look at what details you've got. Let's see if we can find out how far back your amnesia goes, hmmn?
"Okay," she mumbled, "start close - " She grabbed the nearest memory. "Noon. August the twelfth. Just eaten a sandwich for lunch. Sat down to write. Managed to get a full chapter done, pretty good - looked up and saw I'd spent three hours just sitting there writing, my wrist was really sore. Told myself I'd go over the chapter tomorrow, but since I'd done so well in one day I decided I'd treat myself to a movie. Went out and caught some zombie flick. Wasn't very good, plot was thin, tried to be an action plot but couldn't even get that. Thought they could substitute tits for writing. At least the theater was empty. Fight scene at the end sucked. Walked out, refilled my drink, but the mall started to crowd up and I got out of there. Went home to my apartment, uh, I think it was...six o'clock then. Made myself some macaroni and cheese, ate it out of the pot while watching the news. Uh, I think I spilled some on my shirt. Uh..." it was getting harder to remember. Her mental images were sketchy, ideas rather than total scenes forming in her head. She strained. "I said something like 'damn' or 'hell' but minor, not anything more than that. At about eight o'clock I decided that the next day would be a good day to drive...someplace, so I had better get a good night's sleep. I...showered, got into bed. Still tired from the writing, so I think I got to sleep rather soon. And...the next day..."
Nothing. To the best of her knowledge, she had woke up the next morning in her crashed van. There wasn't any soap opera fuzzy flash of memory, or anything just out of reach - any memories she would have had were just plain gone. She spied her digital watch, on her left wrist, and checked the date. The date, apparently, was '13'. Unless she had forgotten a whole month, which would be a whale of a coincidence, all she had lost was today. She breathed a sigh of relief.
...where the hell was everyone?
Normally Rachel would have been thankful, but she was just in a car accident and someone should have helped. She cast an annoying look out the window to her side, seeing gray fog. She opened the door and stepped out.
The only other object she saw besides the rolls of cloud was that which her van had crashed against, some sort of sign. She pushed it up with her hand and read what she could. It was partially obliterated by the crash, but she could make out most of the words.
WELCOME TO SILENT HILL, it said in an unimaginative script. Below this was the half word POPULAT before the rest, and the number that would have followed, were taking by the splintering of the sign against the hood of her vehicle. Rachel let the sign drop and frowned. Silent Hill. She knew that name - from where, though? Silent Hill, goddammit, she knew that, she -
Rachel snapped her fingers. Of course! Silent Hill was just off of Brahms! Rachel had spent hours poring over maps, trying to find a way to Brahms, and she remembered that Silent Hill was some little place barely a little ways away. Like a half hour drive or so. Explained what she was doing here, too, and what drive she was going to take - she was probably taking that much-planned trip to Brahms before she got lost (probably in this damned fog) and...crashed, somehow. Rachel still didn't have the memories of earlier today, but she could piece at least this together. She still didn't know how she crashed, though. It wasn't as if the sign could explain that.
Rachel frowned and cast an eye over her van. It didn't look too bad, but the front was crumpled and it sure wasn't going to drive again, not without repair. Rachel sighed, got back into the van, and opened the glove compartment, reaching for her cell phone.
Except it wasn't there. Rachel frowned heavily, annoyance covering her features. There were the road maps, a half empty pack of gum and yes, a pair of gloves - but no cell phone. Where could it be? It wasn't as if she was calling her pals every ten minutes. Hell, this was the one sole purpose she had the thing, to call for help in the case of an accident!
Rachel exited the car, leaned against the side, and pinched her nose. "Ah, Rachel, you ditz..." Okay, so it was gone. She'd most likely had one of her absent-minded episodes again, which tended to happen, especially when she was thinking about her writing. She'd probably been charging it in preparation of the trip and forgotten to take it with her this morning. "I'm such a stupid ass."
Sighing, she pushed herself off the car and looked in the direction of the sign, townward. "Oh well, could be worse," she mumbled, "at least I'm on the edge of a town. Just have to walk a bit, that's all."
She began to walk. The fog swallowed her whole without a sound.
Rachel rubbed her arms. It was chilly, which was odd, given that it was mid-August. The woman gave an eye to her digital watch, confirming her suspicions. Night was falling. Also, she had been walking for over an hour.
Where in the hell WAS everybody?! Silent Hill wasn't exactly state capital, she knew, but she was some miles into town and hadn't spotted so much as another human being. It was like the fates themselves had intervened to hamper her. All she wanted was a tow, was that too much? Maybe a cop that could help her figure out how she had crashed, or a doctor to make sure she hadn't knocked something serious loose in her head. But this was like a bad joke. She had passed by several parked cars but none driving. She'd also spotted a few pay phones, but there must have been a problem with the phone lines; every one she picked up had thrown out nothing but static.
By this time, at least, some of the cotton had been removed from the inside of her head and she could at least form some complex thoughts, though she still had a killer migraine. She cast another look to her right. She'd finally entered the town proper - she had seen some buildings before, but they had mostly been abandoned warehouses with all the windows smashed, or rickety barns with caved-in roofs. Now, though, there was a row of suburb homes to her right. They didn't look much better off, but at least they had cars in their driveways. Rachel wanted to walk up to one, but had this terrible taboo feeling, as if actually knocking on a stranger's door was a good way to get herself run out of town, and slash or killed. She was covered in blood, right? Maybe they'd think she was some sort of psychotic killer. Maybe if she started running up someone's walk, they'd think she was going to attack them, take out some shotgun and blow her away...
No, that's a lie. Her mind was hissing at her, that supposed voice of rationality that could speak independently of whatever she was really thinking. You're afraid of knocking on someone's door because you're afraid of talking to an actual person, aren't you?
It was probably true. Her parents - Mr. And Mrs. Jones, if they were actually married and that was actually her last name - shouldn't have been allowed to take care of themselves, let alone a child. She'd never gotten the full story, but apparently there was some sort of drug problem and she'd been taken away after three months. She'd been passed through foster home after foster home, never spending more than a few months in each, never - as she'd later been able to surmise - forming a lasting relationship with parental figures. No friends, no siblings...
Long story short, Rachel didn't like people. Never got a chance to. Even when she'd hit eighteen and was legally capable of actually staying in one place for over a year she just - couldn't do it. Stay in one place or make friends. Rachel was a loner, a recluse. People scared her, made her feel vulnerable, like they were peering at her, examining her like some sort of specimen in a petri dish...
But you know that isn't true. It's all in your head. And when you figured that out, that's when you decided, didn't you? Not to be a slave to this sociophobia any longer. Not to let it control you. Do you want to let this disorder run your life? Because if a car accident isn't enough to get you to knock on a door, that's what it is. A controller. You're its slave. If you want to beat it, you're going to have to take the first step and knock on one of those doors.
Stiffly, she turned off the road and began to walk up towards the house directly to her right. Its black windows stared out at her from its white front like weasel's eyes, the front door - hanging open - like some dumbly gaping mouth. "Not gonna let it win," she mumbled without realizing it, feet stepping into the stiff grass that rustled as it snapped under her weight, "Not stronger than me. Atta girl, Rachel..."
She hesitated in front of the open door. Why would anyone leave their door open? Not in this fog. Was there a problem? It was odd, you didn't do that, not in Kiren at least -
letting it control you you're letting it control you being its slave
The door opened inward. Rachel put her hand through the doorway and knocked on it, the sound of her knuckles hitting wood tiny and insubstantial. Fidgeting, Rachel looked around the wooden edge of the portal. No doorbell. There was no answer to her pathetic little tapping either. Suddenly, before she could think the thought through, she stuck her head into the doorway, leaning in, and barked out words:
"Hey! Is anyone home? I was in a car accident!"
No answer. Rachel looked around, wondering who would leave their door open when they weren't home, and saw something on the left wall. Handprints, in blood. It was bright red - fresh. Eyes widening, she took a step inside. Dust flew up from the brittle hardwood floor under her sneaker's rubber sole, but she didn't notice. The handprints were well defined and unsmeared, as if someone had pressed their palms against the wall, at face height. A few trails dribbled towards the floor from under the heels of the palms. The prints were close together, as if their creator had expected them to be seen and had deliberately placed them so - though, for what possible reason, Rachel couldn't possibly imagine.
Her eyes wandered, and the woman noticed that the blood went further than just a pair of handprints. A few feet further inside the house, along the wall, was a smear of blood - as if something had sprayed the liquid in a quick spurt, as if from a water gun or artery. Rachel crept forward, transfixed, following the smear. The line of blood petered out after about six feet or so, but about a foot or so later there were several large spatters of blood on the wall, closer to the ground. Her eyes followed as the spotty trail went still further, and still closer to the floor, before they finally met the hardwood. It kept going.
There were about a half dozen or so spots of blood on the hardwood, before the hardwood itself gave way to tile. The hallway had opened up into a kitchen, black and cigarette-stain-yellow checkers on the floor. A few more spots of blood, increasingly tiny and infrequent, led across the tile until a large puddle of red sat at the foot of a wooden, four-legged table. Rachel had no clue as to the origin before the puddle jumped as a droplet fell into it. Her eyes raised up to the table, where a tiny solid trail of blood led to the edge. The trail could be led halfway across the table to its source: leaking out of the end of a barrel of a gun.
The woman just stood there, mouth agape, staring at the gun. She honestly could not think of any appropriate reaction to make to finding out she had followed a trail starting with bloody handprints to a bleeding gun. She cocked her head to the side, studying the firearm. She wasn't exactly an expert on guns, although she had an idea as to how they worked, and had never even liked them much. It was a long, black and blue semiautomatic, looking somehow graceful and deadly at the same time. Why it was bleeding was, though, a total mystery. In any case, she sure wasn't going to take it - she didn't need it, she didn't own it, and she most certainly did not want it. She yanked her eyes away, and spotted something moving out of the corner of her eye.
She took a step backward in shock before realizing she was looking at her own reflection. Over a dull stainless steel sink at the edge of the kitchen stood a mirror, and through the dust on its surface Rachel could vaguely make out her shape, moving identically to herself.
She walked over and used her sleeve to wide the dust off the mirror. In retrospect, it was a good thing she hadn't run into anyone. She was even bloodier than she had been able to make out in her van's review mirror. It practically covered one side of her face. It was even in her bangs! Rachel grimaced, then shot a look down to the sink, then back up to her face, then to the sink again.
Well...why not?
The water drummed loudly against the bottom of the sink. Rachel's hands, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, rubbed against each other, cupped some of the cold liquid and brought it to her face. She rubbed against the dry blood, causing the water to splash down pink.
After a few minutes she looked up and gave a small smile of relief. The blood was more or less gone and she looked normal again, if a bit red from rubbing. She'd even managed to get out the bit of blood that had been in her bangs. Hesitantly, she brought her fingers up above her hairline again, probing a few inches past her bangs...
Touch brought pain, although she was expecting it and didn't gasp this time. Carefully, she probed with her fingers - a clotted gash, probably caused by her steering wheel and itself the cause of her migraine and memory loss. Rachel lowered her hand and leaned forward, hands clutching the edge of the sink and her forehead touching the cool glass of the mirror. Had to get a doctor asap, no doubt, that kind of thing was no laughing matter. Maybe if she -
Crrrrrk.
Rachel's train of thought flew off the tracks and her attention shifted. "Oh, shit," she murmured, very quietly. Someone was home - the type of someone to leave a gun on their dinner table - and she was in their house, unannounced. But she had a reasonable explanation, right? The door was open, the wall was covered with blood - she'd thought there was trouble, etc, etc. Rachel found herself staying silent all the same - she just needed a second, figure out exactly what she was going to say - when she looked up at the mirror and saw movement coming into the kitchen behind her. "Showtime," she mumbled to herself as she turned around.
"I - " she started, then stopped dead, staring at the thing that had entered the room. The bottom could have passed for a hunched over man, in dim light. Bloody, shapeless pants led to swollen, rotting shoes or boots - it was difficult to tell with their level of degradation. Above the pants, was what could possibly pass for a shirt or a jacket, a dull red-brown colour, hanging limply open. The arms ended in meaty hands, the left one holding a two-by-four. The head, if you could call it that, had no face, rather something like a tumor; lumpy and bulging. A mop of black fur represented the hair.
That was the more normal section of the creature. The reason it was stooped over was the aberration on its back. A woman's naked and starved-looking upper body, only gray and apparently skinless, rose from the back, attached at what would have been the waist by one stump and several attacked strands of skin. Muscles stood out clearly on the streamlined form, abs and biceps in clear view. The bald head seemed connected with the right shoulder by multiple strands of skin similar to its waist. Its head shook and twitched as if attempting to tear itself free. Its eyes were empty sockets, and its mouth was open. It gave out a long feminine moan as the creature shambled forward.
"Buh - buh - I - " Rachel's mouth worked, but her brain was elsewhere, watching the female half thrash on the male section's back as its bloody clothing flapped about. "I - I - I - was in a car - car crash, I'm not a thief I - " That was when the thing sung its two-by-four into her, hitting her in the side and throwing her to the floor.
She scrambled back on hands and knees, eyes wide with panic. "Stop! I'm not going to hurt you! Stop! I'm not - " She got to her feet as the thing swung its two-by-four again, hitting her in the gut and knocking her backward. She hit the table, crashing to her back on the wood, gasping for breath. The table cracked at her weight and the entire thing crashed to the ground. Rachel's eyes opened and she saw the black pistol six inches in front of her. She snatched it up, scrambled back from the hermaphroditic creature and pointed the handgun as she got up, back against the wall. The monster was between her and the room's only exit.
"Get away from me!" She shouted, both hands gripping the gun still wet from the sink. "Stop it now! Just let me out, or I'll shoot, I swear to - "
The female half made a loud wailing sound as the creature lurched forward. Rachel's arm twitched and she fired reflexively. A hole appeared in the left side of its gray, twitching chest, spraying some reddish-blackish-greenish substance onto the opposite wall. Still it came forward, and Rachel fired again, and again, and she wasn't even thinking or even there in her own body as the handgun went off over and over - somewhere far away, some whirling kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and confusion - until she suddenly snapped back and she was once again standing in the stale dusty kitchen, deathgrip on the pistol that clicked pitifully as she pointed it at the body of the hermaphroditic creature lying still on the ground.
"Uh - uh - I - uh...muh..." Rachel blinked as her arms slowly lowered, handgun pointing at the floor before it fell out of her nerveless fingers and clattered against the yellow-black tile. She started to move very slowly, going in as wide a circle as the room would allow to avoid the monster's corpse until she came to the other side of the room, backing down the hall for a few steps before she turned and sprinted as fast as she possibly could, heading out the door and clearing the steps as her mind could only focus on getting the FUCK out of this town.