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Chapter 2 ~ That Day, Twenty-Three Years Ago…

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Laura arrived in my darkest possible hour, and has been my light ever since. Though, when we first met our relationship was, well, fairly rocky, to say the least. Actually, scratch that. I'm glorifying it. The girl outright loathed me. She would stamp on my hands, laugh at me, and on the rare occasion give me such a scare it was a wonder I didn't piss my pants on the spot. Once, she locked me in a room filled with mons—

Ahem. Ahem-hem. 'Scuse me, coughing spell. Sudden. Happens a lot nowadays… Mmh.

Laura came into my life twenty-three years ago. She was eight, I twenty-nine. At the time I had never known eight-year-olds were capable of such stubborn hatred… I had never known she'd… Ahem. Well, I was in the dark about a lot of things twenty-three years ago. But that's another story.

"I was friends with Mary."

Twenty-three years ago, Laura spoke those terrible, revealing words to me. It was the first serious, purposeful conversation we'd had; it was then that I learned about Laura and her relationship to my late wife…my Mary.

Orphaned by a severe flu pandemic, Laura had been a ward of the state of Maine, and had spent much of her childhood in hospitals. Apparently, she'd some kind of chronic respiratory condition.

It was in one of these hospitals where she met a terminally ill Mary, dying of that damn disease. This was the reason Laura despised me – she claimed I never loved my dying wife, a statement that both I and the girl soon found to be untrue. See, over their stay at the hospital, Mary and Laura had developed a bond – a kind of bond I could never have held with Mary.

To say I was envious of Laura because of this would have been a severe understatement.

I first met the eight-year-old in the town of… Ahem. In a town Mary and I used to frequent on our vacations. Laura had been searching for her there, unaware that she'd died just the day bef… Ahem-hem. Well, after we both discovered that Mary…wasn't in town…we left together and never returned.

In the weeks that followed, I felt no hard feelings toward Laura, despite how she'd tortured me. My wife, bless her soul, loved that girl as if she was her own daughter – and I vowed to do the same. And so it went that on a rainy day twenty-three years ago, Laura became my daughter. After I settled some…lingering matters from my past, we relocated to Vermont in a quaint town called Woodstock, and lived in quiet happiness. Laura's health improved, and she waltzed through school. Girl had a good head on her shoulders, always had. It surely came from her life as an orphan, no doubt about it.

Right after graduating from college, when she was twenty-two, Laura married her sweetheart, moving in with him in nearby Queechee. I missed her so much that first year, and though I was so happy to see her start her own family, a part of me wished she didn't have to leave… My beautiful daughter Laura…

"Be careful what you wish for, James honey," Mary had once taunted me. "'Cause you just might get it all!" Perhaps that old saying is true. See, it's been seven years…seven years since my beautiful daughter came home. Seven years since my selfish wish came true.

The police officer escorting her told me that he'd found her driving aimlessly along the backroads of Maine – a fact that didn't surprise me. I knew she had business to take care of in Maine – but she knew the state like the back of her hand. It wasn't like Laura to get lost in Maine, her home state… The officer also mentioned her state of mind when she'd been found. She'd seemed dazed and mentally out-of-it – almost as if, as the cop had put it, she'd been "doped up". A breathalyzer test had come up with negative results for any alcohol or mind-altering drugs, however, and I quickly confirmed that; Laura never had a history with substance abuse. Nevertheless, I was relieved to find Laura in one piece.

And yet, the woman who came home to me seven years ago wasn't Laura. Physically, yes, absolutely! She was my daughter, no doubt about it! But she wasn't Laura. The personality of that woman could not have been that of Laura's. Her mind had…had vanished. There in the doorframe stood a tranquil, serene woman – a mild-mannered woman who would fear the judgments of others, who would follow orders without so much as a peep in retribution. Rambunctious, stubborn, vivacious Laura was gone.

That day, I'd called her husband, and he had rushed over to the house, obviously concerned for Laura's wellbeing. What happened next… Dear God, it was heartbreaking. She didn't even recognize her husband, the man she'd dated throughout college, the man she'd vowed to love until her dying day. She had no recollection of being married, or ever meeting the man I claimed was her spouse, and kept on pressing me: "Daddy, are you sure? Daddy, I swear to you, I've never seen this man in my life…"

The divorce was swift and painless. I'd settled most of it; Laura was so timid and uncertain about the whole ordeal, she had resigned herself to staying home, desperate to avoid that 'stranger' who had claimed to love her. She's lived with me ever since that day.

…So, yes. It's been seven years. Seven years since my Laura came home. And it was this morning, twenty-three years since we first met, that Laura spoke of a town…a town whose name I never imagined she would ever say again.

"Silent Hill… Daddy, I need to go to Silent Hill."