Chapter 2:

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Brightness gave way to a new kind of quiet. The muted nothing that comes with snowfall. I opened my eyes.

The side of my face rested against the steering wheel. Something slid down my forehead and into my eyes, blurring my vision red. I raised a hand to wipe it away. Too slowly. Like waking up on too much medicine, too much sleep. I couldn't feel my body for a moment. Disconnected limbs and functions.

I turned my head to the side and saw a spider-web of a cracked window. Wrong side. Turned the other way. Maggie. Oh. Maggie. Not good. Please let her be alright. I kept trying to say her name and my lips were heavy, dream-like in their uselessness.

She cracked an eye open at me and did exactly what I had tried—moving far too quickly, too soon.

"Ashlyn," she said. She rarely used my full name—it was always Ash, Little Lyn, Ashie…a host of names that would get anyone else killed. Coming from her, I never minded.

"Don't," I said, voice awkward. Once I was thrown from a horse. It was windy and a leaf, or maybe a wrapper, frightened it. It bucked, galloped, until I was vertical. I held on the first time, but on the second buck I sailed through the air, and all the way down. I jumped up right away and the instructor pushed me back down, insisting that she had to check for broken bones.

I tried to relay this to Maggie.

"Don't move too quick."

"I'm alright," she said, convincing both of us, or trying to. She straightened, wincing. "What happened? Are you okay?"

"Where's Ian?" I asked, as my mind rushed back to me with terrifying clarity. Suddenly I could move, think, panic with frightening calm. He wasn't in the back seat. His seatbelt was unbuckled. There was no blood. His window wasn't broken. He'd left.

I rushed to unbuckle myself, throwing open the door. It was snowing here. Snowing perfect, grayish clusters of snowflakes. It smelled of cigarettes. No, not cigarettes—fire. A snowflake landed on the back of my hand. To my surprise, it didn't melt. It simply rested until I smudged it to a streak of gray.

"Ash," I whispered.

Maggie had joined me.

"It's raining ash."

"We have to find Ian," she said. There was a note of desperation in her voice, masked by practicality. In another context, she might have remarked that it was raining me. "Ash, we have to find Ian."

"Where is this?" The chain link fence continued to the side of us, fencing off what appeared to be a junkyard. Rusted old cars, bed frames of old metal, once ornate, rested in a graveyard of metal and waste. I couldn't see the fence we'd crashed through. The road looked subtly different. Had we somehow come that far? It was grayer here, cracked and crumbled in some places. A thick fog shrouded the area directly behind us. I couldn't see more than a dozen or so feet ahead of me.

"Hell," I said softly.

"Come on," she said, still in shock. She grabbed my hand and we began to run.

There wasn't much I could do for them. It might be more serious to move them than to try and wake them and check for injuries. I checked their pulses, listened to their breathing, and they sounded okay. Next priority was finding out where the Hell we were.

I didn't even know how we'd gotten here. I woke up when we crashed and I have no idea why we crashed. I didn't even know what state we were in. This was one of those rare cases where I could actually make use of my cell phone. I tried the police first, but all I got was static. I thought that might have been my phone, at first, having used it with considerable disregard in the past (i.e. as body armor). I tried Ash's, to the same end. I tried a friend next, pacing at this point. I thought I heard someone pick up.

"Hi, Kevin, this is Ian. Listen, I just got in a car accident. The lines are down here and...hello?—"

Crackling. A slight improvement on static, but really not that much better. I waited for a moment more, at which point the phone began to really scream at me. I may not have known where we were, but we had to be pretty far out to get that kind of screeching.

I decided to wind my way back a little, try and see if anyone else had been hurt in the accident. Maybe I'd find out what route we're on.

Or maybe I'd find that the road dropped off into nothing.

It crumbled off into a cliff-side, apparently bottomless and so covered with fog that I couldn't see beyond the drop or to the other side. If it had one. One moment road. Next step, air. It was a damn good thing I hadn't been running.

Huh, I thought.

In my experience, roads usually stayed roads. At least in the U.S. We should have been on a major highway to get here. Or at least some sort of developed road. This didn't add up at all.

There wasn't really anything I could do about it, though, so I headed back to the car. They were still passed out. Nothing I could do about that either. I didn't really feel like contracting tetanus, so the junkyard was out.

On a general feeling, or maybe out of habit, I retrieved a tire iron from the car. There were plenty of knives on my person, but right now I wanted something bigger.

I wandered up ahead, where I finally found something I could use. A large sign announcing the state—no, the town we were in. This fog was really intent on making this difficult.

Welcome to Silent Hill

Silent Hill isn't really a name you hear a lot.

Silent Hill...Silent Hill.

Ah.

That would explain the ash.

Might even explain the lack of road. Would not, however, explain how we got here. This isn't the greatest state, but generally speaking, it does have functional roads. Especially highways. And we had to get here somehow.

I was still staring at the sign when I heard the muted sound of a car door shutting. I wanted to turn around, but couldn't seem to take my eyes from the words. And while I looked on, everything I had read of this place ran through my head.

I couldn't help but feel I was missing pieces.

We had barely gone a dozen steps before a hazy figure was revealed through the fog. The height and the hat made it Ian. A fedora, and not the sort used by artsy, willowy boys in thick-framed glasses. It was a hat that one of his relatives had once worn escaping the Nazis when they invaded Norway. He was reading off of some large sign, perfectly still. I knew it was him, but for a moment, it was like those nightmares where until the last moment, you thought it was the person you knew. And the moment they turned around, a monster.

I stopped short with this feeling all through my body and said hesitantly, "Ian?"

He still didn't turn around. There was a tire iron in his hand.

"Hey," I said, before I had any idea what I was going to say. "Are you alright?"

Finally, his neck wrenched his head from the sign and turned him to look at us. The rest of his body followed. He nodded, checking both me and Maggie over. First things first, then; we assessed the damage. I'd knocked my head pretty hard, but if it was a concussion, it was an extremely minor one. I remembered crashing. I knew the president and the date it had been when we left, not that it helped us any now. Maggie had sustained some bad bruising, but it was nothing that wouldn't heal unaided. Ian alone was completely unharmed.

" 'Silent Hill'. Do you know where this is, Ian?"

"Yeah," he said carefully. "And it isn't exactly where we meant to turn up. What road were you taking before we crashed?"

I opened my mouth to name it and found that there was nothing. I didn't know.

"We're not in the right area. We're not even in the right state." He said.

"I was following..." I trailed off. The route we had been meant to take was carefully inked in black. A child could have followed it. I had been following it. I remembered holding it in my hands. But it was barely dark then. There had been seven hours or more since then. I needed to have recollections from that time period and I very simply didn't.

"I am NEVER letting you drive again." Ian said flatly.

"No, I was! I'm not that—"

The amusement on their faces defeated me mid-sentence.

I might lose my keys multiple times each day. I might space out, forget my address, and walk out the door without pants, but damnit, I could follow a map that someone had pre-outlined for me. He had carefully explained the names of the major routes, the landmarks, the distance, the time it would take. I wasn't that incompetent. Was I?

"I had the map," I said, face flushed. I rarely blushed, but I hated it when I did. "I was following it."

"And Maggie was helping you, right?" he said, raising his eyebrows at us.

"I fell asleep," Maggie said, bowing her head. "Sorry..."

He paused for a moment, showing admirable restraint in not cursing us out. "So we're in the wrong state. Fine. Do you at least know how we crashed?"

"Yeah," I said. I was glad to switch to a topic that hadn't really been my fault. "The fog was really thick. Out of nowhere, there was a fence."

"In the middle of the road?"

"Yes. I swear, there was nothing to indicate that a fence should be there."

"That's not possible."

There was something in his voice that was flatter than doubt.

"Why? What is it?" I glanced behind us almost automatically, even though I knew the fence would be covered by this damn fog. We could hardly see in any direction. What was more, it appeared to dull any sound. I could hear neither people nor cars—and the moment I realized that, I became even more confused. Hell, we were in the middle of a road. A shitty, decrepit road, but a road nonetheless. This was not like the roads in our rural to semi-rural hometowns. I'd been on a major highway when last I looked. And there was not a single car.

Without a word, Ian led us back toward the scene of the accident. Which reminded me.

"Ian, have you looked around? Do you know if anyone else was hurt? Shit, we need to move the car. Someone's going to crash into it in this fog."

I'd already taken care of the fence for them.

"That's not really something you need to worry about," he said. He took us past the car, back where we'd come from. A few paces on he stopped. We kept going, and he physically blocked our way. This annoyed me until I saw the reason why he'd stopped in the first place.

Where there should have been a road, there was air. It was sheer, crumbled cliff-side, as though an already aging road had caved in centuries ago. Several steps more and we would have fallen into the chasm.

"Ye gods," Maggie said.

Light headed, I stepped back. Heights. I was not friendly with them. If I had seen this, I would have gone out of my way to avoid it. I would have turned around, all the way back to our home state. I would have stopped. Anything but gotten past it—that was physically impossible.

"Honestly, I haven't figured this one out yet," Ian admitted.

"No—there was a fence..." I trailed off again. I'd crashed because of it. That was the whole reason we were out here. Just a fence. Not a freaking cliff-side.

"There's only one fence, and it leads to an old junkyard," Ian said.

"Yeah, I saw it. But Ian, I swear, that's the reason we crashed."

"Have you seen the front of the car?"

"No."

"It's completely unharmed. If you had crashed through a fence, there would be damage."

"Maggie, you saw it. I crashed through a fence," I said, voice rising slightly. And all I could see was air. Air and cliff and crumbled, decaying roadside. There was nothing this way. Nowhere to go. And not one fence.

"Yes..." she said, but her voice was uncertain. "I did think that was what happened. Maybe we both hit our heads, Lynnie."

I shook my head. I was not going to question our sanity right now. I was going to pretend we had Things We Needed to Do that Were More Immediately Important.

"Ian, have you been into the town yet?"

"No," he said, and again there was something in his voice that gave me pause.

"Where are we, Ian?" I asked calmly. Both Maggie and I turned to look at him.

"Silent Hill," he said. "It's an abandoned mining town."

"Abandoned?" I echoed.

"There's no one here?" Maggie asked.

"No," he said. "They had to evacuate years ago. It used to be a big coal mining town in the 50's. Until the fire, anyway."

"Fire?" Maggie questioned. The cliff-side was momentarily forgotten for her—a history lesson could always ensure her full attention.

"Yeah. No one knows exactly how it started, but with the amount of coal below our feet, it could conceivably still be burning once people are off the face of the planet. The politicians were furious, of course...anthracite coal...really valuable stuff."

"And it's completely devoid of people," I said.

"Oh, yeah. Not everyone wanted to leave, but every now and then holes to the Hell below open up out of nowhere. The fumes alone—in fact, we need to get of here as soon as possible. And until we do, we should be breathing through face masks. Clothes are better than nothing, though." He lifted the material of his shirt to cover his mouth and we followed suit.

"But it would make sense that the road hasn't been properly maintained," Maggie said, almost hopefully.

"Yes. But not destroyed. In fact, it would make no sense for them to willingly destroy a road that no one uses anyway." He frowned—we couldn't see the lower half of his face, but his forehead knotted. "And I don't see how they could do it so completely."

"Be sure to ask later, but right now, we need to leave," I said. Breathing noxious fumes for me is about the equivalent of being near someone with a cold. Makes me feel diseased and more than a little leprous.

"As you say."

We headed back to the car, clothes over our mouths and noses. I went for the driver's seat automatically. Ian raised his eyebrows at me and reached for the keys. Right. I handed them over, retreating to the back seat. Maggie could take shotgun. Maggie was competent.

He turned the key. The engine whispered with an edge of a growl and faded to nothing. He tried again and this time there was only a faint hiss. Once more, and there was simply nothing.

Silence.

"I have never," he emphasized, "heard a car make that noise before."

"I told you we hit something," I said petulantly.

So of course we all got out to look at it, removing the material from our mouths so we could properly communicate.

"See!" I said, part triumph, part anger. The front was crumpled, exactly what you would expect from a head-on collision with a bloody devil fence. There were scratches up to the windshield, almost, paint and metal peeled back like giant claws had raked across the surface.

"No, I do not see," he said back.

I gestured at it. "You said it was 'completely unharmed', and I quote. Well, it clearly isn't."

So, so nice to have someone else in the loony bin chair.

He frowned harder than ever, staring at me as if willing my face to change. "And I stand by that. It's completely unharmed, Ash."

"Well, it's not really," Maggie admitted. "There are scratches. They're pretty deep, Ian."

"They're non-existent," he insisted, incredulous.

Maggie and I looked at each other. We had the same conversation, the same thoughts and anxieties, without a spoken word.

Well, Ash, Ian is the sane one.

Well, Maggie, it's not like we haven't imagined things before.

Though usually not at the same time.

We turned our heads from each other to re-assess the damage.

"It's kind of creepy when you two do that," Ian muttered through his shirt.

"Nope," Maggie said. "Still scratched."

"And crumpled," I said.

"Still fine..." Ian said.

"I don't see the crumple, love," Maggie said to me. "But I do acknowledge the cuts, and if it were a person they would need stitches."

"Well...I don't know what to do with that. What I see is what I see," I said, frowning myself.

"What I see is real," murmured Ian.

"Shut up, Ian," I said disdainfully. No one asked the sane one.

*narrows eyes and glares at the abyss* I will make that abyss my BITCH- do you hear that abyss? That is the sound of you weeping in fear. As well you should. You know how some folks say that people can glare daggers? Well, I glare ACTUAL DAGGERS. So. Yeah. Your funeral.

-Maggie Smith