Author's Note: This is a work of fanfiction, I do not own Higurashi or Silent Hill. Higurashi is property of 07th Expansion, Silent Hill is property of Konami.
Satoko Houjou walked out of the door, into a dark, narrow corridor. The walls appeared to have been roughly hewn from stone, as though this was an old mine shaft or other underground tunnel.
"Where the hell am I?", Satoko asked herself. Had she gotten off on the wrong floor?
"No", Satoko thought, "That's impossible, why would a modern building have this for a basement? It seems impossible, but… I'm here…"
Satoko turned around and tried pressing the call elevator button. Nothing happened. After several minutes, the elevator remained motionless.
"OK, Satoko thought, "Calm down, there must be a staircase somewhere."
As she turned around to face the dark corridor beyond, Satoko heard footsteps coming from deeper into the tunnel. As Satoko shone her flashlight ahead of her, she saw a familiar, but not at all welcome sight, a zombie-like figure in an oni mask wielding a hammer, come walking around a corner.
Satoko readied her short spear- actually once a longer spear with all but a few feet snapped off- and advanced on the enemy, confident she could defeat it with her longer weapon.
As Satoko approached, the "masked man" swung the hammer, but missed, striking the wall of the tunnel, creating sparks as it impacted. At that moment, Satoko made her move, thrusting her spear in her attacker's body with a squelching sound.
The enemy tried to attack Satoko again, but Satoko pulled the spear out violently, causing further internal trauma, tearing the monster's putrid flesh and spraying blood. The masked "zombie" fell to its knees and the to the floor. Satoko stuck her spear in again, making sure it was dead.
When she was satisfied her adversary was dead, Satoko ignored the blood stains on her clothing and stepped over the body. It was amazing how quickly one could get used to committing such acts of violence. Then again, when the targets of said brutality were inhuman horrors that wished the same on you…
Satoko sidestepped around the corner, so as to avoid being surprised by any enemies that may be lying in wait. The corridor, however, was empty. The narrow passage ended in the opening to a large chamber.
As Satoko entered the chamber, her nose was assaulted by the stench of rotting flesh. Looking around her, she gasped in horror, seeing that room had numerous implements of torture and execution inside, all of them stained with blood, and two of them had the bodies of their latest victims still in place.
In the center of the room was a wooden table shaped like the silhouette of a human body, with arms and legs extending out from the center. On the table lay a horrifically mutilated body, which had clearly undergone a gruesome torture, having nails driven into every joint in his fingers, before having his stomach cut open and his intestines torn out, being left to bleed to death after he had been disemboweled.
In one corner of the room was an iron maiden, opened to reveal the dead body still inside, pierced by countless spikes in all parts of their body. Satoko heard the creaking and swinging of chains above her. Satoko looked up to see several man-sized metal cages above her, all of them stained with blood.
Suddenly, something dropped down on Satoko, falling right on top of her, knocking her to the ground, causing her to drop her spear. Satoko looked up, finding herself face to face with one of those giant, blood-sucking insects, its sharp proboscis less than a foot from her throat.
Satoko struck the creature in face as hard as she could with the blunt end of the flashlight, stunning it long enough for her to grab the spear from the ground and thrust it into the monster's face. The insect-like creature let out a final screech before it fell down, dead.
Satoko pushed her dead foe off her body and hurriedly walked out of the chamber, her heart still pounding from the last encounter. The next corridor was much like the last, empty and still, the only sound that of dripping water somewhere in the tunnels.
The tunnels wound onwards, around corner after corner. After about two or three bends, Satoko thought she heard footsteps. Sure enough, around the next corner, a "masked man" with a knife lunged at her. Satoko, however, was ready, and thrust her spear forward. The spear, while shortened to only about two feet, was still longer than the knife, and allowed Satoko to easily dispatch the enemy with a couple rapid thrusts the chest.
Having slain the enemy, Satoko advanced forward, into an area of the hallway that was wider, by several feet. As Satoko stepped into the widened area of the corridor, she heard the sound of metal grinding against stone.
Satoko jumped out of the way just in time to avoid a number of spikes, which sprouted from the wall and thrust across the corridor. Satoko gasped in shock as the spike trap activated. Had she not jumped backwards, Satoko would have been impaled.
"Where the hell am I!", Satoko asked herself again, though she knew she would receive no answer. Wherever she was, she was definitely not in the Centennial Building any more- "Modern city halls do not have implements of torture and spike traps that look like something out of Indiana Jones in the basement!"
After about five seconds, the spikes retracted back into the wall. Still, Satoko dared not move forward, lest the spikes suddenly sprout forth from the wall and impale her.
After about five seconds, the spike trap retracted. Five more seconds, it deployed. After watching the pattern repeat several times, Satoko figured this had to be it, a timing puzzle. The area covered by the spikes was plenty short enough to run across.
As soon as the spikes retracted into the wall, Satoko sprinted across the roughly ten foot length of spikes. Satoko made it across about a second before the spikes activated again.
"Ha", Satoko said, feeling confident, "You're going to have to do better than that if you want to trap Satoko Houjou!".
Satoko should know something about traps- in her childhood in Hinamizawa, she used to play jokes on her friends by setting traps for them, one of her favorites being one that, in hindsight, might have been dangerous- one that dropped a pot onto the unfortunate victim's head.
Beyond her was a T-junction in the corridor. Satoko slowly and cautiously towards the junction, looking first left and then right. There was nothing in either direction, except two heavy wooden doors at the end of a short corridor, one in each direction. After several seconds of deciding, Satoko made a decision: she was going right.
Satoko walked up to the large wooden door and pulled on the handle. Slowly, and with some effort on Satoko's part the door creaked open. Satoko pointed her flashlight into the room. It was a small chamber, carved into the stone like the rest of the underground complex. The room appeared to be an armory- gun racks, though they were all empty, were placed along the wall. There were, however, three magazines on a shelf that looked like they would fit in her Colt M1911.
Satoko stepped through the door, into the room. Suddenly, she felt something hook on to her spear. She turned to see another of those "zombies" in oni masks armed with scythe, having hooked onto her spear. The masked "zombie" pulled Satoko's spear away from her, causing it to drop to the floor as two of its fellows, armed with knives, appeared from dark corners and rounded on Satoko.
Satoko reached for her Colt M1911 as the enemy with the scythe raised his weapon for another strike. Satoko drew pistol and stuck the barrel right against its mask and pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a loud report, blowing straight through the enemy's head, sending a spray of blood and brain matter out the other side.
The "zombie" with the scythe fell to the floor, dead. Satoko shifted her aim to the nearer of the two knife wielders and fired twice, dropping the enemy to the floor to join its fellow. Satoko then repeated the performance with the final "zombie". This time, however, the report of the pistol was followed by the click of an empty chamber – Satoko had forgotten she had only four rounds left in the magazine.
The final "masked man" in the room had been struck by a bullet, but he kept advancing on Satoko, knife in hand. Satoko quickly dropped the empty pistol and seized her dead adversary's scythe. Satoko swung the blade in a wide arc, connecting with her foe's neck in a spray of blood as the masked "zombie" fell to the floor.
Satoko took four deep breaths, before she picked up her pistol off the ground and removed the empty magazine. She took one of the magazines on the shelf and shone her flashlight on it, revealing it to be identical to the one that was in her M1911.
Satoko slid the magazine into the grip of her gun and pulled back the slide, chambering the first round. Satoko then grabbed the other two magazines and put them in her left pants pocket, with the M1911 stored in her right, before she picked up the scythe, deciding its longer handle- about five feet long, would make it a more effective weapon for keeping enemies at a distance.
Having collected the ammunition and weapons, Satoko backtracked to the T-junction and walked into the second door. This door led onto a ledge above a wide, open, roughly dome-shaped room carved into the rock. The ledge ran down the side of the room to the floor. Spaced along the side of the ledge, there were several of what appeared to be prison cells carved into the rock.
Satoko walked toward that first cell when, suddenly, a figure burst out literally about a foot in front of her, its face covered in an oni mask and its skin decayed and dead-looking. It was yet another of the masked undead horrors that Satoko had become all too familiar with since she entered the town of Silent Hill.
"AAAHH!", Satoko let out a scream as she jumped backwards in fright.
The "zombie" raised a large tanto- a Japanese-style dagger- and prepared to thrust it into Satoko's torso. Satoko was too close to make a proper swing with the scythe, so, thinking quickly, she thrust the blunt end of the handle into the stomach of the masked "zombie", causing the creature to stumble backward.
Satoko then brought the scythe forward in a vertical arc, the blade catching the enemy right in the face, punching through the mask and into his head, killing the zombie instantly.
Satoko kept moving down the ledge, sidestepping in front of each cell with flashlight at the ready. The next two prison cells were empty, but in the third, she caught a couple of those weird five-foot long blood-sucking insects by surprise, striking one in the back of the head with the scythe and then using the blade as a hook to the flip the second "insect" monster, before killing it by slashing the scythe blade into its soft underbelly three times, until it stopped moving.
It was in the final prison cell before the exit that she found something as shocking as any monster, albeit less dangerous- a dismembered corpse. Satoko had to use all her strength to stop herself from throwing up then and there- the stench of death and decay was overpowering. The body had been hacked apart, covering the whole floor of the cell with blood, the limbs having been cut apart into several pieces, the torso being ripped open, shreds of bloodstained clothing all over the place. The thing that shocked Satoko the most, however, was the face on the severed head that lied above the torso.
It was a face that Satoko remembered from years ago, from her time in Hinamizawa. The body had to be none other than that of Mion Sonozaki… either that, Satoko thought, or it could have been Shion, Mion's twin sister….
But, this couldn't be Mion or Shion, they both died in the volcanic gas leak. And furthermore, it was hard to tell, but the body appeared to have the proportions of a teenager, as the Sonozaki twins would have been in 1983. They'd be in their early twenties if they had survived.
This had to be someone else, who had been murdered in a grisly manner and set up to look like one of the Sonozaki twins.
"But why would someone do this?", Satoko thought.
She could come up with only one solution: "Someone in this place is trying to drive me insane, trying to destroy me from the inside!"
"Whoever did this, your not going to get away this!", Satoko shouted furiously to the room at large, "I'm not going to let you fuck with my head!"
Satoko received no response, not even an enemy approaching her in an attempt to attack.
After several minutes of silence, Satoko walked out of the large "dungeon chamber", into the narrow hallway leading to a dead end in a sort of well shaft. In the center of the well shaft was an open cage, easily large enough for Satoko to stand in.
Satoko moved closer, realizing the cage was tethered to a chain, and inside was…
"A button!", Satoko thought, "This must be an elevator. Hopefully it will take me out of this place!"
Satoko, however, hesitated before entering. "What if this was a trap?". Satoko scanned the entrance, the chain above the elevator, the walls next to it. She saw no hidden tripwires or switches, no hidden explosives, no spike traps, no objects rigged to fall on the unfortunate victim, no rotating blades.
Finally, Satoko decided there was nothing to be gained by staying in this dark, monster-infested dungeon, and walked unto the elevator. Chains rattled as Satoko pressed the button, as the door closed and the elevator slowly ascended.
The ride up was unnerving, the elevator swung around wildly, at times, the chains sounded like they were going to collapse. Suddenly, Satoko felt something impact the elevator causing it to swing a good five feet in either direction. The flashlight in her chest pocket revealed the cause of the suddenly swing to be one of those insectoid monsters, having jumped from the wall of the shaft onto the elevator.
Satoko practically jumped to the other side of the elevator, shaking the suspended cage further. She wasted no time slicing at the creature with her scythe, slicing the underside of its body open and causing it to fall off the elevator, dead.
A couple seconds later, Satoko felt something graze her side… something that turned out to be the blade-like appendage of one of the insect-like monsters.
"Get the hell off!", Satoko yelled as she thrust the blunt her scythe's pole behind her, knocking the enemy off the elevator. After less than as second, she heard it hit the ground with a crunch of breaking exoskeleton and the splatter of its soft innards.
After slaying a third monster with the blade of her scythe, the elevator finally reached the top, a ledge with a door leading away from the elevator. Satoko exited quickly, not wanting to spend any longer on that elevator, but opened the wooden door on top warily, in case more enemies lay in wait.
The next room was different from the roughly hewn, stone walled dungeon. This chamber has a tiles running up the wall to about waist height, an above that, walls made of vertical wooden boards.
The contents of the room, however, were much in the style of the rest of the mysterious dungeon Satoko had traveled through- the room was centered a blood-stained wooden table with restraints for arms and legs. The walls were covered with racks of knives, swords, scythes, thumbscrews, vices, whips, chains, various spiked objects, and other implements of torture Satoko had not seen before… and did not want to know their purpose.
Most terrifying to Satoko, however, was a blood-stained wooden cross standing against the wall of the room. Chained to the cross was a figure, only a child, who appeared to have been stabbed repeatedly with a knife in the arms and shoulder until she bled to death. The figure's face, her hair, were all too familiar to Satoko.
She know who this was… "Me?", Satoko asked in a shocked in a confused voice. The dead body on the cross was obviously her childhood self.
Suddenly, Satoko heard footsteps behind her. "Yes", a female voice said in Japanese, "That is, or should have been you!"
Satoko turned around to see a figure step into the light of her flashlight, to reveal a girl of about 16. Satoko recognized her instantly, she was just as she remembered her in Hinamizawa.
"Sonozaki Shion?", Satoko asked, speaking the names in the traditional Japanese order, family name, then given name, "No you can't be Shion… Shion Sonozaki is dead!"
"Me… It is you who deserve to die, no, deserved to have died long ago, and you know why… do you realize your sin!", "Shion" asked furiously as she drew a hunting knife.
"You, always crying and calling to your nii-nii, did your ever stop to realize how much of a burden you were putting on Satoshi-kun? YOU PARASITE!", "Shion" said.
"How could she know that?", Satoko though, "How could she know the nickname I used for my older brother, Satoshi?" During her childhood in Hinamizawa, Satoko used to call Satoshi "nii-nii", a child-like shortening of onii-chan, or "older brother" in Japanese.
"Listen, I don't know who you are, or why you've come after me", Satoko said to "Shion"… no the imposter pretending to be Shion, "But I am not a child anymore. I've learned to rely on my self! I know, if Satoshi was still alive, he would be proud of me, everyone would!"
Shion shouted in rage as she lunged at Satoko with her knife. Satoko placed her left hand in front of her face. The blade sunk into her hand, sending a sharp pain through her body as the cold steel drove into her flesh.
Satoko let out a scream of pain, but regained composure in less than a second, drawing her pistol from her right pocket and pointing the weapon at "Shion" and pulling the trigger twice. The Colt Model 1911 recoiled in her hand as the weapon let off two loud reports. Two bullets impacted the woman who claimed to be Shion Sonozaki, causing her to drop her knife, before she fell face down on the floor, dead.
Satoko quickly placed the Colt M1911 back into her pocket and grabbed the first aid kit and opened it. Satoko seized a handful of bandages and tried as best she could to wrap them around the knife wound in her arm as tightly as possible. After a few seconds, the bleeding began to subside.
Suddenly, Satoko heard footsteps coming behind her, along with what sounded like something being dragged along the stone floor. She turned around and saw the shadow of the something moving on the other side of the door. Satoko drew her pistol once again as whatever was on the other side of the door entered the room.
Satoko stared at the creature that had just entered the room, eyes wide in horror. The monster looked something like a cross between the classic depiction of an oni, or demon, like those said to inhabit the swamps around Hinamizawa and images of what Oyashiro-sama, the vengeful god of Hinamizawa's local shrine was said to look like.
The creature was vaguely humanoid, and about seven feet tall, exceedingly strongly built and armed with a five-foot tall kanabo, a wooden club studded with iron spikes, the weapon traditionally wielded by oni. It was clad in a traditional Japanese robe, with a sort of sash on top, both of which appeared to be stained with blood. The creature's face looked like that of a human, but had razor sharp teeth visible in its mouth, glowing red eyes, skin an unnatural yellowish color, and two sharp, downward pointing horns.
Satoko raised her handgun and fired at the creature as it slowly advanced on her, but this seemed to do nothing at all, the monster didn't even seem to notice the impact of the bullets as it moved forward, dragging its kanabo.
Satoko stepped backwards as she fired off an entire magazine to no effect, but she quickly found her self backed into a corner, pulling the trigger again and again, but hearing only the click of an empty chamber.
The "oni" stood less than three feet from Satoko as it raised its kanabo over its head, and, as though in slow motion, brought it down on top of her. Satoko knew this was it, it was over... She saw her life flash before her eyes… her carefree childhood in Hinamizawa with Rika and the rest of her friends, the sudden end of those happy times, first with her abuse at the hands of her uncle, then the loss of Satoshi… and the disaster that claimed the lives of everyone in town. Her daily struggle to cope with the trauma of her past, her years in high school, culminating with her arrival in Silent Hill…
Everything went white in a flash of light. "Am I dead?", Satoko asked herself as she opened her eyes. After blinking several times, they image of her surroundings came into focus. Satoko Houjou was not dead, she was lying in the elevator of the Centennial Building in the town of Silent Hill, the elevator door now open onto the first floor lobby. The Colt M1911 was still clutched in her hands.
"What the hell just happened!", Satoko asked herself yet again, and yet again, knowing she would get no answer. Satoko activated the magazine release on her pistol, hoping to confirm what she had just gone through had not been real… but the pistol had no ammunition in the magazine, just like it had in the nightmare or whatever just happened.
At that moment, Satoko realized something else…. The wound from when "Shion" had stabbed her in the arm was gone, there wasn't even a scratch where previously there had been a gaping knife wound.
Satoko got up, noticing the spear she had been using was on the floor, having been broken yet again, while the scythe from the "nightmare" was nowhere to be found. It was no longer of any use to her now. Satoko was about to leave the room elevator when she noticed something that wasn't there before, a shred of paper lying on the floor.
Satoko picked up the sheet of paper and read, "The path to the truth shall take you through Onigafuchi."
"What?", Satoko asked, "Onigafuchi, "the demon's abyss", like that swamp near Hinamizawa. Wait… didn't the whole town used to be called Onigafuchi?"
"Is this saying I have to go back home?", Satoko thought, "After all this?"
Satoko thought for a moment, and found it unlikely, "Whoever is behind all the shit that's going on in this town would want me to stay here as long as possible… Beside, its not like I'm getting out of here with the town in this state, I doubt the bus route stops at the town of horrors! This must be another of those riddles, like the one on that gun locker. "Onigafuchi" must be a metaphor or something… it has to refer to somewhere in Silent Hill…."