Holy cow guys. It didn't take me over a year to post this? And I didn't even have it pre-written? This must be a miracle! Or at least a personal record.

(Don't get too excited about it, though).

Disclaimer: If I owned either of these, Eileen would have died and Luis would still be alive. LUUUIIIIIISSSS!

Warnings: Content-wise? Nope. Might be some typos though. Entire last half was written in the last half hour. Derp.

Tunnels…

Holes…

Traversing…

Portals…

They were Portals…

Leon came back to reality with a start, the memories of his dream-of careening through a twisting, winding tunnel of stone-fresh in his mind. Awareness of his surroundings came to him in a shock: he was sprawled on a plain, cream-colored couch, the room around him suited to match it: plain, though rather more grey than creamy. He jolted up, heart racing, as he realized that Henry had been telling the truth. The truth. He wasn't quite sure if he ought to be exhilarated or chilled by the fact, so instead, he distracted himself by poking around the apartment and doing what he'd been sent to Silent Hill to do in the first place: investigation.

At first, he found that his original assumption of the apartment being devoid of anything interesting to be a perfect summarization, but for one detail that nearly made his heart stop: the front door. Henry hadn't lied about that, either. Chains were laced across it, at least five of them, each padlocked to the wall on either side of the wooden barrier. It was no wonder he hadn't been able to break it in earlier that day. More disturbing was the message scrawled just below the peephole, appearing to be written in blood:

Don't go out!

-Walter

Leon's skin crawled, and he turned away from the wretched door, suddenly needing to find Henry and pepper him with questions yet again. Surely the apartment couldn't be that big; there were only three other doors. A quick look into one of them revealed a washer and dryer, but no Henry. The second was the bathroom, with a ragged hole in one wall across from the shower, which Leon didn't feel like looking in to at current. At any rate, the man he sought wasn't in there. He turned to door number three, just across from the bathroom, and clicked it open. Henry's bedroom. Bingo.

The agent found the brunette laid out across a bed made up with dull, blue sheets. He appeared to be completely out, at least, he didn't respond when Leon called his name. It took a physical shaking to get the man to stir, and he did so only grudgingly, sitting up with a mild groan and pinching at the bridge of his nose, as if he were suffering from a headache. Not that Leon had any sympathy for him just then. "Mind telling me about Walter?"

Henry stared at him with a look of genuine confusion before his memory and senses returned to him. "Oh. The door." Pressing two fingers to his temples, Henry stood with some effort. "Walter… Sullivan." He blinked, eyes still bleary as they looked upon Leon. "The serial killer."

Leon wasn't sure how many more surprises he could take in a single day. His first reaction was outright disbelief and rejection; it was only natural. "He's supposed to be dead. Everyone in Ashfield said so."

"Supposed to be isn't the same as is." Spoken so bluntly, like just about everything Henry said. So honest. "I can't think of anyone else who'd kill random women in subways, and then carve numbers into them." Henry winced then and turned away, stopping any further inquiry into such a bizarre statement as Leon might have had.

Leon headed over to the nearby window, peering out into the street below. The one he had been standing on not so long ago, or at least, he guessed it hadn't been all that long.
"Then why don't you just leave?" Leon turned away from the window, only to be met with Henry's confused expression. "Surely you have the keys to the chains over your door…?" he asked hopefully, stomach dropping when Henry shook his head. Realization dawned on him; this man wasn't here by choice, an eccentric who wanted to get away from the world. Henry was trapped. Don't go out! -Walter.

And now Leon was trapped, too.

"How in the hell did you manage to get imprisoned in your own apartment by a serial killer who was supposed to be dead ten years ago?" Leon, in his frustration, didn't care if his words seemed 'insensitive'. Henry didn't seem particularly offended either way, though Leon doubted the man could show anything other than fear, or a mask of passive indifference. "How long have you been in here?"

"Five days." The answer was spoken after a long pause, as though Henry was beginning to lose track of the time. Hell, Leon was amazed the man hadn't lost his very sanity after five days of being locked in a room.

After an uncomfortable beat of silence, Leon turned back toward the window, observing the people outside as they went about their business. "How could you stand this? Sitting here, watching the world go on outside, neither caring nor knowing about you and what you're going through…"

"I'm used to it, I guess." Though what that could mean, the agent couldn't be sure. "The hole was a curse as much as a blessing, when it came. Just showed up in my wall, like it'd always been there."

"Yeah, I saw it." A frown tugged the corners of Leon's mouth downward. "It'll take us back to the woods if we go through it from this side?"

"I think so, yes. But I'm not yet sure of the rules."

His head pains seeming to have subsided, Henry headed out into the main room of his apartment, Leon trailing along behind. He knelt, opening the top of a storage box located next to the television in the living room, sorting through the contents inside: a few keys, coins, loose papers, and bottles of what appeared to be vegetable drinks, though Leon couldn't be sure. Finally, Henry drew out a first aid kit, from which he retrieved a small bottle of Tylenol. He took two of them, glancing towards Leon.

"Want any?"

"No, thanks." Leon's headache had left him a while ago, and he hadn't had one upon waking up on the couch. As Henry was packing things back into his box, a glint of metal caught his eye. "You have a pistol, and you're still carrying around just a rusty pipe?"

"I don't have very many bullets, and I'm a terrible shot anyway. A lead pipe kills the nightmares just the same."

"I'll take them, then. The bullets and the gun. I was trained as a cop." Leon patted the gun at his hip, to emphasize his point. Henry stared at him in that unnervingly quiet manner of his.

"Were you trying to break down my door earlier today?" He said this as he reached back into his storage box, gathering up all the packs of bullets, along with the weapon they were fit for.

"Uh… yeah." Leon was a bit surprised at the abrupt questioning, taking the bullets and pistol, going about the business of finding a pocket for them in his coat. "A woman, Eileen, says she's been hearing things from your apartment."

"I know." Henry dropped the lid closed and stood. "I heard all three of you. I tend to watch through the peephole whenever I hear anything outside my door. Not that any of them can hear me."

"You were watching us?" Leon frowned, unsure as to why this disturbed him so. It wasn't as though they had been subtle about the whole thing, after all.

"Yeah. Through the peephole." Henry nodded his head towards the door as he stood, shutting the storage chest with a clatter of wood. He looked to a wall to the right, which looked as though someone had tried to hammer their way through it, and had failed, though not without doing a good bit of damage. "When this first started, I tried smashing the wall down to escape through the next room. I managed to make a hole to look through, but…" His cheeks flushed, as though he was suddenly embarrassed. "…I try not to look into that one very much. Eileen's room is on the other side."

Curious, Leon stepped over and knelt to examine the hole in the wall, though he was only met with the sight of the corner of a well-made bed, as well as what looked to be a stuffed toy, probably a rabbit. Thankfully, the woman who supposedly lived there was nowhere to be seen.

He tried the peephole next, seeing the hallway he had been in earlier that day-or was it yesterday, now?-as well as the handprints on the opposite wall, which somehow seemed far more ominous when viewed from the opposite side of this well-secured door. "Do you know what's up with those prints on the wall?" Leon turned to look at Henry, questioning.

To Leon's dismay, Henry could only shrug. "No; they appeared there along with the chains, and they haven't changed. Except…" He paused, wincing slightly, as though he were remembering something especially tragic. "…except when the woman I met in the subway died. When I came back, there was another handprint. Before, there had only been fifteen."

"The woman you met died?" Leon asked, incredulous. At least he could understand why Henry had had so much trouble discussing it before. "What was her name? Did you know her previously?" Already he had snapped back into detective mode, wishing he had a notepad and pencil.

"She told me her name was Cynthia, and no, I didn't know her previously. She was a… ah…" He blushed, looking suddenly bashful, not quite the face that Leon would expect from a man who had no problem cleaving in the head of a mutant dog. "…I believe she was a whore, or at least she acted very much like one when she approached me. Spanish origin, from her accent. She thought that everything that had happened was just a dream." Henry looked at his hands, sighing. "For all I know, she might be right. This may all just be a dream… maybe I'm the one who's dead…"

"Hey, now. Keep it together for me." Henry looked up, his eyes reminding Leon very much of a doe, or perhaps a puppy. "You don't recall anything else about the incident, or about this Cynthia?"

"There was one thing. When I found her, she was covered in blood, and there were… numbers carved on her. 16121."

Leon frowned, thoughtful as he pondered over the information he'd just been given. "I don't suppose it might have something to do with the string of murders that happened years ago in this area, where the killer was also carving numbers into his victims?"

Henry shrugged, helpless. "I wouldn't know. I wasn't living around here when they happened; I only moved in here a couple years ago. By then, the serial killer from those incidents had supposedly already killed himself in prison."

"Hmm… it might be a copycat. If those murders are even occurring in the real world at all."

"They are. Or, at least, the results of them are. I saw an ambulance parked outside the subway station outside my room a couple days ago, when I returned to the apartment after she died. It was also on the radio." This made Leon perk up.

"You have a radio?" For an answer, Henry gestured to the bookcase sitting in one corner of the room, with a little radio set on one of the shelves. Flicking it on, Leon was met with nothing but the disappointing crackle of static and white noise. Discouraged, he flicked it off once again.

"Only sometimes when I turn it on is there anything actually going. Sorry to get your hopes up over it," Henry said, sheepishly.

Sighing with frustration as his mind fumbled with the details, the faces, the incidents he was learning of, Leon finally turned back to look at Henry, cocking his head to one side in a look of curiousness. "Well? What do we do now, then?"

Henry shrugged. "Back through the hole, I guess. Unless the rules have changed again, it should deposit us back in front of the one we came here through. In the woods."

Leon nodded. "Alright. Let's get to it, then."

Abrupt ending is abrupt, but I tend to prefer those than getting bogged down in needless descriptions and details and OH MY GOD GUYS THEY WENT THROUGH THE PORTAL AGAIN HAPPY?

Also, sorry for having to take this chapter down and put it back up twice. The first time was a formatting error, the second time was me going back to reread it and realizing that they had short-term memory loss. Such is what happens when you try to write the last half of a story over a year after you wrote the first and didn't even bother to reread it... le sigh.

If anymore inconsistencies are found, please leave it up in the reviews, so I can get them patched up.