Woohoo! Chapter 3 of WCA! We're cookin' with gas now!

AWW does not own Silent Hill or Konami... sadly.

- That's exactly what I think. Poor Henry is so underappreciated, and The Room is, in my opinion, one of the most hated in the series. It's a good game, though not nearly as excellent as SH:2 (but then again, what game is?), and most certainly does not deserve the treatment it's being given. And heck yes, I ship 20x21 like I'm FedEx. I don't think I'll shoehorn my ship too much into here- I'll hint at it throughout, however.

Henry cursed his own stupidity. Dammit, one of his only friends and few supporters and he'd called her a nutcase for confessing she needed a help. He'd effectively driven her away when all she wanted to do was assist him by hitting below the belt like a defensive coward, and that was all he was.

Why are you so adamantly against therapy? he asked himself, resting his head against the arm of the sofa. It doesn't mean you're weak.

I don't want to be treated like the victim, one part of his brain argued.

But you are!

He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, no longer moderating the internal debate. Anything that crossed his mind interrupted it, such as Eileen struggling to hold back tears, his own callousness, and the reliving of their experience in Silent Hill.

He opened his eyes again to see anew the pictures that hung mockingly on the plain white walls and were propped up on desks throughout the apartment, all ones of him or taken by him. Relics of a bygone age. Someone else's life, seen through the lens of a camera. It was no longer his life that was framed plainly in glass and stained wood, more like the inherited momentos of a dead man. He gently ran his thumb over the smooth surface of his graduation picture, where he was a young man seven years ago, proudly displaying his high school diploma, a half-smile on his hollow face. The picture next to it was one of him as a grade schooler, shyly grinning at the parent who held the camera on a field trip. Looking over the two now, he found it hard to believe he was once that age. It felt like an eon ago, like his entire life was wasted in the strange worlds he traversed. Had he really been out of this apartment, once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away? When was it decided he was the Receiver?

He understood that if he had chosen a different room, he never would have been roped into the disturbing inner sanctum of Silent Hill and its cults. Some other poor guy- and there had been one, one quite interested in the same room, which was the reason Henry had to hastily make a deal on the apartment- would have roamed the worlds, fought Walter, and possibly died. In a rare show of selfishness, he thought that this scenario was the one he preferred. After all, numbness was the path to survival. Eileen Galvin would be nothing more than a stranger, one he'd feel sorry for when he heard of her murder then promptly forget within a month. When he recalled hugging her, comforting her in the eerie quiet of the yard of the Wish House when she thought for sure he'd been killed by Walter, he instantly hated himself a little more.

She'd have been fine on her own, he justified.

"But the truth is, we're stuck here, and no amount of wishing or praying is ever going to change that," he reiterated to his photo. He couldn't alter the past, no matter how he had been cheated by life. Albeit, that didn't mean he wouldn't try.

Almost absentmindedly, he balanced the picture for a split second on his palm, then in one sweeping arc, he flung it to the north side of his room. It collided with the tabletop lamp there, tumbling it with a cacophony of breaking glass and the thud of a heavy object falling.

You're not me! he yelled inwardly at the pictures that had as of yet escaped his wrath. He leaped up from the couch, desperate to cleanse Room 302 of any trace of his identity. Without concern for the wall, he savagely tore the image of Toluca Lake's picturesque shore on a misty morning from the hook with a strangled roar of anger. He exercised more self-control now, opting to throw it onto the blue carpeted floor, where a flower of milky white cracks blossomed in the glass, blotting out the water.

More photos piled upon the original, his personal photographs treated with exceptional hatred. A year-old profile and the one of him as a child were hurled at the same spot as his graduation image, creating a sizeable crater in the plaster, adding to the glimmering, tiny shards of broken glass peppering the ground. Somehow, the sun shone brightly through his window, uncaring of Henry's predicament.

He stomped through the living room, resisting the urge to flip his coffee table, down the hallway and turning sharply into his bedroom. His gaze scoured over every detail of this room as if he was a predator, searching for a new bit of prey.

There. The desk. The air grew thick, the mood menacing as he glowered at the unobtrusive furniture in the corner, despite the other three pictures in the room, but he would deal with them later.

He shoved the swivel chair aside roughly, setting to work feverishly clawing at the three small frames until they fell to the desktop. Those were more of a stop on the way to his actual destination- what was in the drawers.

Henry tore them out, scattering the contents onto the bed and dashing them to the floor when all the envelopes and squares of glossy paper were emptied. The drawers buckled as they hit the floor, sending out a last puff of dust as their plywood boards parted. Six drawers. That had to be one-hundred unbound pictures, not to mention the seven thick picture books, in each drawer. Over six hundred pictures. Possibly over one thousand.

What events were that interesting in your mundanity, Henry, to take up so much of your space? Like the leering Cheshire cat teasing Alice, he stoked the fires of his irrational rage. Your entire existence has been hand-to-mouth, flipping from bill to bill. So what if you liked that meaningless job? You could never afford more than Room 302.

He couldn't yet touch the desktop and, in one sweeping motion, clear off its contents, as below the lamp was his scrapbook. The sight of its weathered navy exterior gave him pause, as he knew that inside was the documentation of Silent Hill through the words of other people, like Jasper Gein and Joseph Schreiber, even Walter Sullivan himself. All lost souls, those who saw the horror of true evil and did not escape undamaged.

He pondered what he really wanted to do- just moments earlier, he'd been gutting his apartment of almost all semblances of his formerly normal life, so why would he stop at records of his personal hell?

Just once, he reasoned, reaching to the cover. I have to know.

The corner indented the pad of his thumb by a centimeter as he lifted it cautiously, its blunt edge searing like a heated knife on his finger. He squinted, almost dumbfounded, then jerking the corner up.

The cover landed with a muted clack on the desk, exposing a repulsive, living mass.

Maggots.

Their fat, slimy bodies writhed in the pages' remains, engorging themselves on the congealed, rancid blood coating the paper. He gagged into his hand at the stench, tear ducts set afire, unable to focus his attention on something more pleasant, even as his stomach rolled in protest and bile climbed threateningly in his throat. He backed up, and when the backs of his knees hit the foot of the bed, he collapsed gratefully onto its rumpled sheets. He wheezed, sickened, watching as a single trickle of fresh blood seeped onto the desk. Then another. Then another.

The rivulets combined on the desk into a slick puddle, expanding rapidly, sending over the cliff a red waterfall onto the carpet. Its greasy touch leeched into the papers and neatly organized writing utensils, and he was reduced to staring, shocked into indifference.

All those maps, Crimson Tomes, and notes were lost forever. The proof of them was erased, and maybe they never were truly there in the first place. They were, after all, from a separate reality. In that case, how were his weapons and other paraphernalia real? Were they just objects caught up in the Otherworld, like Henry, like good people in a war-torn country?

He laid back on the bed, relieved to feel the rapidfire chop of the ceiling fan as it whirred, the cool air chilling the perspiration on his forehead. He panted the scent of his own skin, resisting the tightening in his esophagus, clamping his jaws shut until it ached. His brain refused to allow the vision of the maggots to be scoured away, and through his fingers, he still smelled the rank, nauseating fluids.

When he was sure he was in no danger of retching, he stood wearily and staggered through the doorway, gratefully sucking in the clean oxygen as he entered the living room. Unmindful of the mess on his floor, he stumbled right over it, a character lost in a daze as he sat himself on the couch again, painfully aware of Eileen's half-empty water glass.

He noted with derision his cell phone, a light blinking to signify missed calls. He'd get to those later... if at all.

As the scent of blood began to flood down the hall, all he wanted to do anymore was sleep, slip into a dreamless rest and forget for an hour or two the troubles that would never cease to plague him.

oOoOoOo

Eileen settled into the pillows of her bed, a book lofted above her head as she tried to read, a simple task turned impossible by the words jumbling together nonsensically. Her mind was in another place, and the fantastical description of a fairytale land could not capture her attention. She gnawed her thumbnail anxiously, a terrible habit reflected in the jagged edges of her nails.

Against the ribbed fabric of her favorite pink tanktop, dead skin forming one number in the gap between her shoulder blades was tickled annoyingly, still raw, with parts of it scabbed.

She finally accepted the fact that she would not be able to read much today and shoved her bookmark into the pages, shutting the book and placing it on her nightstand.

She turned over in bed and reached out to open her closet, greeted by a black garbage bag. She involuntarily shuddered, the contents of that bag all too familiar. Upon her return from the hospital, she'd found her cheery pink rabbit doll soaked in her blood and grinning a little more menacingly. She hadn't gotten around to throwing it out, so there it sat.

Her view trailed to the full-length mirror, where she observed the black circles beneath her formerly bright green eyes. They lacked their characteristic warmth, gaining a suspicious and mistrustful glint. Her lips were curved downwards in a permanent frown, amd her hair hung in lank shoulder-length tendrils. Another thing she hadn't gotten around to doing- cutting her hair. How could she live this way? Would she 'not get around to' eating and drinking and simply permit herself to wither away?

Crash!

Her head jerked around instinctively, and she reached for the nearest possible weapon on impulse- an aluminum baseball bat, bought for self-defense purposes. Some would underestimate its defensive capabilities, but she had seen its power as it dented the skull of a grotesquely oversized nurse, and besides, she didn't want to go through all the hassle of getting approved to buy a gun. She likely wouldn't be approved, too- were permits distributed to therapy patients? Maybe, but they most certainly weren't given to patients who had been on suicide watch, something not even Henry knew.

She searched for the source of the noise, keeping her back against the wall to prevent a sneak attack, half-anticipating a dirty-haired man in a trench coat to approach her, grinning as he pinned her against a wall and cut the tendon in the crook of her knee to prevent her from escaping.

A similar noise resounded from the neighboring apartment, Room 302. She dropped the baseball bat, heart thudding, and listened.

A series of thumps gave her a picture of what was going on: Henry was tearing down the pictures in his room. He cursed once, loudly, then his footsteps faded as he retreated to the bedroom. Not ten seconds later, fainter thumps sounded. Then they stopped.

Eileen tangled her fingers in her hair and paced for a minute, waiting for any indication of life. She introduced her forehead to the wallpaper, face contorting in distress.

She wasn't sure how long she stayed in that position, just harkening the activities of the distressed resident of Room 302, but she was sure she had never felt so helpless in her life.

Funny story, I was playing music as I was writing this. Just as I began to write Henry ripping the pictures of the walls, 'Yakety Sax' started to play. I enjoyed that a lot more than I should've.

Until next time, reviewers!