The run around the neighborhood took them a few days to complete. Harry played tour guide now that they were in his stomping grounds and pointed out some of the buildings he'd described in his notes. He'd been choosy about where they went. James got time to pick at the reading here and there to understand why, though their fan club sure was insistent about following them around. There was one night where they were essentially stuck outside in the dark for its duration, and that was no cakewalk.

It really didn't help that the radio continued to malfunction.

Eventually they decided to stop lollygagging and move on to the neighboring area. James hadn't gotten to the part yet where the bridge had been out, so Harry gave him some spoilers. They were fortunate that his fix from long before was still intact.

A couple encounters later they were in Central Silent Hill. They would need to procure a map for this area, but until then, relied on Harry's memories. Some roads were out, and it seemed like they were more common here than the next section over. It was hard to fully gauge that, though; Harry had, again, seemed reluctant to take James on a full tour of that neighborhood. From what he'd read, James couldn't fault him for it.

By chance they located the post office, and the key fit just fine. The lonely lobby ended at a tall counter and a door to where all the mail magic happened - and it was locked. It left them pondering the next move. James deduced there was only one other way to get past, and so he climbed ungracefully over the counter.

Harry stared at him from the other side. James was young, lean, and somewhat nimble. Harry was middle aged, bulky, and not at all nimble. It proved a feat helping him up and over, but they managed to the tune of muttering about getting old and going to the gym.

There were a lot of forgotten packages to sort through. Albeit with the two of them on the case, it took what felt like too much time to locate the parcel with matching initials. Harry passive aggressively dropped the package on a table, sore at the sight of not only B.C. having stood for Balkan Church, but the full name written above it on the return address.

Dahlia Gillespie was still a stranger to James. The frantic hide and seek competitions they'd unwillingly played the past couple days strongly contended against finding the time to catch up on his reading. He had some paltry hope he'd grab more than a few moments to get through at least three pages and figure out whatever the hell 'gyromancy' was. James tilted his head to read the outgoing address.

Evidently, the Order had meant to send whatever was in it out to a gentleman in Utah. Now, that was quite a ways away from good ol' Maine. Harry wanted to believe that the Order was only a local problem, so holding this troubling suggestion in his hands gave him the sinking feeling of failure. He ought to have been keeping up on monitoring the cult in the past few years. Things had just gotten too busy with Heather, or so he tried to fool himself. In reality, he'd slipped into the mostly-blissful comfort of fatherhood and brushed off every nagging thought that he should be keeping his tabs on the Order up to date. Oh, well; live and learn. Maybe this'd discourage slothfulness in the future.

The damn thing was heavy and wrapped a hundred times in tough packing tape. It needed an axe to cut into it, Harry complained. A hunt for a box cutter or something else as sharp and potentially deadly turned up null. They had no choice; the box had to come with them.

After checking the door to get out, it became clear that they'd have to leave the way they came. James went first, and Harry clumsily followed. One patronizing smirk and an indignant huff later, the pair left the building with the mystery package.

Next on their list was opening it. By dumb luck they found the police station, and even better, no circus act was needed to get into the work room. Harry was glad to put the box down on someone's messy desk; his arms were getting sore. They commenced a fresh look around and along the way found a couple dirty, useless guns and more ammo. The ammo reminded them, yet again, that they absolutely needed to sort the backpack. "Don't fucking forget the next time we have a chance," Harry scolded both himself and James. "You've been a soldier about that, so we need to lighten your load."

James somewhat appreciated the sentiment (though the compliments were getting more draining each time) but had no thanks to return. The men parted ways to canvass the area more thoroughly with the understanding not to go too far. It served as an effort to get a little distance to recoup themselves, and they hid how they were a little too eager for the break from each other.

James left Harry in the policeman's galley. He lazily wandered a hall of locked doors and uninteresting bulletin posts. Dawdling could only get a man so far, and soon he was poking his nose into the unlocked bathrooms at the end of the hall. The ladies' didn't have a speck of interest for him. Moving to the men's, he found a dramatic scene right out of a horror director's wet dream. He stood in the threshold with the door propped open and surveyed for all terms and purposes, a crime scene. The irony wasn't subtle.

From nearly floor to ceiling and wall to wall, blood streaked, splattered, and pooled on the lavatory floor. It was a mixture of old and new, he reckoned, as brushes of flakey orange and brown led to wet-looking, dark red puddles. The largest puddle was centralized around a useless drain that needed a brave plumber to clean out the gummy old secretion blocking the way out. One of the urinals along the wall was broken into pieces. James eyed the other two; their overflow most certainly was not for the faint of heart, and probably not the worst sight in this place as of yet. Naturally, this ostentatious spectacle was meant to be seen so he stepped in to investigate.

There was so much carnage that it looked like someone had sliced an artery and performed an interpretive dance about it. That was actually pretty close to fact. In the handicapped stall, a fat body drenched black by gooey old blood had its head caught in the likewise disgusting toilet. The sight didn't shock James. However, it did look like it may have been a suicide attempt. The cadaver's wrists were slashed on an axis. Judging by another slit and pour from the neck, some effort was made on that artery too. Smudged boot tracks implied the policeman had panicked, slipped in the red mire, and fell face-first into the toilet for an eternal nap. James wrinkled his nose at the inelegantly executed methods but also at the tug of familiarity at his brain. He chose to leave it and checked the smaller stall beside it.

Pattern predicted a porcelain bowl nearly filled to the brim with noxious soup, so there it was. The grossness was nothing special to him. James jadedly looked it over until something solid and silver snagged his flashlight and eye. He tilted his head, examining the fermented undesirables and the present lurking within. Nothing was an accident, everything was connected, and James made peace with that a lifetime ago.

"James? Hey, Jaa-aames," Harry called for him, jiggling doorknobs and knocking on the panels along the way until he found the right door. "Hey, I— oh. Wow. This is somethin'. What the hell happened in here, someone have a bad case of the Mondays? Yikes." He moseyed over to the stall that previewed his cohort's jeans and boots at the bottom. "Hey buddy, you good in here, or— oh, that is a fucking horror show!" Making a strangled, visceral noise, he leaned far back and wished he hadn't peeked around James's shoulder. Mucky toilets in Silent Hill weren't a new concept to him, but they sure were in the top ten of things he hated most about this place. "Ugh, don't tell me that came from you —"

He abruptly cut himself off. Repulsion dropped like a piano on his head when he realized he had caught James in the process of rolling up his sleeve. "James, what— what are you doing?" The cuff folded higher. Harry shook his head, losing his color every second the implication cemented the incoming reality. "No.. no, James, come on, don't— JESUS CHRIST, JAMES! Oh, what the fuck !" he yelled as the blond fellow fearlessly groped around in the stew. Harry threw his hands into his hair and backed up, nausea instantly swelling his throat. "No! " he strongly berated him like a misbehaving dog. "God dammit, James, what the fuck is wrong with you?!"

James turned around to a man nearly white as a sheet and a little green around the gills. "What?" He held up his dripping, vile hand and the item he went rooting around for. Harry gagged at once, and he frowned. "I found an X-acto knife."

"You stuck your bare hand in a gross fucking toilet, James! Why would you do that?!" The conduit gave him a vapid shrug. Harry's eyes darted wildly over him, then whipped one hand from his hair to gesture urgently at James's arm. "No, no, come on, you're dripping! It's fucking dripping down your arm, aw come on, man!"

Annoyed at such an obvious overreaction, James obliged him and started to roll his sleeve down. He stopped short when Harry harassed him again. "Oh no, no no no, do not tell me you're not gonna wash your hands. Do not roll your sleeve down like that."

James opened his arms, frustrated. "What do you want me to do, Harry?"

Harry looked alarmed. "What do you mean— are you serious?" The mutual stare left a beat between them. "Are you fucking dense? Wash your HANDS, James!" He thrust his finger at the sink. James looked at it, then at the author.

"It probably doesn't work."

"Well, fucking try it!"

James gave a moody sigh and did as he was ordered. Miraculously, the squeaky knobs made water flow from the faucet. For the first time since his arrival, James rinsed his hands under icy cold, but clear running water. After he turned it off and shook out his hand, he resumed turning down his sleeve when Harry disrupted him again. He rolled his eyes to him; they both looked exasperated.

"Soap. Use soap."

He glanced at the muddy dispenser. "You sure? It probably won't work, and I doubt anything good's in there."

"Please, James, humor me one more time."

James sourly complied. A translucent orange glob dropped into his palm. Both amazed and peeved that these things worked, he ran the water and got a good lather going to appease Harry's standards. He washed off the tool while he was at it, and when all was said and done, he turned to Harry with dripping, but clean, hands. "Better?"

Harry nodded sarcastically. " Yeah ." He exhaled deeply, watching James wipe his palms off on his jeans and finally roll down his cuff. "You were just gonna not wash your hands?"

He straightened himself out and looked at him "No."

"And why? "

"Because I didn't do it the last few times. And I didn't think the water would work."

Harry couldn't be more scandalized. "Excuse me, 'the last few times'? You've done this, you've reached into disgusting shit bare-handed before? "

James shrugged. Harry dropped his arms soundly to his sides and wryly scrunched his face. "You know what? I don't wanna know. I don't wanna think about what that means. This whole time, you— ugh, yuck ." Harry passed him, exchanging incredulous glares. "You're gross, James. You're really fucking gross."

"So? I got the X-acto knife. Isn't that what we were looking for?"

"Yes," Harry sighed, "and thank you for finding it, but that doesn't negate the fact that that was really, really fucking disgusting. God. Yuck."

James was all eye-rolls. Back in the main station, he passed the knife to Harry. The survivor made a face when he took it, and was all too happy to put it aside when the package was finally opened. While he brushed off his hands on his slacks, shuddering in lingering revulsion, James took it back and put it in his pocket. It was a useful thing to have around; they'd be dumb to leave it behind, nasty origins or not.

Harry unloaded book after book bound in black. All of them were floppy and smacked soundly together as he carelessly stacked them on the table. "Fuck this cult stuff," he muttered. "You know, I was never one for religion in the first place, but if you read up on it, the general baseline is, 'don't be a dick to people and help those less fortunate than you'. Then you have these assholes that throw all that out the window and go, 'we're gonna fuck shit up so that God' - which I highly doubt is the same God everyone else talks about - 'can flip the entire world on its head and bring about Paradise'. Which, by the way," he added, throwing a glance at James, "is the Otherworld. That's what they think 'paradise' is."

James regarded him impassively. There was a lot of hate in Harry for the cult, to say the least. He tilted his head to take a better look at the mountain of books that flawlessly passed as bibles. 'The Scriptures' lay imprinted in gold on the cover. Just like the church itself, that was a fine way to hide in plain sight,

At last, the veteran found something worth its salt. Harry picked open a tome bookmarked by a postcard of Toluca Lake. He frowned down at the pages, then turned over the souvenir card. "'Thank you for your generous contribution'," he read aloud. "'We of The Order hope this finds you in good health. We are proud that others wish to indulge in and spread our good word. Many thanks, and may Paradise come swiftly to you.' Signed, Dahlia Gillespie, High Priestess."

The scowl on his face was soaked in vitriol. "Fuck you, Dahlia," he mumbled, chucking the card over his shoulder. "Piece of shit." Harry squared his shoulders and turned towards James as he went over the text in the book. "There're underlined passages in here. Somebody took a pen and marked it up. Great." He dog eared the section and snapped it shut. "Awesome."

James squinted at him. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's not like I had any big dreams that we weren't gonna have to go back to the church," Harry said, stepping behind James to pack the book away. "I just hate that it exists at all." The pack clicked closed and he rubbed at his head. "Jesus. Sorry about the backpack. We keep forgetting it, or avoiding it. It must be getting really heavy, huh?"

He rolled his shoulders. "Yeah, kinda."

"Hell. Honestly and seriously, the next time we get a big break, we'll go through it. I feel bad that you've been playing pack mule for so long. I could take it, you know.."

James shot him a definitive look out of the corners of his eyes. "No. You're too slow."

Harry huffed and shrugged his shoulder. "Alright, alright. Ouch, though. I know you're right, but that still stings."

There was little else the police station had to offer. They decided to leave and continue on. Before they went to church, the rest of Central Silent Hill deserved a proper tour (though with Harry in the lead, many landmarks would go intentionally unseen for now). A couple days would pass before they matched the address to the key found in the hotel storage and took refuge in the Town Center. Once in there, they hoped they would be safe enough to take the true respite they deserved, and Harry could finally keep his promise to take some of the weight off James's beaten down shoulders.