There was a janitor's closet outside the cafeteria that accepted the key. In there they found the usual bank of cleaning supplies, but with a twist: there was a damp mop within a bucket hosting a pool party of filthy water. With it should've been a folding caution sign, but it was missing. On the shelf within easy reach was a Pine-Sol bottle clear of dust - in fact, it came off as recently used. Nothing else had been touched in years; it was disconcerting. Harry shuffled into the tight space and began to sift through the supplies. Inside the open box of yellowed latex gloves were two new keys - one for a normal door, the other small, perfect for a filing cabinet.

"We got our principal's office keys," he stated, reading the blue plastic tab. "This'll be the second time we break into a principal's office. I'm surprised we haven't gotten expelled yet." Green and brown eyes targeted each other's glance. "Knocking on wood is moot at this point."

"Mm."

Harry scoffed, perceiving that as a slight, and briefly looked about for something wooden. The mop handle fixed the problem under three awkward knocks. "You're killing me, James."

"I didn't say anything."

"Your face said different."

"What?"

"You had that little look on your face," Harry accused, his finger rotating tight circles right up between James's eyes. "That, 'Ooh, you're gonna jinx it,' you smug little shit."

James jerked his head back, charging Harry with a dirty look as the patriarch sidled out of the cramped closet. "I didn't—"

"I think you're becoming more superstitious than I am," Harry interrupted, shouldering his weapon. "I must be rubbing off on you."

His companion firmly closed the door. The next sour look got waved off. "Oh, lighten up. Have a few frivolous precautions in life."

"I forgot how to have fun."

"Now you admit it! Callooh, callay, I never thought I'd see the day."

James fell into stride beside him on their trek through the cafeteria. "I thought you were getting tired of hearing your own voice."

Harry tossed him a sidelong look. The prickly tension was still afoot, and the 'why' was no mystery. He sucked on his teeth, then sighed. "The downfall of man. Even if you sew my lips shut, I'll find a way to keep talking."

"Yeah, I know. But right now, could you find a way not to talk?"

Harry shrugged his shoulder. "I'll do my best."

He did as told; for whatever dumb reason, his heart hurt.

When they got back to the cafeteria, the missing yellow folding sign reading CAUTION: WET marked a dry floor. Harry rightfully thought it was spooky that it popped up out of nowhere. He recalled the mop, accidentally breaking his vow of silence to make a joke about it. Contrarily, James scowled at him; the joke wasn't funny, but the neither was the real comedian here. (The town would beg to differ.) The veteran winced at James's glint of anger, and pushed open the doors.

They had to retrace their steps through the courtyard. The snow was still en masse and up to their knees, but the storm itself had eased. White fluff drifted from the sky, yet no wintry chill numbed their shins as they waded through. Crunchy, unsynchronized steps made conversation instead of voices. Once they arrived where they'd begun, they stomped the packed snow from their feet, and brushed the powder from their legs.

The halls were ever quiet.

Back at the commons the veterans, armed with answers, headed into the staff room. The note asking Mrs. Lounds to return Margot's keys hadn't moved, which Harry thought was a good sign. The key fit the lock and the door opened to a quaint office.

Harry stepped in first and took a look around. Midwich had a principal who kept his office neat and rather ordinary. Their flashlights illuminated two fabric-backed chairs pulled out from an unremarkable desk, the backside of a clunky, era-appropriate computer monitor, a padded desk chair for the boss man and a column of file cabinets. On the desk, a slanted bronze holder hosted an engraved black plate that introduced the principal as Paul Vernon.

"Nice place you got here, Mr. Vernon," Harry complimented, deciding he'd been quiet for long enough, going for the desk. "What else you got?" He rummaged through the typical office supplies on the thin topmost storage, found the second pretty bare, and grinned down at the bottom's deep. "Ooh. Got a stash of candy down here. I see you like taking a break by breaking off a piece of that KitKat bar. Hm.. at least he's not drinking on the job. Attaboy. Be the role model the kids need to see."

Without James's opinion and nothing else interesting, he shut it. Harry wiggled the keys in anticipation before he stuck the promising little key into the cabinet slot. Turning it was a no-go, and after two additional strikes down the tower, he was out. He sighed, pursing his lips as he muttered 'bummer,' then confronted the computer. Rapidly tapping on the keyboard spacebar, jiggling the old mouse nor trying its gravely middle wheel didn't awaken the computer from its decades long, Rip Van-Winkle slumber.

"Welp. I guess we don't get to hack in to change our grades. When my parents see what I got in math, they're gonna have my head."

Harry saw James's deadpan, bobbed his brows, then took a gander at the decor. Mr. Vernon's tastes themed heavily on both school pride and being a proud American. There were great photos of graduating classes and a shadow box containing a vintage triangular cheer flag bearing school initials and colors. That, paired with a folded, framed American flag hanging beside it, must've stimulated all visitors with a sense of Fourth of July patriotism every day of the week.

Other highlights included a motivational poster starring a cyclist racing the sunset, a heavenly picture of the Savior, and a bible quote so adored that it was treated to baroque calligraphy fit for the Vatican. It was so beloved that it was even professionally matted and expensively framed. Harry, wondering what sowed Mr. Vernon's daily inspiration and reflection, shone his light on it and leaned in.

James snapped his eyes over at Harry. Something unnerving over there was picking a few hairs, for it was dread, not grief, sliding its needle into his veins; how peculiar. It lasted only as long as heartbeat's pump. The conduit studied the back of Harry's head, then glanced at the frame; he'd have to have a look for himself.

When Harry left the office, James replaced him at the wall. Tipping his flashlight for proper reading, he at once recalled how much he hated calligraphy. He agreed that it looked pretty on paper, a fine art of its own, but reading it? Psychiatry ink blots were more legible. It took James a little over his preferred limit to understand what the loops and ribbons were trying to say, but when he got it, he didn't quite get it.

The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life

And the souls of the evil will be removed.

James's disappointment looked as strong as the confusion that manifested on his face. The quote rang a tiny bell, but that was all. He wished it made sense right now, yet he knew Harry would let him in on it later.

Out in the teacher's large resource room, the loud tinny bang of a cabinet drawer yanked to max, followed by Harry's triumphant cry, "Oooh ho! Fuck yeah!" gave him a minor jolt. James cocked his head to the side, narrowing an annoyed look through the doorway at a man he couldn't see.

"Sorry to invade your privacy an' dig around in your personal business, everyone," Harry was apologizing to the overstock of manilla folders as James meandered over. His companion, a bit too short for the tower four boxes tall, reached over the extended drawer, craning his neck forward to read protruding separator tabs. "Not gonna snitch on to you to your parents, honest. Just gonna, uh.." trailed off, concentration jumping to tugging out a folder to peek at from amongst the horizontal masses. ".. take a little.. hm."

James monitored him wedging it back into the multitudes. Harry's fingers crawled over the archives, too distracted to finish the thought, too hungry for information. The conduit stepped to his right, standing at the side of the tray to supervise better. Funny how nosy he was, James thought. He couldn't envision Harry as any sort of type to gossip or condone the practice. In all respects, and despite his persistence, Harry would be the best person to tell a secret to - but man!

Soon enough, Harry finally figured out that standing right in front of the drawer and having to reach out over its contents limited his view and progress. He shuffled to his left, unknowingly mirroring James, who silently stood directly across from him on the other side of the bridge. Harry's snooping became easier, quietly skimming over the rest of the first batch until he decided that was all to see. A good push sent the vessel home. "Well, that's one d— oh, Jesus fuck!"

James watched Harry launch himself backwards like a frightened cat finding a rogue cucumber on the floor, tripping over his feet, with his fist throttling the front of his sweater. When he got balance between a staggered stance, he stared wide-eyed and nettled at the unwittingly sneaky resident before him. "You fucker! God dammit, James! How many times are you going to do this?!"

James looked blasé. Harry's lungs sharply evicted the air they had. "I'm gonna kill you," he uttered under his breath. "Swear to god."

"Which one?"

He shot him so dirty a look that it wished it were bullets. "All'a them. Including the one runnin' the place."

"Mm. Those're a lot of gods."

"Yeah, and I'll hit up the pagan ones, too. Throw some Greek in there, they love that shit, I'll betcha the Androctasiae or Ares would do it pro bono."

The younger man curled his lip, distastefully watching Harry bend to unlock the middle. "Who?"

Disgruntled energy clanged the metal basket out. "Who, what?"

"Who's Andro.. casetis.. astasia and Ares?"

Harry peered at him. Sure, Harry did a passable job at disappointing the Greeks for his pronunciation - an imperfection he accepted long ago - but James outright executed it. And on top of that, a cameo by the lost Romanov princess never went amiss. He felt a little better at his expense. "The Androctasiae are female personifications of manslaughter. Ares is the god of war and personification of bloodlust and brutality. Real swell people, fantastic personalities. I'll bet they'd get a real kick out of Silent Hill."

Now he was incredulous and offended. "Jesus. You think—"

"No, not him. That's the hippie."

James icily retorted, "Funny. You think that's kinda overkill?"

He flared his hands. "Overkill is kind of their point, but I see where you're coming from."

"Seriously?"

One guilty sigh exited Harry's nostrils and looked repentant in his eyes. "Alright. It was overkill. You're right. I'm sorry." James seemed to relax a smidge.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

The resident carried a dissatisfied frown. "You're a dick."

"Yeah, I've already added that to my testimonials," Harry brushed off. "Starting to get worried that that's the only reason people like me."

James eyed his ward. "Maybe that's saying something about your personality."

"Psssshhhhhhhhhhh," scoffed a mature adult. "Whaddya talkin' about, I'm the nicest guy you'll ever meet! Especially around here, and it's slim pickings. I think you should consider it a win."

His scoff was softer. "Yeah, sure."

"Find comfort in the little things, James. It'll make your life a little easier to deal with."

James didn't care about the veteran's little nuggets of wisdom, so he asked, "What're you looking for?"

"Oh, who knows," Harry melodramatically sighed. "Something big, something small. Something anything. There're two other ones to get to," he added, nodding at the cabinets next to James. "They're alphabetized by the first two letters of their last names, so there's a shitload to go through."

James swiveled at the waist to give them a quick study. "These are all students?"

"Seems that way, at least. 'A' starts up here."

".. that's a lot of students."

Harry absently drummed his hands on the length of files. "The yearbook was pretty thick. I dunno."

Suspicion locked onto brown eyes. "I didn't think Silent Hill had these many teenagers."

He shook his head, his turn to look them over. "I dunno, James. The map did expand. There're probably a lot more people than we expected." When still he hesitated, Harry suggested, "Or maybe they come from Brahms. Why? Shit, I can only guess as well as you do."

James let it go and replied, "Mm. Could be here awhile."

"Yep."

"Want me to do anything? Look through them, too?"

Harry twisted his mouth, pondering. "Eeeh.. if you want."

James slanted his neck. "That's not a yes or no."

"I'm going through them pretty quickly. .. which probably isn't a good idea, but eh, might go over them again just in case."

"You still didn't answer the question."

"Sure!" Harry, a touch irked, threw up his arms. James set his bland stare on the writer, waiting for his orders.

"You can take over the rest of this one if you want," said his charge, patting the student registers. "I'll take the other two. We should do a run over the place again before we leave, just in case we forgot something - or if something changed."

"Okay."

"Cool! Great. Let's get started."

So they did - once all were unlocked. With James taking over the drawer and Harry ruling the middle, they picked at the stuffed records like park birds feeding on seeds from full troughs. They each delved into looking at things they shouldn't be looking at, reading unabridged biographies from the point of view of several authorities that either hated, liked, or were neutral about the young souls who walked the campus.

Harry was hoping they'd be allegorical, insightful, and ordinary; a piece of teenage lives that existed only here, and they were just what he asked for. However, the task of delving in was "claimed" from the moment he'd laid eyes on the cabinets; he'd been looking forward to it, and the petty man in Harry wished James had volunteered to go do something else. Harry knew it was stupid, but his saltiness had an aura heard loud and clear.

James thought Harry was a kind of a control freak.

He wandered his eyes over the paperwork. Clear plastic tabs alphabetized by the first two letters of surnames kept the bunches segregated and organized, leading a winding path for his traveling fingers. He caught glimpses of students' names (surname, first name) labeling folders that were passed over like roadside attractions. 'F' went uneventfully by, 'G' came after 'F', and it wasn't long after that 'Gi' showed up.

Hm.

James coaxed Alessa's profile out of the bulk, dark excitement palpitating his heart, and opened it on the row. A drawer below him grumbled into its cave. The noise didn't rouse a flinch.

"Y'know? Fuck this," complained an impatient voice studiously ignored. "Uuugghh, fuuuck meeee. Why's it always gotta be floors..?" Harry knelt at the third cabinet and jiggled the bottom cache open. "Alright, you little shit," he murmured under his breath. "Where are you."

There he was. Harry sat down and hoped that position was good enough to be spared from numbing legs. He opened the folder and started to get to know the pretentious teenager he'd met through a club handbill.

Vincent Smith was born on December 31, 1977 and at the time of this file, a sophomore. (The file, like everything else, lacked a completed year.) Just for fun, Harry used his rudimentary knowledge of the zodiac and deduced Vincent was a Capricorn, whatever that meant about him. He shrugged to himself; it's the little things.

There was also a face to the name. Vincent's yearbook photo, stapled to the left hand corner, showed him a lean-faced kid with oval glasses, middle-parted brown hair, brown eyes, and, contrary to what he expected, a humble smile. Harry hummed. Reading on, he learned that he was related a Claudia Wolf (his half-sister, the register ascertained), was a B average student, and described as smart, even sharp, and active in the student body.

Vincent liked to partake in a few clubs alongside his own; he must've been a busy man. As assumed, there were bullying complaints, teacher reports of disrupting the class, and poor attendance and performance in P.E, amongst other notes, including evaluations from the school counselor. And there were several . Harry distractedly gnawed on his lip during his investigation into who Vincent was.

But then, he frowned. Something nagged at him. Turning back to the first page, he spotted the name that he'd belatedly processed: Claudia Wolf . Wolf. L. Wolf. Harry dropped Vincent's dossier beside him and raced to the W's. The section was thin and finding her, easy.

Stapled to the first page was Claudia: a pasty, mousy girl who wore her thin, platinum blond hair sectioned over her shoulders, fencing in a collared white blouse buttoned to the neck. Her eyes, a pair of light brown, bore a stare faraway. But he recognized her immediately. Unruly pantry moths swarmed flustered and confused in his aging heart when he counted not one, but two riddles solved.

Claudia's father was Leonard Wolf.

Harry found L. Wolf, and a friendly neighbor.

"James." Harry looked up at his fellow partially obscured by the open bin. The named met his eyes. "I found L. Wolf, the guy who donated the moth. His name is Leonard."

James faintly frowned, observing him painfully haul himself to his feet. Harry braced his hand on the locker, woozy from standing up too fast, and held up the two files. "You have to see this. You remember that girl that the whatever-the-hell-she-was showed us? From the mall?" He opened her folder, turning it around and plopping it over James's reading. "Her name's Claudia. She's Leonard's daughter. She's Vincent's half-sister."

Frowning deeper, James flicked his eyes over her portrait, then thumbed up its corner to read. "Who's Vincent?"

"Some kid who wrote a club flyer I found back in the biology room. There were flyers for clubs on the counter," Harry explained. "He had this 'truth-seekers' club he was president of. Doesn't matter. Vincent and Claudia have different last names - he's Vincent Smith, she's Claudia Wolf - which makes sense, being half-siblings, but look at her," he insisted, urgently tapping the picture. "She's the same girl that other girl showed us. 'One is a neighbor and a friend of two.'"

He waved the second transcript in the air. "This is Vincent's. There's a lot here, man - this is a huge breakthrough."

James spent a few seconds looking over Claudia's page, then closed it, holding it out for Harry. "Yeah, it is." Harry took it, sighing anxiously, then finally noticed the open folder on the row. "What's that?"

"Alessa."

Harry's eyes bugged out; his jaw slackened. "What— Alessa?!"

"She apparently went to school here," James continued, taking his eyes down to it. "A lot of stuff is blacked out, but it's hers." Like Harry had done, he turned the folder around for him to see, and it was instantly snatched up.

Lo and behold, it was truly her - the witch, the damned, the sacrifice, the vessel - gazing sad and resigned out of a literal snapshot of her life.

"Holy shit."

"Yeah."

The wayward father's shoulders fell. "Holy. Shit."

".. yeah."

Harry released a shuddering breath. "I can't fucking—"

Their heads snapped towards the principal's office. The speakerphone was on. Three ascending, distinctive beeps dialed, identifiable as an error tone preceding a robotic, prerecorded operator apology. Seamlessly thereafter, the pitch flattened itself like a death tone into one tight, quivering line; a total combination Harry oddly recognized. Then it took a breath, and that was when he realized exactly where he'd heard it before.

The shrill, grating scream and fluctuating honk of a dial-up modem trying to connect to the Internet exploded the air at a volume fit for a stadium. James flinched hard, instinctively shooting his shoulder to his ear (despite being insubstantial defense); Harry shrank back, both hands clapped over his own. They winced excruciating pain and wild alarm at each other, but didn't need their voices to speak.

There was no time to pack the new valuables away; it'd be too much of a risk. They had to leave now. The dial tone looped its tortuous caterwauling so loud it felt like their brains were set on a decreasing bomb timer set to explode. Abandoning the drawers, they seized their weapons, and with the files gripped like a lifeline in Harry's hand, made haste.

Suddenly, incandescent bright white and blue light hurled an electronic neon wall directly in their path past the office, stopping the survivors dead short in its ray. The attack blinded, deafened, and caged them, forcing their cower under the violent barrage. It lasted seconds thereafter, then like a pulled plug, the discordant squealing died without warning, and a butcher chopped the fluorescence's intensity in half.

Buzzing stuffed their ears; their vision stung, branded by black boxes that hopped about every time they blinked. Harry and James looked at each other, then into the office. Frantically strobing blue light swallowed the room in neon, its erratic flickering strangely rhythmic - as though it were spelling out Morse code neither knew how to read.

Harry rushed in, sweeping around the desk and squinting hard to protect his adjusting eyes. The monitor seemed to detect him and blackened its screen. Harry snarled. Anger ate him like fire on a pile of dry leaves, the audacity of these games edging him a twitch away from smacking the monitor when it switched back on. A bearable white glow paled Harry in static spotlight, staining the wall behind with a wraith's towering, elongated midnight shadow.

"James, get over here," he grimly demanded. "You gotta see this."