Heather had just learned to drive.
On a bright, beautiful Saturday morning, Heather's shrieks of joy woke up a couple of happily asleep neighbors in their homes at the sight of a big red bow tying up the best birthday present of her life thus far: a new car, all for her. It was actually a used car, a Toyota Corolla circa 2010, predominantly certified as one of the safest vehicles on the market, shiny and painted robin's egg blue. (Heather routinely "hinted" her preference whenever they'd discussed the subject; her dad heard her loud and clear, and so was blithe to splurge on a paint job to double the surprise.)
Harry chuckled and hugged her tight when she threw her arms around him, tucking his head down next to hers and laying a kiss on her cheek. "Happy birthday, babygirl."
That was back in August: August 6th. Heather Mason, newly seventeen years old, a milestone anticipated by her father well-nigh as she, took an epic step towards independence. Anyway celebrated, Harry, like many parents, warred with letting her roam free on her own accord - and that's where their characteristic similarities ended. See, Harry's role as a guardian existed poles apart from other parents; ergo, his motivations in keeping her hooked to the nest couldn't be more opposite. They didn't know how happy they were not to have a history, or a child, like his. Why? Because Heather was not like other girls.
She'd even said it a few times.
"Why aren't you like other girls?" he asked her on the first instance she declared so in an arrogant, matter-of-fact tone. Heather was thirteen then, officially walking the rocky road of adolescence. Experimental endeavors in exploring, finding, and creating herself were upon her - and with it, the infamous budding attitude problem.
Apparently, it'd begun with a tidy dose of hubris.
"I'm not into pink or makeup or girly stuff," Heather haughtily replied. "I listen to metal and rock, REAL rock, and—"
"What's 'real rock'?"
"Like The Who and Moody Blues, and Jethro Hull, and Beastie Boys and AC/DC. And Rancid." (Harry chuckled at that; he'd be lying if he said he wasn't pleased his musical tastes had rubbed off on her.) "Not like, Maroon 5, or Nickelback, or Mumford & Sons."
"What's wrong with Nickelback? You liked them a month ago."
"Well, they're lame," badmouthed her changed opinion. "Anyway, I don't listen to like, Taylor Swift, or Katy Perry, or One Direction or Bruno Mars or anyone like that, like other girls. And they're so fake."
"So no pop music?"
"Yeah."
"You like Madonna. She's pop. So is David Bowie, and Michael Jackson. Belinda Carlisle. Tiffany. Cher."
Heather huffed. "Yeah, but they're old school. They make real music. They're like, actually cool, so that makes them better."
Harry side-eyed her. "Alright. So that makes you not like other girls? No One Direction or Katy Perry? You like Pink, though - the singer."
"That's not the point," his daughter stressed. "Their music's laaame-uh. And all the other girls who listen to them are so fake and catty. They're just, like— they look at me and they think they're better than me because I wear different clothes and I like different music, and that I get along better with boys. I don't wear girly stuff like pink, or dresses, or makeup," she repeated for the umpteenth time, in case her dumb dad already forgot. Harry wrinkled his chin and forehead at her.
"That's kinda shallow, Heather. You're also acting like you're better than them just because you don't follow the herd."
She shot him a scathing glare. "They're shallow. All they care about is looks and boys. It's dumb."
Harry shrugged and sealed the plain turkey sandwich for Heather's lunch in tin foil. "Okay. If you say so."
She watched him pick out a fruit and snack cake, then get a brown paper bag from the drawer to stow her school meal. Heather folded her arms over the counter and leaned into her rounded shoulders, a dab of tension pickling the air. Harry patiently stood by for hearing the rest of her grievances. He didn't have to wait long.
".. and they've been here forever. I move around a lot and they were giving me shit for it."
Her professional novelist father met her melancholy eyes. Harry sighed softly. "Sweetheart.. I'm sorry. I promise you, this was the last time we were moving. We're not doing it ever again."
"Pft," she rebutted, looking away. "Okay. I'll believe it when I see it."
"We bought a house. I'd say that's pretty permanent. I promise you, baby, we're staying put."
"Sure, dad."
Mood swings and pushback were collateral to puberty sprouting its brassy head. Harry dreaded her upcoming teenage rebellion, and its preliminary phase looked like it was starting right on time. What bliss.
"You'll eat those words; I promise that, too."
"Yeah," Heather mumbled. "Okay."
She had all the right to distrust him, of course. As a family of two fugitives, the Masons hadn't seen permanency all her life. Harry couldn't disclose why it'd been an unavoidable curse, or why settling down took guts. Still, Harry did everything within his measly power to give his daughter the illusion of normalcy, and for a while, he thought his magic was working.
Then, in the second of her four elementary schools, some puny brat informed her that moving as often as they did wasn't normal. What a shit day that was; it'd started out so nice, too.
"It's just that the jobs I need send me in different places," he'd fibbed over a fast food dinner. "I know it sucks. I hate it, too."
Heather'd sullenly stirred her chocolate soft serve. The cup beaded and dripped watery sweat, dessert slowly melting. For some reason, the sight hurt his heart. "Why can't you find a job that doesn't make you move?"
"Because writing for newspapers and magazines requires me to be in their area. Sometimes those jobs dry up, or I get replaced. And I take other jobs too, yes, but if I'm gonna pursue a career in writing, I have to follow the work."
Harry's soul had wilted when she looked up at him, a thin trace of resentment (which he refused to acknowledge for what it was) in her eyes. "Do you have to have a career in writing?"
He never forgot those words, or that first instance of vitriol for the tough, unfair lifestyle they led. It was selfish, and he knew it, and it bothered him more than it did her. "Yes, babygirl," he'd murmured sadly. "I promise that it'll be worth it, and one day, we won't ever have to move again."
His daughter looked down at her liquifying treat. She hadn't finished it like he'd hoped she would before they left.
Oh, how Harry could've wrung that stupid twerp's neck for planting the first seeds of insecurity and doubt in her.
In the present, Harry'd found a bedroom in the townhouse where he could recover, repose, and reminisce after the recent escape. Here, on a made bed with flat, timeworn pillows stuffed underneath his greying head, fingers locked over his belly, he mulled over what he incorrectly posited was the last time he stood in the fog and snow augur; revived the long era linking then and now; and ruminated on the Pandora's box of complex, oppressive emotions in regards to his daughter. .. s.
His daughters.Harry's eyes slid closed. His daughters.
Harry was a father of two, and he always would be. Heather and Cheryl were sisters in his mind, individual yet comparable, irreplaceable stars in his sky; his meaning. From them he was bestowed the precious gift of fatherhood, and being a father was one of the very few things he'd indisputably craved for most in life. That said, while following that dream wasn't meant to be easy, he didn't expect his destiny to turn out like this.
The grand plan all along was to raise Cheryl with Jodi - the perfect family of three to have and to hold, in sickness and in health - but in sickness, his beloved left them too soon. Becoming a single parent in the wake of her death, natheless lamenting his razed picturesque future, proved a non-issue for Harry. He'd vowed that, no matter what else befell him, their little Cheryl would grow up healthy, strong, and smothered in his love. Yes; that had been the plan.
Then everything changed overnight.
When Harry got home from Silent Hill (a stunt indefinitely unexplained), it'd been late afternoon. He'd laid the cursed baby on the couch then left her, all alone, to walk up the street to the grocery store. There he purchased a baby bottle, formula, diapers, and sleeping pills. He fitted her with a diaper a bit too big for her newborn frame, wrapped her up in her blanket, pounded back three of those fingernail-sized blue pills with two swigs of whiskey, and abandoned her to collapse on his bed.
Once upon a time, he would've swelled with elation to awaken to a baby's cry. Ten hours - twelve, perhaps - after awakening from the last deep sleep of his life, Harry's head felt like a waterlogged sack; his body numb and heavy under an invisible coffin's pall; his eyes, pins stabbing behind their lids; and in the living room, that detestable freak screamed her tiny lungs to pieces. It's anyone's guess how long after he lay there listening to her bawling for help. Autopilot eventually got him to his feet, finding himself staring down at the red faced monster shrieking, fussing, crying for attention, crying for him.
At that moment, one that would repeat for the first year of her life, Harry Mason very nearly snatched her from the couch, wanting to shake and throttle her dead.
I'm moving away, he said in two different calls to his parents and Jodi's family, who had moved back to Mexico. I'm starting over. I'm sorry to do this to you. I need to rebuild a life, and I think it's best that I give Cheryl a clean slate, too. I know it's very selfish, but she's my daughter, and I'm doing this with her best interests and future in mind. I know it's hard to understand. Thank you for everything you've done for me, and for Jodi; for our family. Please don't try to contact or look for us. We'll be fine. I promise we'll be fine.
Then Harry hung up, disconnected the phone, put the thingin her secondhand carrier, buckled it in the passenger seat of the rundown Mazda stuffed with just the necessities that he hoped would take them as far as they needed to go, and ran away from home.
They never heard from him again.
For months, he refused to name her. The only name he wanted, loved, was 'Cheryl', who she was not. Mistakenly calling her his real daughter's name tasted like vomit in his mouth - and a couple times, he threw up. Harry hit rock bottom: he cried too much, yelled at her too much, ignored her too much; he hated her even more than he ever imagined he could hate a human being other than himself.
Harry was glad to have finally bought a house, because he never wanted to live in another apartment, least of all a motel, again. Bad things happened in those acrid, cramped units. In there, an unwanted baby existed too close to a father who didn't want to be her father. Pacing on the trampled carpets was a bereaved young man who'd lost his only child, willingly neglecting the babe unloved; a someone who escaped committing infanticide (filicide) by a whisker. And in those reproachful, shoddy rooms, that very same tragic widower made numerous attempts at suicide, too.
He hated her - for the longest time, Harry hated her.
It was a busy Monday morning in a Maine county courthouse the day he was forced to register her existence to the government, and name her. The clipboard and crowded paperwork received his black stare while the baby slept in her basket beside him. He didn't want her to have his name, or any name. She wasn't a Mason, and would never be a Mason; he was just relieved he didn't take Jodi's, because it'd've meant she, not he, would've blasphemed the venerated title, 'Escobar.' Maybe it's for the better she's a Mason, he'd brooded at the time. Now we can both fucking hate it.
'Heather' came to him when he looked at her, cozy and swaddled in a pink fleece blanket. Hours later, Harry took her back to their temporary motel "home," and placed baby Heather, still sound asleep, on the bed. He located his pack of cigarettes and poured a smudged glass of whiskey, retreating outside. That afternoon, the struggling author demolished the remaining third of booze, and crushed ten cigarette butts in the motel's carbon-scabbed, complimentary ashtray.
He loathed her. His life had turned to shit, and it was her goddamn, fucking fault.
One day, Heather called him 'daddy'. Harry stopped cold and looked down at her. She looked up at him, holding out a packet of fruit snacks. He tore it open, she chirped "Thank you!", then toddled off to the couch to enjoy her morning cartoons. Standing there in the open kitchen of another rented apartment, her warden seethed, overcome with the desire to shout Do NOTcall me 'daddy'! because she had no right in calling him that.
Only Cheryl was allowed to call him 'daddy.' In fact, he hadn't realized the devastating impact it'd have on him until she said it. Cheryl, lost and afraid in a walking nightmare, was the last it'd been heard. Daddy, help me! echoed his seven-year-old's pleas when he closed his eyes at night; but, he never could. That moniker wasn't for Heather to use, making his gut twist and heave.
It was tarnished.
Worse, as she grew, Harry began to forget Cheryl's voice, even in his restless dreams. Heather's sweet little tones were replacing her, though every so often his ear tricked him into hallucinating the girl astray. Now, almost two decades later, her daddy didn't know her voice anymore. Silent Hill robbed him of a body to bury, or a gravestone to visit to beg Cheryl's forgiveness for letting her tenor slip from his memory.
He was so tired of crying.
But Harry knew the moment he'd realized he loved Heather. It was the morning post- her seventh birthday which was, ironically, also August 7th. Bedraggled after a sleepless night, he slugged into the kitchen, itching to chain smoke at least five cigarettes to start the day. Harry expected Heather to sleep in an extra hour. He sought out his half-empty pack and rapped it on the counter.
It was when he turned around that he finally noticed the girl seated in the dining area with a plate. Carelessly tossed to the side was a helplessly crinkled sheet of saran wrap, blotched with opaque, peaked terrains of colored icing, that'd been peeled abjectly away from a large rectangular slice of white sheet cake. At the head of the table, Heather held a fork, big and imbalanced in her hand. Beside her, on the placemat, a second utensil awaited him.
She beamed up at him. Pure white and lavender paste stained her lips and cheek (the byproduct of clumsy eating, a work in progress). Fork prongs had been used to design spongey cliffs in the decorated corner square he'd cut the previous day. Harry stared; he couldn't believe he'd walked right by without noticing her. Heather continued to smile back. "Want some cake, daddy?" she asked, gleefully kicking her feet under the table. "I got you a fork."
He slowly released the cigarette box to the counter and joined her at the table. Pleased as punch, Heather pushed the plate to him, then on the chair, got to her knees. "You can have the rose," she said. "I had like, four of them yesterday."
Harry said nothing. Undeterred, Heather sheared off more cake, and ate. Reaching out, her glum caretaker brushed a long lock of thin brown hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear. "Don't get your hair in the cake, baby," he softly advised. Heather blinked at him.
"I won't." Harry studied her; she smiled again. "Have some! I don't wanna eat it all." The girl, recently turned seven-years-old, rotated the plate, presenting the sworn pink flower, wrinkled and squished to a glob from the cling wrap. "There. Now you won't drop any on the table."
The heartbeat hereafter represented the second Harry self-confessed he loved this little girl; his daughter, Heather Mason.
"Cake for breakfast, huh?"
"Yeah. We should eat cake for breakfast every day."
"Heh! You wish, kiddo. It's back to fruit and yogurt tomorrow, so you better savor it."
"Don't worry, daddy. I will."
Day in and day out for the rest of the year and into the next, Heather's hazel green eyes beheld smiles for him more often than her mouth; his hand dwarfed hers, but she delighted in holding it. To her, he was 'dad,' and she liked the way he laughed. Heather basked in her father's affections, naif to the rapidly approaching day she'd surpass her dead sister at the age of eight, and that there'd been another daughter at all.
Accepting the fact his love for her now was bona fide, week in and week out, Harry looked at the child he parented, and bled for her. He saw her as overly credulous, a trait he'd hoped would mature into something less exploitable; and fortunately, it did. During that year and forever after that, the man who grieved his first family thanked every god she'd been happily clueless to ineffable, nonstop fantasies enticing her father to put a bullet in the back of her head, before he planted one right between his own eyes.
Harry inwardly harbored the devil until that next August 7th, and then, it was gone.
Despite getting off to a rocky start, Harry hadn't been unkind to Heather; aloof, sometimes, but not intentionally cruel. He cuddled, read her stories, and kissed her goodnight. He played with her, hugged her, said 'I love you,' even when he couldn't mean it yet. When she skinned her knees, he bandaged and soothed her with a joke. He scared away the monster under the bed, built her back up when a bully knocked her down, took her to Wendy's to celebrate winning second place in the school spelling bee, and told her he was proud of her, because he was.
Heather, without question, was adored. She became his own. Forever onwards, Harry regretted the past, self-flagellated for the reprehensible urges, neglect, and contempt. Luckily for both, Heather grew up never the wiser.
He was a good dad.
Reminiscing about birthdays circled him back to Heather's seventeenth. He remembered it like it was yesterday, but something was wrong beyond his ken. The vicious debate in the auditorium about her age floated back.
"You lied to me. It's not 2019. It's 2016."
"Nnnooo, it's 2019. Trust me on that, James."
"It's 2016, or it's 2018. I did the math. You've been saying Heather's seventeen. Nineteen ninety-nine plus seventeen is twenty sixteen. You're three years off."
"No.. wait. No, it's 2019. It's definitely 2019, I know that for certain."
"Heather can't be seventeen then, Harry. She has to be twenty."
"That's.. no, wait, something's wrong."
"No shit?"
"James, I'm not lying to you. Heather is seventeen and it's 2019. I'm forty-eight. I don—"
"Then how does that work?"
"Do you think I fucking know?! James. Listen to me. It is twenty. Nine. Teen. Heather, my daughter, is seventeen. Okay? And I just turned forty-eight in February. Out of the things I don't remember, I sure as hell remember that. I seriously don't know what to tell you, James. I know what I know. But now that I think about it, no, it doesn't make any fucking sense. I'm just as lost as you are, here. Okay?"
"NO! It's not okay! Harry, you are missing three fucking years! Everything you've said, or claimed, doesn't add up at ALL! You've got to be lying about something!"
No, it really didn't add up.. and Harry knew, better than the whole damn world, that he wasn't lying. Not about that, of all things! But the math was concrete - three years were missing, just as James said. That's a huge chunk of time to just up and go make a milk run without leaving a note. It spun him in a loop. Howcould he get that wrong?
Well, the most obvious answer, one could divine, was that the town was fucking with him. Again. His retrospections were suffering short-term retention, sure, but messing with his living timeline seemed inordinately far out of bounds for even Silent Hill's recondite influence. Say what one will about the place, its machination's strength still had to have a cutoff point.
Returning to the gorilla in the room, Harry went over the math from the top with a fine-toothed comb, but the sum sustained. James's deductions indubitably caught the total chronology in a catch-22. Then, like a turntable stylus's scratch, anxiety waylaid Harry into gridlock. Wait; Heather didn't come here on her lonesome - there was a man with her. Harry's eyes zipped craggy circles over the ceiling. Where did he learn—
That's right: the cassette tapes. He hadn't listened to them since they were discovered at the hotel quite some time ago. It felt like centuries since their overnight scavenger hunt at The Lake View Hotel, but that didn't mean he didn't forget the grainy crackle superimposed over a tired old man's soliloquy.
Curling his lip, Harry recalled how convenient modulation omitted particulars, bearing a striking resemblance to government tampering. The tape, minding the censorship, spoke of a sinner's confession to signing a pledge, sanctioned by the Order, to find and escort Heather into Silent Hill. There'd been more to the story, if his defective memories served, but other than what he immediately knew, he was in a stalemate.
He needed to listen to the tapes again. Harry didn't give a shit if blackmail oiled the wheels (rather charitable of him, to lend a granule benefit of the doubt); the mercenary kidnapper still pandered to turpitude by accepting dirty money to use gambling with his daughter's life.
For what it was worth, Harry was impressed he'd had the balls to sound contrite.
They were here; James said so. Harry continuously wondered how much the "conduit" did and didn't know, and most of all, the whereabouts of his daughter. He suddenly remembered the comment he made when they stood outside the amusement park: That isn't ours to go to. James had spoken it like a caveat, so Harry didn't question it at the time, but now.. well.
If James were pulling a fast one on him by knowing more than he let on, that just made two gamblers shading their cards at the poker table, covertly hand in glove, watching Harry's backslide into debasement, going broke at a rigged slot machine.
But Heather wasn't helpless, and neither was she without protection. A couple birthdays ago, Harry gave her a necklace. The present, weighing heavily on a long chain, was an oxidized, sterling silver locket, stoutly palm-sized, embellished, and egg-shaped. Acting like a Russian nesting doll, it cradled a smooth, oblong, priceless red jewel within also containing a secret: the Kabbalah antidote known as Aglaophotis.
(The artifact is authentic. How or when he obtained it, he'd never tell.)
Saying only that it was an irreplaceable family heirloom rumored to have protective qualities, and nothing more, Harry demanded she treat her new treasure with respect and care. To her credit and his relief, Heather seemed to instantly understand its significance and took his earnest "request" to heart. She wore it often, drawing Harry to wonder if she felt a connection to it. Either way, he hoped it hung 'round her neck, wherever she was; it might be the only thing that could save her from Silent Hill in the end.
Heather was his everything, and every waking moment, which was all of them, he worried about his daughter. She could be anywhere, she could be suffering, or already in the hands of the Order. So in knowing what grave danger she was undoubtedly in, Harry didn't understand why he could be so apathetic about his rescue mission. The town controlled the pace, so logically, there was no use in constantly biting his nails and making mad dashes when finding Heather wasn't ever going to be a job done lickety-split.
But on the same token, if he was going to save his daughter from the evils of those who appraised her as nothing but a tool, and do it right, then he had to stay calm. He - she - couldn't afford panicked, rash decisions, leading them into needless mistakes and graphic failure. The veteran's wrists were bound in barbed wire by the will of the town, steering him helpless to do anything for her other than what he was already doing. These were rational convictions, Harry kept telling himself; but everything felt like excuses.
Observations like these scared him into doubting his loyalty, because chasing Heather into the inferno wasn't ever a duty he felt coerced into carrying out. This wasn't obligation; it was love.Long ago, he made an oath to protect his little girl, come what may. Without her, Harry truly had nothing left. His final act of service would be to complete what he'd failed to do seventeen years prior, and send himself off with a bullet right between his eyes. He needed her as much, or perhaps more, as she needed him.
Harry'd been only twenty-eight when he lost absolutely everything he cared about to a portend sleepy tourist town. This was notthe life he'd been promised, or supposed to build. But since that snowy, late-summer night in 1999, Harry often asked himself, would he ever let Cheryl go? Not could; but would? Would (or could) he ever stop blaming herfor losing his baby? .. for fucking up his life?
Cheryl would've been twenty-four, now.
August 6th marked a date that celebrated a new life; was a time of death; was the day Silent Hill ruined his life; and in spite of the peace he'd made, the pieces that forgave and loved his daughter, his brutal devotion to shielding her from harm, it is unquestionably, without argument or leniency, ALL HER FAULT.
Harry tenderly passed his fingertips into his swollen eyes, then blearily opened them to the ceiling.
Oh, Heather.
Memory lane was a particularly unpleasant drive today: the traffic was cutthroat and fierce on a road dense with potholes. It was a toss up which hurt more: his heart, head, or his nose, but the longer he laid on this old bed, the more he brooded about things he didn't want to. Those three aches combined didn't hold a match to that. Also, his back hurt. He figured it was high time he got up and rejoined James downstairs.
Rolling off the mattress to his feet, Harry groaned to a clammy, unsympathetic room, and stretched. The common mistake of standing up a trifle too fast rushed blood to his head, making him feel faint, hazing his vision in black, and exacerbating the throbbing in the middle of his face. After failing an attempt to sniffle through his busted airway, he grumbled a few choice words under his breath, and left the bedroom to go assess the damage in the bathroom.
Wiping dust from the glass, Harry was taken aback by the catastrophe he saw in the mirror. Jesus Christ! He didn't just look bad, he looked like pure dog shit!Leaning in to his reflection, Harry's swollen regard squinted at the purple swoops analogous of a cold-cocked boxer potting his eyes; and felt as such, to boot. He courageously scraped a bit of congealed, crusty blood rimming his nostrils, and while he was it, whimpered softly to his distressingly misaligned nose.
Wasn't he supposed to try to set it? or was that just some Hollywood mumbo jumbo (as too much of first aid "education" generally came from)? Harry chickened out the second he put minimal pressure into pinching it, arresting a breath before dropping his hands to clutch the sink, riding out the condensed, buffeting pain with his jaw tight as vise clamps until it diffused to a lethargic thrum. Once passed the hurdle, he exhaled hard and glared into the glass.
"You better fucking heal right," he lowly threatened his nose. "You better goddamn heal right or I'm gonna be pissed. Man, that fucking sucked! An' I barely even fucking touched it!" Harry sneered; then resignedly mumbled, "Not like I could actually do anything if it doesn't heal right, even if I wanted to. Which, I do. Well.. whatever," he dismissed. "Thanks, y'all, for even healing me up in the first place, I guess. S'probably the one good thing you've done. .. eehh, I'd hate to jinx it after all, but.. so much for knocking on wood anymore."
Valuing his appearance despite the fact that the only person to see him didn't care about his looks to begin with, Harry, to the best of his abilities, tried to clean his face. The faucet squeaked but wouldn't give him water, and though it looked clean, he lacked full trust in the one hand towel draped over the bar on the wall. He put a lot of careful labor into dry wiping, picking, and scratching the grot; alas, he soon knuckled under, and reconciled himself to a towel spit shine.
Harry kinda saw the method as unsanitary, but when there's no water to do the job, a man has to improvise. Incidentally, it evoked nostalgia of a grandma's fuss over her grandson's dirty cheek, and gave him a good chuckle. In the end, overall exhaustion won out over vanity, red ash still spotting his neck when he literally threw in the towel.
He smoothed his hair back. God, he looked old. Roaming his eyes over the man in the mirror, he saw someone who would be "over the hill" in the near future, as people liked to call turning the big five-o, and sixty-five by his own juxtaposition. Though becoming half a century old didn't bother him on the surface, he was loath to think too much about it, because as he got older, Heather did too.
Harry had plenty of years ahead of him, at least four more decades of nurturing a beautiful, growing woman.. and yet.. every passing day narrowed the margin of their seasons. Depressingly, he couldn't even make an educated guess for how long he'd been impounded in the fog and snow. Turning from the mirror, he angrily suppressed the want (and need) to cry because he was so fucking tiredof it, and of the yoke he wore, and the lies he got (gets) away with all the time.
Drawing a deep breath, Harry approached the stairs, worn out, never ready to continue his quest to unmask the nebulous town, but ardent as ever to find his wayward child. In August, she'll be eighteen, a high school senior; an official adult. Heather wanted him there when she bought her first pack of cigarettes (not that she was going to smoke them, but just because she could), and neither of them were going to miss their date.
With that in mind, he popped up his chin, mustered his courage anew, and descended to the conduit who'd guide him to his lost, and precious daughter of Silent Hill.