Me: Here's Chapter 22.

Rendan: After only a week?

Me: Like the situation last time, it's roughly the same thing. I just wanted to give chapter 21 a little bit of time.

Zero: Makes sense. So, we're continuing from where we left off?

Me: We?

Rendan: Well, we're reading this too, ya know.

Me: I tend to forget that.

Zero: What I don't get is how you manage to keep this shit secret from us, considering we all exist in your mind and have unlimited access there.

Me: I'm just that good I suppose.

Rendan: So this time we're going over the fourth member's story.

Me: A bit of it, yeah. According to him, his last bit of hidden darkness, one that even he couldn't accept.

Zero: Can't wait. Dibs, by the way! Azard doesn't own Silent Hill or Hey Arnold. They are the respective properties of Konami and Craig Bartlett. Azard owns the core concept, the monsters and puzzles that he created, his OCs, and the monstrosity that he calls a plot when it's really a bunch of psychological torture of a bunch of innocent kids.

Me: Bullshit! I can justify this and have on several occasions!

Zero: -Ingoring Azard- Azard wishes that he owned Pyramid Head but he does not! PH, along with Silent Hill, belongs to Konami, no matter how much Azard wishes otherwise.

Me: What? Like you wouldn't want an immortal punisher to do your bidding?

Rendan: Case and point. Read and enjoy.

Chapter 22: The Evil of The Order

When Arnold awoke after the siren's blare and the consciousness stealing effect of the white light, he found himself in a building, more specifically in a diner, the one that he and Helga were in earlier, and was placed carefully into one of the booths. He looked around for a moment, finding AJ sitting down contemplatively at the counter while Helga and Lila were also placed in different booths to give them room to lie down. As far as Arnold could tell, only AJ and he were awake.

"H-Hey," Arnold called out with some hesitance. It wasn't without reason either. The last thing he wanted to do was startle AJ, especially since right now his mind must be in clear turmoil, and startling him would end badly. AJ may have been good at hiding such things, but that didn't mean Arnold couldn't tell said boy was hiding them. AJ waved slightly, not even turning to acknowledge Arnold. Arnold stood up and took the seat next to him. "Just so you know, I don't blame you for hiding that kind of stuff." AJ turned his head just enough to look at Arnold out of the corner of his eyes. "I mean, I wouldn't want anyone to think these guys got a hold of me either, let alone to turn me into some kind of monster, which it's pretty clear you're not."

"What makes you so sure?" AJ asked.

"Monsters wouldn't care about anyone except for themselves, and they certainly wouldn't throw themselves in death's path to protect anyone for any reason," Arnold said. AJ shook his head.

"Some monsters are so frightening that they can hide their evil under the guise of care and compassion," AJ commented.

"And if you were a monster," Arnold continued, "you wouldn't give yourself away that easily, nor would you give us your strategy."

"Unless I was so secure in my belief that I'd fooled you that I knew you wouldn't believe the truth, even if I told you it," AJ stated. Arnold blinked owlishly.

"If that was the case, you wouldn't have knocked me out of Pyramid Head's path," Arnold said. "If your guise was under care and compassion, I highly doubt you'd do something like that, especially when the chance of you being killed was so high, even running the risk of putting your fate in our hands, when you knew the one that could save you didn't trust you. A monster wouldn't take a gamble that risky." AJ turned to Arnold and chuckled.

"Some monsters would," AJ added, "if they were really stupid."

"Which you aren't."

"Tell me that after you hear my story."

"Fine, I will, but first we have to wait on the girls," Arnold agreed. AJ nodded. It took about ten minutes for the girls to stir from their slumber. Helga and Lila did little more than stare at the two boys at the counter before said boys realized the rest of their group was awake.

"Morning," AJ said. "Pick a booth and have a seat, I'll start then." The three students nodded and sat at the same booth, right next to the door, all of them sitting on the same side which faced the door. AJ stood and sat on the other side of the booth, his back turned toward the door. It was then that Arnold noticed that there was no static to speak of. Both the walkie-talkie and the radio were turned off. "Before I start, I'll ask you all if you have any questions for me, because if you interrupt me while I'm speaking, chances are I won't be able to continue because this is a very painful memory I'm dragging up. If I'm going to tell this, it has to be straight through in one go, no interruptions. Okay?" Everyone nodded. "Good. Now, questions?"

"When did they grab you?" Helga asked. Sure, she saw it on the form but right now she needed to confirm if it really was true. With all the red tape in paperwork, information was sure to get mixed up. AJ took a small breath.

"April twenty-third," AJ replied. Lila's eyes widened as she remembered the notes she found in both the school and the police station.

"Does that mean that," Lila paused a moment as she tried to figure out how to best word the rest, "the papers we found in the police station were about—"

"Yes," AJ interrupted her. "Those were talking about me." Lila stifled a gasp and tried to hold back some tears that threatened to spill from her eyes. Arnold and Helga's questioning glances were enough to prompt AJ to continue. "What she's referring to is how I was grabbed. I went to the police to ask them for help since a bunch of robed people were following me around everywhere, and yes, those robed people were members of The Order. What I didn't know was that the police themselves were also cultists. I stupidly walked straight to them."

"I wouldn't say that," Helga said. "We're taught to trust the police to help us when we're in trouble. You were doing just that, going to the police for help. You were betrayed by the people you were taught to trust. That's not stupidity on your part."

"It's more like bad luck," Arnold added. AJ sighed. "Like I said, you're not stupid." Helga and Lila glanced over to Arnold before he replied in turn with a shrug.

"I guess," AJ stated. "Any more questions?" He received a simultaneous shake from the other three. "Nothing more, eh? Fine. Just as a warning, you probably won't like what you'll hear. Do you think you can handle that?" He was looking more toward Lila than anyone else. Again, the three responded together with a nod. They were adamant about hearing this. "Fine." AJ took a deep breath, paused a moment, and began.

(Flashback. AJ is Narrating)

The bastards that grabbed me weren't exactly gentle. I slammed my head on what I think was a stair and blacked out. When I came to, I was in a cell in what I eventually learned was a secret hideout for The Order. I was chained to the wall by short chains that kept me bound by the cuffs they'd placed on my wrists. When I looked around, I saw that I wasn't the only one there. If I remember correctly, there were at least twenty more kids. All of us were locked in this one cell, kept bound to the wall however the cultists could muster. Some of the rowdier kids were eventually nailed to the wall, in a manner of speaking, being tethered directly to the wall to keep them from moving at all. One of the cultists was standing outside of the cell and told us that we were forbidden from any voluntary noise. What he meant was that if any of us let out so much as a peep, they'd kill us. Two kids learned this lesson the hard way.

They spoke up then in anger and were both shot in the head by the man in front of the bars to the cell. It scared the living hell out of us but we remained silent, if only to keep ourselves alive. Despite this, some of us still made small talk by teaching ourselves to read lips. We'd have silent conversations, telling each other not to give up hope and that we'd somehow find a way out, as futile as it was. Either way, I became something like friends with one of the other captives. He was chained right next to me in that cramped cell and I can't even remember his name. We shared as much as could be, and even shared a few silent laughs at the cultists' expense and that was just in the first day. Of course, that was before they brought— those in.

A day after I was brought in, kept fed and quenched by cultists that would volunteer and force feed their prisoners, the cultists started to bring in— devices. I don't know what else to call them. Each of them was different, suited for a different purpose, but all meant to do the same thing. This wasn't just meant to torture us, this was a conversion. Listening to the cultists outside the cell talk revealed as much, since they'd talk about converting the heretics to their Order. Before I get ahead of myself, let me go back a bit. I think I passed out briefly that first night, since it seemed to be no more than a blink but, when I awoke, I found myself in the Fog World. I knew there was fog because everything was far more hazy than it used to be. They purposely instilled our first darkness in us, being taken from our families, to trap us in Silent Hill.

After they'd brought in all the devices they'd intended to use, two cultists came in and grabbed the kid on the farthest corner of the cell, luckily or unluckily the one opposite mine, since I was the last one brought in and was the last kid on my end. The kid they grabbed was a girl that couldn't have been much older than me or you guys. I don't really remember what she looked like, sadly enough. In the next few minutes, the silence that had held us all shattered forever.

The girl they grabbed screamed, loudly, in such a way that it utterly terrified us. Her screams conveyed her fear, her sorrow and her pain all at the same time. They ripped through us and killed us on the inside. Each shriek, each cry, hurt us just a bit more, knowing that we could do nothing to help her as the cultists undoubtably tormented and tortured the girl endlessly. They kept it up for the entire day and there wasn't a minute of peace until, what I assume was, nightfall, since the cultists told us to go to sleep. None of us slept that night, either way. The girl's screams were too fresh in our minds and haunted us. We could only pray the screams would stop. The next morning one of the cultists that had taken her away returned.

"The bitch is dead," he told the others, "grab us another one." When the cultists opened the door, the remainder of us tried to squirm and scramble as much as we could in the vain hopes of escape. Sadly, it never worked. Not once. The next kid they grabbed was a boy, probably in his early teens. A few minutes later, the screaming continued, exactly the same as before. I passed out from exhaustion shortly after, but the screams of those two haunted my every dream and, I would soon find out when I woke up, I wasn't the only one that was haunted.

After that, it was a strange mixture of some of us being awake while others passed out from exhaustion. Some of us even missed feeding time because of it and had to starve until the next meal if we could. In the time I was there I think one or two died of hunger or thirst. For the longest time, that's the way it was. Every morning the cultists would enter the cell and take someone, kicking and screaming, all the way to whatever horrible devices they had ready and the screaming would begin. It wouldn't stop, not once until night, when the rest of us were sure that the one they took was dead. No one seemed to be able to last more than a day of that torture.

After being there for a week, the cultists made a big show of carting out the tortured, dead, bodies of those they'd grabbed before, probably in an attempt to break us in quicker. We weren't spared anything. Every wound, every cut, scrape, broken and displaced bone was shown to us. They told us that this was our fate if we refused to convert. I think their fear tactic had the opposite effect. None of us were willing to convert. None of us. And none of us ever did. Every week they did that show, and whoever remained became just a bit more defiant. The cultists got frustrated and began to take two at a time, doubling the tortured screams and the bodies we saw at the end of that week. Still, no one lasted longer than a day, while the screams of the tortured haunted our every waking hour and our every dream.

I forgot how many times I cried for the ones that died. I regretted being unable to help any of them but I was at a loss for what I could do. No matter how much we prayed for a reprieve from the screams, none ever came. The screams never faded from either our ears or minds. Finally the day came when it was just me and my friend left in that cell. Everyone else was dead. The cultists even did the parade of the dead before they came in the cell again. I don't know why they didn't take me, but I wish they did. I wish things were the other way around and he'd been saved. No such luck.

The first day they took him the screams continued just like they always had, but it was different once night fell. They carried him back into the cell and chained him up again, all the same broken bones and cuts that the other dead bodies had, he even had some of his limbs bent backwards, but he wasn't dead. He'd passed out from the pain and could barely move. I was awake most of the night and heard some of the cultists talking to each other. They called his survival a 'miracle' and a 'sign that God favored him'. I think they were just fucking insane. Either way, when dawn came again, they took him back out just as he'd woken up and the screams continued, just like they always had.

It was like this for several days, several long days of continuous torture that I have no idea how he survived it all. The last night they tortured him, they wheeled him into the cell bound on a stretcher and, for the first time in my life, I was scared absolutely shitless. He was on the bed, completely awake, and his skin had been crudely peeled off. They skinned him alive and the worst part of it was that he was still alive! He couldn't even move without flinching in pain. The worst part of it all was, despite the pain he was in, for some reason, he tried to reach out to me and I tried the same, though I didn't get far. In that moment, we both cried and I could tell his tears hurt so badly but he couldn't stop. Sympathy, empathy, whatever the right one is, brought me to the brink of it. I felt so weak, so helpless, and I could only sit there and watch him slowly dying with his skin peeled off.

I eventually cried myself to sleep, believing that soon, the both of us would be nothing more than corpses. I wanted my mother and father more than ever in those moments, and cried for the help that would never come for me and the help that didn't come for any of the others. I think that's when and why I lost my faith... I can't even remember if I had any to begin with, but if I did, that's when I'd lost it. What kind of God could and would allow this to happen?

The next day I didn't see him at all and I was sure he was dead. What surprised me was that they didn't come for me. Even stranger, the cultists seemed to be celebrating. All I could think about was whether or not they'd broken him or he'd converted. Either way, I didn't hear a damn thing about him the entire day. I wouldn't hear about him until the next day. I woke up to the haze, just like every other day, but this was the day that I met The Guardian. About an hour after my consciousness returned, I heard a siren blaring in the distance. Seconds later the walls began to peel and the world around me changed into the hellish nightmare that was the Otherworld for the first time. I couldn't have done more than blinked but when I did, he stood in front of me.

He was little more than a figure that was obscured by the shadows around him, no taller than me and most likely no older. The shadows themselves seemed to move and bend around him. For the briefest of seconds, I looked at his eyes. They were the same color as the gut encrusted walls, the color of dried blood and entrails with the same texture before they too vanished into the shadows. He looked down at me, being that he was standing and I was on the floor, and raised a hand toward me. Barbed wire shot from the floor and went into the locks on my cuffs that freed me from my imprisonment. I couldn't move though, and I'll never know why I couldn't. He kept looking at me and briefly broke away to look outside the cell before turning back.

"You have a five minute head start," he told me. "Get going." I didn't need to be told twice. I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could and ran. I ran as fast as I could, but I didn't know the way out. Every way I turned I just found myself in another torture chamber, probably one they were going to use on me eventually. My five minute head start was completely wasted because of how lost I was. I could hear the footsteps of the approaching Order cultists as I scrambled to hide somewhere, anywhere, that might've kept me safe. There was nowhere. I was quickly cornered by the cult when the shadowy figure in the cell appeared. He rose barbed wires from the floor and tore into each cultist before he tore them apart, limb by limb. He looked at me again, this time though he didn't say anything, and motioned with a hand as if he were telling me to follow him.

I don't know what I was thinking at the time but I listened. I followed him through the hideout as he murdered every last cultist we encountered one by one. Eventually though, his murder spree led the both of us out of the hideout and back into the town, though seeing the town in its Otherworldly state was no picnic. I turned to try and face him again but he'd already vanished completely and I wasn't about to stay in the same place there. I took off in a random direction and kept going until another siren took me out of the Otherworld and back into the Fog World. Since then, I've been moving about, trying to find a way out with no luck. You all basically have an idea of the story from there.

(Flashback and Narration ends)

Arnold, Helga and Lila stared at their companion with what could be called poorly masked shock. None of them could imagine or even try to comprehend the terror someone going through that would be feeling. There was a moment of silence that left the three clueless on what they could say. The three stared at the table for a moment, taking the time to consider what could be said, yet nothing came to their minds. When they raised their heads to look at AJ, however, they were struck with a crippling fear. They'd been so invested in the story that none of them noticed Pyramid Head had entered the diner and was standing behind AJ, his sword held in the air ready to strike. By the look on AJ's face, seeing as he was staring at the table, his head resting atop his hands, he didn't notice it either.

"So there you have it," AJ continued, still unaware of what could very well be his imminent doom. "The worst part about all of that was the guilt I felt after I'd escaped. Why me when no one else did? Even now I sometimes think I should be punished for not even trying." None of the others could even speak or move, for if they could, they'd have turned on either the radio or walkie-talkie to warn their fourth companion. Pyramid Head took this moment to raise his sword higher up into the air, ready to bring it down at a second's notice. "Now that I think about it though," the blade came down, "I shouldn't be punished," and stopped an inch from splitting the boy's skull open. Arnold and Helga stared on in shock while Lila had fainted from the close call. This was still too much for her to handle, it seemed. "I mean," AJ kept talking, still clueless to the fate he so narrowly avoided, "I was chained to the damned wall and if I made any noise I'd have been killed. Then none of us would've survived." AJ shook his head. "The most I can do at this point is keep on living, if only to keep their memories alive, even if I can barely remember them. Right?" He finally looked up, looking at the terrified duo and the passed out third. "Bad story, right?"

Helga nodded her head before she found she could move again. She gulped audibly and raised her hand to point just behind the boy sitting opposite to her, Arnold, and Lila. AJ gave her a confused glance before he turned his head briefly, looking back at her. Did he miss that?! Suddenly his face contorted into an expression of fear as he turned pale. He turned more slowly, this time staring at the monstrous Pyramid Head that was still standing behind him, still holding that massive blade, and still poised to end his life.

Pyramid Head moved the blade again, this time slamming it into the ground as he reached out and grabbed AJ by the vest and hoisted him into the air effortlessly. Arnold and Helga scrambled out of the booth and readied themselves to fight, to at least try to get the immortal of Silent Hill to drop AJ so they could all flee. To their surprise though, the color of AJ's face returned and he held out a hand to stop them.

'What the hell is he thinking?!' Helga shouted at her mind.

"I knew he was remorseful but not suicidal," The Guardian said inside Arnold's mind. "Either way, this'll be interesting." Nothing happened for a moment. Pyramid Head stared at the no longer scared boy in his grip and said boy stared back. Unbeknownst to them, Lila had just stirred from her slumber and had been watching.

"I think this is it," AJ said as he stared at Pyramid Head's helmet. "I no longer have to fear you, since my guilt has been vanquished. My belief that I deserved punishment is no more. Now, everything is up to you." Arnold, Lila, and Helga stared, bug eyed, at the scene before them. He was seriously talking to Pyramid Head, seriously! Lila watched on in wonder, a familiar moment to this playing in her mind. "So, oh great punisher of Silent Hill, what is your will?" Pyramid Head obviously said nothing but held onto the boy for another minute, a minute which felt like an eternity to everyone else watching. Pyramid Head looked around and placed the boy in his grip on the floor before retrieving his blade and walking out.

"Holy... shit," Helga gawked. AJ dusted himself off and turned to the others with a nervous smile on his face.

"So... where to next?" He asked.

Me: And that's the chapter. -There is a long silence.- What?

Rendan: Okay, Azard, that was some seriously fucked up shit. I mean yeah, I'm sure someone out there's written worse, but Kami dammit man!

Zero: Sick, twisted, and completely awesome at the same time.

Me: You're only saying that because Pyramid Head showed up again.

Zero: Any time Pyramid Head showed up it's been epic. Even in those shitty movies. At least Pyramid Head was still awesome.

Me: Okay, I'll give you that. The movies sucked but Pyramid Head was probably the only good thing about them.

Rendan: Anyway, what's next?

Me: I don't know just yet. I'll have to see where inspiration takes me. From the concrete walls of prison. I'd assume that's where I'm taking them next... maybe after I do a couple other things. -Evil laugh-

Rendan: Why do I hate the fact that you're laughing evilly?

Zero: Because it usually ends up with some pretty fucked up stuff on the way?

Rendan: Oh yeah.

Me: Anyway, I think that'll do it for this time. Be good and be safe. We're outta here!